From Treaty to Tree: A Postcard from Nea Roda

I travelled to the refugee settlements of Halkidiki’s coastline in July 2025 as part of my research on everyday geographies of peace-making across Greece, Turkey and Cyprus. Adopting what Gerard Toal describes as an “anti-geopolitical eye” [1], I wanted to understand how Lausanne’s legacy of displacement, migration and survival would emerge in the everyday. I visited folklore museums, spoke with locals and wandered the village’s narrow streets. However, it was the pomegranate trees spilling red fruit over courtyard walls that left the most enduring impression. As a researcher in the Eastern Mediterranean, I knew that the pomegranate was a symbol of optimism, hope and new life – apposite, perhaps, for an academic interested in peace-making. Yet memory, place and identity intersect in unexpected ways; the power of Nea Roda’s humble pomegranate trees to bind the global to the local was yet to be revealed.

In 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne formalised a forced population exchange between ethnically Turkish Muslims and Greek Christians in the wake of intercommunal violence.[2] Under the terms of the treaty, the lives of over 1.5 million people were forcibly shifted ‘eastwards’ to Turkey or ‘westwards’ to Greece.[3] In a process overseen by the League of Nations, Greek refugees from Asia Minor rebuilt their lives in newly-constructed villages spanning the nation’s biggest cities and most remote corners. Whilst poorer urban refugees were resettled in informal settlements on the outskirts of major cities, agrarian communities established new settlements in peripheral rural regions such as Thrace and Macedonia.

A Migratory Mirror

One of the areas with the highest concentration of Asia Minor refugees is the coast of Halkidiki. Refugee settlements on these peninsulas often bear the prefix ‘nea’ (‘new’) in a linguistic reincarnation of a lost homeland. Located on the margins of power, these shores were settled by Greek families from Eastern Thrace, Western Anatolia and the Black Sea coast throughout the 1920s. The fact that the littoral geography and mountainous topography of Halkidiki mirror the erstwhile homelands of these refugees is no coincidence. The site of Nea Roda was chosen by early refugee arrivals; the calm shallow waters and mountainous shadows strongly resembled their former home in Roda – a village now known as Narlı in modern-day Turkey.

As I contemplate this resemblance, it becomes clear that this is not simply a site of resettlement. Instead, it is a requiem for a lost land. If Pierre Nora’s notion of lieux de mémoire is about memorialising architectural or agrarian landscapes, then Nea Roda takes it further.[4] Not only does the village reflect the homeland of Asia Minor refugees, but it replicates it too – manifesting a memory by recreating the contours of the landscape, the connection to the sea and the plants in their gardens.

Memorialising and Extending Memory

Such eternal echoes work alongside more tangible markers to anchor migratory memories in place whilst extending refugee identity to future generations. On the seafront promenade of Nea Roda stands a wooden monument recalling the forced displacement of entire communities. “Have you seen the monument?”, a local shopkeeper asks me with pride, recalling the two boats upon which Greek residents of Roda fled from Anatolia in 1922 – in a journey that prefigured the mandatory population exchanges formalised by Lausanne the following year.

Designed by Dimitris Gardikiotis in 2017 for the local municipality, this evocative wooden sculpture faces the water over which people of all ages made the journey between Anatolia and Macedonia. The ubiquity of the sea in the background beyond serves not only as a reminder of loss, but also a physical connection with (to quote a nearby plaque) “our unforgettable homelands in Asia Minor, immortal in thought and time”. Perhaps this monument signals that even enduring memories must be memorialised to cultivate what Marianne Hirsch terms a ‘postmemory’, sustaining the identity of refugee communities whilst extending the collective geopolitical understanding of traumatic events towards future generations.[5] Such memories are not static but must be actively enacted and extended into the everyday of the present.

Uprooting, Rerooting and the Power of a Pomegranate

In Greek, ‘roda’ is derived from the word for pomegranate – a symbol of renewal, rebirth and optimism that reflects the resilience of its refugee communities. However, in the village of Nea Roda, the etymology of the name reveals a much deeper connection. When fleeing Roda in 1922, refugees did not simply gather their personal belongings; they also uprooted pomegranate trees from the soil of their homeland. Once these trees were rerooted in the gardens of their new homes, the pomegranate became a living, breathing manifestation of continuity between ancestral homelands and refugee settlements.

The case of Nea Roda also gives new meaning to the Greek word for displacement – ‘ξεριζωμός’, which literally translates to ‘uprooting’. In Nea Roda, this human act of uprooting and rerooting is vividly embodied by the pomegranate trees. Both metaphorically and physically, these trees not only stand testament to the journeys undertaken by the village’s forebearers but also carry the intergenerational memory of laying down roots in an unfamiliar land.

Treaty to Tree: The Everyday Geopolitics of Asia Minor Refugees

By tracing the thread between pomegranates, peace treaties and ‘prosfiges’ (‘refugees’), the importance of everyday geopolitics assumes even greater significance. Understanding geopolitics as a set of embodied, grounded and located practices connects the macro to the micro – from the high diplomacy of Lausanne to a single pomegranate tree in one courtyard of a remote Greek village.[6]

Between the spatial mirroring of a lost homeland and the profound symbolism of pomegranate trees, Nea Roda acts as a repository for these lived experiences of Asia Minor refugees. As the young manager at my guesthouse explains: “On the coast of Halkidiki, we are all refugees – ourselves, our grandmothers and our grandfathers”. This simple yet striking acceptance of a timeless geopolitical consciousness seems to linger in the air. The villages of Halkidiki have become a geopolitical palimpsest. Just as Yael Navaro-Yashin describes in relation to displaced Greek and Turkish communities in Cyprus, memories of conflict and displacement in Nea Roda are inhabited by residents yet transmitted by places, plants and landscapes.[7] The pomegranates of Nea Roda serve both as a metaphor and an affective agent, therefore – bridging continents between ancestral soil and adopted land. From treaty to tree, the pomegranate has borne witness to it all.

Notes

[1] G. Toal, “An anti-geopolitical eye: Maggie O’Kane in Bosnia, 1992-93,” Gender, Place and Culture, 3.2 (1996): 171-185.

[2] S. Green, “Performing the border in the Aegean,” Journal of Cultural Economy, 3 (2010): 261–278.

[3] J. Conlin & H. Ozavci, eds., They All Made Peace ­– What is Peace? The 1923 Lausanne Treaty and the New Imperial Order (London:Gingko, 2023).

[4] P. Nora, “Between memory and history: Les lieux de mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 7-24.

[5] M. Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today, 29.1 (2008): 103-128.

[6] J. Sharp & L. Dowler, “A Feminist Geopolitics?”, Space and Polity, 5.3 (2001): 165-176.

[7] Y. Navaro-Yashin, The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. (New York: Duke University Press, 2012).