ABSTRACT
Between the years 1911 and 1923, the Ottoman Empire was engaged in a series of disastrous wars that changed the make-up of the Eastern Mediterranean altogether. is also had catastrophic eects on the port cities. Some, such as Smyrna, suered a sudden and immediate break-up or ‘unravelling’ of their ‘cosmopolitan’ character;6 others, such as Salonica and to a lesser degree Constantinople (Istanbul), then experienced the rst wave of ethnic cleansings that would continue over the following decades.7 Others still, as in the case of Alexandria (Iskenderiye), survived this initial wave of turmoil to be remodelled later.8 It is in this general framework, rather than an ethnocentric perspective, that we have to view the case of the German communities on the two shores of the Aegean during the First World War.
