The completion of the centenary of the Asia Minor Catastrophe (1922-2022) offers the unique opportunity of national reflection on the greatest catastrophe suffered by Hellenism. 

As the vision of Greater Greece was crushed and buried definitively in the ruins of Smyrna, the displacement of almost one and a half million people from Asia Minor, Pontus and Eastern Thrace created a colossal humanitarian disaster sealed by the Treaty’s mandatory Population Exchange of Lausanne, thus definitively erasing any hope of returning to the ancestral lands. But through the uprooting, the pain for the thousands of losses, the unbearable nostalgia for the lost homelands, the painful reception, acceptance and rehabilitation of the refugees in metropolitan Greece, a new vision was born and with it the certainty that the creative and rejuvenating forces of Hellenism they were not lost. Gradually, the Greece of natives and refugees turned defeat into creation and loss into indelible memory.