The uses and abuses of history in Greece and Turkey
The uses and abuses of history in Greece and Turkey

Author(s): Nikos Christofis, Kerem Öktem
Subject(s): History
Published by: Transnational Press London
Keywords: Greece; Turkey; history; public; Greek; Turkish;
Summary/Abstract: History, or rather the uses and abuses of history were at the heart of the making of both Greek and Turkish nation-states. In the Greek Kingdom already in the 1830s, and in the Turkish Republic more than ninety years later, nationalist elites chose to remember certain episodes, and forget or even deny others. The power of seemingly historical narratives like the pan-Hellenic Megali Idea (Great Idea) or the pan-Turkic Turkish History Thesis was real: The former paved the way to the Asia Minor catastrophe, the latter legitimized Turkey’s claim on the empire’s Anatolian heartlands. The Greco-Turkish War is remembered in a diagonally opposed fashion, as a catastrophe in Greece and as the decisive victory that made possible the Turkish Republic, even though this narrative has been challenged in Turkey in recent years. These narratives and much history produced in both countries on the ‘other’ contained more ideology than history. Today, these narratives have lost some of their attraction or have been rearticulated with other metanarratives on European belonging or neo-Imperial Islamism, yet their core ideas on the civilised/good ‘self’ and the barbaric/quarrelling ‘other’ continue to circulate through public spheres and are frequently mobilised by right-wing political parties in Greece and the Justice and Development’s authoritarian power project in Turkey.

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