Greek Refugees - Population Strength

Population Strength

1914 Ottoman census, which followed the 1909 census, showed a steep decrease of the Greek population by almost 1 million between these years due to lost of lands (with their population) to Greece after the Balkan Wars. The argument that Greeks constituted the majority of the population of Anatolia claimed by Greece during Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) has been contested by a number of historians. In their book about the British foreign policy of World War I and post war years, Cedric James Lowe and Michael L. Dockrill argued that: Greek claims were at best debatable, perhaps a bare majority, more likely a large minority in the Smyrna Vilayet, which lay in an overwhelmingly Turkish Anatolia. The estimations of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the Greek state and various Western sources, place their number much higher. The number of Greeks excluded from the population exchange was about 300,000 (270,000 living in Istanbul). There are not exact figures of the refugee population in Greece.

The first national Greek census after 1923, conducted in 1928, showed the number of the Greeks of Asia Minor origin to be 1,164,267 (probably over 3 million). Some refugees had moved to Russia and the Middle East in previous years. Approximately 250,000 Greek Americans of Asia Minor descent had emigrated to the United States between 1866–1917, had American citizenship, and thereby would not become refugees; they would, however, be deprived from their property rights in their ancestral homeland, as well as from their right to return. It is usually estimated that the refugees in Greece numbered approximately 1.5 million people. Descendants of the refugees took part in the great Greek migrations of the Interwar period, as well as the large immigrations to the United States, Australia and Germany in the 1960s-1970s. Today, about 40% of the population of Greece claims full or partial descent from the Asia Minor refugees; as does an almost equal percentage of diasporan Greeks.