KRITIKAKOS ON GENOCIDE AND AUSTRALIA

 

There are works that catalogue atrocity and works that interrogate the afterlife of atrocity. Dr Themistocles Kritikakos’ Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian Genocide Recognition in Twenty-First-Century Australia: Memory, Identity, and Cooperation belongs firmly within the latter category. It is a study concerned less with rehearsing established narratives of 1914–1923 than with tracing how those events persist, mutate, and acquire political meaning within contemporary Australia. In doing so, it makes a substantial contribution to genocide studies, memory studies, and the historiography of the Australian diaspora.

Kritikakos situates the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian genocides within the final decades of the Ottoman Empire and the violent unravelling of imperial rule. He frames this period as a sustained continuum of anti-Christian persecution, mass violence, displacement, and dispossession culminating in the population exchange of 1923. Drawing upon genocide studies debates concerning intent, victimhood, and the longue durée consequences of mass violence, the book develops a carefully constructed conceptual architecture. Genocide is treated as a critical analytical category through which language, representation, and remembrance may be examined. Legal definition alone does not circumscribe the inquiry. Instead, the study is animated by a sustained examination of how traumatic pasts are interpreted, structured, and transmitted across generations.

The comparative framework constitutes one of the book’s most significant achievements. International recognition of the Armenian Genocide has achieved a degree of visibility that the Greek and Assyrian experiences have seldom enjoyed. Kritikakos resists any hierarchy of suffering and instead positions the Greek and Assyrian genocides as constitutive elements within a broader Ottoman genocidal process. This comparative gesture advances scholarship by drawing attention to relational histories, shared experiences of persecution, and the interwoven legacies of violence that continue to shape diasporic identity. However, comparative genocide analysis carries ethical risks, since it can flatten difference or encourage competitive hierarchies of victimhood and Kritikakos navigates this terrain with care, neither collapsing distinct communal trajectories into a single undifferentiated narrative nor isolating them within mutually exclusive silos. Instead, he traces structural continuities alongside divergent mnemonic developments. The result is a relational model of remembrance that foregrounds shared vulnerability while preserving historical specificity. Such an approach contributes to an ethics of comparison grounded in solidarity rather than rivalry.

The Australian context especially provides the study with its distinctive focus. Australians witnessed, reported, and responded to atrocities between 1915 and 1930. Humanitarian initiatives, fundraising campaigns, and sponsorship schemes formed part of a civic culture that engaged with distant suffering in concrete ways. Kritikakos excavates this humanitarian history and situates it within broader Australian historiography, demonstrating that engagement with Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian suffering once occupied a visible place within public life. Beyond its contribution to genocide scholarship, the book thus intervenes decisively in Australian historical writing. Recent decades have witnessed a gradual incorporation of migrant narratives into the national story, yet these inclusions often remain framed as supplementary rather than constitutive. Kritikakos advances a more demanding proposition. He shows that the histories of Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian suffering are interwoven with Australia’s own moral and civic development through humanitarian mobilisation, public advocacy, and parliamentary debate. Consequently, genocide recognition emerges as part of Australia’s ethical self-fashioning. In this respect, the study reframes diaspora memory as integral to the nation’s historical consciousness.

This humanitarian memory coexists uneasily with the dominant Australian narrative structured around the Gallipoli Campaign. The Anzac legend has become a foundational myth of national identity, shaping diplomatic relations with Turkey and framing a discourse of reconciliation. Within this symbolic landscape, campaigns for genocide recognition encounter structural tension. Kritikakos analyses how recognition efforts by Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian communities must navigate an environment in which Gallipoli functions as a sacralised narrative. His study reveals how national mythologies can marginalise alternative histories while simultaneously offering unexpected avenues for reframing. The Australian humanitarian response and the Anzac experience thus become sites through which communities seek to inscribe their histories into the moral fabric of the nation.

The book rests methodologically on oral history, memory studies, and cultural history. Through interviews with descendants of survivors, Kritikakos traces the intergenerational transmission of trauma and the subtle ways inherited experience shapes identity. Silence, fragmented storytelling, grief, and displacement emerge as structuring elements within family narrative. Among Greek and Assyrian families in Australia, memory moves unevenly across generations, at times carefully guarded, at times released in moments of ritual or crisis, always shaped by distance from the original rupture and by the pressures of settlement in a new society.

