Refugees, Locals and “The” State: Property Compensation in the Province of Izmir Following the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange of 1923

Abstract

This article studies the application of laws regulating the settlement and compensation of migrants who came to Turkey from Greece in the course of the population exchange. By using petitions and administrative documents, it discusses the questions of legality and legitimacy with regard to two problems: First, the status of exchangees as a group privileged by law, and second, the bureaucratic procedure through which they were given temporary property rights (tefviz). The article shows that laws can by no means be taken to be identical with their application, and that various notions of legality and legitimacy were at play, both in different state administrations and among those affected by their policies. It thus makes an important contribution to a better understanding of the relationship between law, state and society in early Republican Turkey. The mutual and compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey marks a crucial event in the demographic, economic and social history of both countries. Signed on 30 January 1923, the agreement between both governments sealed the fate of about 800,000 Greek-Orthodox citizens of the Ottoman state (known as Rum) who had involuntarily left Anatolia and Thrace between 1912 and 1922, banning them from ever returning to their homeland again. Those who were still in place were also forced to emigrate to Greece. The same rules were applied to the Muslim population of Greece (including those who had already left during the Balkan Wars), which was to emigrate to Turkey. Exceptions were made for the Greeks living in Istanbul (including Greek citizens who were known as Yunan in Ottoman Turkish), the Muslims of Western Thrace, and the Rum island populations of Imros and Tenedos at the mouth of the Dardanelles. 1 As an internationally sanctioned forced migration, the exchange helped to legalize and make permanent the ethnic cleansing of the Ottoman Greeks that had  Ellinor Morack is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Martin Buber Society of Fellows in the Humanities, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel; email ellinor.morack@mail.huji.ac.il * I would like to thank all the participants of the graduate student workshop on “Turks in Conflict” at Columbia University who provided feedback on an early draft of this article. Special thanks go to the two anonymous JOTSA reviewers for their very helpful criticism and suggestions. 1 Onur Yildirim, Diplomacy and Displacement: Reconsidering the Turco-Greek Exchange of Populations, 1922-1934 (London: Routledge, 2006); Renee Hirschon, ed., Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey (New York: Berghahn, 2003). This content downloaded from 157.55.39.60 on Mon, 18 Jul 2016 06:17:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms