Sound, photographs, and text for installation at Yiali Tzami, Chania, Crete
Jason Francisco / View of the Old Venetian Harbor, Chania, Crete, 2023. Yiali Tzami, the Mosque of the Sea, is at center.
Top: Bahaettin Rahmi Bediz (1875-1951) / Old Venetian Harbor of Chania (postcard), early 20th century, Courtesy Mert Rüstem.
Bottom: Photographer unknown / Cretan Muslims in Chania, early 20th century. Courtesy Manolis Manousakas.
Jason Francisco / In the home of Ayla Eşmeler, Ayvalik, Turkey, 2023
Jason Francisco / View of the harbor at Çeşmealti, Turkey, near Izmir, 2023.
The year 2023 marks the centenary of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange, an event that forever changed the social and cultural character of Crete. This exhibition contemplates the legacy of the Population Exchange, the spiritual bonds that Cretan Muslims today have to their ancestral home, and the inner meanings of remembrance and reconciliation.
This exhibition was designed specifically for the Yiali Tzami (“Mosque of the Sea”) on Chania’s Old Venetian Harbor. Built in 1649, Yiali Tzami was the first religious building constructed in Crete by the Ottomans. Today it is a ruin of what it once was—its minaret has been cut down, its gardens uprooted, its tombs demolished after the Population Exchange—but it remains the most important example of the city’s Muslim patrimony.
The exhibition begins with portraits and video messages from people of Cretan descent living in western Turkey. They are descendants of Cretans who were expelled with the Population Exchange, or who left earlier. All have deep and complex attachments to Crete. The exhibition continues in the prayer hall under the dome of the former mosque. The room is visually empty—an emptiness that holds many things. The space is crisscrossed by electromagnetic sound beams, or what could be called invisible sonic triplines, which you will break as you move through the space. Doing so will cause a voice to be heard for as long as you physically interrupt the beam. It is a voice of praise: calling people forward and inward, proclaiming what is most precious in life, reminding us of what is finally holy.
Jason Francisco, Chania 2023
Jason Francisco / Yunus Çengel, Davutlar, Turkey, 2023
Jason Francisco / Sinem Çengel, Davutlar, Turkey, 2023
Jason Francisco / Muezzin Mustafa Dursun Gezer, Kuşadası, Turkey, 2023
Jason Francisco / Mavro Hüseyin, Davutlar, Turkey, 2023
Jsaon Francisco / Hüseyin Özdoğan, Çeşmealtı, Turkey, 2023
Jason Francisco / Ruhsar Karakuş Ayışığı, Izmir, Turkey, 2023
Jason Francisco / Adnan Kavur, Izmir, Turkey, 2023
The Giritli
Communities of Muslims of Cretan descent live in many places in the eastern Mediterranean, including Turkey and Syria (in the town of al-Hamidiyah). The largest Cretan Muslim communities live in the region around Izmir, where they call themselves Giritli, after the Turkish name for Crete, “Girit.” For more than a century, the Giritli have maintained a remarkably durable and fertile attachment to Crete. Cretan foodways, customs, cultural references, and the Cretan dialect of the Greek language form important parts of their lifeworld in Turkey. Today, some twenty Cretan cultural associations have arisen in the Izmir area alone and dozens of social media groups, supporting all manner of learning formal and informal, publications, art exhibitions, concerts, lectures, and a major Cretan festival each summer in Kuşadası, not to mention trips to Crete itself.
And this is not surprising. For nearly three centuries prior to the 1923 Greek-Turkish Population Exchange, Cretan Muslims formed an integral part of the island’s multi-religious and inter-communal society, along with Cretan Orthodox Christians, an ancient Cretan Jewish community, and other smaller communities. A hundred years before the Population Exchange, about half of Crete’s population followed Islam, the vast majority of whom were Greek-speaking ethnic Cretans who had converted to Islam in substantial numbers after the Ottoman conquest of Crete in the middle of the 17th century. By the time of the Population Exchange, many Cretan families could trace their Muslim ancestors back as many as ten generations. The Cretan Muslims were—are—a Muslim people of Greek descent, deeply rooted in Cretan identity, language, and culture.
To answer a question about the Giritli you will meet in this project: their connectedness to Crete is not, in my experience, a form of manufactured nostalgia, or latter-day revanchism. Rather I would put it this way: the hearts of the Giritli form a parallel Crete, a place greater than the parochial hostilities between Greeks and Turks, Christians and Muslims. When the Giritli call Crete home, they mean a spiritual home, broken by history, whose shards they carried over the sea and still carry. Their deep attachment is an exilic belonging. It is belonging mixed with longing, belonging that separation keeps renewing, and belonging infused with aspiration—that expulsion, displacement, and bitter stories should not be given the final word.
And I should say: I am not a Cretan, or a Greek, or a Turk, or a Christian, or a Muslim. I am a Jew from California, from a family of refugees. My ancestors fled anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire a hundred years ago (those who did not flee were mostly murdered in the Holocaust), and I have spent the last quarter-century creating artistic works in response to the cultures of remembering and forgetting that have arisen in the worlds of my ancestors. This exhibition reflects what is important to me as a humanist and a Jew. It reflects what the Greek language calls φιλοξενία, “philoxenia”—a word usually translated into English as “hospitality,” but whose literal meaning is “the love of those who are different." It is the very opposite of xenophobia, the fear of strangers.
Jason Francisco / Bayram Balik, Ayvalik, Turkey, 2023
Jason Francisco / Eşref Jale, Ayvalik, Turkey, 2023
Jason Francisco / Ayla Eşmeler, Ayvalik, Turkey, 2023
Jason Francisco / Mine Kösemen, Izmir, Turkey, 2023
Jason Francisco / Şebnem Kösemen, Izmir, Turkey, 2023
Historical Considerations
With the end of the Greek-Turkish war of 1919-1922, Greece and Turkey agreed on measures that resulted in homogeneous nation states, in keeping with contemporaneous nationalist agendas. A compulsory exchange of populations was the main instrument of national homogenization. Orthodox Christians in newly created Turkey, with the exception of Istanbul and the islands of Gökçeada (Imbros) and Bozcaada (Tenedos), were forcibly moved to Greece, and Muslims in Greece were forcibly moved to Turkey, with the exception of those in Western Thrace.
In Crete, the Population Exchange was in fact the last stage of at least a quarter century of significant demographic shifts. By the end of the nineteenth century, decades of political turbulence in the countryside had led many Muslims to flee to the cities (and Christian city dwellers to move from them), so that by 1881, Chania’s population was over two-thirds Cretan Muslim, with certain areas of the Old City such as Splantzia almost completely so. Spiraling inter-communal violence, in which both communities suffered greatly, increasingly led Cretan Muslims after 1897-1898 to leave the island altogether: prior to 1923, some 70,000 Cretan Muslims felt compelled to emigrate, to which another 30,000 were forcibly expelled in the Exchange itself.
The Population Exchange was negotiated under the auspices of the League of Nations at the 1922-1923 Lausanne Conference, and represented the first time in history that the international community mandated the expulsion and resettlement of large populations. Numbers, of course, do not tell the story, but indicate its scale: by the end of the Exchange, some 1.2 million Greek Orthodox people had been pushed west, and some 400,000 Muslims had been sent east. This is not to say that some 1.6 million people moved in 1923 itself—migrations had already been underway for years. The agreement at Lausanne rendered de jure what was already de facto, compelling partition where war had not already initiated it. In this sense, the 1923 Population Exchange was, among other things, a legal mechanism for the state seizure of property, supposedly to compensate migrants for their losses. In fact, serious problems ensued concerning property rights and transfers, and there was nothing like a one-to-one exchange of property to match the “exchange” of people.
Let me say plainly what seems obviously true: the Population Exchange was an act of profound social violence. It brutalized Muslims as it did Christians, and any fair reckoning with it must account for the effects on both sides. With a century’s hindsight, it is both harder and easier to recognize its traumatic effects. On the one hand, we can see clearly the abrogation of human dignity that the Population Exchange unleashed, and its crudeness—the savagery of spirit that led states to regard populations as cattle whose ownership could be transferred arbitrarily. On the other hand, a new normality has settled in, and it is not easy to imagine what the Population Exchange must have made Chania feel like at the time—the shock caused by the deportation of most of its residents, leaving a city all but unrecognizable to itself. It is likewise difficult to measure the psychological effects on the remaining populations on both sides, which handed future generations two bad choices: to explain the cruelty and inhumanity visited on those who were pushed out—fellow citizens and neighbors—or not to explain it.
From today’s perspective, the ethnic cleansing of the Population Exchange presents the same kind of humanitarian crisis that the Partition of India was in 1947, and the Yugoslav wars were in the 1990s. Indeed, the 1923 Greek-Turkish Population Exchange was, in historical perspective, the dry run for those disasters. The year 1923 gives us an ur-example of the social pathology characteristic of puritanical nationalisms, which see social homogeneity as a desirable response to the challenges of inter-communal societies.
From today’s perspective, the ethnic cleansing of the Population Exchange presents the same kind of humanitarian crisis that the Partition of India was in 1947, and the Yugoslav wars were in the 1990s. Indeed, the 1923 Greek-Turkish Population Exchange was, in historical perspective, the dry run for those disasters. The year 1923 gives us an ur-example of the social pathology characteristic of puritanical nationalisms, which see social homogeneity as a desirable response to the challenges of inter-communal societies.
Jason Francisco / Hüseyin Öztürk, Ayvalik, Turkey 2023
Jason Francisco / Hakan Karakova, Ayvalik, Turkey, 2023
Jason Francisco / Neval Akkaya Tuntaş, Urla, Turkey, 2023
Jason Francisco / İbrahim Akkaya, Urla, Turkey, 2023
Jason Francisco / Mert Rüstem, Izmir, Turkey, 2023
Jason Francisco / Mustafa Duğral, Izmir, Turkey, 2023
Jason Francisco / Neyyir Berktay, Çeşmealtı, Turkey, 2023
The Ezan—the Muslim call to prayer—as sung by Mustafa Dursun Gezer in Kuşadası, Turkey, 2023. Gezer serves one of several large communities of Muslims of Cretan descent in western Turkey. This is the recording I made for the experimental sound installation at the Yiali Tzami in Chania, Crete.
The Exhibition
All artists work with various interlocutors sitting on their shoulders. I designed this project with diverse audiences in mind: the locals of Chania, the Cretans of Turkey, non-Cretan Greeks, international visitors to Chania, those familiar with the Population Exchange, and those completely unfamiliar. In joining a poetic approach to historical remembrance with social research, my goal is not didactic. Rather it is experiential: to engage the body, the mind, the heart, and the spirit, all of these in an open exploration of the topic.
The portraits of and video messages from the Giritli that begin the exhibition were made in western Turkey in 2023—in Izmir, Ayvalik, Kuşadası, Davutlar, Urla, and other places. None of the Giritli I came to know were born in Crete or have lived here. In detailed interviews, they shared with me the difficult stories of their families’ histories, with sincerity and vulnerability. We spoke about what Cretan identity has meant to them, and how it has changed in the second, third, and fourth generations inheriting the trauma of the Population Exchange. At the end of each interview, I asked each person to record a short video message specifically for the people of Chania today: these messages are to you, directly from the minds and hearts of Cretans across the sea. Several of them are in the Cretan dialect of Greek, which the Giritli continue to use and to cherish.
The main space of the exhibition is an encounter with the Islamic call to public prayer, known in Turkish as the Ezan (Adhan in Arabic). The Ezan proclaims the greatness of God, the singularity of God, and the unity of God, and is sung here by Mustafa Dursun Gezer, a renowned muezzin from Kuşadası. Listening deeply to the spiritual challenge of the Ezan, I have laced the sacred space of the former mosque with paradoxes. In the empty room are hidden beams, each full of the message of God’s oneness, waiting to be broken. When the hidden beams remain unbroken, God’s oneness is silent. When the hidden beams are broken, God’s oneness is sounded. You yourself are the severing cause—your body breaks the silence that proclaims the oneness, and the character of that proclamation depends entirely on you. If you break the beam momentarily, the call to prayer will be fragmented. If you stand in the place of the severance and stay there, you will sustain the call. If you stay there long enough, the call will be revealed in full. The beams are not synchronized, so there is an infinity of variations of silence, fragment, cacophony, harmony, and partial and full discernment. Yiali Tzami is a defunct mosque, but through you, the call to prayer will be heard here for the first time in a century. You yourself are the instrument of the return.
Finally, on the back wall, on the far side of the sanctuary, are photographs contemplating the waters of the Old Venetian Harbor of Chania—the very waters that carried the Cretan Muslims from their homes, to distant shores and new generations formed in apartness. For me, the harbor’s endless play of light and color and watermass induces feelings of wonder and incomprehension. In these photographs, I have received the liquid variables as lyric valuables, or so I can hope.
Jason Francisco / This photograph and the six above: the Old Venetian Harbor, Chania, looking east from my perch at Pension Theresa.
Postscript:
This exhibition was to have taken place in August 2023 at Chania’s Yiali Tzami, arguably Crete’s most important Ottoman building and one of the most significant sites of Ottoman heritage in Greece. The texts and images on this webpage were to have been part of the exhibition, supporting the sound installation, which was the main element of the work. A long story of bureaucratic incompetence and connivance from the municipality of Chania, plus the unexpected breakdown of fellowship among the small group at the Etz Hayyim synagogue working on the project’s realization, were enough to doom it. A reflection on the dynamics of the project's non-viability can be found here.
Maybe it is all for the better: just as life is sometimes better as art, art is sometimes better as idea. Born dead in the world of people and things, this project remains a vision only—perhaps (if I am lucky) a beautiful and enlivening one.
Jason Francisco
Chania, July 2023
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Acknowledgments
Work on this exhibition was the collective effort of many people. I extend to all of them my gratitude.
In Greece:
Thora-Marit Bilz, Christos Chatziioannidis, Konstantinos Fischer, Anne Germanacos, Flora Gürth, Esra Makara, Vasiliki Yiakoumaki, and Anja Zuckmantel. Additional thanks to Manolis Manousakas.
In Turkey:
Nükhet Adıyeke, Nuri Adıyeke, İbrahim Akkaya, Ruhsar Karakuş Ayışığı, Bayram Balik, Neyyir Berktay, Sinem Çengel, Yunus Çengel, Mustafa Duğral, Ayla Eşmeler, Sait Fafal, Muezzin Mustafa Dursun Gezer, Mavro Hüseyin, Eşref Jale, Adnan Kavur, Mine Kösemen, Şebnem Kösemen, Hüseyin Özdoğan, Hüseyin Öztürk, Mert Rüstem.
Probably Bahaettin Rahmi Bediz (1875-1951) / Family portrait, Chania (La Canée), Crete, early 20th century. Courtesy Mert Rüstem.
Probably Bahaettin Rahmi Bediz (1875-1951) / Old Venetian Harbor of Chania, early 20th century, Courtesy Manolis Manousakas.
Jason Francisco / Yiali Tzami in its current remnant form, Chania, Crete, 2023