Antioch's Last Heirs: The Hatay Greek Orthodox Community between Greece, Syria and Turkey

This study explores the identity dynamics of the Arabic-speaking Greek Orthodox community of the Hatay province of Turkey. Citizens of Turkey, members of the Greek Orthodox church and Arabic speakers, members of this small but historic community stood at the crossroads of three nationalisms: Greek, Syrian and Turkish. Following the urbanization waves that swept through the Turkish countryside since the 1950s, thousands of Hatay Greek Orthodox moved to Istanbul and were given the chance to integrate with the Greek minority there. The case of the Hatay Greek Orthodox community points to the resilience of millet-based identities, more than a century after the demise of the Ottoman Empire.


Introduction
Within Turkey's dwindling Greek Orthodox population, there is a sub-group that has attracted relatively little attention, disproportionate to its rich history. The Arabic-speaking Greek Orthodox community (cemaat or jama'a) 1 of the Hatay (Antakya) province, 2 on Turkey's southern border with Syria has inhabited one of the most historic regions of the Levant, where Antioch, one of the greatest cities of the ancient and medieval era once thrived. Known in the 1 On different aspects of the history and the sociology of the minority, also see Haris Rigas, ed., Üç Milliyetçiliğin 4 of their identity features, but never strong enough to identify with Turkey's Arab Sunni Muslim minority. Their identification with Sunni Islam was too strong to allow for Orthodox to define their language as their primary identity badge. Citizens of Turkey, members of the Greek Orthodox Church and Arabic speakers, this small but historic community stood among three nationalisms. They have faced the option of either integrating into the Turkish mainstream by emphasizing on their citizenship and abandoning their primordial identity bonds based on local community and Orthodoxy, 7 integrating with Turkey's Sunni Muslim Arab minority, due to their language, or integrating into the Greek minority by focusing on their religious identity.
The Hatay Greek Orthodox community could also be viewed as a 'double minority,' in other words a minority within a minority. 8

The "Vestigial Millet" and the Role of Linguistic and Religious Pluralism
This study embarks on an overview of the history of this extraordinary city, which is essential Istanbul, who chose to maintain their anonymity. It engages with the concept of 'vestigial millet system' 9 introduced by Barkey and Gavrilis, and Brubaker's work on language and religion as identity components to explore the identity of the Hatay Greek Orthodox community. Barkey and Gavrilis argued that despite the formal abolition of the millet system with the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey vestiges of the millet system have continued to shape identities and state policies. 10 Such vestiges can help explain the identity dynamics of the Hatay Arabic-speaking Greek Orthodox community, as primordial affiliations proved resilient and adaptive against pressures by modernization and urbanization.
Brubaker argued that language and religion were 'arguably the two most socially and politically consequential domains of cultural difference in the modern world.' 11 Language and religion have been the most consequential elements of the identity of the Hatay Greek Orthodox 9 Contrary to the mainstream view that the millet system was established by Sultan Mehmet II and Patriarch Gennadius Scholarius a few months after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, recent historical research has pointed that the emergence of the Greek Orthodox (Rum) millet institution from what the Ottoman records described as Rum tai'fe (group) was a long and complicated process. Religious change, on the other hand, is often substitutive and transformative.
When adults add a new language to an existing repertory of languages, this may inflect their identity, but it is unlikely to transform it. Yet when they convert from one religion to another, or from one form of religious engagement to another, this can involve a basic transformation of identity. 12 People do not ordinarily simply add a new religion to a repertory of religions, notwithstanding the flourishing of various forms of hybridity and syncretism, nor do they ordinarily 'convert' from one language to another.
For children of immigrants, to be sure, language change is often substitutive rather than additive; but this reduces heterogeneity in the receiving country, while religious conversion often increases it. 13 Tracing the identity dynamics of the Hatay Greek Orthodox community between Arabicspeaking Sunni Muslims, Greek-speaking Greek Orthodox and the mainstream Turkish population, as well as their position between Greece, Syria and Turkey with the analytical tools offered by Barkey and Gavrilis, and Brubaker is the main aim of this study.

