It is festival day and Dino Haimandos is savoring the sight of Gokceada’s streets filled with Greek Orthodox icons for a parade led by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, who was born on the Turkish island.Now 77, Haimandos returns every summer to the village where he grew up on this island off Turkey’s Aegean coastline, which he reluctantly left in 1964 following clashes between Greek and Turkish communities over Cyprus.Every Aug. 15, hundreds return for the Feast of the Virgin Mary on Gokceada, led by the island’s most famous son, Bartholomew I, the 86-year-old spiritual head of the world’s 260 million Orthodox Christians.
People perform a traditional Greek dance near Tepekoy Square during the Feast of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary on Gokceada Island, Turkey, on Saturday last week.
Many fear the culture of the island’s Greek population risks disappearing.Under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, signed a year after the end of a three-year Greek-Turkish war, Athens and the nascent Turkish nation did a sweeping population exchange. However, the Greek-speaking Christian population of Istanbul, along with Imbros and Tenedos, were exempted from the swap, as well as the Turkish-speaking minority in the Thrace region.
