The population exchange of 1923, self-determination, and the “Greek Gypsies”

This paper reconceptualizes Roma integration in Greece through the case of Agia Varvara, the first Christian Roma ( Tsiggani ) neighborhood in Athens, founded after the 1923 compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Drawing on oral-historical fieldwork (2023–2024) and archival material from both states, it compares the Greek Gypsies’ trajectory with that of other exchanged communities across a century of upheaval. Where dominant frameworks read incomplete integration as failure or victimhood, the paper recasts it as agency: alterity performed as strategic non-compliance; and as collective representation rooted in communal socioeconomic survival. The analysis advances the concept of “sentient diachrony” to theorize self-determination through the lens of self-authorship rather than state-granted status. This approach situates both the exchange and contemporary dynamics within a wider critique of the role played by hierarchical biopolitics in shaping modern international law. The neighborhood’s stories, the paper argues, stem not only from displacement but from enduring patterns of regional resilience that rhyme with the defiant self-authorship of the global subaltern.