A Turk searching for the family of a Greek woman buried beneath his house

It was discovered in the summer of 2017: a marble slab with an inscription in Greek, embedded in the concrete floor, beneath the old tiles being replaced by two cousins in their grandparents' home in Karacakoy, northwest of Istanbul. "All we could make out was the date," one of the cousins, Kerem Soyyilmaz, tells Kathimerini. He took a photo of the slab and sent it to a Greek friend. "It looks like there's a Greek woman buried beneath your house," the friend replied, explaining that the slab was a tombstone and it read: "Here lies the servant of God Chrysoula Rodaki. March 1887."

The information sent Kerem on a quest for Chrysoula's descendants. He knew very little about the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey at the time. "I don't know why I felt such a strong urge to investigate, but it has been a wonderful journey," he said when we met in Thessaloniki,...