Ptolemy's exodus
Fifty years on,
Alexander Kazamias* asks why the Greeks left Egypt
On 29 December 1961, an article in the London Times titled "Greeks Flee U.A.R. Persecution" claimed that the thousands of Egyptian Greeks arriving to the Port of Piraeus were victims of president Nasser's policies against his country's foreign communities. With memories of Suez still fresh on everyone's mind, much of the British right-wing press portrayed the exodus of Egypt's largest local foreign community as the outcome of Nasser's "ingratitude" towards a minority that had supported him strongly during the Tripartite Invasion of 1956. This narrative soon spread into the Greek national press, which began to reprint The Times reports, while the liberal Eleftheria ran a front page article on 30 December 1961 titled "Persecuted from the Land of the Nile. Hundreds of Fellow-Nationals Arrive from Egypt". Three weeks later, the issue was debated in the Greek Parliament, with the main opposition leader, George Papandreou, branding Egypt as "hell for the Greeks" and the leader of the Progressives, Spyros Markezinis, speaking of "an uprooted Hellenism with [...] damaged properties".
Ever since, numerous books, articles and television documentaries have identified Nasser's nationalism and particularly his Egyptianisation Laws of January 1957 as the key factors which forced the Greeks out of Egypt. Among the most notable examples are Robert Ilbert and Ilios Yannakakis, Alexandrie 1860-1960: Un modèle éphémère de convivialité (1992), Michael Haag, Alexandria: City of Memory (2004), Manolis Yalourakis, The Greeks' Egypt [in Greek] (1967) and Floresca Karanassou, "The Greeks in Egypt: from Mohammed Ali to Nasser, 1805-1961" in R. Clogg (ed.) The Greek Diaspora in the Twentieth Century (1999). Even the schoolbook on Modern Greek for the final year of the Greek Lykeion teaches students that the acclaimed Egyptian-Greek writer Stratis Tsirkas, in his famous novel Ariagne (1962), discusses "the expulsion of the Europeans from Egypt in 1956 by the Egyptian president Nasser [when] the greatest part of Egypt's Hellenism was uprooted". Ariagne, of course, treats the issue completely differently, while Tsirkas himself, whose journalism in the 1950s was highly supportive of Nasser's anti-colonial policy, never said that the Greeks were "expelled" from Egypt.
What is neglected by this narrative, however, is that most of the resident Greeks who left Egypt did so in periods other than the Nasserite. Egyptian census figures show that between 1927 and 1947, Egypt's Greek community declined from 87,000 to 59,000, while according to Greek Foreign Ministry estimates, a further 7,500 left the country in the five years leading up to the Free Officers' coup of 1952. This means that 40 percent of the community had left before Nasser took power, mainly as a result of the economic depression of 1930s, the abolition of the Capitulations in 1937 and the sweeping Egyptianisation Law of the Nuqrashi government in 1947. Furthermore, in 1972, the Greek Centre of Social Research conducted a survey which found that 15,000 Greeks were still living in Egypt. These figures combined suggest that more than half of Egypt's Greeks left the country either before or after the Nasser period.
In addition, many of those who left in the 1950s and during the big exodus of the 1960s did so for reasons other than Nasser's Egyptianisations or Nationalisations. For instance, between 1952 and 1956, a period in which no significant measures affecting the interests of resident foreigners were adopted, Greek Foreign Ministry estimates suggest that as many as 6,000 Greeks migrated from Egypt. Many went to Greece, but also to countries like Australia, Canada, France and South Africa, mainly in search of better life chances. Moreover, in the case of the Suez Canal Greeks, there is clear evidence that thousands of them were forced to leave by the Anglo-French and Israeli Invasion of 1956 and the Israeli Occupation of Sinai in 1967.
Thankfully, in more recent years the stereotypical view of the alleged "expulsion" of Egypt's Greeks appears to be giving way to more sober assessments. In December 2009, the New York based Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora dedicated a special issue to the question of the Greek exodus from Egypt, with contributions from respectable historians like Alexander Kitroeff, Anthony Gorman, Abdel Wahab Bakr, Katerina Trimi-Kyrou and others. The issue's contributors also included the known writer Harry Tzalas, author of Farewell to Alexandria (AUC, 2000) and Sofianos Chrysostomidis, one of Greece's leading journalists, who started his career in Cairo as editor-in-chief of the Egyptian-Greek newspapers Foni (1952-53) and Paroikos (1953-61). Chrysostomidis, who experienced these events first-hand, argues that "Nasser's laws (January 1957) [...] were not the only thing responsible for the exodus of Egyptian Hellenism; rather, there were other causes, like [...] the degree of the community's adaptability, the political-cultural advance of Egypt, and to a certain degree, the Greek development factor".
