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2011
53

Commercial transactions and social relations between the Greeks and Turks of Brussels

Press release

Notes de la rédaction

This is the press release related to the article from Katerina Seraïdari, published October 24th 2011. Read the article.

Relations between Greece and Turkey were very tense throughout the 20th century.  Both countries were also countries of emigration, with Belgium being one of their emigrants’ destinations.  What relations did the nationals of these two countries have in Brussels when they found themselves living or working side by side?  That is the question that anthropologist Katerina Seraïdari asks in issue 53 of Brussels Studies, with special attention paid to local commerce, particularly the grocery shops managed by Greek and Turkish immigrants.

A total of 10,195 Greeks were given Belgian work permits between 1955 and 1961.  Most of them emigrated to work in the coal mines.  When the Turks arrived, not too long afterwards, the Greeks already knew the local language and had had time to become familiar with the minor’s trade and the country’s cultural codes.  The relations that they forged with the new immigrants were ones of solidarity, but strongly hierarchical ones.

Basing her work on the members of these Turkish and Greek populations’ own views, the author draws the contours of their cohabitation in Brussels.  The overwhelming majority of the people she interviewed felt that there were no relational problems between these two communities.  The Greeks and Turks mixed regularly in their work lives and continue to do so, particularly in neighbourhood shops selling products from Greece and Turkey. They also frequented the same neighbourhoods, schools, trade unions, grocery shops, and cafés.  However, very few people forged lasting friendships.  It seems that these two groups rubbed shoulders during two specific periods: first in the coal fields, then in certain underprivileged Brussels neighbourhoods into which the two groups moved in the 1970s.  Lasting ties did not develop, however, and once the climb up the social ladder allowed some of them to move to a privileged neighbourhood and move in more affluent circles, these neighbourly ties and bonds of camaraderie unravelled.

The question, so often raised in Brussels, of the (non-)importation of conflicts and rivalries via transnational population movements likewise runs through this text.

References
Seraïdari, Katerina “Commercial transactions and social relations between the Greeks and Turks of Brussels”, Brussels Studies [Online], General collection, No 53, October 24th 2011. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/brussels/1054
Contact
Benjamin Wayens, Senior Editor: bwayens[at]brusselsstudies.be

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