Greco-Turkish Population Exchange Research Articles

New Critical Approaches to the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange

New Critical Approaches to the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange

The Asymmetries of Displacement: The Spatial Aspects of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange

Abstract The Greek-Turkish population exchange convention of 1923 had major effects on both countries in terms of politics, economy, society, and space. Some of the negative impacts were minimized over time. However, there are some long-term impacts, for instance on space, that are still observable in the cities we live in, even though a full century has passed since the exchange. This article focuses on both the local and broader spatial consequences of the population exchange from a comparative perspective.

The Toynbee Affair at 100: The Birth of ‘World History’ and the Long Shadow of the Interwar Liberal Imaginaire

Functioning as “precedent” and “templates” for future transfers, the Greco-Turkish population exchange and the Lausanne Treaty) are undoubtedly events of world-historical significance. But they are also crucial in the genesis of the subfield of historical research we now call “World History”: they provided the backdrop against which Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889–1975) began sketching his magnum opus, A Study of History and developed the foundations of this subfield of history writing. This article revisits the so-called “Toynbee Affair” and places it in its intellectual and political contexts. First, it revisits the British classicist scholarship that provided the backdrop and initial inspiration for Toynbee as it shifted its gaze from ancient Rome to Greece, which was put forward as a better model for foreign and imperial policy. Next, it examines Toynbee’s wartime activities and shows that his attitudes towards the new states of Central Europe were based on principles that often stood in tension with his activities and views connected to the Middle East. During these years, Toynbee was an active participant in a discourse concerning the need to manage “mixed populations,” which moved to the forefront of a new form of internationalism, while also exposed to the writings of authors such as Oswald Spengler and Frederick J. Teggart, who pushed him to advance a new type of historiography. Third, the article looks at the uneven reception of Toynbee’s ideas after 1945, including his views on the US, the “Muslim civilization,” and his controversial views on Jews and the politics of the Middle East. The article concludes by arguing that his views, which rested on a deep suspicion of liminal hybridity or cultural mestizos, failed to transcend the basic logic of separation developed in Lausanne. Entirely on the contrary: Toynbee’s story offers us a case in which we can recognize the making of the interwar “cultural imaginaire” and “reinvention of differences,” which continues shaping our view of “the West’s” supposed borders to this day.

Nations on the Move: U.S. Humanitarians and Refugee Management in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1918–1923

In January 1923, a treaty between the warring nations of Greece and Turkey authorized by the League of Nations empowered the two states to denaturalize and expel over one and a half million residents of their nations in what became known as the Greco-Turkish population exchange. Hundreds of thousands of Greek and Turkish residents deemed ethnic minorities—Greeks in Turkey and Turks in Greece—were stripped of their citizenship and forced out of their homes on the promise that citizenship, along with housing and welfare, would await them in their new home country. While the Greek and Turkish governments oversaw the eviction and expulsion of their counterparts’ newly made citizens, the actual movement of these refugees took place largely under the official protection of the U.S. Navy, with the transportation out of Turkey under the auspices of an American humanitarian organization, Near East Relief (NER). NER’s role in the exchange represented a radical break from years of work in the region focused on nurturing a generation of American educated Christian minorities to “reconstruct” the Middle East.

Rethinking the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange in the Civilizationist Present

Rethinking the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange in the Civilizationist Present

Race in Circulation: Blood Banks and Forced Mobilities in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The emergence of blood transfusion services after the First World War provided new venues for nationalist and racial research. This paper focuses on racial serology in the Turkish Republic during the period between the 1920s and the 1970s, with particular attention to the role of the Greek-Turkish population exchange and the political conflict over Cyprus. These events entailed mass movements of refugees and violence based on communal identities, which were racialized through serological studies. As the blood of recently displaced people circulated through Greek and Turkish blood banks, physicians used data about blood types to substantiate historical hypotheses about past mobility. Through these genetic reconstructions of historical population movements, they took sides in contemporary territorial disputes. Beginning in the 1950s, the transnational conflict over Cyprus gradually transformed Turkish scientists' representation of Greek Orthodox communities' blood group frequencies, portraying them as "racially Turkish" rather than as biological others.

