Journal Article

The Greek-Turkish population exchange: internationally administered ethnic cleansing

Shields, Sarah

2013

Overview

The photographs are compelling: Greek Orthodox Christians are gathered in small groups on the Aegean coast of what is now Turkey, wearing too much clothing for the hot day, whatever possessions they could carry sitting at their feet, their faces drawn with worry as they stare at the water, awaiting the ships that would take them to Greece. They were being expelled from Anatolia, where their ancestors had lived and died and worked and prayed for so many centuries that most claimed no other homeland. These Christians followed a patriarch who had resided in Constantinople/Istanbul since the year 330 and whose massive cathedral, Hagia Sophia, had already become a major tourism site. For centuries, the community had regulated prayer, education, taxation and communal life under the ruling Ottoman sultans. The status of Orthodox Christians, like those of the other Ottoman millets (Armenian, Syriac and Catholic Christians, as well as Jews) began to change dramatically as increasingly powerful European empires intervened in Ottoman territories, claiming to be `protecting minorities.' Still, despite anti-Armenian violence at the end of the 1800s, it was only with the Balkan wars at the beginning of the twentieth century that the Ottoman regime began to define Greek Orthodox Christian Ottomans as enemies. And it took a Greek invasion of Anatolia in 1919 to set in motion the catastrophic events that would result in the expulsion of these Christians standing on the Aegean shore.

• Subject: Ethnic cleansing / Exchange / Forced migration / Greece / Minority protection / Regional history / Turkey