These patterns speak to established currents within memory studies. They echo Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, where descendants inherit affective traces rather than lived recollection. They also recall Jan Assmann’s distinction between communicative memory sustained within intimate circles and cultural memory formalised through ceremony and monument. Commemorative sites assume the character of lieux de mémoire in Pierre Nora’s sense, anchoring dispersed histories within public space. Throughout, Kritikakos maintains analytical restraint, allowing lived testimony to converse quietly with theory rather than forcing it into abstraction.

In the study, acts of remembrance emerge as dynamic processes rather than static rituals. Commemorative events, monuments, and community gatherings operate as sites in which memory is negotiated and rearticulated. Kritikakos demonstrates how these practices evolve over time, responding to political developments, generational change, and the shifting priorities of community leadership. Memory appears as a living practice, continually reconfigured through dialogue, contestation, and coalition-building.

Particularly valuable is the study’s attention to internal tensions within the Greek community. Recognition activism has often been associated with particular subgroups whose historical experience is most directly connected to the events of 1914–1923. These tensions are illuminated within a broader sociology of diaspora identity. Greek communal life in Australia has long been structured around language preservation, ecclesiastical continuity, and a transnational attachment to the Hellenic state. Genocide memory constitutes a comparatively recent axis of mobilisation, unevenly distributed across sub-communities with distinct historical genealogies. Descendants of Asia Minor, Pontic, and Eastern Thracian refugees frequently carry different mnemonic intensities and political priorities. Generational distance, processes of assimilation, and anxieties concerning diplomatic repercussions further complicate communal consensus. By mapping these internal divergences, Kritikakos resists homogenising narratives of collective will and instead portrays recognition activism as a negotiated and sometimes contested project.

Such candour strengthens the work. By charting both commitment and apathy, Kritikakos situates genocide recognition within the broader sociology of diaspora life. Community priorities extend beyond memory politics to encompass language maintenance, economic advancement, religious institutions, and transnational ties. Recognition campaigns must therefore compete for symbolic and organisational capital. The study’s sensitivity to these dynamics enhances its analytical depth.

The exploration of intercommunal cooperation represents another major contribution. Dialogue among Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian communities in Australia has intensified over recent decades, resulting in joint commemorations, collaborative lobbying, and shared public statements. Kritikakos reconstructs the history of this cooperation, tracing its origins in the late twentieth century and its consolidation in subsequent years. Coalition-building emerges as both pragmatic strategy and ethical project. Shared histories of violence provide a foundation for solidarity, while differences in narrative emphasis, institutional structure, and global recognition status require negotiation. Through careful analysis, the book shows how communities that once remembered separately have begun to articulate convergent narratives. This convergence has strengthened campaigns for state-level recognition in South Australia, New South Wales, and Tasmania. It has also illuminated the obstacles encountered in pursuit of federal recognition, where diplomatic considerations and national myth continue to exert influence. Recognition politics appears as a field shaped by persistence, adaptation, and strategic alliance.

The significance of Kritikakos’ intervention is heightened by his position within the field. He does not emerge from those sub-communities traditionally regarded as custodians of genocide memory within the Greek diaspora. His scholarship therefore occupies a space that bridges established memory activism and broader academic inquiry. That vantage point allows him to approach the subject with intellectual independence and methodological rigour. His contribution underscores that the study of genocide recognition need not be confined to inherited identity. It can also arise from scholarly commitment to historical justice and analytical clarity.

For scholars of genocide, diaspora, and Australian history, Kritikakos provides a model of careful comparative analysis. For the communities whose histories he examines, the work offers recognition of complexity and agency. Remembrance appears as a process forged through dialogue, disagreement, and perseverance. In tracing that process with nuance and intellectual integrity, this book secures its place as an essential contribution to the study of genocide recognition in Australia.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 7 March 2026

THE ILIAD: A BARBEQUE IN HEXAMETERS

 

Long has it  been the cherished misapprehension of classical scholarship, perpetuated by tweed-clad dons, elbow-patched pedants, and a suspicious number of Germans with umlauted surnames, that Homer’s Iliad is a weighty tome of high moral gravitas, a sort of bronze-age Ethics of War, or, for the more Freudian among them, a sprawling meditation on the anguished human psyche cunningly disguised as men shouting in dactylic hexameter. But this, dear reader, is precisely the sort of delusion we must now, once and for all, roast on a spit and serve medium-rare.

