The compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1923 defined a whole generation of Christians and Muslims who became citizens of Greece and Turkey. It was done in a swift and brutal way. In addition to a life marked by the fear of violence and sudden death created by more than ten years of constant war, their legal identity was transformed at the stroke of a pen from one based on confession to one primarily defined by nationalist criteria. At the same time as their Muslim or Christian identities made them subject to forced exchange, they were officially transformed from Muslims and Christians into Turks and Greeks. This has left two main legacies: the official narrative that frames the exchange as ‘coming home’, on the one hand, and the recollections of individual refugees, in which the term ‘home’ is far more complex and often connotes conflicting sentiments, on the other.
This is the subject of Emine Yesim Bedlek's book. Her main focus is on the experience and memory of the Orthodox refugees, but she includes Muslim voices. She also discusses the different ways in which Greek and Turkish society understood the exchange: to Greeks it was a result of military defeat, while for the Turks it was the outcome of military victory.
Bedlek's analysis is based on a wide range of sources and input from history and social science, but her main focus is on three novels, Farwell Anatolia, by the Greek author Dido Sotiriou, Birds without Wings by the British writer Louis de Bernières and Emanet Ceyiz: Mübadele Insanlari (The Entrusted Trousseau: Peoples of the Exchange) by the Turkish writer Kemal Yalcin. In relation to this, she discusses the merits of oral history and what it offers that traditional history does not: oral sources tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing and what they now think they did.
Like other researchers before her, Bedlek defines the co-existence between Orthodox Christians and Muslims as inter-communality. Her book covers the entire period from before competing Greek and Turkish nationalisms began to disturb inter-communality in earnest, to a time when the refugees had been living in Greece for decades. Such an extended time span makes it possible to examine in depth a number of the issues that affected their lives and how the refugees dealt with these.
For the period when inter-communality was still by and large undisturbed, Bedlek's, results confirm the conclusions reached by other researchers, namely that Orthodox Christians and Muslims lived harmoniously together. They would meet and interact in the public space, be guests in each other's homes, share a number of saints and practise syncretism to a large extent. True to this understanding, she seeks the causes for the break-down of inter-communality in politics and acts of violence intended to destroy it by outside actors, whether in the service of Greek and Turkish nationalism or great power interests.
Bedlek's analysis is well balanced. She allows the refugees to be an authority on their own life-stories, while at the same time she is fully aware of the fact that their recollections may have been influenced by the encounter with their new homeland. She discusses the implications of their marginal role in Greek society and the ways in which the impact of life-defining events like the Axis Occupation (1941–44) and the Civil War (1946–49) may have had a bearing on their narratives, because these events structured Greek society in new ways that affected the position of refugees within it.
Bedlek's evaluation of the importance of inter-communality raises the following intriguing suggestion: that it is the Exchange of Populations and not the Conquest of Constantinople by Sultan Mehmed II that constitutes the real end to Byzantine heritage and culture. This leads her to introduce the term ‘imperial identity’ and to suggest that the refugees represented the last Ottomans. This is so, she reasons, because their world-view was significantly different from that of the Greeks of the nation state; it far more closely resembled that of the citizen of the heterogeneous Ottoman empire with its Byzantine past. Some, for example, attested to a strong awareness of Russia and its Tsar - the self-proclaimed protector of the Orthodox Christians - but hardly any concept of the Greek Kingdom. Although the refugees hardly ever used the term ‘Ottoman’ to define themselves, they would begin to call themselves Mikrasiates, as opposed to Greeks, after their arrival in Greece.
One of the most instructive passages with respect to their specific identity and its difference from the national Greek identity concerns the Karamanlides, the Turcophone Orthodox Christians of Cappadocia. Many resisted the idea of being exchanged, claiming that they were Orthodox Turks and not Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians. The most extreme case is provided by Papa Eftim, the spiritual leader of the Karamanlides, who tried to exempt his flock from the population exchange. He rebelled against the Patriarchate and declared that he was ready to take orders from Mustafa Kemal; but to no avail: at the end of the day, the Karamanlides too had to leave their homes.
Overall Bedlek takes great care to contextualize her analysis in the political, social and cultural settings of the time and to relate her results to previous research. This is a well-judged decision because it gives the reader a good opportunity to follow her reasoning and evaluate her findings against the broader background of the existing historiography. Furthermore, her decision to let the refugees speak so extensively through the literary texts as they do eases our access to their world and the forces that shaped it. Her book is a valuable contribution to the historiography of the Asia Minor refugees, not only in their old homelands but also in Greece.
