Heirs of the Greek catastrophe: The social life of Asia Minor refugees in Piraeus

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”.The presentation then focuses on the space and infrastructure in Germanika/Yerania – a small settlement close to Piraeus – some contextual (behind the scenes) of her fieldwork, and the demographic changes she recorded in 2001 and 2008. The key findings concerning the use of space can be best captured by the phrase “spotless slum”. Germanika/Yerania was overcrowded, without an integrated sewage system, and without paved roads – except for two main roads leading to the port of Piraeus. Nevertheless, they were spotless clean because the women of the town would sweep the street nearby their houses in the afternoons.

The author’s interactions with some of her Greek hosts had been rather warm to the point that a Greek friend of hers, who was rather worried that the author was unmarried, proposed that she get married to a Greek man who owned a tailoring workshop for the production of men shirts. This anecdote serves to indicate that the author’s friend, a Greek woman, saw her as a daughter because she had sons.

The fieldwork was conducted during the regime of the Greek military junta. Despite some challenges and the need for caution at the time, the initial study did not take into account the political dynamics. The author returned in 1983 and included the political conditions in the area.

At the end of the presentation, the author noted some changes and continuities she had recorded. The community in the area had been coping with the displacement by creating a “memory bank”, for example by reproducing past regional stereotypes, to create a continuity with their previous lives in Türkiye. On the other hand there had been changes to marriage and family life as more people had been divorced. The urban and demographic landscape had also changed. Roads were paved and three-four storey buildings had replaced the one-storey ones. Once a homogeneous community, in 2001 there were approximately 6,000 inhabitants from 83 countries who declared their foreign origin. They were mainly from Albania and other countries in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Migrants from Pakistan and Egypt, mainly single men, had also moved into the area in later years.

Robin Cohen commented on the importance of the book as a work of urban ethnography, whereby the author is able to zoom in and out to simultaneously underscore the relevance of the sociopolitical context and understand how it influences the details of social life and identities. He further discuss displacement in the context of nationalism and of more recent studies, and argues that the book provides a wider understanding of the wider expressions and manifestations of displacement that does not happen only to those who have been displaced but also the communities they have left behind and the communities in which they have been settled.

Başak Kale discussed the book in the context of the Turkish perspective and how the Lausanne Convention and the forced resettlement of Greek Muslims has affected Turkish communities. She emphasised that for the Turks the population exchange was not considered as a disaster. It was considered part of a victory that was sealed by the Treaty of Lausanne, and the issue of the population exchange has been seen in legalistic terms. Given this background, the second edition of the book, published in 1998, coincided with an important moment for Turkish scholarship, which had begun to re-examine identity, belonging, homeland, and the social and psychological processes of being part of the nation. According to Kale, re-examining these topics in a historical perspective are critical to understand contemporary issues of citizenship, belonging, and displacement.

The question and answer session was rather short, and the questions focused mainly on the methodological aspects concerning the anonymisation of the locations where the fieldwork was conducted, the timeline of the research, and potential silences of the communities studied.

by Alban Dafa (ESC Reserach Assistant)