Testing the Strength of Conviviality: Love, Intermarriage and Solidarity in Times of Crisis

This chapter sheds light on the strength of conviviality in Burgaz and explores the dynamics between conviviality, toleration and intolerance by exploring the ways in which Burgaz islanders remember the homogenising Turkification policies (e.g. 1964 expulsion of the Rums with Greek citizenship) and crisis events (1955 pogrom) that impacted their lives. In this chapter, I compare and contrast the memories of the 1955 pogrom and the homogenisation process in documentaries and research, with the memories articulated in Burgaz (in locally produced documentaries, novels and memoires and interviews with the islanders). In Burgaz, the riots were articulated as memories of conviviality, because the islanders engaged in an act of solidarity and collective resistance against the riots. The islanders used digital and non-digital media to express their memories of conviviality and solidarity in critique of Turkish homogenisation policies, with the aim of reuniting and bringing back the non-Muslim Burgaz islanders, who had to leave the island. In the national framework, the riots were recalled as memories of intolerance because, the non-Muslim minorities’ ethnic and religious identities were attacked. While some studies (Nowicka, Fantasy of Conviviality: Banalities of Multicultural Settings and What We Do (Not) Notice When We Look at Them. In Conviviality at the Crossroads: The Poetics and Politics of Everyday Encounters, ed. Oscar Hemer, Maja Povrzanović Frykman, and Per-Markku Ristilammi, 15–42. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) explore conviviality as acts of courtesy and individual interactions, this chapter argues that conviviality in Burgaz is a mechanism of resilience and solidarity against public and state violence. At times of crisis, when an individual or the whole island is in danger, the islanders protect each other and collectively show resistance. Memories of the resistance to the pogrom, and different acts of solidarity form a shared rhetoric that gives strength to the continuity of conviviality in Burgaz.