Memories of Asia Minor in

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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN MEMORY STUDIES

Memories of Asia Minor

in Contemporary
Greek Culture
An Itinerary

Kristina Gedgaudaitė
Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies

Series Editors
Andrew Hoskins
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK

John Sutton
Department of Cognitive Science
Macquarie University
Macquarie, Australia
The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends
that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to
that of memory, from ‘what we know’ to ‘how we remember it’; changes
in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory;
panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination
with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of
trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed to
an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last thirty years.
Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect
what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This
groundbreaking series tackles questions such as: What is ‘memory’ under
these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for its
interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theoreti-
cal and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination?

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14682
 Kristina Gedgaudaite

Memories of Asia
Minor in
Contemporary Greek
Culture
An Itinerary
Kristina Gedgaudaite
The Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ, USA

ISSN 2634-6257     ISSN 2634-6265 (electronic)

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies
ISBN 978-3-030-83935-2    ISBN 978-3-030-83936-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83936-9

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In loving memory of my grandmother Maria
 Acknowledgements

In my dreamlike early childhood recollections, the wheel of my grand-

mother’s sewing machine buzzes through the night to finish my winter
princess costume in time for the morning carnival in Karaganda, then part
of the Soviet Union. Many years later, we would be sitting in the kitchen
in Vilnius, now in independent Lithuania, where, with the help of a differ-
ent sewing machine and a pair of scissors, she would help me shred my
otherwise perfectly fine pair of jeans to fit my rebellious teenage soul. Yet,
despite the multiple analogies we find in literature between sewing and
storytelling, she never talked of how she, as a young girl, once made the
journey from Ukraine to Kazakhstan to reunite with her family, who had
been deported there during the 1940s.
It was not until 2014, when I first embarked on the project researching
memories of the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) in Asia Minor and read
about the intergenerational transmission of memories, that I came to
realise that not only stories, but also gestures, silences and worldviews can
traverse distances and shape who we are and how we relate to the world.
Perhaps it was the experiences of my grandmother, recollected from the
shards of the Soviet Union, that drew me closer to the ruins of a different
empire nearly a hundred years after its dissolution?
Several scholars whose theoretical insights form the backbone of this
book are representatives of the generation of postmemory, to use Marianne
Hirsch’s term, having grown up among the recollections of catastrophes—
they had not lived through these catastrophes, but they have long lived
with them, as memories of these times keep finding ways into the everyday
lives of their families, while also providing them with affiliations to other

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

such events around the globe. This book, then, one might say, was written
as just such an affiliation link. However, it is an affiliation that I recognised
as such only when I started building the methodological framework and
working with conceptual tools that would enable me to see it in those terms.
Over the years, as this project grew and developed, it also brought
together a large community, people who have supported me and infused
the project with new energy and ideas when most needed. Antonis
Nikolopoulos-Soloup, Mimi Denisi and Maria Repousi met with me dur-
ing my research visits to Athens and generously shared views on their own
work and memories of Asia Minor. Kostas Skordyles, Guido Bonsaver,
Eleftheria Ioannidou, Gonda van Steen, Penelope Papailias, Emilie Pine,
Enrique del Rey Cabero, William Drummond, Alexander Kazamias, Effie
Voutira, Olga Demetriou and Pavlos Moulios, enthusiastically engaged
with this project in its various forms, providing constructive comments,
criticism and advice. Anouska Wilkinson, Richard Harber, Patrick Murphy,
Tatiana Faia and Nina Macaraig read and proof-read my drafts at various
stages with great care and patience. Exchanges with Giorgos Tsimouris,
late Libby Tata Arcel, Renee Hirschon, Emilia Salvanou, Vangelis
Karamanolakis, Antonis Liakos, Angela Melitopoulos, Will Stroebel and
Carl Mauzy helped answer certain questions. Kristina Svarevičiūte, Eleni
Bampasaki, Frances Restuccia and Claudia Koonz, each in their different
ways, led me to this book. Jean Ha, Mary Sarandari, Anna Papaeti, Fiona
Antonelaki, Neringa Barmute, Kostas Psathas, Rovena Papa, Pinelopi
Flaouna, Rahul Santhaman, Tatiana Markaki, Salomeja Marčauskaite,
Karolis Butkevičius, Anna Sandretti and Emanuele D’Osualdo and Nilüfer
Hatemi supported me in various forms in different corners of the world.
In this large community, a special word of thanks must go to Dimitris
Papanikolaou for the energy, enthusiasm and care with which he sup-
ported this project from its beginning as a doctoral thesis to its publication
as a book. His intellectual guidance has shaped my own approach to con-
temporary Greek culture in profound ways. Our conversations on modern
Greek literature and culture have been going on for a decade now, and I
can only wish that they will continue with the same energy into the
next decade!
Much more recent, but no less cherished have been the conversations
and intellectual exchanges with Maria Boletsi: I am enormously grateful
for her attentive readings of my drafts, sound advice and precious time gen-
erously shared with me.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix

For the past two years, both Dimitris and Maria were also my ‘partners
in crime’ in setting up the cultural analysis network Rethinking Modern
Greek Studies in the 21st Century/Greek Studies Now. This collaboration,
the conversations that it instigated and the people it brought together
hold many especially dear and enriching moments, important for both
rethinking the current project and embarking on new ones. I thank
Claudio Russello and Yiorgos-Evgenios Douliakas, the newest addition to
our editorial team, for all their help and support, as well as everyone who
took part in our network’s activities over the past two years and shared
fruitful ideas.
Several conferences also provided fruitful terrain for exchanging and
developing ideas over the years, including the Modern Greek Seminar,
Renegotiations of History in Light of the ‘Greek Crisis’, Crossings:
Negotiating Borders and Boundaries in the Eastern Mediterranean at the
University of Oxford, the symposium organised by the Historical and
Folklore Society in Rethymno, the Annual Postgraduate Colloquium of
the Society for Modern Greek Studies, the In Search of Transcultural
Memory in Europe Postgraduate Training School at the University of
Dublin, the Futures of Memory Workshop at the University of Leeds, the
Memory Studies Association Conference at the University of Copenhagen,
the Gate to the Eastern Mediterranean (GEM) seminar at the University
of Birmingham, the Research Seminar at the Department of Social
Anthropology of Panteion University, the Strategies of the Documentary
Conference at the University of Vienna and the Works in Progress: New
Approaches seminars at Princeton University.
The Taylor Institution Library, the Social Science Library and the Old
Bodleian Library at Oxford, the Gennadius Library, the Centre for Asia
Minor Studies, the Contemporary Social History Archives, the Library of
the Greek Parliament, the French School of Athens, the Scholarly
Communication and Information Centre at Vilnius University, the
Amsterdam University Library, the Calvia University Centre and Princeton
University’s Firestone Library, as well as their helpful staff, have been cru-
cial for honing my ideas in this book.
As the project moved through its various stages, the stimulating research
environment I found at the Sub-Faculty of Byzantine and Modern Greek
at Oxford, the Department of Modern Greek Studies at the University of
Amsterdam and the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton
University were invaluable. The Seeger Center has been the last home of
this project before it goes into publication and I am grateful for all the
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

staff, the community of postdoctoral fellows, especially Nathanael

A. Aschenbrenner and Yannis Stamos, and the Center director Dimitri
Gondicas for supporting me during the last stages of writing this book and
the unprecedented times of the COVID pandemic.
Over the years, the project was made possible and sustained by the
financial support I received through an Oxford-Aidan Jenkins Scholarship,
Sub-Faculty of Byzantine and Modern Greek, Merton College and Faculty
of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford; the
Onassis Foundation; the Kostas and Eleni Ouranis Foundation; a Marilena
Laskaridis Postdoctoral Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of
Amsterdam and a Mary Seeger O’Boyle Postdoctoral Fellowship at
Princeton University.
I am also especially grateful to Oleksiy Kustovsky, Soloup, Lefteris
Partsalis, Michael Bakas, Mimi Denisi and Ioanna Tzetzoumi for allowing
me to reproduce their images in this book. The material discussed in
Chap. 4 has previously appeared in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, as
article titled ‘Comics, Memory and Migration: Through the Mirror Maze
of Soloup’s Aivali’, while an abridged discussion of Leferis Partsalis’ pho-
tograph in Chap. 6 has been included in the collected volume (Un)timely
Crises: Chronotopes of Critique (Boletsi et al. 2021). I am grateful for being
able to include both as part of this book as well. The editorial team at
Palgrave Macmillan has supported me with great care and patience at each
stage of the publication process.
This project had many different homes and itineraries over the years.
From the beginning to its very end, I feel very fortunate to have had the
support of Robert Casado, whose reservoirs of encouragement, positive
attitude and epic music have sustained me day by day.
Finally, but most importantly, I would like to thank my parents, Galina
Gedgaudiene and Raimundas Gedgaudas, for their unconditional sup-
port—not only at this milestone, but at every single one. Without their
fresh apple juice at the most crucial stage of this project, it would probably
still be under construction.
 Contents

1 Memory Work and History in the Making  1

1.1 Cultural Form: Notes from the 1930s  2
1.2 Finding a Place in History: Notes from the 1960s  4
1.3 From Cultural Heritage to Inheritance: Notes from the 1990s  6
1.4 The Stories that Are Yet to Be Told: Notes from the 2010s  8
1.5 The Structure of this Book 10
References 14

2 An Introduction to the Histories and Legacies of the

Greco-Turkish War and the Memory Studies Toolbox 17
2.1 Historical Background 22
2.2 Cultural Legacies 28
2.3 Memory Studies as Methodological Framework 35
2.3.1 From Collective to Cultural Memory 35
2.3.2 From Memory to Postmemory 37
2.3.3 Visual Memory and Affective Connections 41
References 46

3 Affective Alliances in the Greek History Wars 55

3.1 Everyday Encounters: Asia Minor between Memory and
History 55
3.2 History as Building Block for a Nation 57
3.3 Chronicle of a History War: Actors, Arguments, Affects 62
3.4 The Multi-Vocal Public Sphere 68

xi
xii Contents

3.5 Mnemonic Itineraries 79

3.6 Conclusion 86
References 88

4 Fragmented Pasts, Postmemory and the ‘Grandchildren of

Lausanne’ 95
4.1 The Journey of Return 95
4.2 Graphic Novel, Literary Canon, (Counter-)History100
4.3 Through the Mirror Maze of Soloup’s Aivali102
4.4 Mnemonic Itineraries: Once Again120
4.5 Conclusion127
References129

5 Smyrna in Your Pocket135

5.1 In Response to the History Textbook Controversy135
5.2 Smyrna as Portable Monument141
5.3 Affect, Emotion and Historical Truth145
5.4 Witnessing the Greco-Turkish War ‘In and through Time’160
5.5 Conclusion169
References170

6 Framing the Futures of Memory175

6.1 Notes from the Field, September 2015177
6.2 Lesvos: Framing Solidarity, Empathy and Identification180
6.3 Locating Memory in the Frames of Media Witnessing185
6.3.1 The Three Grannies of Lesvos and the ‘Image of the
Europe that We Want’: Empathy as Identification
Reconsidered185
6.3.2 Comparison and/as Relationality: Crete, Eidomeni190
6.3.3 ‘We Are All Refugees’: Particularising the Universal193
6.4 Connective Memories198
6.5 Conclusion205
References208
 Contents  xiii

7 Epilogue215
References221

Appendix of Primary Sources223

Index229
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 A school parade in Mytilene on a national holiday. The word

‘συνωστισμός’ (synostismos) here makes a witty allusion to
the ‘crowding’ controversy, pp. 32–33. (© Soloup.
Reproduced with permission) 83
Fig. 4.1 Reflection of the city and the protagonist Antonis on the quay
of Mytilene, pp. 24–25. (© Soloup. Reproduced with
permission)103
Fig. 4.2 Family photograph album assembled in the graphic novel,
pp. 360–361. (© Soloup. Reproduced with permission) 105
Fig. 4.3 Antonis and his grandmother look through the newspaper
clippings, p. 363. (© Soloup. Reproduced with permission) 106
Fig. 4.4 The ghost of Photis Kontoglou shares his memories, pp.
70–71. (© Soloup. Reproduced with permission) 108
Fig. 4.5 Visual reference to Edvard Munch’s The Scream, p. 36. (©
Soloup. Reproduced with permission) 110
Fig. 4.6 Imaginary projections onto the landscape of Asia Minor, p. 39.
(© Soloup. Reproduced with permission) 113
Fig. 4.7 A statue of Kemal Atatürk encountered in Aivali brings back
memories, p. 320. (© Soloup. Reproduced with permission) 115
Fig. 4.8 Braiding the scream of the Greco-Turkish War, p. 163. (©
Soloup. Reproduced with permission) 117
Fig. 4.9 Double-page spread collating Francisco de Goya’s etching
No. 39 from the series The Disasters of War (1810–1820), the
gate of Auschwitz and the barbed wire around the detention
camp of Guantanamo Bay, pp. 386–87. (© Soloup.
Reproduced with permission) 119

xv
xvi List of Figures

Fig. 4.10 The exhibition Soloup Aivali: A Journey through Time at the
.
Benaki Museum (Pireos). (© Kristina Gedgaudaite)122
Fig. 5.1 Photograph used as part of performance promotional material,
with the burning Smyrna in the background. (© Mimi Denisi
and Ioanna Tzetzoumi. Reproduced with permission) 136
Fig. 5.2 Filio and Takuyi in the family living room. (© Mimi Denisi and
Ioanna Tzetzoumi. Reproduced with permission) 151
Fig. 5.3 A night out in the taverna. (© Mimi Denisi and Ioanna
Tzetzoumi. Reproduced with permission) 154
Fig. 5.4 Restaging the premiere of Rigoletto in 1917. (© Mimi Denisi
and Ioanna Tzetzoumi. Reproduced with permission) 157
Fig. 5.5 Welcoming the Greek navy to the port of Smyrna, May 1919.
(© Mimi Denisi and Ioanna Tzetzoumi. Reproduced with
permission)158
Fig. 6.1 The statue of a refugee mother in Mytilene, Lesvos, September
2015. (© Michael Bakas. Reproduced with permission) 182
Fig. 6.2 Three grandmothers of Lesvos, Skala Sykamias, October 2015.
(© Lefteris Partsalis. Reproduced with permission) 186
Fig. 6.3 Photomontage ‘Children’, March 2016. (© Soloup and To
Pontiki. Reproduced with permission) 202
 CHAPTER 1

