The National Emergency Response Mechanism (NERM) is nominated for the award for best provider of social services in Europe, and a public vote to choose the winner is now open.

NERM, the flagship mechanism of the General Secretariat for Vulnerable Persons and Institutional Protection of the Ministry of Migration and Asylum is among the nominees for the "2024 European Social Services Awards ", following a presentation of its work at the European Social Services Conference.

We count on your vote to highlight the positive results of cooperation between the state and civil society.

Throughout its four years of operation, NERM has been a day-to-day example of excellent cooperation between the two, to ensure the best interest of children. NERM was established following a joint initiative of the Special Secretariat for the Protection of Unaccompanied Minors (now the General Secretariat for Vulnerable Persons and Institutional Protection) of the Ministry of Migration and Asylum and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and has already received several distinctions as it has rescued thousands of children, adolescents and vulnerable persons from organised crime.

After having received the European Crime Prevent Award (ECPA) for the prevention of trafficking in human beings, NERM was again recognised as a good practice, earning Greece a prestigious place on the Interreg Europe 2021-2027 website.

Now the time has come again to acknowledge the work of NERM.

Public vote has been open since 1 October and will close on 21 October 2024.

You can vote for NERM in the Collaborative Practice category at the link: https://essa-eu.org/vote-2024/

Let's all vote for another international success for Greece.

Source: Ministry of Migration and Asylum

The post Public vote for NERM as the best social service provider in Europe has opened appeared first on Greek News Agenda.

Angelos Dalachanis is a Researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and is based at the Institute of Early Modern and Modern History in Paris. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the European University Institute, Florence, and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University and at the French School at Athens. His research interests include the history of migration, labor and Greek diaspora in the Eastern Mediterranean in the modern period. He is the author of "The Greek Exodus from Egypt: Diaspora Politics and Emigration, 1937–1962" (2017) and co-editor with Vincent Lemire of "Ordinary Jerusalem, 1840-1940: Opening New Archives, Revisiting a Global City" (2018).

Angelos Dalachanis spoke to Rethinking Greece* on the socio-economic characteristics of the Greek community in Egypt and in Jerusalem, the Greek 'exodus' of the early 1960s and how it relates to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the collapse of colonial empires, and the Cold War; the complex relations between the diasporic communities and the Greek state, and finally, the challenges the Greek diaspora communities face now in the wider area of the Middle East. As far a a more dynamic Greek presence in the Middle East is concerned, he emphasizes the role Greek Universities can play, by giving more grants to students from the area so that they can come and study in Greece, and utilizing the human capital of numerous students from Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iran and other Middle Eastern countries that have studied in Greek Universities over the last decades. He concludes that "to rethink the Greek presence in the Middle East, we need historical knowledge of the region and its people, as well as a strong imagination and an unbiased attitude".

Greeks were the largest community of foreigners living in Egypt during the first half of the 20th century. How big was the Greek community in Egypt and what were its socio-economic characteristics?

Indeed, the Greek community was the largest foreign community in Egypt during the 19th century and until the mid-20th century, followed by the Italians. The Greek population fluctuated in the course of this period, reaching its peak in the late 1920s, after the arrival in Egypt of Greek refugees from Asia Minor. At that time, according to official statistics, there were approximately 77,000 Greek nationals living in Egypt, while the total population of Egypt was over 14 million. Just before the exodus of the early 1960s, the number of Greek citizens had already dropped to about 48,000, while the Egyptian population had almost doubled, approaching 26 million.

Other numbers that still surface from time to time in the public debate, and sometimes in the historical literature about the demographic power of the Greeks in Egypt, are based on arbitrary estimates, and always show the community to be much bigger than it appeared in the census. Many explanations can be given for the difference between official statistics and estimates. But there’s one explanation I would like to insist on. This difference is largely due to theuncertainty about who could be considered Greek in Egypt:Was it only those who were citizens of the Greek state?Those of Greek origin? The Orthodox Christians who spoke Greek? So, it is important to emphasize here that neither the census takers nor the Greek diplomatic authorities and communities had a clear picture of the exact number of the Greek population in Egypt, because it was not clear exactly who constituted this community. Even though we consider Greeks a single entity, the boundaries of the community were not firmly defined, but were fluid and constantly changing.

One thing is for sure. Even though Greeks never exceeded 0.6% of the overall population of Egypt in the early 20th century, their economic power however was immense, mostly because of the Greek economic elites’ dominant place in the cotton and banking sectors. This of course doesn’t mean that all Greeks of Egypt were rich; quite the opposite.

Most Greeks arrived in Egypt in the 19th and early 20th century as migrants. Initially, this movement concerned big merchants andtraders who were part of the Greek merchant diaspora around the Mediterraneanand Black Sea. In Egypt, they established nodes of extensivecommercial networks, encouraged by Muhammad Ali, the leader of Egyptfrom 1805 to 1848, who favored their settlement. Later, migration to Egypt also took the form of a mass movement of labor, as in the case of thousands of Dodecanese islanders who came to work on the construction of the Suez Canal. The newly arrived Greeks settled not only in Cairo and Alexandria, but also inhabited the old town of Suez and the newly founded cities across the Suez Canal area, Port Said and Ismailia, and penetrated theinterior, namely the cities of the Nile Delta such as Mansoura, Tanta, andZagazig, and also Upper Egypt.

Greek migrants who arrived in Egyptbecame engaged in a wide range of economic activities. The big Alexandrian cotton merchants and other entrepreneurs (Georgios Averoff, Emmanuel Benakis, Konstantinos Salvagos and others), who are now mostly known for their activities as benefactors, constituted only an extremely small part of the community. The economic elites greatly profited by the regime of the Capitulations and the British semi-colonial presence in Egypt after 1882. The Capitulations were bilateral agreements between the Ottoman Empire and individual states that regulated the rights and special privileges of foreigners within the empire, including Egypt. When in 1940 the Greek consulates conducted a survey on the professional activities of Greeks they revealed an interesting social stratification: the “clerks” constituted the majority of the workforce, which amounted to 33.5% of it. They were followed by the technicians (13.2 %), handicraft laborers (12.8 %), and the various shopkeepers (7.8%), while several other professions such as artists, waiters, teachers and professors, drivers, nurses, doctors, and all kind of liberal professions amounted to just over a quarter of the workforce. Finally, the upper middle class and the big bourgeois of the community—merchants and industrialists, various businessmen, landowners, and rentiers—accounted for 6.6%.We should not forget that the community also contained a significant number of destitute people with very low or no income at all. If the magnates mentioned above were involved in charitable activities (soup kitchens, orphanages, hospitals, etc), it was because there was a real need for them. In fact, there were people who relied on such practices for their survival.

In terms of context, there are similarities between Palestine and Egypt: both are Arab provinces under Ottoman rule, the majority of the population is Muslim, and they are under strong European influence, especially British, until the mid-20th century. Nevertheless, there are obvious differences between these two settings: Palestine did not have a significant port and Jerusalem was not a major merchant city, nor was it built around fertile grounds to attract rich merchants, or big landowners, as it happened with Egyptian cities. Even though itinerant workers from Egypt moved to Palestine for the construction of major development projects (such as the Palestine Railways) this did not result into permanent settlement. Moreover, Egypt had a high degree of autonomy from the Sublime Porte, and the Capitulations were extremely favourable to foreigners, more than in any other place of the Ottoman Empire.

