And this last one. Any guesses?

Snag! Wrong! It’s a woman from Ramla in Palestine in the 1930’s. The eastern Mediterranean is one!

Didn’t expect Greek to still be #1 in Astoria, since the neighborhood’s Greek population has been dwindling steadily for decades. Also didn’t expect so many west African languages being spoken in west and south Bronx.

O.K. Upon examining better, this map is totally bonkers. How can there be NO predominantly Spanish speaking neighborhoods in New York? Not in Jackson Heights? Not in Washington Heights? Not in the Barrio or South Bronx? And who are all these French-speakers on both the Upper East and West Side? And Far Rockaway doesn’t have any Black English speakers? Just Amharic-speaking Ethiopians? And there are no Italian speakers in Staten Island?

“The Ethnically-homogeneous nation-state has been the major destructive force in human history for more than two centuries now: eliminating ethnic and linguistic minorities, robbing a society of its many riches, killing or disappearance of millions of human beings, the MASS destruction of art and architecture, creating wars of unprecedented destruction — I could go on.

“And the richest part is not that it’s purpose is to create purer, and more authentic, more energized Greeks, Turks or Georgians. It’s too establish a homogeneity that makes it easier to turn their populations into better modern mass consumers who will fit better into the Neo-Liberal vision.

“He dicho.

October 8, 2021 by administrator Leave a Comment

Soso Dzamukashvili

Tbilisi’s Armenian heritage is danger of being forgotten entirely, but there is some hope.

Armenian intellectuals, wealthy merchants and leading cultural figures have been an integral part of life in the Georgian capital Tbilisi for centuries.

Indeed, according to Finnish academic Serafim Seppälä, who has written extensively on Armenian culture and history, Tbilisi in the 19th century was “the most Armenian town in the world”, with Armenians accounting for more than two-thirds of the city’s population.

Today, while Tbilisi’s population tops one million people, Armenians constitute around just five per cent.

The decline has been steady, not precipitated by any one particular event, but the reduction in  size of the city’s Armenian population has meant that much of its Armenian heritage – residential buildings, schools, churches and other cultural monuments built by the Armenians of Tbilisi – has been neglected or simply forgotten entirely.

The Armenian Apostolic Church has borne the brunt. Where once there were 24 Armenian churches in Tbilisi, today just two remain.

Some of these were confiscated under Soviet rule, only to be handed in the 1990s to the Georgian Orthodox Church.

According to a report on international religious freedom published by the US Department of State, both the Roman Catholic and Armenian Apostolic Churches in Georgia “have been unable to secure the return of churches and other facilities closed during the Soviet period, many of which later were given to the Georgian Orthodox Church by the state”.

The same could be said for many other Armenian heritage sites in Tbilisi, such as the Armenian Drama Theatre, one of the most potent symbols of Armenian culture in the city.

Named after an outstanding Armenian actor and poet, Petros Adamian, the theatre was established in 1858 by the Armenian theatre figure George Chmshkian.

Rebuilt in 1936 and renamed the Stepan Shahumian Armenian Theatre after a leading Bolshevik, it is currently in poor condition, and has been closed for seven years.

Fortunately, there is hope.

The Kartu Group, a charity organisation founded by Georgia’s richest man and former prime minister of Georgia Bidzina Ivanishvili, has undertaken to restore the building. Armenia’s Ministry of Culture is also set to provide the theatre with funding.

However, while reconstruction was planned to be completed in 2020, Tbilisi City Hall recently announced that the date had been postponed until 2023.

The most beautiful city in Eastern Europe

Among the many Armenians who left their mark on Tbilisi few are greater than Mikael Aramyants, a man who in the latter part of the 19th century wanted to turn Tbilisi into the most beautiful city in Eastern Europe.

Originally from Karabakh, he made his home in Tbilisi in the 1860s and became a successful sugar and cotton trader, and later an oil magnate.

Part of his legacy is the magnificent renaissance and baroque Tbilisi Marriott Hotel, which he built at the beginning of the 20th century, calling it the Mazhestik, and the former Aramyants Hospital.