Let us cast off our academic sandals, and set our feet squarely upon the warm, olive-oil-glistening turf of Homeric reality: The Iliad is not, and never was, a poem about honour, fate, or man’s eternal struggle with his own mortality. It is, quite unapologetically, an exquisitely seasoned pretext for a ten-year-long open-air banquet. Not a war. Not a literary monument. A continuous, ox-roasting, fat-dripping, god-appeasing, thighbone-charring, amphora-draining, tent-to-table culinary extravaganza, briefly and somewhat inconveniently interrupted by the occasional spear-throwing and light homicide.

In short, The Iliad is less a martial epic than a Mycenaean MasterChef episode, one in which Achilles may well be the world’s first celebrity chef with anger management issues, and the central conflict arises not from the abduction of Helen, but from a grave disagreement over who gets the lion’s share of the petsa.

Let us open with Book I, where Homer famously sets the tone:

“Sing, Muse, of the wrath of Achilles…” a wrath, one submits, not just provoked by the theft of Briseis, but by the distinct lack of properly roasted meat at the Greek camp following Agamemnon’s bureaucratic debacle. Is it not suspicious that the first thing the Greeks do after consulting Calchas is not to form a battle strategy, but instead, to fire up the spit?

“They stood in a circle round the sacrificial victim, and they washed their hands and took up the barley-meal. Then Achilles drew his knife, cut off the firstling hairs, and cast them on the fire, and they poured wine and laid the thigh-bones wrapped in fat upon the flames.” (Book 1)

The above, is not piety. That’s mezedakia in verse. The gods, particularly Apollo, are hangry. And the only way to restore divine order is to serve up an entrée. The plague? A clear case of food poisoning from undercooked goat. The cure? A respectable souvlaki offering. This is not theology. This is food safety.

Fast forward to Book II and the “Catalogue of Ships,”  traditionally interpreted as a grand account of Achaean military mobilisation, is actually the guest list. One hundred thousand men, all ready not for glory, but for grilled glory. Why else does Homer painstakingly enumerate how many ships came from each region, down to the last Thessalian rowing enthusiast? So that everyone knows how many sheftalies to prepare.

And now to the heart of the matter: the sheer volume of culinary episodes scattered throughout The Iliad is enough to make a dietician weep and a cardiologist reach for his stethoscope:

Book IX, for instance, is a masterpiece of gastro-epic. Odysseus, Phoenix, and Ajax are sent as envoys to Achilles, not with battle plans or political strategies, but with snacks.

“And they came to the tent of the son of Peleus, and they found him delighting his soul with the sweet notes of a lyre, and beside him sat Patroclus, roasting a sheep’s loin over the fire.”

That, mes enfants, is not just casual background activity. Instead, it is the Iliadic version of firing up the Weber before guests arrive. Achilles is not sulking. He’s meal prepping. His emotional turmoil takes second place to ensuring his lamb is evenly cooked. He even personally carves the meat and serves it to his guests. The man is less of a warrior and more of a butcher-in-residence.

Consider too Book VII, when Ajax and Hector engage in a duel so evenly matched, it ends not in death, but dinner. The gods, clearly bored, induce a draw. And what happens?

“They broke up the contest, and the warriors went their ways. Then the Achaeans feasted in their huts, and the Trojans likewise in the city, and many oxen’s thighs were burned in sacrifice.”

“Many oxen’s thighs.” That’s not mourning. That’s a symposium. And the meat, always the thighs, wrapped in fat, gets its own lines. These thighs, lovingly roasted, become recurring characters, like the chorus in a tragedy. Only greasier.

By Book XXIII, the carnivorous crescendo is reached. Patroclus is dead. Achilles is devastated. The mood is sombre. And the solution?

