'When I Die You Should Bury Me in My Hometown' : the transport of bones as a form of repatriation for Greek political refugees from the Czechoslovakia

By the end of the Greek Civil War (1946–1949), about 50,000 Greeks had fled to Eastern Europe. The complex conditions of this massive exodus have been thoroughly discussed by historians and social scientists. However, much less is known about the conditions under which a large number of political refugees eventually returned to Greece. The few available studies on the repatriation of such refugees have shown that returning home was a more complicated and demanding process than adjusting to a "host" country. Repatriation was the primary desire of the majority of Greek refugees. However, as the years in Czechoslovakia passed, the hopes of free repatriation diminished. What the refugees were most fearful of was dying in a foreign country, away from their homeland and relatives, something they considered to be a "double death". Thus, some refugees expressed a "last wish" that at least their bones would be taken back home. The work I present here concerns the difficulties that this kind of repatriation faced. I attend to the meanings as well as the hopes and fears attached to the notion of "home" as a place of origin to which one yearns to return.