FIELDWORK

This article is based on ethnographic research conducted in Antakya over sixteen months between 2010 and 2012. When the war in Syria began, I was examining the sociopolitical conditions of coexistence among the city's bilingual Alawi, Jewish, and Orthodox Christian residents as well as Sunni Turks, all groups with whom I had already established relationships through regular visits, mutual friends, and participant observation. Given the region's historical networks with Syria (described shortly), commentaries about Turkey's Syria policy quickly entered the daily conversations in my research locations, which varied widely and included city bazaars, shared sacred sites, public interfaith events, women's social gatherings, and a multireligious choral ensemble. Although hospitality-based relationships were already prevalent in these settings (also discussed shortly), with the arrival of Syrian refugees the term misafir gained a new referent in such relationships.

Of the forty-four ethnographic interviews that I conducted with members of Antakya's diverse communities after the outbreak of the Syrian war, thirty-eight made direct reference to the Syrian misafirs in responding to my general questions about intercommunal relations. Most of these comments echoed those of Meryem, expressing suspicion and uncertainty and implicating the Turkish state's role as the Syrians’ hosts. The most common complaint I heard, for instance, concerned the privileged access to public healthcare that Syrians were assumed to have and was encapsulated in a comment by one of my Christian interviewees: “They make us wait for hours [in hospitals] but accept any Syrian patient upon arrival. Who is the misafir here—us or them?”Footnote ¹⁸

In my return visit to the field in the summer of 2016, I found that the rhetoric of hospitality endured, but the terms and context of its negotiation had changed. Displaced Syrians were now called mülteci or sığınmacı in official records and were no longer restricted to the camps (which, until recently, only officials had been allowed to enter). Numbering approximately 83,000 in Antakya alone, Syrian refugees had already started to blend in with locals as their neighbors, coworkers, grocers, and tenants, blurring the boundary between Syrians as familial misafirs and Syrians as misafirs of the state.Footnote ¹⁹ I also observed that Syrians, too, were using the language of hospitality to construe their experiences of precarity and temporariness in these everyday networks.Footnote ²⁰ Because my argument concerns the implications of “state hospitality” toward noncitizen Syrians for those who already inhabited the margins of Turkish citizenship, I prioritize here the perspectives of Antakya's Arabophone non-Muslim residents rather than those of Syrians themselves. The early days of the conflict that constitute the main time frame of this article provide a particularly significant context for identifying such implications in the absence of direct relations between these two groups.

Although my fieldwork involved interaction with Alawi and Sunni residents who constitute the majority of Antakya's population of some 470,000 people, their perspectives are omitted here because they demand attention to issues beyond the scope of this article. For the Alawis, these issues include the nuances of Arab Alawi identity in Turkey, this community's political and religious attachments to Bashar al-Asad, their reliance on cross-border economies prior to the Syrian war, and the sectarian tensions between Alawis and Sunnis.Footnote ²¹ Sunni Turks, by contrast, tend to adopt a much more distant tone in their expressions of sympathy or concern regarding Syrians due largely to the absence of a shared language and history between the two groups.Footnote ²²

My analysis of the narratives presented here attends to their indexical characteristics that are contingent on the social situation of their communication.Footnote ²³ What Antakyans relayed to me about their experiences was initially informed by my positionality as a Turkish anthropologist from Canada—that is, a member of the ethnoreligious majority and a fellow Turkish citizen with the means to amplify their voices for the international community. As our relationships developed, however, I came to occupy other positions as well and became their customer, neighbor, friend, tenant, and guest—the latter, in its figurative sense, subsuming all the others and marking their impermanence. Shaped by my interlocutors’ awareness of my researcher identity, their public commentaries about Syrian misafirs demonstrated a negotiation of their own precarious identities vis-à-vis the Turkish nation. Our interactions in other social domains, however, pointed to the cultural and historical forces underlying these commentaries. Having embodied the guest status in these domains, I was also able to identify the ambiguities of identity surrounding hospitality that transcend the distinctions between minority and majority.

INSTITUTIONAL AND EVERYDAY MEANINGS OF HOSPITALITY

Studies that examine hospitality in the context of national borders often approach the dialectic of inclusion and exclusion through the legal, territorial, and nationally ascribed categorizations of identity. Works inspired by Kant's formulations of cosmopolitanism, for instance, understand hospitality as a natural and “cosmopolitical” right bestowed by the state and protected by international law.Footnote ²⁴ Hospitality as a universal right requires the nation-state to open its borders to noncitizens yet does not necessarily challenge the nation-state system or its power to inscribe individual and national life. It also does not account for the everyday forms of sociality that refugees become part of—or are excluded from—after they cross borders, especially (as in Turkey) in the absence of structured legal asylum mechanisms.

