The preparation of the interview begins with locating the people that belong in one of the categories that interest the program. Initially we record the name and basic biographical details of individuals, something that the interested party or their family may have already done by completing the Genealogical Tree Report. A note with those characteristics of the person that render him/her an interesting informant and point out any particularities should accompany the above. These details are assessed by those in charge of the project, so that an interview is scheduled.

Crucial to the field of locating and choosing the informants is the contribution of volunteers and members of associate institutions who know much better than the researchers of the Genealogy Department the people and the particular facts and interests of each community. Moreover they are the people who are closer to the elderly informants and can create an environment of confidence and familiarity that is necessary for conducting the interviews. Especially in the areas out of Attica, volunteers arrange the meeting between informants and researchers and accompany them, thus gaining knowledge and experience in research. Apart from the volunteers and the officials of associate institutions, everybody can contribute to the work of collecting "Testimonies" by proposing an "informant" or "depositor" of a testimony.

The choice of persons is dictated firstly by biology, since our primal objective is to record with modern digital media and in digital configurations (formats) the picture and the voice of the last surviving refugees, the people who experienced the forced and occasionally violent movement from Asia Minor, Pontus and Eastern Thrace to Greece. Of particular interest are those who abandoned their homeland old enough to have memories and recall and recount stories of their life there.

Certainly in the case of these people the memory is subjected to influences and feedbacks from later experiences of those same people, from others´ narrations and general perceptions that are created by the perception of historical, folklore and other interactions which are conveyed through books, the Press, the Media and the Arts. Usually it is the eldest members of a community that carry the role of the guardian of heritage and memory and that´s why most refugees have already shaped certain histories or narratives that they reproduce without fail.

The biological choice based on age, physical and mental health and the wish of participation decreases the margins of organizing the samples with the guise of representativity that is validated by objective criteria of sex, origin, descendance, and so on. Our choice was based on the biggest dissemination of objective characteristics -persons of every possible origin, educational level, descendance and linguistic background-and on the cohesion the recording process. For auxiliary purposes, the genealogy of persons, biographical details and facts on their writing work or their public presence as "informants" are included and recorded.

The generation of refugees does not exhaust its interest in the memories of the old homeland, which is influenced by various dependences and feedbacks. To its largest extent, it carries the memory and grief of the period after coming in Greece and what constitutes the memory of refugee life and the backbone of the refugee identity. Furthermore if we erased the event of uprooting and the unification of various groups under the title of refugee, it is likely that other regroupings would have had bigger social importance and scientific scope. Even the section between refugees and their descendants does not clearly distinguish generations of people with common experiences since people who were born in 1922-1923 are not really different to those who were born a couple of years before, except on a temperamental and symbolic level.

Therefore, we selected a second group of "informants" who were not necessarily born in Asia Minor, Pontus or Thrace, but who grew up in the places of refugee settlement and maintain equivalent memories and experiences from the Interwar and the war decade of 1940-1950. If we consider this generation a single one, it is the generation that experienced the most difficult periods for survival in Greek history and at the same time developed apart from refugee culture, local, social, political and immigratory cultures, of big importance to the current physiognomy of Greek society.

A Third group, more of a subgroup, is constituted by people who developed and keep developing activities aiming to maintain and support refugee memory and identity and this identity´s local, ethnic distinctiveness, whether it originates in Asia Minor, Cappadocia, Pontus or Thrace. Music, dance, union pursuits and efforts in amateur historiography and folklore, are distinctive traits of this activity which is of particular interest to our program. Even today, our purpose is to be able to examine refugee memory and identity through the generations in the frame of the same communities and families as they are recorded in the Genealogy project and participate by offering evidence and personal narrations or explanative texts to the offered documents and photographs.

< Previous page  Next page >