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Greek refugees is a collective term used to refer to the Greeks from Asia Minor who were evacuated or relocated in Greece following the Treaty of Lausanne and the Population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Although the term has been used in various times to refer to fleeing populations of Greek descent (primarily after the Ionian Revolt, the Fall of Constantinople or the Greek Civil War), the population strength and the influence of the Asia Minor Greeks in Greece itself, has attached the term to the Anatolian Greek population of the early 20th century.

Usage of the term

The Greek refugees from Asia Minor are usually called in Greek simply Οι Πρόσφυγες (The Refugees), with a capital Π, cause of their population strength and the circumstances of their relocation. Alternative terms used are Οι Μικρασιάτες πρόσφυγες (The Asia Minor refugees) or Οι πρόσφυγες του '22 (The refugees of ’22). Further distinctions are made to denote the refugees from various historic regions of Anatolia: Πόντιοι πρόσφυγες (Pontic refugees), Καππαδόκες πρόσφυγες (Cappadocian refugees), Μικρασιάτες πρόσφυγες (The refugees from Asia Minor), to refer to the Greeks from the geographic area of the peninsula; special reference is made for the Refugees from Smyrna (Πρόσφυγες της Σμύρνης), since the core of the Greek population lived in the city of Smyrna . The refugees from Eastern Thrace are also included.

Historical background

Antiquity

The eastern coast of the Aegean was inhabited by Greeks as early as the 9th century BC. Aeolian, Ionian and Dorian colonies were established from the Dardanelles to Caria, with the most important been Miletus, Phocaea, Ephesus and Smyrna. The prominence of the Ionian colonies and the Ionic dialect gave to the region the name Ionia. The Greeks of Asia Minor contributed significantly in the ancient Greek history, from the Ionian Revolt, the Ionian League and the conquests of Alexander the Great, to the Hellenistic kingdoms of Pergamos and Pontus. The Arabic, Turkish , Persian & Urdu name for Greece is Younan (یونان), a corruption of "Ionia." The same is true for the Hebrew word, "Yavan" (יוון). The Ionians were the first Greek-speaking people that Semitic, Turkic and Persian language speakers encountered, and the name spread throughout the Near East and Central Asia. The Arabic, Turkish , Persian and Urdu name for Greece is Younan (یونان), a corruption of "Ionia." The same is true for the Hebrew word, "Yavan" (יוון). Following the spread of the Hellenistic civilization, Greek had become the lingua franca in Asia Minor by the time of the Roman conquest.

Byzantine Empire

After the founding of Constantinople by Constantine the Great in 330 and the split of the Roman Empire in 395, Asia Minor, the major part of the Greek East, became the most important region of the Byzantine Empire. For the centuries to follow, the area was the main manpower and wheat source of the state. Numerous invasions and epidemics (especially the Plague of Justinian) devastated the area in various times. However, Asia Minor remained densely populated, compared to the rest of the Medieval world. The Greek population began to decline rapidly with the invasions of the Seljuq Turks in the 11th century. The establishment of the Seljuk Empire deprived the Byzantines of a large part of Anatolia. The Fall of Constantinople on May 29 1453, marked the end of Greek sovereighty in the area.

Ottoman Empire

The first centuries of the Ottoman rule were named by the Greeks The Dark centuries. The custom of the Janissaries and the various restrictions on the religious, economic and social lives of the non Muslim inhabitants of the Empire, constituted an imminent danger for the continuation of the Greek inhabitation of Asia Minor. Conditions were improved the following centuries, but the Greeks remained in the status of Dhimmi. Islamization and gradual Turkification continued. The ideas of The Enlightenment and the subsequent Greek War of Independence, raise the hopes of the Asia Minor Greeks for sovereighty. Many Greeks from Anatolia fought as revolutionaries and faced the retaliations of the Sultan.

