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Children of Memory: Narratives of the Asia Minor Catastrophe and the Making
of Refugee Identity in Interwar Greece
Haris Exertzoglou
Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 34, Number 2, October 2016, pp.
343-366 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI:
For additional information about this article
Access provided by Aegean University (27 Apr 2017 19:23 GMT)
https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2016.0030
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/631679
Journal of Modern Greek Studies 34 (2016) 343–366 © 2016 by e Modern Greek Studies Association
343
Children of Memory: Narratives of the
Asia Minor Catastrophe and the Making
of Refugee Identity in Interwar Greece
Haris Exertzoglou
Abstract
is article examine s the organization of the memory of Asia Minor in Greece
during the interwar period. e disastrous Greek defeat in the Greek-Turkish
War (1919–1922) and the subsequent Treaty of Lausanne together constitute
a major turning point in the history of Modern Greece. Not only did these
events end Greece’s irredentist dream, but they also led to the uprooting of
1.5 million Greek Orthodox people from Asia Minor and their resettlement
in Greece. Despite its importance, the trauma that the exodus inicted on
refugees and non-refugees alike was not treated at the time as a subject in its
own right; rather, it was subsumed within competing nationalist narratives
that were directly related to the ongoing political conicts that beset interwar
Greece. Refugee associations negotiated the memory of Asia Minor for the
purpose of achieving the integration of refugees into mainstream society
without ever directly addressing the burden of the trauma itself.
e idea of Asia Minor is deeply embedded in the structure of Modern Greek
identity for two main reasons. First, since the nineteenth century, the region
had been celebrated in the Greek national narrative as part of the country’s
imagined homogenous, national space. Second, it was the physical territory
where hundreds of thousands of Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians had
lived for centuries until they were forced to abandon their homeland in 1922.
Consequently, Asia Minor occupied an important place in the Modern Greek
national imagination. e forced population movement that was one result
of the Greek-Turkish War (1919–1922), an event referred to in Greece as the
Μεγάλη Καταστροφή (Great Catastrophe, hereaer referred to simply as the
Catastrophe), is widely considered as a central turning point in Greek history.
e 1923 Treaty of Lausanne mandated a compulsory exchange of populations
that aected more than 2 million people, including approximately 1.5 million
Christians who lived in Ottoman lands and 400,000 Muslims who resided in
344 Haris Exertzoglou
former Ottoman provinces annexed by Greece in the Balkan Wars of 1912–
1913 (Pentzopoulos 1962; Kontogiorgi, 2006; Yildirim 2006a, 2006b). Aer the
collapse of the western front in Asia Minor in August 1922, civilian casualties
became widespread, but even from the early stages of the conict, attacks on
noncombatants were commonplace. Ethnic cleansing was employed by both
sides to stabilize defensive lines and supply routes, and in many respects these
practices were reminiscent of similar policies employed by the opposing states
during the Balkan Wars and the First World War. In August and September
1922, hundreds of thousands of Greeks sought safety on the Aegean shores or
le the area to seek refuge on Aegean islands and in other Greek ports. ou-
sands died in the eort, while an even larger number perished at the hands of
the advancing Turkish nationalist forces.
e experience of expulsion, bitter and traumatic as it was, aected hun-
dreds of thousands of Ottoman Christians who le their homelands during
and aer the war. e human cost was enormous: dislocation, violence, and
the loss of property and life beset Christian civilians, who had to abandon
everything in an attempt to save their lives. When they rst arrived in Greece,
the refugees presented a miserable sight. Settlement in the new country fell
short of even the most modest of expectations. Serious problems arose with
food shortages, the spread of epidemic diseases, and a lack of employment and
housing, and it would take years before many of these issues were dealt with
adequately. One of the main reasons for this was that the refugee issue became
intensely politicized due to internal divisions in Greece.
e period between 1915 and 1936 was marred by the bitter and vehe-
ment conict between the Royalist and the Liberal camps for reasons directly
related to Greece’s stance as either neutral or aligned with the Entente Powers
during the First World War. Although both camps were nationalistic and both
subscribed to the irredentist project known as the Μεγάλη Ίδέα (Great Idea),
they espoused dierent paths to its fulllment and chose dierent partners to
assist them. e gap between the two rival camps and their two leaders, Ele-
herios Venizelos and King Constantine, respectively, proved so deep that the
years between 1915 and 1936 are known as the period of the Εθνικό ιχασό
(National Schism) (Mavrogordatos 1983, 25–101; Clogg 1984, 105–132). e
years following the Catastrophe found Greece in a state of constant political
turmoil. e Greek monarchy was abolished by a military coup, and a repub-
lican regime was proclaimed without achieving political stability. e country
continued to be divided between Liberals and Royalists for many years. During
the 1930s, Greece continued to experience changes in government and political
instability, which eventually led to the toppling of the Republic, the restoration
of the monarchy in 1935, and then the Metaxas dictatorship in 1936.
Under these conditions, there was no call for commemorating the Asia
Minor Catastrophe. Devastated by war, debt, and internal divisions, Greece
Children of Memory 345
was in a desperate position and could not easily address the refugees’ needs for
food, housing, and jobs. Indeed, Greek administrations did not encourage the
commemoration of the exodus from Asia Minor during the interwar period.
Despite ongoing political instability, the ocial Greek policy towards Turkey
was cautious, and the administration refrained from endorsing memorials or
other public events that could provoke Turkish reactions. is was predictable
given the poor state of the Greek economy and its limited military capability,
as well as the prospect of Greek-Turkish rapprochement, which appealed to
leaders with completely opposing views on almost everything else, like the
Liberal, Eleherios Venizelos, the Royalist, Panagiotis Tsaldaris, and even the
extreme right-winger, Ioannis Metaxas.
It is also true that the refugees were preoccupied with the exigencies of
everyday life, and bringing up the traumatic experiences of the exodus was
last on a long list of pressing priorities. is, however, does not mean that the
memory of 1922 was entirely repressed. As will become evident in the fol-
lowing discussion, the politics of the memory of the Asia Minor Catastrophe
were always present, aecting both the making of a refugee identity and the
dynamics of Greek politics.
e aim of this article, then, is to examine and contextualize the forms
of refugee memory that developed during the interwar period. e scholar-
ship on refugee memory in this period remains underdeveloped, despite the
fact that the Asia Minor Catastrophe has received much historical attention,
particularly aer the 1940s. As far as issues of memory are concerned, it must
be pointed out that concerted eorts were made by the Centre of Asia Minor
Studies in Athens to collect individual testimonies in the 1950s and 1960s
from rst- and second-generation refugees about their lives in the Ottoman
Empire before 1922, their experiences of dislocation and migration, and their
lives aer settlement in Greece. Memory as an analytic category, however,
was not deployed by historians to analyze refugee testimonies, and so indi-
vidual recollections were treated simply as sources of information without
taking into account that memory is not static but always in ux. Of course, I
do not suggest that issues of memory were entirely neglected, particularly in
studies of refugee communities. For example, the anthropologist Renée Hir-
schon, who did eldwork in the refugee settlement of Kokkinia in the 1970s,
avers that the memory of refugees was a cultural asset serving as the bond
between the past and the exigencies of the present (Hirschon 1998). However,
one might wonder about the kind of stories refugees relayed to their children,
given that by then their recollections had been mediated by the subsequent
experience of settlement, the Axis occupation of Greece, the Civil War, the
authoritarian post-civil war regime, and the 1967 dictatorship, to name only
some of the major political developments of the twentieth century. is brings
to the forefront the intriguing but sensitive issue of generational dynamics and
346 Haris Exertzoglou
how contemporary political and cultural agendas inform issues of memory
in the long run.
