Today we went to visit a ghost town, with a tragic story behind it. The town is called Kayakoy, and it was a thriving Greek village near the coast of Turkey until 1923…. the horrible year of repatriation, when millions of Greeks were sent packing back to Greece (never mind they had lived there for over two thousand years) while hundreds and thousands of Turks were sent from Greece back to Turkey. This village basically became a ghost town over the period of a few years. It’s a horrible story, which shames both those countries after WWI, and I’ll let you look it up. Here are the pictures…
Soak this in, when you think of man’s humanity to man.
There were beautiful homes with walls with bright red and blue colors…
There were chapels and churches where Greeks heard God’s word and were baptized, including one on top of the hill overlooking the sea…
Undoubtedly, these ethnic and immigration issues are thorny issues…
Thorny as a Kaykoy cactus, and it causes one to reflect, as Elaine is doing high up in the site, under a fig tree.
It’s so important on occasion to see the world through other people’s points of view…
Imagine if you had grown up in Kayakoy, and so had your parents and your grandparents etc. and then you were told by your government— ‘You have to move to a country where you have NEVER LIVED’.
Down in the cafe below, which serves the tourists who come to see Kayakoy, life goes on as normal.
They keep pouring the Turkish coffee and baking bread….
They keep on selling trinkets, and over the bar there hangs this sign…
This version of ‘mind your own business’ is all very well, except it’s ironic here, because Trouble came to Kaykoy when the residents were doing that, and by then it was too late to do anything about it. Deportation followed. Think on these things.
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