Memory Work and History in the Making

How does one begin to tell a story permeated by the violence of war and
the pain of loss—of one’s home, livelihood, family and the communities
where they belonged? How does one tell this story if it happened a long
time before they were born? And then, how does one retell it, knowing all
too well that, while it is familiar to many, certain things nevertheless have
not been told? These are the questions that echo through the pages that
follow, as I turn to the legacies of the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) in
Asia Minor and the ways in which its memories have been kept alive in the
Greek community until the present day.
The how of these questions, as I will argue in this book some pages later,
is what sustains and animates memories of Asia Minor in Greece today, a
century after the end of the war. It also opens up a wide array of connec-
tions, showing that any answer to them requires a considerable amount of
memory work on behalf of those who chose to tell this story. Or perhaps I
should say that they chose to continue the work undertaken by those who
moulded this troubled past into many different shapes and sizes over the
course of a hundred years, so that it could be shared with others and
respond to the needs of the communities by which it was invoked.
Thus, before anything else, let me begin just there: recollecting frag-
ments of past memory work from the cultural archives in order to fore-
ground the concerns that this book addresses.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
K. Gedgaudaitė, Memories of Asia Minor in Contemporary Greek
Culture, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83936-9_1
2 K. GEDGAUDAITĖ

1.1   Cultural Form: Notes from the 1930s

Describing the lives that the refugees of the Greco-Turkish War in Asia
Minor had built in the refugee neighbourhood of Kokkinia in Piraeus in
the 1970s, Renee Hirschon claims that memory was ‘their most valuable
property’ (Hirschon 1989: 15). As refugee testimonies reveal, many fled
violence and persecution empty handed, or at the most carrying what they
could fit into a bundle (Apostolopoulos et al. 1980). Their memories of
life in Asia Minor and experiences of war travelled with them and, shared
among the members of the refugee communities, they served as grounds
for constructing a new identity in the newly acquired homeland—at the
very time when this homeland itself was also heavily invested in construct-
ing its own new identity from the disaster of war. Over the years, memo-
ries brought from Asia Minor also became associated with certain stories
and cultural practices. These memories, condensed and attached to spe-
cific signifiers, helped to make sense of the traumatic experience and shape
it into a narrative that could be passed on to subsequent generations, as
both personal and national memory.
Yet, by the time the accounts of Asia Minor had reached their audience,
the lines between fiction and real-life experience seem to have been
blurred.1 Strikingly, the term ‘fairy tale’ has often been invoked in refer-
ence to the accounts of what happened in Asia Minor. One might be quick
to assume that the fairy tale of Asia Minor tells of the happy life that the
refugees had had before fleeing their homes: this is the story that can be
commonly heard today. However, as can be seen in the extract from the
novel Serenity (Galini) by Ilias Venezis, a prominent Greek writer of refu-
gee origin, the refugees from Asia Minor frequently used this word to
refer to their experience of the violence of war:

Then, when they were left alone the same evening in her room, Aunt Maria
made him tell her everything from the beginning, blow by blow, about how
they spent their days—fourteen months—of imprisonment.
His own mother, Aunt Sophia, was also beside him. She must also hear
the fairy tale and nothing else. He improvised what had happened and the

1
The blurred distinction between fiction and real-life experience undoubtedly also applies
to literature in the form of testimony, which came to play a prominent role in shaping refugee
memory (Chap. 4).
 1 MEMORY WORK AND HISTORY IN THE MAKING 3

harsh lines evaporated, as happens with the fairy tales of dragons and mon-
sters that you tell a child to make them sleep.
Ilias Venezis’ Serenity, translated by Joshua Barley (Venezis 2019
[1937]: 146–147)

Both incomprehensible to listeners and concealed from them, the experi-

ence of war becomes a fairy tale at the moment of its transmission. This is
not to trivialise the war, persecution or discrimination endured by those
who came to Greece as refugees. Rather, a fairy tale here acts as a template,
a form that lends shape to this story, so that the community could then
share it in order to mourn their losses. This particular form of ‘fairy tale’
shields listeners from experiencing the pain endured. ‘The tough lines
faded in the fairy tale’, and once it was heard there was no need to ‘learn
anything else’. With the fairy tale, the painful experiences found rest, like
‘a child put to sleep’. Yet, for the children who did not see the war, the
stories of refugees sounded unlike anything else that they knew in the
world around them.
The reference to fairy tales as a genre to tell of the experience of war can
be found not only in literary fiction, but also in refugee testimonies:

And was there anyone who did not mourn the dead? Who did not suffer and
who isn’t still crying? Only the children who were born here listen to this as
fictitious fairy tales.
Apostolos Mykoniatis (Apostolopoulos et al. 1980: 142)2

History relies on cultural templates to gain a form so that it can be

shared with others (see also Sect. 2.3.1). Listening to violent histories of
war as a ‘fairy tale’—far removed from any known life experiences—pro-
vides a template to make sense of these incomprehensible events, at the
same time as it helps rework the past trauma without transferring it onto
the listeners.
Over the years, the history of the Greco-Turkish War and its aftermath
has acquired many cultural forms, remediated not only in literature, but
also in popular films, music, theatre and even—more recently—graphic
novels. This book engages with a diverse range of cultural forms used to
tell the history of Asia Minor since the 2000s. As metaphors from the
cultural sphere come to inform public views and as public statements in
turn find their way into cultural representations, form plays a role as cru-
cial as content in linking the public and cultural spheres.

2
Here and elsewhere, all translations into English are my own unless otherwise specified.
4 K. GEDGAUDAITĖ

1.2   Finding a Place in History: Notes

from the 1960s

Today, the history of the Greco-Turkish War and its legacies form a water-
shed moment in Greece’s modern history. Yet the experiences of the 1.5
million refugees transferred between Greece and Turkey in the aftermath
of this war have not always been part of this history. The testimony of a
refugee woman Marianthe Karamousa, recorded in the archives of the
Center for Asia Minor Studies in Athens, is a poignant reminder of the
painstaking memory work needed to turn an experience into history.
When Marianthe Karamousa talks of her hardships in the aftermath of
the 1922 Greek military defeat in Asia Minor, she refers to her experience
in the plural, as if speaking in one voice together with all those uprooted
from their homes, as well as with those who could not speak out because
they had perished before crossing the Aegean. Her account of fleeing from
her hometown—the village of Bagarasi in the province of Aydin—is punc-
tuated by the many deaths of her family members and co-villagers. At
these very moments of narrating death, Marianthe laments that there is
nobody to turn their own suffering into history:

Oh, my dear child! Who will tell of our sufferings, who will make history out
of them so that everyone could read it and learn about it? Our own [suffer-
ings] do not survive!
Marianthe Karamousa (Apostolopoulos et al. 1980: 191)

Marianthe is sharing her story with an interviewer from the Centre for
Asia Minor Studies, which today houses one of the most important collec-
tions of refugee testimonies. At the time of recording her statements to
become part of the historical record, she nevertheless feels that she is left
out of history.
According to the archival records of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies,
the interview took place on 15 June 1962. That was the year when Asia
Minor refugee associations across Greece and abroad united in commem-
oration of the Year of Hellenism of the East, forty years after the end of the
Greco-Turkish War. It was an occasion that attracted nationwide as well as
diaspora media coverage, with many events, cultural initiatives and book
publications to mark the occasion as an important part of national history
(Anastasiadis et al. 1964).
We can get a sense of the attitudes towards the Asia Minor campaign
prevalent in the 1960s from articles in the national press: ‘The Asia Minor
 1 MEMORY WORK AND HISTORY IN THE MAKING 5

Catastrophe constitutes a vivid memory of the nation’ (Asterinos 1962);

‘Forty years have passed since the Asia Minor Catastrophe, this utmost
and shocking venture that put its bloodied stamp on our soul and the
whole of recent history’ (Soteriou 1962); ‘Greece will not stop mourning
this national calamity and holding memorial services for the martyrs of the
faith and of the homeland’ (Kantiotis 1962); ‘This year’s fortieth [anniver-
sary] from that indescribable calamity of 1922, gave, and is still giving, an
occasion for thousand—two [thousand] events [organised] by people who
lived through these horrendous days of the homelands of the East’
(Chatzianagnostou 1962). Quite clearly, within these articles, the Asia
Minor Campaign is recognised as a vivid and sorrowful memory that con-
cerns the whole nation. It would seem that at least some of this recogni-
tion transpired into the hearts and minds of all the refugees, giving them
a sense of belonging to history, as well as an awareness of participating in
it in various ways.
During the 1960s, the refugees’ contribution to the economic, cultural
and social development—as well as the modernisation—of Greece was rec-
ognised, and they were acknowledged as valuable members of society. This
was in line with the ideology dominant in the country, which emphasised
modernisation and progress as the main goals of postwar Greece, a narra-
tive fully embraced by the 1967–1974 dictatorial regime, too. For many
refugees, however, the hardships that they suffered simply could not be
consigned to the past, as they continued to live in appalling conditions
forty years after their arrival from Asia Minor, despite the major housing
programmes implemented by the state and international organisations
(Pentzopoulos 2002 [1962]: 225–36).3
Against this background, Marianthe’s complaint that refugee suffering
has no place in history shows that the public feelings expressed during the
commemorative events of 1962 were not necessarily part of the common-
place views that all the refugees held on the Hellenism of Asia Minor, but
rather the projections for its future. The time lag that can be seen in
Marianthe’s testimony is indicative of the memory work involved in turn-
ing an experience into history: in 1962—that is, forty years after the
events—she had an opportunity to share her experience during the Greco-
Turkish War with the interviewer from the Centre for Asia Minor Studies;
yet it took a long time and considerable memory work before the

3
Cf. Hirschon (1989: 36–55), who describes the difficult living conditions in the refugee
quarters fifty years after the exchange.
6 K. GEDGAUDAITĖ

hardships suffered by the refugees were recognised in the national imagi-

nary as their own hardships.
It was not until the 1980s, I would like to argue, that the voices of
Marianthe and others who had experienced a similar fate had found their
place in history, and it is not a mere coincidence that the first volume of
the collection The Exodus, in which Marianthe’s testimony is printed, was
published in 1980. Transnationally, the 1980s mark the rise of the human
rights regime, increased attention to individual stories used to lay claim to
these rights and the memory boom where individual stories were used to
speak of collective suffering (Iğsız 2018: 25; Blight 2009; Huyssen 2000;
Winter 2001). In Greece, the 1980s also mark a turning point: after the
fall of the military junta in 1974, society was no longer ‘aspiring to collec-
tive ideals’, and subjective and personal perspectives gradually became
valid and valuable points of reference in the reconsideration of historical
experience (Exertzoglou 2014; Kitromilides 2004; Mackridge and
Yannakakis 2004). A parallel turn towards reconfiguring personal stories
into collective memories, starting in the 1980s, has been observed in
Turkey (Iğsız 2018: 107–11). Finally, at that time, the discipline of history
was also radically expanded and redefined in response to these develop-
ments, and the so-called cultural turn drew attention to the analysis of
discourses, representations and identities, helping to bring individual sto-
ries to the foreground (Kitroeff 1989; Liakos 2004; Chatzis and
Mavrogonatou 2010). In the 1990s, these perspectives would be coupled
with emerging identity politics, and issues of memory, culture and identity
came to the very foreground.4
The mnemonic landscape with which this book engages largely grows
out of these post-1980s developments.

1.3   From Cultural Heritage to Inheritance:

Notes from the 1990s
In 1962, Marianthe Karamousa had complained that her own hardships
were not part of history, but the perspectives on history that found their
way into the 1990s made it possible for another refugee woman from Asia
Minor, Filio Chaidemenou, to finally incorporate the experiences of com-
mon people like herself and Marianthe into history. At the end of the

4
For how these developments influenced the trajectory that the perceptions of the history
of Asia Minor followed, see Salvanou (2018: 84–9) and Sjöberg (2016: 54–117).
 1 MEMORY WORK AND HISTORY IN THE MAKING 7

1990s, after years of persistent efforts, Filio Chaidemenou established the

Museum of Asia Minor Hellenism.
The words with which a contemporary visitor is welcomed to the exhi-
bition hall of the museum draw attention to how the history of the Greco-­
Turkish War was shaped by individual voices and stories from the very first
moments:

The history of Asia Minor is not only military events and diplomacy, the
actions of historical personalities. It is also the record of memories of people,
families, and Asia Minor communities. In this exhibition, the silent protago-
nists, the ordinary people who experienced the events, have the floor.
(Museum of Asia Minor Hellenism n.d.)