And yet his name is all but forgotten. Although some older Georgians still call the hospital after its founder, it is officially today simply known as Central Hospital.

According to Anna Sarkisyan, president of the Georgian Association of Cultural Relations, neglecting the Armenian legacy in Tbilisi is nothing new.

“The process of abandoning Armenian heritage in Georgia started during the repression of Tsarist-era Russia,” she tells Emerging Europe.

And since then, little has changed.

“Unfortunately, the Georgian government is not usually interested in the preservation of [Armenian] heritage, which is systematically demolished.”

Also at least partially forgotten is the name of the Tamamshevs, a wealthy Armenian family of merchants.

The Tamamshevs played a significant role in Tbilisi’s cultural and educational development: Gavril Tamamshev funded the construction of the first opera house in Tbilisi in 1847 when the Russian Tsar’s treasury refused to do so.

Gavril Tamamshev also donated his library, containing thousands of volumes, on the establishment of the Georgian National Library.

In the 1850s, the Tamamshevs constructed a magnificent house in Tbilisi, which in 1876 was part of Elizaveta Tamamsheva’s dowry on her wedding to Mikhail Smirnov, a Russian botanist and ethnographer.

During the Soviet period, however, it was confiscated by the municipality. And while today the house is home to a museum that commemorates both the Tamamshevs and Smirnov, it carries the latter’s name.

Pantheon, or what’s left of it

Elsewhere in Tbilisi is Khojavank, an architectural complex in the north-eastern part of the Avlabari district of the city.

Integral to Khojavank was a huge memorial cemetery, which remains the burial site of many prominent Armenians, including writers Raffi and Hovhannes Tumanyans.

Parts were destroyed by the Soviets however in 1937, and what was left was taken over by the Georgian Orthodox Church in the 1990s, its heritage further erased by the subsequent construction of the huge Holy Trinity Cathedral. The tiny section that remains, together with some relocated gravestones, is preserved as the Armenian Pantheon of Tbilisi.

Sarkisyan says that Armenian heritage is viewed by many in Georgia as a “competing memory”. (MONEY QUOTE — anything that threatens the fairy-tale, fabricated narrative of nationalism).

“The most important thing is to realise that Armenian architecture and legacy, in general, cannot be taken away from Georgia. It is our [Georgian-Armenian] shared heritage,” she says.

“We can benefit mutually from its existence.”

Too bad you’re about the one in a thousand people today who believe in that…

(AN INTRO COMMENT FROM ME) Unortunately, the article below doesn’t mention — surprising for Hadad, a Latakian Greek Orthodox/Rum — that the OVERWHELMING number of people who call and consider themselves “Rum” in modern Istanbul are Greek Orthodox Arab/Syrian migrants from southeastern Turkey. They outnumber the “Greek” Rums left in the City by what I wouldn’t hesitate to say is something like 20 or 30,000 to 1 (the real figure for Greeks left in Istanbul is about less than 600 mostly aging people, though for political reasons both Greek and Turkish governments still stick to the bogus number of 3,000). They attend school in the magnificent educational structures that Greeks in Istanbul built over the past two centuries. The younger ones are almost the only cantors to be found in Greek churches anymore, and they do a magnificent job. They’ve moved in to support, preserve and occupy every part of the former Greek infrastructure in the City — proving that Romios or Rwmaios, or even Romanitas was a cosmopolitan identity through most of its history.

(I was once taking to Polina Giotzoglu, an anthropologist, on this Syrian Orthodox population in Istanbul, who she was writing her dissertation on. I remember asking her if they spoke Arabic (very few), because the assmilationist and forced Turkification of Antakya’s Arabs has been as oppressively successful as it has been with Turkey’s other minorities. They’re Greek is not great, despite the fact that they’re taught it in the formerly Greek schools they attend — with the exception of their ecclesiastic chanting, where their sense of rhythm, chromaticism, melisma, tempo and Greek diction is unsurpassable. (Plus they’re cute; a man behind the analoi with a great voice has always weakened my knees and much heightened my spiritual fervor.)

