The original publication of this text appeared in Greek in the journal Faros Alexandroupolis as part of Persefoni Myrtsou's graduate work, entitled "Contemporary migration biographies. Life and work styles of Greek female and male artists”. For reference to the original text, please contact Persefoni Myrtsou: myrtsou@hu-berlin.de. This was written as part of the graduate program "Art in Context", Berlin University of the Arts (Institut für Kunst im Kontext - Universität der Künste Berlin, supervised by Professor Wolfgang Knap). It was translated from German to Greek by Persefoni, and from Greek to English by me. Persefoni notes: "As I waded through [the German text], I felt the need to make some additional comments, in appreciation of the [Greek] readers of Faros Alexandroupolis, with which I wish to share some extra personal thoughts that did not fit within an academic work".
I got to know Persefoni from another art installation of hers - you can read about it in this link. Her recent work struck me as a very insightful contemplation on the concept of homeland, whose importance cannot be underestimated among diaspora communities around the world. Greek heritage may be shared in global terms among Hellenes, but their concept of Hellenism is more often than not influenced by locality. What follows is the journey Persefoni took to formulate her own concept of 'homeland'.
I got to know Persefoni from another art installation of hers - you can read about it in this link. Her recent work struck me as a very insightful contemplation on the concept of homeland, whose importance cannot be underestimated among diaspora communities around the world. Greek heritage may be shared in global terms among Hellenes, but their concept of Hellenism is more often than not influenced by locality. What follows is the journey Persefoni took to formulate her own concept of 'homeland'.
In Greek, the terms "migration" and "migrant" are
connected mainly with the experiences of Greeks in terms of labor migration,
thus the experiences are mainly perceived as negative ones. In the context of this study I intend to use the term freed from its negative connotation and to use
it for any more permanent than temporary human movement, though without overlooking
the weight it often carries in the collective memory of Greek society.
When my
grandfather Constantine Mirtzos (our name would later morph into Myrtsos due to
state negligence in transcription) and my grandmother Persefoni Christodoulou, both
born in Ainos in Eastern Thrace, were expelled as refugees in Turkey and sent
to Greece in 1923, they were given - according to the Treaty of Lausanne that regulated
the population and property exchanges between Greeks and Turks - a piece of
land in the village of Agioneri (also known as Vourlantza), located near
Thessaloniki. Before the population exchange, my grandparents had never even
heard of this place, nor did they know anyone there. So they decided to live
in Thessaloniki, where they had some relatives. They still had to travel to
Agioneri where my grandfather had set up a small grain mill in the fields, and
a dairy products business with his brother, Anastasios.
From the
beginning Agioneri was a cursed place for my grandfather and grandmother. According
to the population exchange, this village was defined as their new home. This place
had to replace their idea of “homeland” which they had for their own village in
Turkey. Clearly it was impossible to replace Ainos, a place that they were
forced to abandon. Neither in their memory nor in their heart, nor in their
bodies. My grandfather Constantine was able to work for a few years. Later, the
work situation at Agioneri went awry, his body gave up, he left and remained
constantly sick until his death. Although I did not meet him, because he had already
died before I was born, I do not think anyone knew exactly what disease he was
suffering from - to a certain extent his diseases were exaggerated by my
grandmother, who adored him tremendously - but I think deep down inside, the
pain of leaving his homeland ate him away. I did not get to know him, but I got
to know to my father and my aunt, his children, who inherited the same disease:
they hated Agioneri, and its people.
They believed that the village was the source of all the family’s ills and there
is still silence about the family’s past, much of which is probably ignored by
them all.
The refugee
culture of the Greeks from Asia Minor and Eastern Thrace significantly changed
the composition of Greek society, mainly because the concepts of migration and “prosfigia”
(which roughly means “being expelled from your home” - in modern Greek, it means 'the state of being a refugee') were introduced into the
collective subconscious of the people. After 1923, the feeling of homesickness
and nostalgia for the so-called “lost homelands” became two central motifs in
the Greek language. As I stated above, in my family there is a mystical
tendency to avoid making clear references to the past. In this way, I too neglected
our family’s past. For me Turkey, namely Eastern Thrace, where Ainos is located,
represented an eerie place. For my grandparents, their place of origin was
something whose memory was very painful. So they decided not to talk about it.
