From the 1954 and 1964 Turkish pogroms agains the Greeks to the present day
The Zografeion Greek High School in Istanbul boasted 750 students during the mid-20th century but now has only fifty. / Engin Güneysu/Le Jounal pour La Croix
Looming like a gray monolith over a street that seems too small to contain it, the austere yet imposing building is located not far from the old French-speaking Galatasaray high school.
Just a few meters from the Istiklal pedestrian mall at the center of the cosmopolitan old trading quarter of Constantinople, the building has hosted the Zografeion high school for 124 years.
It is one of the five remaining Greek schools in a city that once had sixty.
Behind its heavy doors, a series of period photos and beautiful wooden carvings seem frozen in time, dating perhaps from the middle of the 20th century when the school had around 750 students.
The fewer than fifty students who took their places at the old green school benches when school reopened this year now look a little lost in the vast five-story building.
“Our main problem is the lack of students,” recognizes Giannis Demirtzoglou, the school principal.
“Ten thousand students have studied and hundreds of teachers have taught here over the years. Today there are only nineteen teachers, including four who have come from Greece to provide the courses that are mainly done in Greek,” he says.
Demirtzoglou says the non-Greek exceptions are sociology and Turkish history, “which are obviously taught in Turkish, not to mention Turkish language lessons of course”.
The decline of the Zografeion high school is linked to the fate of the Istanbul Greek community, known as the “Rums,” which is the Turkish word for designating “Romans” or rather the descendants of the Eastern Roman Empire.
Although they were one of the largest ethnic groups in Constantinople, during the middle of the 20th century they became the scapegoats for quarrels between Ankara and Athens over the Cyprus issue.
In 1955, a nationalist demonstration degenerated into an anti-Rum pogrom in Istanbul. In 1964, Turkey canceled the residence permits of 12,000 Rums who went into exile to Greece, taking with them several thousand other Orthodox Christians, who held Turkish passports but also preferred to leave.
Although 100,000 still remained during the 1950s, their number has now fallen to 2,500.
“We cannot live in the past; it is the future that is important,” comments Demirtzoglou, who oscillates between optimism and fatalism.
“The existence of the Zografeion High School today sends a message that Turkey is our country,” he says. “Moreover, without the Rums, Istanbul would not be Istanbul. However, we are now so few that we have almost become museum pieces…”
In fact, the community is continuing to diminish and age. Many young Rums are leaving to settle in Greece since they have access to a simplified residence permit, but few make the return trip. Those who do are often retired people desiring to spend their final days in their native city.
On the other hand, Mihail Vasiliadis did not wait for retirement to return to Istanbul, which he originally left in 1975. In 2002, he took over the oldest operating daily newspaper in Turkey, namely Apoyevmatini (The Afternoon), a Greek-language paper founded in 1925.
It once had one of the highest circulation in the country with 35,000 copies daily. Now, however, it only manages to continue with the help of donations from the diaspora, with 600 copies distributed to families, businesses, schools, and churches in the community.
Vasiliadis’ son now manages the publication of the newspaper with his father.
“It is increasingly difficult,” says Minas Vasiliadis. “We no longer have advertisers since the Greek economic crisis and the drop in Turkish currency also affects our expenses such as the printing of the newspaper, which needs to be paid for in euros.”
Although the newspaper received financial support from the Ankara government during the first decade of this century, this has now ended.
“The more Turkey drifts away from Europe, the less the government is likely to assist us,” he says with a sigh.
As well as the tense situation in Europe and the complicated relationship with Greece, Ankara’s relationship with the Ecumenical Patriarch is also difficult. A Turkish project to transform the Hagia Sophia cathedral museum into a mosque is one major issue. The Orthodox seminary in Halki located on an island opposite Istanbul has been closed since 1971 following a decision by Turkish authorities is another.
The closure is also a problem for Patriarch Bartholomew since according to law the next patriarch must be of Turkish nationality.
Are the descendants of the Eastern Roman Empire simply destined to silently disappear? Sporadic efforts are being made to make known and to transmit their heritage.
For example, in 2012 a young team founded a publishing house plus a production house and a cafe named “Isos,” meaning “network” in Greek, in order to share and promote the memory of the minorities in Turkey.
“This is not a matter of nostalgia,” explains Anna Maria Aslanoglu, one of the founders of the association. “It is a genuine need. Rum literature, for example, has never been translated into Turkish.
“And many Greek authors are translated into Turkish from a third language! This is the gap that we want to fill. The community is now aging and very small but the Rum memory will not die.”
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