| This investigation examines the interactions between Turkish-language schools and the Greek state during the early interwar period, lasting from the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne on the 24th of July, 1923 to the appointment of Ioannis Metaxas as Prime Minister by King George III on the 13th of April, 1936. These schools served a population known as the Muslim Minority of West Thrace, and were subject to a complex range of domestic and international laws. Until now, trends in minority education in West Thrace have been interpreted primarily through the twinned lenses of nationalism and modernizing reformism. By drawing upon under-utilized documents produced by the Ministry of Churches and Public Education and held by the General State Archives in Athens, I argue that neither concept sufficiently explains the complex ways in which the Greek state sought to shape the development of minority schools.;Focusing upon the lives of individual teachers and the rhetorical and moral frameworks used to contextualize their work in the schools, I discuss the extent to which different branches of the Greek state undertook interventions into minority education. I show that while the state did take an active role in shaping policies such as the use of the Latin alphabet to write Turkish, it was neither willing nor able to control all aspects of school administration. Instead, it worked with and through the school boards---thereby demonstrating that local voices and pressures did exert a measure of communal agency that deserves more serious and sustained scholarly recognition. |