(So I asked Polina: “They don’t speak Arabic, their Greek is poor, Turkish is their most widely used tongue — so what are they and who are they to become?” And she answered: “they’re going to be the Rums of the City.”)

And I find that extremely moving.

The Hidden World of Istanbul’s Rums

21 February, 2021 Rana Haddad

An Interview with Nektaria Anastasiadou, author of the novel A Recipe for Daphne

Rana Haddad

A Recipe for Daphne first arrived in my inbox as a pdf manuscript a year or so before it had found a publisher. Nektaria Anastasiadou contacted me on Twitter after she had read my first novel, The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor. She felt an affinity between our literary voices, even though my novel was set in Syria from the 1970s to ‘90s and hers in Istanbul between 2011–2012. Both our texts were out-of-the-box in that we combined a literary voice with a playful and entertaining tone, and used humor to address sometimes intense and painful themes. We both seemed to write about the Middle East in a way that was not often familiar to an English-reading audience, and had both experienced rejection from mainstream publishers resulting from that lack of familiarity, or attempts to make us rewrite our novels to fit an often stereotypical view of our native worlds. 

When I first began to read Nektaria’s manuscript, I was a little taken aback by the character of Fanourios Paleologos (or Fanis). Oh my god—why is she writing about a 70-year old skirt-chasing fantasist who thinks he can have any young woman he likes, including the rather beautiful 30-something Daphne who had just arrived in Istanbul? 

As I read through the pages I started to see the delicacy of Nektaria’s narrative style and her purpose behind the partly comical, partly touching portrayal of this mischievous Greek orthodox church cantor, and then the array of other arresting characters that people this novel, including Kosmas the clumsy and shy master pastry chef (dressed in a most unflattering way by his mother who would like him to stay single forever). 

Kosmas also falls for Daphne’s charms but does not know how to approach her. Fanis gives him the wrong advice in order to slow down his progress, which he cleverly ignores. He has another plan too; Kosmas decides to find a recipe for a long-forgotten pastry that people in Istanbul or “The City” had mysteriously stopped making since an anti-Rum pogrom in 1955. Why is this recipe so important for Daphne, and what impact did the pogrom—which took place more than 50 years ago—have on these characters’ hearts and destinies? This is a novel about now, but also then, and about how the past can seep into the present, both in its beauty and pain, but it is also essentially about survival and about thriving against all odds. 

What I found most fascinating about A Recipe for Daphne, from a personal point of view, apart from its truly entertaining characters and startling observations, and the texture and skill of its language and style, was that it reminded me of my own childhood and teenage years, of a world I had also left behind — not in Istanbul but on the coast of Syria. In Syria the Rum did not speak Greek nor Turkish but Arabic. However, except for their use of language, everything that I read in a Recipe for Daphne evoked that same culture, spirit and even humor and outlook on life that I had grown up with as a child and teenager. The heroine of my own novel,Dunya Noor, was also from a Rum (or Greek Orthodox) family, yet in my novel I did not explore that aspect of her and her family’s life, which was only mentioned in passing. I had also never been aware of that word in my own life and never dug deeper as to what the word Rum, which was recorded in my passport and Syrian identity card, had meant. 

Perhaps it was only after I read Nektaria’s novel that I fully realized that the word Rum referred to the word Roman, and meant that we were once members of the Eastern Roman Empire, otherwise known as Byzantium. In A Recipe for Daphne religion for the Rum is not simply a spiritual orientation but mostly about culture and way of life. For example, her church cantor is very much a lady’s man, and the priest regularly reads coffee cups as well as GQ magazine. In Syria it was the same; being Rum or Greek Orthodox was not a reason to be particularly prudish or fanatically religious, but often a way of life full of a delicate knowledge of how to dress, what to say and how to eat, along with all types of rituals and habits developed and inherited over centuries. 

