The Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) in Asia Minor and the Population Exchange that followed led to the forced displacement of more than 1.5 million people who became entangled in the nation-building processes of both Greece and Turkey. This book examines the memories that shaped Asia Minor refugee identity, focusing on the ways in which these memories continue to reverberate in contemporary Greek culture. It explores how memories of Asia Minor frame wider social debates, foster affective alliances, inform different notions of belonging and provide a toolkit for addressing contemporary concerns. Taking the reader across a wide range of cultural works—history textbooks, comics, theatre, documentary and fiction films, news footage and photography—the book shows how these works have become means for individuals and communities to contribute to the process of history-making. While keeping its focus on present-day Greece, Memories of Asia Minor joins wider global debates over contested pasts, legacies of war and refugeehood.

The story of 19th-century Asia Minor Greeks illustrates the interplay of European and non-Western cultures. Although grounded historically in the latter culture, Greeks in Asia Minor interacted economically and culturally with Europeans. They were an integral part of Ottoman society, yet considered an ethnoreligious minority. Gerasimos Augustinos, in his comprehensive social and cultural survey, traces their progress during a critical era of modern history and discusses how their development ultimately affected the entire Hellenic world. Augustinos emphasizes the period from 1840 to 1880, a time of transition from traditional agrarian society and the primacy of religious identity in multinational authoritarian states in Eastern Europe to the dynamic and more complex era of industrialization, nationalist ideology, mass politics, and centralizing states. The role and structure of the Greek Orthodox church was challenged, commerce and education developed, and culture became politicized with the emergence of a Greek nation-state which transmitted its influence from Athens to Asia Minor. Within the Greek communal institutions the sense of ethnic self-identity was reshaped. These forces, however, did not result in an allegiance to one political path. Differences between the urban and provincial Greek communities developed, as did tensions between higher clergy and community leaders, the Patriarchate and the representatives of the Greek government, and Greeks native to Asia Minor and those from Greece. Augustinos addresses these problems of social accommodation among a communally organized people in a multinational state and further defines the interrelation of folk and formal culture and thedynamics of ethnicity and faith. Using unpublished materials from a number of important archival collections and contemporary publications, he draws on the work of Ottomanists as well as neo-Hellenists. His is the first extensive treatment of the subject and a significant contribution to the social and institutional history of the nationalities in the Ottoman Empire. The Greeks of Asia Minor will interest historians of the Middle East, the Near East, and Southeastern Europe, particularly Ottoman specialists, in addition to historians of modern Greece. It will also prove indispensable to specialists in nationalism, ethnicity, and nation- and state-building and valuable to Asia Minor Greeks and their descendants in the English-speaking world and Greece who want to better understand their heritage.

The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture engages with migration to, within, and from Europe, foregrounding migration through the lenses of historical migratory movement and flows associated with colonialism and postcolonialism. With essays on literature, film, drama, graphic novels, and more, the book addresses migration and media, hostile environments, migration and language, migration and literary experiment, migration as palimpsest, and figurations of the migrant. Each section is introduced by one of the handbook’s contributing editors and interviews with writers and film directors are integrated throughout the volume. The essays collected in the volume move beyond the discourse of the “refugee crisis” to trace the historical roots of the current migration situation through colonialism and decolonization.

Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe is a landmark work in the areas of anthropology and migration studies. Since its first publication in 1989, this classic study has remained in demand. The third edition is published to mark the centenary of the 1923 Lausanne Convention which led to the movement of some 1.5 million persons between Greece and Turkey at the conclusion of their war. It includes updated material with a new Preface, Afterword by Ayhan Aktar, and map of the wider region. The new Preface provides the context in which the original research took place, assesses its innovative aspects and explores the dimensions of history and identity which are predominant themes in the book.

How did the cities of Ionia construct and express a distinct sense of Ionian identity under Roman rule? With the creation of the Roman province of Asia and the ever-growing incorporation of the Greeks into the Roman Empire, issues of identity gained new relevance and urgency for the Greek provincials. The Ionian cities are a special case as they, unlike many other cities in Asia Minor, were all old Greek poleis and could look back on a glorious tradition of great antiquity. Martin Hallmannsecker provides answers to this question using studies of the extant literary sources complemented with analyses of the rich epigraphic and numismatic material from the cities of Ionia. In doing so, he draws a more holistic and nuanced picture of the region and furthers understanding of Greek culture under the Roman Empire.

The previously unpublished memoir of social worker Charles Schermerhorn offers new and eye-opening source material pertaining to the epicenter of the early Cold War: northern Greece. This book brings this memoir to light to enrich the discussion about the Greek Civil War and the late 1940s, through the highly perceptive views of a firsthand observer of the turmoil. Schermerhorn’s writings speak most compellingly to the power of human agency amid adverse sociopolitical circumstances. His memoir takes a child-centered and social-historical approach to controversial events, filling a great void in our knowledge. This book looks at a single mid-twentieth-century crisis in multidimensional ways, as a moral, material, social, and institutional calamity that mobilized a motley crew of actors, from new humanitarian aid organizations to press agents, from soldiers to destitute repeat-refugees, from fledgling modern missionaries to foreign diplomats and economic strategists. It was Schermerhorn’s unique achievement to interact with them all, seeking common ground in the arduous task of trying to improve living conditions for children and rural families. But he also realized how easily foreign aid could become a tool of political power and expediency. Focusing on the Greek Civil War, this book will interest readers studying the Cold War, the heated peripheries of proxy wars, and the devastating social fallout of conflicts raging in areas hidden from public view. The global history of humanitarian crises is a burgeoning field, and Schermerhorn was the first to place Greek children and villagers, who themselves left hardly any sources behind, at the center of this urgent and ever-relevant debate.