Derrida used the term “conditional hospitality” to describe the limitations of this state-centered perspective.Footnote ²⁵ Hospitality as a juridicopolitical right, he suggested, starts with the interrogation of the newcomer's name: it is conditional on the state's ability to identify, recognize, and name the border-crossing other. This is why the gates and borders are opened only to “deserving” guests—that is, “those who arrive with their passports, valid visas, adequate bank statements, or invitations.”Footnote ²⁶ Many others face hostility, or as Derrida called it, “hostpitality,” as the states’ preferential welcoming of guests is often accompanied by maintaining the guests as strangers for generations; placing them in refugee camps, detention centers, or ghettos; or simply refusing them entry.Footnote ²⁷ Located at the intersection of compassion and repression, conditional hospitality reconfirms the nation-state's sovereignty through its ownership of “home” and its populations. Its territorially based language undergirds both the national and international regulation of refugees that anthropologists have explored in relation to law, spatial containment and immobility, time, uncertainty, dispossession, and border security.Footnote ²⁸

The hospitality offered to the Syrian newcomers by the Turkish state can be understood in similar terms, yet also adds a new dimension to Derridian critiques. Housed in impromptu tent camps in Hatay's border district of Yayladağı as registered misafirs, Syrians who arrived in Turkey with their passports during my fieldwork were mostly identifiable to the state and relied on its institutions for survival. Their official status as misafirs evoked a discourse of generosity and compassion rather than one of rights, however, putting many in a legally precarious position. While providing access to the free healthcare, education, and labor market that were denied to conditional asylum seekers in Turkey, the TPR also placed the guests’ destiny mostly in the hands of the Turkish state with little in the way of protection from international agencies.

The Syrians’ state-ascribed status of misafir in Antakya also created problems for their local integration beyond these institutional processes of identification. Unlike in major Turkish cities such as Istanbul and Ankara, the Syrian misafir in Antakya never denoted a unified identity marked by national citizenship. Instead, this status embodied multiple positionalities anchored in the local vernaculars of ethnicity, language, kinship, and religion. While negotiating the implications of these positionalities for their own self-image as Turkish citizens, Antakya's long-term Arabophone residents drew on customary traditions and historical registers of hospitality. They construed the state's hospitality toward Syrian newcomers on the basis of their own experiences of hosting and being guests in ordinary settings, experiences that formed the basis of but also transcended the official rhetoric of guesthood.

Anthropologists have long observed hospitality as one of the most intimate ways of interacting with people outside of one's own household in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean contexts.Footnote ²⁹ They have examined how the routine of hosting others establishes and strengthens relationships based on neighborliness, partnership, camaraderie, and kinship, and defines the internal and external boundaries of the house.Footnote ³⁰ They have also shown how such relationships can be bound up with jealousy, familial and communal hierarchies, and sociospatial exclusions.Footnote ³¹ Like Derrida's “conditional hospitality,” which entails hostility, everyday hospitality upholds and creates conflict as much as it establishes intimacy and social solidarity.

In Antakya, this power-laden intimacy is most evident in the moral weight of being a host, where it operates through the display of certain objects, the performance of certain rituals, and hierarchies of reciprocity. For instance, almost all kinds of social arrangements start with the visit of one party to another's house, a visit that must be reciprocated later for the continuation of the relationship. Women arrange rotating reception days (gün) in the guestrooms of their homes, where they offer each other coffee, food, and company; demonstrate their cooking and hosting skills; and share gossip and news. Alongside these güns (some of which are exclusive to women of a particular religious community) there are also visits that include both men and women; ideally, these involve two or three families that may be relatives, neighbors, or business partners. Customers in the historical souk or visitors to people's workplaces are always greeted as if they are a misafir in a house and insistently offered coffee or tea until they accept. Most such visits end with the misafir stating, “We're expecting you” (biz de sizi bekleriz), an implication that the visit should be reciprocated.