The reasons for which the Church divided into Orthodox and Catholic in 1054 were political as well as ecclesiastical. With the passage of time, Western Christianity took a disparaging and even inimical stance toward Eastern Orthodox Christians, as in the case of the Fourth Crusade, during which Western Christians sacked Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul). Even today, the West continues to ignore the existence of Christians in the Middle East. So much so that, when Nektaria sent her manuscript to agents and publishers in the UK and the US, she was regularly told that it would be a difficult novel to publish because the world of the Rum is unknown and therefore of no marketing value. One editor went as far as to tell her that she was “not moved by the Rum community and its existential crisis,” while anotherUS editor and an agent asked Nektaria to add bombs to the story, because “that’s how we think of Istanbul in the US.” Of course, Nektaria refused and persisted until she found a home for her novel where she would not be asked to fit her narrative to their pre-conceived ideas.

Q & A With Nektaria Anastasiadou

 
Before we discuss Istanbul and the world in A Recipe for Daphne, could you define the word Rum? 

The word Rum comes from the Greek word “Ρωμιός/Ρωμαίος,” which literally means Roman. The citizens of what we call the Byzantine Empire called themselves Romans, not Byzantines, because they lived within the Eastern Roman Empire. The primary language of the Eastern Romans was Greek and the official religion of the empire was Orthodox Christianity. After the Ottoman Empire succeeded the Byzantine Empire, the Ottomans referred to the Orthodox Christians in its lands as Rum, regardless of whether they spoke Greek or other languages. Ιn both the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, the term Rum referred to a multi-ethnic population. 

Today, the Rums of Istanbul are united by adherence to the Orthodox Church and the Greek language. However, the term is still multi-cultural. Istanbul Rums have heritage from Istanbul itself and also from various parts of the Balkans, Turkey, and other Ottoman lands. Some also have mixed heritage. They may have some Levantine, Armenian or other heritage. Rum is usually translated as “Greek” in English, but I find the word Greek is confusing. It makes people think that the Rums are recent transplants from Greece rather than a native population that has lived in Istanbul for at least generations if not millennia. 

Can you talk about the significance of Istanbul in your novel, with respect to Daphne your heroine and to you personally? 

For me, Istanbul is more of a character than a setting. In the Istanbul Greek dialect, we refer to Istanbul as the Polis (City), as if there were only one city in the whole world. The Polis is at the center of the novel. Daphne says, “In Istanbul you never know what’s around the next corner.” Whether you love or hate the City, you must agree that it is never boring, and it is therefore an endless source of inspiration. A Recipe for Daphne grew out of it and is inseparable from it, just like the rest of my writing.

What is the “magic” of the “City” to which you refer and conjure up in your book? 

Daphne’s mother Sultana refers to Istanbul as magic, but I personally would say that it has an irresistible charm that comes from its two-thousand-year history…Byzantine, Ottoman and Turkish, and from the mixing of peoples and religions especially during the Ottoman period. This is what Daphne refers to in the book as the Byzantine and Ottoman salt. The presence of salt is not felt if it is in good measure, but its absence renders everything tasteless. Daphne finds her life in Miami tasteless in comparison to her life in Istanbul. 

Kosmas feels that if he were not in Istanbul, he would not be himself, he would be in danger of losing himself. I find that fascinating. The feeling of becoming extinct, of being in danger of becoming extinct, a vanishing community….

Plato writes about the importance of harmony between the psyche and polis, or the soul and the city. Kosmas, a pastry chef and one of the main characters of the book, studied in Vienna and perhaps toyed with the idea of leaving, but he only feels at home and at peace when his soul is in Istanbul, the city in which his family has been rooted for as long as he knows. He has internalized the city to such a degree that he doesn’t want to leave even to visit other places. In a larger sense, this attachment is related to his fear—and everyone’s fear—that the Rum community could disappear. I share his attachment, but I firmly believe not only in the survival, but also in a renewed flourishing of the Rum community of Istanbul.

Daphne, who has Istanbullu parents but who has grown up in Miami, also feels this soul attachment to Istanbul even though she was not born in it. But her attachment will require a choice. If she chooses the home of her soul, she will have to leave everything behind from her previous life in Miami. If she chooses her parents and her status quo in Miami, she will lose a part of herself.  And even if she does choose Istanbul, she will be one more member of the community, unless she and Kosmas have children. Perhaps this doesn’t seem like much, but I do believe that so much in life depends on one. One person, one opportunity, one decision. 

