Authors

Discussion

The repatriation project of soviet Greek diasporic communities, especially the ones of Georgia and Abkhazia, that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, has been viewed as the end of an odyssey that followed successive migration fluxes, keeping Greeks away from their “historical homeland”.

Even when the myth of return was finally fullfilled, the orientalist view of the locals (mestnye) on the non-Western, Russophone Greeks led to the disillusionment of the newcomers who faced discrimination, as well as social and spatial exclusions. In an attempt to resist the devaluation of their social status, post-soviet Greeks soon tried to emphasize the originality of their identity by adopting modes of life inherited from the ex-soviet space, either reinvented in Greece through the media.

From the persistence to use Russian language instead of Greek, to the consumption of Russian beverages and food, to the display of wealth and prosperity as part of a new-Russian cultural trend, post-soviet Greeks attempt to reaffirm their otherness.

The aim of this paper is to shed light on how Russian modes of life have survived today deterritorialized in cultural practices of the Greek post-soviet diasporic communities. I will show how these cultural imports are shaped with resistance ethics to the dominance of local “Greekness” and deal with the processes of gaining prestige and authority.