Conviviality in Burgaz

Front matter

Conviviality in Burgaz

Living, Loving and Fighting on a Diverse Island of Istanbul

Deniz N. Duru pn

Contents

Introducing Conviviality: Ebru-Like Living in Burgaz A Diverse Island in a Homogenising Context

Exclusions of Conviviality: Negotiation of Space, Ideology, Class, Gender and Lifestyle Differences

Conviviality as Performance of Pluralism and Living with Difference: Sociable Sociality and Labour of Peace

Chapter 1

“Anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists should come here and see how people can live in friendship and harmony. It is an example to the whole world.” Dr. Robert Schild, Burgaz islander. (Hazar 2005)

This call for a social scientist to come and explore how people live together in Burgaz was uttered in the documentary Nearby Yet Far Away — the Isle of Burgaz (Hazar 2005). I heard it while watching the documentary at the open-air cinema of the Sports Club, during my pre-fieldwork trip to Burgazadası in the summer of 2008. In the documentary, Burgazadası is talked about and seen as the model of harmony and coexistence of a plural society. This island is home to Jews, Armenians, Rums! (Greek Orthodox minority in Turkey), Suryanis, Sunni Muslims, Catholics, Alevis and Kurds, who belong to a variety of different ethnic, class and religious backgrounds. While the Balkans and Turkey have long been pathologised as places of ethnic turmoil (Todorova 1997) and un-mixing of people (Hirschon 2003), peace there did not break down despite Turkification policies (Aktar 2021; Güven 2006; Zürcher 1993), pogroms in 1955, (see Güven 2006; Mills 2010; Kuyucu 2005), the worsening relations between Turkey and Greece over Cyprus, and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus (Ors 2019; Akgónül 2007; Güven 2006; Papadakis 2005; Bryant and Papadakis 2012; Akar and Demir 1994). How did, and how do Burgaz people from different backgrounds live together? How do they

© The Author(s) 2024 1 D. N. Duru, Conviviality in Burgaz, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52334-2_1 manage tensions? What makes them bond with each other? How can we describe, explain and conceptualise this?

During my fieldwork, I was struck by the fact that some Burgaz islanders described their diversity as ebru (marbling in Turkish; see Fig. 1.1). Ebru-like living was contrasted with living like a mosaic (Fig. 1.2), where the tiles, representing many different ethnic and religious groups, live side by side and have distinct borders and hence can fall out of the mosaic. While making a mosaic, you stick together the tiles with a kind of glue, with the hope that it holds them together. In ebru, the boundaries of patterns are fused into each other and hence, while you can see their distinctiveness and differences, they are tightly bound to each other and are not prone to separation, nor destruction. While making ebru, you throw the colours on the water and with the help of different brushes, you fuse the patterns together, by mingling them without mixing the patterns or melting them together. You, then, put a paper on the water and pull it out, where the picture stays solidly on the paper.

Before my fieldwork, I had read about multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism and coexistence in order to comprehend how people conceptualised diversity and living with difference but there was something different in the ways in which the islanders described and lived like ebru. I conducted 14 months of fieldwork between July 2009 and September 2010, trying to understand what is ebru-like living and how it is different to living side by side, or living with difference. My exploration of “living togetherness” in my long-term ethnographic and longitudinal research, and analytical journey of 15 years (2008-23) led me to write this book on conviviality, a joint-shared life of living, loving and fighting on an island that belongs to a small archipelago, called the Princes? Islands of Istanbul.

In the last decade, there has been a growing interest to explore conviviality, coexistence and pluralism especially in Europe. Academic journal articles and Special Issues on conviviality (Erickson 2011; Marsden and Reeves 2019; Nowicka and Vertovec 2014; Padilla et al. 2015; Wise and Noble 2016) and ethnographic works covering many regions in the form of edited volumes on coexistence (Bryant 2016; Hayden et al. 2016; Albera and Couroucli 2012) and conviviality (Hemer et al. 2020) have emerged; however not in the form of an ethnographic monograph. This field needs in-depth ethnographic and longitudinal analysis in order to give a holistic and contextualised account of how conviviality is practised and sustained during times of political crises. This book aims to satisfy this need by situating conviviality in a historical, political and socio-economic

DN v e

Fig. 1.1 Ebru—marbling (The ebru is made by my brother, Can Duru, who gave his consent for it to be published in this book)

context (homogenising Turkey); explores how memory shapes current conviviality; the complex impact of class difference in everyday interactions and the relationship between conviviality, coexistence/toleration and intolerance.

