“Today, we are all refugees.” The closing words of Emilia Salvanou’s new book, The Making of Refugee Memory, emphasise the condition of rootlessness and lack of identity which Salvanou sees in today’s world.
Her study concentrates on the effect of the expulsion of the Greek Orthodox population from Turkey in 1922-1923, but she takes a longer and wider historical perspective, pointing to the massive disruptions caused between 1912 and 1922 by the Balkan Wars and the first World War. Her thesis is that refugees, then and now, are perceived not as individuals with personal identities, but as a collective social problem – one that practical politics would prefer to ignore.
For such refugees to survive, they must not only remember their identity, but must assert it and re-enact it. Salvanou draws on Maurice Halbwachs’s term Collective Memory: “The shaping of collective memory is a work in progress. Stories that circulate in communities and that create, through their repetition, communal bonds and ties, are crucial for the survival of the community.” Yet to re-establish “community” when you no longer have a homeland, is an organic process incompatible with modern politics.
The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires provoked the carve-up of Europe into vigorous and competing nationalisms. New hegemonies came into existence.
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The Greek word is very apt, meaning supremacy and the power to exercise it either benevolently or not, as occasion demands.
These are people for whom the concepts of ‘home’ and ‘identity’ have been irrevocably separated; people for whom the word ‘home’ will never have the same meaning. They run the risk of disappearing from history
The Greek state was profoundly changed by the influx of 1.2 million refugees from Anatolia, the Pontic region and Thrace (Salvanou’s particular area of study). But it was almost impossible to accommodate the human, social and cultural differences this involved. Probably the worst hit by the 1922 relocations were the Pontic Greeks, from the Black Sea area of Turkey, whose cultural and linguistic differences were so marked that even today they suffer ostracisation and marginalisation, as depicted in Constantine Giannaris’s vivid 1998 film From the Edge of the City.
In the past 10 years, 1.35 million refugees arrived on Greek shores – almost the same number who arrived in Greece from Turkey a century ago. They have a similar problem: how to accept their new circumstances and yet sustain a memory of who they actually are, because the international refugee system, as Salvanou explains, designates all refugees as a single problem.
These are people for whom the concepts of “home” and “identity” have been irrevocably separated; people for whom the word “home” will never have the same meaning. They run the risk of disappearing from history.
The refugees since 2014 have been mainly escaping conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan. I recently edited the story of a Syrian refugee working as an interpreter in a camp in northern Greece. He reported that such refugees “are caught in the inescapable rough seas of international political affairs and national interests, left aside by the system and left to fend for themselves”. He says: “It is the screams of these people that I hear incessantly, day and night.”
Kapka Kassabova’s stunning quartet of books about the Balkans also features people screaming at the injustices of history. Her Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe (2017) illustrates the fact that political borders in the Balkans cannot contain ethnic, cultural, linguistic or religious identities. The more recent Balkan wars after the break-up of the Yugoslav Federation in the 1990s continue to resonate within the geography. Kassabova’s analysis of the situation in the Prespes region, which lies between Albania, Greece and Bulgaria, should be read alongside the more humdrum political accounts of how North Macedonia got its name under the Prespes Agreement, because hers is about real people and their landscape, rather than a placename on a political map.
In 1943 the Greek minister of information could envisage Athens as the commercial and political hub of the postwar Balkans, rather than the Russification which was already under way. If that had evolved, the history and present status of eastern Europe and the EU would be very different. The complexity of the Balkans will not go away, and Greece is deeply implicated in its border issues with its neighbours, in each of which there are ethnic Greeks experiencing discrimination and even open aggression.
Kassabova writes of her life among the Sarakatsani – transhumant shepherds, not unlike the Sami peoples of Lapland – whose peripatetic lives are now contained within the new borders of the Balkan region which deny them freedom of movement. Their way of life, and their reason for living, have been taken away. Their life stories must be weighed against the narrative of modernisation and conformity. They are now refugees within what was once their own terroir.
Migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, transhumant shepherds are not unlike transgender people in that they challenge the boundaries which separate “us” from “them”, which impose definitions rather than recognising difference and otherness. Ethnic Greeks in the Balkans know how profoundly true that is.