The Greeks in Jerusalem tell us a somewhat different story from that of Greeks in Egypt. The Greek presence in Jerusalem has been invariably related to the existence of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, which is the oldest Christian institution in the Holy Land, the principal custodian of the Christian sacred shrines, and one of the most important non-state landowners in what is now Palestine and Israel. Greek and Palestinian Arab sub-communitiesformed the clergy and the congregation.Palestinian Arabs always formed the largest part of the Greek Orthodox congregation in Jerusalem, while Greeks constituted a small minority. However, due to historical factors, the Greek clergy always controlled the Brotherhood of the HolySepulchre, and thus the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate.

Beginning in the 1840s, European powers opened consulates in Jerusalem and the city attracted people who were for the most part religious, but also Greek migrants from the Ottoman Empire and Greece. In demographic terms the Greek population in Jerusalem reached its peak at the end of World War II with 1,500 people out of a population of about 165,000. Despite its small size, the symbolic capital of the Greek community was large, due to the spiritual and economic importance of the Patriarchate. Jerusalem’s Greek economic elites consisted mostly of liberal professionals and were not comparable with the strong economic elites in Egypt. There were, however, links and connections between Jerusalem and Alexandria, mainly through the religious networks between the Jerusalem and Alexandria patriarchates. Some of the most prominent figures of the Greek community in Egypt, who spoke Arabic and actively participated in the community’s intellectual life, had studied at the theological school of the Monastery of the Cross in Jerusalem. The best known example is Najib Michail Sa‘ati, a Greek Orthodox Arab born in Jerusalem in 1885, who translated and adapted the spelling of his name into Greek Eugenios-Michailidis when he moved to Alexandria in 1912 and became a prominent figure of Greek intellectual life in Egypt. Ηe is included in Despina Sevastopoulou’s 1950 book on “The Alexandria that is leaving” among other biographies of “Alexandrians of the last 50 years”, and his case is conceptualised in a recent article by professor Antony Gorman.

What were the main factors that made the Greeks of Egypt gradually leave the country? Conventional wisdom connects the 'Greek exodus' to the nationalization of many industries in 1961 and 1963 by the Nasser regime, but your research shows that there were other factors at play as well. 

You are absolutely right in saying that Greeks left Egypt only gradually. People often leave one place to find a better future in another, and those Greeks who left Egypt did so because they were convinced that the country offered them no future or because they had better prospects elsewhere.

Greeks always left Egypt either after fulfilling the objectives that had driven them to emigrate there, or in times of economic crisis. In the post-war setting though, something fundamentally changed. Greeks stopped migrating to Egypt because it became more difficult to enter the country and opportunities for work and wealth dwindled.

The mass departure of Greeks did take place in the early 1960s, but the dismantling of the structural components that linked the Greek presence to Egypt had begun years ago. The most important structural change was the abolition of the capitulation privileges that foreigners had been enjoying in Egypt until 1937. The capitulations protected Greeks and other foreigners by exempting them from almost all taxes and guaranteeing freedom of movement and commerce. Moreover, they granted immunity from legal and judicial control. As long as the Capitulations were in effect, Egypt had no right to promulgate laws relating to foreign citizens, over whom Egyptian courts had no jurisdiction. The results of the abolition of the Capitulations in real life were not always immediately perceived.

The domination of foreigners as a result of the Capitulations and the British presence had not only economic and political but also cultural aspects. It led to a superiority complex toward the Egyptian population, apparent in the reluctance of the majority of Greeks to acquire fluency in Arabic. In other words, they refused to integrate into Egyptian society to any significant extent, as well as to “converse” with the Egyptian state, especially since after Arabic language had become one of the basic tools of Egyptian nationalism, and its use had been extended to all aspects of public life through the 1940s and the 1950s.

So, yes the nationalizations of the early 1960s did indeed take place and played a role, but they did not happen like a bolt from the blue. Measures associated with the process of transforming Egypt from an autonomous Ottoman province under European control into an independent nation-state, were taken also before the coup of 1952 and the ascent of Nasser to power, and contributed to Greeks’ decision to leave Egypt. Historians must expand the picture in terms of time and space in order to understand complex phenomena such as the Greeks’ definitive departure from Egypt. In doing so, it becomes clear that the departure of Greeks was not an isolated phenomenon, but part of broader population movements, relatedto three different historical developments: the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the collapse of colonial empires, and the Cold War.

You mention that many diasporic communities historically preceded the emergence of the Greek national state, which complicated relations between the new Greek state and “it’s” Diaspora. How have these relations evolved over the years?         

The demographic power of the Greek nation and the geography of the Greek state have never been in complete agreement. Despite the fact that quite a number of Greeks live outside Greece since the foundation of the Greek state, the state has never developed a stable and consistent policy towards the Greek Diaspora. And despite the pompous statements of governmental and non-governmental actors who speak of an «ecumenical Hellenism», the Greek State does not treat all Greeks outside its borders in the same way. Its concern for the diaspora is determined by its own needs: the presence of Greeks in the territories of the Ottoman Empire, for example, supported the irredentist doctrine of the Great Idea and the need for geographical expansion. After 1922 and until the end of the Second World War, interest in the diaspora was limited. Diaspora interest was strengthened again by the need for reconstruction after WWII and was greatly renewed in the 1970s after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and in the 1990s when the Macedonian issue came to the fore again.

The state turned its gaze in the most beneficial direction for itself, depending on circumstances: either to the East until 1922 or to the West in the post-war period.However, apart from the general geographical orientation, the institutional, political and economic aspects of relations between the state and the diaspora were mostly based on personal strategies and initiatives that rarely went beyond the period of one governmental or ministerial term, or one generation on the part of the expatriate community.

For Greece, it is itself at the centre, and the expatriate community revolves around it. But for many members of the Greek diaspora, this is not necessarily the case. Over time, numerous Greeks of the diaspora did not treat Greece as their sole or even major point of reference. For instance, there are cases of Ottoman Greeks who decided to migrate to the US, France and other Western countries without ever passing through Greece. Similarly, only approximately half of the Greeks who left Egypt moved to Greece. The rest moved to Diaspora settings all over the world, to Africa, Western Europe, Oceania and the Americas. For these people, the homeland was and is more of a cultural, imaginative space. But if we consider that “Hellenism has no borders”, as the Atlas Larousse illustré wrote back in 1901, for the additional reason that it is an imaginary space, we cannot disregard the fact of its multiple centers, both political (the Greek state) and religious or other symbolic (Istanbul, Jerusalem, Alexandria). So, the point of reference is not always and not solely Greece but areas in Asia Minor, Egypt, Palestine and other regions, mainly in the Eastern Mediterranean, where Greek populations lived for a long time.

What are the challenges the Greek diaspora communities face now in the wider area of the Middle East? 

Each country of the Middle East has its own specificities. For instance, the Greek population of Egypt has three main components today: those who are descendants of the old flourishing communities and never abandoned Egypt; newly arrived expatriates who work for Greek or other western companies for a certain period of time; and clergymen and people close to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria.

Each of these sub-communities faces different challenges. I would say that the Greek secular presence, whose roots go back to the old Greek community of Egypt, is most at risk. Demographic decline and lack of proper education are the most important challenges. There are very few Greeks living in Egypt nowadays and the use of the Greek language is decreasing day by day. The Greek state, and especially the Ministry of Education, has a central role to play here. It should strengthen the educational structures in the area and listen more carefully to the demands of the communities. As for the demographic problem of Greeks in the broader area, we should probably reconsider who is a Greek in the Middle East and who can become Greek or come closer to the Greek communities.

