Extract

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The First Waves of Emigration

During the early part of the twentieth century, numerous young men from the Ottoman region of Epirus – along with many of their counterparts elsewhere in Mediterranean Europe – were swept up by the growing trend of emigrating to the United States of America. Although there are no statistics on emigration from Epirus at this time, the figures are likely to have been significant, given that approximately 170,000 individuals in neighbouring Greece – representing one tenth of the country’s population – left their homes and journeyed across the Atlantic (Kitroeff, 2004: 346; Voultsos, 1992: 8). What we know for certain is that the destination of the vast majority of Epirot emigrants was the industrialised north-east of the States. Many of them originated from Tsamantas and its sister villages on Mount Mourgana; most of the rest came from other remote communities in the Pindus mountains. Large-scale migration was not a new phenomenon within these communities: the men of Tsamantas, for instance, had sometimes been obliged by lack of work to move to the major commercial centres of Epirus and the rest of the Ottoman Empire, as well as those of Greece and other countries around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. But by the early 1900s the population of Tsamantas had increased to such an extent that a significant number of men were unable to find work in the fields and pastures, and as the wider region of Epirus lacked the...