The diversified, pluralised and individualised perspectives on history that

emerged in Greece since the fall of the military junta in 1974 opened up
for debate many complex historical moments and experiences, at the same
time as they encouraged ordinary people to take ownership of their his-
tory. Filio Chaidemenou worked to bring the experiences of refugees from
Asia Minor to the fore when she established the museum.
As one proceeds through the collection, many personal objects, donated
by the families of refugees, testify to a once vibrant cultural life that was
violently uprooted. Where known, the trajectory of these objects is clearly
indicated in the accompanying labels, such as ‘Men’s woollen hat that
belonged to the father of Eleni Polydou-Schida from Kaisarea’ or
‘Embroidery for the wall (banda) that belonged to Martha Pigopoulou, the
mother of Efanthia Souri from Sinasos’ (Museum of Asia Minor Hellenism
n.d.). The labels not only strip the artefacts of their anonymity, but also
highlight the generational links to the refugee past: while the objects once
belonged to specific named individuals, they subsequently passed into the
care of the refugees’ offspring, who are also inscribed in the object labels
as named individuals, who then donated these objects to the museum, thus
transferring them (and the past that such objects are seen to bear) from the
private to the public domain. Interestingly, through the label descriptions,
the descendants of refugees are not only identified as guardians of the refu-
gee past, but also come to inhabit that past themselves, when the homelands
once lost to their parents—Kaisarea, Sinasos—are recognised as homelands
of the refugee descendants themselves.
As this book will go on to show, such identifications are characteristic
of the stance that many descendants adopt with regard to their ancestors’
8 K. GEDGAUDAITĖ

difficult past; the implications that these attitudes have for how the history
of the Greco-Turkish War and its aftermath are remembered constitutes
the departure point of this book.

1.4   The Stories that Are Yet to Be Told: Notes

from the 2010s

In Yannis Economides’ film Ballad of the Pierced Heart (2020), one of the
main characters, Olga, decides to leave her husband and start a new life
with her lover, the pop singer and nightclub-owner Manos. Just before
leaving her house, Olga hastily packs as part of her luggage 1 million
euros, obtained, as we understand, from her husband’s shady businesses.
As the husband’s rage upon discovering what happened and the search for
the culprits ensues, the couple hide in a house in the countryside to wait
out the storm. It is at this point that, one evening, we see Olga comfort-
ably curled up on the sofa and reading Dimosthenis Papamarkos’ short-­
story collection Gjak (2014), narrating the experiences of Greek soldiers
during the Asia Minor Campaign and upon their return home.
The cameo appearance of the short story collection in the film is quite
telling of the role that memories of Asia Minor play in contemporary
Greek culture—that is, markedly present in the Greek everyday, even
when not mentioned directly. Several years after its first publication in
2014, Papamarkos’ Gjak has become a landmark in contemporary Greek
culture, reprinted several times, staged as theatre play by two different
companies and even finding its way into a comics magazine.5 The short
story collection opened doors to many more projects for its author—as
scriptwriter of comics, opera and horror films, among others—including,
not coincidentally, the film Ballad of the Pierced Heart itself. It also served
as a business card of sorts for the publishing house Antipodes, which had
started its venture into the publishing world with this book and the objec-
tive to bring the voices of newly emerging writers into a public sphere
marked by the economic, social and cultural transformations caused by
Greece’s debt crisis; it has continued to be a distinctive and influential
player in the field of publishing ever since.
Papamarkos’ Gjak is a paradigmatic example of literature emerging
during the past decade, marked by the so-called crisis—moulding the
memories of Asia Minor into a short form, adopting performative
5
See Mavragani (2016), Dovris (2016) and Zervos (2017).
 1 MEMORY WORK AND HISTORY IN THE MAKING 9

aesthetics and participating in the creative economies of solidarity, where

collaborations such as the ones stemming from the short story collection
flourished. Likewise, Economides and his oeuvre are representative of
contemporary Greek cinema and the so-called Greek weird wave, associ-
ated, albeit not without contestation, with the sociocultural transforma-
tions that accompanied the debt crisis (Papanikolaou 2021).
On a diegetic level, some parallels between the film and the short story
collection can also be drawn: both develop within narrow family and com-
munity boundaries and pursue the issues of honour and justice, although
in different ways. In Economides’ film, the pursuit takes place within the
matriarchal structures of the family—the mothers of Olga’s lover and of
the husband decide to restore order by arranging the murder of their
opponents—coincidentally, however, employing the same gang to carry
out the job. It is from this point of view that the narrative unfolds in
Tarantino-like fashion. Papamarkos’ Gjak returns to the patriarchal social
structures of the 1920s, with its chief focus on soldiers’ experiences, but
also within the narrow boundaries of the local communities to which these
soldiers return and within the networks of kinship and comradeship where
things are always settled ‘between men’: restoring family honour; arrang-
ing marriages; providing care, affection and support.
The memories encountered in the short story collection unlock the
experiences in Asia Minor in important ways. Foregrounding the local
soldiers’ identities, for example, they enable us to view the experiences of
the Greco-Turkish War as intersectional, gendered experiences. Bringing
into focus other historical moments—such as labour migration to the
USA—they also show the ways in which memories of Asia Minor are mul-
tidirectional, entangled with histories that take us beyond the borders of
Greece or Turkey.
I have focused on the parallel readings of these two cultural texts so
as to highlight that, just like when they first reached Greece, memories
of Asia Minor continue to be (re-)shaped in response to present-day
concerns. These concerns give the memories of Asia Minor certain aes-
thetic characteristics while also establishing dialogues with other cultural
narratives. Memories of Asia Minor are both recognisable and adaptable.
They are also everywhere, easily spotted in contemporary everyday life,
tastes, sounds, objects and stories: this is why Papamarkos was able to
write his short story collection without recourse to archival sources, as
he mentioned in several interviews, solely inspired by a trip to Asia Minor
that he undertook one summer and drawing on the memories of the
stories he had heard in his village as a child. If in the first fragment
10 K. GEDGAUDAITĖ

analysed in this section those stories were referred to as ‘fairy tales’, here
we can see how listening to these ‘fairy tales’ has left a deep imprint on
the subsequent generation and how it has become material for their own
creative expression and rethinking of history.
Moreover, the stories that Papamarkos chooses as his focus may be
viewed as indicative of a stance that many adopt towards the history of the
Greco-Turkish War, which we will encounter in this book: despite the
prominent place that Asia Minor holds in present-day Greece, not all that
happened in Asia Minor has been told. The reasons behind adopting this
stance are twofold. On the one hand, some believe that any experiences
that do not support the national narrative have been left out. On the other
hand, some think that the suffering that the common people endured dur-
ing the campaign and in its aftermath has never been adequately addressed.
The stories of soldiers who served in more than ten years of warfare (from
the First Balkan War in 1912 to the debacle in Asia Minor in 1922) thus
open up the experiences of the Greco-Turkish War to new dialogues in
multiple directions. The fact that these dialogues in Papamarkos’ Gjak are
cast in the local Albanian dialect spoken in Greece—known as arvani-
tika—plays into the established genre conventions of both oral tradition
and first-person testimony. At the same time, it also problematises the
experience in Asia Minor as a collective and uniformly national experience.
Told across media, engaging the established cultural canon to open
new, hitherto underexplored routes, reliant on certain aesthetic practices
that put them in dialogue with the wider social context—these are the
memories of Asia Minor as we encounter them in Dimosthenis Papamarkos’
Gjak and the other case studies which this book will discuss in the follow-
ing chapters, exploring and assessing the role that memories of Asia Minor
play in present-day Greece.

1.5   The Structure of this Book

In the previous sections, I outlined the wide network of connections
between different historical agents, discourses and aesthetic forms used for
remembering and memorialising the Greco-Turkish War and its aftermath.
Chapter 2 provides a more thorough overview, including the historical
background and the methodological framework employed in this book.
The chapter discusses the Great Fire of Smyrna as the key moment that
haunts narratives of the Greco-Turkish War in present-day Greece, as well
 1 MEMORY WORK AND HISTORY IN THE MAKING 11

as the Exchange of Populations between Greece and Turkey as a frame-

work that continues to define the popular understanding of what it means
to be a refugee. Taking its cue from Marianne Hirsch’s postmemory, it
conceptualises the role that the generations that came after the Greco-­
Turkish War play in the relay of remembrance.
In Chap. 3, I delve into the case studies, starting with the major debate
on memories of Asia Minor, to showcase the stakes that this memory holds
in present-day Greece. Drawing on the controversy over the history text-
book for the sixth grade of Greek primary school (dimotiko), edited by a
team of history educators led by Maria Repousi, I examine different mne-
monic communities that the memories of Asia Minor brought together,
each with its own agenda and vision for the future of those memories. I
argue that, if we are to fully grasp the dynamics through which memories
circulate, we need to take into account the emotions evoked by any
one memory.
The debate over the history textbook occurred in 2006–2007: it was
seen as undermining the solid pillars of the national narrative and, hence,
the national identity that rests on them. Although the arguments sur-
rounding the controversy referred to several pivotal moments in modern
Greek history, the whole discussion eventually boiled down to one specific
word—synostismos in Greek, which can be translated into English as
‘crowding’—with reference to the Greeks assembling on the quay of
Smyrna as they tried to escape the burning city in 1922. The reference was
seen as trivialising the event, with heated arguments about the use of this
word and the book more generally erupting across a wide range of media
and summoning opposition across the political spectrum. Drawing on the
theorisations of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2002), I propose that both
opponents and supporters of the textbook appealed to paranoid visions of
the future of the nation and its history, and that, in order to advocate their
views, both sides of the debate were employing strategies and tactics that
essentially mirror each other. The remainder of this book is structured as
a response to this controversy. Ten years on, the echoes of the debate are
still present in the public and cultural spheres, and their analysis can offer
us a glimpse into the future unfolding of memory.
Many of the participants in the debate over the textbook were descen-
dants of refugees from Asia Minor, who felt that the memory of their
ancestors was disrespected. I therefore focus on family memories with the
case-study presented in Chap. 4 and discuss the ways in which these mem-
ories are reworked and presented to larger audiences. In its essence, Chap.
12 K. GEDGAUDAITĖ

4 foregrounds the aesthetics and memory practices that Asia Minor sets in
motion when the relay of remembrance reaches the third generation. By
building on the concept of the generation of postmemory, as developed by
Hirsch, and the intergenerational transmission of trauma, as discussed by
Tata Arcel, the discussion focuses on the graphic novel Aivali (2014,
translated into English in 2019) by Soloup—a grandchild of refugees from
Asia Minor.
The plot of the graphic novel develops within one day, when Soloup’s
protagonist, a meta-representation of the author himself, undertakes a boat
trip between the ports of Mytilene and Aivali, which once formed a single
cultural space within the Ottoman Empire but is now divided by the bor-
der between Greece and Turkey. During the boat trip, voices of Greek and
Turkish writers intertwine with Soloup’s family memories so as to provide
an insight into the region’s past and the repercussions of this past on the
present. By bringing Greek and Turkish voices together, Soloup advocates
a reparative remembering that would bridge the divisions cultivated by
national ideologies. As will become evident from the discussion of cultural
events organised in relation to Aivali, the graphic novel has led to many
such encounters with the past. During these encounters, memories of Asia
Minor travelled across Greece and beyond, became the subject of debates
and led to new remediations and re-readings. In Marianne Hirsch’s terms,
the graphic novel thus paves the way from familial to affiliative postmem-
ory. Yet, as I will go on to show, the affiliations that the book generates—
and those that it inhibits—stretch beyond authorial intentions.
Chapter 5 builds on the notion of affiliative postmemory, by turning to
the most prominent among the unforgettable homelands of Asia Minor,
that of the affluent and cosmopolitan city of Smyrna. It does so through
the medium of theatre, which has so far received little critical attention for
its representations of Asia Minor. I argue that Smyrna has starred in the
story of the lost homelands on so many occasions that it has become fixed
in the Greek popular imagination as closely associated with certain cultural
tropes that condense the history of the city in the same way in which a
pocket guide might do. The recurrence of these tropes in literature, music,
film and theatre preserves such a version of Smyrna in the memory of the
Greek people. Extending the term ‘portable monument’ coined by Ann
Rigney (2004), I refer to this type of Smyrna as ‘portable Smyrna’. The
analysis of the play My Beloved Smyrna (Denisi 2014) shows how the the-
atre stage becomes a space where such a Smyrna is performed. For many
critics, the staging of Greek history that Denisi is known for represents a
 1 MEMORY WORK AND HISTORY IN THE MAKING 13

popular form of Greek nationalism, fostering national pride, a sense of

cultural exceptionalism and a possessive vision of the past. By discussing
my encounters with the performance’s audience members, I challenge this
assumption and suggest that My Beloved Smyrna provides a chance for
audiences to confront different viewpoints on the history of Asia Minor
emerging across generations. Ultimately, my argument in this chapter is
that portable memory, such as that of Smyrna, provides a toolkit for craft-
ing one’s own place in history—past, present and future.
Chapter 6 returns to the idea that portable memory provides a toolkit
for reconstituting a relationship to the past and for bearing witness in the
future. Using this premise as a starting point, I argue that the current refu-
gee crisis constituted just such a moment in Greece. When in the summer
and early autumn of 2015 thousands of people arrived daily on the Greek
islands of the Aegean, the overwhelming emergency response exhibited by
the inhabitants of these islands, and especially those of Lesvos, was dis-
cussed in the media as that of solidarity with refugees. This outpouring of
solidarity was often attributed to the fact that many of the islanders them-
selves were descendants of the 1922 refugees and still remembered the
hardships that their ancestors had suffered. In my analysis, accounts from
the field, as provided by some of the leading anthropologists, are coupled
with a discussion of widely circulated media representations that called for
solidarity in order to put this premise to the test. Furthermore, in this
chapter, memories of Asia Minor are discussed as connective memories in
relation to other moments of recent Greek history. Limitations in the ways
memories of Asia Minor are employed by and circulate in the media become
apparent once they are embedded in this larger context. Bearing these
limitations in mind, in the final part of this chapter I consider what might
be an alternative framework.
Finally, Chap. 7 provides a brief summary of the key points developed
throughout the book and offers some reflections on its central premises,
taking its cue from the work of the filmmaker and video artist Angela
Melitopoulos.
By engaging with cultural representations pertaining to Asia Minor and
the wider debates in which they participate, my aim is not to provide an
exhaustive categorisation of how and where Asia Minor is remembered in
present-day Greece. Rather, this book should be viewed as following one
particular itinerary and, by doing so, charting the dynamics of memories
of Asia Minor in contemporary Greek culture—their genres and reper-
toires, aesthetic registers, multimedia ecologies, as well as continuous
transformations through a range of encounters with them.
14 K. GEDGAUDAITĖ