“They brought forth the victims for the fire, and slew many sleek sheep and shambling oxen before the pyre. They cast in jars of honey and oil, and Achilles cut the throats of twelve Trojan youths and laid them beside the body.”

Now, ignoring the minor detail of the human sacrifice (a most unfortunate misstep in catering etiquette, which ,I f you believe our community neo-pagans never actually happened), we cannot overlook the fact that even funerals are excuses for meat-based pageantry. There is a veritable food court of mourning around Patroclus’ bier. Achilles is grieving through grilling. The man apparently cannot shed a tear without skewering something and there is a school of thought, DNA testing pending, that contends that it is his direct descendants in Melbourne who are responsible for the introduction of meat courses in catering for sundry mnemosyna around town.

Even the so-called games that follow the funeral are less athletic and more gastronomic in motivation. The prizes include tripods, cauldrons, and  a fattened ox. Not only is the barbeque central to Iliadic culture, it is also its highest reward. The moral lessons of The Iliad? Courage. Loyalty. And a good marinade.

And then, of course, there’s the divine peanut gallery, the Olympians, those supposedly lofty arbiters of fate, virtue, and cosmic justice, who in reality spend the entire war behaving like uninvited relatives hovering near the barbeeque, pretending to be interested in the conversation while mentally calculating how many lamb chops are left.

The gods, we are told, meddle in mortal affairs out of concern for justice, honour, or divine prerogative. But let us not be fooled. Their involvement in the Trojan War is, at best, metaphysical window-dressing for what is clearly a sustained campaign of buffet-crashing. Hera does not throw a celestial fit because cities are sacked or children orphaned. No, she goes incandescent when Zeus, that thunder-wielding pot-bellied patriarch, keeps helping himself to the choicest burnt offerings without so much as a divine «παρακαλώ».

Athena, described endlessly as “eager for war,” maintains this martial enthusiasm with all the sincerity of someone who only arrives at the battlefield after the ceremonial ox has been filleted, basted, and lightly blackened on both sides. One imagines her descending from Olympus, nostrils flaring, eyes fixed not on the phalanx formation but on the sacred thighbones sizzling over the fire like divine bacon. Her so-called “battle fervour” is suspiciously correlated with the aroma of medium-rare entrails.

Even Apollo, that allegedly high-minded bringer of plague and poetry, seems to show up largely in response to undercooked goat. His retribution is less divine punishment and more the righteous fury of a health inspector disappointed by insufficient charring.

Zeus himself, in Book IV, lays out the divine culinary hierarchy:

“For unto me men offer sacrifice first and last, and pour the choicest wine, and lay the fat upon the fire.”

Note the divine order: not prayers, not hymns, meat first, then talk. Even the king of the gods operates on a strict no-offering, no-audience policy. He's basically the bouncer at an exclusive heavenly taverna.

Let us now consider the Trojans. For all their poetic nobility, their one true innovation was the indoor barbeque. When Hector returns to Troy and visits Andromache, she begs him to stay home , not out of fear, but because they’ve just bought new charcoal.

“You, Hector, are my father and my honoured mother, my brother, and my strong husband. Stay here upon the wall. Do not go forth to the fight, and let us roast the kid your father brought from Ida.” (a quote, one must confess, improved slightly in translation).

Even Priam, the venerable patriarch, when he journeys to Achilles to reclaim Hector’s body, does not forget the first rule of Homeric diplomacy: always bring food. Achilles, moved not by pity but by hunger, relents, and the next scene is yet another culinary interlude.

“Then they laid ready the supper, and put bread and meat before Priam, and they ate.” (Book XXIV)

Thus, the entire poem concludes not with vengeance or triumph, but with dinner. War, grief, fate; these are mere garnishes. The true telos of The Iliad is digestion.

And so, let us at long last banish forever those among us who insist upon reading The Iliad as a tedious litany of wrath, carnage, and solemn heroics. Instead, let us embrace the far juicier truth whispered by every Greek uncle wielding a skewered lamb over a crackling fire on Easter Sunday: that it is meat, gloriously marinated, expertly turned, and bountifully distributed, that alone holds the divine alchemy to reconcile the living, the dead, and those notoriously picky Olympians who are never satisfied unless there’s a platter of gyros in front of them.

