The forced displacement of children in the Greek Civil War

At the height of the conflict in 1948, almost 40,000 children were evacuated from their homes in the mountain villages and towns of Greek Macedonia, at a time when many children were already in exile on Greek islands, along with their mothers who were labeled as communists. The Greek Communist Party, as part of an organized operation to “save the children”, relocated half of them to orphanages in Eastern Europe. In some cases, this move was made at the request and with the consent of their families and in others against their will. The Greek government described this operation as paidomazoma (child-garhering), using a term referring to the Ottoman practice of kidnapping young boys, and made a formal complaint to the UN.

At the same time, the government also carried out mass evacuations of villages and relocated thousands of children to camps called Child Cities, under the aegis of Queen Frederica. In both cases, the children who were accommodated in shelters, orphanages, or camps, went through an educational process, either based on communist ideals or the nationalist-religious beliefs of the civil war state of “nation-mindedness”.

The children of the Greek Civil War either returned or were reunited with their families in Eastern Europe where thousands of war refugees settled or built their lives without family in their new homelands. One part of them returned to Greece after the establishment of the Third Greek Democracy in 1974. This controversial and traumatic episode of Contemporary Greek History continues to fuel tensions within Greek society and between Greeks and Macedonians.