Immigrants in Smyrna – Refugees in Greece: Subsequent Transformations of Identity among Kytherian Migrants

Ioannis Karachristos / Athens

Michail Warlas / Athens

We think that our paper legitimises in a way Antonis Liakos’s suggestion that all our studies have an autobiographical character. As a matter of fact our paper denotes also the transformation of two historians of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries to contemporary historians. For both of us, Vienna – either as a centre for social history and historical anthropology, or as place of study, scientific inquiry and exchange – has played a significant role in our personal and scientific evolution.

During the last years we both had the opportunity to work on problems concerning migration and refugees’ memory at the “Foundation of the Hellenic World” (FHW), a private cultural foundation in Athens. There are two large scale projects, the “Encyclopedia of Asia Minor Hellenism” and the “Refugees’ Genealogy and Testimonies Project”, which act as the departure point of our intellectual travel into the world of the migration of Aegean Greeks to Asia Minor and the reverse movements of refugees after the defeat of the Greeks in the War of 1919–1922. Yannis Karachristos has written several papers on migration and on various Greek Orthodox communities.

Among them, one deals with the different migratory movements of the Orthodox population of Asia Minor. In the FHW genealogy department we have collected – and we still collect – genealogies of refugees’ families, who, in many cases, initially originated from the present Greek State.

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Immigrants in Smyrna.pdf