Today, the memory culture of Asia Minor in Greece is thriving (James
2001; Varlas 2003; Deltsou 2004; Nikolopoulou 2007; Exertzoglou 2011; Tansuğ
2011; Tsimouris 2011). ere is consistent reference to the “lost homelands,” a
term invented in the 1960s as a metaphor for Asia Minor and its constituent
parts. is term refers to a memory culture accommodating both nostalgia
for the “lost homelands” and the revisiting of the trauma of exodus by later
generations of refugees. is form of nostalgia accommodates both concilia-
tory and explicitly anti-Turkish overtones directly associated with the current
political tensions between Greece and Turkey. e Greek Parliament in 1994
and again in 1998 ocially recognized the events of 1919–1922 as genocide and
requested that other countries and international bodies join them in doing so,
but so far few have.
is article focuses particularly on the ways in which the memory of
the Catastrophe was cast into meaningful narratives directly connected to
strategies of integration and, therefore, treats memory as a dynamic aspect of
refugee identity. My discussion is limited to the rst-generation refugees and
does not extend to the generational dynamics that aected the transformation
of the memory culture of Asia Minor later on.
is discussion of the memory of the Catastrophe raises the interrelated
issues of refugee memory and refugee identity. e arrival of 1.5 million ref-
ugees profoundly impacted Greek society and culture, and it generated new
tensions in a political landscape already riven by deep divisions. e refugee
vote, for example, proved decisive in every general and local election during the
interwar period, tilting the balance in favor of the Liberal Party and against the
Royalists, whom most refugees held responsible for the Catastrophe. Voting for
the Liberals earned the refugees the open hostility of the Royalists. In addition,
the dierent cultural and linguistic practices of the refugees created new cul-
tural and material spaces within the new homeland that oen caused tensions
with so-called indigenous Greeks. Many of them confronted the refugees with
suspicion, if not open hostility, blaming them for all the country’s problems,
totally forgetting that the refugee exodus from Asia Minor was the direct out-
come of Greece’s failed irredentist policy. In this context, the integration of the
refugees in interwar Greece proved both dicult and complicated, involving
material demands but also the prospect of cultural and political reform.
For their part, refugees complained about the poor material conditions
in which they lived, the mismanagement of their aairs and property rights,
and their exclusion from positions of power. ey frequently expressed their
disappointment that these issues were not being addressed. However, the ref-
ugees were themselves not a monolithic group, despite the fact that they voted
en bloc for the Liberals. On the contrary, there were many social and cultural
Children of Memory 347
dierences among the various urban and rural refugee communities. Most
refugees shared common experiences of the exodus from Asia Minor and the
less-than-ideal living conditions in the settlements in Greece, but they also
clung to their local identities, which provided security and recognition in what
one could call an almost foreign environment. erefore, an array of local ref-
ugee identities coexisted in tension with the more homogenizing identity that
was emerging through the contested process of integration.
Refugee memory dees easy generalizations. e refugees were not a
coherent group, nor were their experiences of the exodus uniform. Some suf-
fered much more than others, and everyone experienced the Catastrophe dif-
ferently depending on their individual circumstances. In addition, peoples’
memories were not xed, but rather changed over time. Individuals tend to
remember or forget in relation to the changing patterns of their lives, and what
they remember of the past is modied accordingly (Lebow Neb, Kansteiner,
and Fogu 2006). Memory, traumatic or not, is a work in progress, always unsta-
ble and in the process of transformation under the inuence of subsequent
events. Accordingly, there were dierent registers of refugee memory.
On the one hand, there were refugees with traumatic experiences who did
not have the chance or the will to narrate them. In general, individuals’ painful
experiences remained untold to the general public. On the other, it is dicult
to qualify the psychological and cultural framework within which the refugees
made sense of their experiences. e bulk of them were illiterate, and many had
poor or no knowledge of Greek, their mother tongue being Turkish. Besides,
what the refugees actually remembered was their bitter individual experiences,
which could not explain or illuminate the reasons for their misfortune. I do
not suggest that these refugees were incapable of telling their stories, but rather
simply that their stories were limited in scope, not to mention that, if told at
all, they were recounted within families in private.
Against this background of separate, individual, and private oral memo-
ries appeared a kind of transcendental public memory, which I call institutional
refugee memory. I adopt this term in my analysis as a useful category to help in
understanding the reconguration of interwar refugee identity (Lebow Ned,
Kansteiner, and Fogu 2006). Institutional refugee memory was associated with
certain kinds of public narratives about the recent past. ese were available for
public use and embedded in the public discourse by the refugee press and by
the communications of refugee associations. In addition, this kind of memory
was directly implicated in other narratives and practices that were not sim-
ply commemorative but also addressed the exigencies of the present and the
uncertain integration of the refugees in their new country.
e institutional memory of Asia Minor established a framework of
remembrance that put a transcendental, coherent subject—the refugee—into
sharp relief and raised claims on its behalf. In this framework, individual
348 Haris Exertzoglou
suering made sense only in relation to broader contexts. e articulation
of this kind of memory required a level of abstraction above the individual
memory of suering and identity and in a sense distinct from them. I am not
suggesting that the institutional memory supplanted individual memories
entirely, nor that the institutional and private forms of memory were in oppo-
sition. ey were not identical because they worked on dierent scales, one
public and the other private, but they also interacted. at was because in order
to have validity the institutional memory, in whatever form, had to be broadly
consistent with the individual memories and experiences of all those who were
involved in the events of the Catastrophe. But this interaction between public
and private memory did not take place for the sake of memory alone. It is my
contention that some forms of institutional memory contextualized the Asia
Minor Catastrophe in terms of the prospect of furthering refugee integration,
and, in this respect, memory construction was coordinated with other refugee
activities.
