Introducing Conviviality: Ebru-Like Living in Burgaz

Abstract

Burgaz island, one of the Princes’ Islands of Istanbul, is home to more than twenty different ethnic and religious groups from different socio-economic backgrounds. While the Balkans and Turkey are pathologised as places of ethnic and religious turmoil and “un-mixing” people, peace in Burgaz did not break despite homogenising Turkification policies. This monograph shifts the emphasis in this study of post-Ottoman plurality from coexistence/toleration to conviviality, which I describe as both living together in diversity, producing everyday life and a sense of place through embodying diversity, enjoying, performing and valuing it, and living with difference, by letting people, who might have different lifestyles, to perform and practise daily life the ways in which they would like to.

Introduction

“Anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists should come here and see how people can live in friendship and harmony. It is an example to the whole world.” Dr. Robert Schild, Burgaz islander. (Hazar 2005)

This call for a social scientist to come and explore how people live together in Burgaz was uttered in the documentary Nearby Yet Far Away – the Isle of Burgaz (Hazar 2005). I heard it while watching the documentary at the open-air cinema of the Sports Club, during my pre-fieldwork trip to Burgazadası in the summer of 2008. In the documentary, Burgazadası is talked about and seen as the model of harmony and coexistence of a plural society. This island is home to Jews, Armenians, Rums¹ (Greek Orthodox minority in Turkey), Suryanis, Sunni Muslims, Catholics, Alevis and Kurds, who belong to a variety of different ethnic, class and religious backgrounds. While the Balkans and Turkey have long been pathologised as places of ethnic turmoil (Todorova 1997) and un-mixing of people (Hirschon 2003), peace there did not break down despite Turkification policies (Aktar 2021; Güven 2006; Zürcher 1993), pogroms in 1955, (see Güven 2006; Mills 2010; Kuyucu 2005), the worsening relations between Turkey and Greece over Cyprus, and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus (Örs 2019; Akgönül 2007; Güven 2006; Papadakis 2005; Bryant and Papadakis 2012; Akar and Demir 1994). How did, and how do Burgaz people from different backgrounds live together? How do they manage tensions? What makes them bond with each other? How can we describe, explain and conceptualise this?

During my fieldwork, I was struck by the fact that some Burgaz islanders described their diversity as ebru (marbling in Turkish; see Fig. 1.1). Ebru-like living was contrasted with living like a mosaic (Fig. 1.2), where the tiles, representing many different ethnic and religious groups, live side by side and have distinct borders and hence can fall out of the mosaic. While making a mosaic, you stick together the tiles with a kind of glue, with the hope that it holds them together. In ebru, the boundaries of patterns are fused into each other and hence, while you can see their distinctiveness and differences, they are tightly bound to each other and are not prone to separation, nor destruction. While making ebru, you throw the colours on the water and with the help of different brushes, you fuse the patterns together, by mingling them without mixing the patterns or melting them together. You, then, put a paper on the water and pull it out, where the picture stays solidly on the paper.

Fig. 1.1

Ebru—marbling (The ebru is made by my brother, Can Duru, who gave his consent for it to be published in this book)

Fig. 1.2

Destroyed mosaic in Agia Sophia (photo taken by the author)

Before my fieldwork, I had read about multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism and coexistence in order to comprehend how people conceptualised diversity and living with difference but there was something different in the ways in which the islanders described and lived like ebru. I conducted 14 months of fieldwork between July 2009 and September 2010, trying to understand what is ebru-like living and how it is different to living side by side, or living with difference. My exploration of “living togetherness” in my long-term ethnographic and longitudinal research, and analytical journey of 15 years (2008–23) led me to write this book on conviviality, a joint-shared life of living, loving and fighting on an island that belongs to a small archipelago, called the Princes’ Islands of Istanbul.

In the last decade, there has been a growing interest to explore conviviality, coexistence and pluralism especially in Europe. Academic journal articles and Special Issues on conviviality (Erickson 2011; Marsden and Reeves 2019; Nowicka and Vertovec 2014; Padilla et al. 2015; Wise and Noble 2016) and ethnographic works covering many regions in the form of edited volumes on coexistence (Bryant 2016; Hayden et al. 2016; Albera and Couroucli 2012) and conviviality (Hemer et al. 2020) have emerged; however not in the form of an ethnographic monograph. This field needs in-depth ethnographic and longitudinal analysis in order to give a holistic and contextualised account of how conviviality is practised and sustained during times of political crises. This book aims to satisfy this need by situating conviviality in a historical, political and socio-economic context (homogenising Turkey); explores how memory shapes current conviviality; the complex impact of class difference in everyday interactions and the relationship between conviviality, coexistence/toleration and intolerance.

In this ethnography, I narrate stories of conviviality, solidarity and management of conflicts and tension on Burgaz, which is home to more than twenty ethnic and religious groups, who come from different socio-economic backgrounds. The main contribution of the book is the anthropological analysis of pluralism as the embodiment of diversity through shared experiences of sensory diversity to the recently emerging studies of conviviality and to media, communication and cultural studies. Islanders attend each other’s religious places, feasts, parties and funerals; experience the island with their senses, while swimming and fishing in the sea, smelling and touching the mimosas, eating the berries and the green bitter plums of the trees, watching the sunset and the sunrise; they also fight with each other about who gossiped about whom, or who beats the carpet and lets the dust fall on the neighbour below. All of these pleasures, joys, conflicts and tensions make the islanders feel that it is their island, creating a sense of unity and a strong sense of belonging to the island that overrides ethnic, class and religious identities of individuals at times of crisis and despite political tension in Turkey. At times of crisis and hardship, survival of the community of Burgaz islanders takes priority over individual or group differences.

