The Lausanne Peace Treaty, signed in July 1923, ended the Greco-Turkish War. As a part of the treaty, Greece and Turkey signed the “Convention for the Exchange of Populations”, which devised and implemented the principle of a compulsory exchange of population for the first time in modern history. The convention dictated that all Greek Orthodox of Turkey and all Muslims of Greece were to be denaturalized, leave the country they reside in, and acquire the citizenship of their destination country. As a result of the population exchange, Greece, a country with less than five million inhabitants, received more than one million refugees from Turkey. In return, about 400,000 Muslims left Greece

# **2.2 Resettlement of refugees**

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Greece was primarily a rural agrarian country. In 1920, the urbanization rate was only 23 percent, and more than half of the population was employed in agriculture. The relief and resettlement of such a large-scale refugee inflow were far beyond the limited resources of the Greek State, which had almost gone bankrupt after a long and costly war. As a result, the League of Nations intervened and founded the Refugee Settlement Commission (RSC) in September 1923. The RSC had full authority over the distribution of funds and resettlement of refugees.

**Agricultural Resettlement.** The mandate of the RSC was to establish refugees in agricultural work and assist them to become self-supporting. To this end, the RSC provided them with land suitable for cultivation and with various farm inputs, such as livestock, seeds, and some machinery (Kontogiorgi, 2006, pp. 78, 86, 90). The RSC concentrated its operation in Northern Greece where large tracts of arable land were left vacant by the expelled Muslim population. The RSC split the large estates of Muslim landlords ( _chiftliks_ ) into smallholdings and distributed them to the Greek refugees.<sup>8</sup>

**Infrastructure Works.** The RSC also expanded the cultivable land area by undertaking important and costly drainage and reclamation works in the valleys of the Northern provinces, often waterlogged and prone to malaria. As a result, the area of cultivated land doubled in Northern Greece (Kontogiorgi, 2006, pp. 277–290) and the drained marshlands hosted many new settlements of refugees.<sup>9</sup> In addition to distributing land and houses to refugees, the RSC also initiated a public utility program: it constructed roads, bridges, dispensaries, and schools (Pentzopoulos 1962, p. 108; Kontogiorgi 2006, p. 297). The decennial 1922–1932 total budgetary expenditures for the relief, housing and settlement of refugees amounted to a little more than 10 millions British pounds, with 9.1 millions spent for agricultural settlement and 1.3 millions for urban settlement (Kritikos

> 8By contrast, the refugees who settled in urban centers — about 50 percent of them — were given no means of providing for themselves, apart from accommodation (Kontogiorgi, 2006, p. 103).

> 9In total, the Greek regions of Macedonia, Thrace, Epirus, and Thessaly hosted more than 90 percent of the refugees’ agricultural settlements (uthors’ calculation using data from the 1930 Statistical Yearbook of Greece)

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