ABSTRACT
I had never been to Western Thrace prior to my eldwork. I knew of course where it was; far at the north-eastern end of Greece. Only much later I learned that in Western Thrace resides a Turco-Muslim minority group with around 100,000 members. At the end of the last Greco-Turkish war, the Muslims from Western Thrace were excluded from the forced exchange of populations which was specied by the Convention of Lausanne in 1923 as a means of ethnic cleansing. The aim of the Convention was to enhance the creation of homogeneous nation-states; Orthodox Greeks at the one side of the Aegean Sea and Muslim Turks at the other. The Western Thrace minority group remained as a living trace of Greece’s Ottoman past. Traces from this past have been muted in the public space because they only create an anomaly to the national rhetoric of the glorious national continuum from Ancient Greece to Orthodox Byzantine till the Modern Greek nation.
