Introduction: The ‘Turks’ in the Imagination of the ‘Greeks’

Greek views of their Turkish neighbours draw inspiration from a wide variety of sources. These include perceptions of resemblance and difference, metaphors of inclusion and exclusion, ideas promoted by national education, adaptations of history, painful personal memories, and experiences of friendly contact. This introductory chapter explores these themes as they emerge in the anthropological literature and suggests that the notion of the generalized Turk, in the mind of those people who identify themselves as Greeks, can be approached as a ‘hollow category’. The concept encapsulates several potential identities for the Turks formulated by Others. The hollow capacity of this type of categorization accommodates a continuous but incomplete process of interpretation and reinterpretation, in the context of which new and old information are combined to substantiate more or less conventional evaluations of the Turks.