SPACE, MEMORY AND IDENTITY: THE MEMORY OF THE ASIA MINOR SPACE IN GREEK NOVELS OF THE 1960s (original) (raw)

2007, CAS Sofia Working Paper Series

One of the milestones of 20 th century Greek national narrative is the Asia Minor Catastrophe, i.e. the defeat of the Greek Army in the Greek-Turkish war (1919-1922) and the resulting wave of refugees of Greeks from Asia Minor (Rum in Ottoman terms) to the Greek state. The object of this study is to analyse why and how during the forty-year anniversary of this event certain novels appear to commemorate the Asia Minor space and identity: Ματωµένα Χώµατα [Bloodied Earth, transl. as Farewell Anatolia] by Dido Soteriou (1909-2004); Στου Χατζηφράγκου [Stou Hatzifrangou, In the Hatzifrangou Quarter] by Kosmas Politis (1888-1974); To Αϊβαλί, η πατρίδα µου [Aivali, My Homeland] by Fotis Kondoglou, all published in 1962; and Λωξάνδρα [Loxandra] by Maria Iordanidou (1897-1989), published in 1963. While literature, the novel and especially the novel with historical subject matter, has traditionally been connected to the discourse of nationalism (Brennan 48-49, 52), these texts challenge official nationalistic discourses by commemorating a pre-modern space, which was destroyed by nationalism, and by exploring refugee identity. The space commemorated, which defines the Rum identity, is irrevocably lost and only exists in memory. Thus the familiar becomes unheimlich (Bhabha Introduction 4 and DissemiNation 299, 315.). This loss can be overcome only temporarily by memory and narrative. Narrative attempts to recuperate the loss, in some cases with the awareness that it constructs a "meta-geographical internalised space" (Seyhan 134). This study will first focus on the historical, cultural and ideological conditions, which led to the 1962 commemoration of the Asia Minor Catastrophe and its centrality in the discourse of the period. It will then explore how the texts present a multiplicity of identities in the space of the Ottoman Empire, the texts' stance to nationalism and the textual techniques employed to commemorate the lost space.