Events in Cyprus down the years have had a tragic impact on a tiny island just seven kilometres from Turkey
FROM the highest peak on this island, one can look across the sea to Turkey, seven kilometres away, and see two battlefields: the plains of Troy, where the ancient Greeks fought the Trojans, and the hills of Gallipoli, where thousands of Australians, Britons, Frenchmen and New Zealanders died fighting the Turks in 1915.
The island of Tenedos, or Bozcaada in Turkish, was on the sidelines of both wars. Homer says the Greeks hid their ships behind Tenedos as they waited for the Trojans to fall for their wooden horse. And during WW1, the allies used the island as a staging post. Today the museum in Bozcaada town displays letters from soldiers who visited the island and wrote pessimistic accounts of the Gallipoli battle.
In modern times, Tenedos/Bozcaada has been on the sidelines of the conflict between Athens and Ankara, and has borne the brunt of Turkey’s vexation with Cyprus. Fortunately, the tendency of Tenedos to get the backwash of other people’s fights has diminished, although the stains remain. Today the island seeks to preserve its community in a region where island populations are falling, and maintain its traditions while responding to the imperatives of tourism.
A quiet man with the demeanour of an economist, Ahmet Talay runs the biggest winery on Bozcaada. His mentor was a Greek islander, Grigori Bubulya, a wine expert so esteemed that a superb vintage was named after him in 1999.
“He made me love making wine,” Talay recalled, drinking coffee outside his wine store in Tenedos’ main square. But when he and Grigori had a glass together after work, they always drank raki – the Turkish ouzo.
Tenedians have been making wine since the earliest times. The Bozcaada Book by Haluk Sahin records that coins bearing the image of a bunch of grapes have been found on the island dated around 200 BC. A French orientalist, Guillaume Olivier, visited the island in 1807 and wrote: “Tenedos’ wines are excellent. The island’s red wine is as good as Bordeaux’s.”
The Talay winery has the capacity to produce 1,700 litres a year, but this year it will produce 400 litres, Talay said. He has a million litres in storage “because the taxes are too high”.
The government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan pursues a mildly Islamic agenda, and has tripled the taxes on wine. “We can hardly tell citizens not to drink,” the then finance minister said in 2005, “so we discourage them by raising taxes.” Last year Erdogan visited Tenedos and, when the islanders told him of their difficulties, he replied: “If the vines aren’t profitable, cut them down and grow something else.”
The remark was widely resented. Wine and grapes are intrinsic to Tenedian culture. As Talay spoke, waiters behind him were serving elegant glasses of red on the pavement tables of Republic Square. On the pavement opposite, stall holders were offering wooden boxes of Chavush – the fat, golden table-grape for which Bozcaada is famous in Turkey. And later that night Talay was to be a judge in a harvest festival competition for the finest Chavush crop.
Talay is still pushing his brand. The winery has 25 labels, produced its first Shiraz this year, and sells a small quantity to the Netherlands. But he is thinking of changing gears to become a “boutique” producer – making a small quantity of top quality wine, where the profits are higher than in table wines.
As he works to improve his bottom line, Talay is aware that he is putting sentimental things such as tradition and love of wine-making ahead of economics. “If I wasn’t born into a grape-growing family,” he said, “I wouldn’t be in this business. I would have left the island.”
Most of the Greek islanders, including Grigori Bulbuya and other friends of Talay, have already left. And this is very sad because ethnic Greeks have lived on Tenedos for centuries. The island even became Greek territory in 1913 after Greece’s victory in the First Balkan War. The Turks regained it after they won the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22, but the ethnic Greeks of Bozcaada were granted special status under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. They were one of four communities which were not uprooted by the treaty’s exchange of populations. (The other three were the ethnic Greeks of Imbros/Gokceada – the island immediately north of Tenedos, the ethnic Greeks of Istanbul and the ethnic Turks of western Thrace.)
The tolerance between Greeks and Turks on Tenedos set an example to the region. Muslims tended to live on the one side of the town, Christians on the other – but each respected the other.
The prize example of this occurred on September 6, 1955 when the Turkish government covertly organised a pogrom against the Greeks in Istanbul to put pressure on the Cyprus negotiations. The leading Turkish landowner on Tenedos got word of what was happening and took action. Latif Aral, known as “Latif Aga” or Lord Latif, strode into the harbour and told the ferry captain to stop operating until further notice. There would be no racist thugs coming to Bozcaada.
However, things changed in the 1960-80s. Ethnic Greeks formed the majority of Tenedos’ population of about 2,000 in 1960. But, according to a 2008 report by the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly, the island has now only 25 Greeks, most elderly.
What happened? The Council of Europe rapporteur for human rights, Andreas Gross, found there were several reasons for Greek emigration: economics (many Greeks went to Australia and prospered), Turkey’s closure of the Greek-language school, its expropriations of Greek property and “various forms of harassment”.
