The Great Idea is Dead, Long Live the Great Ideas

Abstract

The “Asia Minor Catastrophe” cast its heavy shadow over Greek interwar era developments in two fundamental ways: first, there was the terror of the ideological void after the bankruptcy of the Hellenic “Great Idea” due to the military defeat in Asia Minor; and second, the physical arrival in Greece of an almost 1,500,000 refugee population after their expulsion from Turkey. This paper argues that against this background, the issues of national reconstruction and a new cultural orientation for the Greek nation were strongly connected. Moreover, it argues that various projects and discourses emerged in search of the new Great Ideas that would successfully replace the irrevocably lost one. They had as a common denominator the “modernist ethos” of a “new beginning” which was necessary for the nation’s and society’s regeneration to be achieved. Thus, in exploring these projects, it attempts to identify their convergences, their mutual exclusions, as well as their cultural, ideological and political imprints.