Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations - Displacements

Displacements

After the Ankara-based government of the Turkish National Movement rejected the Treaty of Sèvres that had been signed by the Constantinople-based Ottoman government, a new peace conference was organised at Lausanne, Switzerland, in order to draft a treaty to replace the Treaty of Sèvres. While the Lausanne Peace Conference was ongoing, but separate from it and its resulting Treaty of Lausanne, the "Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations" was signed at Lausanne on 30 January 1923 by the governments of Greece and Turkey at the insistence of Eleftherios Venizelos and Kemal Atatürk. The convention had a retrospective effect for all the population moves which took place since the declaration of the First Balkan War, i.e. 18 October 1912 (article 3).

By the time the Exchange was to take effect, 1 May 1923, most of the pre-war Orthodox Greek population of Aegean Turkey had already fled. In practice, the Exchange only involved the remaining Greeks of central Anatolia (both Greek- and Turkish-speaking), Pontus and Kars, a total of roughly 189,916. Only 354,647 Muslims were involved.

The agreement therefore merely ratified what had already been perpetrated on the Turkish and Greek populations. Of the 1,300,000 Greeks involved in the exchange, only approximately 150,000 were resettled in an orderly fashion. The majority had already fled hastily with the retreating Greek Army following Greece's defeat in the Greco-Turkish War, whilst others fled from the shores of Smyrna. The unilateral emigration of the Greek population, already at an advanced stage, was transformed into a population exchange backed by international legal guarantees.

In Greece, it was considered part of the events called the Asia Minor Catastrophe (Greek: Μικρασιατική καταστροφή). Significant refugee displacement and population movements had already occurred following the Balkan Wars, World War I, and the Turkish War of Independence. These included exchanges and expulsion of about 500,000 Muslims (mostly ethnic Turks) from Greece and about 1,500,000 Greeks from Asia Minor, Trabezond/Pontus, Kars, and Eastern Thrace to Greece.

The convention affected the populations as follows: almost all Greek Orthodox Christians (Greek- or Turkish-speaking) of Asia Minor including the Greek Orthodox populations from middle Anatolia (Cappadocian Greeks), the Ionia region (e.g. Smyrna, Aivali), the Pontus region (e.g. Trapezunda, Sampsunta), the former Russian Caucasus province of Kars (Kars Oblast), Prusa (Bursa), the Bithynia region (e.g., Nicomedia (İzmit), Chalcedon (Kadıköy), East Thrace, and other regions were either expelled or formally denaturalized from Turkish territory. These numbered about half a million and were added to the Greeks already expelled before the treaty was signed. About 500,000 people were expelled from Greece, predominantly Greek Muslims, and others including Turks, Muslim Roma, Pomaks, Cham Albanians, Megleno-Romanians, and the Dönmeh.

The criterion for the population exchange as codified in the Convention was religion, not ethnicity or mother language. That is why the Karamanlides (Greek: Καραμανλήδες; Turkish: Karamanlılar), or simply Karamanlis, who were a Turkish-speaking (while Greek alphabet-using) Greek Orthodox people of unclear origin, were deported from their native regions of Karaman and Cappadocia in Central Anatolia to Greece as well. On the other hand, Cretan Greek Muslims who were part of the exchange were re-settled mostly on the Aegean coast of Turkey, in areas formerly inhabited by Christian Greeks.