Examples like that of Eugenios Michailidis, which I mentioned earlier, can show us how to envisage these relations in the future. You know, hundreds, maybe thousands of students from Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iran and other Middle Eastern countries have studied in Greek Universities over the last decades. Accordingly, thousands of immigrants who have lived and worked in Greece for many years have returned to their countries. Are there any significant efforts by the Greek state or other associations to maintain relations with these people after they return to their homeland? I strongly doubt it.

However, these people often have a solid knowledge of the Greek language and modern Greek reality. Some of them have been married to Greeks. The Greek state should establish ties with them and make them unofficial ambassadors of Greece, so that the country can play a more energetic cultural and economic role in the Eastern Mediterranean. More grants should be given to students from the area so that they can come and study in Greece. Greek universities have always been a hub for people from the region, but the Greek state traditionally has shown indifference to them. So, instead of providing golden visas and citizenship to people with controversial economic and moral status, because they pay a few thousand euros, we should find ways to exploit the human and cultural capital which is already there. These people should be creatively integrated into the actual communities and create the Greek communities of the future. To rethink the Greek presence in the Middle East, we need historical knowledge of the region and its people, as well as a strong imagination and an unbiased attitude. This will also help us rethink Greece and the ways in which migrant and refugee populations from the Middle East can be integrated into our country and become part of the Greek nation.

The post Rethinking Greece l Angelos Dalachanis on the Greek Diaspora in Egypt and the Middle East appeared first on Greek News Agenda.

Alexander Kitroeff is Professor of History at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, where he has been teaching courses on Modern European and Mediterranean history since 1996. His research interests focus on nationalism, enthicity and identity in modern Greece and the Diaspora, across a broad spectrum, from politics to sports. His recent publications include Greek Orthodoxy in America: A Modern History (2020), The Greeks and the Making of Modern Egypt (2019). He has also collaborated with film director Maria Iliou as historical consultant in several documentary films -such as Smyrna 1922: the Destruction of a Cosmopolitan City- and more recently “Athens From East to West, 1821-1896”  the first of a 5-part series on the city’s modern history. He is currently working on an project on the history of the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (AHEPA) to mark the organization’s centenary in 2022.

Alexander Kitroeff spoke to Rethinking Greece* on the Greek Diaspora communities in the United States, Egypt and their common characteristics around the world; how the Orthodox church became the most important Greek American institution, Philhellenism in the US during the Greek Revolution of 1821 and now; how Greek Diaspora has influenced the history of host countries around the world; the centrality of ancient Greece in diasporic identity and finally, how Athens could recognize the Diaspora's attachment to the home country and their achievements by establishing a Diaspora museum.

Your latest book is on the modern history of the Greek Orthodox Church in America. Could you briefly walk us through how the Orthodox Church became such an important Greek American institution? Does it still hold this role today?

Orthodoxy is a cornerstone of Greek identity so it follows that the Church would play a role in shaping the Greek experience in the United States, but its significance was also due to its sophisticated infrastructure. Churches and community organizations were the first ethnic associations established by the Greek immigrants that began arriving en masse to the United States beginning in the late 19th century. The creation of a governing body of Greek Orthodoxy in America, the Archdiocese which was established in 1921 and officially recognized in 1922 helped strengthen the role of the Church in the United States. But it was the arrival of Archbishop Athenagoras in 1931 that set the Church on course to becoming the most important Greek American institution. Athenagoras strengthened the role of local parish organizations and gave them the responsibility to administer the Greek language schools and to initiate philanthropic activities through the local Women’s Philoptochos organizations. From then on, the parish replaced the community organization as the hub of Greek American cultural and social life and has remained so since then because its managed to adapt so as to serve the needs of the increasingly Americanized faithful.

 

You recently published a book on the Greeks of Egypt, the largest and most economically powerful European community in that country from the early 19th century to the 1960s. How important were their contributions to modern Egypt?

The Greeks of Egypt contributed to Egypt’s economy in all three phases of its evolution. In the first one, when the focus was overly concentrated on exporting cotton, beyond their role as cotton merchants and bankers, the Greeks also provided important know how as agronomists. They also helped the economy by manufacturing the world renowned “Egyptian cigarette” and by also introducing paper manufacturing, wine production as well as the production of range of beverages, confectionaries and foodstuffs. When Egypt embarked on a sustained effort to diversify its economy and create a large manufacturing sector, the Greeks contributed by investing in textile mills, construction companies and build factories that produced oil and soap from cotton. In the second half of the 20th century when the Egyptianization of the economy began the Greeks remained economically active in partnership with Egyptians until the nationalizations in the 1960s forced them to leave.

We have all heard about the American Dream. Are the any distinct aspects to the “Greek American” dream and how has it changed in the last decades?

The concept of the American Dream is a highly idealized concept that anyone can achieve success in America, that regardless of social or ethnic origin anyone can achieve success through sustained effort and hard work. Although this myth has not applied to anyone, nonetheless, compared to many other societies, America does reward innovation and inventiveness and adheres to meritocracy. This provided extraordinary opportunities to the Greek immigrants throughout the twentieth century and there are countless of success stories. A few are about the first-generation Greek-born immigrants such as Spyros Skouras who left a mountain village in Peloponnesos and became president of twentieth Century Fox in Hollywood. Most success stories involve primarily the children of the immigrants who benefitted from the work of their parents, were educated and achieved success. Among them are former presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, U.S. Senator Paul Sarbanes and businessmen and philanthropists such as George Behrakis, Michael Jaharis, Angelo Tsakopoulos and Roy P. Vagelos among many others.

Studies have shown that the embrace of market economics from the 1980s onwards have slowly eroded the chances Americans from underprivileged backgrounds have of achieving a version of the American Dream. But Greek Americans who can attain a good education still have the potential of gaining economic and social prominence.

Do you find that there are common characteristics among the Greek Diaspora communities around the world?

Yes, I believe there are common characteristics among diaspora communities. In settling in a foreign country both in the past and the present, the Greek knows that he or she cannot rely on the support of a big powerful country as is the case of American, British, French and Italian expatriates for example. This is despite the excellent quality of the Greek Consular services around the world. Therefore, the Greek immigrant takes care to adapt to the conditions in the host countries and to also observe the laws. Yet at the same time the Greek carries with him or her the experiences of living in Greece where rules and regulations are more loosely applied, where bureaucracy and red tape force one to find loopholes or rely on political connections and personal networks.

Thus, the Greek immigrant is in a position to both play by the rules and when needed to find ways to resolve issue through creativity and imagination. By the same token, the Greek takes care to establish good relations with the citizens of the host country, even when they held a relatively more privileged position as was the case in Egypt and several African countries. Many diaspora Greeks throughout history have played the role of economic and cultural middlemen.

A second common characteristic is the reliance on family ties which is a reflection of one of the pre-modern features of Greece that survived into the modern era and was carried abroad by its emigrants. The assumption and acceptance that the family is a closely knit unit benefits family-run businesses such as restaurants and provides a support mechanism. And if the diaspora family can evolve away from its traditional patriarchal structures it can play an even more helpful role for all its members.

A third important characteristic is the universally strong connection Greeks abroad feel for both their particular place of origin and for Greece. The first is another relic of traditional society in which the primary allegiances after the family was the village or island. A little bit like the family this works both ways, as a means of networking and a support mechanism but can also engender undue insularity and even suspicion of outsiders. More straightforward is the attachment to the country. This is strengthened by the continued geopolitical uncertainties and threats Greece faces, which elicit a deep attachment and concern about Greece and its general wellbeing, even among second and third generation Greeks abroad.

