My grandmother’s lost homeland

Unknown artist

This photograph shows my great grandmother, her name was Athina Kitsaki, and my great grandfather Konstantinos Kontoudakis, and their two children. It was taken in 1923 in Crete, right after they arrived in Greece. At the time of the exchange, my great grandmother was 24 and my great grandfather was 41 years old. My grandmothers both come from the prosperous area of Smyrna just off the Turkish coast. Greeks have always lived in Asia Minor since the 3rd millennia BC. The Ottomans, a Muslim warrior nomad tribe from the East, conquered the area gradually from the 13th century and the Ottoman Empire was established in the region with the final fall of Byzantine Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1453. For the four centuries that followed in the Ottoman empire lived mostly peacefully a broad mosaic of people- besides Greeks, Armenians, Kurds, Jews and others. The 19th and the 20th centuries were marked with upheaval in the different regions of the Ottoman Empire as the different ethnicities fought for independence. It was the time of the formation of the modern nation states and the shaping of national identities. The Treaty of Lausanne signed in 1923 ended the conflicts defining the borders of the modern Turkish Republic. In the treaty, Turkey gave up all claims to the remainder of the Ottoman Empire and in return the Allies recognized Turkish sovereignty within its new borders. The rationale behind this Treaty, was that an exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey would help establish homogenous populations and establish peace in the region. Forced migration was imposed to populations living with more or less violence on both sides of the Aegean sea in the years around the signing of the Treaty. Although numbers are to date not exact, an estimated more than 1 million Greeks were expelled and a 350,000 Muslims were expelled from Greece to Turkey. My family, like many others, were forced to leave overnight which means they took only what they could carry along with them on the trip to Greece. That is why there are not many relics in the family from this time. Following the years of their arrival, Greeks were given property based on an estimation of the fortune left behind the family in Turkey. My great grandparents used to own a small tile factory in Turkey and they were quite well-off. The second artifact here is the decision of the Evaluation Committee in 1924 estimating my great grandfather's movable and immovable property to 694 Turkish golden Liras based on the accounts of different witnesses. The brother of my great grandmother tried to flee to Latin America in the years before the expulsion as young Greek men were recruited by Turks for forced labor and they never heard back from him as the family was expelled in the meantime and the traces were lost. Such stories exist in most families that came from Minor Asia. Although Greek Orthodox, refugees were not initially welcome by locals. They were looked down on and it took many years for them to integrate in the mainland. However, they played a very serious role in development of the country in the coming years and this is very important chapter in modern Greek history. Although I was born in Crete and I am a fourth generation immigrant, the way of speaking and my upbringing was deeply influenced by my family’s Asia Minor roots. My grandmother, for example, always used to “read” the coffee cup for me to predict the future and she would occasionally apply some sorcery tricks on different occasions.