Legacies of the 1923 Turkish–Greek Population Exchange

During the Axis occupation of Greece (1941–44), around 70,000 Greeks fled to Turkey and the Middle East. They were escaping hunger, persecution, and violence. The experience and recounting by refugees and Greek state authorities of this WWII population displacement were from the beginning saturated with the memories of the previous Great War and the forced migration it had caused. Many of the WWII Greek refugees to Turkey had been refugees from Turkey to Greece 20 years before, while not a few among the Turks who met them had also been expelled from Greece. In a sense, the WWII displacement to Turkey functioned as an interesting, yet brief, ‘re-mixing’ of the people who had been ‘unmixed’ at the end of WWI. WWI refugees – Greeks and Turks – met old neighbours and friends. Although the old peaceful coexistence was occasionally celebrated, this short moment was also from the very start marked with the legacies of the previous war, the atrocities, and the huge price paid by civilians. This chapter reviews a corpus of refugee memoirs published in Greek since the end of WWII. It looks at the recounting of the past legacies and explores the ways the tensions produced by the unexpected meeting of old neighbours, friends, and enemies were managed.