The program “Faraway Words” featured researcher and author Soula Bozi, on the occasion of her book “On the Wings of History” (Topos Publications), which brings to light twenty testimonies of uprooting from Ionia, Thrace, and Constantinople.
Through the voices of men and women who experienced the tragic events of September 1955 and the deportations of 1964, the book reconstructs the collective memory of a community violently displaced from its ancestral homes.
In her interview, Ms. Bozi spoke extensively about her acquaintance with Dido Sotiriou, whose testimony forms the opening narrative of the book. As she noted, the twenty testimonies included in the volume are only a small part of the roughly 115 she has recorded from the 1990s to the present.
The narratives capture the memories of people who were in the final years of their lives but still carried vivid images of Asia Minor and Constantinople. The pages of the book revive the neighborhoods, scents, flavors, schools, and cosmopolitan spirit of a Romiosyne that once flourished—and was later diminished. Readers also gain insight into how the Greek Orthodox inhabitants experienced the Istanbul pogrom of 1955 and the events of 1964, as well as the struggle they faced to rebuild their lives upon settling in Greece.