Is Turkishness in Greece different than Turkishness in Türkiye?
This question may sound deceptively simple, yet it goes to the heart of how identity actually works. We often assume that identities rooted in a shared history, culture, and language naturally produce similar ways of belonging. When it comes to “Turkish identity,” this assumption is particularly widespread. However, once we look beyond historical origins and focus on political and social contexts, it becomes clear that the same identity can take on strikingly different meanings in different countries.
History classes are often assumed to exist so that people do not forget who they are and where they come from. But would people truly lose their sense of identity if history were not taught in schools? More importantly, in pre-modern societies—long before standardized history curricula—did people lack an understanding of who they were? The more plausible answer is that history education does not simply teach people the past; it teaches what to remember and, just as crucially, what to forget.
This selective remembering becomes particularly visible in moments of encounter. For many Turks from Western Thrace who, like myself, go to Türkiye for education, there is a striking and often unsettling experience. People who have lived with identity denial in their homeland—who have had to constantly assert and defend their Turkishness—suddenly find that in the so-called “motherland” they are free to declare who they are, yet struggle to find anyone who truly recognizes or understands them. They can finally say “I am Turkish,” but are often met with blank stares rather than recognition.
What is even more revealing is that this lack of awareness extends well beyond everyday interactions. Many academics in Türkiye are well informed about Indigenous peoples—from Aborigines to Apaches—yet remain unaware of the existence, history, and lived experiences of Turks in Western Thrace, just across the border. This paradox is not accidental. It reflects not an absence of historical knowledge, but the outcomes of a learned hierarchy of memory: a structured sense of what is worth remembering and what is rendered invisible through omission.
In this sense, many Western Thrace Turks who come to Türkiye for education encounter a deeply paradoxical situation. In Greece, they live under conditions of identity denial and struggle to make their presence visible; in Türkiye, they encounter freedom of expression without recognition. They are no longer prohibited from saying who they are, yet they struggle to find others who can meaningfully hear it. This gap points directly to the politics of memory—what societies are trained to remember, and what they are taught to forget.
Let us then ask a simple but crucial question:
How can an identity rooted in the same historical origins come to take on such different meanings in different countries?
Türkiye and Greece offer a particularly instructive comparison. Communities that once lived within the borders of the same empire and shared similar historical experiences now encounter and construct “Turkishness” in markedly different contexts.
In Türkiye, Turkishness has long occupied a hegemonic position closely intertwined with state ideology. Through official discourse, education, historical narratives, and national symbols, Turkishness is presented as the norm. One of the most striking features of this hegemonic position is its relative invisibility: the less an identity is questioned, the more “natural” it appears. This invisibility also shapes how people talk about the past. When discussing historical traumas, participants in Türkiye often reinterpret them through a discourse of perseverance and national endurance, drawing primarily on official narratives rather than family or personal memories.
This may also explain why many participants in Türkiye struggled to articulate their identity perceptions, particularly when asked about symbols. Responses often appeared ideologically framed rather than experientially grounded. By contrast, in Greece, memory-related questions elicited detailed, personal, and emotionally charged narratives. Indirect questioning proved especially effective there, suggesting that marginalization fosters deeper and more reflexive engagement with identity.
Another striking divergence emerges in symbolic representations of Turkishness. In Türkiye, symbols such as war, martyrdom, and military service are frequently linked to pre-Ottoman history, emphasizing an ancient and continuous national past. In Greece, however, Turkishness is symbolically anchored in religious shrines, everyday Islamic practices, and narratives rooted firmly in the Ottoman era.
This contrast is not incidental. Turkish participants in Türkiye overwhelmingly referenced pre-Ottoman history, while those in Greece focused on the Ottoman past. This raises a critical question: does Greek society’s rejection of Ottoman history paradoxically reinforce Ottoman identification among Turks in Greece? Or does this divergence instead reflect ideological divisions within Türkiye, where some groups gravitate toward pre-Ottoman heritage while others increasingly embrace Ottomanism?
At a deeper level, these patterns appear to be shaped by the unresolved trauma of the Balkan Wars. In Türkiye, this trauma has often been managed through selective forgetting—an effort to compensate for loss by emphasizing continuity and strength. Among Turks in Greece, however, the same historical rupture has produced the opposite effect: a heightened attachment to memory, history, and identity as tools of survival under conditions of denial.
The comparison reveals a central insight: identity is not shaped by history alone. Even identities that share the same historical roots can evolve in radically different ways depending on political context. Power relations, state policies, minority status, and practices of exclusion decisively shape how identity is interpreted and lived.
Collective memory lies at the heart of this process. Which pasts are remembered, which traumas are transmitted, and which symbols are invested with meaning all define the boundaries of identity. Religion, language, and everyday practices of nationalism—flags, ceremonies, linguistic choices, and the everyday construction of “we”—continuously reproduce identity in daily life.
Viewing identity as fixed, immutable, or essential is therefore misleading. Identity is a context-sensitive process, shaped by time, place, and politics. When it is hegemonic, it may fade into invisibility; when it is marginalized, it may become sharper, more conscious, and more forcefully articulated.
The comparison between Türkiye and Greece makes these dynamics unmistakably clear. The same identity can function as a taken-for-granted norm in one country, while becoming a symbol of resistance and survival in another. This underscores the limitations of analyzing identity solely within a single national framework.
Perhaps the more fundamental question, then, is this: is identity defined by history itself, or by the political and social contexts in which people live? How we answer this question has implications not only for understanding Turkish identity, but for rethinking national identities more broadly.
The arguments outlined in this column are explored in much greater depth in my recent academic article, which offers a comparative analysis of hegemonic and marginalized constructions of Turkish identity in Türkiye and Greece. The study is based on qualitative research and engages with debates on nationalism, collective memory, and minority identity.
🔗 Full article:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14608944.2025.2598008?src=#d1e142