Studies of conviviality in Southern Europe have presented an alternative to multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism (Erickson 2011; Duru 2013, 2015, 2016; Heil 2014; Nowicka and Vertovec 2014). In difference to the English meaning of conviviality, as having a good time with others, these studies opted for the Spanish word “convivencia,” as “a joint/shared life,” driving from the verb convivir, “to live together” (Overing and Passes 2000; Erickson 2011). Conviviality does not mean continuous harmony and peacefulness, but includes tensions, conflicts and disputes (Karner and Parker 2011; Overing and Passes 2000) as a part of sharing space and living together. Many communities in the Balkans, in Anatolia, the Mediterranean, the Levant and in South Asia, have lived, coexisted for centuries, with and without conflict, prior and after the emergence of nation states (see Bowman 2016a, 2016b; Bigelow 2010; Doumanis 2012; Saglam 2022; Turkyilmaz 2009). What can be considered “new” with the concept of conviviality is that in contrast to the passive, non-interference type of coexistence and/or living side by side that implies and embeds toleration; conviviality is performative and active, and people, who engage with it, practise it, perform it and value it (see Bryant 2016).

What is also new with the concept of conviviality is how it is applied in different contexts. In Northern Europe (especially in the UK), Australia and Canada, conviviality came out as a reaction to top-down multiculturalism, a political project that manages diversity (Wise and Velayutham 2009; Wise 2010; Wise and Noble 2016; Nowicka and Vertovec 2014; Neal et al. 2013, 2019; Gilroy 2004). Multicultural policies were criticised, as not reflecting what people actually do in their daily lives and pluralism in multiculturalism was seen as a matter or rights and duties (Zapata-Barrero 2017; Zapata-Barrero 2018) emphasising how people are different from each other rather than by what they have in common. Therefore, attentions turned into “everyday multiculturalism” (Wise and Velayutham 2009), “interculturalism” and intercultural policies which stressed that community cohesion should focus on the bonds among the people, and what they share in common by highlighting a diversity-based common public culture (Zapata-Barrero 2017). “Intercultural conviviality” was used as a framework to describe the ways in which pluralism was practised by individuals in their everyday life (Harris 2016). During this “convivial turn” (Neal et al. 2013) scholars investigated friendship among people from different ethnic and religious backgrounds to be able to draw out “affective dimensions of social relations” in the ways in which sociability in friendship builds and springs from what people share in common, in difference to living with difference described as sociality across different ethnic and religious divides (Glick Schiller and Çağlar 2016).

However, conviviality as an analytical framework, a joint-shared life across ethnic, religious divides have not been applied to post-Ottoman contexts. For instance, in Greece, Cyprus and Turkey, “coexistence as toleration” have been dominated and overburdened by ethnic and religious differences, where social relations, cohesion and conflict are seen to be affected by these differences and hence put a shadow on the shared ways of living (Bryant 2016). During and after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, following the national building processes based on homogenisation of the nations, “coexistence” referred to the pre-existing categories of ethnicity and religion. Ethnographies explored bi-communal interaction in the neighbourhood, such as between Muslims and Christians in Bosnia, Bulgaria and Greece (Bringa 1995; Georgieva 1999; Lubańska 2007; Demetriou 2005; Huseyinoglu 2018). In Cyprus, coexistence between “Turkish Cypriots” and “Greek Cypriots” was ruptured (Bryant and Papadakis 2012; Bryant 2007; Demetriou 2007) and new forms of coexistence are limited to border crossings to visit left-behind villages, houses, gardens and objects (Navaro-Yashin 2009; Dikomitis 2012); tourism visits for business, shopping and dining (Scott 2012; Dikomitis 2012); and forced political projects of post-conflict resolution (Scott 2012; Bryant 2016).

My use of conviviality derives less from the English and French meanings that connote feasting and celebration, and more from the Spanish convivencia, meaning “a shared life.” Expanding on this meaning for their own work in Amazonia, Overing and Passes (2000, xiii–xiv emphasis added) remark that conviviality’s “features would include peacefulness, high morale and high affectivity, a metaphysics of human and non-human interconnectedness, a stress on kinship, good gifting—sharing, work relations and dialogue, a propensity for the informal and performative as against the formal and institutional, and an intense ethical and aesthetic valuing of sociable sociality.” I would like to put emphasis here on the performative aspect of conviviality, as well as the valuing of “sociable sociality.” Sociable sociality, or conviviality in the more conventional English sense, is something that, in this definition, is valued enough to be produced through performances that involve transforming “the violent, angry, ugly capricious forces of the universe into constructive, beautiful knowledge and capacities” (Overing & Passes, 6). Conviviality, then, is both “sociable sociality,” and the production and performance of that sociality, which often also involves control of tensions (see Bryant, (see Bryant 2016, 21). In a Karachi apartment building, Ring (2006) shows that the production of the apartment building as a peaceful space is achieved not only through pleasurable moments but also through the management of tension in everyday interaction and exchange.

