Greek Diaspora and Migration since 1700

Society, Politics and Culture

Dimitris Tziovas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754666097
• eBook ISBN: 9781317124771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Greek diaspora is one of the paradigmatic historical diasporas. Though some trace its origins to ancient Greek colonies, it is really a more modern phenomenon. Diaspora, exile and immigration represent three successive phases in Modern Greek history and they are useful vantage points from which to analyse changes in Greek society, politics and culture over the last three centuries. Embracing a wide range of case studies, this volume charts the role of territorial displacements as social and cultural agents from the eighteenth century to the present day and examines their impact on communities, politics, institutional attitudes and culture. By studying migratory trends the aim is to map out the transformation of Greece from a largely homogenous society with a high proportion of emigrants to a more diverse society inundated by immigrants after the end of the Cold War. The originality of this book lies in the bringing together of diaspora, exile and immigration and its focus on developments both inside and outside Greece.

PART I
Society and Politics

1. The Emigré Experience: Case Studies

Chapter 1
Tales from the Dark Side: Transnational Migration, the Underworld and the ‘Other’ Greeks of the Diaspora

Thomas W. Gallant

On Wednesday, 9 March 1859, Nikolaos Antonellos murdered Stefan Lagerhamm. The slaying was quick and brutal. Lagerhamm was the captain of the Swedish merchant vessel the Magnus Stenbock and Antonellos was an off-duty ship’s pilot and a passenger on board. At four o’clock in the morning as the ship was nearing the mouth of the Bosporus, Antonellos confronted the captain on the ship’s deck and, in front of two crew members, drew a dagger and fatally stabbed Lagerhamm in the chest. Aroused by the commotion, the ship’s crew gathered on deck, subdued the murderer and locked him in the captain’s quarters, where he was seen licking the blood off the murder weapon.¹ Word of the incident spread rapidly while the ship was moored at the Lazaretto so that, when the period of quarantine had ended and the crew and their prisoner could disembark, a mob of men from the Ionian Islands had gathered to rescue their compatriot Antonellos. They were unsuccessful but the judicial proceedings against the murderous pilot proved long and complicated. The accused was a citizen of the United States of the Ionian Islands and because of that he was also a subject of the British Crown, which exercised legal protection over the Ionian state (Gallant 2002). The killing, however, involved a Swedish national and had occurred on a Swedish vessel in international waters. Consequently, three different legal authorities, the Ionian, the Swedish and the British, claimed jurisdiction. After numerous hearings the British finally ceded authority to the Swedes and so, in March 1860, Antonellos was tried and convicted in Stockholm.² While fascinating in its own right, the Antonellos case is of interest for the topic of this study, because the massive paper trail it created provides us with insights into the social world of men like him, who spent their lives migrating to and working in the port cities around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

In many ways Antonellos typifies the migrants discussed in this chapter. Born on the Ionian island of Kefallinia, he spent most of his adult life working in foreign lands as a ship’s pilot. His sojourning took him from Constantinople to Sulina to Odessa. During the 17 years he worked on ships he returned to his home village of Pali on five occasions, once to take a bride. He never severed his ties to his place of birth and did not settle in any one place. Instead, he was constantly on the move, travelling from port to port with the occasional trip back to his homeland. In addition, while residing abroad he was connected to a community of fellow workers and migrants. So numerous were Ionian islanders in the ports of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea that, according to Sir Patrick MacChombaich de Colquhoun, Chief Justice of the Ionian Supreme Court, the Greek-Italian patois that they spoke had become the lingua franca of workers (Colquhoun 1878: 448). But Ionian islanders were only one of many groups who constituted the sailors, stevedores, pilots, dockworkers and petty artisans who migrated to the major ports of the Ottoman Empire. Antonellos and the men and women like him dwelt on the margins of ‘respectable’ society, in a rough-and-tumble world marked by high levels of crime and violence. As one defence witness responded when asked if the accused was a man of fierce character: ‘No. He was not a violent man. Sure, he stabbed some men before, but never without cause’ (NA CO 136/360: deposition 78). For men like Antonellos and his peers violence was not deviant or socially dysfunctional, it was a way of life. And theirs was a social world where ‘murder, prostitution, theft and sexual profligacy’ flourished (Vryonis 2004: 261).

