Abstract
The past few years have witnessed an increasing number of Turkish citizens leaving Turkey for Greece, a trend that has intensified following the failed coup d’état of 15 July 2016. Starting with the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in the early 1920s, migration from Turkey to Greece has been intermittent with the Istanbul Pogrom of 1955 and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus of 1974. What makes the current wave notable, however, is the profile of the migrants. While before, those leaving Turkey were Greek Orthodox (Rum), the group migrating today mostly consists of upper-middle class, highly educated Turks, who seek mobility through buying immovable property, which grants a five year residency in Greece and access to the Schengen Area, and the possibility of gaining permanent residency or even upgrading to citizenship in the longer run.
Based on interviews with real estate brokers, upper-middle class Turkish citizens investing in real estate in Athens, as well as individuals of the long-established Turkish communities of Athens’ Palaio Faliro and Nea Smyrni neighborhoods, this paper discusses the personal, social, economic and cultural factors that pose particular motivation for the current wave of Turkish citizens emigrating to Greece under the conditions of ‘new Turkey’, which threatens the lifestyles of groups whose values are not fully aligned with the ruling party’s conservative worldview (Weise, 2017).
Siding with Hirschon (2009) in that the ground of shared experience between the people of the two countries through the long-term separation has been lost, this paper argues that there a century after the population exchange is a notion of Greece being a proximity in terms of geography, culture, and history among the Turks leaving for Greece, which helps us understand why Greece is chosen over countries offering similar visa options such as Spain, Portugal, and Cyprus. This paper seeks to explore the hypothesis that the population exchange of 1923 did not end in the early years of the Republic, yet aims to establish a deeper connection between the Greco-Turkish population exchange and the outflow of Turkish citizens to Greece these days, as the finding of this study suggest that an imagined sense of community has become one of the factors that create new forms of mobilities emerging in the context of ‘new Turkey’.
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