Faced with discrimination in Turkey, the Greeks of Istanbul and Imbros overwhelmingly left the country of their birth in the years c.1940-1980 to resettle in Greece, where they received something of a lukewarm reception from the government and segments of the population. This book explores the myriad ways in which the expatriated Greeks of Turkey daily understand their contemporary difficulties through the lens of historical experience, and reimagine the past according to present concerns and conceptions. It demonstrates how the Greeks of Turkey draw upon the particularities of their own local heritages in order simultaneously to establish their legitimacy as residents of Greece and maintain a sense of their distinctiveness vis-à-vis other Greeks; and how expatriate memory activists respond to their persecution in Turkey and their marginalisation in Greece by creating linkages between their experiences and both Greek national history and the histories of other persecuted communities. Greeks without Greece shows that in a broad spectrum of different domains - from commemorative ceremonies and the minutiae of citizenship to everyday expressions of national identity and stereotypes about others - the past is a realm of active and varied use capable of sustaining multiple and changeable identities, memories, and meanings.
Author(s): Huw Halstead
Series: Routledge Studies in Modern European History
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: xiv+256
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of figures
List of tables
Acknowledgements
PART I: Introduction
Introduction
Greeks without Greece: overview
Terminology
Methodology and sources
Structure of the book
Chapter 1: The Greeks of Turkey
Istanbul
Imbros
Greece
PART II: Local homelands and national belonging
Chapter 2: Patrída as a local metaphor
Patrída as a local metaphor
Through the looking glass: continuity, invention, imposition
The ‘usable past’: the everyday life of national identity
Chapter 3: More than simply Hellenic: belonging andinclusive particularity
The Greeks of Turkey: a diaspora community?
The Helleno–Romaic dilemma
‘The Romiós is one thing and the Hellene is another’
Inclusive particularity (1): Polítes and Byzantium
Inclusive particularity (2): Imvriótes and Ancient Athens
Expatriate protoselves
Conclusions
Chapter 4: Without barbarians: Turks and Elladítes
Ethnicity as an ‘interpretive prism’
Good Turk, bad Turks
Nominal and experiential Turks
Privileged knowledge (1): the ‘bad Turks’
Privileged knowledge (2): the ‘good Turk’
Conclusions
PART III: National and transnational histories
Chapter 5: Everyday multidirectional memory
Holocaust memory
Mediated memory
An everyday history of multidirectional memory
Chapter 6: ‘The Third Fall’: commemorations and national history
‘The 300 who stayed’: thinking analogically
Commemorating the 1955 Istanbul Riots
Commemorating the 1453 Fall of Constantinople
1453 and 1821
1453 and 1955
Transcending the national paradigm: the Federation ofConstantinopolitans
Conclusions
Chapter 7: ‘Kristallnacht in Constantinople’: parallel and analogous histories
Parallel histories: Armenians and Kurds
Analogous histories: Jews and Nazis
Asymmetric histories: the Western Thracian minority
From ‘pogrom’ to ‘genocide’: classifying the persecution of the Greeks of Turkey
Transcultural memory in personal testimony
Transnational nationalism?
Conclusions
PART IV: Homelands new and old
Chapter 8: Welcome to Gökçeada: the Greek return to Imbros
Between ‘New Imbros’ and ‘Old Imbros’
Confronting ‘the real Imbros’: challenges and prospects
‘Native tourists’: belonging in the Imvrian return
‘When you return to your patrída’: the second generation
Conclusions
Conclusions
Inclusive particularity
The past as a critical mirror
Excavating and backfilling the past
Everyday multidirectionality
Appendix: Tables
Table 1 – List of interviewees: Polítes
Table 2 – List of interviewees: Imvriótes
Table 3 – List of interviewees: second generation
Table 4 – Decline in Greek-speaking/Orthodox Christian populationsof Istanbul and Imbros
Glossary
References
Index