Chrysostomidis also notes that equally important was the fact that "the [Greek] community was not particularly interested in acquiring Egyptian citizenship". When the Greek prime minister Constantine Karamanlis visited Cairo in August 1957, he recalls having asked him: "Are you ready to request Egyptian citizenship for our fellow-citizens who want it?" Karamanlis's answer was: "As prime minister of Greece, I do not intend to ask for Egyptian citizenship on behalf of Greek communities, unless they themselves make the request". Chrysostomidis then remarks that such a request was never made.
In September 2011, Al-Jazeera TV also broadcast a 50-minute documentary by the Greek director Giorgos Avieropoulos titled "The Second Homeland". This was yet another nostalgic journey into the personal memories of a group of Alexandrian Greeks, whose last 18 minutes focused on the painful and thorny issue of the big exodus of the 1960s. Most of the witness accounts featuring in the documentary showed that Nasser's nationalist turn after Suez and particularly his Egyptianisation Laws of 1957 were not a decisive factor. Stathis Athanassoglou, whose family owned the famous 'Salon Vert' in Alexandria, explained that in January 1962 the firm was nationalised and stressed how respectful the Egyptian officials were towards his uncle. "The Egyptians are people with a heart; they respected him and treated him as if he was the director. [...] There was no hatred. We never felt fear. If we felt obliged to go, this was because we could no longer secure our needs, secure our income".
In the same documentary, the writer Harry Tzalas recalls that one of the major causes of the exodus was the reaction of the owners of the 38 Greek firms that were nationalised in the early 1960s among hundreds of Egyptian companies were also subjected to Nasser's socialist experiment. Many of them, he says, chose to leave the country, a move that encouraged their employees to follow, often because these businessmen were also the notables who ran the official Community institutions and held sway with ordinary Egyptian Greeks. Tzalas's observation is all the more pertinent in view of the fact that in late 1961, these businessmen had secured the compensations for their nationalised firms from the Greek government, which in turn agreed to be reimbursed from the Egyptian state through a bilateral treaty. Another insightful account is that of the Greek schoolteacher named Popi, who joined the Egyptian Popular Resistance on the eve of the Tripartite Invasion of 1956. Her departure a few years later was forced upon her by the sharp decline in the number of pupils in Egypt's Greek schools. Her case, like that of thousands of other professionals, shows that high levels of economic interdependence within an ethnic group can have major knock-on effects, leading many of its members to migrate simply because other members of the same community are also migrating.
Fifty years on, the exodus of some 30-40,000 Greeks from Egypt remains a traumatic affair which still produces sharply contrasting memories. Moreover, for many Greeks, but also for several Egyptians and Europeans, this issue has a historic and symbolic significance which exceeds the relatively limited scale of human suffering associated with it. For example, parallels are often drawn -- totally inappropriately -- between the Greek experience and that of Egypt's other local foreign communities, like the Italians, the Jews, the French and the Armenians, with the aim of drawing general conclusions about the end of Egypt's urban "cosmopolitanism" in the 1950s and 1960s. Another dimension concerns the attempt of several European historians to connect the Greek exodus to the Suez War of 1956 rather than the nationalisations of 1961-63, often in order to draw damning conclusions about Nasser's anticolonial policy in subtle Orientalist fashion. Finally, the portrayal of the Greek exodus as a "purge", precisely because Greece supported Nasser during Suez, forms a crucial part of the Zionist narrative which portrays the expulsion of Egypt's Jews in 1956-57 not as a reaction to the Israeli invasion of Sinai, but as the outcome of Nasser's hatred of all foreigners. Nevertheless, as new and more rigorous evidence is challenging the myth of the Nasserite "purge" of Egypt's Greeks, these and other related assumptions about Egypt's contemporary history will also have to be seriously reconsidered.
* The writer is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Coventry University and Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (CASAW), University of Edinburgh. In 2009 he wrote the article "The Nasserite 'Purge' of the Greeks from Egypt: Myths and Realities"
Printer-friendly
