ECMI Minorities Blog. Pomak Minority Women and the Fallout of Male Migration
*** The blog posts are prepared by the authors in their personal capacity. The views expressed in the blog posts are the sole responsibility of the authors concerned and do not necessarily reflect the view of the European Centre for Minority Issues. ***
Author: Marta Averof | https://doi.org/10.53779/VIVI1711
* Marta Averof is a Greek-Italian researcher interested in human rights, conflict resolution, gender and minority issues. She is a recent graduate of the University of Cambridge and the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Contact: marta.averof@
gmail.com
Western Thrace, Greece’s easternmost region, is home to most of the country’s Muslim minority population, including Pomaks, a component of the minority of around 30,000 people. Pomak communities live in remote mountain villages close to the Bulgarian border, speak a Slavic dialect (as well as Turkish, in some cases), and have suffered a painful history of extreme exclusion from the rest of Greece.
Nowadays, few young men are left in Pomak villages (‘Pomakochoria’). As in other cases where men depart from their communities for seasonal migrant labour, it has become commonplace in the last ten to twenty years for Pomak men to travel abroad to work in shipyards. They are most often hired for jobs in Germany and the Netherlands, typically for three to nine months at a time, and return home periodically between contracts.
Pomak women rarely accompany men abroad. Instead, they remain in their village to raise their families and keep community ties alive, supported by the generous remittances sent by migrant men. This pattern echoes numerous reported cases documenting how men’s financial and social remittances (i.e., ideas, behaviours, and social capital transmitted through migration) have affected community and gender relations both positively and negatively.
In late 2023, I undertook field research in the Pomakochoria (Figure 1) and conducted interviews with local residents. Behind the excitement of newfound financial freedom, I observed women who are struggling with burdensome family responsibilities, loneliness, growing jealousies within their communities, and persisting marginalisation in Greek society.
A history of military surveillance and second-class citizenship
Pomaks have historically experienced a unique set of Greek state policies that the Turkish (and largely urban) component of the Muslim minority has not. The majority of the Pomak population of Greece – those inhabiting the Rhodope mountains in Western Thrace – were subjected to sixty years of strict movement restrictions. From the mid-1930s to 1996, they lived in a state-sanctioned military surveillance zone (epitiroúmeni zóni). A militarised border, known as the ‘bára’ (‘barrier’ in Greek), cut off mountain villages north of the city of Xanthi from the rest of the national territory. This was established due to fears that Pomaks would endanger national security by developing ties to Pomak groups across the Bulgarian border, a preoccupation magnified during the Cold War by the looming threat of communism.
Pomaks were viewed as doubly suspicious because of their religious (Muslim) and ethnocultural/linguistic (Pomak) identity. As a result, Pomak villages were placed under surveillance to a much greater extent than neighbouring Christian-majority villages, and remained in the surveillance zone while the latter were removed during border relaxations in the 1970s.
Surveillance involved prohibitions on movement from midnight to 5am. During the day, Pomaks were required to show police-issued passes to enter or leave the surveillance zone through army-controlled checkpoints. They also needed to obtain special permits that authorised them to work, obtain a driver’s licence, or migrate to another village. Meanwhile, employment outside the zone could only be secured through approved mediators.
Over half of the Pomak population remained under surveillance until 1996. By then, it had been six years since the collapse of Bulgarian communism, and five years since the then Prime Minister of Greece, Konstantinos Mitsotakis, had called for ‘isonomía-isopolitía’ – judicial and civic equality for all Greek citizens. Emine (all names used in the text are pseudonyms), a 55-year-old Pomak woman, remembers her experience of restrictions:
To be in Greece, and to not be allowed to get into Greece! … It was very difficult. We were afraid sometimes: they [border officers] might let us go out through the checkpoint, but when we returned, they would sometimes not let us get back.
Movement restrictions had devastating economic effects on Pomaks. Families were forced to survive on subsistence-based agriculture. The only economic opportunity in the surveillance zone was the cultivation of tobacco, introduced in the 1970s and sold to the few wholesalers authorised to enter the villages.
Older Pomaks describe the bára period as ‘difficult years’ of widespread poverty and isolation. In Emine’s words, the Greek state acted ‘as if we didn’t exist. […] The state saw us as a “nothing” because we are Muslim, even though we are Greeks.’ Despite being legally recognised as Greek citizens, in substance Pomaks did not truly belong as members of the nation-state.
The transformative effect of male migration
Because of the severe underdevelopment of their villages, Pomak men sought permits to work in Greek cities outside the surveillance zone. Once checkpoints were abolished in the mid-1990s, but amid continuing state neglect, men also started being recruited and looked for employment abroad. Nowadays, transnational male migration has become strikingly widespread. The vast majority of adult Pomak men (more than two-thirds, according to what locals told me) work or have worked abroad, commonly in construction and repair jobs in shipyards in Germany and the Netherlands. A growing number of local Pomak-owned firms work with Western European employers to hire men on temporary contracts lasting from three to nine months at a time. Fathers, sons, brothers, and brothers-in-law often depart as one cohort, leaving their wives, children, and families behind.
