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#greek genocide #greek history #Thracian genocide #Pontic Genocide #Cappadocia #Smyrna #Greeks of Minor Asia

Statue of poet Sappho (2nd century CE, Smyrna) at the Istanbul Archeological Museum.

#sappho #ancient art #ancient greece #sculpture #istanbul #archeology #beauty #art #art history #smyrna #my photography

Amazing documentation of history in a single photo I just found

Smyrna (modern day Izmir, Turkey), Ottoman Empire 1908. Photo colourized by Christos Kaplanis.

In this photo one can see the multi-cultural character of the Ottoman Empire and the significant presence of the Greek element.

Flags are raised over the fascades of the shops, indicating the ethnicity of the shop owner. This is hardly a celebration of diversity though - it was almost certainly a marking, so the customers knew which ethnicities they were choosing to do business with. The street is full of Turkish and Greek flags but there are also a couple green-white-red ones with a cross in the center. This was the Italian flag at the time.

An interesting detail is that we see two styles of the Greek flag present; the striped one, which is the current flag of the state but at the time it was the Greek navy flag and the Greek flag of foreign service. There is also the style of the single white cross on blue background; this was the flag of the Kingdom of Greece at the time.

Another interesting piece of information comes from the variety in dress code. The men with a red fez are almost certainly Turks, or at least Muslims. The man in a suit and the girl could be Greeks, because the Greeks were quite possibly the first sizeable community of Anatolia to embrace western clothing.

My eyes spotted two more cool details: on the first wall on the left it has a label reading "LABORATOIRES ARGYROPOULOS". So it's some scientific / chemical / medical laboratory owned by a Greek as indicated by the very standard surname. The nature of the business is described in French, probably inviting all kinds of customers in a neutral, cosmopolitan language. I have just finished reading a largely autobiographical book (Number 31328 by the Anatolian Greek Elias Venezis, first published in 1924) and his character and a Turkish doctor do not speak each other's language so they communicate in broken French. This was a surprise to me because I expected that all Greeks would need to speak at least some basic Turkish, but apparently this was not necessarily the case.

On the other side, on the right, we can barely see a label reading "PHAR- A. YANN-¨. So this is a drugstore, a pharmacy, I assume written as "pharmacie" in French and by the beginning of the surname as "YANN-", clearly hinting at the common Greek name Yannis, it was also owned by a Greek pharmacist.

#history #old photos #smyrna #izmir #ottoman empire #ottoman history #greek history