Crossing the borders in reality and in press: the case of the newspapers Yeni Adım and

Abstract

Contrary to what the title of this article may eventually lead to understand, this paper is mainly about the management of public opinion by the editors of two newspapers published in interwar Thrace, Yeni Adım and Yarın. More precisely, this paper focuses on their use of the news that spread by mid-October 1928 among the ‘non-exchangeable’ inhabitants in Greek Thrace, regarding the emigration of their fellows to Turkish Thrace and the reactions of the Turkish and Greek authorities to that small scale migration. The emigration of ‘non-exchangeables’ from Greek Thrace has already been considered as the main reaction of that people who had been exempted, in early 1923, from the compulsory exchange of Greek and Turkish populations, to state policies that aimed to settle ‘exchangeables’ in Thrace. While offering a historical account of the Greek demographic engineering in two Ottoman provinces which had formed a Bulgarian province between 1913-19, this paper describes how ‘non-exchangeables’ debated the emigration to Turkey, which has been curiously neglected as an issue of public debate by current scholarship on that minority. The paper also dwells on the transformation of the public sphere of ‘non-exchangeables’ following the establishment of a Turkish Consulate in Komotini and the spread of Turkish-language newspapers from Xanthi and Komotini. My focus then tries to identify the ways people tried to pass the Greek-Turkish border in autumn 1928, the ways the Turkish and Greek authorities tried to stop that ‘leak’ of ‘non-exchangeables’ and to reassign that status those who had tried to leave it, and, at last, the ways Yeni Adım and Yarın editorial teams spoke about these particular events in the name and place of their audiences, the ‘Western Thrace Turks’ and the ‘Muslims of Western Thrace’ respectively. Since this investigation rests on information and opinions exchanged through newspapers, the present paper necessarily addresses the need to move from the traditional approach of the ‘state minority policy’ towards questions of ‘government by consent’.