Echoes of memories of forced displacement: The case of the Greek island of Lesvos
Introduction
How do people’s memories of forced relocation affect their identities, values, and attitudes towards contemporary migrants and refugees? In this chapter, 1 examine the potential effects of refugee memory through the historical parallel between the Greek-Turkish population exchange (1923) and the contemporary migration and refugee flows (2015). More specifically, while focusing on the case of the Greek island of Lesvos, the question that I aim to address is: how do people with family memories of forced relocation relate to contemporary migrants and refugees? To unpack the fluid relationship between history, memory, identity, and values, as well as the way they inform assistance to migrants and refugees, 1 will use evidence drawn from primary sources, including oral testimonies from my fieldwork on Lesvos in the course of 2017, and archival evidence.
Lesvos is an island that constitutes an entry port for significant contemporary migration flows and whose present population composition has to a large degree been formed by the 1923 population exchange. In Greece, the case of Lesvos is far from rare given that a significant percentage of the country’s current population is descended from refugees from Asia Minor (Tata Arsel 2014). Manifold examples illustrate that a large percentage of Greece’s population has experienced immigration and forced displacement. The reason I chose to examine forced displacement memories in Greece through the case study of the Greek-Turkish population exchange can be summarized in the following points. First, this exchange of populations poses paramount international interest in modern history since ‘[i]t was the first time in history that the transfer of large ethnic groups was tried as a means to separate nationally intermingled people’ (Pentzopoulos 1962: 18). In addition, it is central to the Greek identity dominating ‘the modern Greek consciousness as the fundamental event which has transformed the form and the character of the contemporary history of the nation’ (Kitromilides 1972: 372).
Although limited in scope, the present chapter has broader implications and is relevant to many countries with similar traumatic experiences of forced displacement. Forced displacement has been experienced by a large
Echoes of memories of forced displacement 13 percentage of people throughout the world. By drawing boundaries within intermingled populations through forced assimilation, large-scale human displacement, ethnic cleansing, and mass killings, nation-states were built on ‘victories as much as on defeats, on “catastrophes” and traumas’ (Akgonul 2009: 195), shaping collective memories central to ethnic identities.
Europe’s current demographic profile is rooted in past relocation experiences of forced displacement. Considering this, the rise of xenophobic sentiment, the great debates with regard to refugees’ distribution within the European Union, and the place of the newcomers in the host societies (Gero & Sik 2019; Main in this volume), it comes into question how and to what extent memories of forced migration influence people’s attitudes towards contemporary migrants and refugees. My aim is to examine the effects of the wounds of memories of forced displacement on people’s identities, values, and attitudes towards subsequent migration in the context of Europe’s ‘migration crisis.’
Narratives
The data that inform this chapter1 derive from the collection of primary sources using oral testimonies from my fieldwork on the island of Lesvos in 2017 and archival evidence from the Oral History Tradition archive of the Centre of Asia Minor Studies.2 It should be noted that this research is not designed ‘to tell a fully representative story - an unmanageable task for any project that adopts in-depth interviewing’ (Gildea &. Mark 2013: 11) but rather to unpack histories of subjectivities, providing a more diversified picture.
This chapter aims to shed light on the interplay between the Asia Minor refugee memory of forced displacement and people’s identities and values with regard to subsequent migration in the context of Europe’s ‘migration crisis.’ With this aim, the case of Lesvos has been chosen based on the following criteria. Firstly, this island experienced the greatest number of refugee arrivals in both 1923 and 2015 relative to its size and constitutes the largest port of arrivals and a traditional epicenter of both the past and the contemporary refugee arrivals. A second criterion is the island’s proximity and exposure to the contemporary migration due to the existence of refugee camps and other accommodation facilities.
My main analytical category is Asia Minor refugees and their descendants of the second and third generations. My sample also includes people without refugee family background. Using snowball sampling and access to refugee associations, I traced people with refugee roots. I conducted 13 face-to-face, in-depth, and semi-structured interviews on the island of Lesvos in Mytilene (the capital and port of the island), Moria (a hotspot), and Kara Tepe (a refugee camp).
Through the lens of micro-history, I carried out an in-depth analysis at the individual level and related it to collective and cultural frameworks of remembrance. The questions of what kind of memory is transmitted and if it is lasting or changeable over time, as well as its imprint on the transmitted identities and values was elucidated through the conducted interviews. Tracing voices that otherwise would have been lost, my analysis went beyond traumatic events as such, examining histories of subjectivities and ‘the changing uses and meanings of that past in the present’ (Thomson 2015: 26).