Homer, far from being a staid poet ensnared in lofty metaphor and tragic grandeur, was in fact the original μαγειρεύς, a highbrow σουβλατζής, a spit-wielding bard of blistered flesh and smoking embers, a Homeric maestro of meaty masterpieces. The Iliad is less sombre epic and more the world’s inaugural and finest menu dégustation, a twelve-thousand-line tasting tour de force of sacrificial feasts, slow-roasted ambitions, and the meat platter for two at your local Greek restaurant. In recognition of such, let us raise your kylixes, loosen our belts, and join in the ancient chorus that echoes through time and grease-streaked tents alike:

«Pass the τσόπια».

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 28 February 2026

GREECE’S REJECTION OF YAYLALI’S ASYLUM APPLICATION IS ILLEGAL

The case of Yannis Vasilis Yaylalı concerns a Turkish citizen of Pontic descent who has resided in Greece since 2019 and who has been publicly identified as a political dissident and activist critical of Turkish state conduct. Reporting indicates that he has previously been imprisoned in Turkey and faces continuing criminal exposure connected to his political speech and advocacy. His application for international protection has been rejected at first instance. The legality of that refusal must be examined within the integrated framework of refugee law, European human rights law and European Union law.

Article 1A(2) of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees defines a refugee as a person who, owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons including political opinion, is outside his country of nationality and unable or unwilling to avail himself of its protection. Political dissidence lies at the centre of that definition. Where an applicant presents evidence of prior detention, ongoing prosecution, or arrest exposure connected to political expression, the determining authority must conduct an individualised and forward-looking assessment of risk.

The European Court of Human Rights in F.G. v Sweden (Grand Chamber, 2016) held that national authorities are required to carry out a rigorous examination of foreseeable risk on return, including risks arising from political activity and expression known to the authorities of the receiving state. The analysis must engage directly with the applicant’s personal profile and current country conditions. Generalised references to stability or diplomatic relations cannot substitute for a structured evaluation of individual exposure.

Refugee protection under Article 1A(2) extends to persecution “for reasons of political opinion.” The interpretive focus of that phrase rests on the motive of the persecutor rather than the subjective ideology of the applicant. Authoritative interpretation has long recognised that protection arises where a political opinion is attributed to the individual by the authorities. The UNHCR Handbook on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status, at paragraphs 80 to 84, explains that an applicant may qualify where such an opinion has been imputed to him. European Union law reflects the same approach. Article 10(1)(e) of Directive 2011/95/EU requires assessment of whether the applicant holds a political opinion or whether it is attributed to him by the actor of persecution. The emphasis lies on the perception of the state and the consequences that flow from that perception.

In Yaylalı’s case, if Turkish authorities regard his activism, public criticism or advocacy as politically hostile, and if that perception has resulted in detention or prosecution, the refugee definition is engaged. The relevant inquiry is whether adverse measures are connected to that attributed political position. A determination that overlooks imputed political opinion fails to apply Article 1A(2) in accordance with its settled interpretation.

A further dimension concerns the distinction between prosecution and persecution. Refugee law recognises that states may enforce general criminal law. It equally recognises that criminal law may be deployed as a mechanism of political repression. The inquiry therefore addresses motive, selectivity and proportionality. If proceedings arise from political speech and carry penalties that are disproportionate or discriminatory, they may constitute persecution. A decision that treats politically sensitive prosecution as neutral without analysing its context does not satisfy the Convention framework.

Country-of-origin information and pattern evidence are legally material. The treatment of comparable dissidents, the use of broadly framed security legislation, detention conditions and the independence of the judiciary form part of the required assessment. Strasbourg jurisprudence requires that such information be current, reliable and meaningfully engaged in the reasoning. Omission of this contextual analysis undermines the legality of the determination.

