He asked her where her family was from and she said “Thessalonica” (Thessaloniki is the more modern spelling and pronunciation ). She obviously had a fair amount of non-Turkish blood – Greek, Slavic, etc – in her family tree.
There is a reason this wasn’t just a lucky guess. Sirince a mostly Christian village up until 1923. In fact, that’s one of the reasons it was, and is, well known for its wine production: Christians could make and consume wine. Moslems could not.
After the Greek-Turkish war in the early 1920’s, a population exchange was agreed to. Christian “Greeks” (they would still have thought of themselves as “Byzantines”, not “Greeks” in the sense we think of the modern state of Greece) would leave Turkey and move to Greece. Turks now in Greece would leave and move to Turkey.
There were far more “Greeks” in Turkey than Moslems in Greece and so, there were far more Christians displaced than Turks, but it was hard on both sides. Thus, a large population of Christians that had lived in Anatolia since the Roman period were forced to leave. That was the final chapter in how the heartland of Biblical Christianity became almost completely devoid of Christians.
The Christians of Sirince left and Moslems from Greece replaced them, some picking up where the Christians left off in fruit wine production.
But 400 years of Turkish presence in the west led to intermarriages and some Christians became Moslems, so the genetic pool of dark eyed Moslem Turks was infused with a few blue eyes – like these eyes that trace back to northern Greece.
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| Today's sleeping dog. |
