[LINK] "Ports of call"

[rfmcdonald]

Grecophones in Libya? Al Majallah describes the descendants of post-Ottoman migrants from Crete to Cyrenaica.

Turn on the radio and Greek music will waft over the squat brick houses built by Italian colonizers in the 1920s in a bid to finally urbanize a Bedouin population of roamers and tie them down to the Cyrenaican coast’s fertile land.

“Star FM, the soundtrack of our lives,” a breathy announcer’s voice exhales in Greek from across the sea’s blue horizon.

Subconsciously, when these former nomads nod, it takes them 200 kilometers across the sea to Crete. It also takes them back to their past. For Jalal Bayram, a retired Libyan civil servant, the island over the horizon feels even closer: His family came from it.

“When my family arrived, the Arabs accepted us,” he told me one scorching March afternoon as we stood in the shade of his porch.

I had been touring the Appolonia archaeological site when a couple of locals asked me where I was from. They had never met a Greek but suddenly their faces lit up. “Go and see Jalal Bey,” they told me using the Ottoman honorific for older men. “He’s Kritli.”

Kritli, it turned out, was the term used for a very special tribe: a group of Cretan Muslims who arrived in Libya in the early 20 century when it was still part of the Ottoman Empire. It would be the last organized migration of people from the Greek mainland to Libya and it happened in the mid-nineteenth century as some 20 thousand Muslim Greeks fled the Greek War of Independence, the accompanying persecution of Muslims and the destruction of their holy places.

As Crete left the orbit of the Ottoman Empire and became part of the fledgling Greek state, they abandoned their mountain villages and fishing ports in a Great Exodus that lacked a convenient national narrative of loss and exile to adopt it.

The Ottoman Empire evacuated its own citizens to Muslim lands still under its control. Half were sent to the Syrian coastline where they built a new life for themselves. The village of Hammidiyeh still survives today and has been visited by several Greeks dumbfounded to find some of the older residents still speaking a fossilized Cretan dialect.

These people, the author notes, are victims of the nationbuilding in the former Ottoman Empire that defined ethnicity and nationality on confessional grounds, not linguistic ones.

For years, the Greek media has described the two Greek-speaking villages on the Muslim Mediterranean coastline—Sosa in Libya and Hamidiyyeh in Syria. The breathless reports relate with a latent pride how their older inhabitants still speak an archaic Cretan dialect. But what the reports don’t stress too strongly is that these people who were forced from their homes by the cruel processes of state formation are Muslims: For the Greek state to come into being, across-the-board homogenization had to be imposed to exorcise the amorphous, the ethnically diverse and the ambiguous. Indigenous Muslims need not apply.

“They call them Turkish Cretans but they’re not, they’re Greek Muslims,” said Kanakis Mandolios, president of the Greek community of Benghazi, the historic center of Libya’s Greek diaspora. “Either way, they’re headed towards extinction.”