# **1 Introduction**

Mass displacement of people is common throughout history. The 20th century alone experienced the uprooting of millions of Jews, Hindus, and countless others. More recently, civil wars and conflicts displaced millions of Sudanese, Syrians, and Rohingyas. While significant attention has been given to the short-term costs that mass refugee inflows may cause for hosting countries in the shortterm, less is known about the long-term legacy of such events. In particular, little evidence exists on how large-scale population resettlements affect the social cohesion of receiving communities in the long-run.<sup>1</sup> This question is important because the short-term and long-term effects could be very different.

This paper aims to fill this gap by exploiting the 1923 Greek population resettlement to examine the long-run consequences of mass refugee inflow on the social cohesion of the receiving society. In the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish war of 1919–1922, escaping religious persecutions, the Greek Orthodox population of the Ottoman Empire fled from their homeland in Turkey they inhabited since antiquity. In total, 1.2 million Greek Orthodox were forcibly resettled to Greece, increasing the host population by more than 20 percent within a few months. Confronted with such a sudden influx of refugees, Greece – an agrarian country economically drained by several years of war – called for the help of the League of Nations, which not only provided immediate relief (food and shelter) but also implemented an ambitious resettlement program. Former marshlands were reclaimed and refugees were provided with arable land, livestock and other farm inputs. New houses were build and new schools opened to accommodate the newcomers. Furthermore, given that refugees could not return to their homeland and had to remain in Greece permanently, they were granted the Greek citizenship.<sup>2</sup> Despite these substantial investments, refugees – initially in a state of “utter destitution”<sup>3</sup> – were often met with hostility by the locals, who felt their way of life under threat. Serious clashes occurred over the distribution of farmland, which mostly benefited refugees at the disadvantage of local cultivators.<sup>4</sup> Furthermore, although refugees and natives shared the same religion and often the same language, they were often met with prejudice and rejection, especially as “competition for

> 1 For a review of the literature see Becker and Ferrara (2019); Verme and Schuettler (2019); Ruiz and Vargas-Silva (2013).

> 2Some of the terminology (“refugees”, “resettlement”) used in this paper does not align with contemporary legal definitions or customary uses in international refugee protection regimes. By “refugees”, I designate Greek Orthodox population who fled Turkey due to religious persecutions, even if they cannot be considered as refugees under the 1951 Genena Convention as they were already Greek nationals upon they entry on Greek territory. Likewise, by “resettlement”, I mean the displacement of population from an origin to a receiving country (and not the transfer of refugees from an asylum country to another State).

> 3Kontogiorgi (2006), p. 88.

> 4Large tracts of arable land were also left vacant by the forced expulsion of all Muslim inhabitants of Greece (about 400,000 people), who resettled in Turkey 1928. The League of Nations split the large estates of the expelled Muslims into smallholdings and distributed them to the Greek refugees, while virtually none were redistributed to the native peasantry.

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