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 CHAPTER 2

An Introduction to the Histories

and Legacies of the Greco-Turkish War
and the Memory Studies Toolbox

This book turns to a watershed moment in the history of modern Greece—

the defeat in the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) in Asia Minor and the
population exchange that followed. It asks the question: what remains of
this historical event? The book discusses the legacies of the Greco-Turkish
War in the context of contemporary Greek culture, showing how it inter-
twines with and speaks to present-day concerns. On the one hand, I
describe how family memories find their way into cultural representations
and provide a language as well as a form for public recollection. On the
other hand, I show how those cultural representations participate in wider
transformations that occur in the public sphere, often used as springboard
for debates on identity and belonging.
The case studies that I have chosen were deliberately selected from a
wide array of popular representations that capture large audiences and the
arguments that they help to develop can be divided into three broad cat-
egories: (1) the role of media and popular culture in establishing some
memories as ‘canonical’; (2) the use of the canon and the archive in order
to develop new ways of seeing the history of the Greco-Turkish War and
its aftermath; (3) the implications of memory as a toolkit to address con-
temporary realities. Probing into how any particular event is remembered
in society opens a large network of connections, where multiple historical
agents, discourses and aesthetic forms are engaged, revealing how mem-
ory work is always a work in progress. A consistent effort to view cultural

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 17

Switzerland AG 2021
K. Gedgaudaitė, Memories of Asia Minor in Contemporary Greek
Culture, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83936-9_2
18 K. GEDGAUDAITĖ

aesthetic strategies in their broader social context is thus where the contri-
bution of this book lies.
The conceptualisation of memory in the public sphere on which I rely
is akin to that Michael Rothberg describes—that is, ‘public sphere as a
malleable discursive space in which groups do not simply articulate estab-
lished positions but actually come into being through their dialogical
interactions with others’ (Rothberg 2009: 5). In such a public sphere,
according to Rothberg, ‘one cannot know in advance how the articulation
of a memory will function; nor can one even be sure that it will function
only in one way […] individuals and groups play an active role in rearticu-
lating memory’ (Rothberg 2009: 16). In other words, memory not only
reflects the concerns of the communities that it brings together, but it is
also actively engaged in shaping those communities. Moreover, the path-
ways that it opens up often lead in unexpected directions.
In my work, I quicky became aware of the dynamic outlined by
Rothberg through different encounters I had with scholars, descendants
of Asia Minor refugees, journalists, readers of comics, theatre-goers and
other people I met by chance, who displayed interest in my work and were
willing to talk with me. In some ways, tracking the reception of the cul-
tural works analysed in this study also served as a way to document the
different encounters that they prompted. The reader will find a number of
such encounters referred to throughout this book, as a gesture towards
the analysis of cultural representations that takes into account the views
and feelings of those who consider themselves to be the stakeholders in
this memory work.
Encounters with memories of Asia Minor as discussed here thus serve
as a critical intervention that helps to highlight both the contingency of
memory and the affective alliances that it entails in present-day Greece.
They are used to foreground that, although we all operate within given
social frameworks and with certain cultural, political and other tools, the
meaning that our ideas take on is ultimately determined in an encounter.
Through such an approach, my intention is to show that the memories of
Asia Minor are dynamic, innovative, reflective of present-day ideologies
and responsive to contemporary issues. Building on these insights, I argue
that a closer look at encounters with cultural memory can show how the
contingent futures of that memory emerge from established views and
openings to difference.
The primary case studies I engage with date from the period between
2006 and 2016. This places the overall study within larger debates on the
 2 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORIES AND LEGACIES… 19

economic, political, social and cultural transformations brought by the so-­

called Greek crisis and the impact that the refugee crisis in Europe had on
Greece’s society and culture. As has been pointed out by Nyers (2006),
the sense of urgency characteristic of crises is also the central premise upon
which refugee identity is built as a subject in ‘a state of emergency’ and in
need of immediate assistance and relief, prompting the enactment of cer-
tain structures of governmentality that often extend well beyond the crisis
itself. In this context, returning to the case of refugees from Asia Minor in
present-day Greece offers an interesting point of departure for considering
what meanings of refugeehood persist when the initial sense of emergency
and crisis that led to it are long gone. More importantly, it also enables us
to ask the question: what happens at the crossroads of past and pres-
ent crises?
A return to the past at the time of crisis has been pointed out as one of
the dynamics observed in present-day Greece, leading to the radical reas-
sessment of certain histories, such as the transition to democracy post-­1974
(better known as the metapolitefsi in Greek; see e.g. Kouki and Liakos
2015) as well as the resurgence of some periods that hitherto have been
largely absent from public discourse, such as the years of the occupation by
the Axis powers (Knight 2015). At the same time, the Greek financial crisis
intensified negative attitudes towards migrants, who were often blamed for
unemployment and social decay (Tsimouris and Moore 2017) and became
a target of violent attacks by both police forces and racist groups (Rozakou
2017). In the cultural field, critics have been working to identify strategies
that would transform the hegemonic crisis narratives into alternative social
imaginaries (Boletsi et al. 2020; see also Boletsi 2016, 2019).
Some of these alternatives have been productively captured by the
modality that Dimitris Papanikolaou has called ‘archive trouble’. As he
has pointedly observed, in an increasing number of cultural works that
came into being during the years of the Greek crisis, the return to the past
has been framed as ‘the moment when aesthetics reframes historical and
political understanding and alerts us to the modalities of history in the
present’ in order to problematise the ways in which we understand and
encounter the past (Papanikolaou 2017: 46; see also Papanikolaou 2011,
2021). The recontextualisation of cultural texts and problematisation of
the process of unearthing and digging in a participatory art form that
constantly pushes one to question more are set out by Papanikolaou as
aesthetic strategies of the modality of archive trouble. At the same time,
the politics and the poetics of archive trouble insistently return to the
20 K. GEDGAUDAITĖ

body as a site where ‘the body’s foundational precarity and the iconoclas-
tic return to an archive of cultural and historical material were proposed
as interconnected narrative gestures that could link past and present in a
radical mixing’ (Papanikolaou 2021: 186–187). In this way, history, body
and their rearchivisation become intrinsically linked to wider questions of
national politics and belonging.
It would certainly be an understatement to say that the Greek crisis
brought memories of Asia Minor to the forefront of public memory. Asia
Minor has been nourished through cultural practices and embedded into
the everyday of the Greek people from the very first years following the
military debacle of 1922; it has been mobilised in relation to the wider
political and social concerns each time when remembering happened (see
Sect. 2.2). In the 2010s, then, remembering Asia Minor inescapably also
participated in the dynamics set in motion by the wider context of the
crisis. Although pre-dating the crisis, the debates on history and identity
to which I turn in Chap. 3 in many ways anticipate those that would come
with greater intensity in 2010s. As the discussion in Chap. 4 demonstrates,
the aesthetic strategies employed by the descendants of refugees from Asia
Minor to address the legacies of the Greco-Turkish War come to resemble
the modality of archive trouble. As further elaborated in Chap. 6, which
addresses the current refugee crisis, the archives of past experiences and
the aesthetic strategies that frame them can profoundly shape our percep-
tions of and response to the present. At the same time, different articula-
tions of the memories of Asia Minor brought forth by the examples
discussed in this book not only come to reframe the political, as
Papanikolaou’s archive trouble does, but also participate in reaffirming the
national genealogies of memory, identity and their archives.
‘Must the claims of memory always be calculated according to their
relevance for national history?’ asks Rothberg in the introduction to his
study Multidirectional Memory (Rothberg 2009: 3). By using a number of
examples located in different national contexts—including France,
Germany, Israel, Palestine and Algeria—he shows that memories certainly
do not always have to be nation-bound and in fact can lead to what he calls
in his later work acts of ‘long distance solidarity’ (Rothberg 2019). For at
least two decades, significant efforts in the field of memory studies have
been dedicated to stepping out of the national frameworks and advocating
for a multidirectional, transnational, transcultural and unbound approaches
to memory in culture (Rothberg 2009; de Cesari and Rigney 2014; Erll
2011a; Bond et al. 2017). Likewise, the Greco-Turkish War, while it is
 2 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORIES AND LEGACIES… 21

certainly perceived today as a milestone in Greek national history, has also

been part of transnational memory networks and subject to cross-­
referencing with and borrowing from other contexts, as has been produc-
tively shown in the studies by Sjöberg (2016) and Halstead (2018).
Nevertheless, as this book goes on to show, discourses of nationalism can-
not be easily dismissed and play a prominent role in the public sphere,
leaving scholars of memory studies and other fields with many questions
about how to address the gap between the transcultural dynamics of the
historical processes that they trace in their work and the national frames
within which these are frequently imbricated. It is with these struggles in
mind that this book stays within and engages with the Greek national
context.
At the same time, the questions on histories of dislocation and their
legacies in the present addressed here have a much wider resonance. The
1923 Treaty of Lausanne that separated Muslims and Orthodox Christians
of the Ottoman Empire into Turks and Greeks and relocated them to cor-
responding geographies subsequently served as a benchmark against which
the success of other refugees’ resettlement in Greece was measured and as
a model for efficiently executing other displacements, most notably in
Germany after the Second World War and during the partition of India in
1947 (Voutira 2003b; Clark 2007: xi–xvii). The route on which refugees
from Asia Minor once embarked—from coastal Turkey to Greece via the
Aegean islands—is today used by refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq
and other countries. While each of these events has its distinct histories,
bearing in mind that these histories also intersect at crucial points helps to
see how the central questions that this book addresses—what remains of
the violent legacies of war a century later and what role do these remnants
of the past play in contemporary society—continue to be equally relevant
beyond the Greek context. Furthermore, the questions that this study
poses with regard to the contemporary present—how contemporary iden-
tity politics intertwine with questions about the past and how claims of
ownership over this past inevitably come endowed with specific demands
for the future—resonate strongly with other global contexts where debates
about the past have shaken the public sphere. For example, where to place
the Algerian struggle for independence in French national history? Should
Turkish immigrant children in Germany participate in Holocaust remem-
brance? How do Confederate monuments in public spaces in the US per-
petuate everyday racism? These questions all take us to the intersection of
22 K. GEDGAUDAITĖ

the past with the present. Bringing the two perspectives together—lega-
cies of a violent past and the ways in which they continue to shape present-
day identities—drives one of the central inquiries of this book: in which
ways are we also implicated in witnessing war and dislocation, which the
new connective media environments have turned into a perpetual pres-
ence of distant suffering?
But let me retrace my steps and set the discussion at the core of this
book into a wider context. In order to do so, I will first give a brief outline
of the historical background of the Greco-Turkish War and discuss how it
has been collectively reworked into a cultural memory that could be shared
with others.

2.1   Historical Background

In the aftermath of the First World War, as a victorious party that had
joined the cause on the side of the Allies in 1917, Greece was presented
with the opportunity to claim Asia Minor as part of its territory, which it
had been steadily expanding since the establishment of the Kingdom of
Greece in 1830.1 The region of Asia Minor carries deeply symbolic
significance in Greek culture, as a marker of its continuity from ancient
times.2 Simultaneously, the geographical position of Asia Minor at the
intersection of Mediterranean trade routes, with the cosmopolitan port of
Smyrna3 at its centre, certainly added to the appeal of those lands in the

1
Throughout the nineteenth century, Greece was pursuing a nation-building project com-
monly known as the Great Idea: an aspiration to create a Greece of two continents and five
seas, with the capital of Constantinople, thus effectively reconstructing the Greek state
extending to the frontiers of the Byzantine Empire before the Fall of Constantinople in 1453
(Clogg 1992: 48). For more on the Great Idea and the ways in which it shaped the ideas of
Greekness, see Christopoulos and Bastias (1977: 455–84); Doulis (1977: 9); Skopetea
(1988); Kremmydas (2010); and Rizas (2015). Here it is important to point out that,
although the Great Idea had become a dominant ideology by the beginning of the twentieth
century, it was by no means the only vision for the futures of Greece and the Ottoman
Empire. Other views prevalent at that time included the ideology of Ottomanism, advocating
for a multi-ethnic Ottoman state where Greeks would have an upper hand; the preservation
of multi-ethnic society on equal terms and the creation of the Ottoman race; or the confed-
eration of Balkan States (Kechriotis 2005; cf. Kitromilides 1990).
2
References to Asia Minor as a territory denoting Greek settlements can be traced back as
early as the end of the second century bc, while references to the same territory as simply
‘Asia’ can be found in Homer (Anagnostopoulou 1998: 51).
3 ̇
Present day Izmir, Turkey.
 2 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORIES AND LEGACIES… 23

early twentieth century. In May 1919, internal divisions within the coun-
try notwithstanding,4 the Greek army disembarked at the port of Smyrna,
under a mandate obtained from the Great Powers to protect the Greek
Orthodox populations of Asia Minor.5 Within weeks, this military opera-
tion developed into a fully fledged military campaign, advancing far
beyond the boundaries of Smyrna into the hinterland of Asia Minor. The
events that unfolded over the next several years are variously known as the
Greco-Turkish War, the Asia Minor Campaign or the Turkish War of
Independence, depending on whose historical account one reads. For
Turkey, this war brought the celebratory moment when the modern
Turkish Republic was established. For Greece, the campaign ended in a
military debacle, the impact of which was to be felt so severely that it
became known as the Asia Minor Catastrophe,6 an emotionally charged
term that is still in use today.
The destruction of the city of Smyrna, the most devastating image of
the Greek losses that over the years came to bear the symbolic weight of
all losses inflicted by this war, haunts many of the case studies discussed
in this book. In early September 1922, a few days after the victorious
Turkish forces, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, had
entered the city, a great fire erupted, leaving the thriving Ottoman port a
heap of ashes (with the exception of the Turkish quarters). Questions
about who set the city ablaze and why have been debated until today
(Kırlı 2005; Neyzi 2014; Amygdalou 2020), but the fire’s fatal conse-
quences for the thousands trapped on Smyrna’s quay are indisputable: at
least 30,000 Greek and Armenian Orthodox Christians—both residents
of Smyrna and wartime refugees—died in the flames, drowned in the sea

