Aegeans’ pain remembered in new Istanbul Museum

ERİSA DAUTAJ ŞENERDEM
ISTANBUL – Hürriyet Daily News
22/12/2010

Kitchen utensils, photographs and pieces of lacework are among the everyday items displayed in a new museum to tell the story of how thousands of ordinary lives were turned upside down in 1923.

The uprooting of some 2 million people on both sides of the Aegean Sea as a result of the compulsory exchange of populations agreed to by Greece and Turkey nearly a century ago is a tale not even told by some of these families, known as “mübadele,” to their descendants.

“Our parents never talked about the population exchange,” Sahime Yeruşan, the Istanbul-born daughter of a mübadele family, told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review earlier this week at the opening of the Istanbul Capital of Culture Population Exchange Museum in the city’s Çatalca district.

Yeruşan, who donated her aunt’s dowry to the museum’s collection, said the new institution creates a very good opportunity for future generations to know what their grandparents experienced during the population exchange. Some 1.5 million Greek Orthodox citizens of Turkey and 500,000 Muslim citizens of Greece were expelled from their homes and relocated across the Aegean as part of the exchange. While the new museum focuses on the stories of the Muslims who had to move to Turkey, the foundation behind it has plans in the works to highlight the other side of the exchange as well.

“The content in the museum will remind us of the humanitarian plight and suffering from [massive displacements] that might happen to us one day,” Carol Batchelor, the Turkey representative for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said in her speech Monday at the museum’s opening. She said the organization would support the museum by providing historical documents and by organizing joint exhibitions and other activities.

The building that houses the museum, formerly a Greek Turk tavern before the exchange and later the Bank of Agriculture, was donated by the Ölçer family. The objects in its collection – historical documents, kitchen utensils, audio and video tapes, photographs, instruments and books of sheet music – were largely donated by mübadele families.

“Words are not enough to express my deep feelings,” Vediya Elgün, who was 1.5 years old when her family moved from Thessaloniki to Istanbul in 1923, told the Daily News while visiting the museum. Elgün donated three pieces to the museum: a book of sheet music in her mother’s handwriting, her mother’s “paçalık,” an elegant piece of clothing worn by newly married women the day after their wedding, and a piece of lacework. She said her family was one of the lucky ones; they were given a three-story villa in the Black Sea province of Giresun after the exchange.

The population exchange was agreed to by Greece and Turkey during the same peace conference that resulted in the Treaty of Lausanne, the document that led to the international recognition of the newly formed Turkish Republic. The museum is a project of the Foundation of Lausanne Treaty Emigrants, in partnership with the Çatalca Municipality, and was sponsored by the Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture agency. Fener Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew I attended the museum’s opening ceremony.

“We have just signed a second agreement with the Istanbul 2010 agency to launch another museum on the Orthodox Rums [Greek Turks] who had to leave Turkey during the exchange,” Atilla Karaelmas, a member of the foundation’s board of directors and the coordinator of the project, told the Daily News on Tuesday. The new museum, to be launched by February 2011, will be located near the first one, he added. “We wanted both sides to be reflected in the museums.”

Plans for the museum had been in the works since 2001, but it took the foundation nearly a decade to find sponsors to finance it. “It took a long time for [the mübadele families] to be organized, as they were placed all throughout the country,” Karaelmas said. He added that the foundation is now looking for sponsors for the establishment of an Institute on Immigration in the Balkans.

The opening of the museum in Çatalca is among a series of recent moves toward reconciliation with the Greek communities living in Turkey. A long-closed Greek Orthodox seminary on the Princes’ Island of Heybeliada was opened over the summer to host an exhibition titled “Tracing Istanbul”; the seminary’s closure by Turkish authorities in 1971 has been a source of ongoing tensions between Turkey and Greece.

A 19th-century orphanage on Büyükada, the largest of the Princes’ Islands in the Marmara Sea, was meanwhile reclaimed by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in November, after it was granted back to the community by the European Court of Human Rights. The building had been under Turkey’s control since 1997, on the grounds that it belonged to another foundation, but the European court ruled against this argument in June, ordering Turkey to pay 6,000 euros in compensation and 20,000 euros in court fees.

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