Istanbul Is a Moveable Feast

Maria Eliades

A crowd of men berated Yiannis Boutaris, the mayor of Thessaloniki, violently attacking the 75-year-old on May 19, 2018. Velvet banners of saints and staves topped with crosses filled the square around the White Tower, a notorious former prison and one of the few vestiges of the city’s Ottoman past, once ringed with walls, now a focal point of the city’s harbor as well as the city’s identity. People carrying the staves wore black, yellow, and maroon. Some wore the traditional Black Sea garb; others were covered in black, from their tall boots to the squashed hats that looked like wrapped scarves, with a round of bullets slung over their chests. The crowd had gathered to commemorate the Pontian Genocide. Their banners and yellow flags with the single-headed Pontian eagle stood arrayed like an army marshaled for the ranks of the dead and the short-lived Republic of Pontus. 

 “Leave!” yelled the faction across from the crowd carrying the staves and flags. 

“I’m talking to you, you bastard,” another shouted. A man wearing a mauve T-shirt among a sea of men wearing black shirts surged toward the mayor and delivered the first blow to Boutaris, who watched them. 

The black-shirted faction kicked the septuagenarian mayor to the ground and turned the area around him into a mosh pit as he staggered up. His vice mayor and a staff member shielded him. In the next instant the mob chased Boutaris—wearing a blue suit, pants held up by suspenders, and a yellow commemoration pin—as he limped through the square away from the White Tower. The crowd followed him off the pavement and onto the grass, hitting him with bottles. A man carrying a motorcycle mask spit on the mayor’s face as the cries rose above the crowd: “Come on, hit the traitor,” “He’s the one who sold out Macedonia,” “Bastard Turk.” Boutaris’s car was close, but a man in a balaclava kicked the mayor before he tucked himself into the compact vehicle. As he escaped, a group of men took turns kicking the hatchback’s rear window until it shattered.

Boutaris has long been a controversial figure for his efforts to cultivate better relations with the Turks and for his close relationship with the city’s Jewish community. He courted the Turks, highlighting the city as the birthplace of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey. In his speeches Boutaris described Thessaloniki as a “Balkan ‘melting pot’” where Greeks, Turks, Jews, and Slavs once lived together, until the rise of nationalism and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century.[1] Even though his efforts improved tourism and brought about a slow shift in public opinion in his favor, Boutaris inflamed nationalists during an interview at the 2017 Concordia in Europe Summit in Athens when, in response to a question about the renovations at the Atatürk Museum on the grounds of the Turkish Consulate in Thessaloniki, he commented that he didn’t “give a shit” whether or not Atatürk had massacred Greeks.[2]

This interview took place a year before the attack on the mayor at the Pontian Genocide commemoration, thus making a direct link impossible. However, the far right group Golden Dawn praised what seems to have been a planned attack—ironically at an extremely nationalist event.[3] It’s also been assumed that the anger that sparked the attack on Boutaris stemmed not just from his statements and reconciliatory actions but also from false reports saying that he had allowed the city’s Gay Pride Parade to take place on the same day as the commemoration—though in truth it was to take place on June 20–23, which speaks to another layer of Greek nationalism and conservative Greek identity.[4] That the elected mayor of a democratic country became a target of their ire is a haunting message to those who believe in a multicultural, nonnationalistic identity. The overall message is that there is only one way to be Greek, which is especially haunting to someone like me.

I was 15 when I first visited Greece, which until then had been a semi-mythical homeland role-played and ritually enacted at Greek School, church, and at home in northern New Jersey. The arid summer landscape outside of Athens unfolded before me as I sat in a bus that was part of a caravan taking me and two hundred other teenagers to Ionian Village—a summer camp run by the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America in a lush site in the Peloponnese. A billboard was propped up in the middle of the empty, undeveloped plains.

“Gambling Made Easy,” or “Pay Day!” or something like that the billboard said in Greek, with the photo of a busty, smiling Hellenic woman in a low-cut T-shirt.

