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“We are descendants of Haik”: Armenians’ history in Greece from refugees to a diasporic community
Abstract
After the defeat of the Greek army in September 1922 in Asia Minor, the Armenian populations (and also other Christian groups) of western and northwestern parts of Anatolia, eastern Thrace, and Cilicia began to flee as they feared retaliations by the approaching Kemalist army and the chetes, armed bands. Mostly between 1920 and 1922, but also in the few years that followed, about 90,000-100,000 Armenians from Anatolia fled to Greece. They were mostly old men, women, children, and orphans. Armenians’ uneven distribution in Greece tending towards the urban settlements and their agglomeration in certain districts of Athens and Piraeus resulted in the formation of new neighborhoods with a distinct character. While in Thessaloniki, which had become a big refugee city in the aftermath of WWI, Armenians lived in refugee camps in impoverished conditions. Correspondence between the Ministries of the Greek state and the international humanitarian aid organizations reveal that the settlement, relocation, employment, and the health situation of Armenian refugees and orphans was a current and serious concern for the Greek authorities. One of the main aims of this paper is to explore the social profile and the refugee experiences of the Armenians who came to Greece. In some ways, their experiences were similar to those of the Christian Orthodox who came to Greece with the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange, and in others to those of the Anatolian Armenians who fled to other destinations in the Mediterranean and the Middle East after the genocide. In addition to examining the social characteristics and the experiences of Armenians as refugees in a host country in the postwar period, this paper will also investigate the Armenian identity/ identities in Greece, the Armenians’ conceptions of homeland, and how the Armenians remembered their past and how they have made it a part of their hybrid identity as the Armenians of Greece. The history of post-genocide Armenian communities in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East has not been sufficiently researched so far. Hence, this paper aims to shed light on the post-WWI history of Armenians in Greece by analyzing a set of sources, such as archival documentation from the Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs, sources from church archives, newspapers, and oral history interviews taken from second- and third-generation Greek Armenians.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Mediterranean Countries
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries