“Go away, the refugee will eat you” – Verbal violence for the… “foreigners” of the Asia Minor Disaster

“In April 1923 in Tekeli, today’s Sindos, about 20 kilometers outside of Thessaloniki, the newly settled farmer Nikolaos Papadopoulos from the Forty Churches complained that when he and his family attempted to celebrate Easter day with the locals , local people beat his children, his son, his daughter, and him and insulted them with the words, “ruffians, lewds, refugees with your p….wives”. “They did not allow us refugees to dance” are his words, while the incident is found in the Archives of the Misdemeanor Court of Thessaloniki, in court decision 6037 of September 17, 1923 as an appeal of a previous decision of the criminal court. 16-year-old Mr. Tantos and 20-year-old Giorgos Stafylis (pseudonyms are used in the reports) who seem to have been inconvenienced by the initiative of the refugee family, were acquitted in the trial due to doubts. Regardless of the truth of the complaint, the combination of verbal and physical violence is interesting in this specific instance, but above all the use of the word refugee itself as an abusive aversion and reference.”

With the above words, the Doctor of History and contract lecturer in the Department of Political Sciences of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Kostas Tziaraspresented the imprints of verbal violence and snapshots of social tension after the arrival of the refugees in 1922, at the International Scientific Conference on the Asia Minor Catastrophe, with the theme “The day after the Catastrophe”, held in Thessaloniki.

After his research in the judicial decisions recorded in the file of the Criminal Court of Thessaloniki and in the oral testimonies kept in the Historical Archive of Refugee Hellenism of Kalamaria, Mr. Tziaras pointed out that insulting derogatory terms such as Turks, refugees, yogurt-baptized have been highlighted in the literature and have been preserved in the collective memory as stereotypical racist insults against refugees, as indications of the social, economic and cultural contrasts and antagonisms between natives and refugees. Several cases have also been highlighted in which conflicts took on generalized dimensions on the basis of confrontations in relation to the distribution of cultivated land in the countryside or in connection with the extreme poverty and conditions of class exploitation of the refugee labor force in the cities.

“Go away, the refugee will eat you”

The Doctor of History cited, among other things, the testimony of Dialekhti Mendekidou from Trebizond, from the Historical Archive of Refugee Hellenism of Kalamaria. She characteristically remembered that for years the locals scared their children that “the refugee will come to take them”, even saying “go away, the refugee will eat you” or “old refugees who didn’t get slaughtered by the Turks”.

The refugees were accused of lacking national consciousness and immorality

According to Mr. Tziara, the thorough recording of the criminal record shows that the refugees were mainly attributed to a lack of national consciousness, reduced national purity (Turkospore Turkospori, Turke Turkala, Turkissa), delinquent behavior (you refugees are criminals, criminals, robbers, belittled , thief, thief, Yagula), destitution and their association with extreme poverty-related social diseases characterized as interwar social diseases (old refugee, hungry, you came here and became human, crazy, syphilis, phthisis, phtisikie, ticks, lice, psoriasis ).

But above all, as he pointed out, the refugees were accused of immorality. “In the word Turkospori – Turkospori and other insults, it is not only the origin from Turkey or the immoral culpable sexual association that is affected, but also the violence, the traumatic sexual violence suffered by the refugees during the period of persecution. The reference “the Turk dishonored you” is typical. Insulting sexual morals, especially women’s, is the most frequent pattern of verbal abuse for the entire population. However, especially for refugees, it was a stereotypical category and many times the insult was expressed interchangeably with the reference to the place of origin: Karamanlou, Smyrnia, old Smyrnia, Raidestini. The offense of refugee female sexuality which is often interpreted as projecting – highlighting different cultural practices or customs in relation to things like cleanliness, concerned refugee women who often lived in the urban context alone as widows or orphans and who were targets among others, and human trafficking rings” he added.

Poverty fueled the differences

Mr. Tziaras pointed out that the overall percentage of refugee participation in the criminal court record of Thessaloniki, although not proportional to the percentage of the refugee population, is significant and noted that the tensions described in the record concern mainly the popular strata and unfold mainly in the infrastructure poor refugee districts. “Poverty and the struggle for survival activate existing differences,” he said while he appreciated that the 1940s through war, famine, destruction and resistance are often pointed to as a unifying intersection between locals and refugees.

RES-EMP

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