The uncertain future of Greeks in Turkey

OUTSIDE a small chapel on Imbros, a windswept Turkish island on the Aegean Sea, the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians relaxes under a canopy of oak trees, catches up with old friends and reminisces about his birthplace’s dark past. Bartholomew I, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, born Dimitrios Arhondonis, left the island in the early 1960s to study abroad. By the time he returned a few years later, he could hardly recognise it. The vast majority of the island’s 6,000 Greeks were gone, replaced by settlers from Turkey. Convicted prisoners, also shipped in from the mainland, terrorised those Greeks who remained. Some women were raped; several men were killed. The government in Ankara closed the Greek schools, seized nearly all the arable land, and changed the island’s old Greek name, to Gokceada.