Door het oog van de naald: het Cappadocisch Grieks

Cappadocian is an extremely endangered Greek dialect that was spoken in Central Turkey until the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange of 1923-1924. This involuntary emigration to Greece caused the near-extinction of this dialect. Nowadays the number of Cappadocian speakers and semi-speakers has decreased to approximately 2,800. Fortunately this very remarkable dialect, which was thoroughly influenced by the Turkish language, has been captured in many orally transmitted folktales that were recorded by philologists and dialectologists from the nineteenth century onwards. This paper presents a critical edition of a hitherto unpublished folktale: ‘The Shepherd’, a very short story in the Cappadocian subdialect of the village of Axo, recorded by Richard M. Dawkins. The edition is followed by a Dutch translation of ‘The Shepherd’ and a folkloristic discussion on its origin. This folktale is most likely one of the numerous versions of the story about the one-eyed giant, the Cyclops, best known from its variant in Homer’s Odyssey.

Le homeland à travers l’hospitalité : les interactions entre descendants de populations échangées grecques et turques dans les villages de leurs ancêtres

This essay explores notions of homeland among descendants of the 1923 Greek-Turkish Population Exchange. Visits to ancestral villages transform understandings of the homeland that previously existed only in memory or family stories. These visits also require interactions between Greeks and Turks, typically conceived of as national enemies. Inspired by the Ottoman model presented by their forebears, exchangees reply upon shared hospitality practices to structure cooperative and durable interactions that become central to their conception of their homeland.

Longhand Lines of Flight: Cataloging Displacement in a Karamanli Refugee's Commonplace Book

AbstractThis essay examines a handwritten refugee ballad in a handmade codex, using both to illuminate some of the lingering blind spots in national philology and world literature. The ballad, printed in full after the essay, belongs to the Karamanli Christians of Anatolia, who spoke Turkish but wrote it in the Greek alphabet. Uprooted from Turkey by the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange of 1923, Karamanli refugees were scattered across Greece and North America, where they were often excluded from publishing. Poets like the author of the present ballad, Agathangelos, turned instead to more accessible manuscript formats. I interpret Agathangelos's ballad and codex as a catalog, documenting and preserving his lost homeland, where multiple scriptworlds, languages, and confessions coexisted. I conclude by calling for a people’s history of the book to decentralize and democratize world literature’s political economy (tacitly accepted as print capitalism), foregrounding textual networks that have remained illegible to our discipline.

Envisioning Greek Refugees as ‘Farmers for Australia’: Christy Freeleagus, Land Settlement and Immigration Restriction in White Australia

In the early 1920s the Greek Consul General in Queensland, Christy Freeleagus, attempted to persuade Australian politicians, diplomats and immigration officials to grant assisted passage and allotments of land to Greek refugees. Making representations in the United Kingdom and Australia, Freeleagus claimed that Greek refugees, who were displaced due to an imposed transfer of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1923, would make ideal agricultural settlers. While Freeleagus’ representations for a Greek land settlement scheme were ultimately unsuccessful, his advocacy reveals how Australia’s preference for British immigration overshadowed any likelihood that displaced Greeks could be humanitarianly assisted to immigrate and resettle in Australia as farmers. By focusing on Freeleagus’ advocacy and the refusal of Australian immigration officials to assist displaced Greeks, this article ties Australian history to studies on Greek-Turkish population exchange. It also reveals how the interwar dynamics of land settlement and immigration restriction in White Australia were interlinked.

Claiming “Imagined Property”: Ṭaṣfiye Ṭalebnāmes and the Lost Material World of Migrants after the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange of 1923–24

According to the exchange convention signed in Lausanne in January 1923, all people who were ‘subject to the exchange’ between Greece and Turkey were entitled to compensation in the receiving country with property of a value equal to that they left behind. In 1925, the Mixed Commission asked ‘exchangees’ in Turkey to fill in ‘applications for property liquidation’. These documents provide a wealth of information about ‘exchangees’ that was previously unavailable. This article studies a sample of these applications (ṭaṣfiye ṭalebnāme) that were drawn up in 1925 in western Turkey in order to find out how the applicants described their houses, living conditions and belongings back in Greece. Utilizing theoretical approaches from anthropological literature, the article analyses these standardised forms as places of encounter between the bureaucracy and those who were subject to the exchange convention. The property listed is conceptualized as “imagined”, i.e., lost property that people had to present in certain ways in order to be compensated for it. The paper traces different presentation strategies in the documents, showing how social status, bureaucratic literacy and narrative content were utilised in this endeavour.

Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange. By Aslı Iğsız. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. xii, 332 pp. Notes. Index. $27.95, paper.

Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange. By Aslı Iğsız. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. xii, 332 pp. Notes. Index. $27.95, paper.