Philhellenism was ubiquitous in the US public sphere during the onset of the Greek Revolution in the 1820s. What is the significance of the Greek Revolution for Americans and Greek Americans today?

Americans identified with the Greeks during the revolution of 1821 because they saw close parallels with their War of Independence against the British, and they sympathized with a Christian people fighting for their religious freedom, with fellow white civilians who were suffering at the hands of a barbaric enemy. Because of its foreign policy interests, embodied in the Monroe Doctrine of non-intervention in European affairs, the United States did not offer diplomatic or military aid to Greece. But this unleashed a huge wave of humanitarian support that swept through the country and has been described as the “Greek Fire.”

Because this was a social movement focused on benevolence and philanthropic aid offered to the Greeks, it legitimized the involvement of women, and this was the first time they became so heavily involved in a public issue. The solidarity movement with Greece, that took the form of creating committees throughout the country aimed at gathering funds and supplies to the Greeks, prepared the ground for the movement for the abolition of slavery. This was the second major humanitarian issue that dominated American life in the ensuing decades, and thus the earlier involvement for the Greek cause provided a training ground for the abolitionists among whom many were women.

The significance of America’s support for the Greek revolution functions, for all Americans as a reminded of the legacy of humanitarian support that the United States has offered peoples throughout the world. While other forms of U.S. involvement abroad have been controversial, the humanitarian impulse that was expressed in reaction to the 1821 revolution and other similar events around the world stands out as a beacon that shines a light on the good sides of America’s global reach. And the same applies to Greek Americans, they can also learn from America’s support of 1821 and understand that the common interests of Greece and the United States are especially significant when they are built upon the principles of humanitarianism and of mutual respect.

In a recent presentation you outlined some modern historical perspectives that examine the Greek Revolution through the prism of American history, such as the research on Philhellenism and the Development of Female-led Reform in the United States. Could you talk to us about these approaches?

Inevitably, the earliest historiographic approaches to topics such as the Greek diaspora or relations between Greece and countries that have hosted the Greek diaspora were conceived as basic history recounting the main events. In the case of diaspora histories I am thinking of the works by Greek diplomat Athanasios Polites on the Greeks in Egypt, and of the work of scholars such as Theodore Saloutos and Charles Moskos on the Greeks of America. And among the earliest studies on American philanthropy towards Greece were those by George G. Arnakis on 1821 and Louis P. Cassimatis on the help Americans offered Greece in the wake of the 1922 Asia Minor Disaster.

Based on those valuable foundations, a new generation of historians are employing new perspectives that examine Greece and its diaspora through a lens that takes into account the dynamics of hist societies such as the United States and on the significance that gender, race and social class. For example, American philhellenism examined as a phenomenon that not only affects Greece but also America. Other example would be focusing on the position of women or on how racial discrimination in America both benefitted and harmed Greek immigrants. Overall, it is a way of understanding the past as a transnational, global process. The impact of 1821 on American society is just one example.

I can think of others along the lines of the title of my recent book “The Greeks and the Making of Modern Egypt.” We can have studies on how the Greeks helped make the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany and other countries. And studies of how other major events such as the Asia Minor Disaster affected other countries and elicited their responses. Greece and its diaspora in other words have a global significance and that is a story we need to start narrating.

In your 2004 book “Wrestling with Ancients” you talk about Greeks’ multi-faceted relationship with antiquity and with the way other nations view Greece through a history of the modern Olympics. Seventeen years later, how do you think Modern Greek identity and our relationship with antiquity has evolved?

My book on Greek identity and the Olympics appeared six months before the opening of the Athens Olympics of 2004. Based on Greece’s historically close association with the Olympics and the significance of Ancient Greece for Greek identity, I predicted that Athens would host the Games successfully. And that is what happened. Unfortunately, as soon as the international spotlight moved away from Greece, the authorities did nothing to capitalize on the spirit Greece had displayed and it also failed to find ways to reimagine and use the athletic facilities that had been built for the Olympics. But this was a failure of governance, not an indication that antiquity was somehow now being discounted. Indeed, the opening of the New Acropolis Museum in 2009 confirmed the continued pride the Greeks have for their ancient past and the continuity with it that they embrace.

And speaking about the close relationship of the Modern Greeks with their Classical era ancestry, we should note how this relationship is also very strong in the Greek diaspora. Naturally, Greek immigrants around the world invoke their connections with Ancient Greece not only because it is part of their identity but also because it enhances their status. Nonetheless this relationship remains strong and it is expressed clearly in many ways, as for example the concern Greek Americans have shown at times when Classical studies in U.S. higher education have been threatened.

Indeed, the diaspora’s attachment to Ancient Greece is an important reason why Athens functions as the unofficial capital of the Greek diaspora. Most Greeks living abroad originated from the provinces where conditions were more difficult than those in the cities. But for them Athens is Greece’s window to the world and they are attached to it. Many public buildings in Athens such as the Polytechnic, the old National Library and the Zappeion Hall were funded by diaspora merchants in the 19th century. When travel back to the homeland became easier, diaspora Greeks when they return to Greece, aside from going to their villages or islands they stay in Athens, visiting government officials, laying a wreath at the monument to the unknown soldier, visiting institutions they have funded such as hospitals. Major diaspora organizations such as AHEPA regularly hold their conferences or conventions in Athens.

What I would like to see would be for Athens to honor and recognize the diaspora’s strong attachment to it by establishing a diaspora museum. It could house exhibits showcasing the lives and the achievements of the Greeks around the world. Such a building would serve as a cultural bridge between the Greeks abroad and the Greeks of Greece, bring them together and help them understand each other together. And it would remind everyone that Athens is not only the city with the Parthenon and not only the capital of Greece but the capital of world Hellenism.

*Interview by: Ioulia Livaditi

The post Rethinking Greece | Alexander Kitroeff: “Greek Diaspora has affected the history of host countries around the world” appeared first on Greek News Agenda.

Smooth integration and coexistence between refugees and local communities are the main goals of the HELIOS project recently launched in Greece, as the country in recent years has been receiving thousands of migrants and refugees with a peak during 2015-2016.

The HELIOS project is implemented by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in cooperation with the Ministry of Migration and Asylum and the funding of the Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs of the European Commission (DG Home).

The main pillars of the project include accommodation support, Greek language courses and employability support as the inclusion of refugees to the Greek society are for the benefit of both sides. In close collaboration with national authorities and experienced Partners the HELIOS project supports the integration of beneficiaries of international protection currently residing in temporary accommodation schemes into the Greek society, through the following components:

• Integration Courses: Conduction of Integration Courses within Integration Learning Centres set-up across Greece consisting of modules on Greek language learning, cultural orientation, job readiness and life skills.
• Accommodation support: Supporting beneficiaries towards independent accommodation in apartments rented on their name.
• Employability support: Provision of individual employability and job readiness support, including through job counseling, access to job-related certifications and networking with private employers.
• Integration monitoring: Regular assessment of the integration progress of the beneficiaries to ensure that they will be in a position to confidently navigate through Greek public service providers once they will exit from the HELIOS project and start living independently in Greece.

Photo: IOM FB page 

The objective of the project is to increase beneficiaries’ prospects towards self-reliance supporting them in becoming active members of the Greek society, while establishing an integration mechanism for beneficiaries of international protection.