A key issue in this discussion is who spoke for the refugees and, therefore,
who were the framers of the institutional memory of Asia Minor. Despite their
numerical strength, the refugees did not form a political party of their own and
thus had no ocial representatives. ere was, however, an extended group of
mostly male, educated refugees who were involved in refugee aairs in dierent
capacities. is group of refugees—MPs, teachers, doctors, lawyers, journalists,
artists, and businessmen—was not coherent, although most of its members
had strong Liberal sympathies. Politicians like Leonidas Iasonides and Stavros
Nikolaides, priests like Anthimos Papadopoulos and Crysanthos, Archbishop
of Trapezounda, journalists like Solon Solomonides, Kostas Misailides, and
Yiorgo Asketopoulos, and educators like Dimitri Economides spoke on behalf
of the refugees on many occasions. e public voices of educated refugees were
important because these people were in a position to articulate demands that
shaped the fate of the refugees. Although these voices were not identical to one
another, they represented a source of authority and power and, at the same
time, created a space for mediation between the mass of the refugees and the
Greek state and its political system.
is public voice of refugees was not, however, simply a matter of the indi-
vidual voices of prominent refugees. ere were various networks of refugee
sociality that created a public space which was in tension with state policies.
Important among these was the large network of refugee clubs and associations
established in Greece during the 1920s and 1930s. ese accommodated local
and more general refugee demands and provided a space for refugee sociality.
ese clubs and associations, like the Society of Pontic Studies, the Union of
Smyrniots, and many others, were mostly involved in cultural, educational, and
athletic activities, while also providing a space for discussing issues of major
interest relating to the demands of the refugee population. Of equal importance
Children of Memory 349
was the refugee press, which included various newspapers, with Prosfygikē
Phonē (Refugee voice) and Prosfygikos Kosmos (Refugee world) being the best
known. Published in Athens and in other places, these papers were major vehi-
cles for expressing the refugees’ claims vis-à-vis the state. Within this extensive
institutional network, the memory of Asia Minor and of the Catastrophe was
discussed, reshaped, transformed, and institutionalized.
e institutional memory of Asia Minor was a discursive eld that
involved not only the voices of the refugees but also those of non-refugees,
including politicians, journalists, state ocials, intellectuals, philanthropists,
and others who addressed the events of the Catastrophe and of the Asia Minor
campaign on numerous occasions. It could not be otherwise, considering the
vast impact these events had had on Greek society. e memory of Asia Minor
did not belong exclusively to the refugees; rather, it was shaped and reshaped
within a broader discursive and cultural framework involving dierent voices
and accommodating dierent intentions, which, as we will see, proved of major
importance to the political conicts of the interwar period.
e institutional memory of Asia Minor authorized dierent narratives
of the Catastrophe that made reference to the tragic events of the last episodes
of the Greek-Turkish war and the suering of expulsion and forced migration.
In fact, it is possible to discern two overlapping but dierent narrative patterns
within which the institutional memory of the Asia Minor Catastrophe was cast.
e rst narrative pattern focused on victimhood, emplotting the suerings of
Christians at the hands of the Turks and using particular examples as cases in
point. e second pattern did not suppress the memory of death and destruc-
tion, but it was forward-looking, in search of a positive identity for the refugee
more tting to the demands of social integration. Both versions suppressed
the heterogeneity of the Ottoman Christians who became refugees, favoring
instead their equal membership in the undierentiated and united body of the
Greek nation.
I call the rst pattern the narrative of victimization. ere are very few
public testimonies of this kind in the period under consideration. Most of these
testimonies, moreover, do not present the voice of the refugees themselves but
instead are mediated versions, shaped by those who collected and edited them.
A major example of these narratives is the collection of stories by refugee girls
published in 1925 by the Women’s International Association, a philanthropic
society running a boarding school in Athens for refugee girls (Αυτοβιογραφίες
προσφύγων κοριτσιών [Autobiographies of refugee girls] 1925; hereaer, APK
1925). e edited volume consists of 20 testimonies, all written in the rst
person, of girls from various areas of Asia Minor. ey describe the violence
of the Turkish soldiers; the loss of their family members; the travails of their
arduous escape; their rescue by the boats that transported them to Greece;
and, nally, their admission and experiences at the boarding school. Excerpts
350 Haris Exertzoglou
from three narrations by girls living in Smyrna at the time of the Catastrophe
demonstrate my point.
Amphyline Hatzimarkou told of the happiness and safety that she and
her family felt during the three-year occupation of Smyrna by the Greek army
and acknowledged t hat no one ever envisioned the army’s defeat and disastrous
retreat. Amphyline recalls that when the Turks suddenly entered Smyrna: “Our
father went to his shop as he did every day. Two hours later one of his clerks
ran in our house and told us the breaking news, ‘My lady the Turks are here.
Save the children.’ My mother was so astonished to hear this that she fainted.
... We rushed towards the shore to catch one of the ships to carry us across to
the islands. ... e Turks put severe obstacles to Christians asking for papers
and documentation and taking bribes. Father went to the Governor’s oce to
get a document with the help of a Turkish lawyer but they kept him there. ...
We le Smyrna leaving behind father and all our property. Father never joined
us in Athens” (APK 1925, 11–12).
According to another witness, Evgenia Digeni: “On September 2 Smyrna
was on re. ... When the re reached the house we le and found rescue in
the nearby school where we thought we would be safe. Just as we got there we
heard gunre ... the Turks did not put out the re but fueled it with gasoline.
So we abandoned our refuge and ran to the shore only to nd out that the re
was already there. e horror in the streets was beyond description. e Turks
were running, torturing us and taking everything of value. ey slaughtered
people in front of our eyes. ... ey also took all the men they found into cus-
tody. And we were unable to hide [our] father from them. We paid many liras
to get forged French papers and boarded one of the ships but father was le
behind and lost” (APK 1925, 19–22).
Virginia Apergi oered a similar account. Virginia was born in Smyrna
in 1907 into a merchant family. According to her narrative, her family life was
happy and untroubled, and she remembered the palpable joy she felt when the
Greek army entered the Port of Smyrna to establish the new Greek administra-
tion. As the fortunes of war turned against the Greeks and the Turkish forces
reached Smyrna, fear spread throughout the Christian population. “During the
rst day of the [Turkish] occupation we kept ourselves in the house ... when the
re reached our homes we were forced to leave taking with us only few valuable
things ... we rushed to the streets and found refuge in the cemetery, in the
family tomb. en we le for the Quay in the hope that we will be shipped away
and save our lives. It was then that my troubles began. A wild Turk snatched
my brother and my mother was lost in the crowd [as she probably followed
the Turk to get her child back]. e pain I felt as the ship carried us away from
Smyrna without my mother and brother is beyond words” (APK 1925, 23 –24).
