Migration from Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic
Between Istanbul and Izmir, just off the major highways of western Anatolia, lay previously unknown to us a layering of migrations, displacements, resettlements, and multiethnic coexistence.
Western Anatolia has witnessed wave upon wave of migrations, dating back centuries and still ongoing. Especially as Ottoman frontiers shrank during the 19th century, refugees came from the Balkans and the Eastern borderlands (Finkel, 2005a, pp. 479-487, 501-504, 533-551). During the 1990s, with new Balkan conflicts, the Turkish state appears to have continued to follow Ottoman precedents, settling newcomers from the Balkans in villages that would otherwise be seriously depopulated, if not abandoned. The march from countryside to urban centers in Turkey, as elsewhere, is well established and continuing. Since the mid-20th century, the rural population has dropped from around three-quarters of the national total to less than a quarter today (Ozturk et al., 2018, p. 514).Around 2009, it was still the case that roughly 45 percent of the labor force continued to be employed in agriculture, with agriculture’s share in total GDP at 13 percent (Aksoy, 2005, p. 235). The most recent figures show a sharp decline, with agriculture now employing 20 percent of the populationand accounting for only 6.1 percent of GDP. And yet, with the increased ease of mobility between urban centers and rural areas and the interpenetration of new sources of income generation (hipster, counter-cultural or boutique agriculture, tourism including eco- and agri-tourism, retirement and holiday homes), rural places are increasingly connected rather than cut off from metropolitan developments, suggesting that the “reconstitution of rural space” fueled by neoliberal policies is underway in Anatolia (Ozturk et al., 2018, pp. 513-514). Despite the urbanization of the population, however, it is the case that “the village” remains a resonantly symbolic space crucial for the construction of Turkish identity (Landry, 2017, passim).
Since our journey, the influx of 3.5 million Syrian refugees has overtaken these earlier migrations, with consequences as yet to be understood (UNHCR, 2018).
One major difference is the ethno-linguistic one, since being Turkish-speaking had more or less bridged differences for earlier incomers. However unevenly managed the conditions of reception and hospitality for these new refugees, however, the Turkish government’s policy of accommodating them needs to be understood within this context of a longer history of welcoming and dealing with migration (The Economist, 2018). Theoretically, that is, Turkey has traditionally represented itself as welcoming to visitors, whether refugees or tourists, though the practice is proving increasingly turbulent. Economic downturn and potential crisis are causing nationalist resentment in Turkish society, with Syrians a particular target (Ahval, 2019). None of this could have been predicted in 2009.However, if there is a notable absence from our account—that is to say, of finding communities deriving from non-Turkish identities—it is surely that of migrants from Kurdistan or those willing to represent themselves as Kurdish. The apparent absence of Kurds from the places we visited is not a reliable indicator of a real absence but rather of a reluctance to draw attention to Kurdishness publicly, and this reluctance signifies an important difference from the politics of ethnicity and coexistence during Evliya’s day.