According to IOM data from July 2019 up today, 18,947 recognized refugees have enrolled in the HELIOS project, while 6,115 of them have signed new lease agreements for apartments rented in their own name. It is worth to highlight that from June 2020 - after the decision for the exit of recognized refugees from the accommodation facilities - until 9 October, 4,428 beneficiaries of the project have been registered with new rental contracts.

The project also includes a program of sensitization of the host community through the organization of workshops, activities and events, the production of a nationwide media campaign to create exchange occasions between the hosting and the hosted communities, while highlighting the value of the integration of migrants into the Greek society.

Integration efforts through education and training are essential not only for refugee’s inclusion in Greek society but also in every EU country where they could be relocated, in the future. Effective management of migration and asylum policies in the EU also depends on the effective social inclusion of refugees and migrants through the osmosis with the European societies participating and contributing to the well-being of the communities ensuring thus the social cohesion.

The new EU pact on Migration and Asylum

A new pact on Migration and Asylum was proposed on the 23rd of September by the European Commission requiring approval by the European Parliament and member states at the European Council. The proposal sets out improved and faster procedures throughout the asylum and migration system and makes efforts to set in balance the principles of fair sharing of responsibility and solidarity. Through improving cooperation between the countries of origin and transit, ensuring effective procedures as well as successful integration of refugees and return of those with no right to stay, European Commission’s proposal is trying to introduce a comprehensive European approach to migration.

Greece during negotiations on Commission’s proposal -as a frontline country like Italy or Spain still bearing the brunt of migrant/refugee’s arrivals- will support its fundamental positions asking for mandatory relocations and solidarity insisting on fair sharing of the burden between all the member states that will balance the responsibility borne by the first host countries.

Read more on GNA

Refugees in Greece: Integration efforts, remaining challenges
“Face forward... into my home” | Portraits and stories of refugees in Athens
EU-UNHCR Launch Housing Scheme for Refugees in Greece

I.E.

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Commissioner Johansson had actually had the opportunity to meet with Minister for Migration and Asylum Panagiotis Mitarachi earlier on that same day; following that meeting, they announced the creation of a temporary framework for the voluntary return of 5000 migrants that arrived on Greek islands before January 1 2020. This framework will offer an incentive of 2000 euros to each participating individual currently residing in reception centres, with funding from the EU. Returns will be implemented in cooperation with the International Organization for Migration and FRONTEX.

The Greek government’s global approach to the European migration crisis was anew firmly stated during the Council of EU Ministers of Justice and Home Affairs in Brussels the following day, March 13 2020. The Greek side made clear that for a solution to the migration crisis to be viable, it has to be based on the foundational principles of fairness and solidarity among member-states. Along these lines, Greek representative Alternate Minister for Migration and Asylum Giorgos Koumoutsakos spoke on behalf of all frontline member-states, which are Greece, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, and Malta. Mr Koumoutsakos expressed their common concerns and views. These suggestions first of all address the creation of an efficient system for the management of normal migration flows, as well as sudden surges. Secondly, the creation of a common framework for the return of migrants. In a long-term perspective, the Greek side stressed the need for a common system for the distribution and the prompt evaluation of asylum applications, beyond their current concentration in frontline countries as prescribed by the Dublin regulation. The recent external threats on the eastern Greek borders also rendered urgent the further enhancement of European external borders, including supplementary funding, ad hoc interventions, border patrolling cooperation, anti-trafficking initiatives, humanitarian aid initiatives and cooperation in migrant returns. Finally, Greece stressed the increased importance that legal migration and social integration should hold in the elaboration of any future EU migration policy.

*Intro Photo: Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis discusses with European Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson at the Maximos Mansion in Athens, March 12 2020 (Source: AMNA/Dimitris Papamitsos)

D.G.

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Angela Ralli is Professor of General Linguistics at the Department of Philology of the University of Patras and director of the Laboratory of Modern Greek Dialects. Since 2013, she is an ordinary member of the Academia Europaea. Professor Ralli completed her undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Montreal, where she also received her Phd. Her main area of expertise is theoretical morphology, particularly Greek morphology and its dialectal variation. Angela Ralli is particularly active in the field of preserving language heritage. In this framework, she has conducted research expeditions to South Italy, Pontus, Cappadocia, Cunda (former Moschonisi) and Aivali (today's Ayvalik) and has documented linguistic systems which are on the way to extinction. More recently, Professor Ralli received a Niarchos foundation grant (New York branch) to investigate and document the history and language of Greek immigrants in Canada, in collaboration with colleagues from three Canadian Universities, McGill, York and Simon Fraser. This led to the research project IMMIGREC and a virtual museum on Greek migration to Canada of the same name. Greek News Agenda* had the opportunity to interview Professor Ralli on IMMIGREC, as well as current linguistic developments among Greek-Canadians.

The IMMIGREC project is an ambitious collective effort with multiple goals that brought together four universities, three Canadian and a Greek one. Could you provide us with a brief overview of the project, its implementation, as well as the synergies made possible within its context?

The project Immigration and Language in Canada. Greeks and Greek-Canadians (ImmiGrec, see https://immigrec.com) sponsored by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, was implemented with the cooperation οf McGill, Simon Fraser University, York University and the University of Patras. The project’s main aim was to document and investigate the history and language of Greek immigrants in Canada between 1945 and 1975, a period which has seen the bulk of Greek immigration. It covered a unique interdisciplinary field that links history and social history with linguistics and sociolinguistics. For this purpose, the research teams of, mainly, the three Canadian universities collected material from Greek-speaking communities across Canada, both oral (350 hours of narratives about the experiences of first-generation Greek immigrants) and printed (letters, newspaper clippings, photos, etc.), following the rules and regulations of scientific ethics and the protection of personal data. The data were registered in an electronic repository and then integrated into a specially designed electronic database, while a small part of the collected material supplied the exhibits of a digital museum (https://virtual.immigrec.com). All electronic tools were designed and developed at the University of Patras. The linguistic analysis of the available data led to the publication of a volume (see Ralli 2019) and a number of articles on the issue of the Greek language spoken in Canada by first-generation immigrants.[1]

This project has addressed two main topics that narrate the historical experience of Greeks in Canada, while placing particular emphasis on language. The first relates to the stance of Greek Canadian communities towards the official policies of the Canadian state regarding language. For instance, the bilingual characteristics of Canadian society in the province of Québec have created an exceptional situation for Greek immigrants that had to compete with two unknown languages, English and French.

The second derives from the particular characteristics of Greek Canadian communities, since more than 80% of the postwar immigrants were sponsored or nominated by relatives or co-villagers already settled in Canada (Chimbos 1999).[2] The vast majority of Greek immigrants in Canada came from rural and working-class backgrounds, as it is indicated in the predominance of unskilled labor in the early stages of their life and settlement in Canada. Their social background defined their distance from the official language of the Greek state at the time of their departure from Greece, that is, katharevousa, a “purified”, according to Ancient Greek standards, version of Modern Greek, which was often reproduced in diaspora by the prominent community members, official publications and the representatives of the Greek state. This linguistic division reflected social and political divisions that were repeated and reformulated within the ethnic experience. Moreover, the persistence of dialectal differentiations and the strong societal ties between co-villagers created an interesting case to the charting of the multiple worlds and linguistic attitudes of the Greek-Canadian experience.[3]

From a linguistic perspective, what are the different modalities and strategies of using English among Greek-Canadians in comparison to Greek-Americans?

