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Heirs to Byzantium: identity and the Helleno-Romaic dichotomy amongst the Istanbul Greek migrant community in Greece*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Huw Halstead
Huw Halstead*
Affiliation:
University of York
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Abstract

The Istanbul Greek migrant community resident in Greece exists in the space between two homelands and two identities, expressed in the dichotomy between the Hellenic and the Romaic. The migrants exploit this flexibility and ambivalence in Greek identity to contextually navigate a range of social pressures – diaspora, discrimination, alienation, and even financial collapse. At times they pursue assimilation with their host population as the most Hellenic of the Hellenes, whilst at other times they assume a Romaic identity to distinguish themselves from the mainland Greeks. Deploying an identity rooted in Byzantium, the Istanbul Greeks are able to be Greek but more than simply Hellenic.

Type
Articles
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , 2014 , pp. 265 - 284
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 2014

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Footnotes

*

I am above all indebted to my informants from the Istanbul Greek community, who patiently responded to my questions. The guarantee of anonymity prevents me from thanking them by name. For their helpful commentaries on versions of this article, I would like to thank Geoffrey Cubitt, Sharon Macdonald, Iraklis Millas, and the anonymous reviewer of BMGS. The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded research on which this article is based.

References

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2 I have chosen to use the term ‘forced migrant’ as a compromise that best represents the diverse experiences of the Istanbul Greeks. Most of my informants present their migration as forced, and resist the label ‘migrant’ for fear that it portrays their expatriation as an economic migration, although a few left of their own free will (for various reasons) and do not associate their migration with anti-minority persecution. Others were expelled in 1964 as Greek citizens (see below), and commonly call themselves expellees.

3 All informants are pseudonymized.

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5 As well as the Christians of Imbros and Tenedos.

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7 Alexandrie, ‘Religion or ethnicity’, 118-19; Oran, ‘Story of those who stayed’, 102-3.

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13 Fermor, Roumeli, 106.

14 Ibid., 107-13.

15 The Istanbul Greeks use two Greek words to refer to Greeks - Éllinas/Ellinída/Éllines and Romiós/Romiá/Romioí. I translate Éllinas/Ellinída/Éllines as ‘Hellene(s)’ and preserve Romiós/Romiá/Romioí in the original Greek, because no appropriate translation exists. I am interested in the uses to which the Istanbul Greeks put these terms, and so remain faithful to the original terminological choices of my informants. I reserve the word ‘Greek’ for when it is not profitable to distinguish between Éllines and Romioí. I do not intend to imply any strict definitional distinction between the two terms, nor do I consider them to refer to discrete ethnic identities, but rather am interested in how they are used variably as signifiers. My informants sometimes treat the two as synonymous, sometimes as overlapping or one as a part of the other, and sometimes as antithetical.

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17 Just, ‘Triumph of the ethnos’, 83.

18 Ibid., 83; Herzfeld, Ours Once More, 31; Özkirimli and Sofos, Tormented by History, 25.

19 Herzfeld, Ours Once More, 20-3.

20 Ibid.; Özkirimli and Sofos, Tormented by History, 21-3.

21 Herzfeld, Ours Once More, 23; Mackridge, Language and National Identity, 55.

22 Theodossopoulos, ‘“Turks” in the imagination of the “Greeks’”, 18.

23 See Herzfeld, M., Anthropology Through the Looking-glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge 1987) 41-2Google Scholar.

24 Ibid., 29.

25 Proponents of the Hellenic thesis, presumably.

26 Vangelis’ explict use of the word Roman (Romaíos) in addition to Romiós is relatively uncommon. Whether he uses this word for historical/etymological exactitude, or because it further stresses his estrangement from Hellenic identity, is debatable.

27 Herzfeld, Anthropology Through the Looking-glass, 20-1. This sidelining of Byzantium requires a little unpacking. As Mackridge notes, we should distinguish between two conceptions of the Eastern Roman Empire: Byzantium as Christianity and Byzantium as Empire (P. Mackridge, ‘The heritages of the Modern Greeks’, British Academy Review (2012) 38). As Özkirimli and Sofos put it (Tormented by History, 100-1), Byzantium as Empire ‘disrupt[ed] the coherence of the [Greek] nationalist imagination and had to be erased.’ Because complete erasure was impossible, Greek nation-builders compromised by accommodating Byzantium as Christianity. Whilst Byzantium in Greek historiography is thus confined to the religious, the Istanbul Greeks, in imagining a cosmopolitan golden era, also evoke the sidelined Byzantium as Empire.

28 H. Millas, ‘“Greeks” in Turkish textbooks - the way for an integrationary approach’, paper presented at the conference ‘History Education and Textbooks’, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul 8-10 June 1995.

29 Hirschon, R., ‘Knowledge of diversity: towards a more differentiated set of “Greek” perceptions of “Turks”’, South European Society and Politics 11:1 (2006) 61–78 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hirschon, R., ‘“We got on well with the Turks”: Christian-Muslim relations in Late Ottoman times’, in Shankland, D. (ed.), Archaeology, Anthropology and Heritage in the Balkans and Anatolia: the Life and Times of F. W. Hasluck 1878-1920 (Istanbul 2004) 325-43Google Scholar.

30 Örs, ‘Beyond the Greek and Turkish dichotomy’, 79-94.

31 Ibid., 81-90.

32 Ibid., 86-8.

33 Hirschon, ‘Identity and the Greek state’, 163.

34 Herzfeld, Anthropology Through the Looking-glass, 19-21. Herzfeld was not writing in the specific context of economic crisis, and was observing, not subscribing to, this narrative.

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36 Mackridge, ‘The heritages of the Modern Greeks’, 33.

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38 The student oath was abolished in late 2013.

39 H. Millas, ‘The Romioí Istanbul as citizens and as a minority’, Eptalofos (December 1996); wording of the pledge is taken (abridged) from Meseci-Giorgetti, F., ‘Discourse of the student’s pledge in Turkey’, paper presented at ‘European Conference on Educational Research’ (Freie Universität Berlin, 14 September 2011)Google Scholar, http://www.eera-ecer.de/index.php?id=421&Action=showContributionDetail&cconferenceUid=5&contributionUid=18778&cHash=49a57dfd676d2M4168d29a6806cffe7 [accessed 1 August 2012].

40 Hirschon, ‘Identity and the Greek state’, 171.

41 Achilleas is certainly no Turkophobe; he, too, is playing a ‘character’ - the Greek nationalist - for humorous purposes.

42 Güven, D., ‘To «βαθύ» κράτος, τα Σεπτεμβριανά κοα η δημοκρατία στην σύγχρονη Τουρκία’, Proceedings of the International Conference: 6-7/9/1955 An Act of Annihilation of the Greek Community of Istanbul (Athens 2008) 14 Google Scholar.

43 Özkirimli and Sofos, Tormented by History, 100.

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46 Theodossopoulos, ‘“Turks” in the imagination of the “Greeks’”, 23.

47 Eriksen, ‘Two modes of group identification’, 430; Eriksen, T. H., ‘Ethnic identity, national identity, and intergroup conflict: the significance of personal experience’, in Ashmore, R., Justin, L. and Wilder, D. (eds), Social Identity, Intergroup Conflict and Conflict Resolution (Oxford 2001) 61-6Google Scholar.

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