4
The division between those who supported the territorial ambitions behind the Greek
irredentist project of the Great Idea and those who opposed them emerged during the First
World War and led to tensions that some historians likened to a civil war (Mavrogordatos
2015: 269–319). These divisions, known as ethnic schism (ethinkos dichasmos), persisted and
profoundly influenced politics following the First World War as well.
5
The Treaty of Sèvres, signed in August 1920, officially recognised the Greek occupation
of Smyrna and ceded other territories to Greece. Although celebrated as the moment of
fulfilment of the Great Idea at the time, the treaty was never recognised by the Turkish
nationalist forces and thus amounted to Greece’s ‘paper victories’ (Smith 1998 [1973]: 129).
6
This term is usually translated into English as Asia Minor Disaster. Here, preference is given
to ‘Greco-Turkish War’ or ‘Asia Minor Campaign’ to refer to these events. The term ‘Asia
Minor Catastrophe’ is preferred over ‘Asia Minor Disaster’ when translating Greek sources.
24 K. GEDGAUDAITĖ

trying to escape the fire or were killed in the massacre taking place on the
quay as the fire raged.7
After the fire, a large number of people remained on the shores of
Smyrna. Upon the initiative of an American employee at the YMCA, Asa
Jennings, 300,000 Smyrniotes and another 200,000 persons from the sur-
rounding areas were saved by being transferred to Greece (Papoutsy 2008:
44–59). It was mostly women and children who boarded the ships, as men
between the ages of 18 and 45 were detained and sent to forced labour
battalions; very few of those men survived the ordeal.8
The final step in the resolution of the violent conflict came with the
Convention on the Exchange of Populations between Greece and Turkey
stipulated under the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.9 Under the terms of the
Convention, all remaining Orthodox Christians had to leave Turkey and
go to Greece, while all Muslims had to leave Greece and resettle in
Turkey.10 This was not the first time that the idea of a population exchange
was considered in the region, a clear precedent being the population
exchange between Greece and Bulgaria stipulated under the Treaty of
Neuilly in 1919. Yet, for the first time the exchange was envisioned as
compulsory,11 a decision that was heavily criticised by some contemporary
as well as later assessments of the treaty (Hirschon 2003b). The total num-
ber of people affected by the exchange is usually estimated at more than 1
million Orthodox Christians and about half a million Muslims.12 As has
been demonstrated by Olga Demetriou, counting losses in post-conflict
societies is very much reflective of how ‘numbers become tools of
­knowledge, whether by inventorying or obliteration’ (Demetriou 2018:

7
On the destruction of Smyrna, see Clogg (1992: 97), Apostolopoulos et al. (1980),
Milton (2009), Horton (2003 [1926]), Dobkin (1972).
8
The case of the writer Ilias Venezis is often cited as a paradigmatic example of the brutal-
ity of Turkish labour battalions (or Ambele Taburu, as they are also known). He was cap-
tured in his native town of Aivali in September 1922, together with 3,000 other men, and
was one of only twenty-three who survived the fourteen-month-long ordeal (Metevelis
2013: 247).
9
The full text is available in Hirschon (2003a) and Pentzopoulos (2002 [1962]).
10
In practice, the terms of the Convention were translated differently for different com-
munities (Kitromilides and Alexandris 1984; Koufopoulou 2003).
11
Exceptions were granted only to the Greek Orthodox inhabitants of Istanbul, Imvros
and Tenedos, who had settled there before 1918, and to Muslim inhabitants of
Western Thrace.
12
Özkırımlı and Sofos (2008: 117) cite the following sources: Hirschon (2003b: 14–15),
Aktar (2003: 85–6), Campbell and Sherrard (1968: 129).
 2 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORIES AND LEGACIES… 25

43–44). A closer look at the inventory of casualties of the Greco-Turkish

War would thus reveal that the exchange concerned only about 200,000
Orthodox Christians, while more than 1 million had already been uprooted
as a result of the war before 1922. In the meantime, the number of
Muslims displaced before 1923 as a result of the expansion of the Kingdom
of Greece and the Balkan Wars is not normally discussed in this context. It
is also important to point out that the convention concerned not only
those who fled as a consequence of the Greco-Turkish War, but anyone
who came there after 1912, not only those affected by the Balkan Wars,
but also those who migrated as workers, merchants or students during this
period. As demonstrated by Salvanou (2018), these individuals came to
play a crucial role in shaping refugee memory and communities after
the war.
Religion was chosen as basis for the exchange because it served as a way
to distinguish and administer non-Muslim communities in the Ottoman
Empire.13 The (re)alignment of different groups on the basis of religion
presupposed homogeneity within each religious community. In practice,
the incoming refugees were far from a homogeneous group, with different
identities based on their place of origin, language or social class. These
differences, as has been shown by Hirschon (1989), were also inscribed in
the new homelands within the boundaries of the Greek state, and they
persisted even fifty years after the exchange (cf. Pentzopoulos 2002
[1962]: 101–102). Where geographical similarities between old and new
homelands translated into livelihoods familiar to refugees, it was easier for
them to integrate into the host societies (Hirschon 2003b; Koftopoulou
2003). Elsewhere, mismatches between the ways of life to which the refu-
gees were accustomed and those they encountered in their newly acquired
homelands made it rather difficult to adapt and led to many confronta-
tions between locals and refugees (Mavrogordatos 1982: 94–96; Eglezou
2009; Özkırımlı and Sofos 2008: 118; Layoun 2001: 38).

13
Since the mid-fifteenth century, the non-Muslim communities of the Ottoman Empire
were divided into Orthodox (or Rum), Jewish and Armenian millets. Each millet had relative
autonomy, as the responsibility to administer communal matters was allocated to the highest-
ranking clergy of that millet. The millet system did not take into consideration ethnic differ-
ences. For instance, even though the administration of the Orthodox millet was always
largely Greek-dominated, Serbian, Bulgarian, Romanian and Albanian Orthodox Christians
were all part of the Rum millet. It was only during the second half of the nineteenth century
that the word ‘millet’ started to acquire ethno-religious character (Özkırımlı and Sofos
2008: 43–7; Clogg 1982; Katsikas 2013).
26 K. GEDGAUDAITĖ

Recent assessments of the exchange have also shown the racialised

thinking that informed the decisions concerning its terms. In discussing
the legacies of the population exchange in Turkey, Aslı Iğsız reveals how
deportation, relocation, segregation or assimilation were discriminately
applied, depending on a particular group’s ethnic origin—which she refers
to as ‘racialized biopolitics’ (Iğsız 2018: 6–11). An assessment of how
such logics would translate into the Greek context is still pending; how-
ever, it has been generally agreed that refugee populations were used to
resettle those lands deemed in need of ‘Hellenisation’.14 In this context, it
is somewhat unsettling to think that the exchange was subsequently por-
trayed by both Greece and Turkey as a necessary step for modernising
their respective nations and creating homogeneous societies.
At the same time, significantly, one of the lasting legacies of such atti-
tudes is that they prefigured what it means to be a refugee, long before the
1951 UN Convention. As has been insightfully argued by Effie Voutira
(2003a), the understanding of what it means to be a refugee in Greece
owes much to the positive public perception of the successful integration
of Asia Minor refugees and their perceived contribution to the economy,
society and culture of the country.15 The much-quoted Article 1 of the
United Nations Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees
defines a refugee as someone who ‘owing to well-founded fear of being
persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a par-
ticular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his
nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail him-
self of the protection of that country’ (UN Convention 1951: 14). In
contrast, arriving in the country twenty-nine years before the Convention
was conceptualised, the Asia Minor refugees were received as co-nationals
(omoegeneis) returning to their homeland and granted Greek citizenship
upon arrival.
The comment of one Pontic refugee and former member of Greek par-
liament, quoted by Voutira, is a good example of how such an

14
Kontogiorgi (2006) shows how refugee settlement was used to Hellenise the contested
lands of Macedonia and Thrace on the northern borders of Greece.
15
Dimitri Pentzopoulos (2002 [1962]) gives a detailed account on the profound impact
that the arrival of refugees had on the Greek agriculture, economy, politics, social and cul-
tural spheres. See also Mavrogordatos (1983) and Exertzoglou (2016) on the refugees’
impact on interwar Greek politics. Finally, Salvanou (2018: 55–64) argues that, although the
wider claim of refugee contribution to the country’s modernisation could be contested, they
certainly prompted the modernisation of the public health system.
 2 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORIES AND LEGACIES… 27

understanding of refugeehood persists many years after the resolution of

this violent conflict:

Many times, it has been said that we should finally stop being called ‘refu-
gees’ since after 30 years we are all now natives, children of the same Greek
homeland [patrida]… The term ‘refugee’ is a term of ‘honour’ and we must
insist on it, and not only we, the true refugees [alethes prosphyges] but the
children of our children as well.
(Iasonides 1983: 84, quoted in Voutira 2003a)

As Demetriou (2018) has argued, there is nothing intrinsic about the

meaning of the concept of ‘refugeehood’. Rather, it should be viewed as
simultaneously premised on as well as establishing and entrenching other
affective, legal and political structures that have both intended and unin-
tended consequences. The quote by Iasonides provides an insight into
several of them. While in Greece of the 1920s and 1930s the label of refu-
gee for people who came from Asia Minor was coupled with specific mate-
rial claims (to compensation, housing, jobs and so on), in later decades
(and until today, much like envisioned by Iasonides) it has come to func-
tion as a cultural identity, ‘a term of honour’, which can and does get
politicised in debates such as those analysed in Chap. 3. Here, the crucial
point painstakingly demonstrated by Voutira is the following: because of
the legacies that the population exchange has carried, the term ‘refugee’
in popular discourse came to mean a co-ethnic refugee. As such, ‘refugee’
unavoidably becomes a category of exclusion, which can be claimed only
by those who are deemed to be Greek.16 While much of the current public
discussion has focused on the distinction between ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’,
a distinction much more blurry than might appear at first glance, examples
such as those discussed by Voutira (2003a) signal the need to attend to the
cultural specificity of the term ‘refugee’ and its wide-reaching implications
both within and beyond the context of refugeehood. As will become
apparent in Chap. 6, the cultural connotations with which the term ‘refu-
gee’ is imbued in Greece have profound implications on how those per-
ceived to be ‘foreign refugees’ are viewed.

16
Such an attitude, undoubtedly, stems from and is directly related to the narrowly defined
boundaries of ‘Greekness’. Until recently, Greek citizenship has been assigned on the basis of
jus sanguinis (Christopoulos 2017). Any public attempts to redefine national belonging are
often met with outbursts of rage in the public sphere, if not racist violence (van Boeschoten
2008; Tsimouris and Moore 2017).
28 K. GEDGAUDAITĖ

The key question to ask here is: what is the role of a cultural critic in the
era of ‘More Labels, Fewer Refugees’ that Roger Zetter once so poi-
gnantly captured in the title of his article (Zetter 2007; cf. Zetter 1991;
Demetriou 2019)? In that same article, reflecting on the legal processes of
labelling refugees, Zetter points out that through this procedure the refu-
gee ‘story’ is transformed into a ‘case’. In contrast, the cultural, historical
and mass media discourses analysed in this book are all on the lookout for
and stay with stories. What this book sets out to document is the different
‘genres of recollection’ (Papailias 2005) used to tell the story of the Greco-­
Turkish War in present-day Greece. A century after the end of the war, I
argue, this story is still rather vivid in public memory, and the question of
how to tell it occupies centre stage and involves wide-reaching political
consequences: how is one to tell this story so that it respects the pain and
hardship endured by the refugees? How to tell of suffering without repro-
ducing the injustices that led to it? How to appropriately represent the
different views of all those entangled in that history? With these questions,
the memories of Asia Minor become not ‘things we think about, but
things we think with’, implicated in ‘our politics, our social relations, and
our histories’ (Gillis 1994: 5, quoted in Zelizer 1998: 3). The broader
political and social implications of this calibration resonate through each
of the chapters in this book.

