But she mourns the close-knit community that they have lost. Her children attend a Greek school, as she once did. “The Turks came here only 1,000 years ago.”ĭespina has worked in the shop since 1994, when she was in her twenties. “We’ve been here for a longer time than Turkish people,” she exclaimed, to general amusement. “See! Not everyone would tell you the truth about this, but I’m not afraid of anything.”Īt a table upstairs from the Kozmaoglu shop, his daughter Despina was serving lunch to the extended clan. The rich Turks don’t mind these things,” Lazari told me, slapping his belly with glee when we met this summer. “They don’t mind drinking and eating pork. Today they do a roaring trade, though most of their customers are foreigners or secular Turks with a taste for pork. To compete with them, the Kozmaoglus have expanded their butcher’s shop into a charcuterie business. There are a number of delis and supermarkets across the city that sell pork. Happily for the Kozmaoglu family, the demographic decline has not dampened the Istanbullu’s appetite for their wares. Though official figures say that about 3,000 Rum still live in Istanbul and on the Aegean island of Gokceada, the true number is thought to be significantly lower - some say as few as a thousand, most of them elderly. Today, families continue to migrate to Greece, and even further afield. Widespread violence, targeted attacks and discrimination against minorities in the first half of the 20th century made way for a population exchange in 1923, when 1.3 million Greeks were forcibly displaced to Greece and 500,000 Muslims in Greece sent to Turkey as part of the Treaty of Lausanne.Ī pogrom in 1955 and mass deportations after fighting broke out in Cyprus between the Greek and Turkish populations nine years later have slashed their numbers further. More than a million more lived spread across the country.īut the collapse of the Ottoman empire after defeat in the First World War began a chain of events that devastated the Rum community. In 1914 there were more than 200,000 Greeks in Istanbul, just over a fifth of the city’s population. Though they were treated as second-class citizens, they had the right to worship and do business. They lived, quarrelled and thrived alongside Muslim Turks, Christian Armenians and Jews. The Rum, however, stayed - protected by their new Ottoman rulers. But in 1453, the Ottoman armies under Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror took Constantinople, and the Byzantine Empire was crushed. For centuries, the Byzantine Greeks flourished under emperors including Constantine, who named the city after himself, and Justinian, who built the rose-brick Hagia Sophia. They are part of the Rum community - cultural heirs of the Eastern Roman Empire and the glory of Christian Byzantium. For once, the Kozmaoglu family decided against pork and went for roast turkey with rice and a selection of mezzes. Last week they were particularly busy, as the Greeks in Istanbul celebrate Christmas Day on December 25, whereas many other Orthodox Christians wait until January 7. Now his son Makis, 39, and his brother Kozma run the shop, with nieces, nephews and cousins. Now there were only seven, most of them his family.įour months ago, the number grew still smaller when Lazari himself died. A hundred years ago, he said, there were 5,000 Greeks in this neighbourhood. The portly, moustachioed Anatolian Greek had seen good years and bad pass in this corner of Istanbul - where their closest neighbours were a petrol station and a lightly disguised gambling den. “When I was young, I used to get worn out saying hello to everyone I walked past on the street. I’m the oldest person here so no one can say anything to me.”Īs customers dropped by, he shook a few hands - greeting them in a mix of Turkish and Greek - and sat down to talk to me about the old days. “No one complains about us selling pork,” he said. The 75-year-old had little time for rest: his family - distinguished members of Istanbul’s tiny Greek community - ran the city’s last pork butcher’s shop, and they were always busy.Īlthough his Muslim neighbours don’t eat pork, Lazari claimed he had never faced any issues with them. As his niece sliced salami behind a pristine display counter, Lazari Kozmaoglu dashed about in the morning sunshine, arranging mortadella slices and barking orders, much as he had for the previous 50 years.
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