All the girls’ testimonies are of a similar nature. eir horror at the loss
of family members, displacement, and resettlement in an unknown country,
Children of Memory 351
as well as their gratitude to the ladies of the board of the school are com-
mon themes in these narratives, which connect trauma and salvation. ese
accounts seem to follow the same narrative pattern. ey all describe a happy
and prosperous family life before the war, then signal a turning point—some
mention the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, others the outbreak of the First
World War or the occupation of Smyrna/Izmir by Greek troops—and, nally,
they focus on the dramatic period when the actors/narrators had to leave their
homes and run for safety. It is at this nal stage that the voice of the witness
changes from “we,” usually referring to the family, into “I,” the victim herself.
e narrative symmetry of these stories points to their constructed or ltered
nature. Although these stories were collected soon aer the girls’ arrival in
Greece, their nal versions were probably structured in such a way as to fol-
low a coherent, common narrative pattern. is is not to deny that the girls
actually experienced violence, displacement, and loss, but rather to suggest
that their stories originally must have been more chaotic and disrupted than
the nal printed versions. Most likely, the individual experiences of these girls
reinforced one another, and their narrativization took a more denite and
coherent shape in the boarding school with the help of the ladies who ran it.
is last point seems obvious if one reads the volume’s short introduction, in
which the principal of the school states that the girls were asked to tell their
stories as a part of therapy and as a way of highlighting the work of the school
for the “public of the philanthropists” (APK 1925, 7).
Victims of violence oen concentrate on what happened to them, express-
ing their anguish, fear, and despair, without taking much care to explain the
historical conditions and causes of their experiences. In the cases mentioned
above, the narratives focus on individual experience, but there is also reference
to the kind of common knowledge that was available to most Orthodox Chris-
tians at the time, such the trope of the wild Turk or the joy most Christians
felt about the Greek occupation. However, the experience of violence is almost
impossible to explain entirely without the suggestive mediation of those who
asked the girls to tell their stories and then published them as coherent and
self-contained narrations. Although there is no concrete evidence to suggest
deliberate manipulation of the girls’ stories, the repetition of themes, language,
and tropes raises concerns that some homogenizing mechanisms were at play.
Of course, because reason and emotion are neither separated by a rigid line
nor mutually exclusive, I do not claim that the original utterance of these
stories was entirely based on emotion and that they are therefore inherently
incoherent. I do suggest, however, that the recognition of experience as mean-
ingful evidence on a level of abstraction above the suering individual—a level
on which these stories speak—requires a kind of suggestive mediation that
would turn the experience into a story. is process became possible through
the venues of other public discourses that provided narrative patterns and
352 Haris Exertzoglou
homogenized experience, without which individual remembrance remained
elusive.
Similar stories highlighting the victimhood of the refugees were also
published in the press. An interesting case is presented by the accounts from
the Vilayet of Izmit that the journalist and war correspondent Kostas Misa-
ilides collected and published in 1928. According to one account, a certain
Gavur Ali entered the village of Houndi, summoned the Christian inhabitants
to the church, and asked them to bring all their money. en, he asked the
local priest to conduct the service with all the inhabitants present. Aer the
service, “Gavur Ali forced the priest to lead his ock outside the village and in
the meadows where ‘his killers’ were waiting. ere he killed the priest with
his knife and said to the Christians, ‘Now let us see if your God can help you.’
en he gave a command to his men to slaughter all the Christians le in the
village and all of them died in agony” (Misailides 1928). is horric story
was associated with a concrete historical narrative. According to the account,
Gavur Ali did not act alone but in coordination with Ottoman ocials, who
used him and others like him to exterminate Christians.
e accuracy of these stories is not of concern here. What is most note-
worthy for my purposes is that the testimonies of the refugees were cast in a
language that explained a series of terrible events in terms of specic intentions
on the part of the Turks. e plot was easy to follow, as was the position of the
actors: Christians were the victims, Turks the victimizers. e two groups
occupied two unbridgeable subject positions and two opposite natures with
no grey area between them. We are not in a position to know how Misailides
collected these accounts; nor do we know even if these were actually real eye-
witness accounts, let alone if or how he modied them. I say this because in this
particular example no Christians seems to have been le alive to tell the story,
which suggests the likelihood that this is a secondhand account that Misailides
turned into a third-person narrative. is is not to question the factuality of
these events; I simply point to a narrative structure that grants coherence to
the raw material of individual testimonies.
is collection of refugee accounts, which Misailides published in the
Ephēmeris tes Anatoles (Journal of the Orient), as well as the stories of the refu-
gee girls seem to be exemplary of a kind of institutionalized narrative that casts
individual experiences of violence and loss into meaningful stories framed
by victimhood. Narratives such as these portrayed the refugees as victims,
incapable of reacting to their misfortune, almost devoid of agency, and—if
misconceptions were not ruled out—a nancial and cultural burden on Greek
society generally. In this respect, the victimization story provided one pattern
for narrating the Catastrophe as the sum total of individual experiences, but
it proved inadequate as a mechanism for articulating refugees’ demands and
aspirations. e image of the refugee as victim and possibly as a burden in the
Children of Memory 353
rebuilding of the Greek society aer 1922 was counterproductive regarding
strategies for social integration. ese strategies required alternative narratives
that—without suppressing the victimization of the refugees and the memory
of Catastrophe—would provide a positive refugee identity, compatible with the
demands of integration and the changing social and political circumstances in
Greece. is narrative of empowerment was forward-looking and focused on
the qualities of refugees as intelligent, tenacious, and hardworking members
of the Greek nation. In contrast to the narrative of victimization that limited
itself to descriptions of atrocities, the narrative of empowerment portrayed
the refugees in a positive light, depicting them as the saviors of a decadent
society. In this context, a discursive space was created where the refugees saw
and proclaimed themselves to be the redeemers of a Greek society that had
lost its way.
In fact, the redemption of Greek society had been a major component of
the narrative of empowerment since the 1920s. Refugee newspapers published
many articles arguing that the arrival of the refugees was a great boost for the
Greek economy and society. e refugees brought money for investments, pro-
ductive skills necessary for industry and agriculture, and, above all, numbers
that increased considerably the Hellenic composition of Greece’s population,
particularly in the Northern provinces (Pampsosfygikē [Refugee post] 1925;
Pallis 1929; Katakouzinos 1933).
What is more interesting, though, is that this emphasis on the positive
impact of the refugees was oen combined with a view of Greek society as dec-
adent and in need of restoration. On one occasion, for example, the Prosfygikos
Kosmos stated that the patriotic sentiment of the refugees was stronger than
that of the “indigenous” Greeks because the refugees had lived “under bond-
age” and therefore could fully appreciate the value of “freedom”; it was this par-
ticular sentiment that prompted the refugees to serve the national interest even
at their own expense, thus becoming a reliable and irreplaceable element in “the
regeneration of Greece” (Prosfygikos Kosmos 1934a). is argument became
widespread and was repeated in numerous refugee publications that pointed
to the National Schism as the major symptom of national decadence without,
paradoxically, mentioning the strong Liberal aliations of the refugees and
their eventual involvement in the political struggle.