In this way they tried to live a normal life in Greece without mourning what
was left behind. My personal perception of migration has been influenced very much by the story
of my grandparents. Sometimes I feel an inexplicable desire for homing, as well
as the need to redefine my roots. I think this is something I inherited from my
family.
For me the
fact that I made an effort to learn Turkish, which was somehow the key language
in which my grandparents were born into and raised by, as well as my constant
visits to Turkey, were an indirect means of a personal effort to understand
this remote past. My experiences in Istanbul, where I stayed for three months, were
for me a forced landing in reality. Today’s Turkey is connected with my family’s
past only in an imagined way. In fact, rationally speaking, Turkey is now simply
a neighboring country of Greece. In present-day Istanbul, whose population
composition has changed fundamentally due to the internal migration of the last
20 years, mainly from Eastern Turkey and areas of the Black Sea, I was nothing
more than a stranger, coming from a country located more west than Turkey on
the global map composed from a western perspective. So my experience as a migrant
artist in Turkey canceled a romantic and naive side of my personality, which was almost bordering
on orientalism.
The road to the roots: a journey into the de-mystified
past
According
to Nicolas Bourriaud, plants which are radicant, such as some types of ivy, continue to grow and create
new roots in the new soil they are transplanted, although the original root has
already been cut. The trunk of the plant remains the same, but it morphs
through the transplanting process in the new soil. If one understands this idea
metaphorically in the context of human migration, it seems purposeful for
someone to be able to transplant their culture to a set of new geographical,
cultural and social situations. However, at the new point where it has taken
root, there is always the risk of a violent degeneration of the root of the
plant (and respectively, of the personal culture of the individual), perhaps
because if the transplant does not assimilate, it might throw its root out of
the soil and it will thus wither (and respectively the person may drop out
and/or be evicted directly or indirectly from the community). In the migrant
model of life, the personal culture of each immigrant tries to root in a new
place, and is always influenced by this migratory transplanting process.
My personal
reservation concerning this process was the family’s silenced past. In this way
somehow, I decided to make a real journey back to my “roots”: a trip to Ainos.
In October
2011 I traveled with my mother by car from Thessaloniki to Ainos in Eastern
Thrace. This trip was exactly the reverse of what my grandfather and
grandmother did 89 years ago. My father could not come with us because of work,
or so he claimed. I decided to record our trip with a camcorder and a photo-camera.
As an artist I thought such a record would be excellent material for a future
artwork. In my mind I constantly had two questions: is this trip an allegorical
return to the “homeland” or an attempt towards a symbolic appropriation of
space (in the sense of a personal colonial exploitation of the space) as a greedy
artist, who wants to use the history and her relationship with this place for
the purposes of her work? What is the real significance of this journey to the
village of my grandparents’ origin? Am I travelling as a visitor? As a tourist?
As an heir?
The day we
traveled to Ainos was a national holiday in Turkey. We found out later that the
29th of October was the day of the proclamation of the Turkish Republic by
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the year 1923 (in Turkish: Cumhuriyet Bayramı). In the
same year, the population exchange took place, the one in which my grandparents
left Ainos. In the central square of Ainos, a big celebration had been organised - much like our own ones in Greece - with
flags, grandstands, and children from schools reciting poems about
Mustafa Kemal and Turkey, and all these in the predominant presence of military
forces, which probably had to do with the location of Ainos at the border of the
political map of Turkey.
