Immediately after the first World War, at a time when the great powers were dividing up the territory of the vanquished Ottoman Empire between them, the Greek army annexed the western coast of Anatolia, notably Smyrna and its hinterland. The Greeks’ intention was to realize their national dream, the “Grand (megali) Idea” of creating a Greater Greece that would include large sections of the former Ottoman Empire. Soon Greeks and Turks were at war. The fighting ended in 1922 with Greece’s total defeat.
Its political and military dimensions aside, the evacuation of Anatolia by the Greek army precipitated a human catastrophe. Using a wide panoply of threats and intimidation, the Turkish nationalist troops forced the Christian - that is, Greek and Armenian - populations to abandon their homes and set sail for the Greek islands and mainland. The September 1922 burning of the Christian quarters of Smyrna was a flagrant expression of the authorities’ desire to exclude the Christian element from the new Turkey that Mustafa Kemal was then struggling to create.
Beginning in September 1922, hundreds of thousands of refugees, most of them Greek Orthodox, poured into Greece, which lacked the means it needed to absorb, assist, and govern this huge mass of people. Initially, the new arrivals were scattered in disorderly and utterly arbitrary fashion throughout the Greek islands and across the ... Read all
Greece and Armenian Refugees
Smyrna in flames, September 1922
(Coll. Michel Paboudjian).
The population of Smyrna massed near the docks in hope of boarding ships (Coll. Michel Paboudjian).