I understandably had mixed feelings as I walked down Nisantasi's Rumeli Caddesi (Rumeli St. In…read moreNisantasi. Istanbul.) This visit was intensely personal. The last time a member of our family had walked down these streets was in 1955, when my father, then a young man, born and raised in Istanbul, and a member of the Greek minority who had been in Istanbul (Constantinople) since before Byzantium, and was a loyal citizen of the Turkish state, and former officer in the Turkish army, who along with his brother, my uncle, Giorgo, (whom I am named after,) was the owner of a thriving bakery. Until that night in 1955, when relations between Greece and Turkey worsened over the Cyprus issue, and as part of Anti-Greek minority riots taking place in Istanbul and other parts of Turkey, a mob had gathered in front of his bakery. As my father and uncle slept in the bakery, (they lived in the back of the bakery as was the custom then,) the attack on the bakery began. Among other destructive acts, someone threw a petrol bomb through the front window, setting the bakery on fire and burning my uncle to death (who fatefully had decided to sleep in the front that night,) as my father fled out the back door, barefoot, with only his night clothes on. He joined the throng of other Greeks and minorities as they ran through the Sisli neighborhood, down towards the Golden Horn and The Ataturk Bridge where they leapt into the water for safety to escape the mobs chasing them down to the waterway. He and others were pulled from the water by lifeboats sent from a Japanese freighter that was passing through the nearby Dardanelles straits, and after a harrowing sea voyage, were resettled in Greece, along with other Greek refugees expelled from their ancestral homeland. I and my siblings were thus born elsewhere, when arguably Istanbul was (and is) our family's ancestral home, and also where we all should've been born, raised and prospered, as children of one of the most well known and successful bakeries in that area. (Interesting note: There was a military base near my father's bakery, and many of his best customers were Turkish Army Officers, who came frequently to drink my father's famous Turkish Coffee, eat his fabulous Oriental and European sweets, and to play "tavli", (kind of a backgammon type game, played throughout the Near East.) Despite my father's close relationships with many military officers from the nearby Turkish Army base, and the fact that he himself had been an officer in the army, no one came to his aid while the bakery was burning.) So as I tried to find the exact location of the new building that took the place of my father's bakery, (it was burned to the ground,) i used all the verbal clues he had left me before he died. He had told me that his bakery was on Rumeli Caddesi, in Sisli, next door to the famous Turkish author Orhan Pamuk's house. He and my father were friends, and he was a frequent visitor to the bakery. So if what I had been taught was correct, the location had now become one of this area's (and Istanbul's) most popular McDonald's. With a certain amount of hesitation, I entered the restaurant, and as I approached the counter with my friend, who also spoke Turkish, he suddenly told the staff working there that my father owned the business that was there before McDonald's and that my family had been forcibly expelled during the violence against the Greek minority in the late 1950's. As I introduced myself and began to talk with the young people who worked there, (I speak okay Turkish, as I had learned from my parents,) suddenly one young man spoke up and said in Turkish, (translation,) "Damn, your family owned a store on this street? This is one of the most expensive and exclusive areas of Istanbul. If you still owned this property, you would be really rich!" They then treated me to an ice cream cone on the house. I was dazed as I left, and amid the feelings of gratitude for the kindness and warmth shown to me, I had a large lump in my throat as my mind raced. How life's twists and turns affect ordinary people, and through no fault of their own, how their world can be destroyed in a second caused by the whims of bigger powers and others. And the enduring injustice of it all is the legacy of this visit..............
