Trading Places (Published 2006) (2024)

Like so many state actions we now condemn, ethnic cleansing was viewed not so long ago as a legitimate tool of foreign policy. In the early part of the 20th century, forced population shifts were not uncommon, as multicultural empires crumbled and nationalism drove the formation of new, ethnically hom*ogenous countries. The reciprocal, unofficial exodus of Palestinians and Jews during the creation of Israel in the 1940’s is well known; less familiar are the expulsions of millions of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe and the mass transfer of Hindus and Muslims between Pakistan and India after World War II. In “Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions That Forged Modern Greece and Turkey,” Bruce Clark, the international security editor of The Economist, explores another such incident: the population exchange that helped create modern-day Greece and Turkey.

Weaving together a rich variety of sources — interviews with some of the last surviving eyewitnesses, documents and accounts from the time, research by local historians in Greece and Turkey — Clark tells both the diplomatic and human stories of the exchange. He shows how 20th-century nationalist ideology affected the lives of ordinary people caught in its wake, raising complicated issues of identity that transcended each side’s claims about who was “Turkish” and who was “Greek.”

Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Greek attempts to annex parts of Turkish Anatolia resulted in war between the two countries, massacres on both sides and the violent expulsion of Greek Orthodox Christians from Turkey. After the victory of the Turkish nationalists, led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the European powers and Balkan governments met to negotiate a new regional order. The result was the Lausanne Agreement of 1923, which regularized the expulsions of Greek Christians from Turkey and authorized reciprocal expulsions of a smaller number of Muslims from Greece to make room for the refugees.

No one asked the opinion of the people affected, of course, though their identities as Greeks and Turks, Christians and Muslims were far less clear-cut than the Lausanne arrangement implied. The Times of London reported in 1923 that “few if any of the Turks in Greece desire to leave,” and Christians in Turkish Cappadocia and Constantinople struggled to exempt their ancient communities from the exchange. Orthodox Christian and Muslim communities had lived side by side, if not always amicably, for centuries before the rise of nationalism, and minority groups had assimilated aspects of the language, customs and religious practices of their birthplaces. Many Ottoman Christians had converted to Islam. In Turkey, some had continued to practice in secret as “crypto-Christians,” and in many cases later returned to Christianity; while in Greece, converts to Islam retained aspects of Christian practice in their Muslim ritual. Such multilayered religious backgrounds could not be easily categorized. Linguistic boundaries were equally blurred. Refugees arriving for the first time in Turkey or Greece felt like strangers in their supposed homelands, often unable even to speak the language, and facing hostility from their new neighbors.

To be sure, the expelled were also ambivalent about their countries of birth. They combined painful recollections of hostility and violence with nostalgia for a vanished world. Clark’s interviews with elderly survivors provide poignant illustrations: a Greek Christian who left Turkey as a child, after describing the hardships of expulsion, spoke movingly of being “sustained by the memory of the place where I grew up.” A Muslim deported from Greek Macedonia as a boy recalled both killings by roving militias and good relations among Christians and Muslims in his village; after revisiting it years later, he admitted, “I wish we still lived there.” Yet in their new homes, the refugees were expected to put aside any conflicted feelings they might have and adopt an idealized national identity. In most cases, they did so — but at a psychological cost.

For many years after the exchange, those costs were ignored as both countries suppressed the complex past. Official histories maintained that peaceful coexistence between Greeks and Turks was impossible. Disused mosques in Greece and churches in Turkey deteriorated, while history books “airbrushed away” evidence that minority communities had lived in each country’s midst. Only recently have the two nations begun to overcome this purposeful amnesia and discuss the traumatic part of their history publicly.

On a private level, as Turkish-Greek relations have continued to thaw, survivors of the transfer and their descendants have had the chance to visit homes left behind, and to rediscover ties with people in their former homelands. Sometimes these links surface in unexpected places: Clark tells of Pontic Greeks expelled from the Black Sea coast of Turkey who moved years later to Germany and found their own Greek dialect and music still flourishing among Turkish guest workers from the same region.

Clark refrains from casting either side as the villain in the population transfer. He cautiously points out that the exchange achieved its goals by creating clear boundaries and thus making it possible for the two countries to live side by side in relative peace. But this quietly nuanced study, whose lessons transcend the borders of Greece and Turkey, primarily illustrates the human cost exacted by the bloody project of wrenching communities apart and forming hom*ogenous nations based on abstract concepts of belonging.