Antiquities in exile: Ottoman Greek refugees’ trauma and Ionian antiquities

Abstract

This article contributes to our understanding of the links between forced exile, refugee trauma, and antiquities. It zooms in to the case of the Ottoman Greek refugees who fled to Greece in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the defeat of the Greek army by the Turkish National Movement forces in 1922. It critically discusses memories of ordinary people from Lithri (ancient Erythrai, modern-day Ildırı), Nymphaio (near ancient Sardeis, modern-day Kemalpaşa), and Ayasolouk (ancient Ephesus, modern-day Selçuk). It also looks at aspects of the literary world of Smyrna-born poet and Nobel Laureate George Seferis. It is argued that, for these refugees, antiquities served as conduits, symbols, metaphors, and allegories for expressing the trauma linked to their state of uprootedness and forced exile. The refugees in question employed reverse “rescue archaeologies,” where it was for antiquities to salvage refugees rather than the other way round. The main primary material consulted consists of refugee testimonies from the Oral Tradition Archive of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies and Seferis’s diary. The approach is interdisciplinary and, besides Ottoman Greek history, draws on cultural geography, anthropology, archaeology as well as broader discussions in memory studies and critical heritage studies.

The Ottoman Empire and Turkey: a great place to visit, a hard place to live

“…Can one not widen this observation to cover even the orally transmitted memory of past events? One immediately thinks of the extraordinary archive of oral testimonies and recollections of Greeks displaced from Anatolia constituted by Melpo and Octave Merlier at the Centre for Asia Minor Studies (Kéntro Mikrasiatik ón Spoudón) in Athens, which Artemis Papatheodorou puts to a very specific use in this issue (Papatheodorou 2024).…”