The sign was a personal revolution delayed. I would only get a glimpse of nonreligious Greece (rather than Greek America) outside of the camp’s grounds on day trips, when we’d catch sight of Greeks born in Greece manning the periptera, or newsstands, that sold innocent delights such as Ion chocolate bars or Fanta lemonade soda in Greek packaging, alongside porno magazines and cigarettes. 

So this isn’t some elaborate conspiracy between our parents and teachers to torture all of us with extra school and homework twice a week, I thought. The idea never went away, particularly in the week that followed the end of camp, when I toured other parts of Greece with my mother. 

Although seeing that billboard initiated my intellectual awakening, once I was back in the States I was plopped right back into the culture I’d grown up with, one that emphasized nationalism in all of its teachings. As with other diasporic communities, religion stands at the center of what it means to be a part of that nation, or ethnos, in the community in which I grew up. The only independent centers of Greek learning that exist in the United States are in universities. In Greek America you learn the Greek language at church, socialize with other Greeks at church, and learn, consciously or unconsciously, cultural mores—from classic folk dances to masculine dominance—from other Greeks and Greek Americans at church. You also theoretically learn how to be a good Greek Orthodox Christian, but emotionally and verbally, religion and culture are hopelessly tangled. The services I attended were mostly in ecclesiastical Greek, with some lines of English thrown in for the Americanized second generation (and of course never for converts, because the ethnic exclusivity of the church froze out anyone who was not Greek), and my interactions with parishioners were in a mix of Modern Greek and English. 

In this environment, the designation of the Turk as the Other was as essential to Greek identity as knowing how to pronounce tzatziki and celebrating Easter on a different day from Catholics. What was not Greek was Turkish by default, and this paradigm required no further explanation. In Greek School our teachers told us that the Turks had ruled over us mercilessly for 400 years. They were Muslim and we were Christian, and we had to fight for our religion for centuries. Our teachers told us stories about the last century of Ottoman rule, when children like us snuck away to learn Greek by candlelight in secret schools. We memorized poems and prayers in katharevousa, a form of Greek no longer in use. I didn’t understand then how these stories aimed to shape my identity, but to this day the only bit of verse I remember from Greek School—aside from the Lord’s Prayer in Greek and the national anthem— is a poem about those secret schools, where children learned Greek at night because, we were told, Greek was a forbidden language under the Ottomans.

These lessons didn’t carry over to home. My father was born in Istanbul—as were half of my relatives—after my grandparents moved to the city in the early twentieth century from their respective villages in Anatolia. My father always spoke fondly of his childhood in “the City,” as he called it, as well as of his return visits as an adult. His stories about his happy childhood in Istanbul created a dissonance with the teachings of Greek School. The material and nonmaterial evidence of my family’s past in Turkey—the ridged bottle of lemon cologne banished to the basement, my grandmother’s mussels and rice dish, and the unfamiliar words my father would use in Greek that were definitely not taught in Greek School—not only made me feel different from the rest of my classmates but also prompted questions like, “What really happened in Turkey to prompt my family to leave?” and “What aren’t they teaching me in Greek School?” Surely a more complex history that explained who the Greeks were and how we came to be a nation-state and a people must exist, I thought. Answering those questions years later would take me on a long intellectual and physical journey. I would end up where no one, not even I, expected to be: my father’s birthplace, Istanbul. 

* * *

One late afternoon I exited the metro at Taksim Square to hear a familiar, off-kilter, halting tinkling sound punctuated by bells, a sound not out of my childhood but perhaps out of my grandparents’ childhoods. I walked closer to the sound coming from the area in front of the corner of the Taksim aqueduct, where two Ottoman birdhouses are carved in the stone. A man in an outfit reminiscent of the 1930s turned a crank attached to a tall vertical box on stilts, decorated with a lithograph of a dark-haired woman wearing a red cap and vest. A woman, also dressed in a “1930s” dress, danced before the laterna with a tambourine, her face frozen in the blank imitation of a smile worn by dancers who have memorized the expression.