Fig. 1.2 Destroyed mosaic in Agia Sophia (photo taken by the author)

In this ethnography, I narrate stories of conviviality, solidarity and management of conflicts and tension on Burgaz, which is home to more than twenty ethnic and religious groups, who come from different socioeconomic backgrounds. The main contribution of the book is the anthropological analysis of pluralism as the embodiment of diversity through shared experiences of sensory diversity to the recently emerging studies of conviviality and to media, communication and cultural studies. Islanders attend each other's religious places, feasts, parties and funerals; experience the island with their senses, while swimming and fishing in the sea, smelling and touching the mimosas, eating the berries and the green bitter plums of the trees, watching the sunset and the sunrise; they also fight with each other about who gossiped about whom, or who beats the carpet and lets the dust fall on the neighbour below. All of these pleasures, joys, conflicts and tensions make the islanders feel that it is their island, creating a sense of unity and a strong sense of belonging to the island that overrides ethnic, class and religious identities of individuals at times of crisis and despite political tension in Turkey. At times of crisis and hardship, survival of the community of Burgaz islanders takes priority over individual or group differences.

Studies of conviviality in Southern Europe have presented an alternative to multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism (Erickson 2011; Duru 2013, 2015, 2016; Heil 2014; Nowicka and Vertovec 2014). In difference to the English meaning of conviviality, as having a good time with others, these studies opted for the Spanish word “convivencia,” as “a joint/shared life,” driving from the verb convivir, “to live together" (Overing and Passes 2000; Erickson 2011). Conviviality does not mean continuous harmony and peacefulness, but includes tensions, conflicts and disputes (Karner and Parker 2011; Overing and Passes 2000) as a part of sharing space and living together. Many communities in the Balkans, in Anatolia, the Mediterranean, the Levant and in South Asia, have lived, coexisted for centuries, with and without conflict, prior and after the emergence of nation states (see Bowman 2016a, 2016b; Bigelow 2010; Doumanis 2012; Saglam 2022; Turkyilmaz 2009). What can be considered *new" with the concept of conviviality is that in contrast to the passive, non-interference type of coexistence and/or living side by side that implies and embeds toleration; conviviality is performative and active, and people, who engage with it, practise it, perform it and value it (see Bryant 2016).

What is also new with the concept of conviviality is how it is applied in different contexts. In Northern Europe (especially in the UK), Australia and Canada, conviviality came out as a reaction to top-down multiculturalism, a political project that manages diversity (Wise and Velayutham 2009; Wise 2010; Wise and Noble 2016; Nowicka and Vertovec 2014; Neal et al. 2013, 2019; Gilroy 2004). Multicultural policies were criticised, as not reflecting what people actually do in their daily lives and pluralism in multiculturalism was seen as a matter or rights and duties (Zapata-Barrero 2017; Zapata-Barrero 2018) emphasising how people are different from each other rather than by what they have in common. Therefore, attentions turned into “everyday multiculturalism” (Wise and Velayutham 2009), “interculturalism” and intercultural policies which stressed that community cohesion should focus on the bonds among the people, and what they share in common by highlighting a diversity-based common public culture (Zapata-Barrero 2017). "Intercultural conviviality? was used as a framework to describe the ways in which pluralism was practised by individuals in their everyday life (Harris 2016). During this

“convivial turn” (Neal et al. 2013) scholars investigated friendship among people from different ethnic and religious backgrounds to be able to draw out “affective dimensions of social relations” in the ways in which sociability in friendship builds and springs from what people share in common, in difference to living with difference described as sociality across different ethnic and religious divides (Glick Schiller and Caglar 2016).

