Social memories of a heterotopia. The identity of Greek political refugees and their descendants from the village Beloyannis in Hungary

The subject of the project is the social memories and the identity of the Greek political refugees from the village Beloyannis in Hungary. The Beloyannis village was built at 1950 for Greek political refuges of the Civil War in an area which is about 8O km away from Budapest. The Hungarian State supported the project and 418 houses were built by its future habitants. Initially its population was 1850 Greeks. Today many of its habitants still maintain their Greek nationality. In the village there were also public buildings such as Town Hall, school, library, shops, centre of culture etc., namely its town-planning structure was that of a community. The project suggests an approach of the village as a heterotopia, according to the definition of the concept by Michel Foucault. More specifically, the social life of the refugee populations had elements of the follow main juxtaposition. Its content is defined by ideas or collective representations about their host place (Hungary) as a State which is very close to their political ideas on the one hand but they feel a cultural proximity to the country of their origins (Greece) on the other hand. This juxtaposition can be considered as the constitutive component for the formation of their collective identity. Consequently, one of the main research issues is the definition of actions and strategies which adopted the population of this community for maintaining its cohesion. How did they fit their cultural tradition of the Greek mountain societies which is based on conceptions of the social and political life as personal relations of interdependence and complementarity, within a wider society which was an extreme centralized State? Methodologically, the research data of the project will include interviews with people from Beloyannis belonging to the first, second and third generations and also the study of archival material that exists in the Town Hall of Beloyannis and in private collections.