I criticise multiculturalism as a top-down, political project, which puts more emphasis on living with difference and which tends to undermine shared ways of living. My approach to conviviality shows the reworkings of “everyday multiculturalism, multicultural living”—living with difference—, with the shared ways of living—living together in diversity—, and illustrates that people negotiate and navigate between these two (Chap. 4). I describe conviviality as shared ways of living, the production of everyday life and a sense of place through embodying diversity, enjoying, performing and valuing it (Chap. 5), as well as letting people, who might have different lifestyles to perform and practise daily life the ways in which they would like to (Chaps. 4 and 6). I suggest, then, that conviviality is not only these ways of living, but a particular valuing of sociable sociality in the making of place. It is the sort of “everyday coexistence” (Bryant 2016) but here given “an intense ethical and aesthetic valuing” and self-consciously performed. For those who live there, what makes Burgaz a place with which they identify is precisely this form of sociality; to be Burgazlı (from Burgaz) is to experience and value this sociality and to invest in its reproduction. That reproduction involves the performance of particular forms of sociality, as well as the management of tensions. Tension, then, is not absent from conviviality, just as it is not absent from what Bryant (2016, 9) describes as the everyday “labour of peace.” Rather, the management of tension is also a way of reproducing conviviality in that it performatively demonstrates the value placed on shared ways of life over other differences.

In much of the literature on peace and conflict resolution in the Balkans, Southern Europe and the Middle East, scholars attempt to analyse cultural plurality using the concept of coexistence. This is a coexistence that is being excavated from the ruins of conflict, with the idea that it may shed light on how people could live together again. Examples of such coexistence include that between Israelis and Palestinians; Greek and Turkish Cypriots; or Serbs, Croats and Bosnians (Abu-Nimer 2001; Anastasiou 2002; Dayton and Kriesberg 2009; Gidron et al. 2002; Phillips 1996; Wallensteen 2007). This is the coexistence that Bryant contrasts with “everyday coexistence” and notes “the legal, political, and discursive forms of coexistence that imply the ‘living together’ of millets or ethnic groups within the empire or nation” (Bryant 2016, 8).

This book represents a critical engagement with coexistence in the context of Turkey, where the idea of “living together” has been burdened with concepts of “toleration” inherited from the Ottoman past and inscribed in Republican law. Coexistence, with its connotations of different ethnic or religious groups living together, has no equivalent in Turkish. Rather, the most commonly used term to refer to the interaction of such groups is hoşgörü, literally “to see well” and usually translated as “tolerance,” which is a word that has been applied in the post-Ottoman Turkish context primarily to non-Muslim minorities whose status as minorities was secured by the Treaty of Lausanne. This does not mean that there have not been concepts of everyday coexistence in operation, especially the idea of komşuluk (neighbourhoodliness) and the mahalle (neighbourhood) (Bryant 2016). However, these ideas of living together have been problematically projected onto the scale of relations between ethnic and/or religious groups, blurring the scale that equates “the existence of certain neighbourhoods where persons of different religions lived side by side, sharing the responsibilities of the mahalle, with the ‘peaceful’ existence of religious and ethnic minorities within the Empire” (Bryant 2016, 17).

To complicate matters further, this discourse of coexistence, with its blurring of scale, furthermore returns to have real impact on actual everyday coexistence in the present. For instance, in the post-Ottoman context, scholars tend to view coexistence as something that belongs to the Ottoman past, a time before conflict based on ethno-religious identities (see Couroucli 2010). Problematically, this literature tends to view the loss of religious minorities as necessarily creating homogenised nations. Couroucli, for instance, claims that with the departure of the non-Muslim millets—the Jewish, Armenian and Greek-Orthodox minorities—Turkey has long ago lost its pluralism. Such assumptions, however, rebound to reinforce the idea that minorities are those non-Muslim millets who are the subject of toleration, thus reducing coexistence to a form of hierarchical indulgence. Moreover, this understanding of coexistence, by equating plurality with those differences acknowledged by the millet system of the Ottoman Empire, makes it seem as though other forms of difference, such as Alevis and Kurds in Turkey today, are not significant and do not require the sort of “labour of peace” (Bryant 2016).

Hence, this monograph shifts the emphasis in this study of post-Ottoman plurality from coexistence/toleration to my conceptualisation of conviviality—that is, ways of both sharing and contesting particular lifestyles in a place through daily interactions and a sense of belonging (Duru 2015, 2016). I refer to coexistence/toleration to emphasise the complex ways in which local discourses of tolerance are fed by and feed into historical and scholarly understandings of coexistence (see Brink-Danan 2011; Kaya 2013; Kaymak 2017; Oran 2013; Mills 2010). And in my analysis of conviviality, “living together” is understood as sharing the same space and socio-economic resources, and a process that involves both cohesion and tension. The book does not only explore personal disagreements and conflicts but also frictions that are structurally and historically rooted, such as the divisions between seasonal and permanent residents, employee–employer relationships and the interplay between the social capital, income and wealth with differences in ethnicity and religion. While I explore conviviality, its tensions and exclusions due to differences in lifestyle, economic disparities, ideology and class (see also Navaro-Yashin 2006), I also complement it with an analysis of coexistence/toleration, which I understand in the context of Turkey to apply specifically to recognised (former millets) and unrecognised minorities (e.g. Alevis and Kurds) who explicitly articulate their identity based on ethnic and religious difference in relation to the Sunni Muslim majority. My study of pluralism in the Turkish context draws attention to the intersection of class with ethnicity and religion (see Smith 2000) through the concepts of coexistence/toleration and conviviality. Throughout the book, I explore three complex impacts of class in everyday interactions: (1) the ways in which belonging to the “same” class creates similar lifestyles and tastes and subsumes ethnic and religious differences; (2) how differences in lifestyle become exacerbated by class difference; and (3) how, nonetheless, class difference and economic mutual dependency may create a sense of belonging to Burgaz, through conviviality. Hard times, tensions as well as sensorial pleasures, produce a sense of place, where the islanders enjoy the shared ways of living in this diverse setting.