The evidentiary threshold in asylum law is a real risk or reasonable degree of likelihood. It does not require certainty. Where credible past persecution is established, international practice recognises that the burden shifts to the state to demonstrate a fundamental and durable change in circumstances sufficient to neutralise future risk. If prior imprisonment for political reasons forms part of the record, the authority must address whether conditions in the country of origin have changed in a manner that removes that risk. A refusal that applies a higher evidentiary threshold or fails to confront that burden-shifting dynamic misapplies the governing standard.

Non-refoulement provides the ultimate constraint. Article 33(1) of the Refugee Convention prohibits return to territories where life or freedom would be threatened for a Convention reason. Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights prohibits removal where there exists a real risk of torture or inhuman or degrading treatment. In Soering v United Kingdom (1989), the Court confirmed that responsibility arises through the act of removal itself. In Chahal v United Kingdom (1996) and Saadi v Italy (2008), it affirmed the absolute character of that protection. Article 19(2) of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights restates the same prohibition within Union law.

Article 18 of the EU Charter guarantees the right to asylum with due respect for the Refugee Convention. That provision imposes a positive obligation on Member States to interpret and apply national asylum law in conformity with Convention standards. The Court of Justice of the European Union has further articulated the duty of careful and impartial examination of all relevant elements of an application. Directive 2013/32/EU requires an effective remedy providing full and ex nunc examination of fact and law. Where an arguable Article 3 claim is raised, Article 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights requires a remedy that is rigorous, independent and suspensive in effect.

Freedom of expression jurisprudence also needs to be considered. Where prosecution arises from political speech, proportionality considerations derived from Article 10 ECHR intersect with the persecution inquiry. Disproportionate sanction for expressive political activity may constitute both a violation of freedom of expression and persecution for Convention purposes. In addition, where credible evidence suggests compromised judicial independence or politically influenced proceedings, the risk of flagrant denial of justice under Article 6 ECHR becomes legally relevant.

The cumulative effect of these doctrines produces a coherent legal structure. If Yaylalı’s prior detention and current prosecutorial exposure arise from political dissent; if country evidence demonstrates adverse treatment of comparable critics; if no fundamental change in circumstances has been established; and if the risk assessment failed to apply the correct evidentiary threshold or engage with imputed political opinion, the refusal of protection conflicts with Article 1A(2) and Article 33 of the Refugee Convention, Article 3 and Article 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights, Articles 18 and 19(2) of the EU Charter, and the procedural guarantees of EU asylum law.

Where binding norms require disciplined, structured and evidence-based reasoning, and where the resulting decision diverges from those norms in a case involving a documented political dissident, the inference that emerges is difficult to avoid. The reasoning appears shaped less by the imperatives of legal doctrine and more by considerations external to it. On the available facts, the refusal bears the characteristics of a political determination rather than the product of strict legal analysis.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 21 February 2026

GREEKS AND THE ANTI-SEMITIC POGROMS OF ODESSA

Odessa entered the nineteenth century as an imperial experiment. Founded in 1794 on the site of an ancient Greek colony, it developed rapidly into a major Black Sea port whose population was shaped by trade, mobility and imperial privilege. Greeks and Jews, fleeing persecution and seeking opportunity, arrived early and settled in large numbers. By the 1820s, both communities occupied prominent positions in the city’s commercial and social life. Greek merchants dominated shipping, brokerage and international trade networks, while Jewish traders, artisans and middlemen expanded steadily within retail, finance and grain export. Proximity and competition were inescapable.

The first major rupture between the two groups occurred in 1821, driven by events unfolding far beyond Odessa. The outbreak of the Greek War of Independence and the execution of Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory V in Constantinople reverberated across the Orthodox world. Odessa, home to a politically active Greek diaspora and members of the Filiki Eteria, became a centre of agitation. Greek refugees arrived from Ottoman territories bearing accounts of violence, executions and reprisals. Within this charged atmosphere, allegations circulated that Jews in Constantinople had assisted Ottoman authorities in the patriarch’s execution and had even agitated in favour of it. These claims were repeated with growing insistence in the Greek coffee houses and clubs of Odessa.

The burial of Gregory V in Odessa in June 1821, after his body was recovered from the sea, provided the immediate setting for violence. Contemporary observers describe unrest breaking out during the funeral procession itself. The German writer Heinrich Zschokke, present in the city shortly afterwards, recorded that Greek attacks on Jewish homes and shops erupted simultaneously in several districts. Windows were smashed, shops looted and individuals assaulted. The main synagogue was damaged. Later reconstructions based on municipal records indicate that seventeen Jews were killed and more than sixty injured.

Imperial forces were deployed, though their role proved ambiguous. Zschokke reported uneven intervention by soldiers and Cossacks and noted that looting continued in their presence. He further observed that advance warnings had circulated among Jews advising them to remain indoors, suggesting foreknowledge on the part of local officials.

The 1821 pogrom was treated by the authorities as a disturbance arising from exceptional circumstances. No structural measures were introduced to prevent recurrence, and the event was soon forgotten, its memory remaining largely confined to the Jewish community. Within Odessa’s Greek milieu, it was absorbed into narratives of martyrdom and national awakening.

Over the following decades, economic relations in the city shifted markedly. The abolition of Odessa’s free port status in 1859, together with the aftermath of the Crimean War, weakened Greek mercantile dominance. Jewish firms expanded into sectors vacated by Greek trading houses. By mid-century, Jewish traders were prominent in grain export, retail and finance, with statistical surveys from the 1860s showing steadily increasing Jewish ownership across commercial sectors. Greek commentators and merchants registered this transformation with growing resentment.

A second pogrom targeting Odessa’s Jewish population occurred in 1859 during the Orthodox Easter period. Its immediate catalysts lay in the circulation of rumours rather than in any identifiable political event. Jews were accused of ritual murder and of desecrating a Greek Orthodox church and cemetery, allegations drawing upon long-established European antisemitic tropes. In subsequent correspondence, Governor Alexander Stroganov attributed the outbreak to religious fanaticism intensified by false reports.

Violence broke out among groups of Greek sailors and dockworkers, joined by local residents. Jewish homes and shops were systematically attacked. Some contemporary accounts record that Jewish residents confronted their assailants holding Christian icons, hoping that the display of sacred images might restrain or deter the violence. Sources differ regarding fatalities, with some reporting one Jewish death and others two, while several individuals were seriously injured. Property damage was limited in scale compared with later events, though the symbolic impact was considerable. Local newspapers described the episode as a street fight, avoiding the language of communal violence, and once the unrest subsided, the administration treated the matter as resolved.

By the late 1860s, Odessa had become one of the Russian Empire’s largest Jewish urban centres, a transformation accompanied by the growing prominence of Jewish entrepreneurs and the further decline of Greek firms. Within the Greek community, these shifts were increasingly experienced as displacement and loss, with responsibility for economic decline frequently attributed to Jewish competitors. Tensions hardened as economic resentment was expressed in religious terms. Pamphlets circulated accusing Jews of exploiting Christian labour and mocking Orthodoxy, while the memory of Patriarch Gregory V was revived, detached from its historical context and redeployed as a symbolic instrument of grievance.

Against this background, the pogrom of 1871 unfolded over several days and marked a qualitative escalation. It erupted once more during Orthodox Holy Week, apparently triggered by a minor altercation whose precise circumstances remain unclear. What can be established with greater certainty is that organised groups quickly coalesced and directed their actions toward Jewish districts. Contemporary reports and later investigations identified Greek merchants and agitators as principal organisers, and the violence spread methodically, with Jewish taverns, shops and homes subjected to widespread destruction.

Municipal records and eyewitness accounts indicate that more than eight hundred homes and five hundred businesses were damaged or looted, displacing thousands of Jewish residents. Official casualty figures recorded six Jewish deaths and twenty-one injuries, although some contemporary Russian reports sought to minimise fatalities. The scale and pattern of destruction suggest restraint in the use of lethal force, possibly shaped by an assumption that authorities would tolerate extensive property damage while intervening decisively only in cases of murder.

The response of the imperial administration was marked by hesitation. Governor-General Pavel Kotzebue delayed decisive military intervention, while Jewish self-defence groups were dispersed by police and Cossack units rather than permitted to protect their neighbourhoods. In this atmosphere of uncertainty, a rumour circulated among rioters that imperial permission had been granted to destroy Jewish property. One Russian eyewitness later recalled a remark attributed to a Greek participant in the violence: “Do you think we could destroy and beat Jews for three whole days if that had not been the will of the authorities?” Order was restored only when unrest spread beyond Jewish districts and threatened the stability of the city as a whole.

