Hacker News Reader

Comment by planetis | Hacker News Reader

After spending the last year reading about constant warmongering and provocations against my country, with military units on combat alert even on holidays, I only have to say democracy should be reinstated in Turkey and I hope the circumstances can not detriment the friendship and common heritage of Turkish and Greek people.

View on HN

And also someone should care about the Syrian refugees, these people are being used as a pawn to make demands and their rights are violated.

I appreciate you saying that. I am from the Balkans but from neither of these two countries and I was wondering whether you would say most of the people around you share your view. It is heartwarming to see humanist messages like yours, but I have the impression that much bigger part of the Balkans expresses more jingoistic nationalistic and xenophobic views.

Balkans are a war torn region, I honestly don't share some of my compatriots, idiotic opinions about naming other countries. Although they haven't lived though let's say Sarajevo in the 90s, I hope we all realize, that war isn't the solution to disputes. To answer your question, I try to surround my self with educated people, not dogmatic morons.

I understand your sentiment, but, the flip side is that a strong military is a good safeguard for peace. I have this... Hard to formulate opinion that you should be prepared to prevail in violence but at the same time avoid it as much as possible.

Si vis pacem, para bellum

In times of peace, prepare for war.

Not quite.

It means 'If you want peace, prepare for war.'

> common heritage of Turkish and Greek people.

What common heritage are you speaking of?

Edit: Who knew such benign question would trigger so many. I guess foreigners have a different understanding of what heritage means. Heritage doesn't mean being conquered and/or exchanging words, food, building, etc. Heritage implies "descent". Just because you eat sushi doesn't mean you and a japanese person have a common heritage. Just because native american buildings like the hogan are in the US doesn't mean we share the same common heritage as native americans.

https://study.com/academy/lesson/native-american-houses-fact...

We specifically say they are native american homes, not "american" homes because even though the natives were conquered, their heritage is different from ours.

They lived in close proximity for a good part of a millennium. Do you think they haven't influenced each other?

Maybe so but they are entirely different countries currently in the things that matter.

Different countries ... with a common heritage.

Greeks are Christians, Turks are Muslims. For starters.

That is both a difference and a similarity. Both are way closer to each other than any two random religions on average.

That's a bit of a tautology because the population exchange was done on the basis of religion, not language. There were plenty of Greek speaking muslims and Turkish speaking orthodox christians before 1915.

Many parts of Turkey and N Cyprus still speak Greek in secret

Maybe during history lessons you preferred a good beauty sleep instead of paying attention to the class :)

If you don't see a lot of overlap between Greek and Turkish culture ... not sure what to say.

Over a million "Greeks" were deported to Greece in the 1920s, despite many speaking only Turkish and many "Turks" were sent back the other way. Not to mention that most of those inhabiting Turkey today - and identifying as Turks - have an awful lot of non-Turkish ancestry. It's not only Greek of course (plenty of Armenian, Kurdish, Arab, Albanian, Circassian, Bulgarian, etc), but Greeks and Greek culture has had a massive imprint on modern Turkey - and Turks have also had an impact on modern Greek culture.

Of course neither side is particularly happy to admit it, but it's very much there.

> entirely different countries currently in the things that matter.

I don't know, there seems to be quite some common ground when it comes to food and drink, for example. That's part (and the result) of some shared culture, I'd say. Isn't it nice to realize that your neighbors might be people just like you are, who like to take their coffee in quite a similar way?

Perhaps you don't realize that the heart of ancient Greece was really in what we now call modern-day turkey

> They lived in close proximity for a good part of a millennium.

And? That doesn't imply common heritage.

> Do you think they haven't influenced each other?

That doesn't imply common heritage.

Also if you talking about the ottoman empire. isn't the greek position that the ottoman empire was bad for them and hence why they sought independence?

Or are you saying that greece should rejoin the ottoman empire and embrace the "common heritage"?

>That doesn't imply common heritage.

spot the american.

Guilty as charged.

So you think australia and indonesia have a common heritage because they are neighbors, but the US and australia don't because we live an ocean away?

It's so funny, I was genuinely interested in this topic as my understanding of greece and turkey was one of conqueror and conquered, not "common heritage". I thought maybe there was history/ties/etc I was missing, but apparently it's just some politically driven people spewing nonsense.

Perhaps foreigners just don't know what "common heritage" means.