Up to this point, I have suggested that there were two dierent narratives that
shaped the refugee institutional memory of Asia Minor, and I have argued that
the narrative of empowerment was more relevant to refugees’ strategies for
integration. e two narratives of victimization and empowerment overlapped,
but they also diered in that they constructed refugee experience and prospects
in opposite ways. More important, however, is the interplay of these narratives
with the overarching narratives of Greek irredentism and the political conicts
354 Haris Exertzoglou
in Greece that could not remove the memory of the Catastrophe from consid-
eration. Simply put, the memory of Asia Minor was not monopolized by the
refugees. Τhe Asia Minor Catastrophe was associated with the institutional
memory of the refugees and their claims for integration; at the same time, it
was subsumed into the narratives of the Megali Idea and the National Schism
as a key episode in a long series of events that sealed the fate of Hellenism and
the Greek nation-state. As part of the National Schism, the Catastrophe was
politicized and lost its narrative autonomy as an event associated strictly with
the refugees. is did not mean that refugees lost control of this narrative. On
the contrary, the narrative of empowerment was used to highlight a transcen-
dental refugee identity as an integral part of the Greek nation. But this identity
was ineluctably associated with the eld of Greek politics, where the memori-
alization of the Asia Minor Catastrophe emerged as a key point of contention.
is is the issue to which I turn now.
e reader should bear in mind that there were constant changes in
Greece aecting the memorialization of Asia Minor. In the late 1920s, in
contrast to the two or three years that immediately followed the Catastrophe,
there was a major turn in Greek politics as far as relations with the new Turkish
Republic were concerned. Aer 1928, a policy of rapprochement was pursued.
In 1930, the Liberal government signed a treaty with Turkey that arranged var-
ious matters relating to the population exchange, but signing this accord cost
the Liberals in the following elections because the treaty alienated the refugee
vote. Friendly relations with the Republic of Turkey became the motto of all
subsequent administrations, Liberal or Royalist. e authoritarian regime of
Ioannis Metaxas, which took power in August 1936, followed this policy with
even more zeal. e treaty with Turkey was a pragmatic step taken during
years of economic recession, a gesture towards reaching a nal settlement with
Greece’s supposed archenemy in recognition that the country’s reconstruction
was impossible in a quasi-state of war. In addition, Greece’s economic recov-
ery was a crucial precondition for refugee integration. Despite unbridgeable
dierences on most issues, both political factions seemed by the mid-1930s to
have come to accept that the defeat of Greece was nal. However, the political
conict in Greece remained tough and unpredictable, given the deep division
in Greek society.
During this period of tension, the refugee vote became an apple of dis-
cord. As mentioned above, the refugees voted massively for the Liberals, but in
1932 some of their votes went to other parties, even to Royalist-Populist candi-
dates (Karavas 1992; see also Mavrogordatos 1983, 28–54). is shi in voting
is partly explained by the Liberal administration’s failure to live up to the
expectations of the refugees, particularly in regard to property-related issues.
e power struggle between Royalists and Liberals intensied aer the 1932
elections and the fall of the Venizelos administration, and the refugee vote
Children of Memory 355
was eagerly sought aer at this particular conjuncture. However, this constit-
uency could not be swayed only by issues such as refugee relocation, nancial
compensation, housing, and the like. e Asia Minor Catastrophe was involved
in all discourses addressing the refugees as a means of reminding them of the
responsibilities of the two main political parties. erefore, the memory of Asia
Minor and the narratives of the Catastrophe were reworked within this period
(1928–1936) to inuence the refugee vote. Here, of course, the Liberals had the
advantage because the bulk of the refugees shared the Liberal narrative of the
Catastrophe that put all the blame on the Royalists.
During the 1930s, the memory of Asia Minor loomed large in the National
Schism. is memory was instrumentalized and dissociated from the trauma
of expulsion and individual suering, being associated instead with specic
claims relevant to the exigencies of integration. Two specic examples dis-
cussed in what follows are cases in point; namely, the 1933 general elections
and the dispute over the monument to the six Royalist leaders executed in
November 1922 for their role in the Catastrophe.
In 1933, Greece remained in a critical state. General elections were
announced for 5 May, and the Liberal and Populist coalitions were desperately
ghting for votes, refugee votes in particular. e pro-Royalist Popular Party
appealed time and again to the refugees, hoping to win their support, which
they needed if they were to regain power. What is interesting here is the way
populist candidates addressed the refugee public. For example, Nikos Krani-
otakis argued on 4 March 1933 that the refugees did not advance their cause
by voting for the Liberals, asking them instead to change course and vote for
the Popular Party. Kraniotakis did not simply address the refugees on contem-
porary issues; he also couched his call in a historical narrative that went back
in 1914 and ended on the eve of the 1932 elections. e Liberals, Kraniotakis
claimed, did not really care about the refugees. As evidence of this he adduced
the fact that as early as 1914 it was, in fact, Venizelos who rst suggested the
compulsory exchange of populations. He then pointed out that it was the Lib-
erals who had sabotaged the war eort while in opposition in 1920 and who
nally undermined all rightful refugee demands with regard to their property
rights and compensation. He also blamed the Liberals for instigating animosity
among the refugees against the Populists by spreading rumors that the latter
had burned refugee settlements (Kraniotakis 1933a). A few days before the
elections, Vradynē (Evening post) accused the Liberals of being responsible for
all the misfortunes that had befallen Greece since 1914, including, of course,
the Asia Minor debacle. Venizelos was blamed for Greece’s involvement in the
First World War on the side of the Allies, the Ukrainian campaign, the Asia
Minor adventure, and the signing of the Lausanne Treaty (Kraniotakis 1933b).
In a speech by a Populist candidate, Venizelos was styled “Minotaurus” and
held responsible for the war campaigns that since 1914 had “drained the Greek
356 Haris Exertzoglou
youth without serving the interests of the nations but those of foreign powers
instead.” Again, the Asia Minor campaign was directly linked to the “devious
plans” of Venizelos that led to the destruction of “Hellenism in Asia Minor”
and the “deprivation of the refugees” (Akropolis [Acropolis] 1933).
eodore Alexandrou, who presented himself as representing “the Greeks
of Attaleia,” made a public declaration to the refugees, blaming them for the
Liberal electoral victories in the past. Claiming that the Liberal administra-
tions had not lived up to their promises, he asked the refugees to abandon
Venizelos because he was responsible for all their misfortunes, and he urged
them to vote for the opposition (Proia [Morning post] 1933). General Kostas
Petmezas, organizer of the Manissa militia in Asia Minor, exhorted the ref-
ugees to abandon the Liberals and vote for the Populists. Presenting himself
as a father counseling his children, Petmezas repeated the Royalist narrative
according to which the Catastrophe and the consequent loss of thousands of
Christians was the result of Liberal policies (Petmezas 1933).
