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.

Immigration records indicate that over 600,000 individuals arrived to the United States from the Ottoman Empire during the Second Migration Wave (1880-1965). This study employs a purposive sample of 1699 manually collected immigrant records from the Ellis Island Foundation's ship manifest archive to explore the following research questions. First, which natio-racial identities did the immigrants report and what circumstances might explain their identity claims? Secondly, did they claim an Ottoman natio-racial identity associated with a particular geographical location or period? Bivariate and multivariate analyses of this unique data sample reveal thus far unknown findings about Ottoman immigrant identity claims. These data uncover four major natio-racial identity claims: Greek Greek, Ottoman Greek, Turkish Greek and Turkish Turk. Of those four, the majority of immigrants in this sample self-classified using the Turkish Greek natio-racial category. Greek Greek was second and was followed by Ottoman Greek, and Turkish Turk. Additionally, these data reveal the physical erasure of the Ottoman category and its replacement with the Turkish category, as well as the existence of a small cohort of immigrants who claimed their birth city's location in Greece when, in fact, it was located within regions of the Ottoman empire that constitute modern Turkey. This study frames these findings using racial formation theory and the concept of imagined communities.

The rapid changes the Long Great War (1914-23) brought either confirmed or challenged state authority and its nation-building policies. The war emerged as a new structure and introduced a new, but still contingent, definition of national consciousness and belonging. It also raised the dilemma to those about to be drafted, between accepting or refusing to fight and offered the opportunity to the dominant group to include or exclude individuals and even whole communities from the imagined community. Thus, the war evolved into a test of unity and legitimacy for the state and targeted disproportionately the minority citizen soldiers, questioning their allegiances. In the Ottoman case, the defeat in Sarikamis in 1915 culminated into an anti-Christian radicalism that led to the disarmament of the minority citizen soldiers and the annihilation of the Armenian ones. The latter, combined with the unsatisfactory results of the general mobilization and the high number of casualties and military fugitives, meant that the state desperately needed more men serving underarms. The Ottoman Army had just deprived itself of several actual loyalists and from many skilled citizen soldiers that could fill numerous armed and unarmed positions. The state had gradually hyperpoliticized the war service by linking any active and passive resistance and any suspicion for such to nationalism, its own survival and the idea that only itself can monopolize violence. As a result, the previous contract between minority citizen soldiers and the state was abolished. This causal chain limited any agency the Greek Orthodox citizen soldiers might think they had and forced them to renegotiate a new contract. Based on the understudied collections of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies and on published and unpublished memoirs, diaries, and letters from Greek Orthodox citizen soldiers and expanding from Mehmet Besikci’s (2012) thesis on a tacit contract between the Anatolian Muslim citizen soldiers and the state, I argue that there was a replacement tacit contract between the Greek Orthodox citizen soldiers and the Ottoman and, later, Turkish nationalist authorities. Numerous Greek Orthodox citizen soldiers managed to trade their specialized skills for better working and living conditions. This renegotiated contract meant that they could avoid the harsh conditions of the labor battalions, thus, surviving the war. As they were gradually losing their legal rights under the various exceptional war policies that were implemented, they had to navigate themselves during an era when skills and not human lives mattered.

My project concerns the complex racialized assemblages surrounding the sexualized transgender woman’s body in Thessaloniki, Greece. Drawing inspiration from Sasho Lambevsky’s article “Suck My Nation,” and Sara Ahmed’s concept of “Race as Sedimented History,” as well as the work of Afsaneh Najmabadi and others on the field of Islamicate sexuality studies, I explore the idea of sedimented histories of nationalism that produced uneven forms of sexual modernity in northern Greece. Based on preliminary ethnographic fieldwork, I explore the complex ways in which Greek transgender women’s bodies are entangled with the bodies of other people on the margins of Greek society: Albanians, Roma, working-class Greeks and migrants. Bringing the historical literature on Islamicate sexuality studies into dialogue with contemporary realities in northern Greece, I aruge the following: (1) that multiple, overlapping, and conflicting temporalities and sexual epistemes converge around the figure of the sexualized transgender woman’s body, (2) that in order to account for these non-coeval sexualities, the field of Middle Eastern sexuality studies must look beyond the Foucauldian paradigm, and (3) that the question of the history of sexuality in northern Greece requires the fields of both Modern Greek Studies and Middle Eastern Studies to rethink their geopolitical and disciplinary boundaries and orthodoxies.