At the height of the 2015 refugee crisis, a moment of human kindness captured the world’s attention. A young Syrian mother, newly landed by small boat on a beach in Greece, was struggling to feed her child when Militsa (Emilia) Kamvisi, who was then 83, offered to help. The two friends Kamvisi had been sitting with on a nearby bench — Maritsa Mavrapidou and Efstratia Mavrapidou, 85 and 89 respectively — joined in.

A photographer recorded the scene and the three grannies from Lesbos, as they came to be known, became instant symbols of hospitality and welcome. As Kamvisi put it at the time: “What did I do? I didn’t do anything. I just wanted to help the girl, who was wet and tired.”

The poignancy of their gesture was underscored by the fact that all three women were themselves children of refugees. Maritsa Mavrapidou later explained: “Our mothers came here as refugees from Turkey, just across the way, and they were just girls at the time. They came without clothes, with nothing. That’s why we feel sorry for the migrants.”

Their mothers arrived in Greece as part of what historians call the 1922-24 Asia Minor forced displacement. Following the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the Greco-Turkish war that ensued, Greece and the newly founded state of Turkey agreed to the exchange and compulsory displacement of their religious minorities. Around 1.2 million people were expelled from Turkey to Greece and 360,000, from Greece to Turkey.

In my new book, A Century of Asia Minor Refugees in Greece: Flight, Fight, and Fraternity, I show how refugee memory and identity changes through time as it passes from one generation to the next. Refugee memories pass through the different stages of trauma, from silence, to long periods during which memories remain dormant and, ultimately, to a reawakening.

Between 2019 and 2020, I travelled throughout Greece conducting over 260........

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