Expectations of reciprocity in both public and private visits are often disrupted by people's understandings of themselves as hosts more so than as guests. Through the phenomenon that Anne Meneley describes in her work on sociability in a Yemeni town as “competitive hospitality,” men and women manifest their status and wealth in their separate spheres of hosting.Footnote ³² Andrew Shryock observes a similar tendency in Balgawi tales of hospitality, in which leaders of different tribes take pride in their hosting abilities and challenge one another in rivalries of generosity that are measured against an impossible ideal of hospitality, one that resonates with the Derridian ethics of unconditional hospitality.Footnote ³³ Barbara Aswad's analysis of Sunni Muslim women's visitation patterns in Antakya in the 1960s portrays a balanced reciprocity in which the failure to return the visit equivalently and within an agreed upon time limit means either a break in the relationship or the affirmation of the higher rank of one party over the other.Footnote ³⁴ The host's prestige is measured by the number and status of her guests as well as her ability to not reciprocate a visit. Across the border in Damascus, Christa Salamandra describes women's customary morning coffee visits (subḥiyya) and monthly afternoon receptions (istiqbāl) as gendered sites of competitive display.Footnote ³⁵ Mirroring women's güns in Antakya, these gatherings frame the act of hosting as a marker of social distinction, familiar today to both Antakya's long-term residents and Syrian misafirs.

Consequently, in Antakya, I noticed that people often speak from the position of and desire to be the subjects rather than the objects of welcome. For instance, a common expression that indicates the high status of one's family is “I come from a family that hosted [was able to host] guests” (misafir ağırlayan bir aileden geliyorum). One's power is defined by the ability to host others, stage that hospitality, and be recognized as a host; it is this position that allows the host to compete with other hosts and show mastery of the rules of hospitality. Reciprocity and the desire to not reciprocate are intrinsic, rather than in contradiction, to each other, however. The host status owes its power and moral value to the social fact that hospitality can be and often is reciprocated in actual relations.

What happens, then, when hospitality is invoked by the state to address an outsider who is in no position to reciprocate and thus cannot enter into related social networks? What does the micropolitics of everyday hospitality in Antakya reveal about the grounds and limits of this political invocation? Meryem's question “Whose misafirs?” underscored the disintegration of reciprocity in the case of hosting the new Syrian misafirs and articulated a tension between political categorizations of hospitality and the multilayered realities of guesthood in Antakya. On the one hand, social identities ascribed to the Syrians on the basis of their ethnic origin, national citizenship, and religious affiliation gained their meaning in interpersonal relations of hospitality. On the other hand, neither the guesthood of Syrians nor the associated discourses of hospitality in everyday settings was independent of the historically contingent characteristics of the Turkish–Syrian border and the processes of displacement endemic to the Middle Eastern borderlands. This multifold relationship complicates the perspectives on hospitality in migration literature that focus predominantly on hospitality's rhetorical or biopolitical use by state institutions and humanitarian agencies.Footnote ³⁶ This relationship also addresses the underexamined question of how group affiliations surrounding citizenship figure in the daily negotiations of guesthood in the Middle East.Footnote ³⁷ My ethnography suggests that the familial relations of hospitality studied widely by anthropologists of the Middle East are not exclusive of but concurrent—and indeed interdependent—with the social identities that arise historically from such affiliations.

THE MAKING OF HATAY AS A BORDER TOWN

Prior to the Syrian conflict, “the Syrian” occupied an ambiguous position among Antakyans, shifting between kin, neighbor, and enemy. The history of this ambiguity dated back to the region's incorporation into modern Turkey and the ensuing minoritization of ethnoreligious identities and population displacement.

Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, Antakya, the harbor city İskenderun, and the Amik Plain were excluded from the national pact of the newly founded Turkish Republic and instead became part of French Mandate Syria as the Sanjak of Alexandretta.Footnote ³⁸ While Turkey was undergoing national homogenization in an attempt to dissociate itself from the dissolved empire's multiconfessional legacy, France employed the colonial governing tactic of emphasizing the ethnic and religious diversity of the sanjak's inhabitants, a tactic that had also underlain the French subdivision of the Mandate into six states.Footnote ³⁹ By the early 1930s, the Sanjak of Alexandretta contained about twenty-one religious communities that spoke at least five languages (Turkish, Arabic, Armenian, Kurdish, and Circassian).Footnote ⁴⁰ Despite the rigid classifications of ethnic groups in official French statistics, it was not uncommon for people in Antakya to speak more than two languages, with one or more of these functioning primarily as an instrument for commerce, prayer, or government rather than as a determinant of ethnic identity.Footnote ⁴¹

