Conflicts
Diachronic approach to conflicts, culture of war, figure of the enemy, antagonisms.
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The occupants… occupied!
One might consider that our “little stories”—recalled during family gatherings—often illustrate only the anecdotal side of events, the sort of historical details too hastily dismissed as secondary. In our family, our late uncle Chrístos loved to share his anecdotes from the 1940s: the Greco-Italian War, the Occupation, the Resistance, and—subsequently—the utter, profound illogic of the Greek Civil War (1944-1949). He would recount these events down to the finest detail—details that were, first and foremost, his own personal history. He would also readily share his accounts regarding the presence of Italian soldiers in Greece—a subject whose historical reality, winding through the twists and turns of time, remains to this day caught somewhere between memory and oblivion.
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August 1922. The Great Disaster
August is a month heavy with significance for Greek historical memory. In 1922, the country experienced what was, up to that point, its greatest catastrophe: the Greek defeat in Asia Minor and the recapture of Smyrna by the Turkish army under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk—an event referred to in Turkish historiography as the “Great Offensive.” The Greek population of Asia Minor, which had been established there for centuries—dating back to antiquity—was first subjected to widespread massacres by the Turks; subsequently, the survivors were expelled to Greece, following a mandatory population exchange and the treaty signed between Greece and Turkey in Lausanne in 1923.
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Yórgos Ioánnou and his legacy
Yorgos Ioánnou—originally a pseudonym, later the legally adopted name of Georgios Sorolópis—was a distinguished and worthy writer of contemporary Greece. He was born in Thessaloniki in 1927 into a family of Greek refugees from Eastern Thrace, a region that had come under the control of the new Turkish state in 1923 following the Greco-Turkish War in Asia Minor (1919-1922), a conflict Greece lost.