DOCUMENTARY REVIEW: THE OTHER TOWN

The Other Town is a documentary on how Greek and Turkish nationalist narratives
define ‘the other’. The enterprise was undertaken by a Greek-origin person born and raised
in Turkey. He interviewed various Greek and Turkish people, varying from elderly villagers to
primary school students. The Turkish villagers interviewed were for the most part raised with
the stories of how the ‘cavur’ soldiers came and burnt their homes during the war, and how
the ‘yerli gavurlar’ abandoned their native villages accompanying the ‘gavur’ soldiers. The
distinction ‘yerli’ is significant in that it points to the fact that these Turkish villagers can
distinguish between ‘Rum’ and ‘Yunan’ identities, while it is doubtful whether younger
generations such as primary school children are taught this distinction.

The scene where an old Turkish villager woman sings in Greek is a good example:
she had picked up the song from her local Greek neighbors in the village, but now she
remembers little of the song, and the neighbors have long emigrated. When asked whether
she would like to have those neighbors back in the village so she can listen to the song
again, she responds, ‘No, it is better this way.’ While she can reminisce positively to some
degree, she still positions the local Greeks at considerable distance from her own Turkish-
Muslim identity. Although the spatial distance between these Turkish and Greek
communities has been relatively little - they have shared the same village - the cultural
distance, as both sides perceive it, has been far greater. How was this distance constructed
in the first place? Were the local Greeks always perceived as foreign to some extent? To
what extent does religious differences have to do with these sentiments?

Can ‘history’ per se explain the popular hostile sentiments between Turks and
Greeks? Both yes and no: This documentary shows how ‘history,’ in its presented form, can
build seemingly insurmountable walls between communities: as in the statement that a
young woman makes during an interview, ‘Turks and Greeks can never really be friends, it is
a question of history.’ But the official historiography of the Greeks in the Ottoman Empire
through to the founding of the Republic is a faulted account insistently emphasizing conflict,
while disregarding the periods of harmonious co-existence and atomizing the two
communities. The official historiography in primary school textbooks is downright
anachronistic: it depicts a self-aware Turkish nation from the Göktürks through to the
Republic and the present day. No wonder why the school kid who was asked whether he
believed that the Ottoman Empire recruited Greek boys as Janissaries, responds that he
does not believe the Ottomans could have done such a thing, for they had always carried
‘the Turkish flag’ with honor. Taking the official historiography in school textbooks the aim of
which is to propagate the sense of enmity towards ‘the other,’ therefore, would be a mistake
and alternative readings of ‘history’ can yield more sober attitudes in both communities.