La Communauté grecque à Marseille au XIXe siècle

• Main Author: Michel Calapodis
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre d'Études Balkaniques 2011-06-01
• Series: Cahiers Balkaniques
• Subjects: Twentieth century; Marseille; Chiotic diaspora; Chios; Greek diaspora; History
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ceb/847

This historical perspective discusses the settlement of Greeks in Marseille, France, from the late-eighteenth century to the first decade of the 1900s. During this period, the sociological bonds between the different Greek embryonic minorities, suggest a nuclear colony. The wave of new-comers from the Island of Chios precipitated some major changes in the Marseille Greek’s social morphology: they introduced a social crystallization process through which the archontal Generation (1825-1875) incorporated the long-term representations of the group (religion, language, self-administration policy and kinship), into its main identification frame, the Community. At the same time, this Generation elaborated its own social model through a selective acquisition of local French representations and values. In this way, the Greek Community building in Marseille suggested a pattern where coexisted diacritical and congruent identities.