In the context of the efforts of European states to consolidate power and cultivate allies in the run-up to World War II, France reached an agreement with Turkey in 1937 to recognize Alexandretta as an independent state.Footnote ⁴² This state was called the Republic of Hatay in reference to the Hittites, the ancient Anatolian people claimed as “proto-Turkish” and also as ancestors of the local Alawis.Footnote ⁴³ The politics of naming places and communities reflected the increasing political significance of population numbers in deciding the fate of Hatay State. Central to such population wars was uncertainty about whether “minority” and “nationality” were objective designations identifiable through ethnic, linguistic, or religious affiliation, or subjective psychological processes based on individuals’ feelings of belonging.Footnote ⁴⁴ Turkey coerced and persuaded the region's local inhabitants to identify with Turkishness and to register in the Turkish electoral body; the Turkish government also resettled ethnically and linguistically Turkish populations in the region, thus characterizing the republic's relationship to Hatay.Footnote ⁴⁵

In 1939 the Hatay parliament voted for Hatay's annexation to Turkey, and the process—even today still not formally recognized by Syria—was completed with a referendum stage-managed from Ankara.Footnote ⁴⁶ The ambiguous and multiple identities of its people have positioned Hatay at the nation's periphery throughout the history of modern Turkey because they exposed a gap, so central to the processes of state-making in former Ottoman territories, between the state's territorial sovereignty and people's right of self-determination.Footnote ⁴⁷ In Hatay, as elsewhere in the region, this gap manifested in an extended process of forced migrations and minoritization of entire populations that had held relatively stable positions until the late Ottoman period.Footnote ⁴⁸

Unable to fit in with the dominant ideologies of Turkish citizenship and fearing reprisals, many people left for Syria and Lebanon after the annexation. The first to leave were the Armenians, some of whom had been resettled in the region by France after surviving the 1915 genocide.Footnote ⁴⁹ They were eventually followed by the Alawis, Orthodox Christians, and Sunni Arabs, as well as some Turks unhappy with the republic's secular identity.Footnote ⁵⁰ The exclusionary nationalism of the early republican era led to state support for the development of a Muslim bourgeoisie with the introduction in 1942 of the Wealth Levy that specifically targeted well-off Christians and Jews and with the confiscation of the properties of non-Muslim foundations. These developments further encouraged outmigration by non-Muslims—to Europe in the case of Christians, and to Israel and North America in the case of Jews. Fear and violence during the political unrest of the 1970s and after the 1980 military coup led to another wave of migration for the region's Jews and Christians. As the Turkish populations of these communities dwindled, younger generations moved to cities (such as Istanbul) with larger Christian and Jewish populations to study and find partners. At the start of my research in 2011, only about 110 Christian families and ten Jewish families resided in Antakya.Footnote ⁵¹

Non-Muslim communities who remained often encountered suspicion about their role in the delay of Hatay's union with Turkey. They were treated as potential transgressors and felt themselves to be second-class citizens always needing to prove their loyalty to the Turkish state. In an attempt to evade suspicion about their true attachments, many Arabic-speaking residents of Antakya emphasized their love for Turkey in our first conversations and communicated their resentments only after they knew me better. These resentments, it should be emphasized, did not necessarily contradict their first remarks. Their communities had been assimilated into Turkey even if they maintained relationships with the Arab world: new generations, for example, had a better knowledge of Turkish than of Arabic—the end result of six decades of assimilationist education policies on the part of the Turkish Republic. Many of those younger generations referred to themselves and to each other as “Turkish” and distinguished themselves from Syrian Arabs, whom they characterized (following Turkish conventions) as “dirty,” “disorderly,” and “religiously conservative.” The necessity people felt to highlight their nationalism reflected their experiences of exclusion from hegemonic understandings of Turkish citizenship. The same necessity, together with a feeling of resentment, nevertheless implied their desire to be recognized by Turkey, not Syria.

