Erol Haker recounts the history of the Sephardic Jewish Adoto family, which originally hails from the town of Kirklareli. This is one of the few books to describe the Jewish population of Turkish Thrace.
SKU (ISBN): 978-1-61719-091-9
Publication Status: In Print
Publication Date: Aug 11,2010
Interior Color: Black
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Page Count: 321
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-61719-091-9
It is not well known that the town of Kirklareli in Turkish Thrace was once home to a Sephardic Jewish community. Today, due to emigration, only a few individuals remain. Erol Haker, whose parents were originally from Kirlareli, tells the story of three generations of the Adoto family, which has resided in Kirklareli since its expulsion from Spain at the end of the fifteenth century. Using the archives of the Alliance school in Kirklaerli as well as interviews with surviving natives of the town, Haker describes the Jewish lives in the nineteenth century and then their experience of traumatic events from the Balkan and First World Wars and the arrival of Bulgarian and Greek armies until the anti-Jewish riots of the 1930s. Haker’s work serves to reminds us of the fact that the Thracian Jewish community was one of the Ottoman Empire’s most vibrant and that Kirklareli was, until the early years of the Turkish Republic, still home to an important part of Turkey’s Jewish population.
