The difficult return of the civil war political refugees

One of the consequences of the Greek civil war was the forced displacement of about 120,000 people, a new refugee wave which headed towards Eastern Europe and the USSR (mainly Uzbekistan). For years, these refugees were not allowed to return to Greece. Among them were fighters with the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) and members of the Greek Communist Party (KKE), women and elderly people who followed the Democratic Army when it fled Greece, and about 27,000 children who, under the aegis of the Greek Communist Party, were evacuated in an orderly fashion from areas where the civil war was raging.

Most of these refugees were stripped of their Greek citizenship and their assets were seized by the state. For years, they lived under the protection and control of the Greek Communist Party in completely new environments, facing different climate conditions and having no knowledge of the local language, at least at first. Although most of them had been farmers in northern Greece, they were called upon to change professions and become industrial workers in the countries which received them.

The demand for the repatriation of these refugees was put forward quite early on both by the refugees themselves and the Greek Communist Party. However, the GCP was requesting that the totality of the refugees should be repatriated, a demand that was eventually turned down by all postwar Greek governments. The first repatriations from Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia were made in 1954, mediated by the International Red Cross. The photograph presented here probably depicts the first such repatriation at the port of Thessaloniki. In a weird twist of history, the ship carrying the political refugees back to Greece was also the one which had carried National Army troops to central Greece in April 1948 to purge the area from the Democratic Army in the first major military operation of this kind. ^[1]

Over the following years, repatriations were scarce. Essentially, the repatriation process was tightly controlled by the Greek state which gave repatriation permits only to people it did not deem dangerous to public safety. What eventually gave rise to a wave of mass repatriations was, partly, the fall of the military junta, but mainly the joint ministerial decision of 1983 by the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Public Order (Giorgos Gennimatas and Giannis Skoularikis respectively), which allowed the return of most refugees and granted citizenship to those who were ‘Greek nationals’. This led to thousands of people returning to Greece, many of them to Thessaloniki. The only refugees who were excluded from this decision – and are still excluded to this day – were the Slav-speaking political refugees who had been received by and stayed in the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, today called North Macedonia. ^[2]

In 1977, Kostas Virvos, an important Greek lyricist who wrote the lyrics to many songs dealing with Greek postwar migration,^[3] released the album ‘The Uprooted’, with songs written and composed by him and performed by Charalambos Garganourakis. It is essentially a set of songs dedicated to the political refugees and their desire to return to Greece. The album was not successful and has not been re-released as a CD. Even though the songs use a musical form which was common at the time, it is through Virvos’ lyrics that they express the stories, the desires and the dilemmas of the political refugees. In this way, these refugees were finally given a voice, however weak, in the cultural universe of modern Greece. These are the lyrics to the song the album was named after.

Mother, have you ever heard

Of Uzbekistan

It’s in the depths of Asia

And many children are in pain there.

Mother, in Tashkent the uprooted

Are still waiting, disappointed, for a visa (repeated).

In the immense steppe

They’re all good people there

But the way they make their chleb^[4]

Is not the way we make our sweet bread.

Mother, in Tashkent the uprooted

Are still waiting, disappointed, for a visa (repeated).

^[1] Giannis Epameinondas, comment on the photograph in Iraklis Papaioannou, Evdoxia Radi (eds.), Thessaloniki, a city of people. Photographs of the 20^th century, University Studio Press in collaboration with the Cultural Society of Entrepreneurs of Northern Greece, p.123.

^[2] On how these refugees were prohibited from returning or even visiting Greece, see the extensive reports published by the ‘Ios’ journalist team on the webpage http://www.iospress.gr/issues/refugees.htm

^[3] Indicatively, he wrote the lyrics to the 1965 album entitled ‘Songs of migration’ with twelve songs composed by Thodoros Derveniotis. He has also written the lyrics to the iconic song ‘At the factories of Germany’, composed by Thodoros Derveniotis, performed by Stelios Kazantzidis, first released in 1961.

^[4] Russian word for bread