FROM NEIGHBORS AND WIVES TO MISAFIRS

The ambivalent positionality inhabited by “the Syrian” was perhaps most apparent in the intimate domain of the family. Even as the Turkish–Syrian border divided communities and isolated many from their extended kin, Antakyans continued to establish familial relationships with people from Syria.Footnote ⁵² Indeed, cross-border marriages between people of the same faith were strongly desired by the city's diminishing communities of Jews and Christians. It was easier for members of these communities to find an acceptable match of the same faith in Syria than in the rest of Turkey, especially when they could not find one in Hatay. Because such marriages were often followed by the resettlement of the newlywed wife in the place where the husband and his family lived, “the Syrian” as a family member in Antakya referred to the wife rather than the husband. During my fieldwork, I met and became close to two such women, Salma and Dima, who ambivalently cohabited the positions of kin and misafir, and whose stories of border crossing for marriage were woven with the displacement of their larger communities.

Salma was the daughter of a rabbi in Damascus, where she had grown up and worked as a teacher in an elementary school for Jewish boys. One day, a visiting acquaintance of the school's director (who was the Jewish community leader in Aleppo) told her that a young Jew in Antakya was looking for a suitable wife. He asked her whether she would like to live in Turkey, a possibility that her parents thought over and decided to try. This was in 1984, during the years of conflict under the rule of Hafiz al-Asad when it was not easy for the Syrian Jewish community to go abroad, partly due to tensions between Syria and Israel. Eventually, with passports and a one-month visa in hand, the family went to Antakya.

The two families quickly reached an agreement, and by the second week of the visit Salma married Isak, who worked in his family's housewares store in the historic souk. Isak and Salma moved into his family's apartment on the grounds of the synagogue in the old city and lived with her in-laws for some ten years. Her parents left after the wedding, and although some of her family members have visited her, she herself has never been back to Syria, in part because she has feared being arrested by Syrian officials for not returning before the expiration of her Turkish visa. There was little left for her to go back to anyway, she said, since a large part of her community in Damascus had emigrated to the United States in the early 1990s after an agreement between the two countries.Footnote ⁵³

Although like Salma's story in many ways, Dima's was very different. She had moved to Antakya from Aleppo in the 1970s upon her marriage to Hamid, a Christian artisan in Antakya's historical souk whom she had met during one of his visits to Syria. Dima's family was originally from Antakya but, afraid of losing their rights and properties under the Turkish regime, had emigrated to Aleppo along with other Christian families during the annexation. Unlike Salma, who learned Turkish well enough to interact with her customers in the marketplace where she worked with Isak, Dima stopped working after she married at the age of thirty, spent most of her time at home, and spoke very little Turkish, preferring to communicate in Arabic with her neighbors and sellers in the market. The TV in the guest room of Dima's house was always on, broadcasting religious programs from an Orthodox Christian channel in Syria or Turkish soap operas to which she owed her limited Turkish.

Personally both women's connections to Syria were diminished by their marriages, but publicly those connections were emphasized by members of their new communities in Antakya. For instance, while conversing with some men in the synagogue about the life of Antakya Jews, when I explicitly mentioned Salma's name as someone whose religiosity impressed me, one man said, “You know she is from Syria, right? She is different from us. Syrian Jews are more conservative. We are more modern and secular!” as the others nodded in silent agreement. Since all these men were practicing Jews and it was Salma's Jewishness that made her entry to the community possible, I take this comment to be less about discrimination and more about a communal self-representation bound to the interactional context of its utterance. When my questions about Jewish religiosity reminded those men of my identity as a Turkish-Canadian researcher, they endeavored to express their commitment to the Turkish national discourse of secularism by dissociating their community from any links with Syria. In other words, this immediate attempt to differentiate the Antakyan Jew from the Syrian Jew expressed the anxieties of the former (whose loyalty to the Turkish state was under continuous suspicion) about being identified with the latter.

Jacob, a member of the Orthodox Community Foundation, used the term misafir to overcome his anxiety about Dima's background. During one of my visits to his office, we were conversing about the misafir status of the Syrian arrivals, and Jacob told me that if it became necessary, the Orthodox community would be willing to welcome their fellow Christians from Syria in the guesthouse that was attached to their church.Footnote ⁵⁴ He added, “But we also need to ensure the safety of our own community. We cannot let just anybody in.” Amid this conversation, Dima walked past his office toward her home and waved at him. He reciprocated, then turned to me to make the interruption relevant to our conversation: “You see her? She is also a misafir here for many years.” When I asked him what he meant by that, he said, “Her roots are somewhere else.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Having left their homes and lives in Syria under completely different circumstances, Dima and Salma certainly cannot be simply lumped in with the new Syrian refugees settling in Hatay, even those who shared their religions (respectively, Christianity and Judaism). Jacob's emphasis on “roots” while comparing these two groups as misafirs to me is nevertheless telling. In defining guesthood as “uprootedness,” Jacob conflated past and present articulations of the difference of Syrian nationals in Antakya, built on the displacement, fragmentation, and minoritization of their communities in the making of national borders in the Middle East.Footnote ⁵⁶ After all, the stories of Dima and Salma of becoming “Syrian” brides were not merely personal or familial, but were also shaped by the imposition of territorial borders between Turkey and Syria.

