Description
This year marks the centenary of the 1922 forced displacement that followed a decade of warfare between Greece and the Ottoman Empire. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne legalised the expulsion of more than a million Greek Christians to Greece and that of approximately 400,000 Muslims to Turkey. The departure and arrival of both sets of refugees left indelible marks on both states and societies with the memory and trauma of refugeedom still remaining alive today. Fast forward a century, in 2015-2016, the region comes again to the epicentre of forced migrations when more than a million asylum seekers crossed the Greek-Turkish border in search of a better life. Following an initial, albeit short-lived welcoming/desecuritised response, the Greek state’s policies towards newcomers quickly rolled back to a state of increased securitisation. This paper focuses on the role of the Greek public’s collective memories of the 1922 events – which are known in the country as the ‘Asia Minor Catastrophe’ – in contemporary public attitudes towards immigration, security, and Greek-Turkish relations.
