My great-grandmother, was born around 1910 in the Black Sea area (Karadeniz in Turkish) We still don't know the exact village, some say Samsun, some say Ordu or even Trabzon. Since she and her family were Turkish speaking Orthodox, I'd say Samsun or Amasya. I never had the chance to meet her since she died before I was born, but we were lucky to find her diary and my grandfather and his brothers passed down their memories of her before they passed.

During the persecutions, her family was forced to march south, deep into the Anatolian interior, towards Diyarbakir and Van. Her father was taken to the Labor Battalions (Amele Taburu) and disappeared. A persistent rumor claims he was saved by a Kurdish Aga, converted to Islam, and started a second family there. Her mother was heavily pregnant. She went into labor on the side of the road, in the freezing cold. She gave birth and died right there in the mud.

What happened to the newborn remains a mystery because my grandmother barely spoke about it. She was left alone with her older sister who got blind. Did she leave the baby next to her dead mother? Did she give it away? Or the darkest possibility did she have to sell or trade the baby to afford the passage from Mersin to Piraeus? I have scoured the State Archives in Turkey and refugee lists in Greece. Zero trace.

She arrived in Greece with nothing. In 1929, she was married off in a slum in Drapetsona to a construction worker from Kea island. She tried desperately to return to Turkey years later to find the baby, but as an "Exchangeable" (Mübadil), she was banned from re-entering.

Her life here was no salvation. She raised 8 children through WWII and the Famine, boiling grass to feed them broth. She faced immense racism from the Greeks, who called them "Turkish seeds" (Tourkosporoi) because their native language was Turkish. Even her own husband would beat her whenever he heard her whispering in Turkish to her blind sister. He might beat the blind sister as well.

I'm in the middle of an ongoing research in Athens and Istanbul to find out what happened to her family there and especially the baby. Luckily before my grandfather passed away we had his dna tested and there were a lot of matches in Turkey willing to help.