2.2   Cultural Legacies

Although the debacle in Asia Minor was reworked and embedded into the
Greek national narrative from the very first years following the defeat, it
has been subject to multiple reworkings by several different actors. The
first public remediations of Asia Minor addressed the military defeat and
its consequences. As discussed extensively in Emilia Salvanou’s The Making
of Refugee Memory (Salvanou 2018), in the first years following 1922 the
discussion centred on the reasons for the military defeat and those bearing
responsibility for it, as well as the immediate practical problems of accom-
modating over a million refugees. While historians and politicians at the
time put emphasis on the political and social consequences of the debacle,
literature—which also participated in shaping the memories of Asia Minor
from the very first years following the defeat—provided a platform for
processing personal experiences. Chronicled mostly (but not exclusively)
by the refugees trying to make sense of their experience, many war witness
testimonies in the form of fiction were published in local newspapers in
 2 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORIES AND LEGACIES… 29

the years immediately thereafter, such are Ilias Venezis’ The Number 31328
(Venezis 2013 [1931]), narrating the protagonist’s experience in the
Turkish labour battalions in the aftermath of the war, and Stratis Doukas’
Prisoner of War’s Story (1999 [1929]), narrating the experience of surviv-
ing the war years by pretending to be a Muslim.17
Subsequently, in the 1940s, the refugee experience was overshadowed
by another chain of military conflicts that lasted for a decade: the Second
World War, the Axis Occupation and the Civil War. Despite the fact that
some refugee groups were associated with certain political affiliations, this
shared experience smoothed over the divisions between locals and refu-
gees observed in the previous decades and instead imposed a new dividing
line between communists and anti-communists (Salvanou 2018).
Undoubtedly, some of the old rivalries were involved in the new struggle,
but the concerns now were rather different. There are not many accounts
that would allow us to assess how the memories of refugees from Asia
Minor intersected with the experience of war and occupation in the 1940s.
For the most part, this intersection was maintained in silence, which per-
sisted even decades later, much like the divisions brought about by the
Civil War. The memory work of Elli Papadimitriou, who collected testi-
monies on the experiences of uprooting from Asia Minor as well as the
Axis Occupation and the Civil War, constitutes a rare exception to that
silence (Varlas 2003: 169–170).
Several novels also facilitated this encounter, providing what Ann
Rigney calls ‘a meeting point where various other forms of remembrance
are picked up and reworked’ (Rigney 2008: 85). Such was Nikos
Kazantzakis’ novel Christ Recrucified (Kazantzakis 1962 [1951]), which
tells the story of an encounter between a local Greek village and a refugee
population. At the same time, the fissures in the community that made
themselves manifest in the novel turned that encounter into an allegory
for the Greek Civil War, at the very time of the war, when it was a difficult
topic to approach in other public discourses—not coincidentally, it reached
Greece only in 1956, having been first introduced in Germany and in
Norway. Dido Soteriou’s novel Farewell Anatolia (Soteriou 1991

17
Venezis’ The Number 31328 is based on the real-life experiences of the author, whereas
Doukas’ Prisoner of War’s Story is based on an account that the writer allegedly overheard
once in a village in northern Greece. Both were first published as serialised stories in the
newspaper Kampana, the local paper of the island of Lesvos, where many of the Asia Minor
refugees resettled.
30 K. GEDGAUDAITĖ

[1962])18 serves as another example where similar perspectives emerge.

Although narrating war and escape, as did much of the early testimonial
literature on Asia Minor, it tells this story from the perspective of the
Greek Left: the narrative of captivity now also reflects on the ways in which
people’s lives become intertwined with the interests of the great powers,
establishing parallels with the political situation in the aftermath of the
Greek Civil War.19 These two examples show how memories of Asia Minor
could and did become an idiom to articulate other stories, thus exposing
their tangled connections (Sturken 1997) and becoming a multidirec-
tional memory (Rothberg 2009).
The 1940s also mark a time when preserving the memories of the Asia
Minor homelands emerged as a concern, with novels such as Ilias Venezis’
Land of Aeolia (2020 [1943]) setting a precedent for what would become
the most prevalent recollection over the years to come: recuperating life in
Asia Minor before the onset of the Greco-Turkish War. Why would nos-
talgia for the lost homelands play such a prominent role? The journey of
returning ‘home’ is often viewed as a key tenet upon which refugeehood
is premised (Nyers 2006), and in cases where this return becomes physi-
cally impossible, other opportunities might be sought. Critics have also
attributed the trend to look back to life in Asia Minor before the war to
the refugees’ need to record what was lost before it sank into oblivion
(Salvanou 2018). In fact, the majority of retrospective testimonies and
literary works on life in Asia Minor were written at a time when the first
generation who had lived through the events as adults passed away. Anne-­
Marie Fortier’s discussion of diaspora cultures provides yet another possi-
ble explanation. Fortier explicitly links the need to remember to the need
for an identity in diaspora: ‘Memory rather than territory is the principal
ground of identity formation in diasporic cultures, where territory is
decentred and expanded into the multiple settings’ (Fortier 2005: 184).
Finally, some critics have also pointed out that documenting life in Asia

18
The title of the English translation departs from the original title Matomena Chomata,
which literary means ‘bloodied earth’.
19
The analysis of the events in Asia Minor from the perspective of the Greek Left is further
elaborated in Dido Soteriou’s critical essay The Asia Minor Catastrophe and the Strategy of
Imperialism in the Eastern Mediterranean (Soteriou 1975; cf. Psyroukis 1964). Note that
this essay was published more than ten years after the novel and immediately after the fall of
the Greek junta, thus supporting the notion that literature provided a platform to negotiate
certain views that could not be expressed so freely in other forms.
 2 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORIES AND LEGACIES… 31

Minor before the war should be viewed as an ‘attempt to incorporate

greater Hellenism—the failed but now re-collected “Great Idea” of terri-
torial expansion—within the Greek national narrative, a “recuperation” of
the military debacle on an ideological level’ (Petropoulou 1996: 416,
cited in Papailias 2005). Bearing all these perspectives in mind, one could
claim that the narratives of life in Asia Minor before the onset of the war
provide a point of intersection where the personal interests of the refugees
attempting to integrate into their new environment and the interests of
the state that had to overcome the humiliation of losing the military cam-
paign coincided. As the case studies in this book show, journeys of return
to Asia Minor (even those performed through writing) since the early
years following the military debacle continue to bear deep significance for
refugee identity until the present day and acquire new meanings as the
relay of remembrance is passed on from one generation to the next (see
especially Chap. 4).
When discussing refugee identity, it is important to point out once
again that significant efforts were directed at building the Asia Minor
refugee identity as a type of Greek national identity, at a time when the
latter was also under construction and often using the very same tools
and resources. As acutely summarised by Layoun, ‘From within the
post-1922 fiasco of the “great idea” and on the very terrain of that fiasco,
the popular and literary culture of the Asia Minor refugees began to
formulate a redefinition of a refugee as national—that is Greek—subject’
(Layoun 2001: 25). As shown by Salvanou (2018), these efforts trans-
late to various cultural practices and activities that the associations of
Asia Minor refugees undertake, such as promoting the ancient heritage
of Asia Minor or a certain model of what it means to be a good Greek.
In literary works—such as in Photis Kontoglou’s Aivali, My Homeland
(1962)—these are expressed by recuperating the lost homelands as
Greek homelands. Even the early literature on the Asia Minor Campaign
would be reworked in the period following the Second World War to
help shape the memories of Asia Minor as national memories.20 The pro-
cess of appropriation that occurred in national literature is somewhat
similar to that taking place among members of refugee communities, as
the children of Smyrniots, Constantinopolites or Ayvaliotes—topical

20
For a brief overview of revisions in Ilias Venezis’ The Number 31328 as well as several
other canonical texts, see Kastrinaki (1999). See also Lemos (2014), who provides a com-
parative perspective on the reworkings of the war in early Greek and Turkish literature.
Another random document with
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English writers on Ichthyology comment very unfavourably on the
merits of the hake (Gadus merluccius) and call it ‘a coarse fish,
scarcely fit for the dinner table.’ At the Cape its qualities are
generally and fully appreciated; in fact, its flesh is highly delicate and
little inferior to that of the haddock (Gadus æglefinus). At times it
makes its appearance in large shoals. It is then abundantly caught,
salted, and dried, for exportation. The cured or dried Cape stock-fish
is an excellent dish, far superior to that insipid stuff introduced from
Holland or other countries.
The rock-cod (Serranus Cuvierii) is highly esteemed as an article of
food.
Sardines in myriads swarm round Table Bay, at one season of the
year; klip-fish, king klip-fish, and soles (rather scarce), are
considered a luxury.
It is hardly requisite to say much of that cosmopolitan fish, the sole,
which is for its delicacy prized as well at the Cape as elsewhere.
Thousands of cray-fish are caught daily; four of the largest can be
obtained for a penny; but it is not fashionable to eat them, although
they are very good.
The quantity of fish throughout the whole extent of the coast,
bordering on the Agulha’s bank, is immense, and would be the
richest fishery in the world. Exports of sardines in the French style, of
potted cray-fish in the American, and the choicest fish preserved
fresh in tins, might be made profitable.
I may add here that Dr. L. Pappe, of Cape Town, to whom I am
indebted for my information on the Cape fishes, has published in the
Colony an interesting synopsis of the edible fishes at the Cape of
Good Hope, in which he furnishes much new and interesting
descriptive scientific detail.
 INSECTS.
Insects furnish more food delicacies than is generally supposed. In
the popular Introduction to Entomology, by Kirby and Spence, it is
well remarked, that,
‘If we could lay aside our English prejudices, there is no reason why
some of the insects might not be eaten, for those used by various
nations as food, generally speaking, live on vegetable substances,
and are consequently much more select and cleanly in their diet than
the pig or the duck, which form a favourite part of our food. They who
would turn with disgust from a locust, or the grub of a beetle, feel no
symptoms of nausea when a lobster, crab, or shrimp is set before
them. The fact is, that habit has reconciled us to the eating of these
last, which, viewed in themselves, with their threatening claws, and
many feet, are really more disgusting than the former. Had the habit
been reversed, we should have viewed the former with appetite, and
the latter with abhorrence—as do the Arabs, who are as much
astounded at our eating crabs, lobsters, and oysters, as we are at
their eating locusts.’
Herrick, an old author, 200 years ago, in describing a feast given by
Oberon to the fairy elves, alludes to the insects as amongst their
choicest cates.

‘Gladding his palate with some store

Of emmet’s eggs: what would he more?
But beards of mice, a newt’s stewed thigh,
A bloated earwig, and a fly.
With the red-capp’d worm that’s shut
Within the concave of a nut,
Brown as his tooth;—a little moth,
Late fatten’d in a piece of cloth.’
Herrick’s Hesperides, 1658.
 COLEOPTERA.
Many larvæ of insects, and especially of beetles, are eaten in
different parts of the world.
The grub of the palm weevil (Cordylia palmarum), which is the size
of the thumb, has long been in request in the East and West Indies.
The natives of Surinam roast and eat them as something exquisite.
In Jamaica, where it is known as the grou-grou worm, I have seen it
eaten commonly. A grub named Macauco is also there in request at
the principal tables. It is eaten both by whites and blacks, who
empty, wash, and roast them, and find them delicious. A similar
insect is dressed at Mauritius, and eaten by all classes.
An old writer—Brookes, On the Properties and Uses of Insects,
1772, says—‘They are eaten by the French, in the West Indies, after
they have been roasted before the fire, when a small wooden spit
has been thrust through them. When they begin to be hot, they
powder them with a crust of rasped bread, mixed with salt, and a
little pepper and nutmeg. This powder keeps in the fat, or at least,
sucks it up; and when they are done enough, they are served up with
orange juice. They are highly esteemed by the French, as excellent
eating.’
The larva, or grub, of one of the species of beetles which infest
cocoa-nut trees, is called Tucuma, or Grugou, in British Guiana. It is
about two or three inches long, and three-quarters of an inch in
diameter, and the head is black. They are reckoned a great delicacy
by wood-cutters and epicures of the country, and they are generally
dressed by frying them in a pan. By some they are preferred in a raw
state, and after seizing them by the black head, they are dipped in
lime-juice, and forthwith swallowed.
The late Mr. J. C. Bidwell, a botanist, travelling in Australia, states—‘I
never before tasted one of the large grubs, which are a favourite
food of the blacks. They are about four inches long, and about as
thick as a finger. They inhabit the wood of the gum-trees. I had often
tried to taste one, but could not manage it. Now, however, hunger
overcame my nausea. It was very good, but not as I had expected to
find it—rich; it was only sweet and milky.’
Sir Robert Schomburgk writes:—‘The decaying woods of the West
India islands, the Central and some of the southern portions of
America, afford a delicacy to the Indian, which many colonists do not
even refuse, in the larvæ of a large beetle, which is found in
considerable numbers in the pith, when the trunk is near its decay.
The larva, or grub, is frequently of the size of the little finger; and,
after being boiled or roasted, resembles in its taste beef marrow. The
Indians of Guiana frequently cut down the Mauritia palm, for the
purpose of attracting the beetle to deposit its eggs in it, and when
they collect a large quantity, they are roasted over a slow fire, to
extract the fat, which is preserved in calabashes.
The Roman epicures fattened some of these larvæ, or grubs, on
flour. Some naturalists think that the grubs of most of the beetles
might be safely eaten; and that those of the cockchafer, which feeds
upon the roots of grass, or the perfect insects themselves, which, if
we may judge from the eagerness with which cats, and turkeys and
other birds devour them, are no despicable morsel, might be added
to our food delicacies. This would certainly be one means of keeping
down the numbers of these occasionally destructive animals.
The Goliath beetles are said to be roasted and eaten by the natives
of South America and Western Africa, and they often make a bonne
bouche of splendid insects which would gratify many an
entomologist. Although the large prices of £30, £40, or £50, which
used to be asked for them, are now very much reduced, fine
specimens of some of the species even now fetch five to six pounds
for cabinet specimens.
The Australian aborigines are gourmands in their way, and able to
appreciate the good things which surround them. Mr. Clement
Hodgkinson in a work on Australia says:
‘Bellenger Billy amused me very much by his curious method of
diving to the bottom of the river in search of cobberra, the large white
worms resembling boiled maccaroni, which abound in immersed
wood. He swam to the centre of the river with a tomahawk in his
hand, and then breathing hard that his lungs might be collapsed, he
rendered his body and tomahawk specifically heavier than water,
and sank feet foremost to the bottom. After groping about there for
some moments, he emerged on the river’s edge, with several dead
pieces of wood, which he had detached from the mud. Although I
had tasted from curiosity various kinds of snakes, lizards, guanas,
grubs, and other animals which the blacks feed upon, I never could
muster resolution enough to try one of these cobberra; although,
when I have been engaged in the survey of salt-water creeks, and I
felt hot and thirsty, I have often envied the extreme relish with which
some accompanying black could stop and gorge himself with this
moist, living marrow.’
The women of Turkey cook and eat a certain beetle (Blaps sulcata)
in butter to fatten themselves.

