By Alexander Billinis

I was born in the Diaspora, like millions of other Greeks. The word itself, fittingly, comes from the Greek language, “a scattering or dispersion.” For millennia Greece has been shedding population, in ancient times to Greek colonies established primarily in (what is today southern) Italy, Asia Minor, and the Black Sea basin, in the post-Byzantine world often to these same destinations or further west. In our era, Greeks have ventured to the far reaches of the world, North and South America, Australia, and northwestern Europe. Greece owes part of the energy of its rebirth to its Diaspora, which supplied material and physical aid to the cause. Sometimes they resettled in the newly emerged country, and often as not, returned to the Diaspora.

The reason for exit generally consisted of a combination of economic and political factors, and which combination depended on the era in question. Certainly Greece’s grinding poverty and poor soils, coupled with constant wars and revolutions, spurred the majority of the modern exodus, though, as the population became more educated, the political and bureaucratic environment also encouraged a brain drain, as well as the peasants’ brawn drain. As a maritime people from time immemorial, the means to exit are readily available.
My own Diaspora origins derive from political and from economic factors. My maternal grandfather left the hills above the Peloponnesian port of Patras for the railways of Utah about a century ago. He returned to fight in the Balkan Wars, but after marrying, left again for the United States, and had six children in America, including my late mother. My late father was born on the seafaring island of Hydra, the son of a sailor father from a remote Peloponnesian village and a Hydriot captain’s daughter. He was raised in Pireaus, during the 1930s, when Greece was slowly industrializing but deeply shattered by the Asia Minor disaster. My father’s circumstances were middle class; his sailor father visited once or twice a year as the price for his family’s relative comfort. The horrors of World War II and its aftermath took its toll on my father’s psyche, and, after service in the Navy, he took to the sea. He possessed a good education and had every reason why he would live well in postwar Greece, but meeting my mother in America made him part of the Diaspora, and they had three children, all born and brought up in America.

I spent nearly all of the summers of my youth in Greece. As much as I did identify with Greece, I could not really say I felt totally at home there; I often said going back was “a dream that I hope never comes true.” My father sometimes thought of returning to Greece, but the politics of the country, the inefficiencies, corruption, and bureaucracy relative to life in America always stayed his hand. Cautionary tales abounded, about people who sold up in the West, and then moved back. What started as a blessed dream often became a stultifying reality.

Nonetheless, Greece continued to draw me and the Diaspora experience held me in its thrall. I had the good fortune to travel quite widely, and in nearly everywhere I visited, I found Greeks. In Santiago, Chile, at the tiny Greek Orthodox Church, I met a fellow who recognized my last name, and we found that we were distantly related. In Hungary, I met remnants of a Communist Greek Diaspora scattered around the former Communist world. Elsewhere in Europe I encountered nearly empty churches which as always function as the cores of Diaspora communities, and people who barely knew Greek, just that their background was Greek.

Nations resemble sedimentary rock formations, where layers eventually blend into the whole. So it was with the Greek Diaspora. Thus, the Orthodox Cathedral of Vienna, a church with a venerable Greek past, now hosts Austrians of mixed Greek, Serb, Romanian and assorted backgrounds, assimilated for generations, along with a sprinkling of new arrivals, students, or visitors. The same held for the Greek Orthodox Church of Trieste, once home to a thriving Greek community of substantial wealth and influence, and now of Italians who acknowledge their Greek descent by clinging to their church affiliation. Just around the corner, another Orthodox Church, this time Serbian, hosts a flock of Italo-Serbs as well as thousands of new arrivals.

Sometimes the sedimentation breaks down, and the grains of sand emerge again. I have seen this when a fourth generation Greek-American discovers his roots, perhaps after a trip to the old country, and immerses himself in a country or culture he utterly wants to understand but will find that he cannot. It could be even more remote where a Sicilian-American fellow from Ohio converts to the Orthodoxy his distant ancestors might have celebrated, and then returns to Italy as an Orthodox bishop.

Other times, the rocks are crushed and the sands are sent forth to disparate fates. Greeks suffered ethnic slaughter and mass expulsion from their Asia Minor homelands, lands where they formed part of the ethnic mosaic and they were far more indigenous to the area than the Turks who expelled them. Other, smaller expulsions occurred, from Bulgaria, Russia, Alexandria, and finally Constantinople. Often as not, these expellees had a higher economic and cultural level than the local Greeks among whom they settled, and most chafed at their new surroundings and circumstances, the scars of which remain today.

