ABSTRACT
The second half of the nineteenth century has passed into the collective memory as a period of relative freedom and of economic and social development. At the beginning of the twentieth century, more than one million Greek Orthodox lived in the Ottoman Empire. This “golden era” ended in 1913 after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkan Wars, when the Young Turks started to apply exclusion policies that culminated in the ethnic cleansing of the Greek Orthodox in Anatolia and Eastern Thrace during the following years. This process was halted in Western Anatolia and Eastern Thrace during the Greek occupation of these regions. The 1919–1922 Greco-Turkish war saw a series of atrocities by both sides, and the defeat of the Greek Army led to a huge refugee wave to Greece (see Llewelyn-Smith 1998). The burning of the city of Smyrna (Izmir), which was inhabited by a Greek majority, marked symbolically the end of the Greek presence in Anatolia (Asia Minor). The Treaty for the Exchange of Populations between Greece and Turkey sanctioned the mutual ethnic cleansing of minorities in the two countries. These events, which resulted in the uprooting of about 1.5 million people, are referred to in Greece as the “Asia Minor Disaster.”
