Greek Muslims, Greek Christians...

Turkey's Greek-speaking Muslims

1922 was a good year for the Orthodox Church. The army of the Greek state had been routed in Asia Minor and many Christians fled for their lives. It was obvious to them that Turks and Greeks could not live together and it was decided to separate the two populations, to prevent future conflicts. However, the Balkans remained a patchwork of various peoples and it would be difficult to define nationality under such circumstances. On either side of the Aegean there were Greek-speaking Muslims and Turkish-speaking Christians.

Since independence from the Ottoman Empire, after some cunning manoeuvring in the monasteries, Greece had once more come under the power of the Orthodox Church and a foreign puppet king. Decades of propaganda led the illiterate masses to conclude that the Church was the saviour of Hellenism and that all Greek people were Christian. However, there remained a potential that the other religious groups might also claim to be Greek, hence destroying the mirage. The answer to this dilemma was frighteningly simple. All Orthodox Christians, regardless of ethnic background, would be classified as Greeks and all Muslims would be classified Turks. Hence, the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, at Venizelos's insistence, obliged the two sides to exchange populations. The only remaining Romioi in Turkey huddled around their Patriarch, whilst the Muslims of Thrace were also allowed to stay where they were.

In Turkey today, there are two Greek-speaking Muslim groups. One of them continues to occupy the territory washed by the Black Sea, the Pontians, who converted to Islam in the 18th century. The other group is comprised of the Cretan Muslims who were resettled along the Asia Minor coast. The Turkish state began a process of turkification and today most of them claim to be Turks.

The group speaking Pontian lives in 5 or 6 villages in the Tonya and Trabzon regions and in nearly 50 villages in the Yukari Solakli valley. Although they speak Greek, they refuse to refer to themselves as such and call their language Romaiika (Rumce, in Turkish). They view Greek-speaking Christians as a separate people, whom they call Rumlar. The dialect is still spoken fluently by the young generation and most women can only speak Pontian.

On the Greek side, the Muslims of Thrace are made up of Roma, Pomaks and a number of ethnic Turks, along the border. It was good propaganda to class all of these populations as Turkish and their children were educated in that language. An interesting situation evolved; as Turkey experimented with secularisation, the Muslims in Thrace continued to recite prayers for the Sultan and write in Arabic script. Under the 'Greek Ministry of Education and Religions' the Pomaks remained one of the most backward groups in Europe.\

Paradoxically, Turkey began to openly accuse the Greek government of encouraging Islamic fundamentalism in order to destabilise the Turkish Republic. The Christians now had a ready-made scapegoat.

The Greek government eventually recognised the Thracian Muslims as one minority in the 80’s. This was the 'Greek-Muslim' minority, as opposed to the 'Greek-Orthodox' majority. Hellas remained a theocracy and the archbishops were reminded of Ottoman times, when people were classified according to religion and the Patriarch was declared Ethnarch.

The Muslim Cretans living in Turkey reside in villages along the western coast, which were vacated of their Christian populations after 1922. There are Muslim Cretans living in the large seaside towns of Izmir (Smyrna), Antalya and Ayvalik, where the old generation still speak Greek. Their population is estimated to be around 200,000 - 300,000.

However, the young generation can only speak Turkish and identify themselves as Turks. In Turkey they only know of one type of Cretan, the one that calls himself a Turk, because he is a Muslim. This has led many in Turkey to conclude that the Cretans are a race separate from the people of the Greek mainland. Islamists have made use of this ignorance by inventing the notion that there is a movement in Crete that seeks independence. Turkish irredentists have even created 'Resistance Posters' [see left] to convince the older Cretan Muslims that they will soon be going home; thereby strengthening their allegiance to the Turkish state. Whilst this propaganda is being churned out, the forces on the other side of the Aegean remain silent. Simply put, it suits them as well. The weirdos at the Greek intelligence agency may have an alternative theory... like maybe it's, you know, some sort of 'Israeli conspiracy'.

The illusion began to fall apart when some of the Greek-speaking Muslims defied the odds and attempted to re-establish contact with Greece. The Church began to panic when a number of Muslim Pontians from Turkey decided to live in Greece, out of a desire to express their identity. The authorities expelled many of them. The ones still in Greece remain under continual threat of deportation, where they ask for residence permits on humanitarian grounds. Some are students on state scholarships. The neo-Byzantine government regards them as a threat to national security and the status quo. Meanwhile, the Turkish authorities view them as potential traitors. One young man who returned to Turkey for a holiday was stripped naked and detained for 30 days in a basement.