Source: Today's Zaman
The Private Rum Gökçeada Middle and High School is scheduled to open on Sept. 28 with 10 students for the first time since closing 40 years ago.
The restoration of the building, begun in 2013, was recently completed and the school is now ready to host classes for its students. Seven of the students are from the local Rum (Greek Orthodox Turkish citizen) community in Gökçeada, one of the Princes' Islands off the coast of İstanbul, while three will come from Greece to attend the school. The director of private schools at the Ministry of Education, Ömer Faruk Yelkenci, is expected to attend the opening of the school.
The school is located in the Çanakkale area of Gökçeada, known as Imvros in Greek, which once was primarily inhabited by a Rum population. The school closed in the 1970s due to a lack of students.
Although the Rum population in Turkey stood at 100,000 in the 1930s, the population has significantly declined since them. The İstanbul pogrom of Sept. 6-7, 1955 and the 1964 deportation of roughly 12,000 Rums drastically reduced the population. By 1966, the Rum population in İstanbul had been reduced to less than 30,000 and is estimated to be around 3,000 today.