ORTHOPTERA.
In the next order of insects, the locust tribe, as they are the greatest
destroyers of food, so, as some recompense, they furnish a
considerable supply of it to numerous nations. They are recorded to
have done this from the most remote antiquity, some Ethiopian tribes
having been named from this circumstance locust-eaters. The
generic name of the locusts, Gryllus, sounds like an invitation to
cook them. Pliny relates that they were in high esteem as meat
amongst the Parthians. When there is a scarcity of grain, as a
substitute for flour the Arabs grind locusts in their hand-mills, or
pound them in stone mortars. They mix this flour with water into a
dough, and make thin cakes of it, which they bake like other bread.
They also eat them in another way; they boil them first a good while
in water, and afterwards stew with oil or butter into a kind of fricassée
of no bad flavour.
The large kinds of locust are made use of in several quarters as
food, and in the markets of the Levant fresh and salted locusts are
vended. Hasselquist tells us, that when corn is scarce, the Arabians
grind the locusts in hand-mills, or pound them in stone mortars, and
bake them as bread; and that even when there is no scarcity of corn,
the Arabs stew them with butter and make them into a kind of a
fricassée, the flavour of which is by no means disagreeable. Why
should land shrimp sauce not be equal to sea shrimp sauce?
Locusts, Cumming tells us, afford fattening and wholesome food to
man, birds, and all sorts of beasts. The hungry dogs and hogs feed
greedily on them,—so that there are plenty of enemies to prey in
time upon these wholesale depredators. Young turkeys live almost
entirely on them in some parts of America, and become very fat
when they are plentiful. Hence, if so many animals thrive upon them,
they must necessarily be dainty food.
It is not only by the inhabitants of the Great Desert that the locusts
are hailed with joy. The Kafirs also give them a hearty welcome, and
make many a good meal upon them too,—not only eating them in
large quantities, but making a sort of coffee-colored soup of their
eggs.
Locusts are cooked in various ways—roasted, boiled, and fried.
They are also salted and smoked, and packed away against a time
of scarcity. It is said, they taste very much like fish, and are
particularly light, delicate, and wholesome food. They are carried into
many of the towns of Africa by waggon-loads, as we bring poultry to
market.
The Hottentots are highly rejoiced at the arrival of the locusts in their
country, although they destroy all its verdure, eating them in such
quantities as to get visibly fatter than before, and making of their
eggs a brown or coffee-coloured soup.
In the Mahratta country in India, the common people salt and eat
them. This was anciently the custom with many of the African
nations, some of whom also smoked them.
Dishes of locusts are generally served up at the principal tables in
Barbary, and esteemed a great delicacy. They are preferred by the
Moors to pigeons; and a person may eat a plateful of 200 or 300
without feeling any ill effects. They usually boil them in water half-an-
hour, having thrown away the head, wings, and legs, then sprinkle
them with salt and pepper and fry them, adding a little vinegar.
Another traveller describes the way they are prepared for food in the
desert of Zahara.—‘In and about this valley were great flights of
locusts. During the day, they are flying around very thickly in the
atmosphere; but the copious dews and chilly air in the night render
them unable to fly, and they settle down on the bushes. It was the
constant employment of the natives in the night to gather these
insects from the bushes, which they did in great quantities. My
master’s family, each with a small bag, went out the first night upon
this employment, carrying a very large bag to bring home the fruits of
their labor. My mistress, Fatima, however, and the two little children,
remained in the tent. I declined this employment, and retired to rest
under the large tent. The next day, the family returned loaded with
locusts, and, judging by the eye of the quantity produced, there must
have been about fifteen bushels. This may appear to be a large
quantity to be gathered in so short a time, but it is scarcely worth
mentioning when compared with the loads of them gathered,
sometimes, in the more fertile part of the country over which they
pass, leaving a track of desolation behind them. But as they were the
first, in any considerable quantity, that I had seen, and the first I had
seen cooked and eaten, I mention it in this place, hoping hereafter to
give my readers more particular information concerning these
wonderful and destructive insects, which, from the days of Moses to
this time, have been considered, by Jews and Mahometans, as the
most severe judgment which Heaven can inflict upon man. But,
whatever the Egyptians might have thought in ancient days, or the
Moors and Arabs in those of modern date, the Arabs who are
compelled to inhabit the desert of Zahara, so far from considering a
flight of locusts as a judgment upon them for their transgressions,
welcome their approach as the means, sometimes, of saving them
from famishing with hunger. The whole that were brought to the tent
at this time were cooked while alive, as indeed they always are, for a
dead locust is never cooked. The manner of cooking is by digging a
deep hole in the ground, building a fire at the bottom, as before
described, and filling it up with wood. After it is heated as hot as is
possible, the coals and embers are taken out, and they prepare to fill
the cavity with the locusts, confined in a large bag. A sufficient
number of the natives hold the bag perpendicularly over the hole, the
mouth of it being near the surface of the ground. A number stand
round the hole with sticks. The mouth of the bag is then opened, and
it is shaken with great force, the locusts falling into the hot pit, and
the surrounding natives throwing sand upon them to prevent them
from flying off. The mouth of the hole is then covered with sand, and
another fire built upon the top of it. In this manner they cook all they
have on hand, and dig a number of holes sufficient to accomplish it,
each containing about five bushels. They remain in the hole until
they become sufficiently cooled to be taken out with the hand. They
are then picked out, and thrown upon tent-cloths or blankets, and
remain in the sun to dry, where they must be watched with the
utmost care to prevent the live locusts from devouring them, if a flight
happens to be passing at the time. When they are perfectly dried,
which is not done short of two or three days, they are slightly
pounded, and pressed into bags or skins, ready for transportation. To
prepare them to eat, they are pulverized in mortars, and mixed with
water sufficient to make a kind of dry pudding. They are, however,
sometimes eaten singly, without pulverizing, by breaking off the
head, wings, and legs, and swallowing the remaining part. In
whatever manner they are eaten, they are nourishing food.’
Captain Stockenstrom, in a paper in the South African Journal on
these insects, observes, ‘Not only the locust-bird, but every animal,
domestic and wild, contributes to the destruction of the locust
swarms; fowls, sheep, horses, dogs, antelopes, and almost every
living thing, may be seen devouring them with equal greediness;
whilst the half-starved Bushmen, and even some of the colonial
Hottentots, consider them a great luxury, consuming great quantities
fresh, and drying abundance for future emergencies. Great havoc is
also committed among the locusts by their own kindred; for as soon
as any one of them gets hurt, or meets with an accident which
impedes his progress, his fellow travellers nearest to him
immediately turn upon him, and devour him with great voracity.’
Mr. Moffat (Missionary Labours in South Africa) states—‘The locusts
for food are always caught at night, when they are at rest, and
carried in sacks to the nearest encampment or village, to be
prepared for keeping. A very small quantity of water is put into a pot,
and the locusts, piled up to the very brim, are covered very closely,
so that they are rather steamed than boiled. They are next carefully
separated and laid out to dry, which the heat of an Arabian or African
sun does thoroughly and speedily; after which they are winnowed to
get rid of the wings and legs, when they are laid up in heaps, or
packed in bags of skin for future use. Sometimes the dry locusts are
beaten into a powder, of which, with water and a little salt, a kind of
pottage is made.’
Mr. R. Gordon Cumming, in the course of his rambles in Africa, fell in
with swarms of locusts, and gives interesting accounts respecting
them. Here are some extracts from his work:—
‘The next day, as we crossed a vast plain, a flight of locusts passed
over our heads during upwards of half-an-hour, flying so thick as to
darken the sun. They reached in dark clouds as far as we could see,
and maintained an elevation of from 6 to 300 or 400 feet above the
level of the plain. Woe to the vegetation of the country on which they
alight! * *
‘On the march we crossed a swarm of locusts, resting for the night
on the grass and bushes. They lay so thick that the waggons could
have been filled with them in a very short time, covering the large
bushes just as a swarm of young bees covers the branch on which it
pitches. Locusts afford fattening and wholesome food to man, birds,
and all sorts of beasts; cows and horses, lions, jackals, hyænas,
antelopes, elephants, &c., devour them. We met a party of Batlapis
carrying heavy burdens of them on their backs. Our hungry dogs
made a fine feast on them. The cold frosty night had rendered them
unable to take wing until the sun should restore their powers. As it
was difficult to obtain sufficient food for my dogs, I and Isaac took a
large blanket, which we spread under a bush, whose branches were
bent to the ground with the mass of locusts which covered it, and
having shaken the branches, in an instant I had more locusts than I
could carry on my back. These we roasted for ourselves and dogs.
Soon after the sun was up, on looking behind me, I beheld the
locusts stretching to the west in vast clouds, resembling smoke; but
the wind soon after veering round, brought them back to us, and they
flew over our heads, for some time actually darkening the sun. * * * *
****
‘The dullness of the scene, however, was enlivened by a wondrous
flight of locusts, the largest I had ever beheld. The prospect was
obscured by them as far as we could see, resembling the smoke
arising from a thousand giant bonfires; while those above our heads
darkened our path with a double flight, the one next the ground flying
north, while the upper clouds of them held a southerly course. The
dogs, as usual, made a hearty meal of them. * * * *
‘We crossed the Limpopo, and having followed it for five miles, we at
length got into a country so densely covered with locusts that the
spore was no longer visible. A large herd of elephants had, during
several previous nights, however, been there feasting upon these
insects.’
According to Niebuhr, the Arabians distinguish several kinds of
locusts, to which they give separate names. They refer only to the
delicacy of its flesh, and not to the nature of the insect. The red
locust is termed Merrken, as it is esteemed by the epicures much
fatter and more succulent than the light locust, which is called by
them Dubbe, because it has a tendency to produce diarrhœa. The
inhabitants of Arabia, Persia, Africa, and Syria, are accustomed to
eat them. The Turks have an aversion to this kind of food; but if the
Europeans express the same, the Arabians remind them of their
fondness for crabs, &c. This kind of food, however, is supposed to
thicken the blood, and produce melancholy.
The custom of feeding upon locusts seems more generally diffused
than is supposed, and is not merely confined to Africa and Arabia.
They are eaten by the Nanningetes in the Malay Peninsula.
Dampier states that, on islands near Timor, ‘They make also a dish
of locusts, which come at certain seasons to devour their potatoes.
They take them with nets, and broil or bake them in an earthen pan.
This dish,’ he adds, ‘eats well enough.’
And the author of A Mission to Ava speaks of them as a Burmese
dainty.
‘The most notable viand produced consisted of fried locusts. These
were brought in, hot and hot, in successive saucers, and I was not
sorry to have the opportunity of tasting a dish so famous. They were
by no means bad, much like what we might suppose fried shrimps to
be. The inside is removed, and the cavity stuffed with a little spiced
meat.’
The Rev. R. Sheppard caused some of our large English
grasshoppers, or field crickets, to be cooked in the way here
recommended, only substituting butter for vinegar, and found them to
be excellent food.
From these statements it will be seen, that the locusts which formed
part of the sustenance of John the Baptist, and about which there
has been much controversy among learned men, could be nothing
else but the animal locust, so common a food in the East, and even
in Africa, to the present day. They are eaten even by the North
American Indians.
‘Among the choice delicacies with which the California Digger
Indians regale themselves during the summer season,’ (says the
Empire County Argus,) ‘is the grasshopper roast. Having been an
eye witness to the preparation and discussion of one of their feasts
of grasshoppers, we can describe it truthfully. There are districts in
California, as well as portions of the plains between Sierra Nevada
and the Rocky Mountains, that literally swarm with grasshoppers,
and in such astonishing numbers that a man cannot place his foot to
the ground, while walking there, without crushing great numbers. To
the Indian they are a delicacy, and are caught and cooked in the
following manner:—A piece of ground is sought where they most
abound, in the centre of which an excavation is made, large and
deep enough to prevent the insect from hopping out when once in.
The entire party of diggers, old and young, male and female, then
surround as much of the adjoining grounds as they can, and each
with a green bough in hand, whipping and thrashing on every side,
gradually approach the centre, driving the insects before them in
countless multitudes, till at last all, or nearly all, are secured in the
pit. In the meantime, smaller excavations are made, answering the
purpose of ovens, in which fires are kindled and kept up till the
surrounding earth, for a short distance, becomes sufficiently heated,
together with a flat stone, large enough to cover the oven. The
grasshoppers are now taken in coarse bags, and after being
thoroughly soaked in salt water for a few moments, are emptied into
the oven and closed in. Ten or fifteen minutes suffice to roast them,
when they are taken out and eaten without further preparation, and
with much apparent relish, or as is sometimes the case, reduced to
powder and made into soup. And having from curiosity tasted, not of
the soup, but of the roast, really, if one could but divest himself of the
idea of eating an insect, as we do an oyster or shrimp, without other
preparation than simple roasting, they would not be considered very
bad eating, even by more refined epicures than the Digger Indians.’