ese were some of the calls to the refugees published in the Royalist-Pop-
ulist press, directly targeting their vote through reference to the memory of
Asia Minor. Interestingly, during the electoral campaign, the Populist Party
promised a particularly gratifying measure to the refugees: the payment to
all eligible refugees of 25% of the sum of their compensation that had been
withheld by the National Bank of Greece (Mavrogordatos 1983, 190). Shortage
of money had prevented the payment of this sum, and the issue seemed to be
a dead letter until the Populists put it back on table, promising that they could
pay the refugees without depleting the Treasury. It is fair to suggest that the
Populists feared that the proposal for the return of the 25% was not enough
in itself to mobilize at least part of the refugee vote in their favor, and it was
for this reason that they vigorously projected their own narrative for the Asia
Minor campaign simultaneously. e Populists addressed t he refugees in these
terms because they believed that winning the refugee vote was conditional
on the party’s presentation of a historical narrative that would explain the
refugees’ past and present misfortunes and connect these misfortunes to the
Liberal party. In the Populists’ discourse, the refugees were likened to imma-
ture individuals enchanted by the Liberal narrative, blinded by false promises,
and almost incapable of grasping the truth and following the correct path. e
time had come, they argued, for the refugees to disentangle themselves from
emotional memories, change their attitude, and behave responsibly. In this way,
they distinguished the refugees from indigenous Greeks, who purportedly were
not seduced by Liberal rhetoric and lies.
Liberals reacted vehemently. ey rejected the proposal for the repayment
of the 25% compensation and repeated their own version of the 1922 events.
Liberal newspapers reported, albeit somewhat excessively, on the enthusiasm
with which the refugees greeted Liberal candidates when they visited refugee
Children of Memory 357
settlements (Phonē tou Laou [Voice of the people] 1933a; Patris [Fatherland]
1933). A large number of refugee associations steadfastly supported the Lib-
erals, stating that no Populist trick could ever separate them from the party.
Emphasis on refugee identity and its distinct association with the memory
of Asia Minor was oen brought to the fore. According to one Liberal paper,
the abyss dividing the refugees from the Populists was embedded in refugee
popular lore. As one source put it:
e Refugees remember the national cri mes of the Popular Part y, the destr uction
of the victorious Greek Army in the abor tive campaign of the Saggaria River a nd
the elimination of thousands of families [by the Turks] as a result. e Popular
Party abandoned the defense of Smyrna and did not allow the timely removal
of the Greeks to safety. e refugees will always remember these crimes. (Phonē
tou Laou 1933c)
e emphasis on remembering was not accidental. Reminding the ref-
ugees that the King and the Popular Party were to blame for their plight was
essential to the narrative that linked refugee identity to the Liberal party. Not
surprisingly, the Liberals projected the image of Venizelos as the liberator of
the “Greeks under bondage” at political rallies organized on the islands of
Chios and Samos, both annexed by Greece in the Balkan wars (Phonē tou
Laou 1933b). Venizelos visited the islands, and in his speech he presented his
followers with a historical narrative that elaborated the Liberal plans for the
Great Idea, justied his decision to join the Allied side during the First World
War as a measure to protect the Ottoman Greeks from Turkish persecutions,
and stated his belief that his removal from power in November 1920 and the
subsequent change in the conduct of military and political aairs by the Roy-
alist administration were responsible for the Catastrophe (Phonē tou Laou
1933b). e refugee newspapers were even more aggressive. Prosfygikos Kosmos
rejected the proposal of the return of the 25% compensation as a pathetic ruse
and warned the Popular Party:
We the refugees are tolerant to the point of forgetting those who are responsible
for our destruction because we wanted to safeguard the interests of our country.
We also set aside the oensive words like “Turkish seeds,” “Gypsy hordes,” and
“pillagers of the Treasury,” which [the Populists] use when addressing us. We
choose to forget [all these] although they went as far as to question our national
consciousness requesting that we vote on dierent registers. But we will never
accept being treated as complete idiots to the point of self-deception with such
cheap tricks. (Prosfygikos Kosmos 1933)
One of the crucial issues of the interwar period was assigning blame
for Greece’s humiliating defeat in the war and the subsequent Catastrophe.
Although both sides were involved in the conduct of the Asia Minor cam-
paign, the guilt ocially fell on a small group of Royalist military and political
358 Haris Exertzoglou
ocials who were tried by a military tribunal. Six of them were found guilty
of treason and executed in November 1922. e executions did not soothe
public outcry or diminish the political split in the country. On the contrary,
the executions provided a source of constant tension, and, eventually, the issue
became entangled with the memorialization of Asia Minor. e dispute over
the memorial of the six executed Royalists is a case in point.
On 16 November 1934, George Vlachos, editor of the daily Kathimerinē
(Daily post), proposed the construction of a small memorial temple in the
place where the six political and military leaders had been executed (Kathi-
merinē 1934). Supporters of the Popular Party, as well as even some Liberals,
believed that the death penalty had not been justied and that the sentence was
politically motivated by the explicit goal of holding specic Royalists—and by
extension the King himself—responsible for the Catastrophe. A segment of
the pro-Royalist press insisted that the execution of the Six was a prearranged
crime motivated by the hatred of the Liberal Part y and of Venizelos himself for
the King and the leadership of the Populists. Hence, Venizelos and the Liberals
were oen referred to as murderers and criminals.
Vlachos’s proposal was not accidental. A few days before he made it, a
group of Royalists accused of attempting to assassinate Venizelos and his wife
in November 1933 were brought to trial, aggravating an already tense situation
and giving rise to inammatory articles in the press. Vlachos did not even
attempt to hide his intention for the monument to serve as a rallying point
for the Royalists. Obviously, the commemoration of this event was meant as a
provocation in the ongoing political struggle between Liberals and Populists,
but it would have received no further attention had Stamatis Chatzibeis, a Lib-
eral member of parliament, not called for the construction of another monu-
ment to commemorate the ocers, soldiers, and civilians who died during the
Asia Minor campaign. At rst sight, the two monuments did not seem to be
in conict, except for their size and budget. However, the two proposals pro-
jected a completely dierent version of the memory of the Asia Minor Catastro-
phe. Chatzibeis claimed that his proposal would do justice to “the ocers and
privates who died in vain in the war [but also] to the hundreds of thousands
of the unburied and unlamented fathers, brothers and relatives, victims of the
criminal and foolish acts of the post-November administrations” (Patris 1934).
With the term “post-November administrations,” Chatzibeis was referring to
the Royalist administrations responsible for the Asia Minor campaign aer the
electoral defeat of the Liberals in 1920. e Royalists won these elections by
promising an end to the war to an electorate already exhausted by a decade of
constant warfare, but they did not live up to their promise and even expanded
military operations against the Turkish nationalist forces for two more years
until the collapse of the front in August 1922. It is striking that Chatzibeis held
the Royalist administration responsible not only for the military defeat but
Children of Memory 359
also for the civilian deaths caused by the war and the atrocities committed by
Kemalist forces, which, however, he did not mention directly.
