The making of refugee memory: Past as history and practice by Emilia Salvanou (review)

Since the end of the Byzantine Empire with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the Great Idea (Megali Idea) has infused the Greek national imaginary. After Greece's 1821–1828 War of Independence, there were many efforts to materialize the Great Idea as part of the formation of Greece as a modern nation, all leading to the Greek-Turkish war of 1919–1923, including the Asia Minor Catastrophe. There are a number of scholarly books that explore this highly sensitive issue; from autobiographical novels and memoirs, such as A Prisoner of War's Story (1929) by Stratis Doukas and Number 31328 (1931) by Ilias Venezis to Farewell Anatolia (1962) by Dido Sotiriou, and more recently, the rather popular The Witches of Smyrna (2002) by Mara Meimaridi, as well as the film "A Touch of Spice" (2006) by Tassos Boulmettis. These narratives usually express a nostalgic longing for a glorious national past based on personal life-stories that invite audiences to experience vicariously the romanticism of the Great Idea. They also explore how the modernization process for both countries shattered the harmonious coexistence of diverse cultures as well as radically altering individual lives in the process.

In The Making of Refugee Memory: Past as History and Practice, Emilia Salvanou insightfully explores the issue of Greek cultural memory by choosing as her main case study the refugee crisis of the 1930s. Under the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, it was mutually agreed that Greece and Turkey agreed to a population exchange of approximately 1.2 million Asia Minor Greeks and 500,000 Muslims; individuals who would be expatriated from their homelands as part of the ethnic cleansing practices of both countries. Salvanou's book is the product of her postdoctoral fellowship and research on the shaping of refugee memory during the interwar period. Despite her personal connection to the issue through her own family's refugee past (which she declares in the Prologue), Salvanou is able to distance herself emotionally from the subject and situates the issue of refugee memory in a historical context. As a result, she is able to create a solid academic framework for explaining how the traumatic narrating of personal and collective memories saturated the modern psyche of Greece and enabled the construction of the Modern Greek national imaginary.

Salvanou creates a timeline of how the notion of refugee affects the forms and functions of memory in the Greek national imaginary. Salvanou does a masterful job of identifying refugee memory as a catalyst for the Modern Greek identity and collective memory by contextualizing Greek geopolitics within the postwar European as well as global framework. The author splits the book into five sections to explain how the Asia Minor refugees and displaced Greeks became an ethnic category, and as sociopolitical subjects claiming presence and acknowledgment within the national imaginary, that helped create a new modern narrative of the Greek nation.

Chapter 1, "The Modern Refugee", examines the dynamics between the Greek nation-state and the refugees as a social class. Salvanou redefines the notion of refugee memory by employing the paradigm of Asia Minor refugees, and—more specifically—the Thracian refugees. She delineates the transition of the Thracian refugees from being dislocated subjects to citizens as they collectively create a new place of belonging in the Greek society. In addition, Salvanou approaches the Thracian refugees as a multi-layered social category; after being uprooted and forced to migrate they are faced with a mixture of discrimination and pity in the host country of Greece. On the one hand, the refugees function as a challenge for the Greek national imaginary and its non-homogeneous society. On the other hand, the refugees function as a reminder of the Greek struggle to become established as a modern nation. This corresponds to Eric Hobsbawm's assertion that the twentieth century can be considered "the Age of Extremes"; a period that witnesses many failures of nationalism and...