The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey (Greek: Ἡ Ἀνταλλαγή, Turkish: Mübadele) was based upon religious identity, and involved the Greek Orthodox citizens of Turkey and the Muslim citizens of Greece. It was a major compulsory population exchange, or agreed mutual expulsion. The "Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations" was signed at Lausanne, Switzerland, on 30 January 1923, by the governments of Greece and Turkey. It involved approximately 2 million people (around 1.5 million Anatolian Greeks and 500,000 Muslims in Greece), most of whom were forcibly made refugees and de jure denaturalized from their homelands. By January 1923, the vast majority of Asia Minor Greeks and Pontic Greeks had already fled during the recent Greco-Turkish War; nonetheless, they were taken into account in the convention. According to calculations, during the autumn of 1922, around 900,000 Orthodox refugees had arrived in Greece (including 50,000 Armenians) The Greek-Turkish population exchange was a result of the Turkish War of Independence. After Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's entrance into Izmir, followed by the abolishment of the Ottoman sultanate on November 1, 1922, a formal peace agreement was signed with Greece after months of negotiations at Lausanne on July 24, 1923. Two weeks after the treaty, the Allied Powers turned over Istanbul to the Nationalists, marking the final departure of occupation armies from Anatolia. On October 29, 1923, the Grand Turkish National Assembly announced the creation of the Republic of Turkey, a state that would encompass most of the territories claimed by Mustafa Kemal in his National Pact of 1920. The nation-state of Turkey was headed by Mustafa Kemal's the People's Party, which later became the Republican People's Party. The end of the Turkish War of Independence brought new administration to the region, but also brought new problems considering the demographic reconstruction of cities and towns, many of which were abandoned. The Greek occupation and the Turkish nationalist attacks left many of Turkey's cities and villages plundered and in ruins. After the Balkan Wars, Greece had almost doubled its territory, and the population of the country rose from approximately 2.7 million to 4.8 million. With this newly annexed population, the proportion of 'minorities' in Greece rose to 13 percent, and following the end of the First World War, it increased to 20 percent. Most of the ethnic populations were Muslim in these annexed territories, but were not necessarily Greek in ethnicity. This is particularly true in the case of ethnic-Albanians who had inhabited the Çamëria region of Albania. During the deliberations held at Lausanne, the question of "who was Greek? Who was Turkish? Who was Albanian?" was routinely brought up. Greek representatives and Albanian representatives determined that the Albanians in Greece, restricted in the most northwestern part of the country, were not Turkish, and were distinguishable from the Turks (Albanians in this region included both Muslims and Greek Orthodox). Ankara still expected a thousand "Turkish-speakers" from the Çamëria to arrive to Anatolia, for settlement in Erdek, Ayvalık,Menteşe, Antalya, Senkile, Mersin, and Adana. Ultimately, Greek authorities decided to deport thousands of Muslims from the Çamëria region, together with myriad others from Larissa, Langada, Drama, Vodina, Serez, Edessa, Florina, Kilkis, Kavala, and Salonika. Between 1923 and 1930, the infusion of these refugees into Turkey would dramatically alter the Anatolian landscape. By 1927, Turkish officials had settled 32,315 individuals from Greece in the province of Bursa alone. The road to the exchange According to some sources, the population exchange, albeit messy and dangerous for many, was executed fairly quickly by respected supervisors. If the goal of the exchange was to achieve ethnic-national homogeneity, then this was achieved by both Turkey and Greece. For example, in 1906, over 80 percent of the population of present-day Turkey were Muslims. By 1927, only 2.6 percent of the population of Turkey were non-Muslim The architect of the exchange was Fridtjof Nansen, commissioned by the League of Nations. As the first official high commissioner for refugees, Nansen designed and supervised the exchange, taking into account the interests of Greece, Turkey, and other West European states. As a talented diplomat with experience resettling Russian, Armenian, and Assyrian refugees after the first World War, Nansen had also created a new travel document for displaced persons of the World War in the process. He was chosen to be in charge of the peaceful resolution of the Greek-Turkish war of 1912,

• published: 17 Jan 2014
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