Population exchange between Greece and Turkey

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.

In Greece this was called the Asia Minor Catastrophe (Greek: Μικρασιατική καταστροφή) as it involved the expulsion of about one third of the Greek population from millennia old homelands, practically ending some 3,000 years old presence of ethnic Greek people in Asia Minor, from Smyrna (İzmir) in the Ionian shores to Samsun and Trebizond in Pontus.

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 Turkish speaking Christian populations from middle Anatolia (Asia Minor) but mainly Greeks from Ionia, Pontus, Prusa (Bursa) and other regions of Asia Minor, as well as from the European Eastern Thrace parts, numbering to about 1.5 million people, were expelled or formally denaturalized. Expelled from Greece were about 500,000, predominantly Turks, as well as other Muslim population: from Crete speaking a Greek dialect intermingled with some Turkish loanwords, Muslim Roma, Pomaks, Cham Albanians, and Megleno-Romanians.

While the populations which were expelled suffered greatly, some argued^{[attribution needed]} that both the nation states of Greece and Turkey, as well as some circles in 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.^[1]

The Turks and other Muslims of Western Thrace were exempted from this transfer as well as the Greeks of Constantinople (officially Istanbul from 1930 onward) and the Aegean islands of Imbros (Gökçeada in Turkish) and Tenedos (Bozcaada). However, punitive measures followed by the Republic of Turkey, such as the 1932 parliamentary law (which barred Greek citizens living in Turkey from a series of 30 trades and professions from tailor and carpenter to medicine, law and real estate)^[2] the Greek population of Constantinople, began to decline.^[3] The Varlık Vergisi capital gains tax imposed in 1942 also served to reduce the economic potential of Greek businesspeople in Turkey. Furthermore, violent incidents as the Istanbul Pogrom (1955) directed against the native ethnic Greek community greatly accelerated emigration of ethnic Greeks, reducing the 200,000-strong Greek minority in 1924 to just over 5,000 in 2005.^[4]

See also

• Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire
• Greeks in Turkey
• Greek refugees
• Turks of Western Thrace
• Cretan Turks
• Millet
• Istanbul Pogrom
• Religious nationalism
• Kemalist Ideology
• Aristotle Onassis

Notes

References

• Section of the Treaty of Lausanne ordering the exchange of Greek and Turkish populations.

Further reading

• Clark, Bruce (2006). Twice A Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey. London: Granta. ISBN 1-86207-752-5. 
• Vryonis, Speros (2005). The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom of September 6–7, 1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul. New York: Greekworks.Com Inc. ISBN 0-97476-603-8. 

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