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• 5 Everyday Life after Emigration, 1925–1931 In the late 1920s, shortly after the mass emigration of Greeks from Bulgaria, the attorney Dimitris Vogazlis, now a resident of Greece, visited his native Plovdiv/Philippoupolis and, together with his wife, wished to pay tribute to the Mother of God Church (Panagia) in nearby Voden/ Vodena. The village had seen some of the worst violence in the summer of 1924, with repeated clashes between local Greeks and Bulgarian refugees that had compelled the Greeks to emigrate en masse. When Vogazlis and his wife arrived for service on a Sunday morning, the formerly Greek church was almost completely empty. Honoring the visitors, the elderly Bulgarian minister bestowed the protection of the Mother of God onto the couple and blessed them in “decent” Greek. He was pleased to have an audience , and, when invited to join the family in the coffeehouse, the pastor confided with grief: “You Greeks are so devout!...The church was always full on Sundays [when Greeks inhabited the village] ...When the Greeks left Voden, the government gave their homes to [Bulgarian] refugees from Thrace. You might not believe it, but this is the sad truth. Even on Good Friday, when we take the cross around the church, . . . [the refugees] do not do the cross or rise on their feet. Young people mock me disparagingly , with cigarettes in their mouth. You Greeks are a different matter!” Later in the conversation, fixing his eyes on the horizon and talking as if in a dream, the priest deliberated on recent events: “We are both small nations. Our misfortune is that we are located at the crossroad of Europe and Asia. . . . So the Great [powers] would not leave us alone. . . . We, in Bulgaria, without religion, with our extremism that lacks patriotism, with freely distributed materialism, we will be absorbed, either by Russia or Germany. But you Greeks will be saved whatever challenges you face. One 158 | Chapter 5 would say that the words of Christ, ‘Faith will save thou,’...refer to your nation. [You are the] lucky ones!”1 This episode was remarkable for several reasons. The kindly encounter between a Bulgarian priest and a Greek communal leader, representatives of, supposedly, the most uncompromising national stock, refutes, first of all, a black-and-white depiction of the interaction between the two ethnic groups in the interwar period. In fact, cordial relations between Bulgarians and Greeks continued even in the aftermath of violence and displacement. The conversation also reveals the importance of local dynamics, social expectations , and communal practices in the interactions between people, a trend that facilitated the continued close connections between Bulgarians and Greeks at the expense of the Bulgarian refugees who had replaced the Greeks. The disruption of established practices and everyday routines after the Greeks’ emigration made local Bulgarians skeptical of their new Bulgarian co-residents, as they had to learn anew how to live with people, albeit of the same ethnicity, but who had a different notion of communal life and social hierarchy. Finally, people wished to rationalize and overcome the zeal of nationalist ideology that pitted the two nations against each other. Instead of defending the righteousness of their nation, they were critical of the direction their country was taking. In search of normalization after a period of nationalist confrontation, people found solace in everyday customs , expectations, and practices that promised deliverance from the previous turbulence. The refugee crisis in the Balkans in the mid-1920s made the Bulgarian and Greek measures targeting their minorities and refugees uneven; as a result, officials constantly had to readjust their policies and practices in the late 1920s. This trend, combined with the political instability, economic volatility, and social turmoil rampant in the interwar period, determined the situation of ordinary people in the years immediately after emigration. By tracing the experiences of the Greeks who remained in Bulgaria and their relatives who resettled in Greece, this chapter asks how two marginalized social groups, a small minority and an impoverished immigrant population, dealt with the crises of the postwar years in their everyday lives. Revealing how individuals adjusted in a hostile “native land” or commenced new lives in an estranged “national homeland,” the story of the Bulgarian Greeks highlights the blurry link between national identity and place of residence after resettlement. The international and domestic proponents of population exchange had championed emigration as the best way to handle the minority question straining relations between Bulgaria and Greece. However, neither the Greeks who relocated to...

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