Many of these refugees, having been uprooted once, resumed their wanderings in search of a better life. Most famous of these was a tobacco merchant’s son named Aristotle Onassis, expelled from wealthy surroundings in Smyrna and unable to accept his straightened refugee reality, left for Argentina, where he made the first of many fortunes. Many others left for France, America, or the next generation, for Australia, Canada, and Germany. Others, with their relatively higher education and profound sense of material loss and grievance, joined the Communist movement and after the Civil War, many fled, willingly or otherwise, into the Communist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

My sister’s husband’s family was not atypical of Asia Minor expellees. Pontic Greeks uprooted from comfortable surroundings on the southern shores of the Black Sea, to Kavalla, they lived in a prefabricated home in a refugee district, with winding streets recalling Asia Minor homelands. I remember visiting the house in the mid 1970s, before it, like most of the others in the neighborhood, gave way to modern, well-appointed multistory apartments, often financed by members of the family in America, Germany, or Australia. Of the four children in my brother-in-law’s family, two had immigrated to America. Other family returned to Greece after years behind the Iron Curtain as Communist refugees. Still other, more distant relatives, lived in Russia centuries, now “returned” to their nominal homeland, Greece.

My “repatriation” was voluntary, as a senior banker. I possessed a Greek passport, a fluent though flawed facility in Greek, exceptional knowledge of Greek history and extended family in Greece. What I lacked, aside from my passport, were the myriad of hard-to-get documents from a labyrinthine bureaucracy that runs Greeks’ lives, military service, and property. We would go every summer to Greece in my teenage years and my Serbian wife had a Balkan frame of reference which I grafted onto my historical knowledge to “prepare” me for life in Greece. I found that, for one who had lived “outside,” nothing really prepared you for life in Greece.

The Elliniki Pragmatikotita (Greek Reality) strikes both as a fist and as a “water torture” of thousands of drips. The country operates, if at all, on connections and influence, to a degree that I simply could not fathom. Then there was the tyranny of the bureaucracy and the constant attempt to circumvent it and corrupt it, which created a vicious cycle. A case in point was the requirement that I go to the army for basic training, despite being 36 years old. Actually, my service in the army was a great experience, because, due to its short duration, I had the “tourist version” of military service. My unit was full of Russian-born Greeks, so much that Russian was the second language. Most of those Russo-Pontioi (Russian Pontic Greeks) kept to themselves, but in some ways I identified more with them, as returnees from the Diaspora, than with local Greeks. The difference was that I returned under comfortable circumstances, with greater prospects. I was struck by the degree of alienation they felt from “their country” and their fellow Greeks.

Everyday life in Greece is a challenge. To do well seemed to presuppose beating and corrupting the system which is, itself, corrupt. I was not wired for such a life, where so many people got paid under the table and the cost of living was high. Looking the other way, whether in work or in life, was a way of life. I looked to the future of rising cost of living, a crapshoot healthcare and educational system and I surmised that I had a choice: to play the game and go native and under the table, or to vote with my feet and return to my Diaspora destiny. Looking at my wife and my son, named after my late father, the choice was obvious.

So, having seen off the moving vans, saying goodbye to friends and family, we packed our car, which we brought, like ourselves, from America, and started north on Greece’s spanking new autobahns for Serbia and eventually, London. Going north, we encountered others on their way back to Germany, Austria, and elsewhere, particularly as we left Greek Macedonia and entered into the Slav Macedonian Republic. Crossing into Serbia, the road joined that from Bulgaria, where more joined the Diaspora journey north, driving loaded-down used Mercedes sporting German plates but swarthy passengers, Turkish, Albanian, or Bulgarian Gastarbeiter. Throughout Serbia, more cars joined the route northward, all sporting foreign plates but local faces. The whole Balkan Peninsula joined in the Diaspora experience, retracing in luxurious used cars routes once traveled by ox-drawn cart towards greater prosperity. Greeks and Serbs had been traveling this route in successive waves for dozens of generations, founding communities that either assimilated or survived due to influxes of new immigrants. Now the ranks were swelled by a mass of Muslim Turks for the industries of Western Europe.

For centuries Serbia had sent her children outward, due to the same factors as Greece. Serbia had suffered the disfigurement of five centuries of Ottoman rule, like Greece, and her Diaspora at that time also nurtured the dream of a re-born Orthodox state, and when it occurred, like Greeks, they returned to help run the new kingdom, while others, due to poverty and politics, left. The Yugoslav regime’s soft Communism created a Diaspora of political dissidents along with those who left for the economic opportunities in Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere. Then, the wars of Yugoslav dissolution resulted in 400,000 Serbs leaving in order to live a normal life, particularly to Canada, Australia, and America. Among them was the woman who would become my wife. When we met, in Chicago, at the Serbian Orthodox Church, she was one of thousands of well-educated Serbs who sought a better life and possibly roots in America.

As we left Serbia, continuing to London, we waved goodbye to the Balkans and returned to the Diaspora, to the way of life we both knew was our destiny. And yet, before leaving, we bought a house in Serbia and return constantly, as to Greece. Like many Diaspora people, we cannot quite let go. We might just return, one day.

Alexander Billinis has spent a decade in international banking in the US and Europe, most recently in London. He is particularly interested in Greece's economic and cultural position in the Balkans. He has worked with companies invested in the Balkans, and is writing a travel-historical book about the post-Byzantine states of modern Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania.