Memories of Asia Minor in Contemporary Greek Culture: An Itinerary by Kristina Gedgaudaité

Abstract

Reviewed by: Memories of Asia Minor in Contemporary Greek Culture: An Itinerary by Kristina Gedgaudaité Aimilia (Emilia) Salvanou (bio) Kristina Gedgaudaité, Memories of Asia Minor in Contemporary Greek Culture: An Itinerary. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Pp. xvi + 252. Hardcover $109.99. The first thing one notices when taking Kristina’s Gedgaudaité’s book in one’s hands is the cover image: a cartoon, showing a suitcase lying all by itself behind barbed wire. The suitcase is made of people, tightly woven together and indistinguishable from one another, all dressed in the same clothes, clearly in despair. [End Page 151] A small self-made bag that one of them carries gives a hint that they are refugees. At one of the suitcase’s corners, a child lends a helping hand to one of the refugees. By doing so it starts to untangle the human skein. People are about to be seen and their voices heard. The cartoon is actually named “Suitcase: Refugees” and was drawn by Oleksiy Kustovsky in 2016 at the peak of the refugee crisis in Europe. The cover image prepares the reader for an engaging experience: Gedgaudaité’s book is not another study about the past, about what happened in 1922 and the Greek-Turkish exchange of populations, but rather a book about memory, meaning-making, and the understandings of the past in contemporary culture. It is also a book about the way experience becomes intertwined with memory and finds its way in post-memory, cultural memory, and historical culture. The book consists of seven chapters, each of which covers a different aspect of the contemporary cultural memory of 1922 in Greece. The first chapter, “Memory Work and History in the Making,” serves as an introduction and sets the scene for what will be discussed later. It historicizes the emergence of the relevant cultural memory, focusing on the 1930s, 1960s, 1990s, and 2010s, and it emphasizes that it was only after the 1980s, and especially after the 1990s, that this memory was infused with the voices of the refugees’ experience. The second chapter, “An Introduction to the Histories and Legacies of the Greco-Turkish War and the Memory Studies Toolbox,” discusses the historical framework of 1922 and its special place in contemporary historical culture in Greece. It also sets out the theoretical and methodological framework of memory studies upon which subsequent analysis is based, drawing from, among others, the work of Caruth (1996), Hirsch (1997), and Erll and Rigney (2009). The third chapter, “Affective Alliances in the Greek History Wars,” is dedicated to the analysis and interpretation of the history wars that broke out in Greece in 2006–2007 over how historians approached aspects of the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Gedgaudaité states that this controversy was so important that it became engraved in public memory and in many ways shaped the conceptualization of 1922 in the years that followed. On the basis of this observation, Gedgaudaité proceeds to her fourth chapter, “Fragmented Pasts, Postmemory and the ‘Grandchildren of Lausanne’,” which focuses on the aesthetics and practices of family memory, especially that related to the third generation. Here, the author fleshes out her argument that a traumatic conception of the past has reached most of the refugees’ grandchildren through narratives and recollections of everyday life. Gedgaudaité proves her point through a discussion of Soloup’s graphic novel Aivali, in which Antonis Nikolopoulos (Soloup) reflects on the way that the cultural memory of 1922 (on both the Greek and [End Page 152] on Turkish sides) shaped his experience of a journey he made between Lesvos and Aivali. He shows, as Gedgaudaité explains, how fragments of memory can be assembled to give voice to a self-reflective history. The two subsequent chapters, the fifth and the sixth, are respectively titled “Smyrna in Your Pocket” and “Framing the Futures of Memory.” They articulate and are structured around the notion of “portable memory,” and they provide, in many ways, the book’s most original contribution. Their main argument is that the Smyrna Catastrophe has become the lens through which Greeks approach the uprooting of their co-ethnics from Asia Minor in the framework of contemporary historical culture and that the cultural memory of...