Rarely does there emerge an ethnographer whose description and analysis strike so close to the beating heart of the topic that readers palpably experience its beauty and pain. Panayotis League is such a writer. In Echoes of the Great Catastrophe: Re-sounding Anatolian Greekness in Diaspora, League explores the ways that musical traditions from the island of Lesvos have reflected and mediated shifting identities both in Lesvos and in its diaspora. In the process, he touches upon the essence of diaspora—to be exiled from what is perceived as home and thus impelled to constantly re-create it.
From the late 1880s to the early 1920s, almost 500,000 Greeks emigrated to the United States. Most left because of agricultural failures and an economy overburdened with refugees from the Balkan Wars (1912–1913) and Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922)—the latter precipitated by the Megali Idea (Great Idea) of uniting Greek populations in Asia Minor and elsewhere...
