ABSTRACT
In constructing their narratives of persecution, activists representing the expatriated Greeks of Turkey not only make use of archetypes from Greek nationalist history, but also frequently draw parallels between their own experiences and those of other minority communities within Turkey (in particular, the Armenians and the Kurds). Initially gathering pace in the 1970s, by the 1990s such transcultural cross-referencing had become commonplace in formal expatriate discourse, persistently cropping up in discussions that remained focused on Greek suffering, often accompanied by little (if any) explanatory context. Repeatedly name-dropped as fellow sufferers, the Armenians and Kurds became part of a regular cast of persecuted minorities totemically cited by expatriate activists whenever they had cause to articulate their own grievances with Turkey. At around the same time, expatriate newspapers and community organisations also began to analogise between Turkey’s treatment of these minorities and the Nazi genocide of the Jews, for instance presenting the 1955 Istanbul Riots as ‘Kristallnacht in Constantinople’. Such discourses confirm that collective memories, often assumed to be aligned with particular groups of people or rooted in certain temporal or spatial contexts, migrate and interact with one another. Moreover, such mnemonic cross-referencing has the potential to generate new transcultural solidarities between victim communities, and might even lay the groundwork for reconciliation between historical antagonists. Nevertheless, it is emphasised that the transcultural sharing of memories of suffering does not always have ‘post-national’ implications, nor does it necessarily lead to significant reconfiguration of people’s perceptions of the past, self, and other. This chapter introduces the notion of ‘off-the-peg memories’: abstracted and simplified formulae, often accompanied by little historical baggage, that are temporarily adopted by Greek narrators, without necessarily triggering, or indicating, any particularly in-depth engagement with the experiences of the others concerned. Off-the-peg memories remind us that transcultural discourses might often contribute to the consolidation and ongoing explanatory appeal of nationalist histories, rather than producing more reflective and inclusive understandings of the past.
