I thought about it at the opening of the Asia Minor exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Piraeus last Wednesday evening, full of autumnal serenity and emotion: Angelos Delivorias is no longer with us to enjoy it, but he would certainly be absolutely proud of the museum, the team, succeeded him, with the great effort that has gone into making this body move forward with the same passion and professionalism after its own “retirement”. The truth is that the tribute “Asia Minor: Shining – Destruction – Eradication – Creation”, which Benaki organizes in conjunction with the Center for the Study of Asia Minor, is a station for Greek exhibition data for their scientific excellence, kaleidoscopic look at a lost world, thickening of History and selection testimonies by tireless curator Evita Arapoglu and her colleagues. How to close the eyelid and put some rooms inside? How to go around the expanses of memories? And yet he succeeded.

Ms. Arapoglu stood at the large entrance to the building along with the Chairman of the Board of Directors, welcoming the people. KMS George David, its director, Professor Pascal Kitromeldis and, of course, the “hostess” Irini Gerulana. A little further on, Giorgis Magginis, Artistic Director of the Benaki Museum, and Nikos Triboulidis, Head of Development, spoke to the guests who filled the atrium. The atmosphere was full of joy mixed with bittersweet feelings. In contrast to the heroic years of 1821, 1922 and the 100th anniversary, we are more pushed to see our mistakes, to identify the fallacy and error, the wrong balance. On the other hand, there was an incredible miracle of assimilation of aliens, persistence of survival, their reserves of morals and knowledge, which “enriched” our homeland. In his speech, the Prime Minister himself referred to this dual nature of the anniversary: ​​“The catastrophe in Asia Minor is perhaps the greatest trauma of our recent past. But the integration of refugees into our national core is perhaps the highest peaceful achievement of the Greek state,” he said, and later devoted more than an hour to the exhibition, even asking many clarifying questions.

PtD took over the baton, completing his own greeting with a knot around his neck: “Moving from Ionia to Cappadocia, crossing Pontus, stopping in Constantinople and ending up in Eastern Thrace, we feel the shocking imprint of the place, we hear a secret voice. The voice that, as Ilias Venezis wrote, “becomes the most invisible and most reliable link between the generations of ancestors and those to come, the sound that will remain when the memory of people is lost.”

The exhibition emphasizes the vision of two different people, said George David, referring to Octavius ​​and Melpo Merlier, the founders of the Asia Minor Research Center, who managed to create an ark of narratives and testimonies. Without her, the sofa in the past would have been missed. The “gift” was presented by Minister of Culture Lina Mendoni and foreign philellenes such as Michael Llewellyn Smith, who financed the United Kingdom’s ambassador to Athens, the Hellenist Rodrik Beaton, the university and writer René Hirson and others.