Reshaping Alien Silhouette and Transforming Islamic Skyline of the Previously Ottoman Settlements; the Case of Greece
Authors: HOŞ Yüksel Bekir 
Published: December 2021

Due to the fact that ethnic geography is often forgotten in studies on historical geography, the main factor in the differentiation of geographical environment is often attributed to a change that its subject is variable. However, the subject is immutable and human being. People transform their environment in various ways according to their economic, cultural, religious, and social needs. Cities that change hands with political movements change completely after a while, and in some, almost everything can be erased except relief. Changing recreational and cultural areas, cultural texture, and changing city culture of cities have revealed new cities known with their old names, and sometimes they have reappeared in the world geography as new cities where even their old names have been changed. In this case, the existence of a historical German town with a German name and a German texture in its architecture in a country like Azerbaijan and a minaret that could stay in the middle of Hungary gains even more meaning. While changing cities preserve the changing cultural and architectural environments within themselves, many buildings that need to be preserved are sometimes deliberately erased from the silhouette of the cities, sometimes within the context of the historical process, natural disasters, and needs. At this point, the settlements, with their different periods of transformation differing from their former inhabitants and cultures, create areas that history and geography should deal with together. In this study, the spatial transformation caused by the human being was evaluated together with the sample settlements, old and new photographs, and street views, and the reasons affecting this change and the differentiation it revealed were emphasized. In the study, the relevant literature was scanned and the necessary archival documents and the reports of the competent authorities were used, but more land surveys and interviews were made. The main ethnic element living in the place and the issues such as ignoring its own existence in the environment where it lives and paving the way for other places of worship, as well as the construction of Non-Community churches in Muslim villages, zoning law in the country and the tenders for its past, and the ethnocultural environment shaped as a result of these and the changed human geography have been revealed. The main difficulties encountered in the making of this study were the inadequacy of the relevant literature within the scope of the article, as well as the reluctance of official authorities (Greek institutions) to provide documents and their presupposition that there is no double standard against Muslim religious institutions. despite this, the obvious deformation of the silhouette on the field and the scraping of historical artifacts from the city silhouettes, almost as if history were disregarded, were so obvious that no documents other than photographs were needed. Despite this, the part of the old mosques that were allowed to exist, especially in Western Thrace, should have been considered in a separate category. In this context, in the analyzed regions, practices such as destruction, hiding, concealment, or leaving them to be demolished have also been observed. Before this study, the antithesis of the thesis put forward in the article was also examined separately and the possibility of the coincidence of the issues mentioned in the study was also emphasized. In this context, the article has been written with skepticism, from a middle point, and an unbiased perspective. However, in almost all practices, it has been clearly seen that there was no protectionist tendency by Greek authorities towards Muslim religious structures and they do not leave them in their "actual form" as they should be on the city skyline, regarding them as "alien objects". As a matter of fact, this view of the Greek authorities has been proved and revealed by the pictures from the field as well as the statutes and the documents based on the data obtained from the interviews conducted with concerned authorities through the instrumentality of ethnography, discourse analysis, and grounded theory.