Sille, also known as Sille Subaşı and historically Sylata, is a neighbourhood of the municipality and district of

Selçuklu Selçuklu is a municipality and Districts of Turkey, district of Konya Province, Turkey. Its area is 1,931 km2, and its population is 690,667 (2022). Selçuklu is one of the central districts of Konya, along with the districts of Karatay, Kony ...

Konya Province Konya Province () is a province and metropolitan municipality in southwest Central Anatolia, Turkey. Its area is 40,838 km2, making it the largest province by area, and its population is 2,296,347 (2022). The provincial capital is the city ...

Turkey Turkey, officially the Republic of Türkiye, is a country mainly located in Anatolia in West Asia, with a relatively small part called East Thrace in Southeast Europe. It borders the Black Sea to the north; Georgia (country), Georgia, Armen ...

. Its population is 1,191 (2022). Sille Subaşı was one of the few villages where the Cappadocian Greek language was spoken until 1922. It was inhabited by

Greeks Greeks or Hellenes (; , ) are an ethnic group and nation native to Greece, Greek Cypriots, Cyprus, Greeks in Albania, southern Albania, Greeks in Turkey#History, Anatolia, parts of Greeks in Italy, Italy and Egyptian Greeks, Egypt, and to a l ...

who had been living there in peaceful coexistence with the nearby

Turks Turk or Turks may refer to: Communities and ethnic groups * Turkish people, or the Turks, a Turkic ethnic group and nation * Turkish citizen, a citizen of the Republic of Turkey * Turkic peoples, a collection of ethnic groups who speak Turkic lang ...

Konya Konya is a major city in central Turkey, on the southwestern edge of the Central Anatolian Plateau, and is the capital of Konya Province. During antiquity and into Seljuk times it was known as Iconium. In 19th-century accounts of the city in En ...

for over 800 years. The reason for this peaceful coexistence was Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi, who was the witness of a miracle that happened at the nearby Orthodox Christian monastery of Saint Chariton. In the Turkish language the monastery is now called ''Akmanastir'' and is translated as, "White Monastery". Jalal al-Din Rumi constructed a small mosque inside the Saint Chariton monastery. It is also notable that Jalal al-Din Rumi wrote Greek poems using the Arabic-Turkish script, while Greek Sille villagers wrote Turkish using the Greek alphabet scripting. This form of writing spread across the region and was commonly known as

Karamanli Turkish Karamanli Turkish (; ) is an extinct dialect of the Turkish language spoken by the Karamanlides. Although the official Ottoman Turkish was written in the Arabic script, the Karamanlides used the Greek alphabet to write their form of Turkish. K ...

writing.

Mevlana Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (), or simply Rumi (30 September 1207 – 17 December 1273), was a 13th-century poet, Hanafi '' faqih'' (jurist), Maturidi theologian (''mutakallim''), and Sufi mystic born during the Khwarazmian Empi ...

asked the

never to hurt the

of the village, and assigned to the Greek villagers the task of cleaning his own tomb. The Turks respected his commandment. In turbulent times, several

firman A firman (; ), at the constitutional level, was a royal mandate or decree issued by a sovereign in an Islamic state. During various periods such firmans were collected and applied as traditional bodies of law. The English word ''firman'' co ...

s from the

Sultan Sultan (; ', ) is a position with several historical meanings. Originally, it was an Arabic abstract noun meaning "strength", "authority", "rulership", derived from the verbal noun ', meaning "authority" or "power". Later, it came to be use ...

were sent to

, which reminded them of their promise not to hurt the Sille villagers. The coexistence of Sille

with the nearby Turks remained peaceful, which is why the villagers managed to preserve for over eight centuries both their native

Greek language Greek (, ; , ) is an Indo-European languages, Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic languages, Hellenic branch within the Indo-European language family. It is native to Greece, Cyprus, Italy (in Calabria and Salento), south ...

''Modern Greek in Asia Minor: A study of dialect of Silly, Cappadocia and Pharasa'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916), by

Richard MacGillivray Dawkins Richard MacGillivray Dawkins FBA (24 October 1871 – 4 May 1955) was a British archaeologist. He was associated with the British School at Athens (BSA), of which he was Director between 1906 and 1913. Early life Richard MacGillivray Dawkins w ...

(1871–1955) and their Orthodox Christian religion. In the population exchanges between Greece and Turkey (1923), Turkey and Greece expelled their respective Christian and Muslim populations to the other. After 1924, all

had left the village. The majority of this population relocated to the Nea Silata village in Chalkidiki, Greece. Currently, the village is protected and renovation efforts were conducted for preservation and

touristic Tourism is travel for pleasure, and the commercial activity of providing and supporting such travel. UN Tourism defines tourism more generally, in terms which go "beyond the common perception of tourism as being limited to holiday activity onl ...

purposes.

References and notes

External links

Sille Homepage

Pictures of the village

Neighbourhoods in Selçuklu District {{Konya-geo-stub