Their citizenship prior to marriage marked these women as “familial misafirs” and thus “intimate outsiders” within their own family circle, excluded in public discourse yet included in social life. As such, their experiences anticipated the ambivalent domain of hospitality that the recently displaced Syrians came to occupy (and challenged) in the eyes of Christian and Jewish peoples of Antakya.

SYRIANS AS BAD MISAFIRS

Dima's and Salma's guesthood was framed in this realm of proximate relatedness and was managed primarily by the communities they joined. This, however, was not the case for the first arrivals to Antakya from Syria after the conflict began in March 2011. As the question “Whose misafirs?” implied, the problem for people like Meryem was not so much the misafir status of the Syrian refugees, which in fact resonated with how Antakya residents have long been interacting with the Syrians in their own family circles. Rather, the problem was the unknown identity of these new misafirs and the well-known identity of their hosts. “If these Syrians were my misafirs in my home,” Meryem continued during our conversation, “I would do everything on my part to make them feel welcome. But I would also know who they were, how long they would stay, and what they wanted from me. We don't know any of these—only the government does!”

Meryem's suppositional approach to hosting Syrians in her own home acknowledges how power operates in everyday hospitality with respect to time, mutual expectations of guest and host, and the ability to host and recognize the misafir’s identity. As misafirs of the Turkish state rather than of Antakya's local communities, the Syrian refugees not only were removed from these domains and networks of sociality, but also symbolized the official denial of host status to the region's existing religious minorities. A member of the Orthodox Community Foundation in Antakya put this problem into words: “We are one of the most rooted people, who have existed in these lands for centuries, but we have now become minorities. As the government welcomes all these people [Syrians] with an open-border policy, we have become like unwelcome misafirs in our own homes.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Although invoked in the recent context of the Syrian conflict, guesthood here denotes a historical link between minoritization and dispossession, underlining the long-term marginalization of the Arab Christian community in Turkey. If not already deported through internationally sanctioned agreements (as in the postannexation exodus from HatayFootnote ⁵⁸ ), communities labeled as “minorities” were recognized as citizens of the newly formed nations, yet their ethnic, religious, and linguistic difference from the “majority” marked them permanently as foreign to national history and as a threat to its sovereignty.Footnote ⁵⁹ Being a misafir of the state, then, meant not only occupying an ambivalent position between insider and outsider, but also being the threat associated with that position.

The unexpected guesthood of Syrian refugees under the government's supervision only intensified such associations, tying these communities’ past experiences of being at the peripheries of national citizenship to new forms of precarity related to the conflict across the border as well as to Turkish foreign policy in regard to Syria. For instance, long before Erdoğan's public statements on the matter, some of my interlocutors suspected that the Syrians would eventually be given citizenship and integrate easily into society as supporters of the government. Others drew parallels between the government's “excessive hospitality” toward Syrians—in the form of free healthcare, work permits, and education—and the resettling in Hatay of landless Sunni Turks from the Black Sea region in the 1960s and of Sunni Afghans in the 1980s. After all, since its annexation to Turkey in 1939, Hatay had witnessed systematic resettlement policies intended to increase the number of Turkish and Sunni inhabitants. According to my interlocutors, the first group of Syrians who crossed the border in 2011 comprised Turkish-speaking Sunni Syrians; they were followed by Sunni Arabs.

Adding to these parallels was the fear that the conflict across the border would spread to the Hatay region, which according to my interlocutors was a convenient base for opposition forces and a hub for smuggling weapons and rebel soldiers into Syria.Footnote ⁶⁰ Referring to Erdoğan's statement, made shortly after the first Syrians’ arrival, that events in Syria were for Turkey “a domestic issue” rather than an international affair,Footnote ⁶¹ Yeşim, an Antakya Jew in her thirties, remarked: “How can Syria be Turkey's domestic issue when its own citizens are not considered and treated as such?”Footnote ⁶² For people like Yeşim, the kind of misafirs Syrians were in the eyes of the state was directly related to the kind of misafirs they themselves had historically been, showing the contours of who it was that occupied the realm of the “domestic” and under what circumstances.

