My mother’s family comes from Aksari in Asia Minor – Akhisar in Turkish, ancient Thyateira. For many, many years, I did not deal with this origin at all. Only when I ended up in Istanbul, in 2009-2012, out of curiosity, I began to want to see the places from which my ancestors badly left.

My curiosity quickly turned into deep disappointment: the city of 120,000 inhabitants, located 100 km northeast of Smyrna, was once one of the most important tobacco and raisin trading centers in western Asia Minor (with its squares and plane trees, fountains (she and her flowers, “the land that bears fruit twice a year” as my great-grandmother used to say) became an anarchic heap of clumsily built tenements and noisy shops, Turkish flags, battered old cars, badly built mosques and flaky, kneeling and empty Greek houses, by the grace of Allah.Everywhere they asked: no one had any idea that the Romans once lived here.

We got into the car for Izmir in deathly silence. Suddenly, after 50 kilometers, on the right side of the road, they saw a sign: “Focha”. I spent the summer of my childhood near the Palaia Fokaia Attica, in Lagonisi; this sign suddenly seemed to me like a breath of fresh air in the midst of despair and disappointment. Without thinking, I turned the steering wheel, not knowing where I was going, until I reached the hills above the city and an unexpectedly beautiful view opened up in front of me.

Eski Foca (Old Phocaea) was everything that Aksari was not: a small town bathed in the light of the Aegean, with cobblestones and hundreds of restored old houses that still have Greek inscriptions. With a tidy old school promenade gracefully hugging the sea at Mikros and Megalo Gialos, Kavala Café is just a step away from the waves that sweetly crash on the beach. The rest of what we saw (waiters calling us komşu – neighbors – and treating us with smiles and Greek songs) I will not mention: wherever you step on the coast of Asia Minor, this is what you will see and hear, Phocaea is no exception.

With a completely different mood, we again went to Izmir. Then I could not yet know how this small deviation would change my whole life. A series of successive coincidences led me to begin obsessively studying the past of a city that, although it had lived near me all my life, I did not know about it: the “Peace” of Venice fell into my hands that Easter, and I realized how intense was the presence of the Phocians in the places of my childhood; a few months later, an excellent historical documentary by Anis Sklavos and Stelios Tatakis “Events in Phocaea, 1914” revealed to me that the Phocians – and hundreds of thousands of other Asia Minor – twice became refugees: once during the Catastrophe of 22 years and once earlier, in 1914, during the first persecution of Asia Minor.

My native city, Aksari, pushed me away and threw me into the arms of Phocaea with a spontaneous turn of the wheel.

Then I read an album with photographs of the main character of the documentary, the French engineer Felix Charteau, an eyewitness to the first persecutions. I got in touch with the person who lovingly prepared the album, Haris Gyakumis. Then with Anis and Stelios. And when it came time to announce my PhD thesis at Bournemouth University in 2016, I apparently announced the first persecution of Phocaea.

Since then I have met dozens of Phocians, Greeks and Turks. People who agreed to speak on camera about their memories and the traumatic and bittersweet memories of their parents and grandparents; scientists who obsessively, lovingly searched and found details and evidence in the Greek, Turkish and Ottoman archives; the architects who rebuilt the houses of the Greeks in Eski Foca; former and current mayors, here and there, who are moved to tears every time they talk about their common origin. The Phocaean Turks are the only ones I know who call Asia Minor “Yunanli” instead of “Room”: Greeks instead of Romans.

I loved this city with its cobblestones and houses, its bougainvilleas and sweet sunset, its gentle people and its emotional refugees. My life is now inextricably linked with her story. And that was only because my hometown, Aksari, pushed me away and threw me, by a spontaneous turn of the wheel, into the arms of Phocaea once and for all.

* Mrs. Crystalli Gliniadaki is a poetess and translator.