Population exchange between Greece and Turkey biography, high resolution photos and videos by Americola
Population exchange between Greece and Turkey
[edit] Americola's celebrity biographies are provided by AmericolaWiki, a celebrity wiki. You can help contribute to Americola and edit this article.
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]
Contents
- 1 See also
- 2 Notes
- 3 References
- 4 Further reading
- 5 External links
|
See also
Notes
References
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Further reading