However, conviviality as an analytical framework, a joint-shared life across ethnic, religious divides have not been applied to post-Ottoman contexts. For instance, in Greece, Cyprus and Turkey, “coexistence as toleration” have been dominated and overburdened by ethnic and religious differences, where social relations, cohesion and conflict are seen to be affected by these differences and hence put a shadow on the shared ways of living (Bryant 2016). During and after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, following the national building processes based on homogenisation of the nations, “coexistence” referred to the pre-existing categories of ethnicity and religion. Ethnographies explored bi-communal interaction in the neighbourhood, such as between Muslims and Christians in Bosnia, Bulgaria and Greece (Bringa 1995; Georgieva 1999; Lubanska 2007; Demetriou 2005; Huseyinoglu 2018). In Cyprus, coexistence between “Turkish Cypriots” and “Greek Cypriots” was ruptured (Bryant and Papadakis 2012; Bryant 2007; Demetriou 2007) and new forms of coexistence are limited to border crossings to visit left-behind villages, houses, gardens and objects (Navaro-Yashin 2009; Dikomitis 2012); tourism visits for business, shopping and dining (Scott 2012; Dikomitis 2012); and forced political projects of post-conflict resolution (Scott 2012; Bryant 2016).

My use of conviviality derives less from the English and French meanings that connote feasting and celebration, and more from the Spanish convivencia, meaning “a shared life.” Expanding on this meaning for their own work in Amazonia, Overing and Passes (2000, xiii-xiv emphasis added) remark that conviviality's *features would include peacefulness, high morale and high affectivity, a metaphysics of human and non-human interconnectedness, a stress on kinship, good gifting—sharing, work relations and dialogue, a propensity for the informal and performative as against the formal and institutional, and az intense ethical and aesthetic valuing of sociable sociality.” I would like to put emphasis here on the performative aspect of conviviality, as well as the valuing of “sociable sociality.” Sociable sociality, or conviviality in the more conventional English sense, is something that, in this definition, is valued enough to be produced through performances that involve transforming “the violent, angry, ugly capricious forces of the universe into constructive, beautiful knowledge and capacities” (Overing & Passes, 6). Conviviality, then, is both “sociable sociality,” and the production and performance of that sociality, which often also involves control of tensions (see Bryant, (see Bryant 2016, 21). In a Karachi apartment building, Ring (2006) shows that the production of the apartment building as a peaceful space is achieved not only through pleasurable moments but also through the management of tension in everyday interaction and exchange.

I criticise multiculturalism as a top-down, political project, which puts more emphasis on living with difference and which tends to undermine shared ways of living. My approach to conviviality shows the reworkings of “everyday multiculturalism, multicultural living”-iving with difference—, with the shared ways of living—living together in diversity—, and illustrates that people negotiate and navigate between these two (Chap. 4). I describe conviviality as shared ways of living, the production of everyday life and a sense of place through embodying diversity, enjoying, performing and valuing it (Chap. 5), as well as letting people, who might have different lifestyles to perform and practise daily life the ways in which they would like to (Chaps. 4 and 6). I suggest, then, that conviviality is not only these ways of living, but a particular valuing of sociable sociality in the making of place. It is the sort of “everyday coexistence” (Bryant 2016) but here given “an intense ethical and aesthetic valuing” and self-consciously performed. For those who live there, what makes Burgaz a place with which they identify is precisely this form of sociality; to be Burgazh (from Burgaz) is to experience and value this sociality and to invest in its reproduction. That reproduction involves the performance of particular forms of sociality, as well as the management of tensions. Tension, then, is not absent from conviviality, just as it is not absent from what Bryant (2016, 9) describes as the everyday “labour of peace.” Rather, the management of tension is also a way of reproducing conviviality in that it performatively demonstrates the value placed on shared ways of life over other differences.

