Trabzon

Born in 1970 in Akcaabat, a seaside town in Trabzon province on Turkey's Black Sea coast, Imamoglu moved to Istanbul as a teenager, studied business and then went to work in the construction industry.

In 1923, under the Greco-Turkish population exchange, Greek-speaking Christians of Pontus were forced to leave Turkey and relocate to Greece while Romeyka-speaking Muslim communities in the Trabzon area remained in their homeland as they professed Islam, explaining why this Greek variety is still spoken in small enclaves in the region.

Romeyka is thought to have only a couple of thousand native speakers left in Turkey's Trabzon region, but the precise number is hard to calculate especially because of the fact that there is also a large number of heritage speakers in the diaspora and the ongoing language shift to Turkish.

A high proportion of native speakers in Trabzon are over 65 years of age and fewer young people are learning the language.

Over the last 150 years, only four fieldworkers have collected data on Romeyka in Trabzon.