Concepts of Greekness: The Recorded Music of Anatolian Greeks after 1922

Abstract: It is well attested that Asia Minor Greeks faced considerable hostility upon their arrival in Greece after 1922. Among the manifestations of this intolerance were claims that they displayed too many Levantine characteristics to be gnÆsioi ÄEllhnew. Considerable pressure was brought to bear on these refugees to conform, which in turn raised concerns among the refugees about the maintenance of their cultural distinctiveness. This paper suggests that, through the recorded performances of the refugee community in Athens after 1924, historians may begin to appreciate the identity crisis which the Mikrasiãtew experienced. The refugees found in their own highly developed music an avenue for the unchallenged expression of their own concept of Greek identity. Ironically, their own musical idiom, which provided them with a measure of commercial success and a temporary means of identity preservation, was to be ultimately subsumed within the broader, locally developed rebétiko genre that it had unwittingly encouraged. Relegated in rebétiko scholarship to the level of a mere catalyst for the musical revolution of the buzúki that followed, the recorded performances of the refugees preserve for us some of the dilemmas of mass relocation and identity among the displaced of Asia Minor.