Children of Memory: Narratives of the Asia Minor Catastrophe and the Making of Refugee Identity in Interwar Greece

Abstract

This article examines the organization of the memory of Asia Minor in Greece during the interwar period. The disastrous Greek defeat in the Greek-Turkish War (1919–1922) and the subsequent Treaty of Lausanne together constitute a major turning point in the history of Modern Greece. Not only did these events end Greece’s irredentist dream, but they also led to the uprooting of 1.5 million Greek Orthodox people from Asia Minor and their resettlement in Greece. Despite its importance, the trauma that the exodus inflicted on refugees and non-refugees alike was not treated at the time as a subject in its own right; rather, it was subsumed within competing nationalist narratives that were directly related to the ongoing political conflicts that beset interwar Greece. Refugee associations negotiated the memory of Asia Minor for the purpose of achieving the integration of refugees into mainstream society without ever directly addressing the burden of the trauma itself.