When three Greeks opened the Island of Mastic in Izmir, the once famously cosmopolitan town that many of their relatives hailed from, none of them could ever have imagined its runaway success.
Within days of the café-cum-bar’s inauguration on the Turkish city’s elegant seafront, its pastries, jams, Greek-style coffees and Mastic products were going down a treat.
‘It’s great here. It’s so great that the Greeks are back again,” said Dilek, a Turkish student. ‘We’re neighbours. We both live around the same sea, the Aegean. We’ve got a lot in common.”
The Island of Mastic might have gone unnoticed had it not also made history: it is the first Greek-owned enterprise to open in Izmir since the sacking of Smyrna by the Turkish armies after the Greek campaign to occupy Asia Minor in 1922.
For the Greeks, who still refer to the event as the ‘catastrophe”, no other place is as redolent of loss or defeat as the city they once predominated and still call Smyrni. For the generations of Greeks and Turks raised on schoolbook stories of hatred and chicanery, no other place provokes such passion and rancour.
Until recently, it would seem. The tragedy, not least the fire that raged through the city on the night of September 13 1922, and the awful massacre that ensued, has become a distant memory as Greeks and Turks attempt to forge better ties.
‘In our hearts, we just want to get on,” said Nektarios Memekas, who divides his time between Chios, the nearby Greek isle, and Izmir, where he opened the café two years ago. ‘As neighbours we are like two branches from the same tree. Our relationship on the ground has nothing to do with politics or what you see or hear on television. It couldn’t be more different.”
The Island of Mastic appears to have set a trend. Last week the first forum was held in the town between the local chamber of commerce and entrepreneurs from Greece’s Aegean islands. The inauguration of the first air link between Athens and Izmir this month has facilitated exchange.
‘I grew up speaking Greek because that was the language I heard at home,” said Hasan, a 46-year-old hotel employee. ‘My parents were Muslim but until the exchange [of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1923] they lived in Crete.”
‘For people like me it is wonderful that all these Greeks are coming here,” he said. ‘It’s a pity that Turkey doesn’t have its Greek community anymore, that there are only 2 000 or 3 000 of them left.”
Greece’s newly elected prime minister, George Papandreou, appears determined to tap into the desire for improved bilateral relations. In the two weeks since his socialist government assumed power there has been a discernible shift in mood between the two countries, the ties of which in recent years had again fallen victim to paranoia and hostility.
A surprise visit to Turkey — where the Greek leader is still remembered fondly for his reconciliation policies back in the 1990s — was received with near euphoria after he laid an olive branch at the grave of the late foreign minister, Ismail Cem, who helped oversee rapprochement.
In an equally unexpected move, the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, ‘dropped everything” to meet Papandreou, who was visiting unofficially in his capacity as foreign minister.
Making his first official trip to the war-divided island of Cyprus this week, Papandreou set the tone for the reconciliatory policies he intends to pursue. Turkey ‘had every right” to join the European Union, he said, as long as it ‘fulfilled certain criteria”, including good neighbourly relations.
In Izmir, at least, good neighbourly relations is what it is all about. ‘Thank God for Papandreou,” said Dilek. ‘Turks like him. Maybe, at long last, we can just get down to the business of liking one another.