This paper examines the ways in which Turkey’s religious minorities cope with mass displacement, with a specific focus on the restoration and management of immovable religious heritage. The waves of voluntary and involuntary exodus of religious minority groups in late Ottoman and early republican periods left a vast number of Turkey’s sacred heritage sites without their constituencies. While the mass murder and deportation of Armenians in 1915 and the population exchange between Turkey and Greece in 1924 resulted in dechristianization of Anatolia, the pogroms of 1934 in Thrace triggered a mass movement of the Jewish community from the region. As a result of these displacement processes, a large number of churches and synagogues were left without their congregations. In this paper, I will focus on three examples illustrating different restoration models for minority heritage sites, and their consequences vis-à-vis the state, local communities, and their displaced constituencies. The Armenian Church of Surp Giragos in Diyarbakir was restored in 2011 through the efforts of its former Armenian congregation, who now lives in Istanbul and abroad, and with the help of the Diyarbakir metropolitan and Sur subprovincial municipalities. The Greek-Orthodox Church of Aya Vukola in Izmir was restored by the Izmir Metropolitan Municipality. The Grand Synagogue of Edirne was restored by the General Directorate of Pious Foundations. These three case studies illustrate different restoration models, each with varying levels of involvement by the displaced congregations of these religious heritage sites as well as by various local and state actors. Through these examples, I discuss the best practices and shortcomings in restoration processes of displaced minority heritage sites. The Turkish case also presents an opportunity to reflect on the contributions and shortcomings of national and international heritage regimes and suggestions for involving displaced communities in decision making and implementation.

Forced displacement of religious and ethnic minority communities has been used as a political strategy for homogenizing the nation in the Turkish Republic in multiple episodes throughout the (almost) hundred years of its history. In this article, I will be focusing on the expulsions of Greeks in Turkey in 1964 as a case of overtly and decisively applied state policy that led to the largest wave of mass migration of the Christian Orthodox residents of Istanbul, otherwise known as Rum Polites. Through the cancelation of the resident permits of the holders of Greek citizenship, over 20,000 people, who lived for generations as an integral part of the Istanbulite society, were forced to leave their homeland within a few weeks, carrying with them only a few personal belongings. In addition to highlighting important historical dimensions of this traumatic event, the article will be based on ethnographic encounters with the Rum Polites in Athens, reflecting on their personal experiences of expulsion and ways of coping in the aftermath of their displacement. The stories of 1964 add yet another chapter to the dramatic history of how the Greeks and other non-Muslim minorities were excluded by state policies in the process of nation-making in Turkey, but they also contribute to our understanding of the multiplicity of untold stories of migration in the Middle East and beyond.

In my contribution to this panel conversation on displacement in the un/making of Turkey, I investigate the terrain of Turkish return migration in the early 1980s and the Turkish state’s efforts to instrumentalize these returns as a means to refashion a notion of Türklük (Turkishness). In 1983/4, the Helmut Kohl-led coalition government (CDU) of West Germany enticed, through financial incentives, several hundred thousand Turkish guestworkers to “tear up their passports,” that is, agreeing to leave and voluntarily invalidate the possibility of a future return to West Germany. The Milli E?itim Bakanl??? (Turkish Education Ministry) saw this developing stream of return migration into Turkey and, nominally fearing a “loss of Turkishness” amongst the children of adult returnees, developed a series of uyum (re-adaptation) programs to acclimate (or perhaps more pointily, inculcate) the young returnees with renewed notions of an ‘appropriate’ Turkish identity informed by the ideology of the 1980 Turkish coup d'état. In short, Turkish state planners saw this voluntary displacement of Turkish guestworkers from West Germany as an opportunity to enforce and further their refashioned notion of Türklük. My research into this history offers a means to further interrogate the terrain of 1980s Turkish nationalism. During a yearlong research trip in Turkey, I explored the planning and execution for these uyum courses from planning records contained within the Turkish Education Ministry, through an investigation of the textbooks utilized, and also through research into the then-contemporary journalistic coverage of guestworkers returnees and the attendant uyum programs. I also conducted extensive oral history interviews with a number of the (now-adult) children attendees of the 1983/4 programs. The intended and unintended outcomes of these efforts to instrumentalize the return of Turkish guestworkers, explored through both the perspectives of state planners and the lived experiences of attendees, offers another way to consider how displacement, across a spectrum of voluntary and involuntary mobility, played a role in the un/making of 1980s Turkey.

Although the principle of laïcité has been enshrined in the Turkish Constitution since 1937, sectarian discrimination against and persecution of Alevi communities did not abate. Turkey’s state-sanctioned sectarianism and pervasive culture of impunity for perpetrators of pogroms and hate crimes have displaced millions of Alevis within and outside the country, who then sought refuge in metropolises in Turkey and Europe. One of the key challenges of forced displacement from relatively homogeneous and small-scale settlements to heterogeneous urban centers has been the need to reconstitute institutions and practices vital for reproducing Alevi faith and identity. The Turkish state’s draconian restrictions on Alevi rights and freedoms, which have also hindered other ethnic and religious minorities, exacerbated the challenges further. Displaced Alevi individuals and groups have nevertheless demonstrated remarkable resilience and resourcefulness in navigating unfamiliar geographic, politico-legal, and socio-cultural terrains to survive the experience of uprootedness. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul and London, this paper examines the coping strategies displaced Alevi individuals and groups have developed over the years to survive sectarian violence and persecution. Of particular interest are the three strategies Alevis employed to reproduce their faith, identity, and community: 1) Establishment of legal and quasi-legal socio-religious institutions; 2) Adaptation of religious teachings and practice to demands of their new abodes; 3) Processes of alliance building and segmentation in response to challenges from within and outside. These coping strategies have allowed Alevis to resist annihilation and assimilation while also prompting a significant rethinking of their socio-religious conventions. Alevi strategies in turn forced Turkey’s successive Sunni ruling elite factions to develop counter-strategies as they struggled to develop effective policies to sustain sectarian hegemony, reimpose their authority, and maintain their religio-political privilege. Overall, Turkey’s continuous waves of Alevi displacement have led to new struggles within and among Sunni and Alevi factions as they developed novel ways of coping with the consequences of demographic reshuffling.