I want to hear exactly why you chose the character of Fanis Paleologos as the key character in this story, and how he came about in your imagination? 

In the summer 2010 or 2011, I was living in an apartment in the street of Faik Paşa in the historically rich Çukurcuma neighborhood of Istanbul, which is known for its trendy cafes and antique shops. One evening I was sitting in my cumba—a traditional Turkish bay window—and imagining how the street’s nineteenth-century stone buildings would have looked sixty or seventy years before. I began writing about them in my notebook from the perspective of an old man who had lived all his life on that street, who had seen all its changes over time. He would have been born in 1935, when the neighborhood was still Rum, manicured, and well-kept. He would have been a young man during the pogrom of 1955, when organized mobs broke into shops and destroyed their contents. He would have been an antique shop owner by 1964, when Rums with Greek passports were deported, taking with them family members who held Turkish passports. Later, he would have seen the degeneration of the neighborhood. He would see the buildings fall into disrepair. Some would even become derelict and vacant. And then, by 2011, when the story starts, he would have seen the regentrification of the area. This old man became Fanis.

Can you describe to us the vanished world of Fanis’s youth, what it means to you and what is its significance? 

The Rum population of Istanbul was about 100,000 when Fanis was born. I’ve heard older people say that at that time, you mostly heard Greek when you walked in Pera, or Beyoğlu as it is now called. Men didn’t dare walk in Pera without putting on a suit and tie, and women wore hats, beautiful suits and dresses. The avenue was lined with small, upscale businesses, elegant restaurants and pastry shops instead of chain stores. 

 At one point, Fanis loses himself in his memories of an old pastry shop at which he used to meet his fiancée. When he surfaces from the flashback, he looks around at the other customers thinks “Everyone is dressed badly. Which means, of course, that it is still 2011.” Both Fanis and I miss the elegance and grandeur of those times, even though I didn’t personally see it.

American author Ada Calhoun wrote the following: “Nostalgia, which fuels our resentment toward change, is a natural human impulse. And yet being forever content with a spouse, or a street, requires finding ways to be happy with different versions of that person or neighborhood.” To really love a place, you have to love it when it changes, so both Fanis and I try to appreciate Istanbul as it is today but I can’t say that I wouldn’t love to time travel to see the lost elegance and grandeur of Pera. 

Can you tell us about the significance of bearing Rum children and Fanis’s self-image as a 76-year-old lady’s man who thinks he can have any lady of child-bearing age he likes? 

The book begins with Fanis at the German Hospital in Cihangir. He faints during a doctor’s visit. When he wakes up, he thinks that the doctor is the god Hermes. The doctor diagnoses Fanis with cerebral arteriosclerosis and vascular dementia, which could lead to death. Despite the anxiety that the diagnosis causes Fanis, he remains determined to fall in love, get married and have children, which he sees as his duty because the Rum community cannot survive without children. 

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Read a review of A Recipe for Daphne by Anne-Marie O’Connor

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Of course, we could poke fun at Fanis and say that he is deluded. After all, he believes in ancient Greek gods and has an exaggerated view of his male prowess and fertility. However, we can also see Fanis as a metaphor for the Rum community itself. Fanis has been given a death sentence, but he refuses to accept it. And really, why should he? Why do we have to limit ourselves to diagnoses and prognoses which may be incorrect? 

Fanis refuses to accept the end. He decides to keep moving forward and believe that anything is possible. He doesn’t limit himself to societal expectations that he should curl up and die. He doesn’t care what anyone thinks. He doesn’t care that some people may think that he is ridiculous because he believes that he can reproduce. He believes that love and marriage are possible at any age, and he also believes in the renewal of the Rum community. This is what makes him my favorite character. 

Which part of your portrait of Fanis is just humor and which part is perhaps a tender evocation of him as stalwart and stubborn man from a vanishing world determined to stay alive? Is Fanis being unreasonable or will men like him and the few young ones like Kosmas find enough women like Daphne with whom to repopulate the community? 

