The religion constituted a basic element of these populations’ identity that couldn’t be distinguished racially, according to the class or in professional terms from the Muslims, but only in religious terms. Thus, the collective experience and the sentimental background that united them in a community played a very important role and not the dogmatic theological attachment in any detail that was described in Bible or in the decisions of the Holy Sessions. However, the Church, beyond its symbolic dimensions, had also a material presence in the life of the residents. The priest of community practised a line of functions of administrative character, acting as the intellectual top of the community. Thus, the Orthodox Church carried out two roles: from the one side, it constituted the core of these populations’ collective identity and from the other side; it functioned as the institutional organizer and representative of this collective identity in all levels. It was the Orthodox Christian identity that firstly allowed in these populations to consider themselves as Greeks. The beginning of the First World War, the invasion of Russia in the regions of Ottoman Pont, the support that the Greeks provided in the Russians and the later efforts of the constitution of an independent state of Pont had negative consequences for the populations of the region. Generally, the region of Pont and, more specifically, its western side, became the theatre of exceptionally violent conflict between Muslim and Christian armed teams, with main victims civilians of all nationalities. The conclusion of the adventure of Minor Asia and the signing of Treaty of Lausanne put an end in the conflicts. Those who survived from the implementations, the deportations, the hardships and the war left from Pont, most times without being able to transfer almost nothing apart from their personal belongings. They left towards either to the Russian Caucasus or via Sampsounta by boat to Istanbul. There, the Pont’s inhabitants, after being stacked in thousands in settlements of refugees, lived the hunger and the cold; they survived from the contagious illnesses that killed thousands of their own people and, after a few months, they passed by boats in Greece. In any case, we can suppose that roughly the one fifth from them was supposed to have as its basic language the Turkish. Association des Etats Généraux des Etudiants de L’Europe
The Turkish-speaking Pont’s inhabitants were distributed in almost all the prefectures of Greek Macedonia and Western Thrace. There, they continued, in general lines, their rural life. They faced the problems that all the refugees went through: hunger, sordid conditions of hygiene, lack of roof, social alienation. The contact of refugees with the natives can be characterized as a traumatic cultural shock. The wider environment faced the refugees circumspectively and, sometimes, hostile, in individual and collective level, even touching the limits of racism. The disputes that resulted for economic questions, like that of the distribution of grounds, they deplored the population for a lot of years and made the issue of relation between natives and refugees thorny. The element that impended even more the relations between the Turkishspeaking Pont’s inhabitants and the remainder indigenous populations was mainly the language. Even if the official Greek government’s policy did not identify the Greek character with the language that the populations were speaking, the speech of Turkish language was considered as mark of not national “cleanliness” by the mass of Greek-speaking indigenous populations. Apart from the locals, it seemed that, quite often, the Greek-speaking Pont’s populations were also hostile or suspicious in front of the Turkish-speaking Pont’s inhabitants. The language functioned simultaneously as that symbolic border that it determined them as a separate team in the borders of the Greek national state. The strict inbreeding strengthened the isolation of these populations, contributing, thus, in the intensification of their different identity. We had to reach the decade 1950, so that an important part of Turkish-speaking Pont’s inhabitants learns to speak the Greek language. Those that initially learned it were the men, mainly through their military service in the army. Furthermore, an enormous effort was exerted for the learning of language via the school. Special attention was given in the linguistic Hellenisation of Turkish-speaking by various Venizelos’ supporters, who with various activities tried to find resources and a way to found schools in the villages of the Turkish-speaking people. A little time later, during the Metaksas’ dictatorship, it seems that efforts were made for obligatory study of all the Turkish-speaking people in nightly schools. Population Exchange
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