December 27, 1998
‘We arrived at Giannis Minoglou’s house. The whole family was there to welcome us. Giannis, his wife Stella, their daughters, Vasileia, Angela, and Nikoleta with her husband, their grandchildren, Stella and Andreas, and Nikoleta’s newborn baby, so young that it had not even been baptised yet. We found them all waiting for us in the living room.
Along with the trousseau, I had also brought a large photograph of Honaz. I showed them where Minoglou’s orchard was and his house in the old Greek quarter. I then untied the bundle I had used to carry the trousseau in. I laid the pieces on the table one by one. We all sat around the table.
Stella picked up a piece embroidered with roses. “It’s like the people we’ve lost are back here with us!” There were tears in her eyes… She could no longer speak… Silence stretched over the trousseau spread on the table… Then words started pouring out, one by one, from the bottom of her heart: “What happened was evil… We used to live together, side by side. And then they divided the Greeks from the Turks…”
Giannis finished his wife’s thought: “The people were not to blame. It was the governments that turned them into enemies. Our people had built a life over there, they had everything in order. It was all shattered, destroyed, people were killed…” I added, “Let’s hope no more people are killed, no more families are ruined.”
We sat at the table. We ate and talked and through talking, we travelled together to Minoglou’s orchard in Honaz. It was as if we could see Sofia dunk my father in the water, as if we ourselves were wandering through the cherry orchards…
It was late and eventually, we had to leave. As I was leaving, I told them, “Come to Honaz any time you want. Winter or summer, our house will always be open for you. I may be leaving, but I’ve left half my heart here, with you.”
“Yes, but you’ve taken all of mine”, Giannis said and hugged me.
Up in the sky, the sun was smiling down on us…’
Excerpt from Kemal Yalcin’s A dowry left behind. The people of the exchange, Livanis Publications, Athens 2000, p. 429-430.
It was the beginning of the 1960s when Kemal Yalcin’s father told him the story of the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922 for the first time and talked to him about the way their family had experienced these events. It was also the first time Kemal Yalcin had ever heard the story of their neighbours, the Minoglou family. The father was arrested and sent to the forced labour battalions, while the mother and the daughters made it to Greece. Before they left, they entrusted their neighbours with two sacks of trousseau and a silk, striped duvet for safekeeping.
After the Turkish coup of September 1980, Kemal Yalcin, now a professor, was forced to become a refugee himself. He found himself in Germany and only managed to reunite with his parents twelve years later. He asked his father to tell him the story of the Minoglou family again and it was his father who encouraged him to write about it and to look for the family in Greece in order to deliver the trousseau which was still in a chest in the Yalcin home back in Honaz. By March 1998, when Kemal Yalcin’s historical novel A dowry left behind. The people of the exchange was released in Turkey, his father, Ramazan Yalcin, was dead. At the end of the year, Yalcin received the Turkish state prize for literature and a few days later, on December 27, 1998, he was in Volos to deliver the trousseau of Eleni and Sofia Minoglou to Giannis Minoglou and his family. Seventy-six years later, the girls’ dowry was returned to their living descendants, fulfilling the promise made by the Yalcin family to their neighbours. Ramazan Yalcin used to say, ‘A dowry left behind should never be given away. A trousseau laden with sighs of grief cannot bring happiness to the girl who receives it.’ Ramazan never forgot his childhood friend Safie, as he called Sofia Minoglou.
