After the Civil War of the 1940s, Greece could not afford anything other than the idealisation of national and social unity. Certainly in the years during and after the Junta (19671974), historiography cultivated a longing for national unity and social stability. Greek Orthodox refugees were portrayed as Ionian brothers who fled from the lands of Homer; the Greek Orthodox native population who received them as brothers as immune to racism. National unity and homogeneity were also preserved through the pages of Greek school textbooks, which silenced the voices of refugees who suffered not only during their exodus from Asia Minor but during their resettlement in Greece. The indifference displayed by Greek historians on this issue facilitated nationalist propaganda by fostering collective amnesia about the extraordinary role played by immigration in the economic renewal and cultural enrichment of Greece in the twentieth century.

However, in an overcrowded market with unstable employment, the majority of refugees were left unprotected and subject to abusive working conditions in return for low pay. The presence of 1.3 million refugees allowed many employers to reduce the daily wage by 20 percent in 1923, and by 50 percent by 1927 (Moskof 1987, 425–426). As the Chairman of the Refugee Settlement Commission for Greece Henry Morgenthau maintained, the limits of the economy as well as of firms did not allow for more than pitifully low wages ‘which translated themselves, in practical terms, into half a loaf of bread per person per day, a handful of olives, a little olive oil, and meat or fish perhaps once or twice a month’ (Morgenthau 1929, 249). The extra refugee workforce also allowed employers to replace workers who participated in syndicalism or strikes (Liakos 1993, 51). At the pan-Balkan conference of March 1924 in Vienna, it was pointed out that refugees ‘formed a reserve of strike-breakers, which capital could always rely on in every strike’.9Thus the refugee labour force never radicalised. Although all male refugees had the right to vote, the overwhelming majority supported the Liberal Party, with no more than 4 percent voting for the Communist Party (Clogg 1992, 109). Nevertheless, as the government realised that refugee discontent with economic hardship – alongside the prospect of the Ankara agreement of 1930 that wrote off the claims of Greek refugees for properties abandoned in Asia Minor – could fuel radicalisation, it turned to repressive action. Legislation enacted in 1929 essentially penalised the right to strike and was indicative of the government’s intentions to prevent political radicalisation and Communist recruitment (Mavrogordatos 1983, 219).

Female Greek Orthodox refugees suffered an additional difficulty: the lack of male protection. Many women who fled to Greece were unaccompanied by male family members. In many ports of disembarkation, Refugee Settlement Commission officials reported that 90 percent of refugees were old women, old men and children, as men of military age had been detained in Anatolia by the Turks6 and deported to the interior to form labour battalions.7 In his report, Fridtjof Nansen estimated that at least 100,000 male refugees had been detained in Asia Minor. He saw the detention of ‘the entire male population between the ages of fifteen and fifty-five’ as ‘the chief disaster which had befallen these refugees’.8 Without male protection refugee women were the vulnerable members of a gender-biased society that were exposed to the exploitation of their employers.

The end of dictatorship in Greece gave historiography a new political edge. Many works continued to emphasise the suffering and persecution of the Asia Minor refugees during their exodus. In 1980, the memoir of the US Consul in Smyrna George Horton, The Blight of Asia, was published in Greek, contributing to the construction of the memory of suffering and trauma from a witness of the destruction. In 1984, Polychrones Enepekides used the term ‘holocaust’ to describe the same experience (Kitroeff 2012).In the 1990s, the dual effects of globalisation and multiculturalism provided diaspora groups with a new lease on life and revived their sense of identity. These new conditions would bring about new ways of memorialising the Asia Minor Disaster, when the political situation in Greece did not connect historical research to patriotism or national betrayal. Since the late 1980s, more historians have adopted less triumphalist approaches to the achievements of the Greek state in the implementation of the refugee settlement policy and focused on their problems during this process. Some authors emphasised how ethno-cultural belonging served as a factor of social stratification. Elisabeth Kontogiorgi (1996) examined the consequences of rural refugee resettlement in Macedonia through this lens. In 1993, Dora E. Lafazani also researched the cultural differentiation in the rural settlement of refugees.

The political polarisation of Greek society left no room for divisions between natives and refugees as national unity had to be protected.

In this essentialist perspective, the Greek nation was an organic, homogenous community that had to guard itself from outside dangers. This community could afford neither self-criticism of its past nor the commemoration of its multicultural experiences. In that context, historians who wrote about refugees from Asia Minor mainly focused on their persecution before their exodus from Turkey. When they wrote about their resettlement in Greece, they usually focused on the ‘miracle’ of socio-economic incorporation and national homogenisation performed by a poor and war-weary country. The negative experiences of the Asia Minor refugees during the settlement in Greece were condemned to silence whilst historiography reproduced a perspective that labelled them as ‘brothers’ who came from ‘the lands of Homer’.

Traditional, positivist Greek historiography tends to see history as an organic process. In this context, the idealisation of the ancient past haunted the efforts to achieve progress in modern times. This glorified ancient past was the prevalent myth in Greek historiography and created an ahistorical perception of continuity each time the nation needed protection and confirmation of its values. According to Nikos Svoronos (1987, 277) this disproportion between the dominant roles that Greece had in this glorified ancient past and the humble one in modern times favours the production of national myths. During the Greek War of Independence the Greek Cause aroused a supportive enthusiasm in Western Europe and many classically educated philhellenes were inspired by the thought of ancient Hellenic (Greek) glories (Hobsbawm 1990, 62). Moreover, the westernised Greek intelligentsia in cities like Venice, Vienna and Amsterdam also contributed to the resurgence of the Greek sense of continuity, of shared memory and of collective destiny. In other words, it was the revival of a Greek sense of common ethnicity (Smith 1998, 114–115). In the event, Greek intellectuals like Rhigas, Korais, and Katartzis, who inherited the liberal values of the French and the American Revolutions, and of the Enlightenment, favoured national self-determination and the territorial concept of the Greek nation in a broader notion deriving from the dream of a restored Orthodox Byzantine Empire. On Rigas’ map of the Balkan Peninsula and Asia Minor, Greek boundaries were set according to a broader concept which was overlaid by the vision of Byzantium. In his vision, ‘Greek was a broad Hellenic notion, not a narrow ethnic idea’ (Breuilly 1998, 141). A broader perception of Greekness was also favoured by the Phanariots of Constantinople, who held administrative power in the Ottoman Empire and felt themselves tied to the Byzantine Empire, which they envisioned as a multinational state (Jelavich 1983, 56). However, their all-embracing ideas were not popular even after the establishment of the Greek state in the 1830s. The birth of Greek historiography took place in order to defend the continuity of Greek people through ancient and Byzantine worlds. Greek historicism set the foundations for the cultural and national mixture of the Greek classical world and the Orthodox Christian tradition in the term Hellenic-Christian Civilisation (Veremis 1983, 61). This continuity was also expressed in political terms by the nationalist dream of the Great Idea in the form of the restoration of the Byzantine Empire.