by Bruce Clark
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Product Description
In the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, nearly two million citizens in Turkey and Greece were expelled from homelands. The Lausanne treaty resulted in the deportation of Orthodox Christians from Turkey to Greece and of Muslims from Greece to Turkey. The transfer was hailed as a solution to the problem of minorities who could not coexist. Both governments saw the exchange as a chance to create societies of a single culture. The opinions and feelings of those uprooted from their native soil were never solicited. In an evocative book, Bruce Clark draws on new archival research in Turkey and Greece as well as interviews with surviving participants to examine this unprecedented exercise in ethnic engineering. He examines how the exchange was negotiated and how people on both sides came to terms with new lands and identities. Politically, the population exchange achieved its planners' goals, but the enormous human suffering left shattered legacies. It colored relations between Turkey and Greece, and has been invoked as a solution by advocates of ethnic separation from the Balkans to South Asia to the Middle East. This thoughtful book is a timely reminder of the effects of grand policy on ordinary people and of the difficulties for modern nations in contested regions where people still identify strongly with their ethnic or religious community. (20060917)
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 powerful but a little boring, 2008-08-07
This was a very powerful book for me as a foreigner living in Turkey. It's easy to take one side or another in thinking about the past. I can either embrace the typical Turkish line that makes the Turkish revolution look like 100% bravery and honor. Or I can secretly accept the demonization of Turks that I often hear from foreign authors and press whenever they talk about Turkey's behavior toward Armenians or Greeks. This book puts me right where I want to be; namely in a place where I can understand the context of what happened and hear the heartbreaking stories of families on both sides of this terrible period. The book also does a good job of showing this book's relevance for today.
While reading it, I was shocked to learn how many peoples' lives around me were shaped by the events described here. This really isn't ancient history. And these stories must not die. I'm glad that some of them got written down here.
5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
 A Sad Solution to unresolvable religious conflicts, 2007-05-09
The sadness of this book is personal. I had a mother who was evicted from her part of the world in Western Greece into Anatolia, and I know she was twice a stranger in her new homeland. Her birthplace erased from the maps, she wanted to go see it again. Never did.
I don't like to read depressing books about insolvable problems in the Middle East, but this one is very timely. The only solution in Iraq will be just such a separation of the factions into several independent areas. So the more things change, the more religious hatreds cause pain and loss to true believers.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
The book I've been waiting for the last twenty years!, 2007-03-25
My maternal grandparents were Orthodox Christians from Cappadocia. As a child I was told I was Greek; they were Greek, yet they spoke mostly Turkish. I noticed the other Greeks I met in the community were different than my grandparents. When I got to high school, after having lived in Greece for a year, I began asking questions of my grandmother, who told me many details of their Christian lives in a small town outside of Kayseri,then of the march out of Cappadocia, the ship to Greece that ran out of food as they had nowhere to put the refugees, finally debarking and being housed on the floor of a church until the parishioners got angry. She told me they were lucky; her father got a job as a teacher in orphange, as he was educated, a teacher certified by the patriarchate and so ended up on Evia at an American run orphanage. My grandfather and great uncle had escaped with false visas more than ten years earlier. I never fully understood why, based on my reading, the accounts of my grandfather and his brother having to escape at age 14. Now I do. Now I understand why the accounts that I've read from different regions of Anatolia are so different. I appreciated the author's methodology to get to every ethnic and regional group, and all the political parties that put their two cents in and influenced all these people who didn't want to go anywhere.
I have read all the history books and personal accounts I could find but all were clearly heavily biased and didn't reflect all of my grandparents' accounts. My grandparents never spoke ill of the Turkish people, only the Turkish soldiers. I wondered why my grandmother constantly referenced clothing, music, food, or anything to being Turkish-like. I wondered how they came to be called Greeks when my grandfather's written family history shows them having lived in the same valley for at least three hundred years. His ancestors were Persian; my grandmother's were from one of the -stahn countries, southeast of the Caspian Sea. Their family photos looked Mongolian, not Greek.
I once asked my grandmother how she could leave her home, her parents and siblings in Greece to marry a man she'd never met in the United States. (She never saw her parents again and didn't see her siblings for forty five years.)Her answers were forever etched in my mind.
First: She didn't like the Greek "boys" and where they were living wasn't "home." The man she was to marry was from her own village, and although she didn't know him other than to have seen him at church he was their kind.
Second was a lesson for my own marriage and a theme discussed in the book when refugee Christians moved into Muslim homes and shared their homes until the Muslims were deported. "Any two people can live together forever and be happy, if they both work at it." It seems that any two peoples can live together forever and be happy, if there are no politicians involved.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Microhistory with Macroimplications, 2007-03-23
A masterful book that illuminates a little-known bit of history, the mutually-agreed forced exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in the early 1920's. Even those who think they "know" this subject matter are likely to learn something from Clark's careful exploration of how the human tragedy played out differently in each area, sometimes even for different groups of people within the same area. His review of the diplomatic and political machinations leading to the exchange is equally revealing, demonstrating that both the Greek and Turkish governments eagerly pursued the exchange agreement as the best outcome. Clark's last chapter makes some interesting observations on how Turkey's nationalist concept of itself will mesh (or not) with its EU aspirations. Finally, Clark's work gains authority by remaining even-handed throughout.
The only weakness of the book is Clark's argument that the Greek-Turkish exchange was so inhumane that it neither could, nor should, serve as a model for any future resolution of mixed populations. To me, that's unconvincing -- the suffering described here pales by comparison with some of the violence that has been visited on populations that were not exchanged. Still, it's unlikely to be repeated, because the appropriate conditions (two willing governments) are unlikely to recur.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
A Story Unfamiliar for Many, 2007-01-28
This book discusses the population exchange between Greece and Turkey that took place in th early 1920's. Many individuals think that all of Greece was liberated in the early 1820's and do not realize that the northern area remained as part of the Ottoman Empire. Once Mustafa Kemal called Ataturk succeeded in his goal to create one unified Turkey after the Balkan Wars and World War I, he sought to have only Turks in Turkey and the Greeks wanted only Greeks in Greece. The European Great Powers of World War I were not able to prevent the concept of one ethnic identity within one national boundary. So Greek speaking Turks in Greece and Turkish speaking Greeks in Turkey were mutually expelled. People were forced from the homes where they had forged bonds over generations and had shared a common language. When each group arrived to the destination purportedly "correct" for them, they were stangers who could not speak the language of their new homeland. The spiritual pathos and psychological suffering was horrific. The author of this book treats the topic with fair and even handed research and he presents a history that few today know. It is a superb retelling of a time receding in memory and Clark has provided a fine accounting for those who went through the repatriation.
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