It was mid-2010, and I’d been in Istanbul for almost a year, having come to research the Rum of the city in the 1950s for a novel.[5] The appearance of the laterna operated by the dancers I saw that afternoon was part of Istanbul2010, the city’s turn as the European Capital of Culture, in which an uncountable number of exhibitions, films, books, and public performances were produced. Turkey at that time was visibly blossoming. The country was stable, the ruling party seemed to better treat minorities, and the economy was growing. Nevertheless, the memory of the last economic downturn remained fresh in everyone’s minds. The previous bout of inflation never left the lips of the sellers in the weekly street markets, who would call out, “Domates dört milyon, domates dört milyon,” when they meant that tomatoes cost four lira a kilo, and not four million. Veteran expat English teachers living in Istanbul warned me about employers who withheld wages or paid late. 

By the time I moved to Turkey, everyone, from scholars to secular Turks, was interested in the city’s multicultural past. But this multiculturalism that everyone celebrated, including Istanbul2010, displayed a past that no longer existed. Like that laterna, it felt out of place. While old men continue to operate laternas on the streets of Athens, they hadn’t been seen in Istanbul for a good hundred years. For one to suddenly appear was symptomatic of what can happen when a relic of the past is selected without its broader context, repressed in the formation of the single ethnic nation-state. The object or practice stands outside of time, no longer a symbol of another ethnic group but a whitewashed curiosity, a piece of nostalgia. 

While my father still lived in Istanbul in the 1950s, the city had a population of approximately 1 million. Of this population, 67,593 spoke Greek as their first language, 42,652 spoke Armenian as their first language, and 28,172 spoke Ladino.[6] Before the population exchange of 1923, even more Rum lived in Istanbul. Indeed, before that time many more of everyone who was not Turkish lived in the lands that remained of the Ottoman Empire. 

By the time I arrived in Istanbul in 2009, only 1,500 Rum remained, along with a faint memory of what the city had been like with more ethnic and religious minorities. I was the only member of my family living in the city, as the last resident relative had died six months before my arrival and the rest of my family had scattered throughout Greece and the United States over the preceding decades. With the freedom to explore Istanbul and Turkey as both foreigner and repatriate, I found myself in the company of English teachers, Fulbright scholars, political scientists, historians, artists, journalists, and perpetual wanderers. I would occasionally come across someone like me: someone who had grown up elsewhere, whose family tongue was not quite what everyone expected it to be, because we were at first recognized as foreigners who tripped over Turkish. There were members of the Greek, Turkish, Jewish, and Armenian diasporas trying to navigate complex relationships with the country that was supposed to be—according to their diaspora communities—the homeland. For me Turkey was a country that became a second homeland, one I was never supposed to have identified with at all. 

I don’t know what drew all of the foreigners to Istanbul at that time, when a certain Pax Turkana seemed to reign. It was the time of the “Zero-Problems” policy, where talks with the European Union, détente with the Kurds, and a relaxed stance toward minority languages made it seem that the country was turning away from the conflicts that had plagued it since its founding. Until late 2010 one could buy a $15 visa anywhere on the Turkish border and ninety days later do the same, which allowed one to stay in the country without having to acquire a residence permit. Coming to Turkey was easy then, and it seemed that the government largely looked the other way, unlike now, when you must have health insurance and a certain amount of liras in a Turkish bank account for each month of the requested permit—the latter being almost impossible, a Catch-22, if you don’t already have residency. Many foreigners have been pushed out under this new system, which has been limiting the number of foreigners residing in Istanbul in particular. More than a few have packed their apartments, entirely prepared to face being blocked from re-entering when they have been informed that they have overstayed.