As Dimitris Tziovas so eloquently points out in the introduction to this volume, the literature on the Greek diaspora is extensive. Much of that work has focused on the most prominent emigration movements like those to the United States and Australia during the twentieth century. There are numerous studies that discuss in detail the formation and course of these migrations and on the development of Greek communities in the new host countries. Another often told story is that of the merchants and traders who settled all around the world and who created the commercial networks that connected the Greeks of the diaspora (Katsiardi-Hering 2004; Vlami 2006). Much work has also been done on the writers and artists who flourished in diaspora communities. The people in these stories tended to migrate and settle outside of Greece permanently. There has been some work on people who migrated on a seasonal basis, such as shepherds and itinerant peddlers (Caftanzoglou 1997). There was, however, another stream in the Greek migratory flow, and that was of people who moved neither permanently nor seasonally. These people, men like Antonellos, travelled abroad to work but their movement was more of a circulatory flow than a point-to-point migration.

One of the problems confronting historians who study the men and women who dwelt on the dark side of society is the sources. People from this sector of society simply did not leave behind documents, such as letters, diaries and memoirs. Using official records such as population registers, passport lists or censuses, we can catch glimpses of people’s movements, like when they left and when they returned (Costa 1988; Caftanzoglou 1997; Hionidou 2002; Loukos 2004). But these sources tell us only about the numbers of people travelling and the timeframe of their sojourning, and little else. One of the few categories of sources that allow us to hear the voices of the lower classes and to learn about their lives are criminal justice records. When people had brushes with the law, even if they were never charged with a crime, statements were taken and records kept. In the notes and memos written by police officers, in the statements of victims and witnesses, in the transcripts of trials, and in other court records, we can hear them talk about the social world they dwelled in. Of course, their voices do not come to us directly but are mediated by criminal justice institutions. Plus the only stories that we hear are the ones of people who had dealings with the police and the courts. Nonetheless, from the narratives they related we can glean much information about migrant society.

Because the sources about them are so plentiful I focus on two groups of migrants. The first is the men and women from the Ionian Islands who were tried in British Consular Courts in the Ottoman Empire and the second is the women who worked as prostitutes in brothels on the islands and in the cities of Greece and the Ottoman Empire. Because citizens of the Ionian Islands were also British subjects, when they committed crimes in the Ottoman Empire they were tried in British courts attached to the British Embassy in Constantinople or to British consulates in the major cities, such as Salonica, Smyrna and Alexandria. Being tried in a British court or having British consular personnel present at a hearing in an Ottoman court was extremely advantageous. As Charles Thomas Newton noted, ‘The advantages of British protection in a Turkish court are so obvious, that the Ionians are the object of general envy among the Christian subjects of the Porte. The desire to possess a British passport is so strong that every sort of ingenious device is practised in order to obtain one’ (Newton 1865: 76–7). So burdensome had the legal duties of the British consuls become that Sir Edmund G. Hornby was commissioned to completely reorganise the consular judicial system in 1857, creating a separate judicial branch with courts in each of the major Ottoman Empire cities and with a supreme court in Constantinople over which he presided (Hornby 1909). I examined 858 criminal cases adjudicated by the Consular Courts, the majority of them dated to the years 1855 to 1862, i.e. from just before and then after the reorganisation of the courts. Since on the Ionian Islands, in the Kingdom of Greece and the Ottoman Empire, prostitution was legal but regulated, the police kept careful records about the women who worked in their jurisdictions, and I use these documents to examine prostitution in a transnational setting.

This chapter is divided into three parts. In the first I examine the social world of men and women who fell foul of the law. The second deals with people whom we can consider career criminals; in other words, unlike the first group who were labourers and petty artisans who broke the law, this second group consists of people for whom criminal activity was their livelihood. The third section focuses on prostitution.

I begin with some general observations based on a quantitative study of the cases heard by the consular courts. Not surprisingly the Supreme Court in Constantinople adjudicated the majority of cases (37 per cent); followed by Alexandria (28 per cent), Chania (9 per cent), Smyrna (9 per cent), Salonica (6 per cent) and Preveza (5 per cent). That the preponderance of trials took place in Constantinople and Alexandria was due to the fact that they hosted large communities of Ionian islanders and were two of the most important commercial and manufacturing areas in the Near East (Hornby 1909: 92–4). In his memoirs Hornby repeatedly castigates the Ionians as being the most ‘scoundrelly’ race on the planet (Hornby 1909: 92). His anti-Ionian prejudice notwithstanding, it is empirically correct that Ionian islanders dominated the dockets of the Consular criminal courts (Hornby 1909: 144). Ionian islanders sat in the box in 2,840 of the 3,965 criminal cases tried before the Consular criminal court in Constantinople in 1851 (NA Foreign Office 76/976, cited in Turgay 1982: 315, note 30). And that was not an exceptional year.

