Ninety-three years after 1922, Greeks cannot forget the Catastrophe. Unfortunately, on many occasions, instead of remembering the victims, the commemoration takes a defensive nationalistic and somehow escapist character, without ever addressing the deep and permanent psychological trauma that they brought to subsequent generations on both sides of the Aegean. Reading this book is like unveiling the underlying psychological structures that dominate the self-perception and indeed the self-understanding of contemporary Greeks to this day.
“My father never returned to his lost homeland, even when he could, because in reality, his homeland remained alive only in his nostalgia, and this text gives a permanent position, it immortalises it in the magic substance they had for him the places where he lived his childhood years.” Ourania Lampisdou
Ourania Lampsidou wrote and edited this book about her father and by her father, who originates from the famous Lampsidi family of Pontos. The book is not a simple personal account; it is a profound reflection on the historical experience of the Anatolian Greeks, the expulsion from their homeland, their resettlement in Greece, their adventures in a hostile society and ultimately, their final triumph against political persecutions and social exclusion. At the same time, it constitutes an implicit meditation on the identity of their contemporary descendants, and by extension, the future of contemporary Greeks. Lampsidis was keeping notes marking the events of the past but without plan and coherence. His daughter Ourania Lampsidou completed her father’s scattered notes, trying to give coherence to his narrative without imposing any a posteriori unity on the material itself: the historical trajectory of her father becomes an unpredictable narrative covering almost 40 years and ending abruptly with his profoundly eloquent silence.
Yiorgos Lampsidis’ long life (1912-2007) was full of twists and turns like a picaresque novel. The narrative starts like an idyllic recollection of the multicultural and complex society of the city of Erzincan in Pontos and ends with his complete disillusionment with the political life in Greece after the Civil War of 1949.
“I was born,” he says, “in a period of departures, resettlements, cleansings, exoduses and disappearances. For a few lucky years, however, I lived absolutely protected from the cataclysm which had broken out before I was born.”
Re-written by his daughter, the book is at the same time a reflection on families and parents, the great unknowns of our life, whose line we continue consciously or most remarkably without ever realising it.
“Parents,” comments his daughter, “are story without beginning; they have a life before us and when they depart they become a mystery, near strangers. Through their absence we realise whatever had evaded us, we mourn them with our questions, with our unanswerable questions, with such affection which only their departure makes so absolute.”
The book is structured around two voices, not always discernible from each other and not necessarily different. One comes from the past and relives the trauma of loss and displacement; the other contemporarises the echoes of the primary voice with a reflexive mood and by amplifying its consequences. There is always an implied dialogue between them, a synergy of sensibilities.
“My father”, notes the daughter in her prologue, “started his life with privileges and promises, which were all frustrated by great historic subversions and shipwrecks. He survived and continued a great, restless and creative journey in order in the end to return and to drown himself in whatever he had struggled to leave behind.”
Yiorgos Lampsidis, like so many Pontians, went to Greece after the evacuation of Pontos, as Eleftherios Venizelos planned and executed under the coordination of Nikos Kazantzakis around 1920. He left everything behind at the moment the collapsing Ottoman Empire was transformed into the homogenous Turkish nation-state through mass relocations, population expulsions and ethnic purges.
Greece, the idealised homeland, was not the paradise they expected. The most harrowing part of the book is the description of the quarantine centre in Kalamaria, Thessaloniki, which reads like a narrative from the Nazi concentration camps.
“Heat was merciless,” he writes, “… that whole area was without trees, dry; and when there was wind blowing, dust filled the rooms, the food, our clothes. Our mouth, stuck by soil, and our face was even more miserable than it really was. Every now and then they forced us to go to the sanitising kilns and in there we remained naked, waiting for the return of our clothes, which came out half-burnt and creased … stinking of chemicals.”
In Macedonia, where they settled, having lost one of their children at the quarantine centre, Lampsidis encountered the official suspicion and persecution. (All refugees were suspects as Venizelists and were denied for years full political rights; the leading conservative journalist of the time, Angelos Vlahos, declared that they were polluting the purity of the Greek race.) The young boy soon became radicalised and joined the Communist Party; hence another chapter in his life began, with exiles and imprisonment under the Metaxas dictatorship and joining the resistance against the Germans, only to see his dreams and expectations shattered by the mindless Civil War.
After war’s end, Lampsidis withdrew from the irrationalism of Greek politics, renounced the official policies of the Communist Party and dedicated himself to the education of Greek peoples, leaving behind pioneering studies on the refugees of 1922, the rural problem in Greece and the demotic language.
This book is a fascinating tribute to the destiny of the Pontian refugees in Greece. It is a testimony about how an individual can maintain his dignified stoicism and self-respect under the most adverse circumstances. Expelled from his homeland and persecuted in his new country, Lampsidis’ life was a herald of things to come.
His daughter captures the authenticity of his voice and the truth of his experience: “My father,” she says, “never returned to his lost homeland, even when he could, because in reality, his homeland remained alive only in his nostalgia, and this text gives a permanent position, it immortalises it in the magic substance they had for him, the places where he lived his childhood years.”
The loss of Pontos and Asia Minor is an open wound in the Greek conscience to this day. The cycle of trauma which it inaugurated never received a collective closure and what might be called a cultural catharsis. We have a number of overwhelming documents about the Catastrophe, but what this book adds is the human dimension, the impact of history on the life and the psyche of an individual. So many decades later, the trauma remains and needs to become public discourse in order to be healed.
Lampsidou’s book is about memory and its liberating dimension, which keeps the past alive within us, but also releases it towards the future. The book also paves the way for fresh approaches to the past, how to write or indeed understand history from the perspective of the people who suffered it.
As Lampsidis himself concluded his story: “Whatever I have done, it exists in my biography; but if someone asked who am I, I would respond that I am someone who experienced first-hand misfortunes and nightmares yet never found in them a serious reason to deny the joys and the pleasures of life.”
That’s the true Homeric spirit alive to this day, if there was ever one.
* Vrasidas Karalis is professor of Modern Greek at the University of Sydney.
Η ΑΥΤΟΒΙΟΓΡΑΦΙΑ ΤΟΥ ΠΑΤΕΡΑ ΜΟΥ (The Autobiography of My Father) by Ourania Lampisdou is published by Gavrilidis Publications, Athens.