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What were the deepest causes of the 1821 Greek Revolution against the Ottoman Empire? What did the bankruptcies of 1893 and 1932 leave behind, and how do they compare with Greece\u2019s recent bankruptcy in 2010? What were the effects of the Civil War? What were the results of the dictatorship of the colonels and how does it illuminate the relationship between democracy and development? What was the imprint of the 1922 Asia Minor Catastrophe?<\/p>\n
These are not cold academic questions. They are disputes, charged, rightly, with collective memory, family stories, often intensified through song, theater and literature. Author Dido Sotiriou\u2019s \u201cFarewell Anatolia,\u201d George Seferis\u2019 \u201cMythical narrative,\u201d and Elias Venezis\u2019 \u201cLand of Aeolia\u201d have established the memory of lost homelands and refugeeism, which Giorgos Theotokas\u2019 \u201cArgo\u201d places at the core of Greece\u2019s modernization.<\/p>\n
Greek historiography has offered excellent research papers, often through in-depth case studies: searching for the causes of the Civil War through thorough research in a specific province or the effects of the Asia Minor Catastrophe through the lives of refugees in the slums of Piraeus. This approach respects specificity and avoids easy generalizations. But there are limitations. First, even without intention, there is the risk of choosing \u201cconvenient\u201d cases \u2013 those with more sources or those that fit a narrative. Second, it is not at all self-evident that what applies to a specific place and time expresses the event as a whole. For example, the Civil War played out in three distinct periods and had significant geographical heterogeneity. Third, the obsession with case studies weakens the comparison that is essential for understanding the deeper causes and effects, as well as the Greek specificity: How similar is 1821 to other revolutionary movements of the time? How special was the integration of refugees from Asia Minor compared to the millions displaced after the two world wars?<\/p>\n
In the age of artificial intelligence, Greek history can embrace a more holistic and comparative approach, using big data. Not to replace historical and archival research, but to complement the narrative with systematic measurement. Censuses, election results, settlement maps, administrative records and the press can be transformed into structured, ready-to-analyze data (text-to-data). Their analysis with modern empirical approaches allows us to discover patterns and identify causes, mechanisms and effects. The recent Nobel Prizes in Economics, turning in this direction, recognized comparative research that connected history \u2013 as captured by data \u2013 with development through institutions and culture.
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But let\u2019s return to Greece. In recent years, together with Stelios Michalopoulos, associate professor of economics at Brown University, and a team of young researchers, we have been trying to bring a modern approach to one of the most important events of modern Greece using big data: the violent uprooting of approximately 1.5 million Orthodox Greeks from Asia Minor, Eastern Thrace, Pontus, and Istanbul, and their forced relocation to Greece 100 years ago. We managed to digitize in their entirety the general census of 1928 \u2013 the only one that records refugees and natives in approximately 11,000 settlements \u2013 and special censuses that capture the origin and place of settlement for approximately 220,000 families who received allotments and housing which belonged mainly to Muslims who made the journey in the opposite direction.<\/p>\n