As expected, Vlachos replied in very strong language. In a long leading
article, he put the whole period of the Catastrophe into a totally dierent
perspective, arguing that the Royalist government was forced to continue
ghting in Asia Minor as the only means of protecting the Christians from
the wrath of the Turks. But the war itself was the choice of the Liberal admin-
istration, which, in addition, he held culpable for purging the ocers’ corps
of all men with Royalist sympathies. What the Royalist government did was
to rehabilitate these ocers as “these tragic heroes” and to mobilize them
in an unwanted war. erefore, Vlachos argued, the Royalists died by the
thousands in Asia Minor in vain, in support of a struggle that was not theirs
(Vlachos 1934).
Nikos Efstratiou, the editor of the ultra-Royalist daily, Hellenikon Mellon
(Greek future), responded to Chatzibeis with the same vehemence as Vlachos
had. Not only did he support the call for the construction of the temple, but he
added that another monument should be constructed to the memory of King
Constantine, who had died in January 1923 in exile and remained “unburied in
a foreign land” (Efstratiou 1934; Hellenikon Mellon 1934). According to Efstra-
tiou, these monuments would be the answer to the provocation of the Liberals
and their “criminal” leader. In this case, the Catastrophe was simply a subplot
in a narrative whose central theme was the conict between Royalists and Lib-
erals. As a consequence, in this context, the Asia Minor monument was simply
an episode serving as a counterproposal to the Royalist narrative that discarded
the Asia Minor Catastrophe altogether and focused on the executions in the
Goudi Park. Chatzibeis’s accusations were part of the Liberal account that
accused the Royalist side of extending the war, of avoiding negotiations for an
honorable peace, and of completely misjudging the military and political situ-
ation. Nikos Efstratiou deployed the same argument in reverse. In the Royalist
narrative he recited, it was the Liberals who had led a badly prepared country
for an unwise war—and who had le no other option for the new Royalist
government in 1920 than to continue the ghting. According to this narrative,
the Liberal ocers who still served with the Greek army were held accountable
for the military defeat because they disobeyed superior ocers who belonged
to a dierent political faction.
e extent and nature of the controversy was such that it could not go
unnoticed by the refugee papers. Prosfygikos Kosmos joined the dispute, taking
the side of Chatzibeis and the Liberals. is was anticipated due to the strong
Liberal sympathies of many refugees. More interesting is the fact that the Kos-
mos accused Vlachos and the Royalists of tak ing the memory of Asia Minor o
the slate of national commemorations, preferring instead to focus on an event
serving only partisan purposes:
360 Haris Exertzoglou
What can we make of this suggestion? Are we [the refugees] still counted among
the Bulgarians or the Turks and not among the Greeks? Because this is exactly
what monsieur Vlachos seems to be insinuating. But maybe there is simply his
hatred for the ref ugees because their vote deprived his part y of victor y in the elec-
tions for many years. ... His hatred blocks his reason making him incapable of
recognizing that in Asia Minor the Greeks fought and died united without part y
discrimination. But along with the soldiers hundreds of thousands of civilians
also died. Our fathers, our mothers, our brothers and sisters were dishonored,
enslaved and murdered by the Greek state which obstr ucted their timely removal
from Asia Minor sending none of the available ships harbored in nearby ports
to rescue them, leaving them unprotected on the Smyrna quay. (Prosfygikos
Kosmos 1934b)
e Kosmos referred to the lack of will on the part of the Royalist military and
political administration to evacuate the refugees, suggesting that they were as
responsible as the Turks for the murders and misfortunes of the Christian pop-
ulation. But although the presence of the so-called martyrs is evident here, the
refugees were subsumed under the metanarrative of the National Schism. e
memory of the dead was mentioned as an appendix to the major claim of the
paper: the integration of the refugees into Greek society. No wonder, then, that
one of the following leading articles published by the paper purposely avoided
the mongering of the dead, focusing instead on current social issues, specically
the situation of the refugees. e Kosmos lamented the poor living conditions
in the refugee settlements in Athens and elsewhere, blaming the state for their
plight. “It is time for the authorities to remember the refugees and the conditions
they live in. Because the refugees never stop remembering the miserable lives
they now live [in Greece]. If it [the state] does not want to commemorate the
memory of our dead let it take care now of the refugees and their needs” (Pros-
fygikos Kosmos 1934c). In this case, memory was seen as part of the everyday
experience of the refugees, a reminder of the collapse of their social lives that
was, as the paper suggested, the outcome of their incomplete integration.
e two cases presented above allow us to understand the negotiation of
refugee identity in the context of Greek politics during the short period follow-
ing the Catastrophe. e memorialization of Asia Minor was part of the intense
and bitter political conict in Greece and a critical factor in the making of the
Greek refugee identity. For the Populists, the refugees were immature citizens
under the spell of the Liberals; for the Liberals, the choice of the refugees to
support them was the outcome of their having been betrayed by the Royalists.
erefore, there is good reason to suggest that during the 1930s the
memorialization of Asia Minor constituted a complicated discursive eld that
involved many dierent voices and groups with widely divergent goals. e
memorialization cannot, therefore, be limited to the refugees themselves, but
rather must be connected to the broader reguring of the Greek political
Children of Memory 361
conict. e image of the refugee was always associated with memory, either
in the form of the immature individual who could not escape the lure of the
Liberal narrative and see their true interest or, alternatively, in the form of the
individual with the duty to remember betrayal and abandonment. Betrayal is,
as we know, a strong motive to remember. e refugees themselves appropri-
ated their image as children of memory in order to negotiate their integration
into Greek society. e narrative of victimization and the narrative of empow-
erment accommodated memory and politics, though they did so with dierent
emphases. However, there was always the sense that the gradual strengthening
of the narrative of empowerment was more relevant to the politics of integra-
tion, despite the fact that it did not address the traumatic and existential aspects
of the memory of Asia Minor. e refugee narratives did not claim a position of
their own but were coordinated with the overarching narrative of the National
Schism. e Catastrophe as a major mnemonic event was the catalyst for insti-
gating passionate reactions, some more sympathetic towards the refugees than
others. But neither refugee narrative ever reached the level of a main plot in
itself. ese narratives deprived people of any autonomous spaces in which they
could present their traumatic experiences. Traumatic experience as such was
meaningful only to individual victims, insucient to form a coherent narrative
explaining the causes of the Catastrophe unless it was drawn into the major
narrative patterns of the National Schism.
