Uprooted to Greece

St. Sophia of Kleisoura entered the recorded life of the Church as a refugee. Born into the Ottoman-Greek world of Pontus and widowed by the persecutions of the First World War, she was swept up in the great uprooting of the Anatolian Greeks — the flight from Asia Minor, the Catastrophe of 1922, and the compulsory population exchange of 1923 — that emptied Asia Minor of its ancient Christian communities and resettled well over a million Orthodox refugees in the new lands of Greek Macedonia. This file sets her personal displacement against that historical background, pinning the contested details of her own flight to the devotional sources and the general history to the standard scholarship.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Pontic Greek; 20th-c. woman ascetic)

A Woman of the Pontic World

Sophia Saoulidou was born in 1883 in Pontus, the Greek-speaking Orthodox world of the Black Sea coast of Asia Minor, under Ottoman rule; the short notices place her birth at Trebizond, the fuller Life in a village of the Trebizond region (the biography transmitted through her spiritual children and the monastery, as translated by John Sanidopoulos, “Eldress Sophia the Ascetic of Kleisoura,” Mystagogy / Orthodox Christianity Then and Now, 2010/2011; cf. the entry in OrthodoxWiki, “Sophia of Kleisoura”). She married about 1907; her husband, Jordan (Iordanis) Hotokouridou, disappeared around 1914, taken — as were great numbers of Greek and Armenian men of military age — into the Ottoman forced-labour battalions (the amele taburu), from which he never returned, and the child of the marriage died young (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy, 2010/2011; on the details, which vary between accounts, see Marriage, Loss, and the Catastrophe). By the time she left Asia Minor she was thus already what she would remain: a widow without husband or child, alone.

Her private losses were a small part of a vast one. The Greek communities of Pontus and of Asia Minor more broadly were destroyed in a series of persecutions, deportations, and massacres between roughly 1914 and 1923 — the events that Pontic Greeks remember as the genocide of their people and that the wider Greek world remembers, in its 1922 climax, as the Asia Minor Catastrophe (for the general history of the destruction of the Ottoman-Greek communities, see the standard treatments of the period, e.g. Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsion that Forged Modern Greece and Turkey, Harvard University Press, 2006). The labour battalions into which Sophia’s husband vanished were themselves an instrument of that destruction: conscripted non-Muslim men were worked, starved, and in many cases died or were killed, and the disappearance of a husband “into the amele taburu, never heard from again,” is a formula that recurs across the memory of an entire generation of Anatolian Greek women (Clark, Twice a Stranger, 2006, on the wartime persecution of the Ottoman Greeks; Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy, 2010/2011, for Sophia’s own case).

The Flight to Greece

The fuller accounts of her Life say that Sophia left Asia Minor and came to Greece in 1919, and that she sailed on a ship bearing the name “Saint Nicholas” — the patron of sailors and of the Pontic seaboard (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy, 2010/2011; the detail of the ship’s name is transmitted in the devotional biography and cannot be independently documented). She came, that is, among the earliest and largest waves of Pontic and Asia Minor Greek refugees fleeing to the Greek mainland.

[Disputed: the date and wave of her flight. The fuller Life dates her departure to 1919 (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy, 2010/2011). But the refugee exodus of the Anatolian Greeks was not a single event: it began under wartime persecution before 1919, swelled through the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, reached its catastrophe in the destruction of Smyrna and the rout of the Greek army in 1922, and was completed by the compulsory exchange of 1923. Some shorter notices accordingly fold Sophia's flight into the later 1922–1923 wave rather than dating it to 1919. The sources do not permit certainty; the range c.1919–1923 is given here, with the 1919/"Saint Nicholas" account attributed to the fuller Life as its most specific witness.]

Whatever the precise year, she arrived in a Greece already staggering under an influx it was ill-prepared to absorb — a small, poor, war-exhausted state suddenly asked to feed, house, and settle a refugee population equal to a fifth or more of its own. The refugees arrived, in Clark’s phrase, as strangers twice over: strangers to the country that received them and, soon, strangers to the homeland that had cast them out (Clark, Twice a Stranger, 2006).

