Abstract
This paper, based on my monograph The Making of the Greek Genocide: Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2017), examines the construction of a trauma narrative in Greece during recent decades about the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922 as a genocidal experience. The expulsion of Greeks from Turkey after the First World War is remembered as one of the great collective tragedies in modern Greek history. In the 1980s, descendants of the expelled Greeks from Pontos in northeastern Turkey started a campaign to mobilize their community behind the demand to have the persecution of their ancestors recognized as genocide. The role model was the Armenian campaign for genocide recognition which was gaining a momentum at the time. Since 1994 and 1998, the Greek Parliament recognizes the genocides of the Pontian Greeks and the Anatolian Greeks respectively, as a result of ethno-political lobbying by organizations representing descendants of refugees expelled from Anatolia in 1922-23. This is a re-interpretation of the history of the Greek Asia Minor Catastrophe that is a subject of controversy in Greece, with critics accusing it of altering and distorting an already established collective memory deemed essential to “national self-knowledge”. The notion of the Pontian Greek genocide has also been criticized within the Anatolian Greek community on the ground that it obscures the suffering of other Ottoman Greeks by exclusively highlighting the experience of Pontos during and after the Great War. As a result, the notion of the Ottoman Greek genocide has emerged as an alternative concept; expanding the circle of victims and stressing commonality with other Ottoman Christian groups. An important aspect of these controversies is the process of memorialization. Why did this memory-political activity erupt in the late 20th century instead of earlier? Activists concerned with genocide recognition in Greece have often claimed that the Greek state had actively suppressed knowledge about the atrocities in Asia Minor prior to the expulsion, out of diplomatic concern. The demand for the “right to memory” was thus presented as a popular response to a double historical injustice. The basic argument of this paper departs from sociologist Jeffrey Alexander’s notion of cultural trauma, or trauma drama, which opposes the common view that collective traumas exist in and of themselves. Individuals respond to trauma constructions, in response to different political, cultural and personal needs which change over time. In the paper, I explore how the process of memorialization changed from the aftermath of the Catastrophe in the 1920s to the emergence of Pontian Greek identity politics in the 1980s, using various press sources, literary works and activist publications as sources.
Dr Erik Sjöberg is Associate Professor of History at Södertörn University