Peter wrote his master’s thesis about his own family — without naming it that. A 1974 bibliographic listing in the Greek academic journal Επιθεώρησις Κοινωνικών Ερευνών (Review of Social Research), volumes γ’ and δ’ (third and fourth quarters of 1974), catalogues the thesis. The bibliography was compiled by Georgios Giannaris, Director of the Bibliography Department of the Modern Greek Studies Association (Modern Language Association), and lists doctoral dissertations and master’s theses about Greece submitted to American and Canadian universities. Peter’s entry appears in Section B (Master’s Theses), under “J”:
JEANNOPOULOS, PETER G. — «The Plight of the Anatolian Greeks: The Role of Smyrna in Allied Diplomacy, 1919». Hunter College in the City University of New York, 1972.
The thesis and the family’s connection to its subject
Peter — Constantine’s son and Lazaros’s grandson — chose for his master’s thesis the single most consequential diplomatic moment for his own family’s history: the role of Smyrna in Allied diplomacy in 1919, three years before the Asia Minor Catastrophe destroyed the Anatolian Greek world his grandfather Lazaros had practiced medicine in for thirty years.
The thesis’s title — “The Plight of the Anatolian Greeks” — names directly the disaster that uprooted Lazaros, Eftyhia, and their five surviving children from Soma to Mytilene to New York between 1922 and 1924. Peter was 28 in 1972, writing his master’s thesis at Hunter College CUNY about a historical episode his then-living grandmother Eftyhia had lived through. (Eftyhia outlived Lazaros — d. 1939 — and may still have been alive when Peter began this thesis research.)
What the thesis would have argued
The thesis title points to the 1919 Allied diplomatic decisions — particularly the May 1919 Allied authorization of the Greek landing at Smyrna under the Treaty of Sèvres framework — as the inciting cause of the 1919-1922 Greek-Turkish War that ended with the Smyrna fire of September 1922 and the expulsion of the Anatolian Greek population. Peter’s framing — “the plight of the Anatolian Greeks” — suggests a perspective sympathetic to the Greek refugees, situating Allied diplomacy as the structural cause of his family’s displacement.
The thesis sits at the intersection of:
- The family’s living memory — Eftyhia was alive at the time of writing (d. ~1970-1973); Lazaros’s 1915 published polemic on the Asia Minor catastrophe had been in the family papers since before Peter was born; the surviving Greek-language correspondence in the Lazaros archive was within Peter’s reach for primary-source consultation.
- The 1970s-era revisionist historiography of the Greek-Turkish War, which was beginning to challenge older Anglo-American academic framings that had downplayed the catastrophe’s scale.
- Peter’s own genealogical curiosity — the same curiosity that would lead him to scan and preserve the entire 100-PDF Lazaros archive in 2010, making the present family-record project possible.
About the publishing venue
The Review of Social Research (Επιθεώρησις Κοινωνικών Ερευνών) was the journal of the Greek Εθνικό Κέντρο Κοινωνικών Ερευνών (EKKE) — National Centre for Social Research in Athens. The 1974 bibliography was one of the first comprehensive scholarly bibliographies of Greek-American and Greek-Canadian doctoral and master’s-level academic work on Greek subjects. Peter’s thesis appears alongside ~250 other listings of theses submitted to North American universities on Greek history, literature, religion, politics, and economic development.
Other family-relevant entries in the same bibliography
The 1974 bibliography reflects the surge of mid-century Greek-American academic engagement with the Asia Minor Catastrophe period. Adjacent entries in the J section include:
- HONDROS, John L. — The German Occupation of Greece, 1941-1944 (Vanderbilt 1970)
- JAMESON, Andrew G. — The Response and Letters of Demetrius Chomatianus, Archbishop of Achrida and Bulgaria (Harvard)
The Modern Greek Studies Association — under whose auspices the bibliography was compiled — emerged in the late 1960s as the institutional home of Greek-American academic engagement with the Anatolian past. Peter’s CUNY thesis is part of that scholarly moment.