Living in a bilingual environment, where English is the dominant language (in recent years, French became the dominant language but only in Québec), borrowing is natural, which is often lexical (transfer of words from the source language to the target language), but also structural when there is bilingualism and a situation of intense linguistic contact.[4] Crucially, for first-generation Greek-Canadian immigrants, no structural transfer has been observed, which, however, seems to be the case for second-generation immigrants, as their Greek belongs to the so-called “heritage” language. Research conducted within the ImmiGrec project, has shown that English-based loans are fully integrated in Greek-Canadian and that their accommodation is not only the product of socio-linguistic factors but follows specific linguistic constraints belonging to the target language, that is, Greek, of phonological, morphological and semantic nature. For instance, most English nouns receive gender and Greek inflectional endings (e.g. non-animate nouns become neuter and are inflected according to the most frequent Greek nouns in -i, as for instance, bíli < English bill). Moreover, the data has confirmed that there is a comparable accommodation of loan nouns for all varieties of Modern Greek, including the dialectal ones, all of them following the same paths for integrating their loans irrespectively of the source language, which may be English, Turkish or Romance.[5] Finally, comparison with the available Greek-American data has revealed that there are not many differences between the two varieties, Greek-Canadian and Greek-American, at least on the lexical level. However, a more profound research must be conducted on this issue, since oral corpora of Greek-American are not generally available and with some exceptions (e.g. Seaman 1972), written material is not easily found.[6]

Canada offers a particular case, the one of Québec. What has been the linguistic stance of Greek immigrants in this French-speaking environment?

Greeks immigrating to Québec (mainly to Montréal) prior to 1970 would not have given much thought to learning French. French was an obstacle to employment and the French-speaking Quebecers were treated as second-class citizens until state policy began to change language and immigration laws for the province, a process that was rooted in the mid-late 1960s but probably only had real consequences starting from the late-1970s, when Premier René Lévesque struck a deal with the Greek community that funded Greek day schools with the expectation that the students would be taught 60% French, 30% Greek, and 10% English. This deal was part of a provincial strategy to bring allophones (non-English and non-French) speakers closer to Québécois culture. In addition to this, numerous pieces of legislation have mandated language use in public space and immigrant communities.[7] The pervasiveness of language politics in Québécois society has created a different commitment to language retention in Québec than, for instance, in Ontario. As a result, first-generation Greek immigrants live now in a stable multilingual environment, where they speak Greek at home or with other Greeks, while English, or partly French in recent years, is used for communicative purposes with non-Greeks or under official circumstances.

Again, on a linguistic note, the project seems to have opened a rich field of study for the development of the Greek language in itself – dialects, accents, generational gaps. What can we learn on Modern Greek by studying diasporic Greek speakers?

The exploration of Greek-Canadian may be particularly informative on the study of Modern Greek, its history, evolution and its varieties. The recorded interviews clearly show that, in the last decades, the influence of Standard Modern Greek is not negligible in the speech of Greek Canadians due to frequent visits to Greece and the increased exposure to mainstream Greek content through technology (satellite TV and Internet). However, a great tendency for them is to employ features that belong either to their native dialectal variety of Modern Greek, or to a vernacular form of Common Modern Greek, which was spoken in the first half of the 20th century, before the standardization of Modern Greek. Common Modern Greek had received very little influence from Katharevousa (the archaizing official variety of Greece until 1975) and was differentiated from region to region, where the spoken dialectal varieties were increasingly becoming assimilated to it.[8] All Greek Canadians who were born after 1920, and had not lived in a purely mono-dialectal context before leaving Greece, brought this vernacular Common Modern Greek with them to Canada, and continued to use it after their settlement in the new country. Crucially, the exploration of the immigrant speech has provided evidence that despite the pressures of Standard Modern Greek and Common Modern Greek, some dialectal varieties still persist, as for instance, Cretan, Pontic and Lesbian, and some dialectal patterns are also spread among speakers from areas that follow the standard form. For instance, immigrants from Athens occasionally use an unaccented syllabic augment of the e- form (e.g. emílisa) parallel to the standard form where the augment is absent (e.g. mílisa). According to Ralli et al. (2019), the extension of dialectal patterns to other dialectal groups living in Canada may be due to the fact that these patterns can be found in the most prestigious Modern Greek dialects, as for instance, in Peloponnesian and Heptanesian, which are generally considered to be the base for Standard Modern Greek. As a result, a Greek-Canadian Koine has possibly begun to develop, influenced by but essentially independent from both Standard Modern Greek and Common Modern Greek.

An innovative feature of the IMMIGREC project was the creation of a virtual museum of the same name. How was the Greek community of Canada involved and what has been its reception so far?

The digital museum of ImmiGrec (https://virtual.immigrec.com) has been received with much enthusiasm by the Greek-Canadian community, although there are no available figures about the exact number of visitors. It deals with the first-generation Greek immigrants who went to Canada from 1945 to1975 and exhibits various aspects of their lives (e.g. reasons for immigrating, departure, installation, language, work, family, community life, schooling, etc.). It consists of nine rooms, corresponding to nine thematic units and an atrium containing socio-historical information about Greece and Canada from 1940 to 1970 and the process of immigration in general. To give you a specific example, Room 7 is dedicated to the language and the visitor can find information about how English has influenced Greek, the attitude of the immigrants towards language, the role of Greek in the Greek-Canadian families, while emphasis is given on the use of various dialectal features which have been preserved in the speech of immigrants. For the development of the museum, state-of-the-art technologies have been used to create a user-friendly digital environment, in which the user navigates easily and gains access to a variety of exhibits with image, sound and video. The material has been gathered from interviews of informants living in various Canadian cities, from multimedia files, written sources and photographic archives. The museum has already been presented at various international conferences, such as the 2nd EUROMED Pan-Hellenic Conference on the Digitization of Cultural Heritage (Volos: December 2017), and at the Annual Conference of the Associazione per l'Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale (Bari: January 2018).

*Interview by Dimitrios Gkintidis

D.G.

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Poet and art critic Nicolas Calas’ life and work in Greece, France and the USA embodies different historical conjunctures and intellectual movements, that exemplify the evolution of the so-called “international avant-garde” throughout the 20th century (Rentzou 2004).

Athenian youth

Born Nicolas Kalamaris in Lausanne on 27th May 1907 (New York Times 1989) into a wealthy merchant family, the son of Ioannis Kalamaris, with an ancestry of ship and land-ownership hailing from Syros, and Rosa Caradja, great-grand-daughter of the hero of the Greek War of Independence Markos Botsaris, Kalamaris grew up in Athens where he received an English and French education in a bourgeois environment (Hoff 2009). He enrolled in the Law School of the University of Athens sometime between 1925 and 1927, in parallel to his participation in the demoticist group Foititiki Syntrofia (Student Company). In 1929 Kalamaris began publishing works of political and artistic critique under the name of M. Spieros, inspired by Maximilien Robespierre. In the early 1930s, he published his first collections of poems, from now on under the name of Nikitas Randos, a name formed from the quasi-anagram of the name of a former girlfriend, Dora (Kolocotroni 2009), while in 1935, on the occasion of the publication of Andreas Embeirikos’ Ypsikaminos (Furnace), he joined the ranks of the surrealists (Rentzou 2004).

