Greece Culture: Music and Dance

Mikra Asia (Asia Minor) and its Greek refugees

After World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the failed Greek attempt to reclaim Greek territories in Anatolia for Greece, resulted in what is commonly known in Greece as the 'katastrofi' (catastrophe), and the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 by Eleftherios Venizelos, Kemal Attaturk, and representatives of Britain and France. According to the terms of this treaty, a large 'exchange of populations' was carried out between Turkey and Greece, whereby Orthodox Christians were forced to leave the new nation of Turkey for Greece, and Muslims in Greece forced to leave Greece for Turkey, with a few agreed upon exceptions. Muslims in Greek Thrace, on the islands of Kos and Rhodes were permitted to remain, in exchange for Greeks given permission to remain in Constantinople/Istanbul.

An estimated 130.000 refugees flooded into Greece along with another 150,000 from Bulgaria, Romania, Russia and Serbia, with chaotic results. Lack of shelter, food, disease, and trauma were among the extreme hardships they faced, along with hostility from the local Greeks, to whom these newcomers were seen not only as foreigners (despite the fact that they were Orthodox Christians), who spoke either strange Greek dialects, or (worse yet), Turkish or Slavic languages. Despite this horrors of this massive crisis, many refugees managed to remain together, with many located in new villages (including on the outskirts of the much smaller Athens of that time) with members of their own regions. Some surmise that perhaps the uprooting of these people presented an even greater cause for them to hold onto their culture and its traditions, which are often threatened (or lost) during such a situation.