İlay Romain Örs’s book proposes an ethnographic study of that section of the Rum Polites, namely the Greek Orthodox inhabitants of İstanbul, that were forced, or chose to, migrate to Athens, at the pace of the traumatic events that have marked the relations between Greece and Turkey throughout the twentieth century. In the process, she introduces a new concept, that of “diaspora of the city,” neatly capturing the peculiarity of the identity claims of that community. The Rum Polites identify, the author argues, with the City where they came from, İstanbul, and not with either of the nations, Greece or Turkey, that demanded their allegiance. They thus retained a “categorical confusion” (p. 95). In their view, Örs contends, Rum Polites are privy to a “cosmopolitan knowledge,” deriving from the experience of multicultural coexistence in everyday life in İstanbul. This sets them apart not only from the now culturally homogeneous Greek and Turkish societies, but also from the other, rural for the most part, Orthodox Christians that were deported from Anatolia.

The Rum Polites were the only Greek Orthodox Christians spared from the 1923 exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. As Turkey transitioned from empire to nation, and abandoned multiculturalism for cultural homogeneity, the Rum Polites thus constituted an exception, the correspondent of which were the Muslims of Western Thrace in Greece. Their fate would follow the fluctuations of the relations between the two countries and the community’s size would shrink a little more with every crisis, usually around the question of Cyprus, such as the 1942 Wealth Tax, the September 6–7, 1955 Pogrom, or the 1964 deportations. Representing 30 percent of İstanbul’s population right before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, they number today less than 2,000, in a city of sixteen million.

Over the past forty years, following Alexis Alexandris’s seminal 1983 book, several works have focused on the Greek Orthodox community of İstanbul in the age of the Turkish Republic, specifically for what their experience teaches us about nation-building (Alexandris A [1983] The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek–Turkish Relations, 1918–1974. Athens: Center for Asia Minor Studies). Hence Dimitris Kamouzis’ 2020 Greeks in Turkey is the last in a long line of studies by historians, political scientists, and sociologists such as Samim Akgönül, Ayhan Aktar, Méropi Anastassiadou-Dumont, Foti Benlisoy, Esra Özsüer, or Haris Theodorelis-Rigas (Kamouzis D [2020] Greeks in Turkey: Elite Nationalism and Minority Politics in Late Ottoman and Early Republican Istanbul. London: Routledge; Akgönül S [2023] One Hundred Years of Greek–Turkish Relations: The Human Dimension of an Ongoing Conflict. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; Aktar A [2006] Türk Milliyetçiliği, Gayrimüslimler ve Ekonomik Dönüşüm. İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları; Anastassiadou-Dumont M and Dumong P [2003] Une mémoire pour la Ville: La communauté grecque d’Istanbul en 2003. İstanbul: OUI; Benlisoy F [2012] İstanbul Rumları: Bugün ve Yarın. İstanbul: Zoğrafyon Lisesi Mezunları Derneği; Özsüer E [2015] The “other” face of history: re-comprehending history in the example of Turkey and Greece. Turkish History Education Journal 4(2), 165–201; Theodorelis-Rigas H [2017] Model citizens or a fifth column? Greek Orthodox (Rum) communities in Syria and Turkey between secularism and multiculturalism. In Gorman A and Kasbarian S (eds), Diasporas of the Modern Middle East. Contextualizing Community. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 31–69).

Diaspora of the City stands out within that growing literature, in part because it focuses on the Rum Polites that settled in Athens (estimated at about 50,000, p. 19), as opposed to the dwindling community that remained in İstanbul. More significantly, the distinctive aspect of Örs’s book is its commitment, like Anna Théodoridès’ sociological work on the memories of the 1955 anti-Rum Pogrom (Théodoridès A [2025] Partir ou rester: Le dilemme des Grecs d’Istanbul au lendemain des pogroms de 1955. Paris: Cerf), to recover the agency of the Rum Polites, as it manifests itself in the way in which they define their own identity. This enables the author to highlight the inadequacy of certain terms conventionally used to refer to Rum Polites, such as “minority,” “refugees,” or even “migrants” (e.g. pp. 99–100).

