Eight community centers were gradually set up. They operate a lending library, offer afternoon classes and summer courses, the use of computers, Greek classes for parents and unemployed young women, and counselling for parents and teachers. The Centers have proved to be the best way of offering a learning context alternative to that of the minority schools. Being equally staffed by personnel belonging to both majority and minority, they represented a microcosm where different identities coexist and languages alternate, overcoming division and segregation. One of the most important functions of the Centers was to provide physical, social and psychological space in which adolescents could run their own creative projects. The facilitators came from both the minority and the majority populations. For the very first time in Thrace, mixed groups of youngsters were working together. Two mobile units have also been used to reach isolated communities in the remote areas. They are equipped with lap-tops, electronic learning materials, and a lending library, while they are accompanied by trained teachers and animators. Their success can be symbolized by a scene the project’s personnel experienced in several minority settlements: the children waiting for the van at the village’s entrance, jumping around it and accompanying it until the school yard, where it usually parks. The Project as part of a radically new policy The years since 1997 have been marked by a string of opposition and controversies from all sides, which have gradually been tempered. Biased information, open hostility and accusations on the part of the local majority and its press that the Project ‘jeopardizes fundamental national interests’, and opposition on the part of minority representatives and the local Turkish-speaking press, have characterized this struggle. Framed in their historical context, the above reactions acquire meaning. The 1923 Lausanne Treaty regulates the rights of the Christian Orthodox minority in Turkey and of the Muslim minority in the Greek province of Thrace. The frictional relations between the two countries have produced state policies that have had very negative effects on the lives of the respective minorities. As a result of these policies, the minority in Istanbul has been reduced to a currently fading community of a couple of thousand. At the same time, restrictive and discriminatory policies against the minority in Greece have excluded its members from the fruits of development, which was particularly rapid in the 1970s and 1980s, leaving it in a marginal position both economically and educationally. A further complication concerns the internal dynamics of the Muslim minority. The 1923 Lausanne Treaty described the minority in only religious terms. It consequently lumped together diverse ethnic groups that had only in common their Muslim faith. Thus, while religious identity is recognized by the Greek state, whereas ethnic status is not acknowledged. In the power game of minority politics, the largest and strongest group is that of Turkish ethnic identity. Smaller groups within the larger one are frequently omitted in the category shuffle, creating “injustices of recognition”. Identity politics and their ugly consequences torment all three ethnic groups; the majority being reluctant to accept the Turkish ethnic identity of the largest and politically strongest minority group, and the latter being reluctant to accept the fact that the minority is not ethnically homogeneous. The new policy Based on a political consensus, the Greek state’s policy towards the minority changed radically in the 1990s. Several social changes signal a new era. The prevalent nationalist