Population exchange between Greece and Turkey
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The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey refers to the first large scale population exchange, or agreed mutual expulsion in the 20th century. It involved some two million persons, most forcibly made refugees and de jure denaturalized from homelands of centuries or millennia, in a treaty promoted and overseen by the international community as part of the Treaty of Lausanne. The document about the population exchange was signed at Lausanne, Switzerland, January 30, 1923, between the governments of Greece and Turkey. The exchange took place between Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory, and of Greek nationals of the Muslim religion established in Greek territory.
Many huge refugee displacements and movements occurred in the upheaval following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and its evolution into modern Turkey, especially following the Balkan Wars, World War I, and the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922), which was part of the Turkish War for Independence. These included smaller exchanges of Greeks and Slavs, and Turks and Bulgarians.
The Treaty of Lausanne affected the populations in the following way. Almost all Greeks and the Turkish speaking Christian population in middle Anatolia, about 1.5 million, from Turkish Anatolia and Turkish Thrace were expelled or formally denaturalized. Expelled from Greece were about 500,000, predominantly Turks, as well as other Muslim population: from Crete speaking a dialect based on the Greek language with additional Turkish words, Muslim Roma, Pomaks, Cham Albanians, and Megleno-Romanians. The Greeks of Istanbul, Imbros (Gökçeada in Turkish) and Tenedos (Bozcaada), as well as the Turks and other Muslims of Western Thrace were exempted from this transfer.
In Greece this was called the "Asia Minor Catastrophe" as it involved the expulsion of about one third of the Greek population from millennia old homelands.
While the populations which were expelled suffered greatly, both the nation states of Greece and Turkey, as well as the international community, saw the resulting ethnic homogenization of their respective states as positive and stabilizing since it helped strengthen the nation-state natures of these two states. (B.Clark p18)
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[edit] See also
- Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire
- Millet (Ottoman Empire)
- Turks of Western Thrace
- Religious nationalism
- Kemalist Ideology
- Aristotle Onassis
[edit] References
- Section of the Treaty of Lausanne ordering the exchange of Greek and Turkish populations.
[edit] Further reading
- Clark, Bruce (2006). Twice A Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey. London: Granta. ISBN 1-86207-752-5.
