The Burden of Minority Names

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The Greek, Armenian and Jewish communities had been granted official minority status by the treaty of Lausanne in 1923 and were guaranteed the right to have their schools, associations, and to speak their language, yet the defensive nationalism that was prevalent at the time created exclusionary practices in daily life and in institutions.Members of non-Muslim minorities were exempt from the law but many felt pressured to Turkify their names or neutralize markers of their ethnic affiliation. Armenian families often discarded the –ian ending. It is likely that name change was more common in larger cities where interaction with the Muslim majority was more frequent and where the prospect of integration of children in schools and youth in military necessitated a surname that did not attract undue attention. Moreover, it was also more likely among families who had been displaced. Interview materials speak to the loss of security that many experienced in a political atmosphere that privileged ethnic Turkish and Muslim populations. Armenian and Jewish respondents invariably referred to the law designating professions to the Turkish population. The selected interviews, by no means comprehensive, describe the particular semiotic burden that a family name would carry. The small but significant selection of documents from the population offices in Istanbul reveal processes of negotiation between officials and members of the Greek and Armenian communities, as well as varying attitudes toward the minorities, ultimately pointing toward a lack of standardization that was widespread, but also to an uncertain relationship of the Turkish state to its non-Muslim minorities.