Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [38]
The belief that the conference will result in a treaty is much stronger since the Allies’ surrender of yesterday and today. It is generally thought that the conference will run for several weeks more or less, all depending on the Mosul issue.
Recommended Resources
Even the most cursory search on the topic of the Greek-Turkish population exchange reveals two books in particular: Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey, edited by Renée Hirschon (Berghahn Books, 2003), noted above, and Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions That Forged Modern Greece and Turkey, by Bruce Clark (Harvard, 2006).
In the first, Hirschon—also the author of Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe (Berghahn Books, 1998), a social anthropological study of Asia Minor refugees in Piraeus—presents the far-reaching ramifications of the population exchange in political, economic, demographic, social, and cultural spheres. In 1998, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Lausanne Convention, Hirschon organized a four-day international conference on the consequences of the Convention. The chapters in Crossing the Aegean are the (slightly) revised papers given by the contributors, who hail from both sides of the Aegean Sea. Each chapter is worthy and, I think, quite unbiased. Hirschon refers to this book as a work in progress, and states that her own position “inclines towards ways of promoting coexistence and symbiosis rather than the enforced separation of diverse peoples.” In the final chapter, Hirschon reveals the Turkish government’s attempt to rename cities and towns as a way to erase from memory their previous associations. Similar-sounding Turkic names replaced Greek or Armenian names, and this became quite blatant in the nationalist attitude toward the sea: “In a country that is essentially a peninsula with a very long coastline, it is remarkable how minimal the population’s relationship with the sea has been. The major reason is that the coast was regarded as the domain of the Greeks.” Hirschon concludes that the result of this excising of the exchange from national history “has been a particularly schizophrenic existence for modern Turkey and especially for the identity of its inhabitants; the analysis is only now slowly getting under way.”
Twice a Stranger is a less academic book, written by a journalist for The Economist. Bruce Clark is from Northern Ireland, so he himself is no stranger to this type of conflict. He emphasizes that the population exchange is a human story, and also a landmark in diplomatic history. Therefore he intersperses chapters about the lives of ordinary people with other chapters detailing the choices that politicians faced in 1923 and how those choices affected hundreds of thousands of Muslim and Christian families. “Whether we like it or not,” Clark opines, “those of us who live in Europe or in places influenced by European ideas remain the children of Lausanne.” This book is indeed well researched, but Clark should be especially commended for writing it in the first place as the legacy of Lausanne will soon be forgotten: anyone who still remembers the exchange will surely not be alive for much longer, given that the event occurred nearly ninety years ago. Clark traveled extensively throughout Greece and Turkey, and he aptly notes, “Quite apart from its wider implications for 20th century history, there is much about the contemporary state of Turkey and Greece which cannot be understood except in reference to Lausanne and the population exchange.”
Among the numerous personal memoirs Clark shares in the book, I have selected two here that I feel are quite moving. The first is from a village schoolteacher in the Grevena region of Greece who was a child when his Muslim playmates were forced to leave:
I was twelve years old. I remember seeing a crowd of people proceeding slowly and purposefully [from the outskirts of Grevena] towards Kozani, some on foot and some mounted.