Postmemories of the 1922 Asia Minor Refugee Experience on Chios

Memory studies focusing on the Greek refugees from Asia Minor in the early 20th century abound. Still, we have a limited understanding of the ways that memories were imparted from one generation to the next. In this chapter, a corpus of 50 oral histories with Chians is employed to address that question. These oral histories were not collected with a focus on the Asia Minor refugees and related events. However, a significant number of the informants made known during the interviews their own, or their parental or grandparental, Asia Minor refugee background. The variety of stories and information they narrated made it evident that these had been acquired through intergenerational familial or acquaintance interactions rather than through official collective histories. Some stories, involving Turks who were themselves 1923 exchangees or were acquaintances and friends of Chians, were acquired when informants became refugees in Turkey in 1941–43, escaping the famine that prevailed in German-occupied Chios. Thus, this chapter offers an understanding of the ways that intergenerational histories are conveyed, and how such postmemories can be juxtaposed with and challenge the collective national memory.