NEUROPTERA.
Another order of insects contains the so-called white-ant tribe
(Termes), which, in return for the mischief it does at certain times,
affords an abundant supply of food to some of the African natives.
The natives of Western Australia pull out the young from the nests at
one season of the year and eat them. Ducks and fowls also feed
greedily on them.
In many countries, the termites, or white-ants, serve for food. In
some parts of the East Indies, the natives catch the winged insects,
just before their period of emigration, in the following manner:—They
make two holes, the one to the windward, the other to the leeward;
at the leeward opening, they place the mouth of a pot, the inside of
which has been previously rubbed with an aromatic herb, called
bugera; on the windward side, they make a fire of stinking materials,
which not only drives these insects, but frequently the hooded
snakes also, into the pots, on which account they are obliged to be
cautious in removing them. By this method, they catch great
quantities, of which they make, with flour, a variety of pastry, which
they can afford to sell very cheap to the poorer ranks of people.
When this sort of food is used too abundantly, it produces, however,
cholera, which kills in two or three hours. It also seems that, in some
form or other, these insects are greedily eaten in other districts.
Thus, when after swarming shoals of them fall into the rivers, the
Africans skim them off the surface with calabashes, and, bringing
them to their habitations, parch them in iron pots over a gentle fire,
stirring them about as is usually done in roasting coffee; in that state,
without sauce or any other addition, they consider them delicious
food, putting them by handfuls into their mouths, as we do comfits.
[30]

‘I have,’ says Smeathman, ‘eaten them dressed in this way several

times, and think them delicate, nourishing, and wholesome. They are
something sweeter, though not so fat and clogging, as the caterpillar
or maggot of the palm-tree snout-beetle (Curculio palmarum), which
is served up at all the luxurious tables of the West Indian epicures,
particularly of the French, as the greatest dainty of the western
world.’
Ants are eaten in many countries. In Brazil, the yellow ant, called
cupia, and a larger species under the name of tama-joura, are much
esteemed, being eaten by the aborigines mixed with resin for sauce.
In Africa, they are stewed with butter. Ants have really no unpleasant
flavour, but are very agreeably acid. In some parts of Sweden, ants
are distilled along with rye, to give a flavour to the inferior kinds of
brandy.
The large saubas (red-ants) and white-ants are an occasional luxury
to the Indians of the Rio Negro; and when nothing else is to be had
in the wet season, they eat large earth-worms, which, when the
lands in which they live are flooded, ascend trees, and take up their
abode in the hollow leaves of a species of Tillandsia, where they are
often found accumulated by thousands. Nor is it only hunger that
makes them eat these worms, for they sometimes boil them with
their fish to give it an extra relish.[31]
The cocoons of the wood ant (popularly and erroneously called ants’
eggs) are collected on the Continent as food for nightingales and
larks. A recent writer tells us, that in most of the towns in Germany
one or more individuals make a living, during summer, by the
business. He describes a visit to an old woman at Dottendorf, near
Bonn, who had collected for fourteen years. She went to the woods
in the morning, and collected in a bag the surfaces of a number of
ant hills where the cocoons were deposited, taking ants and all home
to her cottage, near which she had a tiled shed, covering a circular
area, hollowed out in the centre, with a trench full of water around it.
After covering the hollow in the centre with leafy boughs of walnut or
hazel, she strewed the contents of her bag on the level part of the
area within the trench, when the nurse-ants immediately seized the
cocoons and carried them into the hollow under the boughs. The
cocoons were thus brought into one place, and after being from time
to time removed, and the black ones separated by a boy, who
spread them out on a table and swept off what were bad with a
strong feather, they were ready for market, being sold for about 4d.
or 6d. a quart. Considerable quantities of these cocoons are dried for
winter food for birds, and are sold in the shops.
Humboldt mentions that he saw insects’ eggs sold in the markets of
Mexico, and which are collected on the surface of lakes. Under the
name of axayacat, these eggs, or those of some other species of fly,
deposited on rush mats, are sold as a caviare in Mexico. Something
similar, found in the pools of the desert of Fezzan, serves the Arabs
for food, having the taste of caviare.
In the Bulletin de la Société Impériale Zoologique d’Acclimation, M.
Guerin Méneville has published a very interesting paper on a sort of
bread which the Mexicans make of the eggs of three species of
hemipterous insects.
According to M. Craveri, by whom some of the Mexican bread, and
of the insects yielding it, were brought to Europe, these insects and
their eggs are very common in the fresh waters of the lagunes of
Mexico. The natives cultivate, in the lagune of Chalco, a sort of carex
called touté, on which the insects readily deposit their eggs.
Numerous bundles of these plants are made, which are taken to a
lagune, the Texcuco, where they float in great numbers in the water.
The insects soon come and deposit their eggs on the plants, and in
about a month the bundles are removed from the water, dried, and
then beaten over a large cloth to separate the myriad of eggs with
which the insects had covered them.
These eggs are then cleaned and sifted, put into sacks like flour, and
sold to the people for making a sort of cake or biscuit called ‘hautlé,’
which forms a tolerably good food, but has a fishy taste, and is
slightly acid. The bundles of carex are replaced in the lake, and
afford a fresh supply of eggs, which process may be repeated for an
indefinite number of times.
It appears that these insects have been used from an early period,
for Thomas Gage, a religionist, who sailed to Mexico in 1625, says,
in speaking of articles sold in the markets, that they had cakes made
of a sort of scum collected from the lakes of Mexico, and that this
was also sold in other towns.
Brantz Mayer, in his work on Mexico (Mexico as it was and as it is,
1844), says,—‘On the lake of Texcuco I saw men occupied in
collecting the eggs of flies from the surface of plants, and cloths
arranged in long rows as places of resort for the insects. These
eggs, called agayacath’ (Qy. axayacat), ‘formed a favourite food of
the Indians long before the conquest: and when made into cakes,
resembles the roe of a fish, having a similar taste and appearance.
After the use of frogs in France, and birdsnests in China, I think
these eggs may be considered a delicacy, and I found that they are
not rejected from the tables of the fashionable inhabitants of the
capital.’
The more recent observations of Messrs. Saussure, Sallé, Virlet
D’Aoust, &c., have confirmed the facts already stated, at least, in the
most essential particulars.
‘The insects which principally produce this animal farinha of Mexico,
are two species of the genus Corixa of Geoffroy, hemipterous insects
of the family of water-bugs. One of the species has been described
by M. Guerin Méneville as new, and has been named by him Corixa
fermorata: the other, identified in 1831 by Thomas Say as one of
those sold in the market at Mexico, bears the name of Corixa
mercenaria. The eggs of these two species are attached in
innumerable quantities to the triangular leaves of the carex forming
the bundles which are deposited in the waters. They are of an oval
form with a protuberance at one end and a pedicle at the other
extremity, by means of which they are fixed to a small round disc,
which the mother cements to the leaf. Among these eggs, which are
grouped closely together, and sometimes fixed one over another,
there are found others, which are larger, of a long and cylindrical
form, and which are fixed to the same leaves. These belong to
another larger insect, a species of Notonecta, which M. Guerin
Méneville has named Notonecta unifasciata.’[32]
It appears from M. Virlet d’Aoust, that in October the lakes Chalco
and Texcuco, which border on the city of Mexico, are haunted by
millions of small flies, which, after dancing in the air, plunge down
into the shallowest parts of the water, to the depth of several feet,
and deposit their eggs at the bottom.
‘The eggs of these insects are called hautle (haoutle), by the
Mexican Indians, who collect them in great numbers, and with whom
they appear to be a favourite article of food.
‘They are prepared in various ways, but usually made into cakes,
which are eaten with a sauce flavoured with chillies. To collect the
eggs the Indians prepare bundles of rushes, which they place
vertically in the lake at some distance from the shore. In about a
fortnight, every rush in these bundles is completely covered with
eggs. The bundles are then drawn out and dried in the sun upon a
cloth for not more than an hour, when the eggs are easily detached.
The bundles of rushes are then placed in the water again for another
crop.’[33]
Mr. Ruschenberger, the surgeon to the American expedition to Siam,
in describing a state feast given to the officers, states that the dinner
was remarkable for the variety and exquisite flavour of the curries.
Among them was one consisting of ants’ eggs, a costly and much
esteemed luxury of Siam. They are not larger than grains of sand,
and to a palate unaccustomed to them, are not particularly savory.
They are almost tasteless. Besides being curried, they are brought to
the table rolled in green leaves, mingled with shreds or very fine
slices of fat pork. Here was seen an ever-to-be-remembered luxury
of the East.
 HYMENOPTERA.
It would hardly be suspected that bees serve for food in Ceylon and
some other places,—an ungrateful return for their honey and wax.
The African Bushmen eat the caterpillars of the butterflies.
The Chinese, who waste nothing, after they have unwound the silk
from the cocoons of the silk-worm, send the chrysalis to table. They
also eat the larvæ of a hawk-moth, some of which tribe, Dr. Darwin
tells us, are, in his opinion, very delicious. The natives of New
Holland eat the caterpillars of a species of moth, and also a kind of
butterfly, which they call bugong, which congregate in certain
districts, at particular seasons, in countless myriads. On these
occasions, the native blacks assemble from far and near to collect
them; and after removing the wings and down, by stirring them on
the ground, previously heated by a large fire, winnowing them, eat
the bodies, or store them up for use, by pounding and smoking them.
The bodies of these butterflies abound in an oil, with the taste of
nuts; when first eaten, they produce violent vomitings and other
debilitating effects; but these go off after a few days, and the natives
then thrive and fatten exceedingly on this diet, for which they have to
contend with a black crow, which is also attracted by the butterflies,
and which they dispatch with their clubs, and use as food.
Two insects, a kind of butterfly, and a thick, white grub, found chiefly
in dead timber, are much esteemed by the aborigines of Australia as
articles of food. The former is eaten at certain seasons by whole
tribes of natives in the northern districts. Their practice is to follow up
the flight of the insects, and to light fires at night-fall beneath the
trees in which they have roosted. The smoke brings the butterflies
down, and their bodies are pounded together into a sort of fleshy
loaf. Upon this delicacy the natives not only feed, but fatten. The
white grub is swallowed whole in his living state, and is much sought
for by sable epicures.
In India, and in South America, these grubs are also eaten as a
dainty.
The trunk of the grass-tree, or black-boy (Xanthorea arborea), when
beginning to decay, furnishes large quantities of marrow-like grubs,
which are considered a delicacy by the aborigines in Western
Australia. They have a fragrant, aromatic flavour, and form a
favourite food among the natives, either raw or roasted. They call
them bardi—and they are also found in the wattle tree, or mimosa.
The presence of these grubs in a xanthorea is thus ascertained: if
the top of one of these trees is observed to be dead, and it contain
any bardi, a few sharp kicks given to it with the foot will cause it to
crack and shake, when it is pushed over and the grub extracted, by
breaking the tree to pieces with a hammer. The bardi of the
xanthorea are small, and found together in great numbers; those of
the wattle are cream coloured, as long and thick as a man’s finger,
and are found singly. The excrement of the latter oozes from under
the bark, of the appearance and consistence of clear gum. The galls
formed on several species of sage by gall flies, in the Levant, are
highly prized for their aromatic and acid flavour, especially when
prepared with sugar. They constitute, in fact, a considerable article of
commerce from Scio to Constantinople, where they are regularly
sold in the market. They are known as sage apples, and in Greece
are made into a kind of conserve, which is highly esteemed.

HEMIPTERA.
Coming to another order of insects, the cicada, or chirping flies, we
find that these were eaten by the polished Greeks, and accounted
very delicious. They were caught, strung, sold, and greedily
devoured; and especially the females were relished on account of
their white eggs. One species, a very long-lived one, which, if
spared, lives to the age of 17 years, is still eaten by the Indians of
America, who pluck off the wings and boil them. The aborigines of
Australia eat them raw, after stripping off the wings.
The 17-year locusts, while in an underground grub state, are a
favourite food of various species of animals. Immense numbers are
destroyed by hogs before they emerge from the ground; they are
also, when in their perfect state, eagerly devoured by chickens,
squirrels, and many of the larger birds. The Indians likewise consider
them a delicate food when fried; and in New Jersey they have been
turned to a profitable account in making soap.
No insects are more numerous with us than caterpillars, and sad
havoc they occasionally commit among our cabbages and
cauliflowers. Now we generally make wry faces, when a stray one is
served up with our greens, and the cook is severely taken to task;
but these are reckoned among the chief delicacies of an African
Bushman’s meal.
The Hottentots eat them boiled and raw, and soon get into good
condition on this food. They bring large calabashes full of them to
their habitations, and parch them in iron pots over a gentle fire,
stirring them about as is done in roasting coffee. In that state, without
sauce or other addition, they serve them up as delicious food, and
eat them by handfuls, as we do sugar-plums.
One traveller tells us he has eaten them dressed in this way several
times, and thought them delicate, nourishing, and wholesome, being
sweeter than the grub of the weevil of the palm, and resembling in
taste sugared cream or sweet almond paste.
 ARACHNIDA.
What will be said to spiders as food? But these form an article in the
list of the Bushman’s dainties in South Africa, according to
Sparrman; and the inhabitants of New Caledonia, Labillardiere tells
us, seek for, and eat with avidity, large quantities of a spider nearly
an inch long, which they roast over the fire. Even individuals
amongst the more polished nations of Europe are recorded as
having a similar taste; so that if you could rise above vulgar
prejudices, you would in all probability find them a most delicate
morsel. If you require precedents, Reaumur tells us of a young lady,
who, when she walked in her grounds, never saw a spider that she
did not take and crunch upon the spot. Another female, the
celebrated Anna Maria Schurman, used to eat them like nuts, which
she affirmed they much resembled in taste, excusing her propensity
by saying that she was born under the sign Scorpio.
If you wish for the authority of the learned: Lalande, the celebrated
French astronomer, was equally fond of these delicacies, according
to Latreille. And if, not content with eating spiders seriatim, you
should feel desirous of eating them by handfuls, you may shelter
yourself under the authority of the German immortalized by Rosel,
who used to spread them upon bread like butter, observing that he
found them very useful.[34]
These edible spiders, and such like, are all sufficiently disgusting,
but we feel our nausea quite turned into horror when we read in
Humboldt, that he has seen the Indian children drag out of the earth
centipedes 18 inches long, and more than half an inch broad, and
devour them.