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Narrating the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange: Stories About Belonging and Otherness in the Nation

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Narrating the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange: Stories About Belonging and Otherness in the Nation Narrating the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange: Stories about belonging and otherness in the nation by Leigh Stuckey Department of Cultural Anthropology Duke University Approved: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 Heather Settle Elizabeth Davis Erdağ Göknar 2009 Dedication This thesis is dedicated those who helped me along the way. Contents 1. Introduction: Ethnic Conflict and Memories of Trauma…………………………..…..….3 The Unmixing of Peoples: An Introduction to the Population Exchange……………..….4 Narrating National Trauma…………………………………………………………..……7 Collective Memory………………………………………………………………………11 Private Memory………………………………………………………………………….13 Methods………………………………………………………………………………….14 Chapter Outline…………………………………………………………………………..17 2. Chapter 2: Establishing Categories of Otherness: National Identity and the Lausanne Convention…………………………………………………………………………….…19 Categorizing National Identity…………………………………………………………...21 Nationalist Histories……………………………………………………………………...23 Religion and the Nation………………………………………………………………….26 3. Chapter 3: Accessing Dominant Narratives: The ‘Other’ in National Historiographies, Education, and Collective Memory……………………………………………………...29 The Nation and ‘Self’/’Other’ Divisions……………………………………………...…33 Stories of Victimhood and Blame………………………………………………………..39 Construction Memory: Tracing the Story of the Souli Women………………………….45 4. Chapter 4: Pluralizing the Account: Representations of the ‘Other’ in Personal Memory and Cultural Productions…………………………………………………………………53 Shared Trauma: The Suffering of the Exchanged………………………………………..56 An Uncomfortable Fit: National and Personal Identity………………………………….60 Nostalgia for the Lost Homeland in the New “Homeland”…………………………...…64 Success or Failure? Evaluations of the Population Exchange…………………………...66 Counter-narratives of Historical Coexistence of Shared Culture………………………..72 5. Conclusion: Larger Implications: Greek-Turkish Relations and Population Exchange as an International Policy…………………………………………………………………...75 Cyprus…………………………………………………………………………………....75 1999: Earthquakes and Empathy………………………………………………………...77 European Union………………………………………………………………………….78 Other Examples of Population Exchange………………………………………………..81 6. Works Cited……………………………………………………………...………………84 2 Introduction Ethnic Conflict and Memories of Trauma A few months into my stay in Turkey, I was confronted with a confusing image: stretching before me in the Cappadocian town of Mustafapaşa was a landscape littered with abandoned Greek homes. In this small town, deep in Anatolian Turkey, a number of what my guide called “Macedonians” populate the region. These people are recognizable by their lighter skin and eyes, and they are still differentiated from the Turks in the town, he said. What he did not explain was where these people came from, whose empty homes they occupied, and the suffering they and their families survived during their journeys and resettlement. My initial probes into a touchy subject brought forth the explanation that decades earlier a population exchange had been orchestrated between Greece and Turkey. The Greeks inhabiting this region were forced to return to Greece, and they were replaced by Muslim populations formerly residing in Greek territory. Cursory research into the population exchange revealed that both the Turkish and Greek governments were complicit in the policies that mandated the population exchange. However, in the six months I lived in Istanbul, I was surprised by the number of occasions the Greek government and people were disparaged. One of these instances during was Eurovision, a European music competition in which the Greek musicians lost to Russia in the final moments of the show. Their dramatic defeat drew more raucous cheers from the twenty-year-old Turks with whom I watched the show than the initial success of the Turkish band. These sentiments were later echoed in their grave attempts to persuade my American friends and me against visiting Greece, where we were sure to be raped like a Turkish woman they’d seen on the news. The negative feelings of young Turks toward Greeks, with whom they had never directly interacted, were mirrored by the Greeks we would 3 meet on our short visit. Employing what then was very rudimentary Turkish, I attempted to speak to the train operators conducting our trip to Greece. The men working on the train, which runs once a day from Greece to Turkey and back, scornfully informed me that they were not Turks, they did not speak Turkish, and furthermore they had no interest in being addressed in Turkish. These men, who come into contact with Turks daily, had little