At
the end of the feast we walked around for a bit. There were a lot of
people in the village, mostly from Istanbul and Edirne, who were probably
originally from Ainos and had travelled especially for the holiday. After a while, we sat down in a restaurant to eat. We ordered meatballs, rice
and shepherd’s salad, my mother asked for Ayran, and I had a Coke. The well-dressed
waiter asked us where we were from and what we were doing on a day like this in
Ainos. I replied in Turkish that we were from Thessaloniki, but my grandfather
and grandmother were from Ainos, and we had come to see their place of origin.
The fact that we had come on the day of the holiday was coincidental. He stared
at us silently for a while. Then he sat down next to us and began to chronicle his
own story: his own father came from Thessaloniki, or from a village near there,
during the population exchange - I didn’t understand him very well as he was
speaking rather fast and my Turkish was quite rusty at this point. He himself
had never travelled to Thessaloniki: “It is that damn hard to get the EU Schengen
visa thing”... On my cellphone, I happened to have a background photo of the promenade
in Thessaloniki. I showed him the photo. He asked me to send it to him by MMS, and
I did so.
The (happy?)
coincidence of the national celebration and the conversation with the waiter
could make a beautiful scenario for a nostalgic film, similar to "Politiki
Kouzina" [“A touch of spice”, directed by Tassos Boulmetis in 2003].
However these events revealed a very obvious truth: Ainos is not a “home” for
me, like Thessaloniki is not a “home” for the waiter. Ainos is nothing more
than the imaginary topography of my family’s past, whose visible signs are
gone. This trip was for me a solution to my very personal concerns regarding
this invisible past. This trip helped me to clarify my personal and artistic
position and responsibility towards this village, which had taken on mythical proportions
in my childhood and later in my adult mind.
Ainos
is located on the political border between Turkey and Greece, which divides the
river Evros (in Turkish: Meriç). Ainos is one of the entry points for many undocumented
immigrants into Greece and at the same time the European Union. Recently I
traveled to Alexandroupolis with a German delegation as a translator and I had
the opportunity to talk to the guards, who describe in gruesome detail the
efforts of immigrants to cross the river. In their attempts to enter, many
drown, as their means of transport is extremely dangerous. Sometimes they are perceived
by thermal cameras installed on the Greek side and they are sent back. Once they
cross half the river and manage to get out alive, they are on “European” soil.
If they get caught, they are identified by FRONTEX, the European border police -
this identification is relative, since most come without any official documents
- and they are then kept for some time in the notorious detention centers for
immigrants, known in Greek as centers of “hospitality”. Once the lengthy
identification process is finished, they are released on the condition that
they return within one month to the country of their origin. (Bear in mind that the text was composed in 2012, so regulations concerning the EU migration and asylum policies may have been revised.].
Why would anyone return?. Most travel to Athens in order to find a way to get
into another European country, and their tracks are usually lost. Thus, this
place, which my grandparents yearned for, is today a tomb for many people with
basically the same story to tell as my grandparents: people who were forced to
leave their homeland or were expelled from it. These modern migration stories relativised
the story of my grandparents. On this very real basis, it felt right to act
artistically.
The
highest point of Ainos is dominated by the ruins of a Byzantine castle. From
the castle one has a panoramic view of the natural border created by the river
Evros. Next to the castle ruins I set up a camping tent and shot some black and
white analogue photography. I chose the castle for this artistic action.
Through the Byzantine aesthetic of the ruins, I wanted to situate the photograph
in space and time.
The Byzantine
castle of Ainos, photo: Persefoni Myrtsou
Panorama of
modern-day Ainos from the castle, photo: Persefoni Myrtsou
The
operation of setting up a tent in Ainos is invoking an ostensible and
simultaneously naive contemporary repatriation. Black and white film photography
was deliberately chosen, since such aesthetics allude to the one and only photograph
of Ainos that I found in the family archive - I found the very same picture on
the Internet later. This photo was probably distributed among many of the
residents of Ainos at the time before or after the exchange. In my own
photograph the item that confuses the romantic landscape of the old is the
modern camping tent. The tent is the simplest and cheapest that can be found in
its category on the market. Moreover it is a one-person tent. By selecting this
particular kind of tent, I wanted to give a personal and collective
interpretation of this work. On a personal level, the tent is a temporary form
of accommodation in the space: just like an archaeologist who is trying to
leave no trace at the place she was studying, I try to discover signs of my
family’s past in modern-day Ainos. The choice of a cheap tent as the key item of
the picutre is an act of self-sarcasm referring to my personal need for “repatriation”
- an idea inspired by a nationalistic rhetoric, which has been the scourge of
modern Greek identity - and to the discovery of my now-proven bogus roots.
