Architecture and Resettler Nationalism: Demographic Engineering during and after the Christian-Muslim Partition of 1923

Abstract

Abstract This article theorizes on resettler nationalism while discussing the architectural impacts of partitions and compulsory mass migrations that have drawn the borders of modern countries. It concentrates on the resettling process after the “Exchange of Populations” (Antallagi/Mübadele, 1923) between Greece and Turkey, which was in effect a partition dividing the Christian and Muslim communities of the Ottoman Empire. It argues that the national and international authorities treated land settlement as a top-down demographic engineering device and its architecture as a modern technological enterprise in a post-conflict setting, failing to notice the trauma of mass expulsion. Reading migrant testimonies on both sides of the Aegean Sea and tracing architectural histories from below exposes the contrast between the accounts of state agents and those subject to resettler nationalism. It reconceptualizes partition as the rift between rulers and peoples and not the rift between two communities.