While coexistence/toleration places emphasis on the need to share space with persons whom we already presume to be different, conviviality places emphasis on the production of place through shared attitudes and experiences. As I will show, conviviality may be seen as a particular form of everyday coexistence in which pluralism is self-consciously valued for its own sake. In this context, while memories of coexistence/toleration become a nostalgia for multiculturalism or an irreversible loss of pluralism as a result of nationalist homogenisation (Bryant 2016, 17), memories of conviviality are used to create a sense of belonging to Burgaz. The shared ways of living that create such a sense of belonging to Burgaz include both sweet memories of leisure and also bitter memories of adaptation, hardship, class and lifestyle differences.

Furthermore, the book brings in sensorial anthropology (Feld and Basso 1996; Classen 1997; Chau 2008; Seremetakis 2019; Sutton 2010) to conviviality studies, in the ways in which sensorial pleasures (feeling the breeze, smelling the mimosas, swimming in the sea, getting drunk, liking being exposed to the sun and feeling it on the skin, watching the sunrise) and the performance of conviviality are experienced through sensory diversity (Chau 2008; Duru 2016). Conviviality on the island takes place through embodying the island, embodying the cultural diversity, through shared experiences of sensory diversity, when the islanders feel together the sensory pleasures as well as do hard work, and also perform the labour of peace, by exchanging food, gifts and services (e.g. to help when in need and moral obligations such as attending funerals) (Bryant 2016, 21). Burgaz islanders embody Burgaz through dancing; playing marbles, scrabble and backgammon; eating; walking; and fighting with each other for daily matters. This embodiment and emotions that are shared create a collective sense of belonging and a shared Burgazlı identity. The experience and the self-conscious valuing of diversity makes Burgaz the place that it is and enjoying the cultural and sensorial diversity is what it means to be Burgazlı.

While Back and Sinha (2016) explore tools for conviviality that people use in their individual relationships to fight racism, I explore the mechanisms that enable and sustain conviviality. Furthermore, I investigate not only how conviviality takes place between individuals, in the form of friendships, but also the collective dimension of conviviality, where people bond collectively, have a collective sense of belonging to a place and share a collective identity. I argue that conviviality is the embodiment of diversity through shared experiences as well as living with difference and is a process that involves both cohesion and tension. Conviviality is both sociable sociality where the islanders enjoy each other’s company, embody the island and each other’s diversity through different senses (sharing food, walking, swimming, fishing, dancing); and a performance of pluralism and labour of peace as conflict solving mechanisms. The mechanisms that sustain it are shared ways of living and embodiment of diversity, shared memories and an articulation of a shared rhetoric that builds on solidarity and collective island identity that values diversity. The diversity of senses plays great importance in the ways in which the sensorial pleasures, hardship and daily conflicts, while people have fun as well as fight with each other, make people bond to each other, make the island their home. Collective sensorial experiences create emotional bonding among the people. They experience the island through their senses and feel they belong to the island. Acts of solidarity forms a shared rhetoric of what constitutes and takes for one to be a Burgaz islander. Differences are recognised and also appreciated; nonetheless at times of crisis, the sense of belonging, shared memories and rhetoric all weigh more than what separates the islanders; and conviviality acts as a mechanism of resistance and solidarity, where the islanders fight for the survival of the island community.

As a final point, the “convivial turn” has been criticised by several sociologists to have focused on the “fleeting, transient and spontaneous interactions” which happened at some moments (Neal et al. 2013; Nowicka 2020; Lapiņa 2016), and the reduction of conviviality to sociable sociality and amicable relationships, fleeting encounters in urban spaces and hence to have ignored the impacts of racism and inequality (Nowicka 2020; Back and Sinha 2016). This “convivial turn” is in fact not so new. Anthropologists have researched coexistence, intercommunality and conviviality, by conducting more rigorous and complex exploration of living togetherness and intercommunal mixing, its potential and limits. For example, Bigelow (2010), Bowman (2016a) and Ring (2006) explored interactions at private, semi-public and public places by contextualising the socio-economic, historical and political contexts of peaceful coexistence, conflicts and the management of conflicts. Hence, the book contributes to this long tradition in anthropology, by providing a longitudinal perspective of 15 years of research (2008–2023) by assessing the strength and continuity of conviviality, by exploring the islanders’ collective resistance and solidarity in hardship and/or at times of crisis. Is conviviality a form of sociable sociality, fleeting encounters and intercultural relations that work when everything seems to be peaceful? What is the relationship between conviviality, solidarity, tolerance and intolerance? Is conviviality ephemeral or temporal and can turn into violence at times of crisis? The findings from Burgaz seek to contribute not only to diverse contexts in small localities, but also to works in cosmopolitan and urban settings in different diverse contexts, in the ways in which conviviality relates to solidarity, coexistence, inequalities, intolerance, racism and nationalism.

Kestane Karası: Representing Conviviality

After I watched the documentary about Burgaz, I got interested more in how the islanders perceived and represented their diversity. I started reading novels written about Burgaz, as soon as I began my fieldwork. I wanted to understand how the islanders live, what they do, what they think, say, write about Burgaz, which concepts, terms, metaphors they use to articulate their representation of diversity by building on media ethnography (Tufte 2000; Schrøder et al. 2003). Grillo (2007, 981 emphasis added) highlights the importance of “understanding what actually happens ‘on the ground’, a crucial aspect of which is the subjective dimension, the ideas, models, projects, definitions, discourses etc. that actors bring to bear on a situation, sometimes very hesitantly, often seeking to work with (or clarify) concepts that are difficult, opaque, elusive and with multiple contested meanings.” Thus, an in-depth, ethnographic exploration of everyday practices of living together in diversity, and exploring how the islanders themselves reflect, represent and conceptualise their conviviality in their media productions (documentaries, novels, memoires) was my response to Grillo’s call (2007) for anthropologists to go beyond the normative analysis of multiculturalism and to move away from the philosophical reflections at an abstract or institutional level.

