The Greek premier has been making the rounds in Washington, trying to rally support for his austerity package, while back home his obstreperous compatriots are striking and rioting and raising merry hell. You wouldn’t have thought he’d have the time, but as he makes his way round the Beltway, the Greek premier has also been attending meetings to deal with a bizarre copyright dispute over the name of the country next door.Turkish bankers snigger politely at Mr. Papandreou’s complaint that Greece is being forced to pay a risk premium on its foreign borrowing, and that this is making it all the more difficult for the country to claw its way out of debt. This is, of course, the very phenomenon which Turkey faced for decades, and which the 2001 crisis forced it to address. However, the rest of the world finds it hard not to suppress a chortle at the long-standing dispute over who owns the rights to Alexander the Great’s legacy and more specifically whether by calling itself “Macedonia” the eponymous republic is not laying claim to northern Greece. What, after all, is in a name?
Quite a lot, it seems. Before Sweden gave such offense to the nomenclatural-challenged Turkish nation by recognizing 1915 as genocide, the Stockholm tabloid Aftonbladet provoked a diplomatic incident in 2002 with a map that referred to southeastern Turkey as Kurdistan. It wasn’t that long ago (well, 1991) that a newspaper published in İstanbul, Konstaniyye Haberleri, was banned by the governor for implying that the city was still part of Byzantium. In fact, Ottoman coins were minted with the word Konstaniyye on them, and it wasn’t until the Municipal Act of 1930 that İstanbul became a legal entity with a name it could officially call its own.
This side of the Balkans is not the only place that is nomenclaturally challenged. Whether you call that Irish bit of the United Kingdom, Ulster, Northern Ireland or the Six Counties says a lot about your political orientation. However, more often than not in Turkey names are changed not to lay claim to bits of territory but to Tipp-Ex out the past. The famous example is the Bayrampaşa neighborhood of İstanbul, or “holiday commander,” which is not a reference to a recess in the Ergenekon trial but a happy-go-lucky 17th century vizier who used to raise football-sized artichokes there. It was hastily instated after the district’s previous name, Sağmacılar, became synonymous with a cholera epidemic resulting from over-hasty development. The people of Tunceli in eastern Turkey are now lobbying to have their city’s name restored to Dersim, the site of a rebellion that was brutally repressed in 1937. Ayşe Karabat has written movingly in this paper of attempts to repaper great swathes of the country with twee, rustic names like “Great Pine Tree Village.” A third of the country’s villages, or 78,000 places with names that meant something to their inhabitants, were re-titled with names that meant nothing.
Changing a name of a place is no less dramatic than changing the name of a person. İstanbul balked at the idea of changing Ergenekon Street to Hrant Dink Street, after the editor who was murdered a few meters away -- a move from the perpetrator to the victim. Ankara was less reluctant to re-label Köroğlu Avenue to Uğur Mumcu, from an epic hero to a modern champion of truth in journalism. I was outraged when “Sunflower” Street in our neighborhood was changed to “Seed” Street for no better reason than the local municipality did not want two streets in the district having the same name. “Spring Flood” Street evoked a time when the there were open creeks running through people’s gardens which could overflow when winter was through. Suddenly, the neighbors found themselves living on a street with the name of a popular singer whom they may or may not have liked.
So one can only wish Mr. Papandreou well in his quest. The name some wag in Washington has come up with is Northern Macedonia -- a more acceptable compromise than “The Republic of Seed.”