20th Century

The persecutions, massacres, expulsions, and death marches of the Asia Minor Greeks were renewed during the early 20th century by the Young Turk administration of the Ottoman Empire and during the subsequent revolution of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The Potic Greek population was the most severely affected; its misfortunes became known as the Pontic Greek Genocide. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, the Allies granted Greece, with the Treaty of Sevres, the administration of Eastern Thrace (apart from Constantinople) and the city of Smyrna and its environs. The Pontic Greeks attempted to establish their own republic, the Republic of Pontus. The defeat of the Greek army during the Greco-Turkish War led to what became known in Greece as the Asia Minor Catastrophe. A series of events, with the Great Fire of Smyrna been their peak, diminished the 3,000 year old Greek presence in Asia Minor. The Treaty of Lausanne, which was signed in 1923, anticipated the compulsory exchange of populations. The remaining Greek Orthodox population of Asia Minor and Eastern Thrace, as well as the Muslim population of Greece (the Greeks of Constantinople, Imbros and Tenedos and the Muslims of Western Thrace were excluded) were denaturalized from homelands of centuries or millennia.

Population strength

The first censuses of Ottoman Anatolia included statistics based only in religion, cause of the millet system. According to the Ottoman census of 1915, the Greek population of Asia Minor amounted to 2,601,312 people. 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. A small number of refugees had fled to Russia and the Middle East the previous years. In addition to them, approximately 250,000 Greek Americans of Asia Minor descent, who had American citizenship and had emigrated to the United States between 1866-1917, were de jure denaturalized from those homelands and lost the right of 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 mass immigrations in 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.

Conditions of the population exchange

The populations which were expelled suffered greatly. Since this was the first compulsory population exchange in human history, no special measures for the protection of the refugees were taken into account. The refugees were packed in ships without any of their possessions and placed in quarantine before landing in the Greek ports. Greece, which had been in a state of war for about 12 years, was a bankrupt state, which had just changed its political system, after a revolution and the expulsion of King Constantine I. The unorganized transfer, as well as the severe economic and healthy conditions, had as a result the spread of diseases and a high mortality rate. Thousands of Asia Minor Greeks had drawn in the sea (especially in the Gulf of Smyrna) or died of epidemics, mainly of malaria. According to the Greek historian A.Papagiannopoulos, approximately 50 people were dying of malaria every day in Thessaloniki alone. It has been estimated that in the refugee camps of Thessaloniki the birth and death rate during the 1920s was 1:3. The hospital facilities of Greece could not support such a large number, and even the cemeteries were not many enough. The conditions of their expulsion and relocation were worsened by the fact that the vast majority of the refugees were women and children (aged under 15), since the male population was not allowed to leave Turkey, and was subjected to labour battalions. According to the statistics, 60%-73% of the refugees were women and children, while men constituted only the 30%, with 12% being incapable for work. In addition, the 1/3 of the refugee families did not have a surviving male member.

Areas of settlement

The core of the refugee population settled in Attica and Macedonia. The official refugee population per region in 1928 was as follows (number of refugees and percent of the refugee population):

Macedonia: 638,253 52.2% (with 270,000 in Thessaloniki alone)

Central Greece and Attica: 306,193 25.1%

Thrace: 107,607 8.8%

North Aegean Islands: 56,613 4.6%

Thessaly: 34,659 2.8%

Crete: 33,900 2.8%

Peloponnese: 28,362 2.3%

Epirus: 8,179 0.7%

Cyclades: 4,782 0.4%

Ionian Islands: 3,301 0.3%

Total: 1,221,849 100%

Numerous suburbs, towns and villages were established to house the additional population of Greece, which rose by about 1/3 in just a few months. In addition, to this day every town in Greece has a quarter named Προσφυγικά, The Refugees' (quarter). These new settlements were usually named after the place of origin of their inhabitants:

List of settlements

This is a list of refugee settlements in Greece (the place of origin is in parenthesis)

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items.

Positive effects

The arrival of the Asia Minor Greeks resulted in the rise of the agricultural production of the state by 400%. The arable land increased by 55%. The Nikolaos Plastiras government decided on February 14 1923 to further divide the arable land of Greece, in order the refugees and their descendants to be the owners of their own land. The income tax of the Greek state rose by about 400% within 4 years, mainly thanks to the refugees (from 319 million drachmas in 1923, to 1 billion 173 millions in 1927).