During my early years in Istanbul between 2009 and 2011, a free-flowing bohemianism depicted in the film Crossing the Bridge characterized the places I passed through. Trendy, expensive bars and restaurants alongside ordinary cafés populated the section of İstiklal Avenue between Galatasaray High School and Tünel, or Stavrodromi as it was once known in Greek, where previously the area had been quiet and in recent memory, unsafe. I often strolled around that area late into the night, meeting my friends at a cultural event at the Sismanoglio Megaro, the Greek Consulate’s cultural building on İstiklal Caddesi; or at a lecture at the German-run Orient-Institut in Cihangir, with its guaranteed post-talk snacks of soft pretzels and bottles of Beck’s beer; or at an opening at a gallery on Boğazkesen Caddesi in Tophane, finally ending up at a bar in Tünel, where I’d spend the rest of the night with a rotating motley crowd. I could move between times and cultures in the space of a street. Progressive, well-off, and secular Cihangir gave way to the grungy,Kurdish- and Roma-populated Tophane within a block of each other. From the middle-class Kurtuluş, still a place where minorities lived, one could cross Cumhuriyet Caddesi to enter the classically upper-crust Nişantaşı, where plastic surgery and designer clothes were as ubiquitous as old school İstanbullu politesse. Nothing in my past life could have prepared me for the Istanbul that I found. The background noise of Greek School, whispering of the evils of Turks, faded out.

During my second year of living in Istanbul, I planned a trip to Greece in a romantic bid to see the section of the country with the largest Muslim minority, starting in Thessaloniki and working my way back to Turkey, stopping in Kavala, Xanthi, Komotini, and Alexandroupoli.

On the bus departing from Istanbul, I had the bad luck to be sitting next to a religious Greek woman, who was returning home from the Patriarchate. The petite, long-skirted, long-haired woman said she often visited the Patriarchate, which still stands in its historic space in the Fener, or Phanari, neighborhood in the Golden Horn of Istanbul. She must have sensed my lack of faith, for in the time that it took to clear the outer reaches of Istanbul, she attempted to school me in Orthodoxy, handing me a flyer in ecclesiastical Greek. That I spoke fluent Greek did not deter her from trying to convert me. I noticed a lanky young man with shoulder-length, dirty blond hair, a full beard, and blue eyes eavesdropping on the exchange with amusement, glancing at me from across the aisle. 

After some time I tried to sleep, tying a scarf over my eyes to block out the bus and my seatmate, only to remove it when the bus stopped somewhere in Eastern Thrace for its usual rest stop and again at the Greek-Turkish border—a no-man’s-land in between the checkpoint with a duty free on the Turkish side and the same setup on the Greek side. 

The passengers waited outside the bus—in a clump rather than an orderly line—to individually see the passport control officer. The young man from across the aisle hovered in the middle of the clump, smiling and cracking jokes, not content to be still. I reciprocated with a joke in Greek, and we started talking. Very quickly, we switched to English. 

Panagis was a master’s degree student at Yeditepe University, heading to his hometown of Ioannina for a few days. It instantly felt like we had been friends for a long time. I sat next to him for the rest of the ride, conversing through whispers and notepad scribbles after my former seatmate yelled at us for being loud. Eventually we had to shut up entirely when our conspiring, teenage-like laughter became too much for her. When we arrived in Thessaloniki in the bright light of early spring, that season when your breath still steams up in the morning, we promised to meet up in Istanbul. 

I didn’t believe we would keep that promise at the time, but we actually became friends. Months later, I spent Easter with Panagis and his family at his grandparents’ village home in Ioannina. When I returned to Istanbul after studying for a master’s degree at Oxford, Panagis and I met often, until he moved to the Asian side of the city, and much like the way New Yorkers rarely cross boroughs, we rarely made the effort to cross to the other side. 

