Story:

These are my old keys, from my home in Istanbul. The last time I used them was 5 years ago. I used them to get inside my house! When I came here, I took them with me, now other people live in that house of course, they have different keys, but I keep them.

Tsintem narrates that she arrived in Greece 5 years ago.

It wasn’t a choice, it was a need. In 2017, 1.228 academics signed a text, it’s called a peace text. This text was against Erdogan and after that a big hunt started. These academics lost their jobs, their passports, all their rights. And some decided, out of necessity of course, to leave Turkey, because life was impossible there for them, without a job or a passport. There was no chance for them to find another job, because the government created codes for them which didn’t allow them to be hired in Turkey anymore. Some of them even had their bank accounts blocked, they lost their right for retirement, and so on. For this reason, any one of them who found a job outside of Turkey, in Europe, or, some of them, in the USA, in Canada, left the country one way or another. That is the story. I am also one of these academics and that’s how I decided to come here. But Greece wasn’t a foreign country to me because I had been here many times already in the previous years, I have many friends here, I know but am still learning the language, but for this reason I was forced to leave the country and my choice was to come here.

Tsintem arrived in Greece with her husband, who had already been in the country for two years. She proceeds to tell us about her home, in which she had been living for 14 years.

What is a home? Can you really say? I mean, to me, a home is not the walls, the couches, I don’t care about that. It’s the memories, I mean, what I lived in there, with whom, who would come. It’s kind of like my roots. I adjusted in Greece and in Athens, as much as possible, but I don’t want to forget the images I still have, from when I was in Istanbul. The keys are one image for me. Every now and then I think about changing the keychain, to take it off, put it on the keys I now have for my current home, but no, something holds me back and I keep it as it is.