"ANTIPODES" AND ASIA MINOR

 

I think that the members of the Greek Australian Cultural League of Melbourne would forgive me for expressing the wish that this year’s edition of their literary journal “Antipodes”, being the sixty eighth, did not exist. This is because it is dedicated to perhaps the most traumatic experience within all of Greek history, the Asia Minor Catastrophe – the extirpation of a three-thousand-year presence of Greek people, in the lands of Asia Minor. 

Conversely though, the current issue of the journal could not have plausibly concerned itself with anything else, given that we are commemorating the centenary of the 1922 Catastrophe, and with it, the one hundred years in which writers, musicians and artists both in Greece and within the Greek communities of Australia have drawn upon this event, both as inspiration and as a festering wound that refuses to heal. 

Viewed from this perspective, the publication of a literary journal that purports to analyse the historical and artistic legacy of 1922 within a community whose organisations have largely ignored it, or who have relegated it to a stereotypical and arid wreath-laying photo opportunity, is a timely one. Prior to the recent launch of this year’s “Antipodes” Asia Minor special, there was a complete dearth within our community, of sensitive, sophisticated and imaginative commemorative events or onversations that seek to interpret the socio-economic, political and cultural factors that led to 1922, but also to initiate a discussion that examines how these engender parallel narratives not only in Greece, but also in Australia, as to the manner in which they are incorporated into our ever-evolving dominant identity discourse and our hybrid hypostasis as diasporic Greek-Australians, let alone how these are then expressed and interpreted as art and literature. 

As such, we ought to be exceedingly grateful that through this year’s journal,  the Greek Australian Cultural League allows for a multiplicity of narratives to contend and enter into dialogue with each other, both historical and literary, with a view to placing the Catastrophe in some sort of local context. This context is necessary, for it gives rise to a number of subsequent questions. A century on from the Holocaust of Smyrna, what lessons can be drawn? One obvious one has international implications: the complete utter failure of humanity to prevent genocide. What possible connection or relevance can this event have in a globalised world, to a Greek community that is completely integrated within the broader Australian social fabric? Maybe, that we cannot fully appreciate our identity as Greek-Australians without reference to the Holocaust of Smyrna and the genocide of the Greeks of Asia Minor, without having a regard to the paradox of our own ontology: as an indigenous people, we know what it means to be colonised, to have our children stolen from us, to be treated as sub-human, to be enslaved, to be exterminated and evicted from our homeland. Consequently, we are in a unique position to enter into dialogue and share parallel stories with the native people of this country. They at least were the recipients of an apology. We are not. Instead, we have a tyrant on the loose inside our ancestral homeland, threatening to finish the job that his ancestors were engaged in a century ago. Further, it should be noted that our presence in this country has been facilitated and is constantly mediated by an establishment that violently seized this continent from its original custodians, committed acts of genocide and that our acknowledgment of their sovereignty, is an act of complicity. 

The “Antipodes” Asia Minor special touches on all these points and more besides. Articles such those by Kyriakos Amanatides and Kostas Vertzayas treat with the history of the region, while Con Aroney provides valuable testimonies of survivors which are remarkable in that these survivors later became members of our own communities, having migrated to Australia. 

Kostas Markos’ article provides a unique contribution to Australian Asia Minor scholarship as, drawing extensively on archival resources within the Greek community and the broader mainstream it deals with the establishment of Greeks from Asia Minor in Melbourne, and the broader social implications of their settlement, a topic that exists largely outside the consciousness of most Melburnian-Greeks . 

Dr Christos Fifis and Dr Thanasis Spilias in separate articles examine disparate aspects of Iakovos Garivaldis OAM’s magisterial series: “Refugee Memories,” a multi-volume compendium of memories of those who survived the Catastrophe detailing both the trauma of expulsion, but also of relocation, a topic that is also examined by Kalliroi Loukidou-Tsiati, but with special reference to the re-settlement of refugees in the Athenian suburb of Nea Ionia. The similarities of the narrations of conditions and the prevailing attitudes of locals are eerily similar to those of early Greek migrants to Australia, and give us pause for thought. 

Yiota Krilli and other authors and poets who populate the pages of the periodical in Greek and in English posit prospective pathways by which we can analyse the extent to which the 1922 Catastrophe influences the literature and art of our community. The poem of second-generation poet George Athanasiou “Bosphorus,” where the Conflagration of Smyrna is conflated with the Fall of Constantinople so that his entire conception of Romiosyni is enveloped in flames and is ultimately incinerated offers a hint at the labyrinthine nature of this subject’s discursive possibilities. Accordingly, throughout the pages of the journal, we encounter treatments of the subject that are eminently conventional and others that attempt to forge completely new paths of expression. Some view the event from Australian eyes and mores, others from those of a Helladic vocabulary of loss and pain. All are fascinating and deserve our close attention and appreciation, as does the fact that there is a noted absence of Turkish narratives, in their own right or within the context to Greek responses to these. This symbolises a complete rupture within the discourse, highlighting the enormity of the trauma that still exists and a consequent inability to reconcile opposing perspectives. Though time and the manner in which we understand it, is an omnipresent dialectic that exists unarticulated throughout the journal. 

The launch of the journal last Sunday, was notable in that it was accompanied by an impressive audio-visual display. Attendees were called upon to observe a minute’s silence, the images of their ancestors who experienced the heinous crimes of 1922 flashing before the screen in front of them. To the rear of the room, the president of the Greek Australia Cultural League, Cathy Alexopoulos OAM, painstakingly assembled a display of remarkable array of ephemera and artefacts from long lost Smyrna, evoking days of old and diffusing throughout the Arcadian Hall, where the launch took place, a palpable sense of loss and nostalgia. On one of the tables was a half-burnt icon of Panayia: the only thing my ancestors were able to salvage from the ashes of their homeland of Aidinio as they fled. Behind the tables, stood mannequins adorned with authentic costumes from Smyrna, Aidinio and Cappadocia, all from my own collection. As I looked upon the many children present gazing at them, and at the supporting exhibition of paintings by members of the GACL inspired by the Catastrophe, pondering their meaning and legacy, an opposing query arose: “What will our legacy be?” 

It is precisely the posing of this intrinsic question that is made possible by the labour of the president and the committee of the GACL, and the editorial board of “Antipodes” headed by Kyriakos Amanatidis. In keeping the memories of our ancestral homelands alive, in facilitating the transmutation of those memories to art and for allowing discussion of their meaning the GACL proves yet again just how necessary it is, in an epoch of white notice, to allow a multiplicity of perspectives to flourish and contend with one another. 

One commentator, writing about 1922 wrote, «ρίξαμε μια μούντζα πίσω στον χρόνο που μας έφυγε». There is no doubt that 1922 was Catastrophic. Yet from the flames of that Catastrophe we rose, phoenix like, certainly to take more batterings in the years to come, but in the certainty that we are always able to take stock, to reflect, to interrogate and to emerge, if not fully healed, then at least present. For if there is anything that the current issue of “Antipodes” teaches us, it is that ours is a discourse of survival. 

DEAN KALIMNIOU 

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 29 October 2022