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EU a fragile hope for Istanbul´s Christians

By Agence France Presse (AFP)

Monday, October 04, 2004

ISTANBUL: Andrea is a “Rum,” Tarin is Armenian, Giovanni a Levantine. For centuries, their communities served as bridges between Europe and the Ottoman Empire whose successor, Turkey, is now seeking full European Union membership.

All three are Christian and favor the mainly Muslim country’s entry into the EU and see in it a fragile hope for their disappearing cultures.

Andrea Rombopoulos single-handedly produces Iho, one of two Greek-language dailies to still appear in Turkey.

He claims 80 percent of Istanbul’s “Rums” – Romans, as Greeks of Turkish nationality are called here, in reference to the Eastern Roman Empire from which they descended – read his paper. That makes about 1,600 people.

Rombopoulos says Turkey’s membership in the EU will end the problems his community faces defending its rights.

“We have about 60 foundations that run our schools and our churches,” he said. “But for the past 37 years, the (Turkish) state has forbidden any elections to renew their management – has sometimes seized their property – and prevented them from functioning properly.”

Turkish membership in the EU, he said, will be the best guarantee for the future of his dwindling community.

In the editorial offices of his newspaper, in a 19th century townhouse built by the great Zarifi “Rum” banking dynasty that is witness to the past grandeur and current decline of Istanbul’s Greeks, Rombopoulos laments: “We are on the verge of extinction.” The EU, he said, can mean salvation. “When Turkey enters the EU, foreign firms will invest in Turkey and they will need staff who know how to trade with the Turks. The Greeks are in the best position to do that. If new (Greek) families settle in Istanbul, maybe we can save our culture.”

Tarin Karakasli, who works for the Armenian daily Agos, agrees. “Turkey joining the EU means normalizing relations with Armenia,” she said. “For people like us, who live in the shadow of their ancestors, this will be like a drop of cool water to a parched throat. … We could speak of a cultural renaissance.”

She is a fervent supporter of Turkey’s accession to the EU – contrary to most of the Armenian diaspora, which says Turkey should be kept out of the EU until it admits that the 1915 massacre of hundreds of thousand of Armenians was genocide.

“My newspaper believes that only a fully democratic country can question its past,” she said. “As things stand, Turkey can neither confirm nor deny something it does not really know about – something that has been kept under wraps like a terrible taboo.”

She says that the democratization process accompanying membership talks will free the Turkish mindset – and let the country’s 45,000-strong Armenian community finally cast off the yoke of the past.

The grandson of a Neapolitan cook who emigrated to Istanbul in the mid-19th century on his father’s side, and of an Italian family long established in the Greek islands on his mother’s, Giovanni Scognamillo, 75, is a Levantine – a Roman Catholic born on Turkish soil, although the term can also apply to Protestants.

Scognamillo, well-know to the Istanbul intelligentsia, has been a book dealer, a decorator, a bank employee, a filmmaker, journalist, author and historian. He says the extinction of his community – a few hundred souls in Istanbul and Izmir, on the Aegean coast – is inevitable.

“Mine is the last generation of Levantines,” he said, without a trace of nostalgia. “The young now go live abroad.”

He is all for Turkey joining the EU, but he does not have much hope for the Levantine community.

“That there will be a rush of Turks into EU countries, I do not doubt for a moment,” he said. “But a rush of Levantines into Turkey – I don’t think so.

“Anyway,” he joked, “once Turkey is part of the EU, at least I won’t have to queue for my residence permit every five years.”

By Nicolas Cheviron, Agence France Presse

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