Then Ilhami told me a story, that his mother told him of a woman at the time of the Balkan Wars in 1912. "She was from our town," he said. "Thats it, Radoviş." "She had to flee. Her husband was killed. She had twin daughters. She had to carry them. She was heading for Salonika. But she could not carry both of them. So she left one daughter by a Christian village and went on. She told the ther daughter to look for her sister some day. "How will I know her?" the daughter asked. "She will look like you", the mother said. Much later the sister came back to Radoviş. She used to come to our house on market days and look out the window at the Christian women who came from the nearby villages. By then she was in her fifties. Then one day she saw her. She had her come into the house and explained what had happened. The other woman did not say anything. Probably she was married with children. She did not want to know she was really a Turk. She just left."
From: Urban Muslim Migrants in Istanbul: Identity and Trauma Among Balkan Immigrants, Frances Trix