Engin Aktel’s novel entitled, Kestane Karası (Aktel 2005), depicts life in Burgaz in the 1940s and 1950s. Aktel’s grandfather, a Turkish Sunni Muslim, was the head of a district in Thessaloniki and he was assigned to continue his job in Istanbul. He came to Burgaz in 1914, where he was given a house. Engin Aktel, born in 1942, has been living in Burgaz since then. The characters of Kestane Karası are based on the people, who lived in Burgaz. He combined his imagination and the island life to tell the story of Burgaz. Kestane Karası is the name of the storm. As Burgaz was a “Rum fishermen village,” that storm affected the lives of many fishermen and the islanders. In the following, I make a narrative analysis (Hansen and Machin 2013) of this novel to show how a new comer to the island, becomes a Burgazlı. The set of events and how the characters react to these events shed light not only on how the challenges, suspicions, tensions and crisis times are solved, but also on the acts of solidarity and the values of the islanders. Characters in the novel are based on real people, who represent the diversity of Burgaz, which not only is about ethnic and religious differences but includes madness, irratibility, annoyance, physical appearance, funniness, drunkenness and so on.

The novel starts with Stelyo Reis (captain), a Rum fisherman, who gets lost while fishing when Kestane Karası hits. In the beginning of the novel, a young man, Sami, from Erzincan arrives in Burgaz after the Erzincan earthquake in 1939. As a person who never had any experience of the sea or fishing, he gets fascinated to see the fish that Stelyo caught and displayed in front of kahve (coffee shop). Sami starts yelling in front of the fish “alive, alive… fresh these fish” and attracted people to come by, have a look and buy them. Having helped him in this way, Sami walks away without asking for money. Stelyo Reis likes Sami’s attitude and employs him to help him fishing and selling fish. They build a father/son like relationship. Sami calls Stelyo Reis’ wife Despina “Mama” (mother in Rumca). Despina sees Sami as her son, cooks for him and washes his clothes. Despina behaves equally to Elpida her daughter and Sami. Sami and Elpida have feelings of love for each other, but they do not reveal it to each other.

One day in September (1949), Stelyo does not come back from fishing. It is the time of Kestane Karası. The whole island tries to find Stelyo in the sea. Stelyo’s friends Topal (crippled) Ismail, Arnavut (Albanian) Muzaffer, Naylon (nylon) Mehmet Ali, Șilep (ocean carrier) Hasan, Mülkiyeli (political science graduate) Muvakkar, Lüfer (name of a fish) Mehmet and Zangoç (verger) Todori, all gather in Sabri’s kahve to make a plan. Topal, Zangoç, Sami and Muvakkar go on the sea to search for Stelyo. The others take care of Despina and Elpida. The islanders bring Despina and Elpida to kahve to keep company with them while they are waiting. Topal, Zangoç, Sami and Muvakkar search for Stelyo in the storm for days and days and come back to Burgaz with no good news.

After Stelyo’s loss, Topal, Zangoç and Muvakkar want to help Despina and Elpida and secretly they gather money from the islanders. However, they know that Despina would not accept the money, so they make a plan. They tell Despina that they will sell Stelyo Reis’ old boat and with the money they get, they can buy a new boat so that Sami can go fishing, earn money and take care of Despina and Elpida. After they gather the money, they tell Despina that two people from Istanbul wanted to buy Stelyo’s boat. They take Stelyo’s boat away and with the money gathered, they get a new boat for Despina, Sami and Elpida.

Elpida talks about her feelings towards Sami to Despina and Despina supports their marriage. Elpida breaks the news to Sami about Despina’s approval. Sami becomes worried, because he knows that the Rum community will object this. Elpida offers to convert to Islam but Sami does not want this and they are trying to find out how they can get married without converting. In the meantime, Muvakkar and Zangoç also feel the love between Elpida and Sami; they want them to get married. However, there were several stories in the novel (as well as in narratives told to me during my fieldwork) about disproving the intermarriage between Rums and Muslims. A Rum lady committed suicide after she fell in love with a Muslim, because the Rum community was against their marriage. Muvakkar and Zangoç do not want this to happen to Elpida and Sami. And something happens … A fire breaks out in the church located at the far north of the island. Sami is the courageous one who saves the priest, Papaz Andon, from the church. Sami then becomes a hero. Muvakkar and Zangoç take this opportunity to tell the priest that Elpida and Sami want to get married and the priest approves this. During the Christmas celebration to which all the islanders are invited, Papaz Andon announces Elpida and Sami’s engagement.

A few weeks later, Sami goes for fishing and does not come back for three days. During these three days, Burgaz islanders express their suspicion towards Sami. Aktel writes that even though Sami had lived in Burgaz for two years, he had not yet become a Burgaz islander. The islanders gossiped that he escaped and that people should not have trusted him. At the end of three days, Sami turns back with three orkinos and the rumours come to an end. The islanders look for a nick name for Sami. When you are given a nickname by the islanders, you become an islander, like Topal, Șilep and Naylon. After Sami had caught orkinos and proved that he was a proper fisherman, they called him Banker (like a banker) which they thought that with the money he will earn from fishing he might have a good life.