The Turkish Foreign Ministry rejected the Gross report as biased. But Haluk Sahin, the one Turkish columnist and academic with a sustained interest in Bozcaada, praised the report as balanced and written with goodwill. “Who can deny that in the recent past bad things, even tragic things, have been done in the name of politics and chauvanism?” Sahin wrote in the island’s newspaper, Adaposta.
Talay and Lisa Lay, an Australian who has lived on the island for 18 years and is the founder-editor of Adaposta, separately told me the No. 1 issue that pushed the Greeks to leave was the closure of their school in 1964 – months after the Cypriot disturbances began.
When I asked Talay why the school was closed, he said: “This is all because of what’s happening in western Thrace.” He meant that Ankara squeezes its Greek community to retaliate for Athens’ taking steps against the Turkish-speakers of western Thrace.
The minorities in western Thrace, Bozcaada, Gokceada and Istanbul are “the pawns” of Turkey-Greece politics, Talay said.
It is a view that one hears in Ankara. Thinking Turks are embarrassed by their Greek population’s falling from more than 100,000 to 3,000 in the past 50 years. Newspaper columnists have even wondered how different Turkey would be if it still had a substantial Greek minority. Thinking Turks know their Greek islanders have been treated badly, but they say this was retaliation for what Greece did to its Turkish minority. Morally that’s no defence, but it’s an explanation.
I asked for an interview with a leading member of Bozcaada’s Greeks, but received no reply. However, Turkish islanders who were well disposed towards the Greeks told me that another factor in the emigration was events in Cyprus in 1963-74. The bloodshed on Cyprus poisoned the atmosphere, making Greek-speakers feel unwelcome.
“The peak of the exodus of the ethnic Greek islanders was in 1974, following new disturbances triggered by a fresh round of conflict in Cyprus,” Gross reported. “The numbers speak for themselves: in 1960, 5,487 ethnic Greeks and 289 ethnic Turks lived on the island of Gökçeada/Im
bros; in 1970, the numbers were 2,571 and 4,020; in 1985, 472 and 7,138.”
Today Tenedos is changing. Tourism has overtaken grapes and wine as the major source of revenue. The island offers beaches where the coral and clear water rival that of the Red Sea, restaurants where one eats fish under a trellis of leaves, grape farms converted into hotels and a magnificent Venetian castle.
Relations between Athens and Ankara have improved considerably since the “earthquake diplomacy” of 1999, and this has affected the islands positively. In his report, Gross noted “the reassuring and helpful attitude” to the Greeks of the state-appointed prefects or kaymakams on Bozcaada and Gokceada.
Gross recommended a number of measures to right the wrongs of the past. Turkey should reopen a Greek school as soon as there are enough children on Gokceada (where the Greeks still number 250) and introduce courses to learn Greek in the Turkish schools. With the vision of a man who comes from multi-cultural Switzerland, Gross wrote: “Giving (the islands’) children the opportunity to learn Greek as well as Turkish, alongside ethnic Greek children, would give rise to a truly bilingual population that would be ideally placed to seize the job opportunities that would be generated by the development of tourism …”
He is right. Islands of Greece lie to the north, west and south of Tenedos. The week I was there, I heard Greek being spoken on Ayazma beach. A dozen Greek pilots were on holiday. One of them, Dimitris Simos from Lesbos, whose grandmother used to live on Tenedos, said that from the moment he arrived, “me and everybody else thought we were in Greece. It’s so similar. The people, the landscape, the food, the way they talk.”
Gross also recommended the return of expropriated property, a new system of property registration and a review of previous decisions, the return of Turkish citizenship to those Greek islanders who have left, and the start of a ferry service between Bozcaada and Gokceada – which are only 35 kilometres apart.
The Greeks who left Tenedos and Imbros miss their islands deeply. “The exiled Imbriots and Tenedians are making a great effort to distinguish themselves from other Greek and Turkish diaspora groups, retaining a specific Imbriot and Tenedian identity,” Gross found.
And some Turks miss the Greeks. “The old islanders would love the Greek community to be restored,” Lisa Lay told me. “Old Turkish ladies sometimes cry when they recall the old days.”
“The mainlanders,” she said, referring to the new islanders who are now the majority of the population, “wouldn’t know what to think about the Greeks coming back. They’re just here to make money.”
Talay, who looks after the vineyard of a Greek islander who’s left, said the Greek and Turkish islanders had overcome what happened in the recent past. “The connection between the two communities is getting stronger even though the population is smaller. We are the natives of this island.”
Two years ago the prime minister reversed years of official refusal and got the state to restore the Greek church’s bell tower – the tallest structure in Bozcaada town – at a cost of about euros 100,000. It was a highly successful gesture, greatly appreciated by the Greek islanders and mentioned three times in the Gross report.
But everyone knows Erdogan didn’t do it to win a few Greek votes. He was looking at Europe. For the same reason, the Turkish government would be wise to look at the Gross report again.
