The multiple migrations of Giorgos Sfougaras and his family

Giorgos Sfougaras’ personal and family history is characterised by movement. His parents came to Greece after the Asia Minor Catastrophe. His mother, Anastasia, and her family, the Georgiadis family, were possibly from Smyrna, from Kelebes. The couple and five children went directly to Crete and settled in Heraklion. They were beneficiaries of agricultural rehabilitation schemes and were granted a large raisin farm in the area of Malades and a house in the Atsalenios neighbourhood.

Giorgos’ father, Christos Nikolaidis, was from Constantinople. He lost his parents at a young age, years before the population exchange. Christos and his brother were orphaned at the age of 8 and 5 years old respectively. They were fostered by various families in the years before the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Shortly after September 1922, they crossed over to Greece with the help of two families: Sfougaras and Xanthopoulos. As a result, the Nikolaidis brothers were registered under the names of the people posing as their parents and these are the names they used ever since.

After their arrival, the two brothers travelled extensively around Greece before settling down. First, they were placed in a refugee camp in Loutraki. Then, they tried to settle in Athens. Afterwards, they moved to Thessaloniki in search of a relative. Finally, around 1930, Christos moved to Heraklion. He opened a barber shop, married a local and had a child. On the eve of the Second World War, Christos got married for a second time, to Giorgos’ mother. Together, they had three children. The first was a girl who was born right after Crete was liberated from the Germans which is why she was named Eleftheria [freedom]. Giorgos was the last of the three children.

During the Greek military dictatorship (1967-1974), Giorgos’ father and brother were under police surveillance. Giorgos claims that neither of them belonged to any political organisations, but they did stand firmly behind their opinions and beliefs, which were probably considered dangerous by the Greek state. In the meantime, Giorgos’ sister got married to an English man she met in Crete and left for Nottingham. At the height of the Junta regime, his parents, Christos and Anastasia, closed down their barber shop.

In the summer of 1973, Eleftheria invited Giorgos, who was 14 at the time, to spend his holidays in England. Giorgos hasn’t returned to Greece since. Instead, his parents sold their assets, packed their household (and their book collection) in huge crates and left for England too. They settled near their children and spent the rest of their lives there. ‘It was a migration they made out of love’.

Giorgos and Eleftheria still live in England while their brother lives in Georgia. Since his parents’ death, Giorgos has discovered a lot of information about the migrations of his parents’ families. His father’s younger brother migrated to the USA where his descendants still live. He also found out that his father had another brother who his father had never mentioned and who has also migrated. Similarly, he discovered that, unbeknownst to him, his mother also had another brother who was about 19 when the family arrived in Greece as refugees.

Surrounded by stories of movement and migration, Giorgos was inspired to create an art series called ‘Personal Maps’. ‘I started to draw simple descriptive maps around May 2016. Their emergence and development were entirely unexpected. I can only suggest that they came from a deep need to revisit aspects of my past and to understand our family history. […] I started to draw a large ‘archetypal’ face of a young man […] I had been thinking about my past, the history of my hometown and my parents’ lives. It was a strange combination of spiritual images and ideas. […] A kind of allegory of our family history and the heritage we share, which gradually emerged and spread over the shaded areas of the face [in the work] like an unfamiliar storyline. […] Some of the details that can be seen include our house in Crete, archetypal female and male figures, (mother, lover, father hero) folk/naïve maps and references to human migration’.

One of the first works in this series of personal maps was a portrait of Giorgos’ mother. If you look closely at the shading on her face and hair you can discern grapes, his family’s livelihood. You can also see trees with their roots clutched in a hand, houses and temples, faces, boats, eyes, cups of coffee, a woman with a child in her arms being battered by the sea; stories and elements of his mother’s life.

Giorgos’ life story contains the life stories of many of his ancestors, adding to the treasure trove of information that can be gleaned from oral narratives about human migrations. Also, his story works like a nesting doll, since he can recognise common elements between his personal experience of migrating to England and the migratory experiences of his ancestors. ‘My father was classically educated, a very refined man, who always wore a suit… always! I mean, I don’t remember him ever wearing track pants or shorts and the like… He was a lot like me, I guess… it’s only now that I see the similarity, maybe he felt like he had to project a certain image… that inspires trust, that shows he is a member of society, that he has created something… I don’t know, maybe he had these feelings inside him which I now recognise in myself… The feelings of the migrant. But he never actually told me so himself’.

Giorgos’ story also highlights issues of collective and individual memory. Giorgos is a man who lives in England; that’s his reality, that’s where he lives his everyday life. The fact that he lives outside Greece has separated him from the public narrative about the history of the Asia Minor refugees in Greece and the collective identity they have formed through public narratives, associations, commemorations. Historiography has shown that the children and grandchildren of Asia Minor refugees in Greece, namely the second and third generations who either live in Greece or have been exposed to the public narrative on the history of the refugees, embrace the Asia Minor refugee identity and find meaning in maintaining and participating in communities of memory.

In contrast, these elements are absent from Giorgos’ narrative. He does not claim the identity of the Asia Minor refugee for himself. He does not make any references to any special characteristics of the Asia Minor refugees that distinguished them from the locals. ‘I remember my father was proud of being from Constantinople. I remember this clearly. My brother still feels the same. As a kid, I thought this was wonderful, I believed it was important. But personally, I never said such a thing because I didn’t feel it. It was a privilege that belonged to them because they were older. Me, I felt Greek, a Cretan boy. A child from Heraklion… a dark-haired boy that played by the sea, in the sun, that was my world. I could see there was a whole world out there, a bigger world, but unfortunately we saw Turkey as the worst place in the world, we believed they had ruined us… we carried a lot of hate when I was growing up, we hated the Germans, we hated the Turks, we hated the Bulgarians. I speak from the point of view of a child now, because obviously when I start speaking Greek, I go back to being a child in certain respects. Because all my life as an adult, as a man, I’ve spent here. So, when I speak Greek two things happen: one, I get very emotional, and two, I feel that I don’t have the language to express myself the way I want.  When I try to express myself as an adult man, I can only do it as someone who has grown up here, in a country where another language is spoken. Anyway, I didn’t know we were from somewhere else. My parents had adopted the Greek personality like all migrants did back then… but I think their generation went through immense hardship’.

Presented here is the booklet of the art series ‘Personal Maps’, reproduced courtesy of Giorgos Sfougaras. The works are accompanied by poems, a verbal representation of the feelings that inspired each painting. The booklet’s title is ‘Personal maps. Printed works on the theme of sense of place and identity’ by George Sfougaras.