Silencing inconvenient memories: refugees from Asia Minor in Greek historiography

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper explores the link between memory and history ‘from below’ as well as the (non-) use of histories of past migration in Greece. It analyses how the memory of the 1920s Asia Minor refugees was guarded by Greek state over the course of time. It explores how state agents (historiography, education system, commemorations, etc.) acted as guardians of collective memory ‘from above’, presenting a rosy past that ignored the experiences of these refugees in Greece. It also examines how this process of constructing historical memory ‘from above’ (re)produced national belonging through homogeneity, without taking notice of refugees’ diversities or problems faced during their settlement in the social, cultural or economic space of Greece. The paper adopts a critical approach to the cultural and social spaces in which refugee memory was selectively constructed as the only past that has to be remembered, stored and recalled, and aims to rescue from oblivion memories that were condemned to silence in the contemporary national narrative. These silenced memories could help us to write a history ‘from below’ and find analogies with the experiences of contemporary refugee flows as well as to combat ever-present xenophobia, prejudice and racism in the present society.