tolerance for their neighbors, or for American students struggling to be understood. Once in Greece, my friends and I quickly learned to leave out the location when explaining our study abroad travels. These experiences sparked my desire to further explore the relationship between Greeks and Turks, which remains so hostile decades after the exchange and among even the youth in the two countries. These hostilities are present in international politics, as evident by the more recent conflict in Cyprus and by some Greeks’ opposition to Turkey’s possible accession into the European Union. My memories of old Greek mansions deep in the Turkish interior that indicated centuries of coexistence contest the bitterness I encountered in casual conversation, and left me with many questions about the population exchange and its legacy. I attempt to explore these issues in this thesis. The Unmixing of Peoples: An Introduction to the Population Exchange On January 30, 1923, the signing of the Lausanne Convention on the Exchange of Populations would mark the world’s first legally mandated population exchange1. This document, and the de facto migrations occurring before the official orders, forever altered the landscape of Asia Minor and the makeup of its population. The exchange was an attempt by members of the Greek and Turkish governments and international officials to address war and 1 Many terms have been used to describe this event, including ‘population exchange’, ‘population transfer’, ‘population expulsion’, and ‘ethnic cleansing’. To employ the loaded term ‘ethnic cleansing’, coined in the 1990s, would constitute an assignation backwards in history. I prefer to follow the language of the Lausanne Convention and refer to the event as an exchange, though keeping in mind its homogenizing aims and the suffering and deaths it caused. 4 violence occurring between Greeks and Turks in Anatolia. In early 1919, the Greek army initiated an attack of these lands, hoping to reoccupy territory formerly part of the Byzantine Empire. The invasion hoped to finally realize the Megali Idea, an irredentist notion born alongside Greek nationalism in the early 1800s (Hirschon, 2004: 4). The Greek government, led by Eleftherios Venizelos, hoped to take advantage of the instability of the region post-World War I and regain vast territories lost to the Ottoman Empire centuries earlier. They justified their attacks by arguing that they were only occupying land that had been promised to them in return for their participation in World War I. In the end, Mustafa Kemal’s forces soundly, and somewhat surprisingly, defeated the Greek army in 1922. The events would come to be known as the “Asia Minor Catastrophe” in Greece, and the “War of Independence” or simply “the Liberation” in Turkey.2 The conflict called attention to ethnic, religious, and national divisions among the populations of Anatolia. Many Greeks, some of whose history in the territory of the Ottoman Empire (and now within Turkish borders) was centuries-long, were called upon to stake their support for the Greek army. Trends of nationalism in both Greece and Turkey called for the abandonment of Ottoman tolerance and for the division of intermixed populations along ethnic, religious, and new national designations. The Lausanne Convention emerged from this atmosphere of nationalism and the redrawing of boundaries, both in terms of territory and of identity. People living upon contested lands were increasingly asked to identify themselves not with by their places of residence but of “origin”. Many Greeks in Anatolia allied themselves with the Greek army, sometimes even providing direct support. When the Turks defeated the Greek forces, hundreds of thousands of Greek people fled with the retreating army. Those who had provided aid feared violent Turkish retribution, often rightly, and others were implicated merely because they were Greeks living in 2 Interestingly, these are the same terms Palestinians and Israelis use to describe the events of 1948. 5 these areas. In any event, atrocities on both sides and increasingly bad relations between Greece and Turkey prompted (or forced) approximately 1 million Greek Orthodox people to flee from Turkey and around 100,000 Muslims from Greece. The retreating Greek army burned Turkish towns in its path, and the Turks followed suit by avenging themselves upon local Greek Orthodox civilians. These atrocities were cited in negotiations for the exchange as evidence of the inability of Muslims and Christians to coexist peacefully. This brings forth an important aspect of the terms of the Lausanne Convention documents: the division of populations on religious terms. Though the exchange fulfilled nationalist agendas of establishing ethnic homogeneity, the documents often referred to Greek Orthodox and Muslim populations, rather than Greeks or Turks. In the Turkish case, this is perhaps the result of an unstable political identity during
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