Echoes of the Great Catastrophe: Re-Sounding Anatolian Greekness in Diaspora

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the music and dance practices of Greek refugee and migrant families from the historical region of Aeolia or Western Anatolia (the Aegean coast of present-day Turkey and the island of Lesvos), including those who settled in the Boston area following the end of the Greco-Turkish War in 1922. Shortly after the end of the conflict, a population exchange between the two states resulted in the deportation of nearly 2 million Greek Orthodox Christians from Turkey – an event known to Greeks as the “Great Catastrophe.” Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Anatolian Greek communities of greater Boston and the island of Lesvos and a wealth of never-before examined archival material, this study examines the multitude of ways that Anatolian Greeks in diaspora have used musically-framed material culture to narrate their community's intergenerational story of displacement and adaptation and enable the preservation and transmission of repertoire, style, and both musical and social memory. Each chapter of this dissertation focuses on a distinct yet overlapping sphere of sensually-rich, performative relationships with material objects and bodily practices in Anatolian Greek music and dance. These include handwritten musical transcriptions from the early 1900s; commercial recordings, from 78 rpm records and piano rolls to compact discs; homemade reel-to-reel tape, cassette, and video recordings; the gendered performance of social dance; legacies of sonic and physical violence; and the role of commensal foodways in theorizing musical time. Drawing on the Greek concepts of myth and mimesis, I highlight the performative agency embedded in these objects and practices. In the process, I reveal that, beyond mere archives or venues of musical and social activity, they are sonic and material sites of emotional valence, nodes for the face-to-face mediation of personal and musical relations, and a means of engaging the body to craft a polytemporal sense of self. These musical archives and actions enter into a pluralistic dialogue with other human and non-human agents to reveal past musical practices, shape contemporary ones, produce ideas and memories about the musicians who made and used them, and contribute to an inherently relational model of Anatolian Greek personhood.