The Rise and Fall of a Glorious Metropolis
Antioch on the Orontes was one of the numerous cities Seleucus I Nicator, the founder of the Seleucid Empire, founded to honour his father Antiochus. Built on the banks of the Orontestoday's Asiriver, a few kilometres from the Mediterranean Sea, it was destined to become the most famous of all its homonymous cities, the capital of the Seleucid Empire, a major economic, cultural and religious centre for the whole Levant and one of the largest and richest cities of antiquity. In the Hellenistic and Roman world, Antioch was second only to Alexandria, the capital of Ptolemaic Egypt, in its economic and political significance. 14 The emergence of Christianity marked another landmark in the history of Antioch, as the city rose to the leading Christian centre of the Roman Empire. 15 The diocese of Antioch was raised to one of the five Patriarchates of Christianity, evidence of its significance and influence within Christianity. 16 Antioch maintained its crucial position, while Justinian was trying to heal sectarian divisions within Christianity until the transformation of Syria into a battlefield first between the Roman and Persian Sassanid Empires, and later between the Roman and Arab Umayyad and Abbasid 14 It is also worth noting that with the exception of an excavation led by Princeton University between 1932 and 1939 under the French colonial administration, no major excavations commensurate to the significance of ancient Antioch have taken place so far. The fast urbanization of Antakya and its environs in recent years have raised fears that important archaeological evidence will be destroyed before being discovered. See, for example, Michael Hodges, "The Remarkable New Hotel Built above the Ruins of Ancient Antioch", Financial Times, 06/03/2020 15 According to Acts 11:19-26, the very term 'Christian' was coined in Antioch to describe the adherents of the new religion.    43 Author, "Participant Observation" (Antakya, 10/4/2012) Alexandretta to Turkey meant that Arabic would no more be taught in schools and Turkish would enjoy a monopoly in the field of education. As Arabic remained the mother tongue of the community, bilingualism grew with Turkish being increasingly used in the public sphere, and Arabic being used in private but less in younger generations, which had no formal education in the language, as well as limited opportunities to practice it. 44

Migration to Istanbul and Its Effects
Urbanization that has swept through the Turkish countryside since the 1950s had a profound The term 'Şamlı' did not, however, gain any political resonance in the Levant, as the term 'Karamanlı' did in Anatolia. 63 Greek citizenship law heavily relies on the ius sanguinis, i.e. ethnic Greek descent suffices to claim Greek citizenship. Proving this however can be rather difficult and open to interpretation. 64 Author, "Fieldwork Interview" (Athens, 6/9/2019) 23 benchmark. 65 Those who were closely affiliated with the Greek minority institutions in Istanbul had higher chances of being recognized as Greeks compared to those who took a more distanced approach. 66 The situation was different in the case of the Greek Orthodox still resident in the Hatay province. As citizenship applications from Hatay Orthodox rose in numbers, Greek state officials had to conclude whether there was a real bond between the applicant and Greek identity, or the application was made for purely instrumental reasons. 67 The absence of Greek minority education there meant that it could not serve as a criterion for diagnosing willingness to adopt Greek national identity. In some cases, state authorities proved willing to recognize Greek ethnic descent and issued passports. 68 In other cases, they were more circumspect and requested more evidence with the aim to avoid being manipulated by the applicants. This often resulted in paradoxical situations where some members of a family were recognized as Greek and were awarded Greek passports, while other members of the same family were not. 69

Relations with Syria
Following the annexation of the Hatay province to Turkey in 1939, a large part of the local Greek Orthodox population chose to emigrate to Syria. This meant that the remaining part of the population developed strong family connections with Syria, in addition to the economic links that predated the annexation. Both were subjected to the vicissitudes of bilateral Syrian-Turkish relations. Ending the instruction of Arabic in the province and launching an assimilation campaign, 70 inevitably affected the Greek Orthodox community, and so did the emergence of the status of the province as a dispute in Syrian-Turkish relations. 71 76 Greek Orthodox settlements located next to the Syrian border like the town of Altınözü (Qusayr) and the village of Tokaçlı (Cünte) were inevitably affected. 77 The abduction -and apparent murder-of one Greek in Turkish politics also took its toll, as the relations between the Sunni and the Arabic-speaking Alawite (Nusayri) communities of the province became increasingly strained. The Greek Orthodox community remained one of the most vulnerable ones, given its demographic weakness and its potential exposure to acts of terrorist sectarian or religious violence.