For centuries, Turkish was not written in just one alphabet. Long before the Turkish Republic adopted the Latin alphabet in 1928, Ottoman Turkish was generally written using a modified Arabic script. Yet alongside it, another remarkable writing tradition developed in parts of the Ottoman Empire: Turkish written with Greek letters.
This form of writing is known today as Karamanlidika, or Karamanlı Turkish. It was used mainly by Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians of Anatolia, commonly known as the Karamanlides. Many lived in central Anatolia, especially around Karaman, Konya, Niğde, Nevşehir and Kayseri, as well as in Constantinople and other Ottoman cities.
Their spoken language was often Turkish, while their religious and cultural life was connected to the Greek Orthodox Church. The result was unusual: a reader could look at a page filled with Greek characters, read it aloud, and hear Turkish.
A Greek alphabet for Turkish
As Karamanlidika was usually Turkish written using Greek characters, it created certain difficulties because Greek and Turkish do not contain exactly the same sounds. Turkish vowels such as ö, ü and ı, as well as consonants such as ş and ç, had no direct equivalents in the traditional Greek alphabet. Writers and printers therefore developed different combinations of letters, modified characters and spelling conventions to represent Turkish pronunciation.
There was never a completely standardized Karamanlidika spelling system. Different writers and printing houses sometimes represented the same Turkish sounds in different ways. For readers who already spoke Turkish, however, the system was understandable because they could recognize the words from context.
Examples of Turkish written in Greek characters appeared as early as the sixteenth century. One notable example was printed in Basel in 1584. The first known standalone printed Karamanlidika book is generally considered to be Gülzâr-ı İman-ı Mesihî, published in 1718.
From the eighteenth century until the early twentieth century, a substantial body of Karamanlidika literature developed. Hundreds of printed books and other publications survive today.
From prayer books to newspapers and novels
At first, much of Karamanlidika publishing was religious. Prayer books, catechisms, saints’ lives, Bible translations and other Christian works allowed Orthodox Christians who spoke Turkish more comfortably than Greek to read religious texts in the language they used in everyday life. Turkish-language hymns and prayers were also used in some churches serving Karamanlides communities.
The Greek alphabet therefore acted as a bridge. Readers could remain connected to the written tradition of the Orthodox Church while reading Turkish. By the nineteenth century, however, Karamanlidika had expanded far beyond religious literature. Newspapers, magazines, novels, histories, geographical works and practical books began appearing in Greek-letter Turkish.
One of the most important figures in this publishing world was Evangelinos Misailidis, a journalist, writer and publisher. His newspaper Anatoli addressed Turkish-speaking Orthodox readers in Anatolia and Istanbul and became one of the best-known examples of the Karamanlidika press.
Misailidis also published the novel Temaşa-i Dünya ve Cefakâr u Cefakeş in 1871 and 1872. The language of the work was Turkish, but the text was printed using Greek characters. The range of material published in Karamanlidika could be surprisingly wide. During the nineteenth century, European literary works were also made available to these readers. Even Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo appeared in a Karamanlidika edition.
Greek-letter Turkish was not limited to printed books. Examples can also be found on gravestones, church inscriptions and other monuments, showing that the writing system had a place in everyday community life.
A window into the Turkish people actually spoke
Today, Karamanlidika texts are valuable not only because of their cultural history but also because of what they reveal about the Turkish language. Some texts reflected spoken Anatolian Turkish more closely than highly literary Ottoman Turkish did. Linguists can therefore study Karamanlidika works to learn more about regional pronunciation, dialects and the way Turkish was spoken during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The tradition also reveals how complex identity could be in the Ottoman Empire Language, religion and alphabet did not always correspond to the national categories familiar today. A person could speak Turkish as a native language, belong to the Greek Orthodox Church and use Greek letters to write Turkish.
Why Greek-Letter turkish disappeared
The major turning point came with the compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. Because the exchange was based largely on religious affiliation, most Orthodox Christians of Anatolia were sent to Greece, including many Karamanlides whose native language was Turkish. Communities that had maintained the Karamanlidika tradition for generations were suddenly dispersed.
In Greece, later generations increasingly adopted the Greek language. At the same time, Turkey introduced a Latin-based alphabet for Turkish in 1928, replacing the Ottoman Arabic script.
With the disappearance of the communities that had used it, Greek-letter Turkish gradually faded from everyday life.
Yet thousands of pages survive in books, newspapers, religious works and inscriptions. They preserve the memory of a linguistic world that does not fit neatly into modern assumptions about language and identity. For centuries, Turkish could be spoken in Anatolian homes, prayed in Orthodox churches and printed in Greek letters. Karamanlidika remains one of the most fascinating reminders of how closely the languages and cultures of the eastern Mediterranean once overlapped.
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