How the students of the 1st General High School of Chania interacted with Asia Minor refugee narratives

On the occasion of the centenary of the Asia Minor Catastrophe, various bodies organised various activities and events associated with the history of Asia Minor refugees. The 1^st General High School of Chania is in Nea Chora, a neighbourhood shaped by population movement. The neighbourhood was created by Muslim refugees from the rural areas of the island at the end of the 19^th century. After 1924 and the population exchange, almost all of them were forced to migrate and the houses they left behind were used towards the housing rehabilitation of Asia Minor refugees.

During the school year 2021-2022, high school teachers Thanasis Gnesoulis and Tzeni Dimakou, a mathematician and a theologian, implemented a project with the participation of students from the high school. The students who participated in the project were: Stella Apostolaki (2^nd Grade), Stamatis Dagiakos (1^stGrade), Sofia Giannikaki (1^st Grade) and Anastasia Mylona (2^nd Grade).

The goal of the project is to investigate the history of Asia Minor refugees in Chania mainly through oral testimonies. The participants sought out descendants of the 1922 refugees and conducted a series of interviews. The next step is to share their findings with their fellow students and the wider public by processing the testimonies and producing a documentary as part of an educational action by the Chania Film Festivalcalled CineMathimata [Film Lessons]. The documentary will be released in 2022 under the title 1922-2022. 100 years later.

This collaborative project between students and teachers is interesting for two reasons. The first is the material the students collected. In the interviews they conducted, extracts of which are presented below, they spoke with the children and grandchildren of refugees, most of whom had never spoken publicly about their memories and experiences before. So, their testimonies enrich the trove of narratives on the history of the Asia Minor refugees who resettled in Greece .

The second reason why this project is of particular interest is the examination of what the participating students and teachers gained from the project. On the one hand, approaching the subject using tools beyond the school textbook was in itself a unique learning experience. As the team melded together and collaboration improved, searching for the next question at every stage of the research came naturally, almost unconsciously. According to the students, it was a process that ‘propelled them forward’. On the other hand, the research posed insistent questions with regards to the issue of memory; both the memory of the people who were giving the interviews and the memory of those learning history through the school curriculum and the public discourse.

The research team of the 1^st General High School of Chania kindly granted us permission to reproduce part of the material they have collected. It consists of seven interviews with descendants of Asia Minor refugees. Four of them are second generation refugees, which means that either one or both their parents came to Greece as refugees. The other three are third generation with either one or both their parents having Asia Minor origins. The interviews were unstructured and the informant was prompted with an opening question or an explanation of the project objectives. Most of the interviews were conducted during the first meeting between the interviewer and the informant and lasted from 10 to 30 minutes.

A common element shared by all the interviews is the unrehearsed nature of the narration, which can be easily recognised when listening to the extracts. It is obvious that the informants were not accustomed to the interview process and didn’t have an oft-repeated narrative at the ready.

Another common element across the narratives is that the informants seem to draw from two memory reservoirs: their grandmothers’ stories and their own childhood. The Asia Minor grandmothers, when present, emerge as protagonists of the refugee family narratives, indefatigable carriers of a familial memory which at several points appears to intersect with the collective Asia Minor memory. Hence, the informants often reproduce narratives of events that they did not experience firsthand, but were handed down to them by these women. However, in most cases, the informants narrate these events with the certainty usually granted by lived experience.

The first two extracts are from the interview of Anastasia Maladaki, née Chatzisavva. She was born in 1932 to Asia Minor parents. In her interview, she often repeats her grandmother’s stories that she ‘used to tell us like they were fairytales […]. I don’t remember everything. She told us so many stories! […] She was a very funny woman. Even though she had been through so much, she didn’t show it. Many times we caught her crying, but she would often make us laugh with the things she said and the way she said them’.

Among her grandmother’s narratives, there is one about Anastasia’s father. He was 35 and married with two children when in 1922 he was drafted in the army along with his brothers and father. After the Catastrophe, when the persecutions and the massacres started, he deserted and returned home to see what had happened to his family. In the extract, Anastasia recounts her grandmother’s narrative of this event. The narrative drawn from Anastasia’s own memory focuses on when, at the beginning of the 1950s, her grandmother met one of her sons that she had thought long dead.

The next two extracts come from the interview of Eleftheria Papadakis. Her mother’s family name, who arrived from Smyrna when she was a baby, was Chatziperrou. The family left Aivali (Ayvalık) where they were probably quite affluent. Eleftheria was born after the Second World War and her narratives about Asia Minor come from her grandmother, since her mother had left her hometown too young to remember anything about life there. Most of her narratives centred on the material possessions the family had to leave behind during the exodus. There were stories of gold liras hidden around the house before they left and of the gold she sewed into the hems of their coats for future use. Eleftheria’s own memories are of family events and her mother’s songs.

The third pair of extracts comes from the interview with Marinos Petrosoglou. He was born in 1968. His grandfather on his mother’s side was from Asia Minor and came to Heraklion, Crete, after the Catastrophe with the surviving members of his family. Similarly, Marinos’ father and his family arrived as exchangeable refugees in 1924 and settled in a village near Heraklion. In the extract, Marinos tells a story that his grandmother used to tell him about the tender relationship between his grandfather and his great-grandfather. The personal experience that Marinos recounts concerns the difficulties his Turkish-speaking father faced when he arrived in Greece.

The extract that follows is from the interview of Emmanouil Mylonas, a second generation descendant born in Chania in 1931. Both his parents were refugees who resettled in the neighbourhood of Splantzia in the centre of Chania. The informant has some scattered childhood memories of the family’s hard life in the city. In the extract, he speaks of how the locals treated the refugees and their children.

The next extract is from the interview with Michalis Schoinas, the grandson of Asia Minor refugee Vlassis Schoinas, who resettled in Crete and married Katina Proimaki from Sfakia. The personal experience Michalis shares is about finding family relatives in Mytilini decades after the death of his grandfather, Vlassis.

The next extract is from the interview with Fotis Lianopoulos, a second generation refugee whose parents were both from Asia Minor. Fotis was born in 1935 and still remembers vividly his parents longing to return to Asia Minor. ‘When they made a toast, they wished each other a safe return home’. He remembers his grandfather singing in Turkish and in the extract, Fotis recalls one particular song he used to hear at family events.

Finally, the last extract comes from the interview of Marika Kokotsaki, a granddaughter of Asia Minor refugees on her mother’s side. Marika recalls a personal experience: a few years ago she received an unexpected invitation to meet some long-lost relatives of her grandfather, Alexandros Tzertzevelis.