KARAMANLI NEOKESARİA KÖYÜNDE DOĞUM GEÇİŞİNE AİT İNANÇLAR.

In the literature, Orthodox Christian communities speaking Turkish are called Karamanlides. These communities had lived mostly in Cappadocia region, Asia Minor until 1924. Karamanlides, like other Rum communities of Asia Minor, were forced to leave their lands and settle in Greece under the Agreement of Population Exchange between Turkey and Greece in 1923. The Karamanli community, the topic of this paper, left the villages of Zile and Karacaören located in Develi--a district of Kayseri, Turkey--and settled in Neokesaria, a village in Ioannina in the Epirus region of Greece. In this paper, this community's cultural practices of birth passage are evaluated in the context of cultural changes and adaptation. The aim of this study is to discuss diachronically the rituals, beliefs and practices of birth passage within those traditions which were, until present, carried from Asia Minor in terms of change and adaptation within the historical and socio-cultural context. In this framework, it is observed that the woman of the village has started to give birth to their babies in the hospitals in early period due to the location of the village. It's understood that the beliefs related to birth started to vanish parallel with the rising modernity. Even though some customs, practices, and beliefs from the past still survive, it is observed that the community adopt the Greek society's customs, practices, and beliefs. This paper is based on two types of sources. The first is research documents from Oral Tradition Archive of the Centre of Asia Minor Studies obtained from first generation settlers of the population exchange. The second is fieldwork conducted in Neokesaria in July 2015. The opportunity to spend plenty of time in the village allowed for the observance of the practices of the community, while also provided the opportunity for semi-structured interviews. Furthermore, a large number of visual records (photographs and videos) of these practices was collected as a part of the field work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]