The black and
white photo that I took while in the castle, photo: Persefoni Myrtsou
On a
collective level, the tent, installed on the border of this area between Greece
and Turkey, becomes a report on the living conditions of refugees, living a precarious
life forced on them, and the undesired uprooting many of them experience. Some
months ago, a journalist in Berlin told me that this action alludes to the
global "Occupy" movement, which also symbolically incorporated
camping tents in their actions. How would it be to “decentralise” such actions and
organise them in places like Ainos, exactly on the Greek-Turkish border,
instead of Wall Street in New York, the Bundestag in Berlin or Syntagma in
Athens?
In
conclusion, the fundamental objective of this project was to create a bridge
between the two stories of refugee phenomena that have occurred in this very
same area: one story from 1923, and the other from the present day. The river Evros
appears on the right-hand side of the picture. Greece is discernible beyond the
river. The country, which was regarded as a place of exile, while it became home
for my grandparents and for many other refugees after 1923, has been
transformed today into a graveyard and, in the best case scenario, into a
transit station for another prosperous country in “Europe” and at the same time
into the first station of hope for a better life.
Selected Bibliography
Anderson,
Benedict, 1983, Imagined
Communities, Verso, London 2006
Auge, Marc, 1992,
Non‐Places. An introduction to
supermodernity, Verso, London‐New York 2008
Bourriaud,
Nicolas, 2009, The
Radicant, Lukas and Sternberg, New York 2010
Brewer, David,
2010, Greece. The Hidden
Centuries. Turkish Rule from the Fall of Constantinople to
Greek Independence, I.B. Tauris,
London‐New York
Chambers, Iain,
1994, Migrancy, culture,
identity, Routhledge, New York und Oxon 2005
Charim, Isolde,
Auer Borea, Gertraud (Εκ.), 2012,
Lebensmodell Diaspora. Uber moderne Nomaden,
Transcript
Verlag, Bielefeld
Hikmet, Nazım,
1925, Die Luft ist
schwer wie Blei, Dagyeli Verlag, Berlin 2000
Hirschhorn, Renee
(Hg.), 2003, Crossing
the Aegean. An Appraisal of the 1923 compulsory
population exchange between Greece and Turkey, Berghan Books,
New York und Oxford
Kristeva, Julia,
1991, Stangers to
ourselves, Columbia University Press, New York
Mahn, Churnjeet
Kaur, 2009 “Romance in Ruins, Ethnography and the problem with Modern
Greeks“, in Victorian
Studies, Vol., 51, No. 1
Özkirimli, Umut;
Sofos, Spyros, 2008, Tormented by History. Nationalism in Greece and Turkey,
Kataniotis, Athens [Edition in Greek]
Said, Edward, 1979,
Orientalism, Vintage Books, New York
Todorova, Maria,
1997, Imagining the
Balkans, Epikentro, Thessaloniki [Editon in Greek]
Ζαφείρης, Χρίστος [Zafiris,
Christos], 2008, Μνήμης Οδοιπορία, Ανατολική Θράκη [A wayfaring of memory, Eastern Thrace], Epikentro, Thessaloniki [title
translated by Persefoni Myrtsou]
Just as Ainos is not a home for Persefoni, Wellington is not my home either. Waxing lyrical about Wellington will not make is any more part of the topography of own family. But not all the visible signs of my family's past are gone. Apart from my mother's grave, our former family home (below) is still in the same state that it was when we sold it.
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