Spot the foreigner.

Edit: As I noted in my other comment, to say greeks and turks share the same heritage is like saying americans and native americans share the same heritage. American heritage stems from britain, but no sane person would claim that native american heritage comes from britain. I don't think any sane person would associate the ottoman empire with greeks. They would associate it with the turks because it was a turkish empire. I bet most greeks see their heritage as ancient greece.

The American educational system has really failed this one

The conqueror and conquered relationship has been about the 40% of aforementioned millennium.

The rest they have been allies, mercenaries, enemies,trading partners, etc...

It's far more nuanced than a single relationship type.

That solves it then, you are Greek-American never went to a Greek school. Well Greek history books are available freely online/

They share food, words, customs and attitudes. That's the common heritage.

Joining Ottoman empire is just a non sequitur.

No. It's just pointing out the obvious. When you say greek heritage, I assume ancient greece, I don't assume ottoman empire. When you say turkish heritage, I think central asian steppes and ottoman empire. Last I checked, the ottoman empire was a turkish empire, not a greek one.

Perhaps it's just the language difference. For example, nobody here would say the native americans and non-native americans have the same heritage. We've been living with natives for hundreds of years, but certainly american heritage stems from britain while native american heritage doesn't. You'd be mocked ( a la Elizabeth Warren ) or canceled if you claimed american native heritage when you are not native american.

Seems like a lot of people are upset for no reason. But when politics and identity are involved, that's just what happens.

> And? That doesn't imply common heritage.

Western Turkey was inhabited by large Greek populations and colonies for a very long time, which was one of the reasons behind the Persian War. During the Hellenistic era, the Seleucid Empire, a Hellenistic kingdom, ruled most of modern-day Turkey. And then from the Roman era to 1453, the area remained largely Greek-speaking, with Constantinople (aka Istanbul) the center of Greco-Roman civilization, with the citizens thereof actually called "Greeks" by many peoples.

Of course the Arabic and Turkic invasions introduced new peoples and changed things up quite a bit, but there's definitely common heritage between many people in Turkey and the Greeks, to the extent that many 'Turks' citizenship-wise are ethnic Greeks and other ethnic groups that spoke Greek and had a long participation in the Greek and Roman kingdoms.

Turks are in large part the descendants of Greeks that were forcefully converted maybe?

Turkish speaking Christians and Greek speaking Muslims moving after the population exchange to boot

Constantinople/Byzantium was in practice a Greek state. In their conquest of it, the Ottomans assimilated both many peoples as well as much of the culture and practice of the area, with Sultan Mehmed II going as far as calling himself 'Ceasar.'

Perhaps Istanbul shows it more than other places. The city was originally Greek, then Roman, Byzantine and more recently Turkish for the last 600 years. But the city itself is a myriad of cultures likely due to its economic importance. Wikipedia covers the history pretty well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul

You are the same people ousting Greek refugees during the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922 (considering them Turkish because they also spoke Turkish) (known locally as the Asia Minor disaster) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia_Minor_disaster For anyone interested I recommend this excellent movie https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0378897/

Similiar food, music, habits, look-alikes.

You'll probably have some puritanical argument to disregard this but throwing it out here anyways: the genetic pool of modern day Turkey is substantially more Greek and Iranian than Asian.

I was very lucky enough to travel through Turkey. The South Western coast of Turkey, from Antalya to Bodrum, is some of the most beautiful Mediterranean sea coasts in the world. Seriously, take a look at pictures from Fethiye or Kas for example.

I'm not expert on the definition of the word "heritage" but my own impression is these countries share more than just a land border and adjacency to the Aegean sea. The people look similar, dress similar, eat extremely similar food, have similar drinks (raki vs. ouzo), live in similar houses. For much of the time I was in that area of Turkey I remember thinking it felt more like Greece than Greece did!

This should be no surprise (although it was to me). They have been neighbours for millennia and their cultures have mixed and intertwined with each other longer than the USA has existed. Much of the land between them has switched hands back-and-forth between various empires dating back to Alexander the Great (and beyond).

Comparatively, the native peoples of the Americas were culturally isolated for that same length of time until ~500 years ago when Europeans with a completely distinct culture showed up in ships for the first sustained contacts. There is almost no reasonable comparison to be made between the two circumstances.

>Heritage implies "descent"

You might have noticed that Turks hardly look Central Asian.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com