![]() ![]() ![]() Reports, such as those of Smyrna burning and the overcrowded, impoverished conditions on refugee ships and in camps in Greece, impelled the international community to mobilize aid.ĥCurrently, remembrance is are enhanced by visual representations such as displays in museums, icons from Asia Minor in churches, collections of photographs in books, and exhibitions of film and photographs at city halls in areas settled by refugees. Many Asia Minor refugees escaped from their homeland with only memories of their former lives. The enhancement of Anatolia emphasizes the importance of real and ideal memories in laying a claim to a homeland and in the creation of a social identity as a people.ĤRecollections passed down through families of large estates and comfortable lives have been used to highlight the disparity between their past wealth in Anatolia and the deprivation that they have suffered as impoverished victims of “ethnic cleansing”. Once reproduced in art and artifact, the remembered places and the imagined community could be modeled, adapted, and transformed to give meaning to social life in the new location, Greece. Using memory as a tool, this displaced population created an imagined community of Mikrasiates attached to remembered and enhanced places of their homeland-the lost paradise of Anatolia. The impact of memory has aided the refugees in the social construction of a common public and private identity.ģThe loss of their homeland might have led to loss of identity, but instead these refugees used the catastrophe of traumatic emigration to give profound emotional legitimacy to their existence as a people. Memories have helped to translate the refugees’ journey and give shape to the imagined community of Mikrasiates (Greek people from Asia Minor). Their memories of their lost homeland of Anatolia have played a major role in establishing their separate status as a refugee group within a population with the same language and religion.ĢAll journeys between times, statuses, and places require interpretation to create a meaningful experience. 1ġGreeks who fled from Asia Minor after 1922 and their descendants created a refugee identity that they have used as a strategy to cope with the trauma of forced displacement. Understanding social life in such localities may provide insights into some ways in which uprooted people cope with the challenges of survival, with material deprivation, with social and personal disruption and with the issue of identity. The experience of the Asia Minor Greeks merits special attention, since it provides a unique, long-term case-study of adjustment and settlement in both rural and urban areas. 1 Hirschon (Renée), Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe : The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeu (.). ![]()
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