ATHENS. – The refugee experience of 1922-23, when over 1.2 million Greeks were forced to abandon their homes in Asia Minor as part of a population exchange between Greece and Turkey (400,000 Moslems of Greece were forced to travel the opposite route) remains central to the identity of modern Greece.
This maxim was proven once again by the lively interest generated on the ACG campus by a one-day conference on the Asia Minor refugee experience organized by the Eleftherios Venizelos Chair of Modern Greek Studies at DEREE-The American College of Greece.
The conference was titled “History and Memory,” and was put together by an expert on the refugee issue, Alexander Kitroeff, an associate professor of history at Haverford College who is the current holder of the Venizelos Chair at DEREE.
The participants, aside from Kitroeff, whose lecture was on “History, Memory and Personal Memoirs of 1922-1923,” were
- Dr. Renee Hirschon, senior research fellow at St. Peter’s College of the University of Oxford (“Reminiscing the Past: Memory and History in Kokkinia” – Kokkinia being an area of modern-day Piraeus which was one of the largest refugee towns in Greece)
- Dr. Christos Hadziiossif, professor of history at the University of Crete, (“Old and New Myths About 1922”)
- Tasos Sakellaropoulos, a historian at the Historical Archive of the Benaki Museum in Athens (“Museum Memory and Activity as a Dialogue between Past and Present: The Benaki Museum”).
Documentary filmmaker Maria Iliou, a DEREE alumna and founder of the Proteus Foundation in Athens and New York, provided introductory comments to her documentary “Expulsion and Exchange of Populations (Turkey – Greece 1922-1924)” which was screened at the closing of the conference for over 200 viewers from the college community and beyond.
Dr. Haris Vlavianos, a poet and professor of history and political science at DEREE opened the conference. ACG president, Dr. David G. Horner, offered a greeting in which he spoke of the parallel histories of the College and the Hellenism of Smyrna. The American College of Greece was founded in Smyrna in 1875 and was forced to relocate to Athens following the expulsion of the city’s Christian population in 1922.