Veiling Religious Diversity: A Note on Greek Women’s Marriages to Turkish Political Refugees
Veiling Religious Diversity: A Note on Greek Women’s Marriages to Turkish Political Refugees

Summary/Abstract: This article deals with the ethnically-informed elements of nationhood as these are resignified in the context of Greek-Turkish families in Athens. My contention is that Greek nationalists’ concern with ethnic traits of identity – religion, culture, memory, language, customs (Smith, 1992: 437) – as opposed to ‘deep-seated’ ones, such as race or civic and political rights (Stolcke, 1995; Brunnbauer, 2001: 56), entails a plethora of incongruities permeating marital arrangements. Greek marriage to individuals of diverse religious and cultural origin is usually discredited (Petronoti, 1995; Petronoti and Papagaroufali, 2006), but the very criteria which define spouse eligibility can provide heterogeneous brides and grooms with the potential to create a family. This paradox, however, is only initially bewildering and must be understood with respect to ethnicisation processes; that is, the legitimisation of conflict and structural change in accordance with divergence or similarity in the cultural properties of Self and Other (Smith, 1992: 437; Trubeta, 2003: 98). I will show that, in contemporary Athens, ‘mixed’ couples ascertain a certain degree of tolerance by rephrasing or reevaluating their cultural capital and past or present motives and qualifications. The question I want to address is not whether individual and family attitudes toward historical Greek-Turkish relations remain ambivalent or if hegemonic notions of spouse selection are challenged by oral testimonies (Hirschon, 2000). Of greater analytical value are the controversial ways in which memory and difference are perceived and remodelled in the domestic sphere. Dominguez (1994: 334) puts it that difference is not imbued with ‘lasting.. social, political, cultural.. significance’: the principle of distinction goes side-by-side with continuity in people’s transactions. This perspective is central in comprehending how Greek men and women affirm or revise prevailing meanings of diversity in concrete settings, in conjunction with the changing role of religion as a marker of nationhood. The main issues in which I am interested are: Why do Greeks marry Turks? How do these couples interrogate and redefine their diverse cultural capital? How do they face counter-acting demands and tension? Do these marriages fuel or blur hegemonic visions of Greekness and Turkishness? What is the impact of religious difference on the upbringing of children? And how do spouses’ ethnic traits relate to asymmetries in their political power?

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