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187-541: The practice was also used to enforce population exchanges such as the Balkan population exchanges in 1913 and the exchanges between the new Republic of Turkey and Greece in 1923. At its height, the Ottoman Empire spanned over the entirety of Anatolia and ruled over many different cultures and peoples. Mass migrations would often be used as a tool to settle political unrest and to bolster Ottoman presence in areas. During

374-606: A state that would encompass most of the territories claimed by Mustafa Kemal in his National Pact of 1920. The state of Turkey was headed by Mustafa Kemal's People's Party, which later became the Republican People's Party . The end of the War of Independence brought new administration to the region, but also brought new problems considering the demographic reconstruction of cities and towns, many of which had been abandoned by fleeing minority Christians. The Greco-Turkish War left many of

561-574: A Greek zone of occupation in the defeated Ottoman Empire. This Greek occupation was designed to protect remaining Christian minorities, who had been massacred repeatedly in the Ottoman Empire before and during World War I: Adana massacre of 1909 , Armenian genocide of 1914–1923, Greek genocide 1914–1922. But, instead, it unleashed further massacres both of these Christians and now also of Muslims as both armies sought to secure their rule by eliminating any inhabitants whose existence could justify unfavorable borders. This continued, now in both directions,

748-461: A Turkish and Muslim middle class and build a statist national economy controlled by Muslim Turks. The campaign to Turkify the economy began in June 1914 with a law that obliged many non-Muslim merchants to hire Muslims. Following the deportations, the businesses of the victims were taken over by Muslims who were often incompetent, leading to economic difficulties. The genocide had catastrophic effects on

935-554: A budget while receiving the fleeing Asia Minor population. To this day, Greece and Turkey still have properties, and ghost villages such as Kayaköy , that have been left abandoned since the exchange. Armenian genocide The Armenian genocide was the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity in the Ottoman Empire during World War I . Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), it

1122-551: A cheap and efficient method, but it caused widespread pollution downstream. So many bodies floated down the Tigris and Euphrates that they sometimes blocked the rivers and needed to be cleared with explosives. Other rotting corpses became stuck to the riverbanks, and still others traveled as far as the Persian Gulf . The rivers remained polluted long after the massacres, causing epidemics downstream. Tens of thousands of Armenians died along

1309-681: A dilemma: If they obeyed, the Armenians expected to be killed, but if they refused, it would provide a pretext for massacres. Armenians fortified themselves in Van and repelled the Ottoman attack that began on 20 April. During the siege, Armenians in surrounding villages were massacred at Djevdet's orders. Russian forces captured Van on 18 May, finding 55,000 corpses in the province—about half its prewar Armenian population. Djevdet's forces proceeded to Bitlis and attacked Armenian and Assyrian/Syriac villages;

1496-726: A distinction between guilty and innocent Armenians. [To do so] was impossible. Because of the nature of things, one who was still innocent today could be guilty tomorrow. The concern for the safety of Turkey simply had to silence all other concerns. — Talaat Pasha in Berliner Tageblatt , 4 May 1916 During World War I, the CUP—whose central goal was to preserve the Ottoman Empire—came to identify Armenian civilians as an existential threat. CUP leaders held Armenians—including women and children—collectively guilty for betraying

1683-467: A faction of society ready to challenge the emergence of single-party rule in Turkey. Although it is very unlikely that an opposition based on an economic elite made up of an ethnic and religious minority would have been accepted as a legitimate political party by the majority population. In Greece, contrary to Turkey, the arrival of the refugees broke the dominance of the monarchy and old politicians relative to

1870-404: A few weeks, until there were very few survivors. This strategy physically weakened the Armenians and spread disease, so much that some camps were shut down in late 1915 due to the threat of disease spreading to the Ottoman military. In late 1915, the camps around Aleppo were liquidated and the survivors were forced to march to Ras al-Ayn ; the camps around Ras al-Ayn were closed in early 1916 and

2057-834: A growing, exclusionary Turkish nationalism in the Young Turk movement, the ARF decided to ally with the CUP in December 1907. In 1908, the CUP came to power in the Young Turk Revolution , which began with a string of CUP assassinations of leading officials in Macedonia . Abdul Hamid was forced to reinstate the 1876 constitution and restore the Ottoman parliament , which was celebrated by Ottomans of all ethnicities and religions. Security improved in parts of

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2244-477: A large percentage belonged to Greek , Roma , Pomak , Macedonian , Cham Albanian , Megleno-Romanian , and Dönmeh Muslim communities. For both communities, the population exchange had traumatic psychological effects. Professor Ayse Lahur Kirtunc, a Cretan Muslim expelled to Turkey stated in an interview: "It's late for us to be preserving our recollections; The essence of them, the first essence, has vanished already. Those first migrants took away their memories;

2431-575: A number of places in the country". However, Talaat Pasha was referring specifically to events in Van and extending the implementation to the regions in which alleged "riots and massacres" would affect the security of the war zone of the Caucasus Campaign . Later, the scope of the deportation was widened in order to include the Armenians in the other provinces. On 29 May 1915, the Central Committee passed

