Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus (review)

134 Reviews oxÃ-tonos, as suggested by Hionidis?) and finally with a discussion of the problem of the notion "(metrical) foot" in modern Greek poetics. There are two added features that further enhance the book. In a long introduction, Massimo Peri, not only sets the stage for Garantudis' presentation, but also presses the need for linguistic approaches to the study of literature and metrics. Garantudis also provides an annotated bibliography of 35 works on modern Greek metrics. At times the information presented seems a bit repetitive, but that is the result of Garantudis' admirable insistence on thoroughness and documentation. All in all, then, the author has put together an excellent study that merits the attention of scholars of Greek in such diverse areas as language, literary theory, cultural studies, and intellectual history. Brian D. Joseph The Ohio State University Renée Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1989. Pp. xiii + 280. $69.00. This fine study describes a community of war refugees living in the Athens-Piraeus metropolitan sprawl as of 1971-72. The refugees are Greek, displaced from Turkey in the early 1920s. They are virtually indistinguishable from the other Greeks around them, but they call themselves Mikrasiátes, which alludes to their Asia Minor origins, and call others Palioelladites, old Greeks. The first three chapters recount the history of the Greek-Turkish war and its aftermath, 1920 to 1972. When the war began, some 1.5 million Greeks lived in Turkey. Several hundred thousand made their way out of Turkey during the fighting, and another 200,000 were removed two years later. These survivors were absorbed by Greece, then a small kingdom of 4.5 million. The refugees saw themselves as the heirs of Byzantium; they viewed other Greeks, more remote from Constantinople, as unsophisticates from the hinterlands. They brought with them the experience of having lived long as an enclaved community. And, by 1971-72, they had experienced three generations of bungling or worse in the handling of refugee matters by a succession of Greek regimes. Chapters 4 through 10 describe the everyday lives of these refu- Reviews 135 gees, focusing on a district of some 3518 persons called Yerania. Hirschon here offers (as I judge) five sets of ethnographic facts which seem especially salient. First, chapters 4, 5 and 6 contain the most graphic account yet of the fierce autonomy of the elementary family household here, as in Mediterranean traditions quite generally. In Yerania in 1927, for example, 552 prefabricated housing units were turned over to as many refugee households. The units were small (4 x 9.5 meters, in three rooms, on small plots). By 1971, 1,071 households , almost double the original, occupied virtually the same units. How? A daughter's marriage is arranged; as dowry she is given one or two rooms (of the three); there she and her husband establish a household, critically including their own cooking area in the corner of one of the rooms; later, for a second daughter or a daughter's daughter, space is excavated under the house for a room or two and another cooking area, and so on. (See pp. 124-125, where Hirschon traces permutations in geneology and floor plans for one family from 1928 to 1972.) In no instance do these become extended families; each elementary family has its own budget, pursuing its own household interests independent from, and often in competition with, the others. The second array of ethnographic facts (chapter 8) sketches the tension between the centrifugal forces generated by these autonomous households versus centripetal forces generated by reciprocal exchanges among neighbors. The author describes these forces from the vantage of adult women who are wives and mothers and, to each other, neighbors. These women look to their respective houses and household interests, and they also look outward to their proximate neighbors toward whom behavior is (ideally) cooperative. First one force, then the other, comes to the fore, according to the situation and, engagingly, according to the seasons and the time of day. A third set of facts (pp. 219—235) traces how concerns for the material and spiritual well...