Panagis was one of many friends of my early years in Turkey who had come to Istanbul because there was the sense of opportunity and a curiosity for this place that had been touted as the exotic East or the Other. That crowd of us—journalists, scholars, and wanderers—spent long nights out and for a time gathered at the apartment of a Kurdish-Danish radio journalist and his Danish girlfriend. We had all met in the same kismet fashion that Panagis and I had. This crowd included a budding Middle Eastern scholar from Oxford, an American journalist who would go on to work in Abu Dhabi and marry a Finnish woman, an Australian Turk with roots in the Republic of North Macedonia who had traveled the Trans-Siberian Railway, a Turkish sports journalist, an Iranian who taught kindergarten at a private Turkish school, a British journalist, a Jewish American whose family roots were in Iran, and an American poet who had lived most of his life outside of the US, was an Orthodox convert, and would go on to become a Turkish translator. There were many others who were part of that group, people I crossed paths with throughout my time there, then and later—Greeks studying Ottoman history, Germans frighteningly fluent in Turkish, Russian activists, a Greek scholar turned musician and publishing-house founder, a Turkish singer who grew up listening to Greek radio stations in Edirne and who eventually became fluent in Greek, a Turkish scholar and Oxford DPhil holder who was one of the most enthusiastic Anglophiles I’ve known in my life, a Jewish-Turkish activist and writer with roots in Thessaloniki, and Turks who were fascinated by Greece to the point that they knew how to dance Greek dances that I didn’t recognize. We were a varied bunch, and we would meet at those lectures and exhibition openings, but mostly we met at each other’s parties.

Perhaps like all expats and people who have found each other across borders, we drank more than we should have. But mostly I remember us in the more comfortable, sloshed moments, where the backdrop was someone’s home and a swirl of bodies and bottles and discussions of Turkish, of history, of world politics, and of Istanbul, alongside flirtations, dancing, and sometimes the eventual staggering home leading up to a one-night stand.

Nothing like that ever lasts. Couples left and settled elsewhere; people got married or broke up and found new partners. The steady turn of the yearly expat cycle took some of our closest friends back to their home countries, and the steady churn of young people in their twenties striving for the next step took people away. 

Beyond the expected cycle of departures, what really changed everything was the turn in the climate around us, outside of the patterns and hopes of our own lives. Chairs and tables were banned outside the bars, cafés, and restaurants on the side streets of İstiklal where we’d spent our days and nights. The country briefly erupted in the Gezi Park protests of 2013, resulting in a backlash from the ruling party. The Arab Spring in Syria—hailed as the start of something brilliant—deteriorated into a civil war that also sucked Turkey into its violence, as jihadis and their weapons passing through the country kindled fears and antagonisms stoked by the rise of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) further south. And then, finally, the death knell of it all came with the 2016 coup attempt and its aftermath.

The repetitious clarion call of nationalism, which in the past had torn life apart for the minorities in Turkey again and again, ended the championing of minority rights and languages and the leery tolerance of foreigners. This had also been the case in the decades that followed my father’s emigration, and it had pushed the rest of my family and families like ours to leave. Such was the case again in the decades after my family’s exodus and in the time leading up to my own exit from the city. 

* * * 

In the summer of 2010, long before I knew the party in Istanbul would eventually end, and a year before my jaunt through Western Thrace, I arrived in Thessaloniki—manuscript and suitcases in tow—to stay for the summer. I sublet an apartment in Thessaloniki’s Neapoli neighborhood. In those days the light coming through the sliding doors that led to the balcony that wrapped around my apartment was magic. I wrote in the mornings, frappé in one glass, water in the other, working at the table set in the corner of my large bedroom or at one of the cafés in my neighborhood when I wanted the distraction of people passing by or a croissant injected with Nutella at the nearest bakery-patisserie-café. In the afternoons and evenings, I read and wandered the city, finding comfort that the tradition of the pazar (weekly market), called the laiki in Greece, was alive. I sampled the occasional bar around the waterfront area, and the restaurant Tsinari in Ano Poli, the former Muslim neighborhood of the city, became one of my favorite spots, perhaps because the area around it reminded me of Istanbul. To get there I took a bus and then walked up the narrow streets that are colloquially called sokakia in Greek, from the Turkish word sokak. In Ano Poli, the Istanbul-like hills, drainage systems that consist of carved paths send water in rivulets to eventual sewers, but most impressively, the Ottoman mansions with their cumbas—box windows on the upper floors of buildings that jut out onto the street, extending the floor space within—transported me back to the city I’d vacated for the summer, and also to another imagined city, one I was just discovering. Clomping up and down these hills in barely supportive flat sandals, a DSLR camera on my neck and Mark Mazower’s Salonica: City of Ghosts in my bag, I discovered the city and country I didn’t know, one that was not only Greek. 

