ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how activists from the expatriated community, in their efforts to raise awareness of their experiences and to combat a perceived diplomatic and historical marginalisation within Greece, adopt and adapt archetypes from Greek nationalist history. Particular attention is paid to the commemorative endeavours of the Constantinopolitan Society – an NGO based in Athens – which has since the 1970s publicly marked anniversaries of the 1955 Istanbul Riots and the 1453 Fall of Constantinople. In these commemorative ceremonies, expatriate activists commonly liken their own experiences during the riots in 1955 to the last stand of the Byzantines and the Emperor Constantine Palaiologos against the Ottoman Empire in 1453, and present the latter as a necessary precursor to the Greek Revolution in 1821, thereby endowing their putative ancestors with the honour of inspiring contemporary Greek independence. Activists from the Greek community of Imbros often draw comparable analogies between the political and demographic changes instituted by Turkey on Imbros during the 1960s and the aftermath of Turkish military action on Cyprus in 1974, and between the few hundred remaining elderly Greek residents of their island and the 300 Spartan warriors of Leonidas who stayed to defend Thermopylae from the Persians. In doing so, activists from both communities seek simultaneously to cast themselves as prototypical freedom fighters for Hellenism and its most recent national martyrs. Yet these discourses also carry an implicit criticism of contemporary Greek diplomacy for its failure to live up to the archetypes of the past, providing further evidence for the malleable and subversive potential of nationalist rhetoric. Moreover, the dynamic interplay between spatially and temporally distant moments contained in these commemorative narratives illustrates that the mobility of memory emphasised in recent scholarship applies equally to the construction and reconfiguration of the past within nation states, and not just to memories that conspicuously traverse artificial national, cultural, or social boundaries.