Türk-Yunan Nüfus Mübadelesi Öncesi Konya ve Sille Rumlarının Giyim-Kuşamları

AbstractIt is known that Greeks were the most populous minority group who lived in the Ottoman Empire. Greek groups were located in different parts of Anatolia and Thrace in this period. It is mentioned in the historical sources that Konya also was one of the regions which was populated with Greek groups. This study was designed to shed light on the historical past and to reflect the clothing characteristics of a minority group that lived within the Ottoman Empire. It is also aimed to analyze the clothings of the Greek female immigrants who immigrated to Greece from Konya which was an important province in the Ottoman Empire during the “Greek-Turkish Population Exchange”. In accordance with this purpose, two pieces of traditional indoor clothings used for special days belonging to Greek women who lived in Konya and Sille regions which are in the “National Historical Museum’s” clothing collection inventory in Athens today were included in the research. In terms of historical and cultural values, these clothings were interpreted additionally supported with period photographs from the “Asia Minor Research Centre” archive in Athens and informations from the source persons. According to obtained data from the most important clothing and photograph archives of Greece, this study is of importance as it contains Greek women’s clothing and accessory samples, period photographs and informations from the source persons about Greek female clothings before the immigration period.

Book Review: Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange

Book Review: Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange

The Evaluation of Architectural Tourism Potentials of Greek Heritage Structures Remained after the Population Exchange in Niğde's Settlements

The population exchange between Turkey and Greece was decided in 1923 as a result of Lausanne Treaty. By this decision, non-Muslim Greeks living in Turkey and Muslim Turks living in Greece were mandatory mutual migration. The immigrants left their architectural heritage that was built with cultural, ethnic and faith values in the settlements where they were born and grew. Many religious structures (churches, monasteries, chapels), civil buildings (housing, education, health, trade, accommodation, social), technical and economic structures (mills, ovens, bridges, fountain) remained after Greek-Turkish population exchange in various regions of Turkey. Besides to being the witness to history each of the original heritage structures that reflect Greek immigrants’ economic, social conditions, cultural wealth and belief have architectural tourism potentials. Within the scope of the study, the architectural tourism potentials were evaluated by selecting the Uluagac Greek School, Fertek Church, Hancerli Laundry and Church Fountain as a sample among the different building groups located in the Uluagac, Fertek and Hancerli settlements located in Nigde/Turkey. The analyzes for the selected buildings were conducted according to the determinants of architectural tourism potential (architectural and environmental factors, targeted tourist).The data obtained from the analysis were synthesized architectural tourism with cultural, ethnic, religious and ancestral tourism and suggestions were developed.

Greece, Turkey, the Eastern Question and the Treaty of Lausanne 1923

Population transfers have throughout history served governments as an instrument to achieve national or regimesecurity objectives. Population exchanges are a special case of such transfers. Here, states enter an intergovernmentalagreement in which the contracting parties decide on a reciprocal voluntary or involuntary transfer of populations.The perhaps most crucial precedent for such a measure is the Greco-Turkish population exchange agreed atLausanne in 1923. The present paper recalls the events that led to the agreement, which essentially legitimised expost one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes of its time in order to solve the thorny Greco-Turkish minorityproblem once and for all. Relying mainly on the conference protocols I argue that the compulsory nature of the exchangewas imposed under duress, but against the wishes of the affected minorities, and in clear violation of thenascent international system of human rights.

Population exchange and the politics of ethno-religious fear: the EU–Turkey agreement on Syrian refugees in historical perspective

ABSTRACTIn March 2016, the Europe Union (EU) and Turkey agreed that all refugees who reached Greece through unauthorized means would be returned to Turkey. The deal was the latest effort to ‘stem the tide’ of refugees fleeing the Middle East. This was not the first time negotiations between Europe and Turkey resulted in an agreement concerning problematic populations. As part of negotiations after the First World War, Turkey and Europe agreed that Christians in Turkey would be sent to Greece in exchange for Greece’s small population of Muslims. Goalwin's article draws on historical research and contemporary policy analysis to compare the 2016 EU–Turkey Refugee Agreement and the 1923 Greco-Turkish population exchange. The comparison reveals the European response to today's refugee crisis to be a product of longstanding prejudices in Europe and Turkey alike.

