Batı Trakya'dan Balıkesir'e: Üç göçmen ailenin hikayesi

Abstract

From the beginning of the 20th century, most of the population in Western Thrace is composed of Greeks and Turks. In the 1950s, Turks in Western Thrace, who were exempted from the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, were feeling a social pressure on themselves. This pressure, the tense atmosphere, the cases of discrimination and the political discourses of the age, especially the Cyprus Dispute, led to the immigration of some Western Thrace Turks to Türkiye. In this study, the reasons and the consequences of this immigration, the life before immigration and the conditions of the period that might have affected it, the complete process of immigration and its aftermath were researched. 3 stories of immigration from Western Thrace to Balıkesir were examined and 3 distinct witnesses who immigrated in different time periods were interviewed during the research. The objective of this research, is to provide a voice to these three families, and while preventing their stories to get lost in the grand scheme of correlated events, is also to study the immigration in different contexts and to ensure the immigration is better understood with evaluations using different perspectives.