Transnational seasonal migration has truly revolutionised economic prospects for Pomak villagers. They were previously confronted with falling tobacco prices, as well as the scarcity of manual jobs in Greece, intensified by the post-2008 Greek debt crisis. The fact that they were (and generally still are) considered ‘unqualified’ workers made their position within the Greek workforce even more vulnerable. During the bára, most men did not pursue high school or higher education. In fact, entry into Greek universities only became an option for Pomaks when a minority student quota was instituted in 1996. While today virtually all young Pomaks complete secondary education and increasingly more attend university, they often still complain about receiving poor-quality teaching in village minority schools.
The lack of opportunities for upward social mobility for Pomaks within Greece has historically been aggravated by the racialised discrimination they experience as a minority. In a national context of widespread Islamophobia and Turkophobia, Pomaks continue to be identified as a suspicious “foreign” group, or as “backward mountain people” by urban Greeks (including among the urban Turkish minority). Aysel, a 20-year-old Pomak woman, still feels that the country ‘doesn’t see us as normal, they see us as inferior citizens.’ Another interviewee echoes this feeling: ‘the state does not care for us (den mas proséchei), it does not help us be involved in anything.’
Instead, manual jobs abroad have now become ‘the easy solution’ for Pomak men (albeit involving precarious conditions). They may earn 3,000 euro per month working in shipyards, versus 600 euro at a local petrol station. According to Hasan, a retired Pomak builder, ‘if there was no Germany, Pomak villages would be very hungry.’
Pomak women also struggle to find employment in Greece, yet few have migrated to other countries so far. Opportunities abroad are advertised as physically demanding “male” jobs, and women are generally expected to care for their children and elderly relatives. Some parents put a veto on their daughters leaving: ‘parents don’t want for them to change, to become more comfortable’, explains Aysel, ‘because there won’t be family there to stop them from doing whatever they want.’ Even so, male absence is profoundly transforming the lifestyles of Pomak women.
The women who stay behind
The end of restrictions and the spread of male migration have coincided with a cultural shift in how Pomaks view women’s education and the gendered division of labour. During the bára, it was deemed problematic for girls to continue their education past elementary school. Instead, under fathers’ strong patriarchal authority, unmarried girls were expected to harvest tobacco during summer and prepare their dowry during winter. They were also discouraged from learning Greek because men handled all contact with the outside world.
Nowadays, all girls attend high school, and a small group of middle-aged women recently started following a ‘school of second chance’ programme for basic literacy and middle-school level education. Thanks to remittances, Pomak women must no longer farm for subsistence (although some still cultivate vegetables, as seen in Figure 2), and many choose not to work. Surprisingly, some pursue traditionally masculine jobs – like driving taxis and working in grilled meat shops – to cover for their migrant husbands. This is a clear sign that women have gained more freedoms as male absence leaves many positions in the community vacant.
Because of men’s migration, women also bear the weight of managing family responsibilities – I was told that children must seek their mothers’ approval, rather than their fathers’. It is women who discipline their children to follow appropriate social behaviour, and who are particularly active in the local community. In 2018, mothers protested against local administrators to demand improved textbooks in minority schools.
Mothers remain in command of running the household even when fathers return. ‘You know how we say, “the father is the pillar of the family”?’, says Aysel. ‘Well, here, it is the mother necessarily. Whatever the mom says goes.’ This is a notable shift in gender and marital relations within the minority.
But women’s new roles and freedoms come with limits. Married women remain largely dependent on their husbands’ income. As one young man said, the absent father is the ‘bank’ of the family. Numerous mothers describe their new family responsibilities as a huge burden, and several women have reportedly been prescribed tranquillisers and antidepressants as a result of the pressure.
Anticipating these challenging prospects, several young Pomak women I interviewed cannot imagine staying in their village. They aspire to integrate into Greek cities as nurses, beauticians, physiotherapists, makeup artists, or lawyers, or to join their boyfriends or husbands abroad. Instead, older women remain firmly rooted in their villages.
The departure of migrant workers transforms village communities. While several studies have focused on migrants’ loneliness and the rise of consumerism as a direct effect of economic and social remittances, the case of Pomak women puts the spotlight on the gendered hardships of those who stay behind. ‘There is loneliness here, loneliness there’, Aysel shares. Similarly, Ozlem, a mother in her forties, tells me: ‘This migration has to stop someday. It is one thing for the whole family to be here, and another for the man to be away for so many months. Very difficult! Whatever happens, everything is on [the woman]. Everything. She doesn’t have someone to share it with.’ The expectation of essentially raising children alone cultivates overwhelming feelings that no one else is there to help these women.