In this context, Antakya's non-Muslim residents once again strove to differentiate themselves from the Syrians and regain their status as hosts by contrasting their deep historical roots in Antakya with the guesthood of Syrians. This comparison involved references to everyday relations of hospitality and expressed anxiety over the possibility of the Syrians settling permanently and taking on the status of hosts, as evident in the following conversation:

A Christian store owner in the souk made a similar comment after repeating rumors that I had heard many times about the newly arrived Syrians going to restaurants in the city and not paying for the food with the excuse that they didn't like it. This rumor was reported as news in local and national newspapers after the number of Syrian misafirs in Hatay increased, with some versions of the story having the cook or restaurant owners being beaten by the customers.Footnote ⁶³ This store owner's concluding comments about these rumors were remarkable: “They show no sign of gratitude. This is not how a misafir should behave!”

Although such incidents were prevalent in public discourse, none of my interlocutors actually witnessed or experienced any of them. Hence, the significance of their narration for my analysis lies in their indexical rather than referential function. In his study of Balgawi hospitality in Jordan, Andrew Shryock argues that bad hosts and bad guests in local historical accounts function as morality tales, registering “the ethical and political weight of the hospitality complex” and increasing the value of those who endure such encounters.Footnote ⁶⁴ As made evident by the statements above, people in Antakya communicated their anxieties about the Syrian misafirs in a similar manner, expressing what good guests and hosts they themselves were in contrast to the Syrians. On the one hand, Syrians were identified as bad misafirs who refused to accept the proper role of guest, showed no respect, became parasitic, and even went so far as to claim the power and rights of their hosts.Footnote ⁶⁵ On the other hand, even having bad guests did not automatically justify showing bad hospitality (at least in the way people talked about such incidents). Giving the impression of being bad hosts could damage one's reputation and in that sense was no less dangerous than the bad guests who violated the rules of hospitality.

The moral weight of being a host and the dangers of unknown guests, however, are both inflected by the state-created conditions of ethnoreligious difference. What made Syrians unwanted guests for Antakya's non-Muslim communities was not simply their alterity but the confirmation, through their guesthood, of the Turkish state's authority as the ultimate host. People held what they considered to be the state's excessive hospitality as responsible for the threat of intrusion that they faced. They believed, as Meryem put it, that “Syrians wouldn't do such things if they weren't backed by the state.” And the backing of the Syrians by the state was yet another indicator for them of how they themselves were understood as the misafirs of Turkey rather than as a “domestic issue.”

Although for different reasons, the state hospitality continued to pose a problem even after the Syrians came to live among these groups. Consider the following statement by Ferit on the Hatay Governorship's attempt to regulate his church's interaction with Syrian refugees:

In this statement, Ferit reclaimed the “host” status from the state on behalf of his Christian community. Yet he didn't introduce the possibility of a similar change in status for the Syrians whom he described as perpetual misafirs, lacking the resources to reciprocate as hosts and often showing signs of ungratefulness as guests. By contrast, his wife Yasemin alluded to the possibility of future communal incorporation while addressing this problem of reciprocity in the context of the mundane practices of hosting and visiting. During our interview, she told me of a Syrian woman whom she had met at her church and saw afterwards at a few gün gatherings, which were held as a part of the larger visitation network composed of Christian women. When I asked her if this woman became a regular member of the network, Yasemin responded: “She needs to be a bit more settled down for that to happen. I know the rental place she currently lives in. It is the basement unit of the house owned by our church's priest's relative. Not really appropriate for having people over. I am sure she prefers this arrangement to the shame of being an inadequate host.”Footnote ⁶⁷

While the label “the Syrian” continued to mark difference in these statements, it is clear that this difference was no longer circumscribed by the state categorizations of the misafir. It was religious proximity, shared language, and socioeconomic conditions rather than bounded citizenship that determined the conditions of and changes for reciprocity in the host–guest relations. Ferit's problem with state involvement was also framed in these terms. The political significance of the misafir resided not in state action but in its everyday connotations as a moral, emotional, and intimate realm of relatedness, within which the Syrians—albeit not yet the host—could also potentially inhabit the positions of tenant, client, or employee irrespective of their ethnoreligious affiliations.