Sansar (marten) Nuri is not liked by the islanders because he tries to fish using dynamite and he steals people’s lobsters and goods. Like Yuakim, a Rum fisherman, who lost his arm while putting dynamite to a fish nest (where fish live), Sansar also loses his arm. The islanders say that if you go against the sea and nature, sooner or later you will get punished. Sansar had killed a man in his village in the Black Sea region and escaped to Burgaz to survive. The islanders heard the rumour of the blood feud, but they are not sure whether it was true or not until the day two men came to Burgaz to look for Sansar. Even though the islanders do not like Sansar, they still protect him, lie to these two men and send them away. Furthermore, Sansar also harasses Elpida and he gets very angry to hear about Sami getting engaged to Elpida. On Elpida’s and Sami’s wedding day in July at Paradiso Gazino, Sansar comes in with a gun and points it at Sami, Sami jumps on him and Sansar shoots somewhere else but the bullet hits Despina’s leg. Sansar is arrested, and the islanders take Despina to the hospital in Istanbul.

Then a miracle happens. Muvakkar and Sami see Stelyo at the hospital. They cannot believe that Stelyo might be alive and approach the doctor, who tells them that that man was found at the shore and brought to the hospital in Istanbul in September, almost a year ago. Since that time, he was under shock, lost his memory and was not able to talk. When the doctor takes Stelyo to Despina’s room, Stelyo’s memories come back: he remembers. Sami and Muvakkar take Stelyo and Despina back to Burgaz. The islanders celebrate Stelyo’s arrival back to Burgaz in kahve. The novel, however, does not have a happy ending. Stelyo realises that he is not as good a fisherman as he had been before. On a day when Kestane Karası hits the sea, he gets on his boat and leaves ….

When I read Kestane Karası in the beginning of my fieldwork, I felt distant to the life in Burgaz, and did not understand why the islanders were so fond of the novel. This feeling of not being emotionally driven by the novel made me feel like a stranger. For a non-Burgazlı, it is a beautifully written novel about fishing and living on one of the Princes’ Islands where the islanders live together, form deep friendships and cooperate at hard times. However, when I read the book again at the end of my PhD thesis, I felt a feeling of warmth. It all made sense to me.

It was a book written for the Burgaz islanders. I could not have understood what it means for a Rum and a Muslim to get married and feel for Sami and Elpida’s concerns, if I had not listened to Manos’ and Ajda’s love story (Chap. 7). Topal, Zangoç, Naylon and Șilep would have stayed as characters in a novel if I had not listened to Orhan’s memories (Chap. 5). I would not have sympathised with how Sami felt in order to be accepted by Burgaz islanders, if I had not felt frustrated to meet with the islanders, trying hard to be approved by Burgaz islanders during my fieldwork. After having lived in Burgaz for 14 months, listening to the memories of the islanders, strolling in the streets, sitting in cafes and restaurants, gone to churches, talking for hours and hours, writing and thinking about Burgaz for more than ten years, I have realised that the adanın tipleri that Orhan was talking about, the love story between Ajda and Manos, the fun at the gazinos, the fish I ate, the trees I passed by, the kahve where I sat and watched the islanders play backgammon, the sea in which I swam, were all in Kestane Karası.

Kestane Karası is about the representation of Burgaz for Burgaz islanders. It is not about multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism or coexistence of how different ethnic and religious groups live together; it is a book about conviviality, about individuals making the life as it is in Burgaz. The book reflects on the social and cultural values of what it is to be a Burgaz islander. It shows the discouragement of the Rum community for intermarriages, yet it also shows that individuals can negotiate these community boundaries. It gives the message that anyone, regardless of where they come from, can become a Burgaz islander; however, one has to do a lot to become one. It is not enough to spend years. One has to become a part of the island’s conviviality and internalise the values of being a Burgaz islander. Sami learnt how to fish, caught orkinos, went out in the storm to search for Stelyo, and saved a man from a fire. Only then was he considered a Burgaz islander. Burgaz is not a land of utopia. Even though, Sami was a part of the conviviality, and saved the priest from the fire, he still faced the suspicion from the islanders. The islanders gossip and do not trust and one always has to keep proving oneself. Greedy people who harm nature are excluded, like Yuakim and Sansar, who get “punished” when the dynamite explodes in their hands, while they want to fish more and more.

My understanding of conviviality in Burgaz was similar to Basso’s embodied practice and sense of place where the islanders’ “relationships to geographical place are most richly lived and surely felt” (Basso 1996, 54). As Basso (1996, 55) points out, people’s relationships embedded in place “cannot be known in advanced.” This was why, Kestane Karası made sense to me during and after my ethnographic encounters in Burgaz with the islanders. My fieldwork revealed that people from different backgrounds form relations based on common interests, lifestyles, tastes, and also in order to fight for a common cause (Duru 2013). While the lens of coexistence/toleration searches for cohesion and conflict based on ethnic and religious differences; my take on conviviality explains what people have in common, their shared ways of living and acts of solidarity, and also describes cohesion and conflict, inclusions and exclusions based on tastes, lifestyles, gender, class and ideology. The islanders’ conceptualisation of their diversity challenged Taylor’s (1992) and Kymlicka’s (1995) approaches to recognition of differences as a basis to secure equality and rights, and Joppke and Luke’s (1999) description of society in the form of mosaic. As stated by the islanders, the diversity in Burgaz was not only about the identity of different groups. People’s ethnicity and religion were recognised, valued and appreciated, but bonding, conviviality, intimacy and solidarity between individuals, and their collective sense of belonging in Burgaz were equally important. Similar to Valluvan (2016, 218), the islanders were able “to invoke difference, whilst avoiding communitarian, groupist precepts.” Some Burgaz islanders described their diversity as “ebru,” by challenging a “mosaic” approach to cultures, which assumes that ethno-religious communities are bounded. This also coincides with Durak’s (2006) and Altınay’s (2006) suggestion to use the ebru metaphor instead of mosaic, for anthropologists to criticise essentialist approaches in studying nationalisms, identity and multiculturalism. Hence, my understanding of conviviality builds on Burgaz islanders’ use of ebru as a metaphor to represent their living together and their diversity.