From his younger days, Kalamaris took a stance in favour of radical and innovative ideas, either artistic or political; proletarian art and the communist ideal, as exemplified by the soviet avant-garde in the 1920s, represented for Calas the quest for novelty and progress (Rentzou 2004). Even though he was initially skeptical towards expressionism and surrealism, Kalamaris took his distances from crude “modernist” realism early on. His conversion to surrealism took place gradually, in the early 1930s; Effie Rentzou attributes his embrace of surrealism to the changes in the dominant esthetic of the international communist movement, Kalamaris’ growing sympathy for Trotskyism, as well as similar developments within French surrealism (2004).

In Paris

Beginning in 1933, Kalamaris frequently visited Paris where he got to know the artistic milieu of the French capital, in parallel to his presence in the Athenian scene (Rentzou 2004). Following his disappointment from the intellectual environment of Athens, as he would later write to Nanos Valaoritis (Hoff 2009), he eventually moved to Paris in 1937, where he began using the name Nicolas Calas (Rentzou 2004); this name was a direct reference to Jean Calas and the case of religious intolerance in pre-revolutionary France that had led to the public intervention of Voltaire in 1763 (Kolocotroni 2009). Calas became an active member of the French surrealist crowd and published in 1938 his first essay collection, Foyers d’Incendie, at André Breton’s encouragement. In this work, Calas was trying to define art as a revolutionary process, while at the same time introducing the themes of love and sexuality and trying to transgress different categories of knowledge; Foyers had an important impact in the following years (Rentzou 2004).

Overseas

Calas left Paris at the outbreak of the Second World War (Hoff 2009); he first travelled to Lisbon where he stayed for a few months and took part in the local artistic scene, before reaching New York in 1940, where he settled, and eventually acquired US citizenship in 1945 (Hoff 2009). As a member of the European exiles circle, Calas held a distance vis-à-vis American intellectuals (Kolocotroni 2009), even though he contributed in establishing New York as a centre for the international avant-garde in the 1950s and 1960s (Rentzou 2004). He worked for the Office of War Information during the war and wrote in the Partisan review (Kolocotroni 2009). In parallel to this, he published Confound the Wise in 1942, which nonetheless was met with mixed reactions among New-York’s artistic circles. This work reflects to a great extent the impact that the new American experience had had on Calas, notably the shift from a holistic vision of the urban landscape to a selection of small de-centered panoramas (Rentzou 2004). The themes of Confound the Wise will permeate Calas’ work throughout the years.

Calas later collaborated with anthropologist Margaret Mead on the book Primitive Heritage, while he continued publishing in reviews such as Artforum, Art International, Arts Magazine, and Village Voice, as well as authoring a series of works of art theory, often in collaboration with his wife Elena Calas. During the 1960s, he taught at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. Vassiliki Kolocotroni suggests that Calas functioned as a mediator between European (French) surrealism and the American scene, as in the case of William Carlos Williams, for whom Calas’ work stood as a major inspiration (2009). Likewise, veteran surrealist Calas became a point of reference for the Beat generation, while he also stood out as a central figure during the early steps of Pop Art (Kolocotroni 2009).

More generally, Effie Rentzou suggests that the trajectory and work of Nicolas Calas – between poetry and critical analysis – placed him in the artistic and theoretic avant-garde of the 20th century, notwithstanding its contradictions, mutations and geographical transpositions (Rentzou 2004).

Renewing the bond with Greece and politics

As noted by Lena Hoff, after Calas settled in the USA, he stopped writing poetry for a period of twenty years; however, his visits to Greece for family matters in the 1950s eventually renewed his interest for poetry and Greek. He thus published poetry in Greek in 1964 and 1965 in the review Pali, using a rather satirical approach in regards to the traditionalist and problematic mores of “petit” and upper bourgeois Greek society, as well as its western geopolitical protectors (Hoff 2009). His distance from Greek artistic circles helped him offer a new fresh outlook on the idea of Greekness, the latter having been initially debated in the 1930s, but also politically instrumentalised by the Greek security state apparatus in the turbulent post-war period and commercialized by mass-tourism (Hoff 2009). The Greek-American community was not exempt from Calas’ playful writings; the poet would avoid socialising with his fellow countrymen in the USA. It was only during the years of the Greek junta in 1967-74 that Calas did begin to establish relations with other Greek-Americans in the context of anti-dictatorship organizations, in collaboration with international democratic resistance networks (Hoff 2009). Indeed, this period marked Calas’ renewed interest in politics – a vocation that proved unaltered by time.

As noted by Panayotis Bosnakis, Calas’ critical poetry did not signal a total break with typical Hellenic imagery but rather its original and subversive re-appropriation that aimed at destabilising the esthetic consensus of the time while prioritising new creative forms and forces (1998). This search for experimentation – often in confrontation with the poetic establishment – was succinctly illustrated in the case of the representation of the Aegean Sea; contrary to the work of Odysseas Elytis, Calas’ Aegean becomes a mystical and revolutionary site. The island of Santorini for example was rendered in red, a color that matched the feeling of a roaring and awakening volcanic danger (Bosnakis 1998).

The 1970s will mark the recognition of the work of Calas in Greece, where he even received the National Prize for Poetry in 1977 for his collection Nikitas Randos Street, consisting of poems of his dating from the 1930s, 1960s and 1970s (Hoff 2009). He passed away on 31st December 1988 (New York Times 1989). The Nicolas and Elena Calas Archives are currently located at the Nordic Library at Athens.

Dimitris Gkintidis | Grecehebdo.gr

Originally written in French, adapted into English by Dimitris Gkintidis.

D. G.

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How has the large Greek community in Australia been formed? How did the Greeks travel to Australia in the 1950s and 1960s? What were conditions like on ships like The Patris, The Flaminia and the others? What do Greeks remember of that experience? What happened when the boats arrived in Circular Quay?

The generation of Greeks that arrived in the 50s and 60s is fast disappearing. Their stories of adversity, strength, and progress to affluence are soon to be lost with them. Determined to not let this rich part of Australian and Greek history fade away with death notices, Associate Professor Nicholas Doumanis from the School of Humanities & Languages in the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales – with the support of the State Library and University of NSW – has set to document the fast disappearing first generations of Greek Australians.

As Doumanis clarifies, pre-war migration populations' history has been well documented; however, there is a significant gap in post-war history, which saw the largest wave come from Greece to Australia. This wave saw mainly village and poor people come to the Lucky Country, either fleeing war or seeking better living conditions.

As pivotal as the contribution of the Greek population has been to what modern Australia is, "Australian historians don't really know what to make of it, therefore it does not figure in the Australian history writing," Professor Doumanis told Neos Kosmos. "Don't forget," he stresses, "Greece don't genuinely consider us as part of their history. It's upon us to show that we are part of the Australian history and a significant part of the Greek diaspora experience".

The project aims to capture the unique oral histories, memoirs and memorabilia of hundreds of Greek Australians, creating a publicly accessible archive, to illuminate understanding of the journey of Greek immigrants and how these experiences have shaped Greek-Australian memory and its cultural heritage. The uniqueness of the project is that for the first time the story of migration will be told through the personal experiences of the each individual and thus history will be captured through the voice of those that lived it. The project will historically link migrant experiences with various Australian records enabling a greater academic and social understanding of the impact of migration in Australian.

"The idea is for this pilot project starting from Sydney's Greek community to be adopted by other states as well. We are also looking into creating a book and an on-line data base," Doumanis continues. An oral archive featuring interviews with about 200 Greek Australians will also be available to the public.

