Guests in the Homeland: Transnational Heritage Tourism in Greece and Turkey

Abstract

Drawing on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Mustafapaşa, Turkey, and Thessaloniki, Greece, this dissertation explores the identity politics, heritage preservation efforts, and transnational homeland tourism of descendants of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange. The 1923 Population Exchange forcibly expelled Ottoman populations to Greece or Turkey on the basis of their religion. Today, their descendants work and travel across a politically charged border that separates not only two hostile nation-states, but two world regions, Europe and the Middle East, that are often portrayed as antagonists.

Exchangee heritage tourism is an ideal entry point for exploring intersections of memory, consumption, hospitality, national sovereignty, and the politics of mobility. I employ hospitality as a useful paradigm for considering how interactions with “others” are managed in intimate household settings and via exchangee heritage tourism. Typically, hospitality interactions rely on clear designations of guest and host. Here, histories of empire, displacement, and resettlement create spaces of hospitality in which the home of the host today is that of the guest in the past, introducing new vulnerabilities and possibilities in the guest-host relationship. To manage these risks and maneuver around national prejudices, Greek and Turkish exchangees rely on an exchangee etiquette of reconnection and the commercialization of hospitality through tourism to clarify their rights and responsibilities as hosts and guests. The establishment of this industry coincides with economic downturns and frustrations with Eurocentric regional paradigms in both nations. The Aegean regional affiliation constituted by the exchangees’ mobility, consumption practices, and communal identity offers a salient alternative. As one that crosses national and regional divisions that place Greece (a member of the European Union and Christian West) and Turkey (a Muslim nation of the Middle East) at odds, this Aegean community destabilizes the coherence of existing geopolitical borders that are intensely, and often violently, protected.

My dissertation contributes to a body of literature examining the increasingly transnational practices that shape everyday practices, and takes seriously the possibility for everyday practices to also shape transnational politics. Further, it provides insight into refugee futures by demonstrating the durability and heritability of the trauma of relocation, as well as possibilities for homeland returns and reconnections. Just as the Population Exchange set a precedent for forced relocations of Cypriots, Palestinians, Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs in India and Pakistan, Albanians, Iraqis, Kurds, Somalians, Sudanese, Tibetans, and many others, the cooperation between Greek and Turkish exchangee descendants serves as a model for reconnection after ethnic, national, and religious conflict. Exchangees reject nationalisms that inspire hatred, turning instead to family memories, local monuments, and the imagined imperial past for alternatives that allow for reconnection with lost homelands and neighbors. They operate at interpersonal, local, and transnational registers, structuring their everyday encounters with national others through shared cultural patterns and hospitality rituals that hold political conflict in abeyance.