The European Studies Centre (ESC) in collaboration with South East European Studies at Oxford (SEESOX) held a book discussion on the experiences of the Greek population of Asia Minor who settled in Greece after the population exchange agreement through the 1923 Lausanne Convention. Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus, written by Professor Renée Hirschon, was first published in 1989, whilst its third edition was published to commemorate the centenary of the Lausanne Convention.
The discussion was held on 25 October 2023, and it was chaired by Michael Llewellyn Smith, Fellow at St. Antony’s College. Renée Hirschon – Senior Research Fellow at St. Peter’s College, Oxford – presented the third edition of the book, while Robin Cohen – Emeritus Professor at Kellogg College, Oxford – and Başak Kale – Associate Professor at the Middle East Technical Institute – discussed the contributions of the book to the research on the topic and more broadly concerning questions of identity, belonging, nationalism, migration, and memory.
During the presentation of the book, Professor Hirschon provided some historical context to her research approach, discussed the key objective of the research, and presented some of the key themes. She first underlined some changes in the names of the locations where the field work had been conducted due to confidentiality concerns. The reader of the third edition should be aware that in the third edition “Nea Ephsus” is used instead of “Kokkinia” and/or “Nikaia”, while “Yerania” has replaced “Germanika”. The author then underscored that the research she was conducting in the 1970s was not part of what we may call today “refugee studies” or “migration studies”. The field did not exist at the time and in 1972, when Hirschon was conducting the research, the worldwide population of forcibly displaced persons was approximately 3.2 million. The purpose of the research conducted in the 1970s was to understand the interaction between the use of space and cultural values. But given the exponential growth of the worldwide number of forcibly displaced persons, she revisits her work and seeks to determine whether “we can learn something from the experience of people who were forcibly displaced in the early 1920s and whether that experience is relevant for us today”.
