Both branches of my family came as refugees from Asia Minor,Turkey.
I have inherited the emotional sensitivity, the rest of the members of the family,either directly or indirectly, acquired dew to the forceful uprooting from their home land .
This experience, helped me appreciate the real value of accommodating differences among people of different cultures, nationalities, religions and backgrounds.
My experience of the pain caused by uprooting people from their natural environment that consider “home land” has been very vivid and I came to the conclusion that it takes three generations to heal the pain of the elderly.That is why you see silent grandparents talking to their Grandchildren, in fact they were speechless and found their speech after two generations….
As a third generation descendant, I feel obliged to record some of these stories and capture their sentiments, although they bare a risk, due to the fact that these stories cut through long periods of time, under different conditions,conflicts, subjective observations and personal points of view, that may contradict or even offend others, due to national, religious or cultural differences.
Presenting the cases of members of my family, which inevitably are Greek stories, in no way, I want to offend or minimize the corresponding position of a Turkish person or counter argue the Turkish point of view, which is very much respected and appreciated.
Very little information exists,about the Greek community of approx. 5.000 people that lived in the town of Kirkagats, from which the branch of my family, related to my mother, came from.
Most of the information has been saved and documented in a book, written by Panos Meimareidis, a member of an important family in Kirkagats.
In the case of Greece this conflict resulted in a major catastrophe during 1922 where a significant part of Greek population was living in Asia Minor, under Ottoman rule, for many centuries. This population was forcefully uprooted and dispersed around the world sending 1.5 million refugees in the Greek mainland
There is no question that Greece made a serious mistake that gave the excuse to the rising new Turkish State to change the “status quo” of multy ethnic coexistence, that used to prevail for thousands of years, including, Hellenic, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman Empire periods.
I have tried to capture the stories of both branches of my family that lived thru these times of enormous change and documented them on various sites on internet and videos. My only desire is to retain the memory of these events for my children
I have introduced English subtitles to video recordings on interviews taken from the last living inhabitants of the town of Kirkagats.
Their stories describe aspects of life in Kirkagats when both communities were living side by side, as well as their experience of fleeing away from Turkey during the retreat of the Greek army in September 1922.
The interviews are recorded on two videos
