Cultural Endorama ’21 (2022)

We usually refer to the refugees of the Asia Minor Catastrophe in connection with the hardships associated with their displacement and resettlement. We speak of the violence of war, the lives lost, the homelands left behind, the families torn apart, and the hardships they faced in their efforts to settle in their new home. What we rarely mention, however, is the refugees’ health situation—their illnesses, the physical and psychological strain, as well as the way in which these problems and the effort to address them have transformed the landscape of public health in Greece.

In 1922, even before the refugees arrived, the Greek population was plagued by endemic diseases (malaria, tuberculosis, Spanish flu). Public health was limited to prohibitive regulations and rudimentary infrastructure. The decade of war from 1912 to 1922 (from the Balkan Wars to the Asia Minor Catastrophe) further exacerbated the situation. Added to the existing problems were those of the New Territories (Northern Greece), but above all those of the war’s wounded and disabled. Already in the period preceding the Catastrophe, efforts had begun to provide care for refugees and the wounded; however, these efforts were primarily local and piecemeal in nature.

The Asia Minor Catastrophe and the mass influx of refugees made the need for care and assistance even more urgent, to such an extent that it could not be met by local initiatives alone. Many of the refugees had already been uprooted from their homes months before they finally arrived in Greece, moving from place to place in Anatolia, as well as to quarantine stations in Greece that had been specially set up for the occasion. Typhus, the plague, influenza, tuberculosis, as well as exhaustion from hunger and hardship and the psychological strain, had reduced the refugees to “human wrecks.” To address this situation, the Greek government implemented a series of reforms and institutional measures that transformed the landscape of public health in Greek society.

Beginning with the “Supreme Directorate of Public Health” of the Thessaloniki government during the period of the National Schism (1915–16) and continuing through the founding of the School of Hygiene in 1931, the presence of refugees led to structural changes that reshaped the field of public health in Greece.