In much of the literature on peace and conflict resolution in the Balkans, Southern Europe and the Middle East, scholars attempt to analyse cultural plurality using the concept of coexistence. This is a coexistence that is being excavated from the ruins of conflict, with the idea that it may shed light on how people could live together again. Examples of such coexistence include that between Israelis and Palestinians; Greek and Turkish

Cypriots; or Serbs, Croats and Bosnians (Abu-Nimer 2001; Anastasiou 2002; Dayton and Kriesberg 2009; Gidron et al. 2002; Phillips 1996; Wallensteen 2007). This is the coexistence that Bryant contrasts with “everyday coexistence” and notes “the legal, political, and discursive forms of coexistence that imply the ‘living together’ of millets or ethnic groups within the empire or nation” (Bryant 2016, 8).

This book represents a critical engagement with coexistence in the context of Turkey, where the idea of “living together” has been burdened with concepts of “toleration” inherited from the Ottoman past and inscribed in Republican law. Coexistence, with its connotations of different ethnic or religious groups living together, has no equivalent in Turkish. Rather, the most commonly used term to refer to the interaction of such groups is hoşgörü, literally “to see well” and usually translated as “tolerance,” which is a word that has been applied in the post-Ottoman Turkish context primarily to non-Muslim minorities whose status as minorities was secured by the Treaty of Lausanne. This does not mean that there have not been concepts of everyday coexistence in operation, especially the idea of komşuluk (neighbourhoodliness) and the mahalle (neighbourhood) (Bryant 2016). However, these ideas of living together have been problematically projected onto the scale of relations between ethnic and/or religious groups, blurring the scale that equates “the existence of certain neighbourhoods where persons of different religions lived side by side, sharing the responsibilities of the mahalle, with the ‘peaceful’ existence of religious and ethnic minorities within the Empire” (Bryant 2016, 17).

To complicate matters further, this discourse of coexistence, with its blurring of scale, furthermore returns to have real impact on actual everyday coexistence in the present. For instance, in the post-Ottoman context, scholars tend to view coexistence as something that belongs to the Ottoman past, a time before conflict based on ethno-religious identities (see Couroucli 2010). Problematically, this literature tends to view the loss of religious minorities as necessarily creating homogenised nations. Couroucli, for instance, claims that with the departure of the non-Muslim millets—the Jewish, Armenian and Greek-Orthodox minorities—Turkey has long ago lost its pluralism. Such assumptions, however, rebound to reinforce the idea that minorities are those non-Muslim millets who are the subject of toleration, thus reducing coexistence to a form of hierarchical indulgence. Moreover, this understanding of coexistence, by equating plurality with those differences acknowledged by the millet system of the Ottoman Empire, makes it seem as though other forms of difference, such as Alevis and Kurds in Turkey today, are not significant and do not require the sort of “labour of peace” (Bryant 2016).

Hence, this monograph shifts the emphasis in this study of post- Ottoman plurality from coexistence /toleration to my conceptualisation of conviviality—that is, ways of both sharing and contesting particular lifestyles in a place through daily interactions and a sense of belonging (Duru 2015, 2016). I refer to coexistence /toleration to emphasise the complex ways in which local discourses of tolerance are fed by and feed into historical and scholarly understandings of coexistence (see Brink-Danan 2011; Kaya 2013; Kaymak 2017; Oran 2013; Mills 2010). And in my analysis of conviviality, “living together” is understood as sharing the same space and socio-economic resources, and a process that involves both cohesion and tension. The book does not only explore personal disagreements and conflicts but also frictions that are structurally and historically rooted, such as the divisions between seasonal and permanent residents, employee-employer relationships and the interplay between the social capital, income and wealth with differences in ethnicity and religion. While I explore conviviality, its tensions and exclusions due to differences in lifestyle, economic disparities, ideology and class (see also Navaro-Yashin 2006), I also complement it with an analysis of coexistence /toleration, which I understand in the context of Turkey to apply specifically to recognised (former millets) and unrecognised minorities (e.g. Alevis and Kurds) who explicitly articulate their identity based on ethnic and religious difference in relation to the Sunni Muslim majority. My study of pluralism in the Turkish context draws attention to the intersection of class with ethnicity and religion (see Smith 2000) through the concepts of coexistence/toleration and conviviality. Throughout the book, I explore three complex impacts of class in everyday interactions: (1) the ways in which belonging to the “same” class creates similar lifestyles and tastes and subsumes ethnic and religious differences; (2) how differences in lifestyle become exacerbated by class difference; and (3) how, nonetheless, class difference and economic mutual dependency may create a sense of belonging to Burgaz, through conviviality. Hard times, tensions as well as sensorial pleasures, produce a sense of place, where the islanders enjoy the shared ways of living in this diverse setting.