The future depends on each and every Rum child that is born and educated in Rum culture and language; it depends on each Rum who decides to remain in the city and create in whatever way s/he can; and it also depends on each participant in Rum culture who decides to move to or return to the City and participate in the community. Miracles depend on both on individual effort and community solidarity. Every single person counts. 

Tell me more about the Balkanik pastry and how your novel was inspired by it and when you first heard about it and the lost recipe? 

An elderly Rum gentleman told me about a forgotten pastry called the Balkanik. He said that it was something like a big éclair, but with differently flavored crèmes inside. Each crème symbolized a different Balkan people and their harmonious coexistence. Because the peaceful coexistence of people with different religions, cultures and languages is something that fascinates me—and also something that I see in Istanbul—the description of the Balkanik remained in my mind. I knew that I wanted to write about a pastry chef who would resurrect that old recipe. Thus, my character Kosmas was born. 

The resurrection of the Balkanik is another metaphor for the renewal of the community. It is a forgotten recipe, or at least the form of it that was described to me is largely forgotten. Kosmas’s effort to resurrect it and all that it symbolizes—the harmonious Ottoman symbiosis of different peoples and cultures—is a personal effort to continue Rum traditions and renew the community. 

Does the recipe book you mention from the early 1900s exist? 

The family recipe book for which Kosmas’s business partner Uncle Mustafa searches is entirely made-up. But I had fun writing about it.

I love the way you were able to evoke the irrepressible joie de vivre and sensuality and humor of the Rums of Istanbul, despite their memories of the 1955 pogrom. Why do Fanis and Daphne’s aunt Gavriela want to stay in the city despite such memories?  

First, we have to remember that, although there were some unfortunate events, life in Istanbul has been mostly quite good, and the Rum community has strong friendships and relationships with Muslim neighbours. And even in bad times, you can love a place so much that you want to stay regardless of circumstances. You create your own world. Fanis and Gavriela are like that. They may be members of a minority, but they still meet with their friends for afternoon tea just like they did decades ago. They still joke and have fun, no matter what is going on. 

I remember a May day a few years ago when most of the city center was in lockdown. I was having tea with some ladies in the hall of Saints Constantine and Helen Church in Tarlabaşı. After we finished our tea, we got up to leave, but somebody said that we couldn’t because tear gas was being used in the street. The hostess, without missing a beat, said “Oh, well. Time for coffee, then.” She took out a Bunson burner and made everyone Turkish coffee. I love this toughness and resilience, this desire to keep going and have another coffee no matter what is going on. 

The Rums have a real talent for enjoying every detail of life, which seems to me very Mediterranean. Also I enjoyed their sense of humor and the awareness of the erotic which fills the pages of the book. Is this something Mediterranean, do you think, or is it Eastern, or do the Rums have a particular flavor of the art of life that is unique to themselves? 

I can’t speak for all Mediterranean countries, but I can say that many Rums have an excellent sense of humor. Perhaps that’s part of having faced so many difficulties in life. If you don’t laugh, you’re lost. And there certainly is a particularly Rum art of life. Our elders speak  about the Istanbul Rum “rhythm” or ρυθμός in Greek. This rhythm refers to the importance of the family meals, afternoon coffees, church services, and other social gatherings. 

I also love the continuous supply of cups of tea, skillfully made Turkish coffees, the array of pastries and savory dishes, not to mention Kosmas’s patisseries. I love how your chapters are structured around meals, deserts, and drinks.  

The Rum dining table—and more generally the Mediterranean dining table—is an artisan’s work bench. At the dining table, we enjoy skillfully prepared food, revive ourselves with coffee and tea, relax with wine and other drinks, tell news and stories, advise each other. At the dining table, engagements are conducted and weddings are celebrated. Agreements are made and partnerships are sealed. Food and drink are at the center of the culture, so they are also at the center of my writing. 

What about writing an Istanbulite Rum recipe book? 

I’m a fiction writer, so I will leave cookbook writing to the professionals. But I do share Rum recipes and culinary traditions on Twitter, and food continues to be important in the novel that I am writing now. In fact, the Rum narrator’s dead father gives her recipes in her dreams. 

I feel that your novel is it not necessarily about religion or race, but more about a mood or a culture or a way of life. 

