page_title: Population exchange between Greece and Turkey
section_title: Historical background
hierarchical_section_title: Population exchange between Greece and Turkey / Historical background
caption_attribution_description: English: Greek dialects of Asia Minor prior to 1923 en:Population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Areas with the presence of Anatolian Greeks in 1910. Demotic Greek speakers in yellow. Pontic Greek in orange. Cappadocian Greek in green with individual towns indicated.[1] Shaded regions do not indicate that Greek-speakers were a majority.
context_page_description: The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey stemmed from the "Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations" signed at Lausanne, Switzerland, on 30 January 1923, by the governments of Greece and Turkey. It involved at least 1.6 million people, most of whom were forcibly made refugees and de jure denaturalized from their homelands.
  The initial request for an exchange of population came from Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, as it was a plan he had come up with before WWI. In a letter he submitted to the League of Nations on October 16, 1922, Venizelos proposed a "compulsory exchange of Greek and Turkish populations," and asked Fridtjof Nansen to make the necessary arrangements. The new state of Turkey also envisioned the population exchange as a way to formalize and make permanent the flight of its native Greek Orthodox peoples following their genocide, while initiating a new exodus of a smaller number of Muslims from Greece as a way to provide settlers for the newly-depopulated Orthodox villages of Turkey; Greece meanwhile saw it as a way to provide propertyless Greek Orthodox refugees from Turkey with lands of expelled Muslims.
context_section_description: The Greek–Turkish population exchange came out of the Turkish military's reaction against Christian minorities in the late days of the Ottoman Empire and its subsequent massacres of them: Adana massacre of 1909, Armenian Genocide of 1914–1923, and Greek genocide 1914–1922.  By January 31, 1917, the Chancellor of Germany, allied with the Ottomans during World War I, was reporting that:
  The indications are that the Turks plan to eliminate the Greek element as enemies of the state, as they did earlier with the Armenians. The strategy implemented by the Turks is of displacing people to the interior without taking measures for their survival by exposing them to death, hunger, and illness. The abandoned homes are then looted and burnt or destroyed. Whatever was done to the Armenians is being repeated with the Greeks. 
  — Chancellor of Germany in 1917, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century
  At the end of World War I one of the Ottomans' foremost generals, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, continued the fight against the attempted Allied occupation of Turkey in the Turkish War of Independence. The surviving Christian minorities within Turkey, particularly the Armenians and the Greeks, had sought protection from the Allies and thus continued to be seen as an internal problem, and as an enemy, by the Turkish National Movement. This was exacerbated by the Allies authorizing Greece to occupy Ottoman regions (Occupation of Smyrna) with a large surviving Greek minority population in 1919 and by an Allied proposal to protect the remaining Armenians by creating an independent state for them (Wilsonian Armenia) within the former Ottoman realm. The Turkish Nationalists' reaction to these events led directly to the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) and the continuation of the Armenian Genocide and Greek genocide. After Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's capture of Smyrna followed by the abolition of the Ottoman Empire on November 1, 1922, over a million Greek orthodox Ottoman subjects had fled their homes in Turkey. A formal peace agreement was signed with Greece after months of negotiations in 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 and provoking another flight of Christian minorities to Greece.
  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 state of Turkey was headed by Mustafa Kemal's People's Party, which later became the Republican People's Party. The end of the 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 had been abandoned by fleeing minority Christians. The Greco-Turkish War left many of the settlements plundered and in ruins.
  Meanwhile, after the Balkan Wars, Greece had almost doubled its territory, and the population of the state had risen from approximately 3.7 million to 4.8 million. With this newly annexed population, the proportion of non-Greek minority groups in Greece rose to 13%, and following the end of the First World War, it had increased to 20%. Most of the ethnic populations in these annexed territories were Muslim, but were not necessarily Turkish in ethnicity. This is particularly true in the case of ethnic Albanians who inhabited the Çamëria (Greek: Τσαμουριά) region of Epirus. During the deliberations held at Lausanne, the question of exactly who was Greek, Turkish or Albanian was routinely brought up. Greek and Albanian representatives determined that the Albanians in Greece, who mostly lived in the northwestern part of the state, were not all mixed, and were distinguishable from the Turks. The government in Ankara still expected a thousand "Turkish-speakers" from the Çamëria to arrive in Anatolia for settlement in Erdek, Ayvalık, Menteşe, Antalya, Senkile, Mersin, and 
caption: Distribution of Anatolian Greeks in 1910: Demotic Greek speakers in yellow, Pontic Greek in orange and Cappadocian Greek in green with individual villages indicated.[15]
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