The Uprooting of 1924

The end of the Cappadocian world: the compulsory Greco-Turkish population exchange of 1923–24, mandated by the Treaty of Lausanne, which uprooted the entire Orthodox Christian population of Anatolia — the Farasiots among them — and forced them to Greece. St. Arsenios, in his eighties, led his flock on the long journey out. The historical exchange is documented; the leading of Farasa is drawn from St. Paisios’ Life.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Cappadocian)

The Compulsory Exchange

The event that ended the Farasiots’ two-thousand-year presence in Anatolia was not a local persecution but a diplomatic settlement. The Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, signed at Lausanne on 30 January 1923 and confirmed within the framework of the Treaty of Lausanne (24 July 1923), mandated a compulsory and permanent exchange between the two states: the Orthodox Christians of Anatolia (with limited exceptions, chiefly Istanbul) were to be removed to Greece, and the Muslims of Greece (excepting Western Thrace) to Turkey (on the Convention and its terms see Renée Hirschon, ed., Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey, New York: Berghahn, 2003; and Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions that Forged Modern Greece and Turkey, London: Granta, 2006). The exchange was reckoned by criterion of religion, not language — so that Greek-speaking Muslims went to Turkey and Turkish-speaking (Karamanli) Christians came to Greece — and it uprooted well over a million Orthodox Christians from Asia Minor in 1923–24 (Clark, Twice a Stranger, 2006, on the criterion and the scale).

For the Christians of Cappadocia this meant the total and irreversible end of their world. Communities that had kept the faith through Byzantine, Seljuk, and Ottoman centuries were removed, whole, from the land of their ancestors; and remote Farasa, which had preserved its archaic Greek and its Orthodoxy in a mountain valley, was emptied of Christians for good (Elder Paisios, Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian, Souroti, on the uprooting of Farasa; on the end of Cappadocian Hellenism see Hirschon, ed., Crossing the Aegean, 2003). This is the catastrophe within which St. Arsenios’ last act unfolds — and it is a documented historical catastrophe, not a hagiographic one.

The Old Priest Leads His Flock

Into this upheaval the tradition places St. Arsenios’ final and, in a sense, culminating service. By St. Paisios’ account, the old priest — by then in his eighties — took charge of the departure of his people, organizing and leading the Farasiot exodus from Cappadocia toward Greece: gathering the community, baptizing the unbaptized children (the future St. Paisios among them; see “I Want to Leave a Little Monk”), and shepherding the frightened refugees on the long and dangerous journey to the coast and across to their new and unknown country (Elder Paisios, Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian, Souroti, on Arsenios leading the Farasiots out of Cappadocia in 1924).

This was the office of a pastor discharged to its very end. The priest who had guarded the flock through the ordinary and extraordinary pressures of Ottoman minority life (see Pastor of a Threatened Flock) now guarded it through its homelessness, carrying his people out of the land where they could no longer live. The tradition remembers him as the steady centre of the community in its terror and grief — the one who held them together and brought them through. Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, the details of the journey as the Life gives them (the hardships, the protections, the specific incidents credited to his prayers) are reported as the tradition attests, pinned to St. Paisios’ account; the fact of the exchange and the uprooting of the Anatolian Christians is independently and firmly documented (Clark, Twice a Stranger, 2006; Hirschon, ed., Crossing the Aegean, 2003).

[Disputed: the route, duration, and specific incidents of the Farasiot journey. The Life narrates the exodus with circumstantial detail and credits Arsenios’ prayers with protecting the refugees along the way; these particulars rest on the Farasiot oral memory recorded by St. Paisios and are not independently documented. What is secure is that the Farasiots were removed from Cappadocia to Greece in the 1923–24 exchange, that Arsenios accompanied and led his community, and that he reached Greece only to die within weeks (Elder Paisios, Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian, Souroti; see Repose on Corfu, 1924).]

Arrival, and the Shadow of the End

The Farasiots reached Greece in the autumn of 1924. Like the great mass of the Anatolian refugees, they arrived destitute and disoriented, strangers in the “mother country” many had never seen, to be resettled — in the Farasiots’ case, eventually, in Konitsa in Epiros and elsewhere in northern Greece (Hieromonk Isaac, Elder Paisios of Mount Athos, Chalkidiki, 2012, on the family’s resettlement in Konitsa; on the refugee experience generally see Hirschon, ed., Crossing the Aegean, 2003). But St. Arsenios himself would not share in the resettlement. He had reached Greece, the tradition holds, precisely in order to bring his people to safety — and having done so, he laid down his life, dying on Corfu forty days after arriving, exactly as he had foretold (see The Prophecy of Forty Days and Repose on Corfu, 1924).

The uprooting thus frames the whole meaning of his end. He completed his pastoral office by delivering his flock, and then died — his task, as the tradition reads it, exactly finished. The community he had saved carried his memory into their exile; and among them grew the child he had baptized, who would one day gather that memory into a book and bring the old priest’s relics home. The next file takes up the prophecy that gave his death its uncanny precision.

See Also

References

  • Elder Paisios the Athonite (Hieromonk Paisios). Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian. Souroti, Thessaloniki: Holy Hesychasterion “Evangelist John the Theologian,” Greek 1st ed. 1975; English translation, Souroti. (Arsenios leading the Farasiots out of Cappadocia in 1924; the baptisms before departure; the journey to Greece; his death within weeks of arrival.)
  • Clark, Bruce. Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions that Forged Modern Greece and Turkey. London: Granta, 2006. (The 1923–24 compulsory exchange; the criterion of religion; the scale and human cost.)
  • Hirschon, Renée, ed. Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey. New York: Berghahn, 2003. (The Lausanne Convention; the uprooting of the Anatolian Greeks and their resettlement.)
  • Hieromonk Isaac. Elder Paisios of Mount Athos. Greek original 2004; English trans., Holy Monastery of Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian, Chalkidiki, 2012. (The Eznepidis family’s resettlement in Konitsa.)