While coexistence/toleration places emphasis on the need to share space with persons whom we already presume to be different, conviviality places emphasis on the production of place through shared attitudes and experiences. As I will show, conviviality may be seen as a particular form of everyday coexistence in which pluralism is self-consciously valued for its own sake. In this context, while memories of coexistence /toleration become a nostalgia for multiculturalism or an irreversible loss of pluralism as a result of nationalist homogenisation (Bryant 2016, 17), memories of conviviality are used to create a sense of belonging to Burgaz. The shared ways of living that create such a sense of belonging to Burgaz include both sweet memories of leisure and also bitter memories of adaptation, hardship, class and lifestyle differences.

Furthermore, the book brings in sensorial anthropology (Feld and Basso 1996; Classen 1997; Chau 2008; Seremetakis 2019; Sutton 2010) to conviviality studies, in the ways in which sensorial pleasures (feeling the breeze, smelling the mimosas, swimming in the sea, getting drunk, liking being exposed to the sun and feeling it on the skin, watching the sunrise) and the performance of conviviality are experienced through sensory diversity (Chau 2008; Duru 2016). Conviviality on the island takes place through embodying the island, embodying the cultural diversity, through shared experiences of sensory diversity, when the islanders feel together the sensory pleasures as well as do hard work, and also perform the labour of peace, by exchanging food, gifts and services (e.g. to help when in need and moral obligations such as attending funerals) (Bryant 2016, 21). Burgaz islanders embody Burgaz through dancing; playing marbles, scrabble and backgammon; eating; walking; and fighting with each other for daily matters. This embodiment and emotions that are shared create a collective sense of belonging and a shared Burgazlı identity. The experience and the self-conscious valuing of diversity makes Burgaz the place that it is and enjoying the cultural and sensorial diversity is what it means to be Burgazlı.

While Back and Sinha (2016) explore tools for conviviality that people use in their individual relationships to fight racism, I explore the mechanisms that enable and sustain conviviality. Furthermore, I investigate not only how conviviality takes place between individuals, in the form of friendships, but also the collective dimension of conviviality, where people bond collectively, have a collective sense of belonging to a place and share a collective identity. I argue that conviviality is the embodiment of diversity through shared experiences as well as living with difference and is a process that involves both cohesion and tension. Conviviality is both sociable sociality where the islanders enjoy each other's company, embody the island and each other's diversity through different senses (sharing food, walking, swimming, fishing, dancing); and a performance of pluralism and labour of peace as conflict solving mechanisms. The mechanisms

1 INTRODUCING CONVIVIALITY: EBRU-LIKE LIVING IN BURGAZ ll that sustain it are shared ways of living and embodiment of diversity, shared memories and an articulation of a shared rhetoric that builds on solidarity and collective island identity that values diversity. The diversity of senses plays great importance in the ways in which the sensorial pleasures, hardship and daily conflicts, while people have fun as well as fight with each other, make people bond to each other, make the island their home. Collective sensorial experiences create emotional bonding among the people. They experience the island through their senses and feel they belong to the island. Acts of solidarity forms a shared rhetoric of what constitutes and takes for one to be a Burgaz islander. Differences are recognised and also appreciated; nonetheless at times of crisis, the sense of belonging, shared memories and rhetoric all weigh more than what separates the islanders; and conviviality acts as a mechanism of resistance and solidarity, where the islanders fight for the survival of the island community.

As a final point, the “convivial turn” has been criticised by several sociologists to have focused on the “fleeting, transient and spontaneous interactions” which happened at some moments (Neal et al. 2013; Nowicka 2020; Lapina 2016), and the reduction of conviviality to sociable sociality and amicable relationships, fleeting encounters in urban spaces and hence to have ignored the impacts of racism and inequality (Nowicka 2020; Back and Sinha 2016). This “convivial turn” is in fact not so new. Anthropologists have researched coexistence, intercommunality and conviviality, by conducting more rigorous and complex exploration of living togetherness and intercommunal mixing, its potential and limits. For example, Bigelow (2010), Bowman (2016a) and Ring (2006) explored interactions at private, semi-public and public places by contextualising the socio-economic, historical and political contexts of peaceful coexistence, conflicts and the management of conflicts. Hence, the book contributes to this long tradition in anthropology, by providing a longitudinal perspective of 15 years of research (2008-2023) by assessing the strength and continuity of conviviality, by exploring the islanders’ collective resistance and solidarity in hardship and/or at times of crisis. Is conviviality a form of sociable sociality, fleeting encounters and intercultural relations that work when everything seems to be peaceful? What is the relationship between conviviality, solidarity, tolerance and intolerance? Is conviviality ephemeral or temporal and can turn into violence at times of crisis? The findings from Burgaz seck to contribute not only to diverse contexts in small localities, but also to works in cosmopolitan and urban settings in different diverse contexts, in the ways in which conviviality relates to solidarity, coexistence, inequalities, intolerance, racism and nationalism.

KESTANE KARASI. REPRESENTING CONVIVIALITY

After I watched the documentary about Burgaz, I got interested more in how the islanders perceived and represented their diversity. I started reading novels written about Burgaz, as soon as I began my fieldwork. I wanted to understand how the islanders live, what they do, what they think, say, write about Burgaz, which concepts, terms, metaphors they use to articulate their representation of diversity by building on media ethnography (Tufte 2000; Schrøder et al. 2003). Grillo (2007, 981 emphasis added) highlights the importance of “understanding what actually happens ‘on the ground’, a crucial aspect of which is the subjective dimension, the ideas, models, projects, definitions, discourses etc. that actors bring to bear on a situation, sometimes very hesitantly, often seeking to work with (or clarify) concepts that are difficult, opaque, elusive and with multiple contested meanings.” Thus, an in-depth, ethnographic exploration of everyday practices of living together in diversity, and exploring how the islanders themselves reflect, represent and conceptualise their conviviality in their media productions (documentaries, novels, memoires) was my response to Grillo’s call (2007) for anthropologists to go beyond the normative analysis of multiculturalism and to move away from the philosophical reflections at an abstract or institutional level.

Engin Aktel’s novel entitled, Kestane Karas (Aktel 2005), depicts life in Burgaz in the 1940s and 1950s. Aktel’s grandfather, a Turkish Sunni Muslim, was the head of a district in Thessaloniki and he was assigned to continue his job in Istanbul. He came to Burgaz in 1914, where he was given a house. Engin Aktel, born in 1942, has been living in Burgaz since then. The characters of Kestane Karas are based on the people, who lived in Burgaz. He combined his imagination and the island life to tell the story of Burgaz. Kestane Karas is the name of the storm. As Burgaz was a “Rum fishermen village,” that storm affected the lives of many fishermen and the islanders. In the following, I make a narrative analysis (Hansen and Machin 2013) of this novel to show how a new comer to the island, becomes a Burgazli. The set of events and how the characters react to these events shed light not only on how the challenges, suspicions, tensions and crisis times are solved, but also on the acts of solidarity and the values of the islanders. Characters in the novel are based on real people, who represent the diversity of Burgaz, which not only is about ethnic and religious differences but includes madness, irratibility, annoyance, physical appearance, funniness, drunkenness and so on.

