Kastellorizo’s Australian Diaspora – A tale of cultural endurance
Source: NEOS KOSMOS
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” – T. S. Elliot
Like many of us who are the products of the migratory experience, I had always felt that something was missing. It was as though there were family stories still to be told and deep-seated memories to be retrieved and unwrapped. An old wall clock and, hanging next to it, a black and white image of an island harbour were venerated items of a transported material heritage, but they were hardly discussed, at least not with the younger generation. It seemed to me that they were there to bear silent witness to unspoken events. For me this made them all the more alluring.
My origins stem back to a tiny speck of an island lying in the eastern Mediterranean – Kastellorizo. An island roughly the size of Sydney’s Centennial Park, Kastellorizo became for me a sort of imagined Xanadu, a place where, we heard, gold, silver and even caviar were once to be found in abundance. Where women paraded their family’s accumulated wealth through their finery, like a mobile savings bank. And where it all went wrong so quickly, leaving a deeply suppressed yearning for a ‘return’, both physical and temporal, to another place and another time.
Lost legacy
Contrary to what is commonly believed, Kastellorizo’s economic and social decline did not begin and end with the island’s cruel devastation during the Second World War. This heartbreaking final chapter, which featured fierce German bombardment, was in fact the coup de grace for a proudly Greek island that had already withstood economic calamity from as early as the last two decades of the 19th century.
Kastellorizo’s story is an extraordinary one precisely because it does not fit neatly within the traditional Greek island narrative – and yet it remains a quintessentially Greek story. A potent combination of local Hellenic zeal, tightening Ottoman rule, strategic worth coupled with cultural isolation, and various accidents of history, produced a series of events peculiar to the island. These included unbridled wealth in the middle years of the 19th century, a local revolt against the Turks in 1913, a short period of frenzied de facto Greek rule, and then successive French, Italian and British occupation, until Kastellorizo’s long-awaited and triumphant de jure union with Greece in 1948.
These cascading events, punctured by cruel bombardments in both wars and a devastating earthquake in 1926, were to produce layer upon layer of emigratory travel from the island from as early as the 1880s up until the aftermath of the Second World War. The first brave adventurers from the island were, typically, young males seeking new opportunities in territories as diverse as the Belgian Congo, Brazil, the east coast and southern states of America, France and, in large part, Australia. Gradually, as more and more relocated over time, the epicentre of the Kastellorizian ‘experience’ shifted from the island itself to a distant, far larger, island continent to which the island’s memorial and material heritage was progressively transplanted.
From isolation to integration
Today, it is often estimated that over 80,000 Australians claim some familial link to Kastellorizo, an island that at its zenith supported a population of no more than 10,000. While smaller Kastellorizian communities flourished for many decades in places like New York and Florianopolis, there is little doubt that, today, the island’s heart beats loudest in cities like Perth, Darwin, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide.
In these multicultural urban centres, Kastellorizian family names like Paspaley, Kailis, Liveris, Michael, Harmanis, Zempilas, Mangos and Bolkus are not only synonymous with success, but deeply embedded into the modern Australian mosaic. And connecting them all is a nostalgic – some might say persistent – attachment to a 10 square kilometre limestone rock in the eastern Mediterranean that has produced a diaspora community whose yearning for their legacy is all-pervasive.
Adorning their loungerooms one will commonly find that same ubiquitous black and white letterbox image of Kastellorizo’s harbour crammed to capacity with two and three-masted brigs and barks. The fact that the photograph dates from the last decade of the 19th century, three or even four generations back in time, does not lessen the image’s force. This is what Kastellorizo represents for these proud diaspora Greeks, even if such prosperity was already but a memory a century ago. Nevertheless, gazing at the image will now routinely evoke treasured memories of a grandfather’s maritime tales or a grandmother’s delicate embroidery or ornate bridal costume.
