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MACEDONIA – Land of Culture, Land of Refuge


   



Following from the success of the Second Annual Return To Anatolia National Conference in June 2008, Return To Anatolia presents MACEDONIA – Land of Culture, Land of Refuge, a public history exhibition of black-and-white as well as colour photographs, posters, rare books and magazines. It has two main focal points: the diverse cultures that have thrived in Macedonia since time immemorial; and the refuge the Macedonian lands have provided to hundreds of thousands of people fleeing persecution over the centuries.

 

Since the beginning of recorded history, the region of Greece known as Macedonia since classical antiquity has been inhabited by a diverse range of cultural groups. Situated at the intersection of major cultural fault lines and trade routes, many different peoples have left their mark on Macedonia. While the Hellenic element has always been culturally dominant, communities of Jews and Armenians, Thracians and Illyrians, Romans and Dardanians have all lived in the northern borderlands of the Greek world. In the early Middle Ages, Bulgar and Slavic tribes arrived from the steppes of Russia. A few centuries later, Muslim Turks arrived. By the 1800s, Macedonia’s population was so diverse, it gave rise to new culinary dishes known for their striking mix of ingredients: the French salade Macédoine, and Spanish Macedonia de frutas.

 

In the 1500s, ten of thousands of Sephardic Jews fled the wrath of the Spanish Inquisition and found sanctuary in Macedonia, especially in its capital, the port city of Thessaloniki. In the early 1900s, hundreds of thousands of Greeks, but also Armenians, found refuge from the genocidal behaviour of the Ottoman Empire, and later the Republic of Turkey. Even in the darkness of World War Two, the rugged mountains of Macedonia held glimmers of hope for Jews and others fleeing Nazi persecution, as did the homes of many Greeks who refused to obey the Germans’ orders to hand over their fellow Greek citizens of the Jewish faith.

                            

In December 2007, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, noting the widespread acceptance of the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide, voted overwhelmingly to recognize the genocides inflicted on Assyrian and Greek populations of the Ottoman Empire as well. According to the text of the resolution, which represents prominent scholars of history from around the world, the Ottoman campaign against the Christian minorities of the Empire between 1914 and 1923 constituted nothing less than genocide against Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontian and Anatolian Greeks. Of these groups, the Armenians, and the Pontian and Anatolian Greeks in particular, sought refuge in the fertile lands of Macedonia in significant numbers, contributing further to the region’s already vibrant cultural landscape.

It is this that MACEDONIA – Land of Culture, Land of Refuge seeks to bring to the Victorian public: the light and the dark aspects of the Macedonian experience of multiculturalism – indigenous Hellenes living, fighting, learning and growing with a plethora of other refugee and immigrant communities in the one shared homeland – Macedonia.

 

 
 MACEDONIA – Land of Culture, Land of Refuge launch, Fitzroy Library, 12 November 2008. Guest speakers included Cr Geoff Barbour of the City of Yarra and the Consul for Education of Greece in Melbourne, Mr Charalambos Ladopoulos.

 


Local resident Lindy Mills and Cr Geoff Barbour of the City of Yarra chat to Cr Kris Pavlidis of the City of Whittlesea.