2. REGIONAL HISTORIES
2.3 Narratives of
Nostalgia
Nostalgia as a component of thinking of time and space, is a
recent preoccupation of historians after the turn of memory in 1990 (…).
Nostalgia, the sense of trauma, the history of loss and disturbing memories,
are another hidden agenda in the writing of national histories. In Greece , this
traumatic history was constructed around the concept of disaster, using the Greek word ‘catastrophe’. The Asia Minor
Catastrophe, Mikrasiatiki Katastrophi
became a memory landmark, a chronotope, for Greek after 1922. Indeed, between
1922 and 1923, a massive influx of 1,500.000 Greek refugees from Asia Minor,
Eastern Trace and the southern coast of the Black Sea streamed into Greece ,
increasing the population by fifth. This forced migration was the final result
of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and
the decade of Greek-Turkish War (1912-22) (…). The refugees were dispersed
throughout Greece carrying
with them histories and memories of massacres, dislocations, deprivations,
deportations, famine and long walks from the interior Anatolia to the coast and
from the Eastern Trace to Greece .
After spending the first few years trying to survive in their new places in Greece , they
started to recreate their community life along the lines of their regional
provenance. Throughout Greece, the names of their former villages and towns
appeared prefixed with the word ‘New’, such as Nea Ionia, Nea Peramos, Nea Philadelphia
to name but a few (…). Refugees’ associations, common holy places and feasts,
sporting associations and small journals have created an imaginary map of the
‘lost homelands’. Greek Anatolian evacuees reemerged throughout the regions of
the Greek state and a new regionalism, unifying these dispersed communities
acquired the status of collective framework of refugee identity. They developed
a narrative of pain, suffering and mourning of loss, which became another topos in Greek literature and historiography
(…). As it was the case with other Greek regions, the refugees tried to
incorporate their narrative into the national narrative. Under the impact of
the international discourse on genocide and the Holocaust, the refugee
narrative was reshaped around these concepts at the end of the twentieth
century. The imaginary regionalism of this population has survived the
post-World War II migration to northwestern Europe, Canada
and Australia , creating
international associations which run along the lines of their regional
provenance, such as the Pontic associations for the people from the southern
coast of the Black Sea . As a consequence,
imaginary regionalism has acquired the dimension of a diaspora. In South East
Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean there are
crossing diasporas, which have constructed an imaginary geography, mental and
mnemonic map. This map is a consequence of the wars and the turbulent history
of the area and the movement of the populations across the borders.
3. NATIONAL HISTORY AND DIASPORA
The myth of Ulysses is the big bang of Mediterranean
mythologies because of the overlapping diasporas around this sea. The Jewish,
Greek and Phoenician diasporas were the classical and typical cases in
antiquity. New diasporas formed as a result of the dissolutions of empires, the
creation of national states along the shore of their Mediterranean
and the impact of the economic and social reorganization of the world in the
nineteenth an twentieth centuries. The age of nationalism in the Mediterranean
was characterized by the mass exodus of the Christian population from Asia
Minor to Greece, of Muslim from Balkans to Turkey, of the Slav-speaking
population from Greece to Bulgaria, and also by Jewish migration to Palestine,
the migration of Palestinians to surrounding Arab countries, and by the mass
departure of Europeans from Egypt and Lebanon and French citizens from Algeria.
Mediterranean migration has also resulted from economic change in Europe and
the Mediterranean has experienced four mass migration movements in the last two
centuries. The first was from the Northern to the Southern Mediterranean at the
turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a result of colonisation of North Africa . The second was the transatlantic migration
to North and South America . The third movement
was the post-war migration from Spain ,
Italy , Greece , Turkey
and Yugoslavia to Northern
and Western Europe , while the fourth is
ongoing and irregular mass migration from postcolonial Arab countries and
post-socialist Eastern European states (…).
