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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how members of the Arabic-speaking Orthodox community from Turkey narrate identity as they move from a minority to a migrant regime through migration to Greece. Drawing on ethnography in Istanbul and Athens, it shows how scripts of belonging shape recognition and legitimisation.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how members of the Arabic-speaking Orthodox community from Turkey narrate identity and belonging as they move from a minority regime to a migrant regime through migration to Greece. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in both Istanbul and Athens, it analyses how marginality is produced and managed across two distinct institutional systems that regulate recognition and legitimacy in different ways.

In Turkey, members of the Arabic-speaking Orthodox community occupy a marginal position within the larger Greek Orthodox minority, where minority status itself is shaped by institutional suspicion, legal constraint, and state surveillance. Arabic language and Arabness further mark internal differentiation, producing marginalisation within an already regulated minority framework. In Athens, migration places these individuals within a migrant regime characterised less by overt surveillance than by institutional ambiguity and classificatory awkwardness. Here, individuals are no longer governed through minority law but are reclassified through migration and citizenship systems in which they may be recognised as co-ethnics, treated as foreigners, or rendered legible only through vague or “unspecified” categories of origin.

The paper analyses how individuals navigate these contrasting regimes by strategically mobilising narratives of Orthodoxy, Greekness, and diaspora. These narrative practices are closely tied to institutional survival across both sites, enabling access to education, residence, and long-term settlement in Greece. Recognition functions as a source of institutional stability, while prolonged non-recognition or recognition under inappropriate categories produces uncertainty, leaving individuals in extended states of bureaucratic and social ambiguity.vTogether, these regimes enable survival while reproducing vulnerability across polarisation.