Population exchange between Greece and Turkey

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The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey is the first large scale population exchange, or agreed mutual expulsion in the 20th century. It involved some two million people, 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 in 1923, between the governments of Greece and Turkey. The exchange took place between Turkish citizens of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory, and of Greek citizens of the Muslim religion established in Greek territory.

Displacements

In Greece this was called the Asia Minor Catastrophe (Greek: Μικρασιατική καταστροφή). It involved the expulsion of about one-third of the Greek population from millennia-old homelands, practically ending a 3,000-year-old presence of ethnic Greek people in Asia Minor, from Smyrna (present-day İzmir) on the Ionian shores, Sampsunta and Trapezunda 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 Slavs, Turks and Bulgarians.

The Treaty of Lausanne affected the populations in the following way: Almost all Greeks of Asia Minor including a small Turkish speaking Greek Orthodox population from middle Anatolia (Karamanlides). The majority of the Greek population were mainly Greeks from the Ionia region (e.g. Smyrna, Aivali), the Pontus region (e.g. Trapezunda, Sampsunta), Prusa (Bursa), the Bithynia region (e.g., Nicomedia (İzmit), Chalcedon (Kadıköy)) and other regions of Asia Minor, as well as from East Thrace, numbering up to 1.5 million people. They were either expelled or formally denaturalized. Those expelled from Greece numbered about 500,000 people, predominantly Turks, as well as other Muslims; from Crete, those speaking a Greek dialect intermingled with some Turkish loanwords, also Muslim Roma, Pomaks, Cham Albanians, and Megleno-Romanians.

Aftermath

The Turks and other Muslims of Western Thrace were exempted from this transfer as well as the Greeks of Istanbul and the Aegean Islands of Imbros (Gökçeada) and Tenedos (Bozcaada). Due to punitive measures carried out by the Republic of Turkey, such as the 1932 parliamentary law which barred Greek citizens in Turkey from a series of 30 trades and professions from tailor and carpenter to medicine, law, and real estate, the Greek population of Istanbul began to decline, as evidenced by demographic statistics. The Varlık Vergisi capital gains tax imposed in 1942 on the rich people in Turkey also served to reduce the economic potential of ethnic Greek businesspeople in Turkey. Furthermore, violent incidents as the Istanbul Pogrom (1955) directed against the ethnic Greek community greatly accelerated emigration of Greeks, reducing the 200,000-strong Greek minority in 1924 to just over 5,000 in 2005 .

The expelled populations suffered greatly. According to Bruce Clark, both 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.

Notes

References

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

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.

External links

Leiden University of Turks exchange research
Red Cross Report on the Greek-Turkish Conflict
The Foundation of Lausanne Treaty Emigrants (in Turkish) Lozan Mubadilleri org
Nikos Xanthopoulos sings "Tsambasin" and then they dance "Serra" from an old B&W movie. In the movie he finds his lost father after the "exchange" of population with Greece - Turkey of the Black Sea (Karadeniz) region.
A research is about Bursa exchangers.(Mubadilller)