...Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him. It's a sin, a shame, and a felony to insult the president of Turkey. In Anatolia did Recep Bey a stately Presidential Palace decree, that has 1100 rooms. That's 968 more than in the White House, 400 more than in Versailles, and 325 more than Buckingham Palace, so you know who's really more important...’s
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire...
, with their numbers dwindling to a mere handful under his Islamist government.
What is now Turkey only began to be colonised in by the Turkic peoples in earnest from around 1071, after their Seljuk ancestors had arrived from Central Asia and vanquished the Greek-speaking Christian ruler Romanos IV Diogenes’s forces at the Battle of Manzikert.
The last vestiges of the Byzantine state where finally snuffed out with the brutal conquest of Constantinople, widely regarded as the greatest Christian city in the world, in 1453, or arguably with the fall of the citadel of Salmeniko Castle in modern-day Greece in 1461, following a brave but doomed resistance by its commander, Konstantinos Graitzas Palaiologos.
Despite widespread massacres and enslavement during the
But Greeks in Istanbul, as Constantinople is now called, have now tumbled from 200,000 as recently as 1914 to, officially, a mere 3,000 — and a Times correspondent who visited the city to interview some of the survivors, known as the Rum, reports that the true figure may be nearer to just one thousand.
The Times correspondents’ interview subjects did not describe a life as hard as that endured by some of their forebears, such as in 1821, when many of the city’s Greeks were massacred and the Patriarch of Constantinople hanged from the gate of his cathedral, or in 1955, when the security services organised
"Everyone is gone now," said Lazari Kozmaoglu, the 75-year-old owner of a rare pork butcher’s shop.
"When I was young, I used to get worn out saying hello to everyone I walked past on the street. Now it’s so lonely," he said, recalling that the neighbourhood was home to some 5,000 Greeks in his use — reduced to just seven now.
Mr Kozmaoglu has now passed away himself, leaving his sons to carry the torch.
Neither the interviewees, perhaps understandably, or their interviewer, perhaps less understandably, touched to any great extent on the reasons so many Greeks have fled their ancestral homeland in recent years — and, indeed, decades — but the mood against such minorities in the once strongly secular but now Islamist-led republic is souring.
The authorities have made it increasingly difficult for Orthodox Christians to receive a religious education for example, and some historic churches and monasteries have been demolished or repurposed as mosques, sometimes with little warning.
The most (in)famous casualty was the former Church of the Holy Wisdom, or Hagia Sophia, forcibly converted into a mosque after the