Jealousy and consumerism
During the bára, the state’s movement restrictions forced the minority to rely on kinship and neighbourhood solidarity. In the current environment, my conversations with local residents reveal that male migration is slowly eroding these internal relationships that helped Pomaks deal with their marginalisation. Across a number of Pomak villages, several interviewees complained about a rise in jealousy and competitiveness between neighbours since men started sending remittances from abroad. Recalling the period of bára restrictions, Emine explains:
There was poverty, but people were more loving. Nowadays, there is no respect. People are jealous when others succeed in something or do something better: “why do you have this, and I don’t?” and “why could they go there, and I couldn’t?” All this didn’t matter before.
After his son’s birth, Ali, a local teacher, heard gossip circulating in his village that ‘the teacher’s home was the poorest’ because he had not updated his furniture since his wedding. He believes this fixation on material things is influenced by what Pomaks see abroad and on social media (particularly the younger generation).
I was told that appearance-related antagonisms were most pronounced in Echinos. This village, one of the largest Pomakochoria, is where many local Pomak men who employ other migrants are based. Selma, a 24-year-old, describes how ‘you go into a house, and even the glass they serve you might be gold. They want to show the money they have.’ In fact, luxury cars are parked all around Echinos (Figure 3).
Since the early years of Pomak migration, researcher Domna Michail reported that migrants acted ‘as carriers of modernisation back to the village by introducing modern conveniences into their houses.’ Modern multi-storey buildings (Figure 4) with new kitchen designs and smart TVs are replacing smaller, older houses. Post-bára exposures to urban culture and deeper integration into the capitalist economy have amplified these materialist attitudes. And the income generated through male migration makes this consumerism more attainable.
I sensed a general uneasiness among interviewees about this individualist, consumerist culture that is slowly taking over many Pomak villages. Often, critical older women attributed these changes and jealousies to young women. But the modern interior design of older women’s homes reveals their own concerns about keeping pace with rising expectations of what it means to successfully manage a modern household.
Nostalgia and the erosion of Pomak conviviality
Ultimately, my conversations with residents in Pomak villages reflect growing anxieties intensified by male migration – related to women’s loneliness, the weight of family responsibilities on mothers, and the pressures of appearance and reputation within the community.
The marginalisation of the minority has fuelled these anxieties, not only by making male migration necessary, but by failing to convince many Pomaks still in Greece that genuine national assimilation is possible for them. Particularly for older women, popular portrayals of Pomaks as backward, conservative, poor, illiterate and “Turkified” Muslims have made the option of leaving the village largely inaccessible and undesirable.
I also found that older Pomak women repeatedly discuss the negative effects of male migration by contrasting it with the past. The way Emine described the period of the bára surprised me:
They were difficult years, but for me (her emphasis), they were our good years. We might not have had money, but we had life (allá eíxame zoí). Now we don’t have… how can I explain this? Happiness (eutichía), let’s say. We’re not as happy as before.
In separate conversations, Ozlem, Halime, and Nesrin reminisced about communal solidarity in tobacco and subsistence farming, and sensed a loss of sociality in their communities. ‘Nowadays, very few families are as tight-knit (deménoi). They all used to be more loving (agapiménoi).’
I argue that what these Pomak women are expressing is nostalgia. I am not suggesting that they want to revert to their old conditions, nor that they have forgotten about the barriers they faced (literally and figuratively). They enjoy their freedoms now and lament many of the restrictions previously imposed on them, as Pomaks and as women.
To better understand their peculiar form of nostalgia, Ayse Parla’s (2019) account of ‘post-communist nostalgia’ is particularly insightful. Her ethnography focuses on female Bulgaristanlı women (of Bulgaria’s ethnic Turkish minority) who have migrated to Istanbul. According to Parla, these women express nostalgia for the rights they were entitled to under Bulgarian communism (e.g., guaranteed paid maternity leave and child support), even though they clearly remember the forceful assimilation they endured under the same regime. Parla shows that Bulgaristanlı women’s nostalgia sheds light onto their precarious living and working conditions in Istanbul. Similarly, I found that Pomak women’s nostalgia for the bára period illuminates their present-day loneliness and family pressures. Furthermore, Parla argues that Bulgaristanlı women express nostalgia for the past as a means to reaffirm their entitlement to better treatment in the present. Drawing on this analysis, I argue that Pomak women use nostalgia as a way of formulating a ‘critical commentary’ (to use Parla’s terms) on the materialism and antisocial attitudes encouraged by male migration.
Left to deal with male absence and community jealousy, and seeing their daughters increasingly wanting to leave the villages too, older women are grieving the loss of Pomak conviviality. What remains is a deep uncertainty about the future of the Pomakochoria, and a worry that the erosion of social ties will outweigh the economic benefits of migration.
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank all the people I talked to during my fieldwork in Xanthi and the villages of Kentavros, Pachni, and Dimario, who opened up their homes to me and were incredibly generous with their time, hospitality and knowledge. I am also grateful to Professor Yael Navaro and Dr Barbara Bodenhorn for their advice and support on this project.