When I interviewed Engin Aktel in 2009 about his novels, I asked him:

Deniz::

In Kestane Karası, you describe the life in Burgaz in 1940s and 1950s. In your second novel, Son Eylül [Last September], you focus on a specific event, the 6–7 September events. Why?

Aktel::

After I retired—I was a journalist—I wanted to write novels about Burgaz. I wanted to narrate how we used to live because life in Burgaz is different today. 6–7 September events were horrible. Istanbul and the other Princes’ Islands got destroyed. We had to protect our island. There were only 10 policemen in Burgaz and it was not enough to protect the whole island so the islanders protected the harbours, Indos, the cemetery, the town centre, Kalpazankaya bay and beaches. We managed not to let the attackers set foot in Burgaz. The issues in Cyprus were a pretext for the 6–7 September events and the target was the Rums. The Rums did not lessen in number right after the 6–7 September events, however it was the beginning of an end. As things got worse, the Rums left in big numbers in 1964–68, and in 1974–78.

Deniz::

So do you mean that the island life changed because the Rums left?

Aktel::

In a way, yes. We used to be çokkültürlü [multicultural]. When the Rums left, we lost our çeșitlilik [diversity].

Deniz::

What do you mean by çokkültürlü?

Aktel::

Çokkültürlülük is köklü [rooted] diversity. Multicultural societies kök salıyorlar [to root], keep the roots of their different cultures and transmit these differences to different groups in the society and to further generations. For example, the Rum culture, the Jewish culture is in me and you can find the continuation of the Rum culture in people in Burgaz. For instance, Muslims or Jews who grew up with the Rums, learnt Rumca while playing with each other as kids, they know Rum religious days and traditions. Burgaz is more multicultural than Büyükada. Büyükada is kozmopolit [cosmopolitan] but Burgaz isn’t.

Deniz::

What do you mean by saying that Burgaz is more multicultural than Büyükada and not cosmopolitan?

Aktel::

Burgaz is not cosmopolitan, because in cosmopolitan societies communities do not leave their impact or transmit their cultures to other groups and to further generations. For example, new migrants, French, Germans and Austrians do not root themselves and integrate their cultures to the society. Cosmopolitan people and communities are distant, more superficial, and temporary, not bonded and are in less contact with each other. Both Burgaz and Büyükada are both very diverse, but people in Burgaz are kaynașmıș [blended, commingled, mixed].

When we were talking, Aktel emphasised the continuity of relationships between Burgaz islanders, who left, and those, who stayed in Burgaz. He said: “Just yesterday, I phoned an old friend from Burgaz, who now lives in Athens. We celebrated our 50th anniversary of friendship. Let me tell you, two years ago, Burgazlılar organised a reunion in Athens. 400 Burgazlı turned up. There was no space in the room, not enough chairs. I gave a speech, signed my novels. Now my novels are being translated into Greek and they will be published.”

Aktel has a complex and ambiguous view about whether Burgaz is still multicultural today. On the one hand, he says that Burgaz used to be multicultural; on the other hand, he says that Burgaz is more multicultural than Büyükada today. His contradiction shows that he acknowledges the departure of the people, mainly Rums from Burgaz. He still associates multiculturality with the millet system, stating that diversity lessened in Burgaz when the Rums, people from the Rum millet left. However, he uses the dominant discourse of multiculturalism based on the millet system to criticise the homogenisation process in Turkey. This is one of the reasons why he wrote one novel about the 6–7 September events, which created discomfort in lives of the non-Muslims.

On the other hand, he also points out that multiculturality is not only about how many people left Burgaz. He draws attention to the fact that multiculturality is about the internalisation and embodiment of different cultures in the self and in the society and that this internalisation cannot be taken away from individuals and societies. The Rum culture is not something exclusive to Rums. It lives in Burgaz islanders and today, the Rum culture continues in Burgaz not only by the Rums who stayed but by the people who embodied it. Burgaz culture lives in the Rums who now live in Athens. Aktel’s perception of intangible heritage echoes that of Alivizatou (2012, 9), in the ways in which “that it is living and taking shape through embodied skills and performance.” In his view of multiculturality, communities are integrated with each other and keep intimate relations. In Burgaz, there are intimate relations between individuals, who, then have a strong sense of solidarity and belonging in Burgaz. The diversity in Burgaz includes and appreciates not only the minorities of the millet system, where the non-Muslims—Jews, Rums and Armenians—are recognised but also the non-recognised groups such as the Kurds and the Alevis. The characters in Kestane Karası show the diversity within millets. Sami, like Nuri, Mustafa and many Zaza, Kurdish Alevis from Erzincan also become a Burgazlı through the embodiment of diverse cultures which forms the social life in Burgaz. Throughout the book, I use the double meaning of the term “community” (see Baumann 1996): one refers to an ethno-religious group and their reified identities, including both recognised (such as the Rum community, coming from the millet system) and non-recognised minorities (such as the Alevi community); and the second one refers to the island community, where the islanders stress their collective Burgaz identity and fight for the survival of the island community.