A more detailed examination of who did what to whom can give us some insights into the lives of migrants. The majority of men were tried for offences committed against another person (66 per cent), with assault constituting the lion’s share of these (70 per cent). The next most common crimes of violence were knife-fighting (12 per cent), armed robbery (8 per cent) and homicide (6 per cent). In regard to crimes against property (27 per cent of the total number of crimes committed), these were more or less evenly distributed between simple breaking and entering (31 per cent), smuggling (30 per cent) and petty theft (27 per cent).³

At the age of 12 Yeoryios Mandiras’s parents apprenticed him to a cobbler in Smyrna. After he left his home in Kerkyra he spent two years working in that bustling port city. His master then sold his contract to a cobbler in Salonica, and there, one day in July 1857, he assaulted another apprentice, Ussi Amire, with a hammer (Criminal Cases, 1852–55, Docket 31, Salonica, 18 March 1855: 96). Spyros Stanellos, a young man (aged 22) from Kerkyra, was a ‘seller of game’ in Constantinople. During the summer of 1852 Ioanna Iakoumi from Greece accused him of indecent assault. But, when she failed to appear at the trial, the judge reluctantly dismissed the case (Criminal Cases, 1852–55, Docket 13, Constantinople, 1 July 1852: 44). Nikolas Antypas, a 38-year-old Kefallinian, had for many years run a wine shop in the Constantinople neighbourhood of Kumkapi. In 1852 he was accused of assaulting Ioannis Kakoris from Kerkyra in front of three witnesses. The parties reconciled and so the case was dismissed (Criminal Cases, 1852–55, Docket 15, Constantinople, 14 July 1852: 44). Yerasimos Florin, a 61-year-old innkeeper from Ithaka, committed an armed robbery against Andon de Avonese, an Ottoman subject. Because of the severity of the offence, he was charged with a capital crime and the case was sent to the Supreme Court, where the jury found him guilty (Criminal Cases, 1852–55, Docket 2, Constantinople, 10 January 1853: 48). Ioannis Ferentinos, a 30-year-old pilot from Lefkas, was charged with assault and uttering a verbal threat against Themistoklis Vlassopoulos Tzannachis, a fellow Ionian islander. There were four witnesses to the fight. He was convicted and ordered to provide surety that he would keep the peace or face expulsion from the Ottoman Empire. ‘He gave good security and was liberated’ (Criminal Cases, 1852–55, Docket 26, Constantinople, 29 June 1853: 50). Aristotelis Kovellas, a 27-year-old merchant from Zakynthos resident in Salonica’s Frankish Quarter was convicted of assaulting Yitzhak Markesun, a Jewish porter. The judge ordered him to pay the victim $5. In the margin of the report the Judge noted: ‘No serious injury done to the plaintiff; the fine imposed, [because] many of the Ionians consider it meritorious to molest the Jews’ (Criminal Cases, 1852–55, Docket 4, Salonica, 19 December 1853: 58). Anastasios Loizos, a 36-year-old publican from Kerkyra, lived in the Cretan town of Chania. In the winter of 1853 a Cretan Muslim named Selim charged him with assault. Hadji Ali, Barea Reis Said and Mehdi witnessed the fight. The Municipal Council acquitted the defendant, deciding that the fight had been a fair contest, but they noted that Loizos was a notorious brawler, having been brought before them on similar charges on 4 August 1847 and 14 October 1851, and so they ordered him to pay a surety to keep the peace (Criminal Cases, 1852–55, Docket 2, Chania, Crete, 7 March 1853: 68).

These cases capture the salient characteristics of the people who sojourned abroad during the nineteenth century, the types of crimes they committed and the social context in which they committed them. The overwhelming number of arrests was for crimes committed by men against other men; approximately 98 per cent of criminal defendants were male as were 97 per cent of their victims. Though men of all ages committed crimes, the vast majority of both perpetrators and victims were young men in their twenties (the average age of criminal defendants was 28). As to the occupations of the accused, 34 per cent were petty artisans, like cobblers, carpenters and lamp-makers; 22 per cent were involved in maritime activities, 18 per cent were listed as ‘labourers’ and 17 per cent were hawkers and street vendors. In notes attached to their cases, the court scribes recorded their previous residences, and occasionally letters were sent to the police elsewhere to obtain information about their activities. From these marginal notations it is clear that these men moved regularly and frequently. Moreover there are numerous ca...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Society and Politics
• Part II: Literature and Culture