Athens Journal: Pursuing Happiness, Greeks And Turks Find One Another

ATHENS — A short decade ago, a blink in the centuries of bad blood between Greeks and Turks, there was no way a Turkish store could have opened at a fancy mall in Athens. So said Elena Kanellopoulou, 60, as she meandered through Athens first megamall, stopping a few steps from an upscale womens shop with a clock in the display window showing the time in Istanbul.

The Athens restaurant Tike is part of a chain of stores that began in Turkey. It has hired Turkish chefs and is popular among Greeks.

The clock is a subtle way of showing that the shop is owned by a Turkish chain, like the shoe store next door and two other shops in the new mall. It is perhaps a risky move, because Greeks defiantly still call the city Constantinople.

But the remarkable thing for Ms. Kanellopoulou, considering that her parents were driven from Turkey in 1922, is that buying from Turks is now unremarkable.

I shop, she said, and I have no problem with it.

All is definitely not forgiven, but a warmer climate between Greece and Turkey is showing up in the daily lives of Greeks. From pricey stores to growing tourism, from belly dancing to a Turkish television show popular here with its Romeo-and-Juliet theme played out by a Greek man and a Turkish woman, cultural barriers are eroding here. Such things are changing faster, perhaps, than the political differences that still divide the two nations.

What Greeks say they are learning in this glasnost of food, fashion and travel is that, for good and bad, much still unites the two countries — one at the edge of Europe, the other at the edge of Asia.

Both share a fascination for baklava and the stuffed leaves known as dolmades. And then there is kokoretsi (if you are Greek) or kokorec (if you are Turkish). Both nations claim this dish — lamb intestines, heart, liver and lungs or kidneys, or both.

The Turkish version is on the menu at Tike, an upscale chain restaurant popular in Turkey, and now doing well in Greece, too.

Turkish food is very close to our tradition, said Alexandros Louvaris, 37, a prominent Greek businessman who opened the restaurant in northern Athens two years ago with Turkish partners and 11 imported Turkish chefs and other employees. O.K., so we had the Turks here for 400 years. Some things stayed.

With memories still bitter about Ottoman rule — and offenses fresher over the population transfers after World War I and other unsettled issues like Cyprus — Mr. Louvaris said that reaction to his restaurant was not uniformly positive in the beginning.

Many people said to me, Shame on you, you brought the Turks, he recalled. I said, I cant help what happened 400 years ago. I am looking at the future. You have a problem with the Turks. Why didnt you care when the Germans fixed the airport?

But the restaurant is now packed every night, making Mr. Louvaris emblematic of a new mood here. He started doing business in Turkey in 2001. Last year he married an Iranian who grew up partly in Istanbul, and gossip magazines tagged it the wedding of the year there.

Indeed, the elites on both sides are at the edge of the cross-border trend. More rich Greeks are marrying in Istanbul, the symbolic seat of the Greek Orthodox Church, and more rich Turks vacation on Greek islands.

But the changes are broader. They began in many ways in 1999, when a pair of earthquakes — one in Turkey, one in Greece — spurred mutual rescue teams and sympathy.

The earthquake diplomacy was followed by a rise in tourism: 540,000 Greeks visited Turkey in 2005, up from 350,000 in 2001 (though the number dropped last year to 480,000, after several attacks in Turkey and worries about the Iraq war, tourism officials say).

The number of Turks coming to Greece also increased, though less so, because of visa requirements for visiting European Union countries and a high departure tax from Turkey. But the tax has been reduced, and Yannis Evangelou, president of the Hellenic Association of Travel and Tourist Agencies, said he expected a large rise this year in Turkish visitors here.

We in tourism always say, The past is the past, lets see to the future, he said. We say that tourism needs peace, but also creates peace.

In the meantime, amid a well-publicized friendship between Greeces and Turkeys prime ministers, trade between the nations has substantially picked up, from 500 million euros ($646 million) three years ago to 2.5 billion euros ($3.2 billion) in 2006, according to the Turkish Embassy here. And a cultural barrier was broken in 2005, when a Turkish television show, called Foreign Bridegroom in Turkey and Loves Frontiers here, attracted an average of 1.5 million viewers in Greece, a nation of 11 million.

The show tells the love story between Niko, an affluent Greek of Turkish origin, and Nazli, the Turkish daughter of a baklava maker. Now in its third season, the show is keeping Greeks glued to their televisions, watching the young couple, now married and with a son, Aegean, named after the mutually shared sea. The suspense is topical: Would Nazli have to convert to Christianity? Would their son be circumcised?

Mitra Fragaki, 35, said the show had had an enormous impact because we got to see how the Turks lived.

We saw that we are very similar, in how closely knit the families are, how close they are to their children.

Ms. Fragaki was shopping with a friend in the mall, near the Istanbul clock, which underscored how, despite the improvements in daily life in both countries, much remained to be done before relations were normal. We insist on calling it Constantinople, she said.

She also said that she had no problem shopping at Turkish stores and that she enjoyed a recent trip she took to Turkey. But she did not feel completely free from suspicious looks by the people there. The feeling was mutual, she said, if more muted than it might have been a dozen years ago.

We dont trust them yet, she said. There is some improvement in relations, its true. But we must try more — both of us.

Anthee Carassava contributed reporting.

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