Aktel’s perception of diversity challenges multiculturalism as a political project, as depicted in Taylor’s (1992), Honneth’s (2003) and Kymlicka’s (1995) works, who put emphasis on the cultural differences and identity of groups. However, according to Aktel, multiculturality is not about the identity of different groups, it is behaviours, shared ways of living together and communal life. A person is recognised as Burgazlı because of being a part of the conviviality in Burgaz. In line with (Örs 2018, 179), who criticises when Rums are depicted “as a vase or a decorative item” in representing the colours of a multicultural rainbow, Kestane Karası is not about the Rums or the minorities who appear as symbolic characters, objects or representatives of a multicultural past. As I explore in the next chapters, Orhan, Ajda and Nuri give specific examples from their daily life, moments and anecdotes that they had with their Rum friends. Through their narratives, they make their Rum friends come back to life. Orhan was angry, because his Rum friends left Burgaz. The nostalgia of Burgaz islanders is not an empty and a symbolic one like “a vase or a decorative item.” It is about the continuation of internalised and embodied traditions and Burgaz culture, of which Rum culture forms one part. It is about the people in Burgaz, all belonging to different backgrounds, contributing to the diversity of Burgaz with their accents, swear words, jokes, their fatness, disability, drunkenness, kind-heartedness, tricks and gossip. Burgaz islanders’ enthusiasm in preparing the reunion on 24 August 2012, their visits to their friends in Greece and the memoire like novels written by Aktel (2005, 2008) and Berberyan (2010) are ways of keeping connections among Burgaz islanders. In August 2012 reunion in Burgaz, some of Burgaz islanders who left 40–50 years ago returned to Burgaz for the first time since their departure. The story of this reunion is told by Uzunoğlu (2013), in her documentary, Antigoni, Our Small Island, Our Life, which I will come back in the following chapters of the book.

Overview of the Book

Chapter 2 gives the historical, geographical, political and socio-economic context of the island and sets out the demographic changes. The chapter documents the Turkification and homogenisation policies during the nation building of Modern Turkey in the ways in which recognised (Rum, Jewish and Armenian) and unrecognised minorities (Kurds and Alevis) were subject to in Turkey and their impact on the changing social landscape of Burgaz. Then, it introduces the reader to the island life, its nature, weather, seasonal population fluctuation and division of labour on the island. I also set out my ethnographic methodology and narrate my entry to the field as an anthropologist.

In Chap. 3, I explore the ways in which the islanders represented/articulated their pluralism by the emic terms, metaphors/allegories they used when we talked about the diversity of the island. Building on media anthropology, media ethnography and cultural studies (see Pertierra 2018; Barker 2012; Lewis 2008; Tufte 2000; Schrøder et al. 2003), I analyse the representation of diversity and conviviality in Burgaz islanders’ media productions, conducting expert interviews (Bruun 2016) with the authors of novels and producers of the documentary, and exploring the islanders’ reflections on these productions. I then put these emic perceptions in dialogue with etic concepts of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. The diversity of emic terms and concepts give a complex picture of conviviality and hence challenge the literature on multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism and the ways in which the islanders reproduce and challenge the dominant discourse of pluralism that comes from the Ottoman millet system.

Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 demonstrate the ways in which conviviality takes place and the mechanisms that sustain it. Chapter 4 explores the negotiation of class differences and its impact on conviviality, by paying attention to the sharing of space. Building on Massey’s (2005) “throwntogetherness” and Lefèbvre’s (1991) social use of space and the social division of labour, I explore spatial negotiations, inclusions and exclusions that are drawn by class, ideology, gender, age and socio-economic differences. Chapter 5 illustrates conviviality as the embodiment of diversity through different senses, sociable sociality and shared ways of living. In Chap. 6, I investigate the ways in which the islanders perform pluralism both as sociable sociality and also as doing labour of peace, in the ways in which they control tensions and manage conflicts. Chapter 7 sheds light on the strength of conviviality in Burgaz and explores the dynamics between conviviality, toleration and intolerance by exploring the ways in which Burgaz islanders remember the homogenising Turkification policies (e.g. 1964 expulsion of the Rums with Greek citizenship) and crisis events (1955 pogrom) that impacted their lives. Conviviality in Burgaz acts as a mechanism of resilience and solidarity against public and state violence. At times of crisis, when an individual or the whole island is in danger, the islanders protect each other and collectively show resistance. The islanders use digital and non-digital media to express their memories of conviviality, in critique of Turkish homogenisation policies, to bring back their friends, who had to leave the island. Their memories of the resistance to the pogrom, and different acts of solidarity form a shared rhetoric that gives strength to the continuity of conviviality in Burgaz.

Chapter 8 explores the impact of politics of recognition on conviviality by focusing on two non-recognised groups: The Alevis and the Kurds, in the ways in which they perceived the AKP’s democratisation packages and articulated whether or what kind of recognition they wanted. The politics of recognition reinforced a discourse of coexistence where the non-recognised Alevis felt the need to stress their “difference,” separate their syncretic religious practices into “Sunni and Alevi components.” While Alevis were vocal in discussing politics of recognition by organising panels and memorials, the Kurdish Burgazlı were rather silent.

Chapter 9 is the conclusion. It summarises the main arguments of the book, its contribution and suggestion to studies on diversity and migration, and peace and conflict.