Disaster and Recovery: Greece’s Major Territorial Upheavals

Studying changes implies looking very closely at key parameters: Pace, magnitude, and cyclicality relate to temporality; spread, clustering, and variability refer to spatiality. Major transformations may result from a series of discrete statistical effects playing in the background. Other variations take the form of unprecedented and unexpected events upsetting old balances in a very small time window. Frequency analysis applied to historical events often reveals combination effects, the way wavelengths interfere between different electromagnetic signals. This chapter addresses some of the catastrophic events that had a lasting impact on Greece’s development in the area of demography. The Asia MinorAsia Minor Catastrophe, the martyr villages and cities destroyed during WWII, and the Civil War are among the milestone events that shaped Greece’s geography in the long run. For the first time in its recent history, the long depression due to the 2008 economic slump might be counted as being part of these all-embracing phenomena affecting the country globally. The magnitude of changes makes it a never-before-seen cycle whose pervasiveness needs to be appropriately weighted in light of other past downturns.