Imagined Communities in Greece and Turkey
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A01=Emine Yesim Bedlek
Author_Emine Yesim Bedlek
Balkan Wars
Category=JBFH
Category=NHG
Christianity
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eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnic identity
First World War
Greece
Greek Muslims
identity
Kemal Ataturk
loss
memory
religious identity
trauma
Turkey
Product details
- ISBN 9780755649068
- Weight: 290g
- Dimensions: 138 x 214mm
- Publication Date: 26 Jan 2023
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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In 1923 the Turkish government, under its new leader Kemal Ataturk, signed a renegotiated Balkan Wars treaty with the major powers of the day and Greece. This treaty provided for the forced exchange of 1.3 million Christians from Anatolia to Greece, in return for 30,000 Greek Muslims. The mass migration that ensued was a humanitarian catastrophe - of the 1.3 million Christians relocated it is estimated only 150,000 were successfully integrated into the Greek state. Furthermore, because the treaty was ethnicity-blind, tens of thousands of Muslim Greeks (ethnically and linguistically) were forced into Turkey against their will. Both the Greek and Turkish leadership saw this exchange as crucial to the state-strengthening projects both powers were engaged in after the First World War. Here, Emine Bedlek approaches this enormous shift in national thinking through literary texts - addressing the themes of loss, identity, memory and trauma which both populations experienced. The result is a new understanding of the tensions between religious and ethnic identity in modern Turkey.
Emine Yesim Bedlek is Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at Bingol University, Turkey.
