The possibility of philia: discourse between Greeks and Turks in Farewell Anatolia and Birds Without Wings

In the wake of World War I, as the modern republic of Turkey was being established, a series of population exchanges occurred. The Lausanne Agreement laid out the terms for a population exchange between Greece and Turkey that occurred in 1923. Up until this point, ethnic Greek and Turkish communities, primarily distinguished from one another by their religious identities, lived side-by-side throughout the Mediterranean and Anatolian regions of modern-day Greece and Turkey. Literature about the time period of the population exchange reveals peaceful coexistence between different communities; and scholarly work on the literature has highlighted themes such as trauma, nostalgia, national identity, and the effects of war on neighborly relations. This thesis seeks to add to the existing literature by exploring the concepts of friendship and dialogue as represented in novels about the population exchange. By investigating the historical time period through sociological, anthropological, and historical sources, the thesis proposes that novels such as Louis de Bernières' Birds Without Wings and Dido Sotiriou's Farewell Anatolia depict intercommunal friendship between Greeks and Turks prior to the population exchanges. The central question of the thesis is how two people groups can live together within their respective collective and individual cultural identities. The thesis will examine the conditions of these friendships and investigate literary and philosophical theories of friendship and dialogue, suggesting that dialogue and threshold encounter with an other creates a possibility for friendship, as seen in these novels.