Refugees and agricultural rehabilitation

The Book of Refugee Statistics for the island of Crete, which can be found in the General State Archive – Historical Archive of Crete, contains a census of the refugees who had arrived in the Prefecture of Chania signed by the Prefect in 1922. Apart from the number of refugees, the census documents the refugees’ professions organised by gender. Of the 8,000 men refugees recorded in the prefecture, 2,600 stated that they were employed as farmers.

From the very beginning, the Greek state had been open about its intention to rehabilitate the refugees according to their previous professions and their places of origin. However, as time passed and more refugees arrived, first the state and then the Refugee Settlement Commission prioritised agricultural rehabilitation. The main actors in the refugee rehabilitation process, both in Greece and abroad, shared the belief that agricultural rehabilitation would not only be less expensive for the Greek state, but would also achieve refugee emancipation and independence faster. This resulted in policies promoting this form of rehabilitation, which appears to have influenced a number of refugees who stated they were farmers even though they weren’t.

However, this was probably not the case with the people surveyed in the 1922 Chania census, since it was still too early for the rehabilitation policies to have taken shape as the arrival of the Asia Minor refugees had only just begun. A few months later, in July 1923, the Prefect of Chania signed a new census of refugee professions in the area. The proportion of farmers remained high, with approximately 1,800 farmers out of 7,000 men refugees surveyed. There were also some specialised farmers (520 viticulturists and 174 tobacco workers) who could be added to the total tally of refugees working in the farming sector.

The management of this population and all others which settled in rural areas during this first stage of the refugee integration process, before the establishment of the Refugee Settlement Commission, was regulated by a series of laws. In July 1923, the Decree-Law ‘On the rural rehabilitation of refugees’ was published in the government gazette. In Crete, the law was implemented through Royal Decrees which were published over the following month (Royal Decree On the implementation of the Decree-Law ‘On the rural rehabilitation of refugees’ in the Prefectures of Ioannina, Preveza, Arta and the island of Crete, GG 17/07/1923, and Royal Decree On granting the powers of the Minister of Agriculture which stem from the Decree-Law ‘On the rural rehabilitation of refugees’ to the General Governor of Crete, GG 31/08/1923). According to these, the General Governor of Crete was designated the authority responsible for the rural rehabilitation of refugees, since no relevant public office was operating on the island.

In the case of Crete, and specifically Chania, a large part of the lands used in agricultural refugee rehabilitation formerly belonged to Muslims. Many of these lands, especially the ones utilised after the departure of the Muslim residents in 1924, were on the outskirts of the city. In Chania, as in other Greek cities, rural rehabilitation also included certain areas that lay just outside the city, areas which have now become suburban. This allowed refugees whose rural rehabilitation had been unsuccessful to reach the city and search for employment in a variety of professional sectors.

Moreover, some refugee accounts describe the outskirts of Chania as a place of final rural settlement after a series of movements. As is true of other places of refugee settlement, the refugees who arrived in Chania and settled in rural land plots around the city did so after a period of wandering and searching. This search was mostly guided by the networks many refugees formed with relatives or acquaintances who had already settled down. Nikos Kokovlis describes the move of his entire family from Samos, where they had originally settled, to Vamvakopoulos in Chania, an opportunity presented to the family thanks to the marriage of one of the family’s daughters to a refugee who had already settled in Chania:

‘So Giannis stayed with us for ten days, they had a small wedding, he took Vangelio and left. He told father that the people who went to Crete got refugee land plots from the properties the Turks left behind […] He would make sure to get some land for us too and would invite us to settle there. A year went by and father started losing hope when the message arrived. “Come to Crete”.

We loaded our stuff on the boat […] and we boarded. […] We took the boat Angelika from Piraeus to Crete. […] Giannis Tsapakos, our son-in-law, was waiting for us there. […] And now we could live in our own house and have our own land. Not much, but still, enough to create a sense of security.

About thirty families lived here, in this metochi [agricultural estate] […] most of them had come from Giantzilar. Some were from Magnisia and other places. […] The land was not enough to feed all the mouths in each family. There were no crops left over to sell, to make money. The family lived mostly on the things they cultivated. […] To ensure the family’s survival, father worked as a day labourer, a digger. In the evening, he would come back and run to take care of his own crops…’