Absolutely. This is the position of both Daphne and her Jewish friend Selin. No person is a thoroughbred anything. You may think that you are 100% French, Greek, Turkish, Chinese, Nigerian, Egyptian, or whatever, but if you DNA test you will most likely learn otherwise. I don’t believe in categorizing people according to their descent. But I do think that we can identify with certain cultures more than others and define ourselves by those cultures. 

The sense of belonging to the Rum Orthodox church seems to be much more about culture and community than it is about strict codes of conduct or theological beliefs, which makes the church quite an entertaining place for people to gather. Do you feel there is a difference in attitudes to the individual and community between Istanbul and the West? 

Being Rum and participating in the rights of passage in the church can be about cultural or religious belonging or both. In Istanbul, not just now but traditionally across generations, people have been allowed be members of the Rum community and also to define their own degree and manner of participation in the community and the church. There is no one way of being. 

Rum values seem so different and so “old-world” in the best sense of that word. How will the Rum continue to exist and understand themselves in a globalized world? 

We have some old-fashioned traditions, but a strong part of the culture is modernity and progress. It has been like this for centuries. Rums, along with Jews, were the foremost merchants of the Ottoman Empire. They brought many innovations to Turkey.  Even now, I am always impressed by older Rum women, who follow fashion and paint their nails crazy colors like bright orange or black for Sunday liturgy. Elderly Rums also use Facebook and love to learn foreign words, especially English and French, which they use liberally in conversation. I think that it is quite natural for Rums to maintain old traditions and embrace the future, because that is what has always happened within the Rum community.

Talk to us about the struggle between “identity and humanity,” which you mention in the novel. 

From the humanity perspective, we shouldn’t care what anyone’s religion or culture is, but rather whether we can relate to the other at a soul level. From an identity perspective, it’s understandable to want to marry someone from the same religion and culture in order to preserve that culture. I have heard people from mixed marriages say that they didn’t teach their children any religion or culture in order to allow them to make their own decisions, but later on they realized that they had deprived their children of both cultures. 

Mothers seem to have a tremendous power in the world of this novel. You describe Istanbullu mothers-in-law as “devils in heels.” It was because of his mother’s advice that Fanis made the mistake of his life, with tragic consequences, or this is what he believes. And it is because of his mother’s emotional blackmail that Kosmas may end up losing and alienating Daphne. 

Mothers are powerful in Mediterranean culture. Many mothers see their sons as the most important men in their lives, almost like their husbands. And this can of course lead to problems not only in men’s relationship with their mothers, but also with their girlfriends or spouses. How to separate emotionally from one’s mother while still caring for her and without deserting her is another dilemma in the novel.

What are you working on now?

In 2019, I won the Zografeios Agon, a literary award that was founded in nineteenth-century Constantinople. I developed the winning story into a novel, which I’m currently editing. Its narrator is Rum, but other main characters are Jewish. The novel is about female friendship, the single life, and anti-Semitism. It’s in Istanbul Greek.

Why are you writing in Istanbul Greek?

Because it’s colorful, flexible, beautiful, and fun. The Nobel-prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer, one of my favorite writers, wrote in Yiddish after the Holocaust when Yiddish was faced with extinction. He wrote the following about his language choice: “Not only Yiddish but all languages are constantly in the throes of death and in the terrible effort of being reborn.” Some people may say that the Istanbul idiom of Greek is dying. I, however, believe that it is being reborn, just like the Rum community of Istanbul.

Rana Haddad

Rana Haddad grew up in Latakia in Syria, moved to the UK as a teenager, and read English Literature at Cambridge University. She lived in London and worked as a journalist for the BBC, Channel 4, and other broadcasters. Rana has also published poetry and is currently mostly based in Athens. The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor, her first novel, was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize and selected as MTV Arabia Book of the Month. She is now working on a novel set in London that will portray England in a way it has never been portrayed before. She tweets @SyrianMoustache.

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Note from me: If you want to find out more about contemporary Antiocheia and can read Turkish or Arabic, check out this Twitter account: @borabinjoseph