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Köksal, Özlem. "Covering and Discovering: Non-Muslim Minorities and Film." Aesthetics of Displacement: Turkey and its Minorities on Screen. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 63– 92. Topics and Issues in National Cinema. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 30 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501306471.ch-003>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 30 September 2021, 21:57 UTC. Copyright © Özlem Köksal 2016. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 3 Covering and Discovering: Non-Muslim Minorities and Film “All ideas of nation and peoplehood rely on some idea of ethnic purity or singularity and the suppression of the memories of plurality” writes Appadurai (1996: 45). Whether ethnic, religious or otherwise, minorities function as a reminder of “social uncertainties” that cause hostility, and in some cases violence, against the minorities. This is due to the idea of purity and totality inherent in the idea of nation-state, or any other form of social identity put forward by an institution. However, the idea of the totality of a nation is as constructed as the concept of minority. What is more, not only are the nation and national unity constructed but their perception and performance depend on various factors, such as social and economic background. Although Europe, and much of the world, has been dealing with rising nationalisms, and the ascent of the far right, there is also a growing desire to recognize and under- stand the other. The films about minorities in Turkey appear to be a response to this process, as well as being the products of the country’s own internal dynamics, which arguably created a discursive space for the unresolved issues of the past to be discussed. Within the last two decades, there have been a considerable number of films dealing with non-Muslim minorities, specifically with the events that are left outside the official narrative of history yet shaped the population of Turkey. These films either deal directly with traumatic historical events, such as the population exchanges of the 1920s, and the pogroms against non-Muslims (Bulutları Beklerken/Waiting for the Clouds, Güz Sancısı/Pains of Autumn) or take a minority identity as an implicit aspect of the narrative (Dar Alanda Kısa Paslaşmalar/Offside, 9), making the silence that existed on various aspects of history concerning minorities visible. 9781501306464_txt_print.indd 63 04/11/2015 13:54 64 Aesthetics of Displacement This chapter looks at films that are either about non-Muslim minorities in Turkey or about events that concern these communities. In what follows, I will first give a brief account of the various historical moments that affected the non-Muslim population of Turkey, providing an overview of the films made within the last two decades on some of these issues discussed here. The second half will then provide a close examination of two films: Politiki Kouzina/A Touch of Spice (2003), the story of the last Greek exodus from Istanbul, the 1964 deportation of Greek residents, made by an Istanbullite Greek director Tassos Boulmetis, and Waiting for the Clouds, a film that deals with a Greek women who lost her family as a result of the forced migrations. There have been a number of events and regulations in the last century affecting the non-Muslim population of Turkey. Starting from the war years leading up to the establishment of the modern Turkish Republic, and continuing in the following years and decades, these events caused the number of non-Muslims in Turkey to drastically reduce. One of those events was the great fire of Smyrna (İzmir Yangını), in 1922. The fire started toward the end of the Greek–Turkish war, when the Turkish army gained control of the city of İzmir. Starting near the Greek and Armenian quarters of the city, it destroyed a large part of İzmir, causing many of its inhabitants to evacuate the city. While Turks maintained that Greeks “burned down the city before evacuating,” Greeks claimed that it was Turkish forces who started the fire. What is telling about the narrative developed around the fire is that, despite the complex nature of the event, its depiction allows there to be no ambiguity for the Turks and the Greeks. While the event is mourned in Greece as a disaster, the Turkish side sees it as the liberation of the city. According to Biray Kolluoğlu-Kırlı the fire was written out of local history by means of recreating the city, and to “mark a beginning, a point-zero,” the space became the embodiment of the newly created nation-state. Hence, the fire “can be interpreted as both an immense act of destruction and an act of creation: creation of national spatialities” (Kolluoğlu-Kırlı 2002: 2). Such erasure of the memory of the place should be thought of in relation to erasure of the people, and the attempts to purify the nation on both sides of the Aegean Sea. The compulsory population exchange was one of the most important attempts toward this direction, which was based on an agreement between the two states—Greece and Turkey—(1923). The agreement provided a legal framework for finishing touches to be made for the “unmixing of people,” which in fact started a decade earlier (Hirschon 2006; Keyder 2006; Aktar 2008). 9781501306464_txt_print.indd 64 04/11/2015 13:54 Covering and Discovering: Non-Muslim Minorities and Film 65 The compulsory exchange involved Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion living in Turkey and the Muslims living in Greece. The Orthodox population of Istanbul and the Muslims living in Western Thrace were exempt from the exchange. The policy inevitably had long-term effects, as well as the immediate human suffering that it caused. Keyder writes that “the Turkish nation […] was itself formed through this process of ethnic unmixing” and, therefore, “it is difficult to isolate the impact of the exchange on Turkish society from the wider process of nation-state formation” (Keyder 2006: 43–4). What is more, although both the Great Fire of Smyrna and the compulsory population exchange redefined the ethnic composition of the region, there is hardly any mention of them in textbooks in Turkey.1 Although silences exist in every nation’s history, Turkey presents a particular case in considering “the enormity of the effort to negate the previous existence of non-Turkish populations in the land that eventually became Turkey” (Keyder 2006: 48). In a study analyzing a large number of novels and short stories written in Turkish, Hercules Millas points to the silence with regard to the population exchange. According to Millas, between 1923 and 1980 the references to the population exchange in Turkish literature “are very few and mostly indirect” (Millas 2006: 221), whereas in Greek literature many novels and short stories were written during the same period about the experiences of Christians (Millas 2006: 224). Only after the 1980s did the situation start to change and the interest in the subject became evident. In cinema, director Yeşim Ustaoğlu’s Waiting for the Clouds was one of the first films to deal directly with the effects of the population exchange. While it is about a Christian woman whose family left their land as a result of the exchange (and it is examined in detail below), there are also films dealing with Muslim subjects who were forced to leave their homes and came to Turkey as result of the exchange, one of which is Dedemin İnsanları/My Grandfather’s People (Çağan Irmak, 2011). Recently a small museum was opened in their memory in a small town near Istanbul.2 Although the population exchange was the defining event in terms of reshaping the population of Anatolia (along with the massacres and deporta- tions of Armenians), the general attitude toward minorities did not improve a great deal in the following years either. The Varlık Vergisi (Capital Tax, also known as the Wealth Tax, 1942), the Pogrom of September 6 and 7, 1955, as well as the 1934 pogroms against Jews in Thrace are among those defining moments in Turkish history that shaped the country’s relationship with its non-Muslim citizens. These events, all part of the attempt to Turkify the nation that began in 9781501306464_txt_print.indd 65 04/11/2015 13:54 66 Aesthetics of Displacement the first few decades of the Republic, continued to affect societies long after they took place. In recent years, both the historical moments regarding minorities and the country’s relation to its minorities have become the center of attention in film as well as in other areas of cultural life.3 These memories, suppressed for a long time, swept under the carpet of “common sense” of national sensibilities and not known to younger generations, started reemerging. Although at times these texts function only to wash the society’s conscience clear, they nevertheless point to a newly awakened concern. Intriguingly, their remembrance and reemergence have remarkable similarities to the place ghosts occupy in culture, haunting the national psyche. Non-Muslims on screen Emerging in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the majority of the films concerning minorities are made by later generations, whose memories and identities are shaped by the conditions created after the 1980s. Similarly, the majority of their audiences also do not have direct memories of these events. Before briefly intro- ducing these films, it should be pointed out that among the historically unjust moments that affected non-Muslim minorities, and often driving them out their own country, one event that still awaits attention is the pogrom in Thrace against the Jews in 1934.

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