NOTES
Acknowledgments. is research was conanced by the European Union (European Social Fu nd
[ESF]) and Greek national funds through the Operational Program, “Education and Lifelong
Learning,” within the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF). e research for this
paper was conducted with the support of the Research Funding Program, THALES, and is part
of a larger res earch project, “Form s of public social ity in 20 ce ntury urba n Greece: Associat ions,
networks of social intervention and collective subjectivities” (grant #MIS377242).
ere is a long debate on the naming of Orthodox Christians living in the Ottoman ter-
ritories during the last century of Ottoman rule. Nationalism in the Ottoman Empire aected
radically local identities that earlier had mostly been articulated around religion and locality.
e eect wa s far more drastic on t he population of Ot toman Christi ans, which in t he ninteenth
century was scattered throughout various ethno-national groups (Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs)
and nation-states. e onslaught of nationalism, however, did not aect all Ottoman Christians
in the same way, and some were not aected at all. ere is always some ambiguity as to how to
name identities and populations in the context of rapid transfomation. In this article, I use the
terms “Greeks,” “Ottoman Christians,” and “Orthodox Christians” interchangably, although I
recognize the dierent signications that these terms still bear.
362 Haris Exertzoglou
is statement requires qualication. e allied nation-states—Greece, Serbia, Montene-
gro, and Bulgaria—that fought the First Balkan War against the Ottoman Empire used ethnic
cleansing extensively to force Muslim populations out of Macedonia and race. e Ottomans
retaliated by relocating thousands of Christians living near the frontlines to areas far away as a
so-called precautionary military measure. e Second Balkan War was fought between the for-
mer all ies, as Greece, Roma nia, Montenegro, and Serbia, on one side, a nd Bulgaria, on t he other,
stru ggled for control of Mace donia. Duri ng the ghting , many atrocitie s were committed aga inst
civilians by all sides (Carnegie International Commission 1993). e First World War proved
especially distressful for many Christians in the Ottoman lands, particularly the Armenians,
whose mass relocation in 1915 ended with the murder of hundreds of thousands. e Armenian
genocide is still a controversial issue because the Turkish state and a large number of Turkish
and other h istorians, p articula rly American s, deny that thi s ever happened, insi sting that t he fate
of the Armenians was the outcome of civil war, presumably between Muslims and Armenians
(Akçam 2004; Göçek 2006; Tugˇal 2007; Neizi 2008; Kayali 2009).
is huge project was instigated by Melpo Merlie, the Director of the Centre, and was t he
outcome of the la borious work of a handul of res earchers who did eldwork for e xtensive periods
of time. ese researchers searched for individual refugees originating from preselected Ortho-
dox communities with the purpose of retrieving information. However, the interviews with the
refugees followed strict ru les and a specic questionnare. e Centre’s procedures for collecting
information institutionalized individual refugee witnesses to the Asia Minor Catastrophe as
subjects for memory work (Papailias 2005, 93–138).
In the last 10 to 15 years, the growing memory culture of “lost homelands,” with specic
emphasis on As ia Minor, is attested by a rticles in t he periodical a nd daily press, h istorical novel s,
cookbook s, TV program s and documentar ies, and organi zed tourist t rips, as well as va rious cul-
tural events, such as music festivals and theater performances hosted in Greece and Turkey, not
to mention the extensive number of refugee associations in every major or minor city in Greece.
Most refugee associations today focus on the bitter aspects of the Greek-Turkish war and con-
sider the persecutions and the nal expulsion of Orthodox Christians from what was to become
the Republic of Turkey as a form of genocide, similar to the Armenian genocide of 1915. What
is especially interesting and requires further study is the way this specic claim combines with
other, less pol iticized aspects of the memory cu lture of the “lost home lands” (Exertzoglou 20 01).
is is why many historians are skeptical, if not hostile, towards the use of memory in
historical studies. See, for example, Megill 2007, 54. Others follow more nuanced approaches.
See the work of Dominick LaCapra, who underscores the close relation of history and memory.
(1998, 19–22).
A short note is needed on my use of the terms “trauma” and “traumatic” in this paper.
Individual trauma, of whatever cause, is associated with painful experience involving dissoci-
ation, hallucinations, dreams, and physical reactions stemming from an overwhelming event
whose reception is not assimilated fully in consciousness at the time of its occurence. Alt hough,
stric tly speaki ng, trauma is a ssociated wit h individual e xperience, the t erm is also used t o denote
collective suerings (Alexander 2013). Other scholars outline the shortcomings of trauma as
metaphor for collective suering (Kansteiner 2004).
Many publications in recent years point to a kind of divided memory that involves indi-
viduals on one side and institutions on the other. For example, Annamaria Orla-Bukowska in
her study on the postwar politics of memory in Poland points to a clear division between ocial
memory of the pro-Soviet regime and the realm of private memory of Poles, which promoted
completely dierent versions of the Polish past (Orla-Bukowska 2006). Such situations do not
necessa rily suggest that the eld of memory is divided along the lines of authentic memory, rep-
resented by individuals, and constructed memory, represented by institutions. e opposition
between collective and individual memory informs Maurice Halbwachs’s celebrated studies on
Children of Memory 363
collective memory (1992). Many critics have outlined t he almost complete disregard which Hal-
bwachs shows towards individual memory, as he places it within broader mnemonic practices
that dened collective or group memory in the rst place. However, the thrust of Halbwachs’s
analysis regarding the importance of events that hold central importance in collective memory,
as well as his “presentism,” is widely accepted (Kansteiner 2002).
e argu ment of Dipesh Chakrabar ty relating historical trauma to historic al truth is ver y
helpful. Chakrabarty 2007 argues that historical truth is the precondition of historical trauma,
meani ng that the recog nition of trauma re quires an organ ized narrat ive that would ma ke trauma
historically meaningful.
e Venizelos adm inistration , which had been in oce since 1928, los t the 1932 elections,
part ly due to a shi in the re fugee vote, and was s uperseded by a right-wi ng coalition govern ment
for a few months unt il Venize los brought it down in the Pa rliament. e new Li beral government
conducted elections in March 1933, which it lost to a coalition of the opposition parties.
What Vlachos had in m ind was a modest temple precisely on the spot of the execution in
the Goud i Park, just beyond the ou tskirts of At hens. e monument would be con structed by pub-
lic contributions collected by a committee of well-known Royalists. e Asia Minor monument
would have been a far more ambitious project. According to the proposa l of Chatzibeis, the idea
was to erect a monument large enough to present the engraved names of all military personnel
and civilians who died in the war years of 1919–1922. is monument was also to be funded by
the public . Ironically, public d ispute over the polit ics of commemoration ended a bruptly due to a
natura l catastrophe . e devastation of a l arge part of Athen s by heavy rain falls al most wiped out
the dense ly populated area s of the city’s centra l and western par ts, inhabited mo stly by lower and
working classes, among them many refugees. Neither of the monuments was ultimately erected.
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