The defeat of the Greek armies in Asia Minor in August 1922, led directly to the flight of Greek refugees from Asia Minor, the compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey and the resettlement in Greece of 1.3 million displaced people. This text covers this impact.
"...Meticulously researched...Thoroughly documented with copious footnotes, a shronology, and extensive bibliography, this work is recommended for academic libraries." —Library Journal Focusing on questions that seek to illuminate vital aspects of the Greek phenomenon, this modern history of Greece is organized around themes such as politics, institutions, society, ideology, foreign policy, geography, and culture. Making clear their predilection for the principles that inspired the founding fathers of the Greek state, Koliopoulos and Veremis juxtapose these principles to contemporary practices, and outline the resulting tensions in Greek society as it enters the new millenium. Challenging established notions and stereotypes that have disfigured Greek history, Greece: A Modern Sequel is meant to encourage a fresh look at the country and its people. In the process, a portrait of a new Greece emerges: modern, diverse, and strong.
Following the defeat of the Greek Army in 1922 by nationalist Turkish forces, the Convention of Lausanne in 1923 specified the first compulsory exchange of populations ratified by an international organization. The arrival in Greece of over 1.2 million refugees and their settlement proved to be a watershed with far-reaching consequences for the country. Dr Kontogiorgi examines the exchange of populations and the agricultural settlement in Greek Macedonia of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Asia Minor and the Pontus, Eastern Thrace, the Caucasus, and Bulgaria during the inter-war period. She examines Greek state policy and the role of the Refugee Settlement Commission which, under the auspices of the League of Nations, carried out the refugee resettlement project. Macedonia, a multilingual and ethnically diverse society, experienced a transformation so dramatic that it literally changed its character. Kontogiorgi charts that change and attempts to provide the means of understanding it. The consequences of the settlement of refugees for the ethnological composition of the population, and its political, social, demographic, and economic implications are treated in the light of new archival material. Reality is separated from myth in examining the factors involved in the process of integration of the newcomers and assimilation of the inhabitants - both refugees and indigenous - of the New Lands into the nation-state. Kontogiorgi examines the impact of the agrarian reforms and land distribution and makes an effort to convert the climate of the rural society of Macedonia during the inter-war period. The antagonisms between Slavophone and Vlach-speaking natives and refugee newcomers regarding the reallocation of former Muslim properties had significant ramifications for the political events in the region in the years to come. Other recurring themes in the book include the geographical distribution of the refugees, changing patterns of settlement and toponyms, the organisation of health services in the countryside, as well as the execution of irrigation and drainage works in marshlands. Kontogiorgi also throws light upon and analyses the puzzling mixture of achievement and failure which characterizes the history of the region during this transitional period. As the first successful refugee resettlement project of its kind, the 'refugee experiment' in Macedonia could provide a template for similar projects involving refugee movements in many parts of the world today.
This unique book examines the international law of minority rights as it has been applied in the Balkans since the First World War, contending that this region, where minority rights issues are acute and abundant, holds the promise of an enforceable regime of international minority rights that would promote both human rights law and peace in the Balkans. Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint.
The relationship between the history, culture and peoples of Greece, Turkey and Cyprus is often reduced to an equation which defines one side in opposition to the other.The reality is much more complex and while there have been and remain significant divisions there are many, and arguably more, areas of overlap, commonality and common interest.This book addresses a gap in the scholarly literature by bringing together specialists from different disciplinary traditions - history, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, literature, ethnomusicology and international relations, so as to examine the relationship between Greeks and Turks, as well as between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, since the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. When Greeks and Turks Meet aims to contribute to current critical and comparative approaches to the study of this complex relationship in order to question essentialist representations, stereotypes and dominant myths and understand the context and ideology of events, processes and experience. Starting from this interdisciplinary perspective and taking both diachronic and synchronic approaches, the book offers a fresh coverage of key themes including memory, history and loss; the politics of identity, language and culture; discourses of inclusion and exclusion. Contributors focus on the geographical areas of Greece, Turkey and Cyprus and on the modern historical period (since 1923) up to the present day, offering in some cases an informed perspective that looks towards the future. When Greeks and Turks Meet will be essential reading for students and researchers working on the cross-roads of Greece, Turkey and Cyprus, on South-East Europe and the Middle East more generally. It will also be a valuable resource for students and researchers in inter-cultural communication, cultural and media studies, language and education, international relations and politics, refugee and migration studies, conflict and post-conflict studies.
This volume brings together young researchers in an interdisciplinary study of Greek interaction with other Balkan states over the past two hundred years. The thirteen chapters of the volume reflect the diversity of a long and complex relationship between Greece and its Balkan neighbours. They thus shed refreshing light on its persistent attributes of opportunity and risk, attraction and enmity, exchange and exclusion, through exploration of historical, anthropological, literary, political and economic perspectives.
K. E. Fleming's Greece--a Jewish History is the first comprehensive English-language history of Greek Jews, and the only history that includes material on their diaspora in Israel and the United States. The book tells the story of a people who for the most part no longer exist and whose identity is a paradox in that it wasn't fully formed until after most Greek Jews had emigrated or been deported and killed by the Nazis. For centuries, Jews lived in areas that are now part of Greece. But Greek Jews as a nationalized group existed in substantial number only for a few short decades--from the Balkan Wars (1912-13) until the Holocaust, in which more than 80 percent were killed. Greece--a Jewish History describes their diverse histories and the processes that worked to make them emerge as a Greek collective. It also follows Jews as they left Greece--as deportees to Auschwitz or émigrés to Palestine/Israel and New York's Lower East Side. In such foreign settings their Greekness was emphasized as it never was in Greece, where Orthodox Christianity traditionally defines national identity and anti-Semitism remains common.
It is common for survivors of ethnic cleansing and even genocide to speak nostalgically about earlier times of intercommunal harmony and brotherhood. After being driven from their Anatolian homelands, Greek Orthodox refugees insisted that they lived well with the Turks, and yearned for the days when they worked and drank coffee together, participated in each others festivals, and even prayed to the same saints. Historians have never showed serious regard to thesememories, given the refugees had fled from horrific ethnic violence that appeared to reflect deep-seated and pre-existing animosities. Refugee nostalgia seemed pure fantasy; perhaps contrived to lessen the pain and humiliations of displacement.Before the Nation argues that there is more than a grain of truth to these nostalgic traditions. It points to the fact that intercommunality, a mode of everyday living based on the accommodation of cultural difference, was a normal and stabilizing feature of multi-ethnic societies. Refugee memory and other ethnographic sources provide ample illustration of the beliefs and practices associated with intercommunal living, which local Muslims and Christian communities likened to a commonmoral environment. Drawing largely from an oral archive containing interviews with over 5000 refugees, Nicholas Doumanis examines the mentalities, cosmologies, and value systems as they relate to cultures of coexistence. He furthermore rejects the commonplace assumption that the empire was destroyed by intercommunal hatreds. Doumanis emphasizes the role of state-perpetrated political violence which aimed to create ethnically homogenous spaces, and which went some way in transforming these Anatolians into Greeksand Turks.