Dear Julia
(2020)
“I am out. Believe me this will be much better. Didn’t you get tired of being partially me and partially you for more than 60 years? My departure doesn’t mean you’ll be alone. From now on, you are one. One mind, one soul. At least, that’s my wish.”
“Dear Julia” revolves around an at-first-mysterious letter written from Hülya to Julia. The photographic images follows the life in an Aegean island; plants, landscape, women, ruins and the sea… The images start to make sense once the premise is revealed. Hülya and Julia were the same person, just as Gökçeada and Imroz were the same island. As many places in Turkey have another name than their “official” Turkish names, many minorities living in Turkey has a cover Turkish name in addition to their “real” names.
Imroz once populated with Greek populationIn “Dear Julia,” loneliness of an island that lost its inhabitants together with its name and the metaphorical dissociative identity of a person - one representing many - who needs her “cover” name converges on the human landscape of a once multicultural geography.
With the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 the island became part of Turkey; but it guaranteed a special autonomous administrative status for Imbros and Tenedos to accommodate the Greeks, and excluded them from the population exchange that took place between Greece and Turkey, due to their presence there as a majority. Massive scale persecution against the local Greek element started in 1961, as part of the Eritme Programmi operation that aimed at the elimination of Greek education and the enforcement of economic, psychological pressure and violence. Under these conditions the Turkish government approved the appropriation of the 90% of the cultivated areas of the island and the settlement of additional 6,000 ethnic Turks from mainland Turkey.[43][44] The Turkish Government, also, closed the Greek schools on the island and classified it as "supervised zone", which meant that expatriates could not visit the island and their homes without special admission.[44] Greeks on the island were also targeted by the construction of an open prison on the island that included inmates convicted of rape and murder, who were then allowed to roam freely on the island and harass locals.[8][45] Some are said to have committed the same crimes before the prison was closed down in 1992.[8] Farming land was expropriated for the prison.[46] Furthermore, with the 1964 Law on Land Expropriation (No 6830) the farm property of the Greeks on the island was taken away from their owners. Additional population settlements from Anatolia occurred in 1973, 1984 and 2000. The state provided special credit opportunities and agricultural aid in kind to those who would decide to settle in the island.[49] New settlements were created and existing settlements were renamed with Turkish names.[8] The island itself was officially renamed to Gökçeada in 1970.The peak of this exodus was in 1974 during the Cyprus crisis.[50]
In 1991, Turkish authorities ended the military "forbidden zone" status on the island
The island became a metaphor for the dual identities that minorities in Turkey have been forced to obtain.
