Kayaköy is just south of Fethiye in south west Turkey. Ro and I walked there with friends in 2024 and the photo (with thanks to Roger Giddings) below shows me, shielded from the bleaching sun, at the start of the Lycian Way (which passes by Kayakoy).

One hundred years earlier, in 1923 the community of Greek orthodox Christians who lived there were driven out and sent to Greece as part of a high-level deal between the politicians of Greece and the newly formed Turkish state (with British connivance). This was despite the fact that Greek orthodox Christians and Turkish Muslims had lived more or less happily together for centuries. When they left, the ‘Greeks’ handed their keys to their Turkish neighbours for safe-keeping until they returned. Their neighbours respected this trust and waited for their return. At this time, millions were moved from Greece and Turkey to satisfy a misplaced sense of national identity in a disgraceful episode that deserves more exposure to our scorn. But we should also remember that this is an episode with echoes throughout modern history. We visited the ruins for a second time in the company of our Turkish friend Kerim. The ‘Greeks’ called this place Leivissi.

One final thought; after I had finished writing this poem, I met with a Turkish colleague and asked him about the relationship between young people from Turkey and Greece today. He told me they are like the cousins at a party playing happily together in the garden but aware that their parents indoors have had a terrible row.

Roofs fall in on broken walls
Making refuges for sparrows, jays, and orioles.
Where children once sang, ravens call.

Hope lived here long after violent exile
Left tables upturned and rotting fruit on trees.
The simple hope that good people
Would soon return to greet good people,
Died in this haunted place.
One hundred years of separation
Suffocated that hope under masonry and memories,
Under bones and feathers,
And crumpled cans of Coca-Cola.

In bleaching sunlight, travellers stare
To where families were taken blinking from their homes,
And marched for weeks, either to a strangers’ land,
Or else a roadside grave.
They were marched because papers from an unknown hand
Declared that they were Greeks.
They carried with them what they could not bear to leave;
Perhaps new shoes just bought from town,
Or a dead child’s christening gown.
They marched because decrees,
When signed and stamped,
Give permits to our pernicious selves,
And passports to our moral poverty.

But we are all Greek,
We all fail our neighbours in their time of need.
We all die by the road in unmarked graves,
And still our stubby fingers will not let go the pen
That signed the forms that smeared our roads with blood.

The exiled Greeks were builders;
They knew where to place the keystones
And how stones rise to make walls,
How roofs defy gravity.
They knew where our foundations lie.

One day we will all be exiles,
From this place or this life.
Until then we can sign the papers,
We can orchestrate an exodus,
We can look on like travellers blinking in the sun.
Or, we can sing with the sparrows and the jays,
Dress in the colours of the oriole,
Dance with the ravens,
And be builders.

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