Churches with minarets

Why do the churches in Ayvalik have minarets?

Or, to rephrase the question, why are all the mosques in the old town of Ayvalik actually old Greek Orthodox churches, rather poorly disguised by the addition of minarets?

The answer is - well, how long have you got?

The very short answer is that in October 1922 the original Greek Orthodox Christian population of Ayvalik left suddenly, and was replaced by in 1923 by Turkish Muslims, who later turned the abandoned churches into mosques.

The slightly longer answer  is that after the First World War, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the Turkish War of Independence, with the victory of the newly emergent Turkish state over the invading army of the newly emergent Greek state, the 30,000 Orthodox Greek Christians of Ayvalik (effectively the entire population of Ayvalik), were forced to leave their ancestral homes (Ayvalik had been an Asia Minor Greek town for 300 years, although part of the Ottoman Empire), and to migrate to Greece.

They were either put onto boats, and forcibly deported to Greece or, if unlucky enough to be male and over the age of 18, sent to forced labour camps in the Anatolian interior, from which few ever returned. They were replaced by a much smaller number of Muslims, many Greek-speaking, from the island of Mytilene (also known as Lesbos) which lies just offshore, from Crete and from other Greek territories now part of Greece, but formerly part of the Ottoman Empire, who were similarly forced to leave their ancestral homes to move to the new, primarily Muslim, nation state of Turkey, created from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.

These forced migrations were part of the much bigger Population Exchange which was taking place between Turkey and Greece at the time, and later ratified by the Treaty of Lausanne, in 1923. This was based purely on religious identity: one and half million Greek Orthodox citizens of Turkey and 500,000 Muslim citizens of Greece were forcibly deported from their homes and sent to live in the other country, where they would form part of the religious majority.

None of the 2 million people involved had any choice in the matter: their lives were torn apart because the international powers had agreed that in order to avoid further conflict Turkey should be primarily Muslim, and Greece primarily Christian. Unfortunately for them, those 2 million people were living in the 'wrong' place for their religion, and because of that were forced to migrate, as penniless refugees, to places where many of them could not even speak the language.

Those are the bare facts about what happened to the Ayvalik Greeks who suddenly disappeared and left all those churches behind, and the people who came in to replace them and turned their churches into mosques. A more comprehensive explanation of why this happened, however, would have to take in both the 3,000 year history of the Asia Minor Greeks, and the rise and fall of the multi-cultural Ottoman Empire and its replacement by the rather more culturally homogenous and less religiously tolerant Turkish Republic. This followed the First World War, the ill-advised Greek invasion of Anatolia in 1919 and the subsequent vicious and bloody Turkish War of Independence, which ended with the Greeks being driven back, quite literally in some cases, into the sea.


That's all rather too much for one blog post, though.