Greece managed to increase the homogeneity of the population, especially in Northern Greece (Macedonia and Thrace. The urban population increased by far, resulting in the creation of the modern Greek metropolises of Athens and Thessaloniki. New liberal ideas arrived along with the refugees, especially those coming from the cosmopolitan city of Smyrna. The influence of the refugees was particularly important in the cultural field.

The Greek trade and the exchange rates pushed the Greek economy into a new era of industrialization and development, partly due to the arrival of thousands of cheap hands, manpower of low cost. New industries were established in short time by the skilled refugee population (e.g. carpet industries). In addition, many of them became later successful ship-owners (e.g. Aristotle Onassis).

The Asia Minor Greeks became an inspiration for the native Greek population during the Interwar period, and fought along with their compatriots in World War II, as well as the Greek Resistance.

Negative effects

The Asia Minor Greeks constituted one of the wealthiest groups of the Greek nation, holding most of the economic life and the trade of Anatolia in their hands. Their expulsion led to the abandonment of thousands of factories and shops in the hands of the newly established Republic of Turkey. According to the Treaty of Lausanne, both states had the obligation to make reparations of the properties of the exchanged populations, an obligation that was never fulfilled, on the expense of mostly the Greek refugees (whose number was three times more and were wealthier than the agricultural Muslim population of Greece). Unlike the Muslims of Greece, the Asia Minor Greeks were forced to leave without any of their possessions.

Rather severe were the demographic changes of the Anatolian Greek population, as well as the changes in the demography of Greece herself. The Young Turks revolution, the Asia Minor Expedition and subsequent Catastrophe, had as a result, apart from the 1.5 million refugees, the death of approximately 1 million ethnic Greek civilians (the most notable case being the Pontic Greek Genocide) and the hostage of hundreds of thousands of Greek men, who were not allowed to leave Anatolia, but were send to labor battalions after the war (it is estimated that as many as 150,000 Greek men from Smyrna were not allowed to go to Greece). The demographic bleeding of the refugee population continued in Greece were thousands of people (especially women and children) died of diseases. The diseases had also an impact on the native population of the country. Apart from malaria, which caused the death of tens of thousands, diseases that had not appeared in Greece for years (cholera, plague) increased the already high mortality rates.

The problem of the housing of the refugees was the most imminent. Within the first 10 days of October 1922, 50,000 Greeks mainly from Aivali arrived in Lesbos, creating a huge humanitarian problem. During the years 1923-1928, the Greek state built 25,000 houses for the refugees. The Institute for the relief of the Refugees (ΕΑΠ) built another 27,000 houses (11,000 only in Attica). The same institute spent an estimated 2,422,961 English pounds in order to house 165,000 refugees in Athens and Thessaloniki.

Impact on the Greek psyche

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Popular culture

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See also

• Population exchange between Greece and Turkey
• Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922)
• Treaty of Lausanne
• Pontic Greek Genocide
• Great Fire of Smyrna
• Greeks of Turkey
• Istanbul Pogrom

Further reading

• Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus, Renee Hirschon
• The Exchange of Minorities: Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey, Stephen-Pericles Ladas
• Greek-Turkish Population Exchange: An Analysis of the Conflict Leading to the Exchange, Safiye Bilge Temel
• Population Dilemmas in the Middle East: essays in political demography and economy, Gad G. Gilbar

References

1. 1915 Ottoman census
2. The Greek minority of Turkey
3. Ο Ελληνισμός της Μικράς Ασίας (in Greek)
4. Educational Institute of Greece (in Greek)
5. Μικρασιατική Καταστροφή, Πρόσφυγες στη Θεσσαλονίκη (1915-1925)
6. Οι Πρόσφυγες
7. Οι Πρόσφυγες

• History of modern Greece
• Greek people
• Greek society
• Greek culture