Ulysses became the self-mirroring myth of Greece because
migration and diaspora have been considered a constant feature of Greek
history. As a topos of a national
historiography, diaspora implies a disassociation between territory, state and
nation. This dislocation is in juxtapostition to the systematization of these
elements by the national state. In terms of the discourse of the diaspora, the
subject is not the Greek nation but Hellenism. Both terms are diffuse as a
clear definition would crystallise an undesired difference, for both parties.
In contrast, the unity and unanimity between fatherland and the diaspora is
underlined. The difference is that the concept of nation implies a strong
emphasis, civic bonds and the state. On the other hand, the concept of
Hellenism is used as a non-territorial conception of nationhood that is
comprised of the metropolis and the diaspora , giving a strong emphasis to the
cultural aspects of the national identity. For this reason, the historical culture
of the Greek diaspora is particularly sensitive and intransigent in matters
related to nationalistic issues, cultural legacies and identity politics.
Diaspora is itself a construction of the national
historiography which has homogenised separate migration movement, with
different motivation, in various parts of the world and at different times.
Beneath this cultural over-determination exist a multiplicity of voices
regarding the past in autobiographies, novels and local histories of the
diaspora. This multiplicity has the potential to introduce peripheral outlooks
and complex articulation to the monolinearity of national history. The concept
of diaspora is central in understanding the multiple frameworks in which the
concept of region and regionalism has been inscribed. If we accept that space
is not only a geographical term but also a historical and cultural
construction, imaginary places of identification such as diaspora belong in
equal terms to this cultural geography (…).
4. THE BALKAN AND MEDITERRANEAN CONTEXT
Does the Balkan or Mediterranean region work as a wider
framework for a supranational Modern Greek identity? The response depends on
the uses of these wider regional identities, the meaning with which they are
loaded and the discourses within which they have bee contextualized.
4.1. The Balkans
The term Balkans, encompassing the European part of the Ottoman Empire and the Christian nations competing for
its spoils, was imposed on the region in the late nineteenth century. A
constellation of negative meanings was constructed around this term and the
term balkanisation came to be used as a synonym of compartmentalization,
fragmentation and conflict (…). Given this negativity, Modern Greek history and
culture refused to be defined as Balkan historiography, considering itself as
the modern sequel to Classical and Byzantine. Between the pigeon holes of time
and space, the first provided greater opportunities for recognition and
respectability (…).
The Ottoman past was another reason why there was no room
for categorising Greek ideology under the umbrella term of the Balkans. The Ottoman Empire and its legacy were the more recent and
visible past shared by all Balkan nations. However, the nationalisation in the
Balkans presupposed the rejection of this common past (…). On the other hand,
was a common past of a Balkan brotherhood possible? What was considered as a
victory and success for the one Balkan nation was described as a defeat for the
other, and vice versa. For instance, what is mourned as the Asia Minor
Catastrophe in Greek history is celebrated as the Day of Independence in Turkey . The
division of the Balkans during the Cold War and the subsequent differing pace
of Balkan societies deepened the division of the area. Wishing to be recognised
as a European, the Balkan nations turn their backs on the term Balkans and
Balkanism in the belief that the concept Balkan and Europe
were not complementary but self-exclusionary (…). In his official speech during
his state visit to France
on 24 November 1994, appealed to President Francois Mitterand, to ‘Make us
Europeans quickly if you don’t want to become Balkans’ (…). In his appeal, the
internalisation of the difference between the Balkans and Europe
is described with a self-sarcastic metaphor of an infection. Although his
statement came during the Yugoslav crisis and the enormous difficulties of the
Bulgarian post-communist economy, Balkan nations still envision their mutual
relation to Western Europe not as a collective
effort but as an individual and exclusively asymmetric relationship. As the
prejudice towards Balkans were turned into an internalised negative
consciousness, turn bottom-up, was transformed into a Balkan self-irony, which
gave a sense of regional communality through cinema and popular music. In the
1990’s, Balkan was imaginary region for Greek cinema. The well-known film of
Theo Angelopoulos, ‘Gaze of Ullyses’, was encompassing Balkans instead of
travelling to the Mediterranean sea (…).
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