Homelands, Real and Imaginary: Refugee Children from the Greek Civil War

FAIN: FB-50028-04

Loring M. Danforth
President and Trustees of Bates College (Lewiston, ME 04240-6028)

In 1948, at the height of the Greek Civil War, the Greek Communist Party and the Greek government evacuated approximately 43,000 children from war-torn villages in northern Greece to "children's homes" in Eastern Europe and in central and southern Greece. I plan to write a book that will analyze the experiences of these refugee children in light of recent theoretical work in anthropology dealing with refugees, diaspora communities, and the role of homelands, both real and imaginary, in the construction of ethnic, national, and transnational identities. This book will offer ethnographically based and theoretically informed insights into the multiple meanings of "place" and "home" in the lives of refugees. It will also enhance our understanding of the complex process of identity construction among displaced people struggling to create new forms of collective identity that transcend the ethnic and national identities that have proven so powerful and so destructive in the recent past.

Associated Products

Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory (Book)
Title: Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory
Author: Loring M. Danforth and Riki Van Boeschoten
Abstract: Bookmark and Share Loring M. Danforth and Riki Van Boeschoten 352 pages | 11 halftones, 4 maps | 6 x 9 | © 2012 Cloth $80.00 ISBN: 9780226135984 Published November 2011 Paper $25.00 ISBN: 9780226135991 Published November 2011 E-book $7.00 to $25.00 About E-books ISBN: 9780226136004 Published October 2011 At the height of the Greek Civil War in 1948, thirty-eight thousand children were evacuated from their homes in the mountains of northern Greece. The Greek Communist Party relocated half of them to orphanages in Eastern Europe, while their adversaries in the national government placed the rest in children’s homes elsewhere in Greece. A point of contention during the Cold War, this controversial episode continues to fuel tensions between Greeks and Macedonians and within Greek society itself. Loring M. Danforth and Riki Van Boeschoten present here for the first time a comprehensive study of the two evacuation programs and the lives of the children they forever transformed.
Year: 2012
Secondary URL: http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo12274715.html
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Multi-author monograph

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