Greeks without Greece: Homelands, Belonging, and Memory amongst the Expatriated Greeks of Turkey by Huw Halstead, and: The Making of the Greek Genocide: Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe by Erik Sjöberg, and: Με το Διωγμό στην ψυχή: Το τραύμα της μικρασιατικής καταστροφής σε τρεις γενιές [Persecution in the soul: The trauma of the Asia Minor disaster across three generations] by Libby Tata Arcel (Λίμπυ Τατά Αρσέλ) (review)

A century ago, after the end of the Greco-Turkish War in 1922 and the compulsory exchange of populations in 1923, Greece experienced the arrival of about 1.2 million refugees. Specifically, under the Lausanne Convention of 30 January 1923, Greece and Turkey agreed on the population transfer of their respective religious minorities: Greek Orthodox Turkish nationals living in Turkish territory and Muslim Greek nationals living in Greek territory. The Greek inhabitants of Istanbul and the islands of Imbros and Tenedos, as well as the Muslims of western Thrace, were exempted from the exchange. However, in the Cold War period, between 1955 and 1964–1965, persecutions of the Greek Orthodox population of Istanbul led to yet another violent expulsion. In light of the centenary of the end of the Greco-Turkish War, ideas of memory, identity, and national belonging come to our attention through three books written between the mid- and late 2010s: Persecution in the Soul: The Trauma of Asia Minor Disaster across Three Generations by the clinical psychologist Libby Tata Arcel, The Making of the Greek Genocide: Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe by the historian Erik Sjöberg, and Greeks without Greece: Homelands, Belonging, and Memory amongst the Expatriated Greeks of Turkey by the historian Huw Halstead. Drawing on various disciplines, methods, and approaches, the authors offer new insights concerning the understanding of forced displacements that are relevant for historiography. Although the aforementioned displacements have attracted a great deal of attention from various studies throughout the years, it is only since the mid-2010s that the ideas of memory, identity, and belonging have been revisited as ways in which to understand the present.

Working through an autobiographical lens, Libby Tata Arcel has produced an extremely thoughtful and in-depth account of the intergenerational Asia Minor trauma that she defines as the “Cultural Trauma of the Asia Minor Catastrophe” (31). In her book, Tata Arcel—the daughter of a refugee from Pergamos in Asia Minor who was born in Mytilene and lived in Denmark— addresses questions of intergenerational trauma and the interplay among individual, collective, and national remembrance and identity. To unpack these questions, Tata Arcel uses a biographical approach: she conducted ten in-depth interviews with members of her family belonging to the first, second, and third generations of Asia Minor refugees. The book comprises three main parts. Part 1 is devoted to the psychological trauma of refugeehood, elucidating both the individual and the collective dimension of the Asia Minor trauma. In Part 2, the trauma of the first generation of Asia Minor refugees is illuminated through her mother Tasitsa’s narration of her life in Asia Minor and her subsequent expulsion and relocation to Greece. Part 3 focuses on Tasitsa’s children’s and grandchildren’s stories, analyzing the trauma of second- and third-generation descendants of Asia Minor refugees and the mechanisms of intergenerational transmission. The journey of her family members’ return to their ancestral homelands acts as a frame for the whole book: starting with Tasitsa’s expulsion in the preface, the book concludes with a journey into memory and the author’s and her family members’ quest to discover their roots. Bringing together the various elements of the Asia Minor trauma, the author concludes that “what matters is not that we remember the history...