Our transcendental identities

Past is like a big box that holds in it memories, colours, tears, smiles and sometimes anger and dispair. It's this past in which our stories are written. The stories of our homeland, the history of the political, the story of our identities, the stories of our lives. And when we open this box to bring up stories and invest the future with meaning, it worths to learn to see those stories through a collective perspective. Because it is this collective perspective which transforms our individual experience into a peaceful protest for a future that is better than the past.

In this place, 100 years ago, two nations used to share the same land. Sometimes in peace and sometimes under a lot of difficulties. Religion and nation was what seperated them, but the warm summer noons and the same sky was what brought them united. Tourkish and Greeks, Muslims and Christians, felt this place, all of them, their homeland. At this time, though, due to the establishment of the nationalistic ideas, both in the greek political scene and the tourkish, millions of people were forced to violently abandon their homeland, in which they used to live till this time, so that a big national political aim be implemented: “Every nation must have its own state”. And somewhat like this, the borders of the two nations were defined, Greeks and Turkish, just after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and just before the start of the Balkan wars.

Our national identities are deeply embedded now in our psyche, they define a big part of our life. Our customs, way of thinking, language, our religion, our limitations, perhaps even our dictations that we want to brake. However, our national identities have their own history through time. They are neither non-historical concepts, outside of the place and time, nor static and unchangeable. They are more like of a plasticine, created by the French Revolution and formed in a way that responds to the needs of a nation that became free from feudalism and pursued more democratic structures, through the existance of a shared connection- identity among the people. The concequences of the French Revolution were to affect, many decades later, what was then the Ottoman Empire, which till then understood, recognized and formed based on the religious identity, the Christian and the Muslim. History, however, has taught us that big political shifts are almost never held peacefully, but abruptly and violently.

One thousand years after the fermentation of the concept of nationalism and the nation-state in the region of Mediterrenean, the shift from the religious to the national identity was held through the violent exchange of populations, christians and muslims, greeks and turkish respectively, in 1923.

This large prologue was brought in my mind to offer you a sense of what was my journey in Fokea like, of Mr. F that I met there and the thoughts that crossed my mind.

In Fokea, we visited a museum full of memories, objects, photos and handmade emdroidery from the years after the Population Exchange. There we met Mr. F.

Mr. F is one of those people whose family took the decision not to leave their house in Turkey during the exchange, but rather stay behind holding this big burden of a quite bizarre choice. They signed their shift to Islam and become Muslim. He guided us through the museum and it was like he was guiding us through his own life. Though only in the end of the tour he made THE question, which I have learned to dislike because of an oppressed childhood from two very strict orthodox parents.

-                     Who is Orthodox?

Someone showed towards me, while I feel a knot in my heart because of this identity that was given to me, without being able to choose it, very carefully and very personally. I didn’t say anything, I just let the moment rush like I wasn’t there.

-                     “Come with me”, he said, and I followed him to a small room inside the museum.“I want to give you this icon of Saint Sotiria. Take it as a gift from me”.

-                     “Thank you very much. I will give it to my mother who believes in God. I am sure she will like it very much, because my family also has origins from Izmir”.

And somehow, like this, seeing his emotions in his moved eyes, I felt that all those thoughts that I had done with my imagination, which seemed like a fairytale, quite unreal, including boats and persecutions, oppression and hatred between people from both sides of the Eagean, it was a harsh past reality for him and his family. I could do nothing less than to forget for a while my oppressed childhood and accept his emotions, not in political terms, but more in emotional ones.

History has its own paradox and not accidentally. There are these transcendental identities that give you the impression that history can be turned into a personal choice just for a while. Mr. F had such a transcendental identity that urged him to overcome the mandatory national and religious identities of the age and to accept an identity which he didn’t choose as well- his shift to Islam.  Mr. F is a communist. That is what he whispered to me, while we were having a cay at a local café.

        For these reasons, it is interesting to talk about these transcendental identities, because they shed light to a part of the history that stayed in the dark for decades. This is because the stories of the specific population exchange are stories of violent repatriations, stories of survival and hatred. And these stories can be found easily in textbooks, in days of remembrances of both countries, they are told by our grandparents and relatives, you read them and hear them somewhere accidentally. Though, you won’t find easily the story of Mr. F, you will not hear or read it anywhere, but only in the place that it was born.

The communist and labor consciousness of Mr. F helped him to see and give meaning to his life, outside the realms of the narrow national and religious identity. He got connected with the people around you with the criterion of class, and not on the basis of nationality and religion. His identities urged him to overcome the bifurcation of “whether you will leave Turkey as a Greek Orthodox or you will stay as a Muslim” and stayed in Turkey as a communist. Because for him, the importance was not hidden in whether someone is muslim or orthodox, Greek or Turkish, but rather on the fact that the struggle of the classes was and would still be a reality.

Mr. F and every Mr. F give through their choices these third, distanced and wise answer to all those who believe that our countries should be mono-ethnic. His transcendental identity is as relevant as ever, although so many years have passed. And it will be relevant as long as we see extreme nationalist parties to recover their power in Europe, as long as the gap among rich and poor will widen and as long as identities like the one of Mr. F‘s will consist a reason of oppression and exile. For this reason this article is dedicated to him. Because with great respect to his family’s experiences, he managed to maintain an identity, which doesn’t set national or religious limits in our existence, bringing in this way solidarity one step closer, in a period of legitimated hatred between the two countries.

                                          ^ To Mr. Fs’ of both countries

            

                                  Evs volunteers in Fokea