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Pastors and Their Flocks: Greek Evangelicals’ Flight from Anatolia to Greece after 1922
Abstract
In the second half of the nineteenth century, under the influence of the American missionaries, some, albeit a small portion, of the Greek Orthodox populations of Anatolia became Protestants. This evangelical Protestant movement was welcomed by some Greek-speaking and Turkish-speaking Greeks particularly in Cappadocia, Pontus, and in and around Smyrna. After the defeat of the Greek army in 1922, even though they were not subject to the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange, the Greek evangelicals left Anatolia and established churches and communities in Greece. Despite their small population size, they were a dynamic group of people who sought to carve a space for themselves in Ottoman Turkey, and later in Greece and elsewhere, thanks to their western-education and knowledge of foreign languages. Beginning from the late 1950s, biographies of numerous Greek evangelical pastors were published in Greece and abroad by their family members. In this paper, I will examine these written and oral narratives on the Greek evangelical communities and their pastors in Anatolia, in order to see how the religious leaders (pastors) navigated through a period of transition marked by uncertainty and violence, trace the course of the Greek evangelicals’ expulsion from Anatolia and their subsequent settlement in Greece, and finally to demonstrate how through these narratives the members of this faith-community sought to revive the memories of past religious communities in the lost homelands.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Anatolia
Balkans
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries