Angelos Dalachanis created quite a stir by starting the Greek edition of this book with the emphatic statement “Δεν είμαι Αιγυπτιώτης.” Although his disclosure loses some of its potency in translation, by declaring that he is not a Greek from Egypt, Dalachanis presumably intended to highlight his lack of bias and distance himself from Greek Egyptians who have published on the subject of their homeland. With this in mind, I should probably mention that my father was a Greek from Egypt and the exodus described in this book directly affected three generations of my family. When recounting their experiences, my Greek Egyptian relatives never referred to an expulsion, a commonly held misconception that Dalachanis and others are trying to correct. Their decision to leave Egypt was clearly a matter of personal choice. Still, their actual motives were often unclear and with the passage of time many of their stories gave rise to questions which remained unanswered. Until now.

Numerous studies of the Greeks in Egypt have focussed on the super-rich cotton barons of Alexandria and a handful of other wealthy industrialists and benefactors. Most Greek Egyptians know very well that their story does not begin and end in the salons of the Benakis and Kotsikas families. Dalachanis’ book helps combat this delusion by introducing a large cast of protagonists made up of influential but lesser-known community leaders, educators, journalists and ordinary run-of-the-mill Greek Egyptians. His analysis of unpublished diplomatic sources reveals that in the post-Montreux era, and especially after World War II, successive Greek governments feared that an influx of impoverished Greek Egyptians would upset the fragile political and socioeconomic status quo in Greece. In response, community leaders, politicians and diplomats tried to prevent such an occurrence from taking place by diverting the flow of migrants in other directions. This uncomfortable truth has not gone down well in some quarters, but the evidence produced by Dalachanis is conclusive. As this book makes clear, during the 1950s and 1960s thousands of Greek Egyptians uprooted themselves from their homeland and scattered across the globe to start new lives. And as Dalachanis points out, even for those who went to Greece, and many did in the end, the short trip across the Aegean signified not επαναπατρισμός, repatriation, but εκπατρισμός, expatriation.

According to Dalachanis, one of the main contributing causes of the exodus was the repeated failure of Greek Egyptian communities to readjust and adapt to the changing state of affairs in post-Montreux Egypt. As Egyptianisation policies gathered pace after World War II and a full command of the Arabic language became essential to secure a good job, graduates of the Greek community schools found themselves at a distinct disadvantage. Dalachanis argues that the Greek Egyptian leadership refused to countenance any significant changes to the Hellenocentric curricula of the community schools they controlled because students who emerged from that system had long provided the ideal workforce for their various business enterprises. Although he marshals some strong evidence to support this view, I am not certain that the élite's support of the community schools and the “bourgeois nationalist ideology” they propagated was quite so self-serving. It is true that the Greeks, like the other European communities in Egypt, failed to integrate on a linguistic basis until after the exodus. The lack of good local educational institutions, where Arabic was the language of instruction, was part of the problem. Egypt's Ottoman heritage must also be taken into account. For centuries Ottoman Christians and other minorities were obliged to organise and fund their own educational institutions. The foundations of the Greek educational system in Egypt were laid during the mid-late nineteenth century, when despite the Tanzimat reforms, little had changed in that respect. This helps explain why Greek models were preferred and an overtly Hellenocentric curriculum emerged and remained in place for decades. In countries where the host culture was Christian and European, for instance in Western Europe, Russia, and North America, integration with the host culture was easier. Within one or two generations Greek migrants tended to assimilate, a process that was hastened by attending local schools and abandoning their mother tongue.

The treatment of Greek nationals established in Egypt was a contentious and constantly evolving issue from the late nineteenth century onwards and quite understandably it is not fully addressed in Dalachanis’ book. Still, one must keep in mind that the capitulatory privileges gradually abolished after 1937 did not apply to the thousands of Greeks who were local subjects, of disputed nationality or stateless. In this respect, their day to day concerns and their long-term outlook did not necessarily coincide with those of their compatriots who held Greek nationality. Even so, their exposure to the Hellenocentric Greek Egyptian educational system reinforced their sense of otherness. The reluctance of the Egyptian government to hand out citizenship to non-Muslim, non-Arabic speakers from the late 1920s onwards, and the difficulties faced by those who actually managed to obtain it, especially in employment matters, were further alienating factors. The anti-British and anti-Semitic animosity which flared up during the first half of the twentieth century often descended into generic xenophobia which affected Greeks and engendered ambivalence and even hostility towards Egyptian nationalism. Many Greek Egyptians had come to the country to escape poverty, persecution and nationalist conflict. The fear of being targeted, losing everything and having to start over again from scratch would have been at the back of their minds when they took the decision to join the exodus.

One last point. A testimonial on the back cover of Dalachanis’ book describes it as “an excellent, richly documented study of the final phase of the history of the Greeks in Egypt.” I fully agree with the accolades, but the final phase of Greek Egyptian history begins after the exodus of the 1950s and 1960s. Active community life survived in Alexandria and especially Cairo well into the 1980s and even today churches, schools and philanthropic institutions continue to function in both cities.