By Catherine Curan

With snippets of recorded songs and a close reading of the 1962 Greek novel "Stou Chatzifrangou," scholar Maria Nikolopoulou evoked the rich and varied soundscape of Smyrna, a multicultural “lost city.”

Nikolopoulou is a visiting fellow at the Seeger Center, and her research interests include literature's role in forging collective memories of historical events. On April 4, she gave the second of three lectures by the Center's Spring 2025 cohort.  

In his introduction to Nikolopoulou, Dimitri Gondicas, director of the Seeger Center, spoke of her research into literary and cultural exchanges between Greece and the English-speaking world.

"A running theme that cuts across Maria's scholarship is that of the role of "cultural mediators," writers and translators who are connectors across languages, media, geographic space, and cultural traditions. This approach is foundational to our teaching and research agenda at the Seeger Center: Building on the legacy of Professor Edmund Keeley, the study of Modern Greek literature as world literature is at the heart of our programs in Princeton and in Greece," said Gondicas.

Smyrna looms large in Greece's collective memory. Though the novel never mentions the city by name, Politis, a celebrated modernist writer, linked his text to the fortieth anniversary of an event known in Greece as the Asia Minor Catastrophe. The novel's subtitle is “The forty-year commemoration of a lost city.”

An ancient port city in Asia Minor on the Aegean coast, Smyrna was part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries. Residents spoke Greek, Turkish, Armenian and other languages and worshipped in mosques, Jewish temples, and churches.

After World War I, the Great Powers partitioned the former Ottoman Empire, and the area of Smyrna was placed under a temporary Greek mandate. Due to the city's substantial Greek Orthodox population, Greece's prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, felt it belonged to a greater Greece. The presence of the Great Powers in former Ottoman territories triggered the Turkish War of Independence led by Kemal Ataturk. In 1922, Ataturk's army entered Smyrna, defeating the Greek army. The city was burned, there were massacres, and the surviving Greek Orthodox population fled. Since then, the city has been part of Turkey and is called Izmir.

Nikolopoulou said, “The Asia Minor Catastrophe still has resonance today, not only for Greece and Turkey but worldwide.”

Refugee communities in Greece initially commemorated the events of 1922, but Nikolopoulou said the focus broadened as the fortieth anniversary approached -- and Politis and other fiction writers changed the national conversation. Politis chose not to focus on famous people or landmarks but on Chatzifrangou, a diverse low-income neighborhood, and the quotidian struggles of its residents. Charting the novel's literary geography, Nikolopoulou explored the author's focus on the power of memory and daily life in this multicultural city.

"The characters are not only Greeks, but come from all the ethnicities of Smyrna, and the identities of most of them do not fit into national categories," said Nikolopoulou.

The novel overflows with references to music, ranging from opera to popular songs to religious music from various traditions. Nikolopoulou described how the soundscapes show "a connection with musical tradition and the multicultural coexistence of Smyrna."

She shared excerpts from music mentioned in the novel, including a folk song about a Christian man's love for a Jewish girl. Nikolopoulou also showed illustrations by Mino Argyrakis that accompanied the novel's publication in serial form in the Greek magazine Tachydromos.

In a discussion after the lecture, Nikolopoulou was asked about the evolution of perceptions of the Asia Minor Catastrophe in Greece. She said Politis' narrative was “a predecessor of the subversion of victimization and nostalgia … the Greeks were not the only refugees.”

Nikolopoulou added, “The novel shows that access to the past and memory is not unmediated. That's what makes it interesting even for today. The refugee experience is still very much present.”

She is working on a new edition of the novel in Greek, which is forthcoming from Crete University Press.