The Population Exchange and the Refugee World of Macedonia

The uprooting that carried Sophia to Greece was given its final legal form at Lausanne. Under the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, signed at Lausanne on 30 January 1923, Greece and the new Turkish republic agreed to a compulsory exchange of their minorities: Orthodox Christians of Turkey were to be sent to Greece and Muslims of Greece to Turkey, the criterion being religion rather than language or self-identification, and the exchange being obligatory — the displaced were not consulted and, with narrow exceptions, could not return (the Lausanne Convention, 30 January 1923; Clark, Twice a Stranger, 2006, the standard English account of the Convention and its human consequences). Roughly 1.2 to 1.3 million Orthodox Christians were moved to Greece under and around the exchange, and a smaller number of Muslims in the other direction (Clark, Twice a Stranger, 2006).

A very large share of these refugees were settled in Greek Macedonia and Thrace — the northern lands newly incorporated into Greece after the Balkan Wars, and now deliberately repopulated with Orthodox newcomers on lands vacated by departing Muslims. It was into this world of Macedonian resettlement that Sophia was received, and it was in West Macedonia, near Kastoria, that she would find her monastery (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy, 2010/2011, for her settling in the Kastoria region; Clark, Twice a Stranger, 2006, on the concentration of refugee resettlement in Macedonia). The refugees who peopled it were, in the main, destitute: they had left land, houses, workshops, and graves behind and arrived with what they could carry. Disease, hunger, makeshift shelter, and the trauma of the massacres and the sea-crossings marked the early refugee settlements, and many of the arrivals — widows and orphans conspicuous among them — lived at the edge of survival for years (Clark, Twice a Stranger, 2006, on the destitution and mortality of the early refugee resettlement).

This is the world St. Sophia entered: not a peaceful retirement into piety but the raw refugee Macedonia of the 1920s, in which a childless widow with nothing was one figure among hundreds of thousands. Her later asceticism — the extreme poverty, the scraps of spoiled food eaten without harm, the refusal to bathe after Pontus, the single threadbare blanket — cannot be read apart from this. What the villagers of Kleisoura would later take for the madness of “Crazy-Sophia” was, in part, the destitution of the refugee raised into a chosen and radical poverty for Christ (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy, 2010/2011, on her manner of life; on that asceticism see The Ascetic of the Hearth). The catastrophe that emptied her of husband, child, and homeland left her with nothing to lose and, in the reading of her spiritual children, free for God.

The Character of the Record

Almost everything known of Sophia’s refugee years reaches us through the hagiographic and devotional accounts — above all the biography resting on the testimony of her spiritual daughter Kyriaki Kioskeridou and the monastery community, as gathered and translated into English by John Sanidopoulos and echoed in OrthodoxWiki and OrthoChristian.com. These are attestations of devotion standing on living witnesses and Greek-language material, not archival documentation, and on the early period they are thin and internally variable (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy, 2010/2011). The historical frame, by contrast — the destruction of the Ottoman Greeks, the labour battalions, the 1922 Catastrophe, the Lausanne exchange, the Macedonian resettlement — rests on the general scholarship and is secure. The honest account holds the two together: a firmly documented catastrophe, and within it a single refugee life whose particular dates and details survive only as her spiritual children remembered them.

See Also

References

  • Clark, Bruce. Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsion that Forged Modern Greece and Turkey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. (The standard English account of the 1923 Greco-Turkish population exchange, the Lausanne Convention, the destitution and resettlement of the Orthodox refugees, and the wartime persecution of the Ottoman Greeks.)
  • Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, signed at Lausanne, 30 January 1923. (The legal instrument of the compulsory, religion-based exchange under which roughly 1.2 million Orthodox Christians were moved to Greece.)
  • Sanidopoulos, John. “Eldress Sophia the Ascetic of Kleisoura.” Mystagogy / Orthodox Christianity Then and Now, 2010/2011. (English translation of the devotional Life resting on the testimony of Kyriaki Kioskeridou and the monastery; her Pontic birth, marriage and losses, the 1919 flight and the ship “Saint Nicholas,” her settling in the Kastoria region, and her manner of life. Treated as hagiographic attestation, not archival documentation.)
  • “Sophia of Kleisoura.” OrthodoxWiki; and OrthoChristian.com. (Aggregator/devotional notices standing on the same Greek-language material; consulted for the range of dates and the shorter accounts of her flight.)