Arrests followed, with approximately six hundred individuals detained, largely from the urban poor. No prominent organisers were subjected to serious punishment. Official reports attributed the pogrom to intoxication, religious passion and class resentment, while an internal memorandum explained hostility as arising from perceptions of Jewish economic dominance combined with religious difference. The language of these assessments avoided sustained engagement with structural or systemic factors.

Jewish intellectual responses were swift. Writing in Odessa in 1871, the jurist Ilya Orshansky framed the violence in legal terms: “Until such time as the divergence between the Jews’ actual and juridical position in Russia is permanently removed by eliminating all existing limitations on their rights, hostility to the Jews will not only persist, but in all likelihood will increase.” His assessment circulated widely within Jewish legal and journalistic circles. The journalist Mikhail Kulisher approached the events from a psychological perspective, observing that “beneath the apparently accidental and singular Odessa pogrom we discovered something of enduring importance, namely, that Judeophobia was not a theoretical error of some kind, but a psychic attitude in which centuries upon centuries of hatred was reflected.”

Taken together, the three Odessa pogroms form a coherent pattern rather than isolated disturbances. In each case, rumours framed in religious language circulated during periods of economic transition, often coinciding with heightened liturgical moments, while administrative hesitation operated as a permissive condition. During this phase of Odessa’s history, the Greek community emerged as the principal initiator of anti-Jewish violence, a role that diminished after 1871 as leadership of pogrom activity shifted toward Slavic populations and organised far-right movements. In this respect, Odessa invites comparison with imperial cities such as Roman Alexandria, where Greek and Jewish communities similarly competed for proximity to power, civic privilege and economic advantage, and where violence erupted when imperial authority proved ambivalent.

In Odessa, as in Alexandria, communal conflict unfolded within an imperial framework that rewarded intermediaries. Greeks in southern Russia functioned for decades as favoured Orthodox agents of empire, occupying a position shaped by commercial utility, religious affinity and political expediency. This alignment conferred privilege while also exposing the community to instrumentalisation. Although direct state orchestration of the pogroms cannot be demonstrated, patterns of hesitation, selective enforcement and narrative minimisation suggest that Greek hostility toward Jews operated within tolerable limits of imperial policy, at times deflecting social tension without destabilising the broader order.

The consequences of this history extended beyond its Jewish victims and profoundly shaped the Greek community itself. As mercantile dominance declined and imperial favour weakened, Greeks in Odessa came to occupy an increasingly ambiguous position within the Russian state. Following the Russian Revolution and civil war, the Greek population of southern Russia abandoned the region in large numbers, dispersing to Greece, the Balkans and the wider diaspora. In exile, memories of Odessa were selectively reordered. Narratives of prosperity, philanthropy and national awakening were preserved, while episodes of communal violence were marginalised or omitted, excluded from the usable past through which displaced Greek communities articulated their twentieth-century identity.

Greek-language sources from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflect this selectivity. Memoirs, communal histories and publications produced by Greek Odessans emphasise educational institutions, churches, benefactions and revolutionary activity, often portraying the city as a site of harmonious coexistence later disrupted by Russian or Bolshevik violence. Where conflict is acknowledged, responsibility is diffused or reframed as disorder and popular excess. The Greek role in earlier pogroms against Jews is rarely examined directly and, when mentioned, appears obliquely, stripped of agency and specificity. Silence thus functioned as a mechanism of communal self-preservation.

The Odessa pogroms therefore illuminate more than a sequence of anti-Jewish attacks. They reveal how imperial structures fostered competition among minority intermediaries, how privilege could be extended without protection, and how violence could be absorbed into administrative routine and later effaced from communal memory. As in Alexandria under Rome, coexistence rested on contingent favour rather than secure equality. The surviving record remains incomplete, shaped as much by omission as by preservation, reminding us that communal histories are determined as decisively by what is set aside as by what is remembered.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 14 February 2026