Identity Geopolitics: Nation, Faith and the Roma of Western Thrace

The house was in a sprawl of cinder-block shanties on the eastern edge of the town. Two Greek flags hung near the approach. Beyond them lay the Muslim cemetery. The women served coffee, accompanied by the usual jokes about whether to call it Greek or Turkish. The correct term, of course, depended on where you happened to be.

We were in the north-eastern tip of Greece, in the settlement of Alan Koyu in Western Thrace. The only region of Greece that shares a land border with Turkey, Western Thrace is also home to the country's only officially recognised minority.

The name by which this minority is known varies, like the coffee, according to where one happens to be. In Ankara, it is known as the "Turkish minority" of Greece, emphasising ties of language and ethnicity that date back to the Ottoman era. Athens rejects that term, saying that it implies a Turkish claim to the region. The Greek state refers instead to the "Muslim minority" of Western Thrace, adhering to the language of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne that completed the dissolution of the Ottoman empire.

As we waited in Alan Koyu, the talk turned from the pandemic to other ways of dying. The women said they had just lost one of their own, to cancer. He was 35 years old. When his aunt heard the news, her blood pressure shot up. They took her to a local hospital but the staff there ignored them. "And then they say we shout too much," our host's mother said.

Situated on the outskirts of Komotini, the regional capital of Western Thrace, Alan Koyu is a Roma settlement. Its 2,000-odd residents live in conditions typical of many Roma settlements all over Greece: in poverty, on the squalid periphery of an urban centre, with limited access to basic services such as healthcare, sanitation and...