Border crossings: memories of the Ottoman Empire
Full Description
Marios has been living in Thessaloniki for the past twenty-five years. In 2013, when this interview was conducted, he was about 50 years old. He is from a town in Southern Albania and descends from a family of merchants who had established trading activity with Greece at the time of the Ottoman Empire. When the communist regime fell, the members of Marios’ family who were still living in Albania moved to Greece and were recognised by the Greek state as ‘ethnic Greek expatriates’.
According to Papastergiou and Takou, ‘ethnic Greek expatriates are people who do not have Greek nationality, which means they are not Greek citizens’, but according to the Greek state, they are of ‘Greek ethnic origin’. The Special Expatriate ID Card (EDTO) gave people designated as ethnic Greek expatriates access to certain benefits as defined by Greek law, such as the right to lawful residence and employment in the country.
As a result, Marios and his family were legally allowed to stay and work in Greece, as well as move to and from the country at will. They settled in Thessaloniki where they had relatives and assets to which they had lost access after the closing of the border between Greece and Albania and were finally able to reclaim.
Speaking of his ancestors, Marios mentions the era of Empires, and particularly the Ottoman Empire, a world of vague borders that his ancestors had the right to traverse freely, working and prospering across various cities of the Empire. Now, these cities belong to different states dividing Marios’ family geographically, since after the end of the Second World War about half the members of his family found themselves in Albania where they were prohibited from having any contact with their relatives in Greece. This glimpse into the history of the Balkans offers Marios the opportunity to tell multiple personal stories, explain how familial relationships became scattered through space, and describe how people from various Balkan cities and countries reunited after 1989.
Bibliography
Dimitra Gefou-Madianou, ‘”Eyes Shut, Muted Voices”: Narrating and Temporalizing the Post-Civil War Era through a Monument’, Social Analysis, Vol. 61, Issue 1, special issue ‘Post-Ottoman Topologies’, Nicolas Argenti (ed.), Spring 2017, pp. 115-128.
Lambros Baltsiotis, ‘The Greek minority in Albania. An approach of a community in a transitional society’ in Tsitselikis Konstantinos, Christopoulos Dimitris (eds.), The Greek minority in Albania, Kritiki & KEMO [Minority Groups Research Centre], Athens 2003.
Vasilis Papastergiou and Eleni Takou, Eleven myths and even more truths. Migration in Greece, Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung, Greek office, Athens 2013.