Memories of Asia Minor in Contemporary Greek Culture

The Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) in Asia Minor and the Population Exchange that followed led to the forced displacement of more than 1.5 million people who became entangled in the nation-building processes of both Greece and Turkey. This book examines the memories that shaped Asia Minor refugee identity, focusing on the ways in which these memories continue to reverberate in contemporary Greek culture. It explores how memories of Asia Minor frame wider social debates, foster affective alliances, inform different notions of belonging and provide a toolkit for addressing contemporary concerns. Taking the reader across a wide range of cultural works—history textbooks, comics, theatre, documentary and fiction films, news footage and photography—the book shows how these works have become means for individuals and communities to contribute to the process of history-making. While keeping its focus on present-day Greece, Memories of Asia Minor joins wider global debates over contested pasts, legacies of war and refugeehood.

“This book is a tour de force: with extraordinary perspicacity, theoretical rigor, sensitivity, and knowledge of her material, Gedgaudaite takes us through a wide range of sources and cultural objects across diverse genres and media, tracing encounters with cultural memory of refugeehood in the public and private sphere in contemporary Greece. This book is a must-read for every scholar who wishes to understand how refugee memories and identities are shaped, but also how fundamentally they shape contemporary culture and history. With the upcoming centenary of what in Greece is known as the 1922 ‘Asia Minor Catastrophe’, and with the European ‘refugee crisis’ still ongoing, this book could not have been more timely. In a climate of hostility and prejudice towards refugees in Europe, this book speaks back to sensationalist and ahistorical approaches, showing that revisiting the past and the workings of cultural memory in the present is essential for envisioning a better, more inclusivefuture.”

-Maria Boletsi, Leiden University & University of Amsterdam, editor of Languages of Resistance, Transformation and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes (Palgrave, 2020) and (Un)timely Crises (Palgrave, 2021)

“Memories of Asia Minor in Contemporary Greek Culture is a fascinating, important, and beautifully written investigation of the interplay between personal, collective, and cultural memory, and of the social and political uses to which these layers of memory and postmemory can be put. Gedgaudaite engages an impressive range of genres in her study, from history textbooks to theatrical productions to novels and graphic novels, in and out of translation. Each case study examines not just these works themselves, but a polyphony of reactions to them, often by people who have experienced neither the works nor the events of population exchange of 1922 firsthand. As such, Gedgaudaite constantly circles the crucial issue not of “reception” of awork so much as the creation of a discursive field around certain works that shapes the ways they are able to move and act in the world. I will be returning to this book often in shaping syllabi for courses on Greek literature and culture, migration studies, and more.”

 -Karen Emmerich, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature (Princeton University) and the author of Literary Translation and the Making of Originals (Bloomsbury, 2017)

Gedgaudaitė’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.

In many ways the book formulates a grassroots approach to a memory that is simultaneously diffused and rearticulated: it is not only the cultural production of memory that Gedgaudaitė studies, but also the way that this memory is perceived and therefore how meanings are produced in performative ways at the time of its diffusion.

All in all, this is a book that leaves its reader with a deep understanding of the formation, role, and dynamics of memory cultures—and with a sense that in this process agency, and therefore responsibility, is shared.

-Aimilia (Emilia) Salvanou, Democritus University of Thrace

Kristina Gedgaudaitė is a Mary Seeger O’Boyle Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University, USA. She has previously held positions at the University of Oxford, UK and the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and is one of the coordinators of the cultural analysis network Greek Studies Now.