The original fund was almost enough to set the foundations of this project, but in order for it to be realized, additional financial support is required so as to: build a rich archive that will house the documents of various Greek institutions and materials that depict Greek Australian life such as photographs, films, letters and diaries; create a signature feature of 200 oral histories from first generation migrants; build an online interactive exhibition; develop online courses in Greek-Australian History that students can take as part of any degree at UNSW; enable the Archive to be accessible to any scholar, both locally and internationally, for future research and teaching.

More about Professor Doumanis' project: Greek odyssey; The University of New South Wales Sydney: Greek Australian Archive; More about Greeks in Australia: Anastasios Tamis: The Greeks in Australia (2005); Professor Nicholas Doumanis’ forthcoming book (with Antonis Liakos): The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 1909 to 2012: A Transitional History

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Since the outbreak of the war in Syria, Greece has been one of the most important entry points of migrants and asylum seekers. The Greek authorities managed to handle the unprecedented refugee flows in Greece by creating, hosting facilities for refugees and migrants and closing, at the same time, unofficial and improper settlements. Refugees and migrants were transferred from parks and squares to organized structures, while make-shift and inappropriate camps at the northern border of the country, in Idomeni - where more than 10,000 people were staying in unsuitable living conditions – were peacefully evacuated by the Greek authorities, almost nine months ago. In addition to the state-run structures, which are gradually being upgraded, accommodation places and hosting facilities are also run by the UNHCR and other NGOs through-out the country.

According to the latest figures (12.12.2016) 62,681 refugees are temporarily residing in Greece, on the islands and the mainland, while the nominal capacity of the official hosting structures is of 71,780.

As mentioned above, since the last quarter of 2014, the village of Idomeni on the borders between Greece and FYROM, used to host a makeshift camp that had for months served as a temporary shelter for more than 10,000 people who arrived there after Balkan countries cut off the route into Europe. By the end of May 2016, the refugees were peacefully evacuated from the border camp at Idomeni and bused to other better organized state-run centers in the wider region of Thessaloniki.

Vassilis Tsartsanis, a hairdresser and part-time film-maker from Thessaloniki, was filming a music video near the Greek-FYROM border in September 2014, when he noticed small groups of people trudging through the fields. Confused over why families would be walking through “the middle of nowhere”, he asked them where they were from. “Syria,” they replied. And where were they going? “To Europe.” Tsartsanis was mystified and returned to investigate why people were starting to journey through the sleepy area. He decided to help them; an act of kindness that would change their lives—and his own. Thanks to his initiatives, he achieved to make Idomeni a more welcoming place for newly arrived refugees. He helped them by providing them water, food and clothes, by giving them a lift, getting them to the doctor and supporting them any way he could. Long before international organizations and donors turned their attention to Idomeni, he and other locals were there offering their help. Tsartsanis didn’t stop at handing out emergency supplies. He started writing to politicians and authorities, advocating on behalf of the refugees whose stories he knew better than most. He was soon invited to address the European Parliament. He talked to major media outlets. He didn’t have a large organization behind him or a dedicated advocacy team—perhaps that was his strength. He was a local who was helping people in his area. He enjoyed the trust of his community.

Tsartsanis now regularly organizes missions for members of parliament and EU governments to Greece’s camps and has been active in efforts to relocate refugees to other countries. His recent work, “Small room project”, is an experiential audio visual and at the same time interactive exhibition which describes the two year every day experience he had with the refugees originating from the war zones heading from Turkey to central Europe. 

Read more about the Refugee Crisis here: Refugee Crisis Fact Sheet – January 2017

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Four months after the 1st Mediterranean EU Countries' Summit,  a Greek government initiative held in Athens last September with the aim of enhancing cooperation between Southern European Countries, the leaders of seven EU southern countries will meet again this Saturday 28.01 in Lisbon to coordinate their actions in anticipation of upcoming EU summits. On the table will  the issues of security and defense, economic and social development, migration and refugee flows, Brexit, the arrival of Donald Trump at the White House, as well as be the rise of populism in Europe in view of the critical elections in the Netherlands, France and Germany.   

A major focus of 1st Mediterranean EU Countries Summit was the Southern EU countries' call for fostering growth and investment. Besides that, the declaration adopted proposed the following measures: ensuring the internal and external security of Europe, reinforcing cooperation in the Mediterranean and with African countries, promoting programmes for youth mobility and employment and effectively addressing the challenge of migration.

In the 2nd Mediterranean EU Countries' ("MED Group") Summit in Lisbon, Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa will host the presidents of Cyprus (Nikos Anastasiades) and France (François Hollande) and the Prime Ministers of Spain (Mariano Rajoy), Malta (Joseph Muscat), Greece (Alexis Tsipras) And Italy (Paolo Gentiloni).

The participating countries stress that they do not want to create an alternative front within the EU. "It is not a separate club, but a contribution to the whole European Union that wants to identify its priorities to relaunch the European project before Brexit," said a Portuguese government source to Portuguese news agency Lusa.

The seven countries intend to "make a concrete contribution" ahead of the informal Malta summit (3 February), the Spring European Council (9-10 March in Brussels), and in preparation of the Rome Declaration, which will mark the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome on 25 March.

For Greece, the Lisbon summit "will contribute to the European dialogue", irrespective of the "ideologies or political orientations of the participating countries," said a spokesman for the Greek government to French news agency AFP.

Portuguse PM Antonio Costa : We need a new cycle of growth 

Faced with the rise of "nationalism, protectionism, populism and xenophobia", the EU needs "a new cycle of growth and convergence," the meeting's host, Socialist Prime Minister Antonio Costa, said on Tuesday.

Outlining the issues in view of the Lisbon EU-MED Summit, the Portuguese PM, also spoke of the creation of a European Monetary Fund and the extension of the Juncker plan to support investment as well as "positive discrimination” in favor of countries that are hardest hit by the crisis, such as Portugal and Greece.

The meeting next Saturday "will also be an opportunity to reaffirm the confidence of these countries in the European project and the conviction that building a stronger and more cohesive European Union" -of 27 members- is "a priority that responds to the national interest of each member-state".

The Portuguese prime minister stressed that an "incomplete" monetary union, "aggravates difficulties and accentuates asymmetries," and will present to the Summmit a new policy mix that combines the monetary policy of the European Central Bank with the coordination of the budgetary policies of the Member States and the completion of the banking union through the completion of the European Deposit Guarantee Scheme and the creation of an eurozone budget.

The participating countries will also uphold the importance of moving forward with the European Fund for Strategic Investments. "We need European rules, defined within the framework of the Stability Pact, which will help to promote development, instead of block braking public investment", explained to AFP Margarida Marques, Portuguese Secretary of State for European Affairs.

As for security and defense, the leaders of the seven countries will discuss strengthening the EU's external borders through the operation of the European Coast Guard and Frontiers  and promoting security within the EU, in particular against the terrorist threat, but without prejudice to the free movement of enshrined in the Schengen Agreement.

In the field of migration, countries will reaffirm their solidarity with states "particularly affected by the migratory crisis" - Greece and Italy - and reflect on the need to avoid diverting Eastern Mediterranean migration routes to the Central and Western Mediterranean, which implies a "fight against the root causes of migration and cooperation with the countries of origin"  and supporting investment and economic growth in Africa.

Read more: Athens Declaration of the 1st Mediterranean EU Countries’ Summit - September 2016; Greece to foster close partnership of European South; Tsipras: Euro-Med summit will unite Europe, not divide it

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