Through more than 1,000 exhibits and over 500 photographs – excerpts from personal testimonies, objects and other documents, the memory of the cultural trauma from the violent uprooting is retrieved
“-What did you see in Vourla, Marko?
– Why should I see fire and a knife…”
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Asia Minor Disaster, the Benaki Museum and the Center for Asia Minor Studies present the chronicle of Hellenism in Asia Minor in the exhibition “Asia Minor: Shine – Destruction – Uprooting – Creation”.
Through more than 1,000 exhibits and more than 500 photographs – excerpts from personal testimonies, objects and other evidence, the memory of the cultural trauma from the violent uprooting that has been recorded in the national consciousness is retrieved.
On the ground floor of the Benaki museum in Piraeus, from September 15 the visitor begins the journey to the splendor of Hellenism in Asia Minor (first section) from Ionia and the western coasts, proceeds to Cappadocia and the southern provinces, continues crossing the Pontus to return to the west, around Constantinople and end up in Eastern Thrace.
The era of prosperity is followed by the period of persecutions, the end of World War I and the Treaties, the period of the Greek landing and the Asia Minor campaign, the Catastrophe of 1922, as well as the Exodus of the refugees (second section). The third and last section of the exhibition focuses on the settlement and integration of expatriates in Greece and the effect their presence had on many sectors of Greek society.
Part of the epilogue of the exhibition is dedicated to the founding of the Center for Asia Minor Studies in 1930 by Melpo and Octavius ​​Merlier. This chronicle is described through works of art, pictures, ecclesiastical, military and personal relics, clothing, jewelry, handicrafts, maps, photographs, archival and film material, newspapers, letters, cards, and many other documents.
The curator of the exhibition and the two accompanying editions is the art historian Evita Arapoglou, in collaboration with the director of the Center for Asia Minor Studies, academic, Paschalis Kitromelidis and the researchers of the Center, the scientific director of the Benaki Museum, Giorgis Mangini, the curators of the Museum and other scientific collaborators.
The exhibition is under the patronage of the President of the Republic Katerina Sakellaropoulou.
The Shocking Exodus
The personal testimonies of the refugees of Asia Minor and the Pontus of the first generation, gathered in the five-part work “The Exodus” are the great legacy of musicologist Melpos Logothetis-Merlieu, co-founder, together with her husband, Hellenist Octavius ​​Merlieu, of the Asia Minor Center of Studies (KMS) in 1930.
“A few years since the last Greek left the land of Asia Minor, Melpo Merlier, with the support in all her efforts of the folklorist Dimitris Loukopoulos, began to send the Center’s collaborators to the four points of the Greek horizon, to find the uprooted and to hear from their mouths the special incidents that they experienced during those hours” notes George Tenekidis in the preface to the first volume of Exodus. “The study of the material certifies, as was natural, that the uprooting of Hellenism had begun long before 1922, immediately after the Balkan wars, as an expression of the first manifestations of neo-Turkish nationalism.”
From 1930 and for a number of years, until 1975, the oral history of 5,000 refugees from all regions of Asia Minor was recorded, 1,375 residential units were investigated and more than a hundred researchers worked for this purpose. The testimonies make up the Archive of Oral Tradition, an archive that numbers 300,000 handwritten pages, refers to the peaceful – the pre-destruction – period and describes the entire life cycle of the Asia Minor populations in their homeland. It is classified by geographical region (Aeolis, Ionia, Caria, Lycia, Pamphylia, Cilicia, Pisidia, Phrygia, Galatia, Lycaonia, Cappadocia, Paphlagonia, Pontus, Bithynia, Lydia, Mysia, Eastern Thrace, Tigris and Euphrates River Countries and Caucasus).
“The testimonies of the Exodus constituted the last chapter of the questionnaire on the basis of which the Archive of Oral Tradition of the Center was established, this monumental collection of oral history, which is not only the largest and oldest in Greece but also one of the most important in Europe” notes Paschalis Kitromilidis in the preface of the fifth and last volume: “Thus, the Exodus, the conditions under which the Greek Orthodox populations left their homes in the Asia Minor peninsula, constitutes the last section of the settlement files studied by the Center. In order to highlight the importance of these testimonies and the overall project of the inventory of the memory of Asia Minor Hellenism, the founder of the Center envisioned the publication of the testimonies of the Exodus, also inspired by the verses of Aeschylus to the Persians (548-549) I’ve been waiting for Asis to be emptied.”
RES-EMP
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