I had been living in Istanbul for a year by that summer. During that year, I’d gorged myself on books about Republican Turkey and the late Ottoman Empire, going to exhibitions, historical sites, and museums to understand what had happened to Istanbul’s Greeks and what their lives were like when they still lived in Turkey. With every book and exhibition, I picked up pieces that shaded in other parts of that map, sometimes finding as little as a line or a glimpse of the past that I’d come across somewhere else in full. What had happened wasn’t exactly a secret, but it also wasn’t part of the acknowledged narrative, so along the way I learned a lot about Ottoman and Turkish architecture, history, and art, as well as the Turkish language. All of that allowed me to see the links that Thessaloniki had with Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire but also made me feel even more connected to Thessaloniki and Greece. Borders were no longer absolutes that summer, and the idea that culture and a way of life had ended just because another country began felt ridiculous and quaint. Greece and Turkey were part of the same continuum of history and shared space, separated only by language, religion, and lines on a map. I could see how close they were from a similar, more languid sense of time than I had been surrounded by in the US, with street sellers peddling almost exactly the same foods, if not the same foods by a different name.

In Mazower’s first visit to the city in the early 1980s, he wrote that the inhabitants of Ano Poli were most likely among the refugees from Asia Minor who had taken over the spaces near the “elegantly dilapidated villas” formerly inhabited by Muslims who had been sent to Turkey as part of the 1923 population exchange. The villas bared their once-enclosed bedrooms to the public, he wrote, and the city of Thessaloniki spread below the viewer in those buildings’ gaps:

Here were vestiges of a past that was absent from the urban landscape of southern Greece—Turkish neighborhoods that had outlived the departure of their inhabitants; fountains with their dedicatory inscriptions intact; a dervish tomb, now shuttered and locked.[7]

These flashes of the city Mazower first got to know as a young man described parts of the city I thought I recognized from my first visit there with my family in the early 2000s, but it was the start of seeing more. Istanbul had opened my eyes to the palimpsest that a city could be, and as I searched for the nondominant narrative of Thessaloniki, I could see beyond Alexander’s statue and beyond the White Tower as just a former prison and into the remnants of the city’s rich past. The capital of Greece’s Macedonian province and the second largest city in the country, Thessaloniki was one of those cities where the multicultural past had been erased in the service of the nation-state. After the city surrendered to the Greeks—or was liberated by the Greeks, depending on whom you ask—in 1912 during the first Balkan War, Thessaloniki went through a process, at times violent, of modernization and ethnic whitewashing that cut Hausmannian boulevards across the city and constructed the University of Thessaloniki over the city’s Jewish cemetery.

Thessaloniki presented a completely Greek façade, but as with Istanbul, if you knew where to look, nothing was homogenous and mono-ethnic. The past was present. After discovering Istanbul’s layers, it was impossible for me to unsee the Ottoman buildings throughout Thessaloniki hiding among their contemporary followers and Byzantine forebearers. They cast an energy that pulled me to them. That’s why one afternoon I set out to find the Yeni Cami, a dönme mosque designed with a mix of Ottoman and Renaissance styles, which was in a neighborhood I didn’t usually go to. When I found it, its place outside of the rest of the neighborhood was clear: it was aligned to a distinct, defiant slant in the shadow of the surrounding multistory apartment buildings in a neighborhood that was once known for its villas. 

The other landmarks I had previously known from family trips became more alive through Mazower’s book as well. I could no longer see anywhere as just Greek or Turkish—like “Yiayia’s vrysi,” a simple well where my Kozani-born maternal grandmother fetched water and the site of the apartment building where she lived, reportedly destroyed in the 1978 earthquake, near the now uncovered Hadrian’s palace. Included among those non-sights, only the Aghia Sophia of Thessaloniki still remained, where my grandmother had attended church and which I passed when I sat at a café to write or simply to wander and breathe in the sharp air of that mixed city. 