Shadow on the Soul dir. by Marios Polyzogopoulos and Dimitris Pliagkos, and: Kisses to the Children dir. by Vassilis Loules, and: Dowsing the Past: Materialities of Civil War Memories dir. by Kostas Kalantzis, and: Beneath the Lemon Tree dir. by Stavroula Toska

Reviewed by: Shadow on the Soul dir. by Marios Polyzogopoulos and Dimitris Pliagkos, and: Kisses to the Children dir. by Vassilis Loules, and: Dowsing the Past: Materialities of Civil War Memories dir. by Kostas Kalantzis, and: Beneath the Lemon Tree dir. by Stavroula Toska Violetta Hionidou (bio) Marios Polyzogopoulos and Dimitris Pliagkos, directors, Shadow on the Soul. 2016. 94 mins. Vassilis Loules, director, Kisses to the Children. 2012. 112 mins. Kostas Kalantzis, director, Dowsing the Past: Materialities of Civil War Memories. 2014. 47 mins. Stavroula Toska, director, Beneath the Lemon Tree. 2015. 76 mins. The importance of film as a medium for imparting knowledge and affect, thus contributing to or even creating a social memory of historical events, is widely acknowledged (Berger 2007). As films, museums, and the press shape the popular understanding of the past, the engagement of academia with such modes of transmission of historical knowledge becomes imperative. The four historical films reviewed here all make references to major events of twentiethcentury Greece, the memory and current understanding of those events, and their connections to today's Greece. For those who know little about Greek history, these films provide an introduction to three traumatic episodes with long-term repercussions: the 1922 Asia Minor Disaster that led to the mandated Greco-Turkish population exchange which created at least 1.5 million refugees; the Holocaust; and the Greek Civil War. As I cannot claim any expertise as a film critic, I feel I have to make it clear from the start that my perspective is that of the historian. Nevertheless, I also review these films as someone who has an increasing interest in how histories are taught, internalized, and ultimately remembered. [End Page 226] For the most part, documentaries bring to the screen the words, voices, emotions, and personalities of individuals who lived through the studied events. This manner of presentation is an engaging and much more immediate way of learning, one that can particularly reach children. However, the immediacy of film and testimonies can also create prosthetic memories. All four films reviewed here bring together in distinct ways issues of collective and individual memory, addressing very painful aspects of Greek history. While the Holocaust has rarely been addressed in the Greek context (the only case I am aware of is the 2013 film, The Longest Journey: The Last Days of the Jews of Rhodes, directed by Ruggero Gabbai), the other subjects have been dealt with in both Greek and non-Greek cinema, as well as in historical documentaries. Shadow on the Soul deals with the 1922 refugees and their legacy, both in Greece and in Turkey. Experts interviewed in the film, including the eminent scholars Renée Hirschon and Dimitris Kamouzis, focus on the social issues concerning the arrival and settlement of the refugees in Greece and Turkey. They identify and elaborate on the friction between the host population and the newcomers, as well as the names that the latter were called by the former: "Turkish-seed" in Greece; "Greek-seed" in Turkey. It is bewildering to hear the Turkish descendants of the exchanged population mix Greek and Turkish words while speaking today—nearly 100 years after the event—a stark reminder of a past when the two languages and peoples inhabited the same spaces. The refugees and their descendants interviewed in the film talk about the hunger, the disease, and the high mortality rate among the refugees following their arrival in Greece. But they also speak about the conviviality of the refugees, their passion for life, singing, and makeshift celebratory gatherings. We are told about the shanty towns that were initially erected in the greater Athens area and how they lacked running water in the early days and did not have a central sewage system until the 1970s. It should be pointed out that these deficiencies applied to most impoverished areas within Greece at the time and were not exclusive to refugee areas. The extensive use of credit when purchasing food from local grocers is mentioned; this too was not specific to refugees, but more of an attribute of the Greek urban poor. It is interesting and rare to see in a documentary the differentiation that is made...

Forced Migration as Nation-Building: The League of Nations, Minority Protection, and the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange

Forced Migration as Nation-Building: The League of Nations, Minority Protection, and the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange

Palimpsests of Multiculturalism and Museumization of Culture

In 2010, the 1923 Greek-Turkish Population Exchange Museum opened its doors as part of the Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture (ECoC) project. Presented as the first migration-themed museum of Turkey, it is a site of cultural recollection focused on family histories. Yet the museum, Iğsız argues, beyond being a site of memory, also crystallizes larger dynamics of cultural policy and recognition of alterity. Concentrating on the European Union Cultural Policy and the Istanbul 2010 ECoC, two official institutions that fund the museum, Iğsız analyzes the transnational dynamics of institutional and official endorsements of diversity and how such endorsements “museumize” culture for display. The article examines the limits of liberal multiculturalism as promoted in the EU cultural policy, revealing how Turkish officials have “discovered” liberal multiculturalism in the Ottoman past as a history of tolerance, which is manifested as a mode of neo-Ottomanism.