Aside from its Indigenous past, Australia was, to a large degree, a blank canvass for the early Greek migrants who arrived not solely from Kastellorizo, but also from Ithaca, Florina and Kythera. This enabled them to speedily make their mark in their chosen destination. Associations were formed and churches were built (the oldest Greek Orthodox Church in Australia is Ayia Triádha in Sydney which was consecrated in 1898, just prior to the consecration of Evangelismós in Melbourne in 1899). Needless to say, such initiatives were vitally important for the maintenance of cultural and religious identity in a new land.
But to their fellow Greeks, the Kastellorizians (or ‘Kazzies’ as they came to be known) seemed to project an unfamiliar sense of ‘otherness’. Occasionally surprised by the Kazzies’ eastern brand of ‘Greekness’ (a quality they shared with many other Asia Minor Greeks), some Greeks could not countenance the labelling of a fellow Greek from another place as a xénos (foreigner). This, and other peculiarities, led to some occasional tensions, but over time such differences dissolved and new, non-regional, associations were formed to cater to a broader Pan-Hellenic audience.
Still, the passion of the ‘Kazzies’ for a romanticised ‘return’ to their island gained traction, long after their relatively seamless integration into broader Australian society. The more time that passed, the greater was the expectation. Indeed, the more ‘Australianised’ the Kazzies seemed to be, the stronger their yearning for the rediscovering of their ‘lost’ island became. Encouraged by Australia’s policies of multiculturalism, children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren of early pioneers started making their own ‘pilgrimages’ to see for themselves where it had all begun. Long-abandoned properties were reclaimed, neo-classical homes were slowly restored and Greek identity proudly re-discovered. And, at the same time, genealogical trees stretching back to the 19th century were painstakingly researched and assembled, while old photographs were retrieved from kaséles, re-framed and displayed again.
A mnemonic renaissance
All of this coincided, of course, with a renaissance of sorts on the island itself, when the azure waters of the easternmost Greek islands became the latest unexplored paradise for itinerant yachters and tourists. On Kastellorizo, new restaurants opened, cafés and bars traded noisily, and the prokiméa, where merchants and sea captains had walked over a century earlier, became instead a place for sunbathers and revellers. But in the island’s narrow laneways, more private moments of exploration began, as old neighbourhoods were re-discovered and oft-told reminiscences at last made sense within their proper context.
Today, one could argue that the Kastellorizian diaspora in Australia is as vibrant as it ever has been, fuelled as it is in large part by the holiday experiences of these descendants’ regular sojourns on the island. Admittedly, this is a far-cry from the earlier years, when afternoons in clubhouses in Sydney or Perth, surrounded by colourised photographs of a devastated island landscape, provided a much-needed connection to the island. But today, clubs and brotherhoods are being re-imagined and are slowly but surely re-directing their energies towards valuable cultural endeavours that seek to preserve and propagate the legacy their ancestors transported to a new homeland across the globe. And diaspora links to Kastellorizo are being reinforced by charitable organisations like ‘Friends of Kastellorizo’ which refocuses expatriate attention and assistance on the essential needs of the island.
The quotation from T. S. Eliot which opened this piece could not be more appropriate. The diaspora experience of the Greeks of Kastellorizo will only be truly complete when their journey has come full cycle for their descendants. It is of lasting credit to our forebears that they undertook that journey in the first place, but it remains our, and our children’s, challenge to complete that circle of exploration and thereby come to ‘know’ our island – and, thereby, Greece – for the first time.
The old clock and photograph now hang in my home, but they have found a voice as Kastellorizo’s calamitous story has been gradually revealed. Long may it remain that way.
The above is an edited version of a feature that first appeared in Greece Is – Issue 45, 2020 and in Dr Helen Vatsikopoulos’s 2024 collection of Greek Australian stories, ‘Hellenic Dreaming’.
*Nicholas Pappas is a retired lawyer and the Chair of the South Sydney Rabbitohs; he also chairs The Hellenic Initiative Australia, serves as Secretary of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocesan Council, is a Trustee of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia Consolidated Trust, and non-executive chair of the Bank of Sydney. Pappas holds a doctorate in economic history from University of Sydney and has authored books and articles on Kastellorizo.
The original article: NEOS KOSMOS .
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