It would be hard to imagine a documentary making more of an impact on
the mind, the heart and the eye than Maria Iliou’s “From Both Sides of
the Aegean: Expulsion and Exchange of Populations, Turkey-Greece:
1922-1924” that opens at the Quad in New York on March 21.
When I ran into Ms. Iliou before a press screening at the Quad on
Tuesday, she described her new film as a follow-up to “Smyrna: the
Destruction of a Cosmopolitan City”, a film that I reviewed for
CounterPunch almost a year ago. The first paragraph of that review
referred to my personal connection to the terrible tragedy of September
1922:
In my one and only visit to Izmir to meet my wife’s relatives, we
walked along the quay to see some of the picturesque city’s landmarks
including the statue of Mustafa Kemal that looked toward the sea. My
wife’s cousin Ceyda, the daughter of a General assigned to NATO and a
rock-ribbed Kemalist, paused in front of the statue to inform me that
this was where their war of independence was won. The quay, from which
the city’s Greek population was literally driven into the sea, is as
important a symbol of that country’s birth in the early 1920s as the
Liberty Bell in Philadelphia is to an American.
As in the first film, Iliou draws upon a treasure trove of historical
photos and film footage, interviews with academic specialists in Greek
and Turkish history, and reminiscences of the children and grandchildren
who were driven from their homeland both through naked terror and
through “legal” decisions made at the top by cynical politicians. Given
the pain—both physical and emotional—visited on the Greeks and the
Turks, the distinction between illegal and legal becomes moot.
full:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/07/in-the-wake-of-the-ottoman-empire/
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