Indeed, İlay Örs skillfully avoids any normative definition of the Rum Polites, acknowledging the wide socio-economic and political diversity within the community (e.g. pp. 85–87). She instead approaches the group through a method she terms “an ethnography of stories” (p. 4), consisting of unraveling multiple threads of analysis from a thick description of vignettes of her meetings with her participants, at a diner, a book talk, a chance encounter with two Turkish-speaking Rums in the Athenian neighborhood of Paleo Faliro. The criteria of belonging to the Rum Polites community thus emerge in an emic manner, their members conceiving of themselves as possessors of a specific “cosmopolitan knowledge.” This refers to their attachment to the cultural diversity they experienced as Greek Orthodox Christians in a predominantly Muslim city, and is illustrated, as it were, by their bilingualism in both Greek and Turkish and their culinary preferences and skills (pp. 60, 77). It is precisely because they recognize that knowledge in the author herself that Rum Polites feel free to evoke that Istanbulite past with her, despite her being a Turkish citizen.

Örs’s conception of cosmopolitanism is theoretically sophisticated, and the author offers a very thoughtful critique of the common, disingenuous uses of that term, a “boutique multiculturalism” (quoting Stanley Fish, p. 179) particularly in vogue in İstanbul. As applied to the Rum Polites, “cosmopolitan knowledge” emerged from an intimate experience of the fine balance underpinning interreligious coexistence in İstanbul, reminiscent perhaps of what Marcy Brink-Danan has termed, in reference to Turkish Jews, “dangerous cosmopolitanism” (Brink-Danan M [2011] Dangerous cosmopolitanism: erasing difference in Istanbul. Anthropological Quarterly 84(2), 439–473). It is this lived experience, “geographically and historically specific” (p. 193) that explains that the counterpart to “cosmopolitan knowledge” is “exclusive diversity,” a notion by which Örs shows how Rum Polites distinguish themselves from people, mainland and Anatolian Greeks or Turks essentially, whom they deem ignorant of that “kind of cultural capital” (p. 42), the finer art of intercultural coexistence. Here the double entendre of “Polites” is particularly significant, in its reference to both the inhabitants of İstanbul, the “City” (Konstantinoupolis/H Πόλις), and to city-dwellers in general, in their opposition to the countryfolk (pp. 80, 102, 111).

The book’s organization serves the author’s overall purpose well. Hence the first two chapters following the introduction – which offers a useful survey of the constitution of the Rum politiki community – elaborate on the central concepts of the study, namely “cosmopolitan knowledge” and “exclusive diversity.” The third chapter examines the impact of the traumatic events experienced by Rum Polites on their identification with the city while the last chapter explains how coming to terms with that violent past colors the specific kind of cosmopolitanism they claim as their own. Taking stock of the current inauspicious state of the Rum community of İstanbul, “made up of frightened and conservative elders, with a youth that is forgetting its own language and culture by interacting, even forming families, with people outside the community,” (p. 210) an epilogue outlines possible avenues for survival, through the transnational lives of some of its members to the opportunities for a “virtual diaspora of the city” offered by social media (p. 217).

This is an insightful and thought-provoking book in terms of both its methodological and theoretical contributions. Its grassroots approach and care of recovering the voices of the Rum Polites stand in contrast to the more top-down studies of that community. Of even broader significance are the two interrelated theoretical propositions buttressing this study. The first is the notion of “diaspora of the city,” which enables the outlining of the contours of a community above and beyond more reifying invocations of ethnicity, or its semantic cousin, “culture.” The second lies in the heuristic paradox of “exclusive diversity,” whereby the claim of cosmopolitanism becomes a boundary-maker against other people deemed deprived of that quality. As such, the book is must-read not only for students of Greece, Turkey, and minorities in the Eastern Mediterranean, but more broadly of diasporas, cosmopolitanism, and ethnicity.

The one point that may be found debatable in this otherwise excellent study has to do with the author’s reference to the ability of Rum Polites to articulate a very nuanced understanding of Greek–Turkish relations, “refuting the inimical discourse” (p. 134). Eschewing reclamations and misrepresentations from either side, they can thus remain, the author suggests, nostalgic of the Turkish society they left and critical of the Greek society where they ultimately settled. But how truly representative is that stance among Rum Polites? This could have been explicated with a more systematic presentation of the research participants than the one given in the introduction (p. 21). How many are, for example, the Rum Polities “known for their fanatic anti-Turkish stance” (p. 149), of whom we learn little, but whose existence is acknowledged in the book? The recent storm clouds gathering above the two Aegean neighbors may even impose less equivocal allegiances, particularly as the generations that experienced life in the City fade away. But perhaps we should abide by the central philosophy of survival that the author ascribes to that community, resting somewhere between “careful optimism” and “recoverable pessimism” (p. 218).