To think now of my time in Istanbul and of Turkey is to reach back into a distant country—both in terms of how I saw the place and in the rarefied moment in Istanbul’s history I was witness to and a part of. Perhaps, like everyone else around me, I was too involved in my own story and my own metamorphosis as the cautious Greek-American looking for her family’s roots and for her own identity to really see that what I was living through was special. 

İstiklal, once the heart of nights out for many, has lost many of the bars, restaurants, and especially stores, owing to high rents, and nightlife has moved across the water to Kadıköy, where the streets get so packed that residents have a hard time getting out of their apartments on the weekends. Greece has finally come out of its austerity measures and the economic destruction of the crisis, but the marks of the resulting brain drain and hollowing out of various sectors will be felt in the years to come, beyond the shuttered shops and more modest ways of life. The moment I lived through is gone. 

As I think back to that summer in Thessaloniki and all those evenings around İstiklal, walking downhill to my apartment in the glow of friendship and talk and Istanbul as it was and as we saw it, I see those moments in full. For that brief spell, in the era of easy visas and ample funds from various governments and universities, we as foreigners and Türkiyeli were able to come together, forming a society that was linked not through blood but through love of a place and through an obsessive, ever-seeking knowledge of it. That time and place can’t be recreated, but when I think of people like Yiannis Boutaris, I know that the spirit of what I experienced in Greece and Turkey lives on in other parts of the world, in those who saw what we saw, and in those who have their own versions of Istanbul.

Notes

1 European Stability Initiative, “Cosmopolitan Visionary – Boutaris and Thessaloniki,” ESI, October 12, 2014, accessed October 27, 2018, www.esiweb.org/rumeliobserver/2014/10/12/cosmopolitan-visionary-boutaris-and-thessaloniki/.

2 Greek Reporter, “Mayor Boutaris in a Tell-All Interview: ‘Greece is the Last Soviet Type of Society’,” GreekReporter.com, YouTube video, 06:35, June 15, 2017. 

3 Niki Kitsantonis, “75-Year-Old Mayor is Attacked in Greece, and Nationalists Rejoice,” New York Times, May 21, 2018, accessed October 27, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/world/europe/greece-mayor-thessaloniki-attack.html.

4 Ellinika Hoaxes (Greek Hoaxes), “To fake news pour epaikse rolo stin epithesi pou dehthike o dimarhos Thessalonikis, Yiannis Boutaris” [The fake news that played a role in the attacks on Yiannis Boutaris, Thessaloniki’s mayor], Athens Voice, May 21, 2018, accessed October 27, 2018, www.athensvoice.gr/greece/444967_fake-news-poy-epaixe-rolo-stin-epithesi-poy-dehthike-o-dimarhos-thessalonikis-giannis. Thema Newsroom, “Attackers of Thessaloniki Mayor Boutaris Apologise in Tears in Court,” Thema News, May 23, 2018, accessed October 27, 2018, http://en.protothema.gr/attackers-of-thessaloniki-mayor-boutaris-apologise-in-tears-in-court/. Kalimera, Ti Kaneis [Good morning, how are you?], “O Dimarhos dilonei oti hestike an skotose pontious o Kemal” [The mayor declares that he doesn’t give a shit if Kemal killed Pontian Greeks], Art TV, May 20, 2018, accessed October 27, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlOuhNVQgdM.

5 The Greeks of Istanbul, and of Turkey as a whole, are known as Rum, since during the Byzantine Empire they called themselves Romans. Rum means Roman in Turkish.

6 Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry General Statistical Office, “22 Ekim 1950, Genel Nüfus Sayımı” [22 October 1950, general population census], in Fuat Dündar, Türkiye Nüfus Sayımlarında Azınlıklar [Minorities in Turkey’s census records] 2nd ed. (İstanbul: Çivi Yazıları, 2000), 186–187.

7 Mark Mazower, City of Ghosts (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), 5.