#the turkish quarter of salonica

[postcard-from-the-past]

Street view in the Turkish Quarter of Salonica, modern-day Thessaloniki, Greece

Greek vintage postcard

#street #day #historic #salonica #the turkish quarter of salonica #photo #briefkaart #vintage #quarter #modern #sepia #greek #thessaloniki #photography #carte postale #postcard #greece #postkarte #postal #tarjeta #ansichtskarte #view #old #turkish #ephemera #postkaart

[faintingheroine]

1) Salonica was a part of Ottoman Empire when Atatürk was born. It wasn’t a part of a different country.

2) Atatürk’s blond hair and blue eyes are irrelevant. No Turkish person in 100 percent Turkic. Atatürk isn’t less Turkish than a curly-haired dark-skinned person from Southern Turkey. Westerners don’t realize this, because to them people from both Adana and Turkmenistan are not-white, so they could just as well be the same.

3) Atatürk’s ethnicity isn’t some recent retcon. Atatürk was a Turkish Nationalist, would actually be considered an ultra-nationalist today. If there is a retcon he himself made it.

4) Balkan ancestry is quite common in Turkey and lines and categories are much more blurred than many Westerners realize. I recently learned that my aunt’s son, my cousin, who is 18 years old, has Macedonian ancestry on his father’s side. I have known him for 18 years and I have only recently learned this on the last New Year’s Eve dinner. Because it is not relevant. We memed for day or two (my cousin is dark but he is quite tall) and then it stopped being a topic of conversation, and I only remembered it while writing this post. Because it is not that important.

Really, Balkan ancestry is so normal in Turkey that probably a quarter to a third of the Turkish people wouldn’t be Turkish if you excluded people with Balkan ancestry from the pool. At that point being Turkish doesn’t even mean anything, especially when you consider that Anatolian Turks are hardly “racially pure” either. What’s next? “Ashkenazi Jewish people aren’t ethnically Jewish”?

4) There was a Turkish migration to Balkans. Yes, probably not as much as there was to Anatolia but there was. Like Filiz Ahmet who plays Nigar Kalfa is from Macedonia, are you going to convince me that she has no Turkic ancestry?

Do I know if Atatürk is Turkish? No, I don’t. My guess would be that he is of partial Turkish ancestry, probably mixed with Albanian.

But his blond hair and blue eyes are not as relevant as Westerners want them to be. They so want Turkey’s founder to have been a White Man and are so fixated on his blond hair and blue eyes. It is annoying.

(Also in my opinion Atatürk doesn’t look like a Westerner besides his hair and eye color. Like he isn’t Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ either. Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ looks like Thor. Atatürk looks like a Turkish man who happens to have blond hair and blue eyes).

#hair color #atatürk #mustafa kemal atatürk