Samim Akgönül on 100 years of Turkish-Greek relations
Samim Akgönül on "One Hundred Years of Greek-Turkish Relations: The Human Dimension of an Ongoing Conflict" (Edinburgh University Press)
The book's research is based on interviews conducted between 1996 and 2022 on both sides. What was the defining impression you got from those conversations?
It was a long process in my academic life and it was also a long process in my personal life. I first started interviewing people in the 1990s about the Turkish Muslim minority in Greece, living in Western Thrace. But at the end of the 1990s I understood that trying to understand a minority living in Greece resulting from the Ottoman Empire and Ottoman society wasn't possible without analysing the other side, the other part of the minority: The Greek minority of Turkey. While interviewing people in Istanbul, Athens, Komotini, Xanthi, Rhodes, Crete, etc, I understood that there were some basic human dimensions related to the experience of these individuals. I was able to interview two-and-a-half generations, approximately two decades. They had their personal impressions and personal lives, but also there was a national narrative and people were impacted by this national narrative. It was very interesting to see that often these two narratives were paradoxical and oppositional. People's own personal experience wasn't exactly the same as the national education narrative and popular press narrative. It was interesting to see this cognitive dissonance.
I conducted field research in archives, but mainly through interviews with those who were impacted directly and those who are descendants at the end of the 1990s, in the middle of the 2000s, at the end of the 2010s and start of the 2020s. Obviously those interviews were conducted over a very long period of time, almost 30 years, spanning from the 1990s to a couple of years ago. I again saw this alterity through national narratives. That is the core of the book.
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