The novel starts with Stelyo Reis (captain), a Rum fisherman, who gets lost while fishing when Kestane Karası hits. In the beginning of the novel, a young man, Sami, from Erzincan arrives in Burgaz after the Erzincan earthquake in 1939. As a person who never had any experience of the sea or fishing, he gets fascinated to see the fish that Stelyo caught and displayed in front of kahve (coffee shop). Sami starts yelling in front of the fish “alive, alive... fresh these fish” and attracted people to come by, have a look and buy them. Having helped him in this way, Sami walks away without asking for money. Stelyo Reis likes Sami’s attitude and employs him to help him fishing and selling fish. They build a father/son like relationship. Sami calls Stelyo Reis’ wife Despina “Mama” (mother in Rumca). Despina sees Sami as her son, cooks for him and washes his clothes. Despina behaves equally to Elpida her daughter and Sami. Sami and Elpida have feelings of love for each other, but they do not reveal it to each other.

One day in September (1949), Stelyo does not come back from fishing. It is the time of Kestane Karası. The whole island tries to find Stelyo in the sea. Stelyo’s friends Topal (crippled) Ismail, Arnavut (Albanian) Muzaffer, Naylon (nylon) Mehmet Ali, Şilep (ocean carrier) Hasan, Mülkiyeli (political science graduate) Muvakkar, Lifer (name of a fish) Mehmet and Zangoc (verger) Todori, all gather in Sabri's kahve to make a plan. Topal, Zangoc, Sami and Muvakkar go on the sea to search for Stelyo. The others take care of Despina and Elpida. The islanders bring Despina and Elpida to kahve to keep company with them while they are waiting. Topal, Zangoc, Sami and Muvakkar search for Stelyo in the storm for days and days and come back to Burgaz with no good news.

After Stelyo's loss, Topal, Zangoç and Muvakkar want to help Despina and Elpida and secretly they gather money from the islanders. However, they know that Despina would not accept the money, so they make a plan. They tell Despina that they will sell Stelyo Reis’ old boat and with the money they get, they can buy a new boat so that Sami can go fishing, earn money and take care of Despina and Elpida. After they gather the money, they tell Despina that two people from Istanbul wanted to buy Stelyo's boat. They take Stelyo’s boat away and with the money gathered, they get a new boat for Despina, Sami and Elpida.

Elpida talks about her feelings towards Sami to Despina and Despina supports their marriage. Elpida breaks the news to Sami about Despina's approval. Sami becomes worried, because he knows that the Rum community will object this. Elpida offers to convert to Islam but Sami does not want this and they are trying to find out how they can get married without converting. In the meantime, Muvakkar and Zangoç also feel the love between Elpida and Sami; they want them to get married. However, there were several stories in the novel (as well as in narratives told to me during my fieldwork) about disproving the intermarriage between Rums and Muslims. A Rum lady committed suicide after she fell in love with a Muslim, because the Rum community was against their marriage. Muvakkar and Zangoç do not want this to happen to Elpida and Sami. And something happens ... A fire breaks out in the church located at the far north of the island. Sami is the courageous one who saves the priest, Papaz Andon, from the church. Sami then becomes a hero. Muvakkar and Zangoç take this opportunity to tell the priest that Elpida and Sami want to get married and the priest approves this. During the Christmas celebration to which all the islanders are invited, Papaz Andon announces Elpida and Sami’s engagement.

A few weeks later, Sami goes for fishing and does not come back for three days. During these three days, Burgaz islanders express their suspicion towards Sami. Aktel writes that even though Sami had lived in Burgaz for two years, he had not yet become a Burgaz islander. The islanders gossiped that he escaped and that people should not have trusted him. At the end of three days, Sami turns back with three orkinos and the rumours come to an end. The islanders look for a nick name for Sami. When you are given a nickname by the islanders, you become an islander, like Topal, Silep and Naylon. After Sami had caught orkinos and proved that he was a proper fisherman, they called him Banker (like a banker) which they thought that with the money he will earn from fishing he might have a good life.