SPACE, MEMORY AND IDENTITY: THE MEMORY OF THE ASIA MINOR SPACE IN GREEK NOVELS OF THE 1960s
SPACE, MEMORY AND IDENTITY: THE MEMORY OF THE ASIA MINOR SPACE IN GREEK NOVELS OF THE 1960s

Summary/Abstract: One of the milestones of 20th century Greek national narrative is the Asia Minor Catastrophe, i.e. the defeat of the Greek Army in the Greek-Turkish war (1919-1922) and the resulting wave of refugees of Greeks from Asia Minor (Rum in Ottoman terms) to the Greek state. The object of this study is to analyse why and how during the forty-year anniversary of this event certain novels appear to commemorate the Asia Minor space and identity: Ματωμένα Χώματα [Bloodied Earth, transl. as Farewell Anatolia] by Dido Soteriou (1909-2004); Στου Χατζηφράγκου [Stou Hatzifrangou, In the Hatzifrangou Quarter] by Kosmas Politis (1888-1974); To Αϊβαλί, η πατρίδα μου [Aivali, My Homeland] by Fotis Kondoglou, all published in 1962; and Λωξάνδρα [Loxandra] by Maria Iordanidou (1897-1989), published in 1963. While literature, the novel and especially the novel with historical subject matter, has traditionally been connected to the discourse of nationalism (Brennan 48-49, 52), these texts challenge offi cial nationalistic discourses by commemorating a pre-modern space, which was destroyed by nationalism, and by exploring refugee identity. [...]

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