2618-636: A peace conference was convened at Lausanne , Switzerland, in order to draft a new treaty to replace the Treaty of Sèvres . Invitations to participate in the conference were extended to both the Ankara Government and the Istanbul-based Ottoman Government , but the abolition of the Sultanate by the Ankara Government on 1 November 1922 and the subsequent departure of Mehmet VI from Turkey left

2805-625: A period of time imposed significant costs on the Greek economy such as building housing and schools, importing enough food, providing health care, etc. Greece needed a 12,000,000 franc loan from the Refugee Settlement Commission of the League of Nations as there was not enough money in the Greek treasury to handle these costs. Increasing the problems was the Immigration Act of 1924 passed by

2992-627: A process of ethnic cleansing in Asia Minor that had been conducted initially by the Ottoman state against its minorities during World War I. On January 31, 1917, the Chancellor of Germany, allied with the Ottomans during World War I , was reporting that: The indications are that the Turks plan to eliminate the Greek element as enemies of the state, as they did earlier with the Armenians. The strategy implemented by

3179-453: A response to violence in the Balkans; 'there were', in any event, 'over a million Turks without food or shelter in countries in which neither Europe nor America took nor was willing to take any interest'. The population exchange was seen as the best form of minority protection as well as "the most radical and humane remedy" of all. Nansen believed that what was on the negotiating table at Lausanne

3366-616: A result of state policy and stated that "humanity, civilizations are shuddering, and forever will shudder, in face of this tragedy". The postwar Ottoman government held the Ottoman Special Military Tribunal , by which it sought to pin the Armenian genocide onto the CUP leadership while exonerating the Ottoman Empire as a whole, therefore avoiding partition by the Allies . The court ruled that "the crime of mass murder" of Armenians

3553-628: A result of the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent separate peace with the Central Powers , the Russian army withdrew and Ottoman forces advanced into eastern Anatolia. The First Republic of Armenia was proclaimed in May 1918, at which time 50 percent of its population were refugees and 60 percent of its territory was under Ottoman occupation. Ottoman troops withdrew from parts of Armenia following

3740-450: A series of military defeats and territorial losses—especially during the 1912–1913 Balkan Wars —leading to fear among CUP leaders that the Armenians would seek independence. During their invasion of Russian and Persian territory in 1914, Ottoman paramilitaries massacred local Armenians. Ottoman leaders took isolated instances of Armenian resistance as evidence of a widespread rebellion, though no such rebellion existed. Mass deportation

3927-461: A series of transit camps were set up to control the flow of victims to the killing site at the nearby Kemah gorge. Thousands of Armenians were killed near Lake Hazar , pushed by paramilitaries off the cliffs. More than 500,000 Armenians passed through the Firincilar plain south of Malatya , one of the deadliest areas during the genocide. Arriving convoys, having passed through the plain to approach

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4114-420: A strange new country, ... registering, valuing and liquidating their individual property which they abandon, and ... securing to them the payment of their just claims to the value of this property". The agreement promised that the possessions of the refugees would be protected and allowed migrants to carry "portable" belongings freely with themselves. It was required that possessions not carried across

4301-609: A subordinate but protected place in society. Sharia law encoded Islamic superiority but guaranteed property rights and freedom of worship to non-Muslims ( dhimmis ) in exchange for a special tax . On the eve of World War I in 1914, around two million Armenians lived in Ottoman territory, mostly in Anatolia, a region with a total population of 15–17.5 million. According to the Armenian Patriarchate 's estimates for 1913–1914, there were 2,925 Armenian towns and villages in

4488-539: A systematic policy to reduce the Armenian population of these areas. This policy lasted until World War I. These conditions led to a substantial decline in the population of the Armenian highlands; 300,000 Armenians left the empire, and others moved to towns. Some Armenians joined revolutionary political parties , of which the most influential was the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), founded in 1890. These parties primarily sought reform within

4675-412: A systematic state policy involving the bureaucracy, police, judiciary, and clergy, was a major structural component of the genocide. An estimated 100,000 to 200,000 Armenians were Islamized, and it is estimated that as many as two million Turkish citizens in the early 21st century may have at least one Armenian grandparent . Some Armenians were allowed to convert to Islam and evade deportation, but

4862-549: A way of weakening the Venizelist movement had greatly increased the hostility felt in "new Greece" towards the House of Glücksburg . Furthermore, the fact that it was under King Constantine's leadership that Greece had been defeated in 1922 together with the indifference shown by Greek authorities in Smyrna (modern İzmir, Turkey) towards rescuing the threatened Greek communities of Anatolia in

5049-768: A way to gain votes. As the largest number of refugees were settled in Macedonia, which was part of the "new Greece" (i.e. the areas gained after the Balkan Wars of 1912–13), they shared in the resentment against the way that men from "old Greece" (i.e. the area that was Greece before 1912) dominated politics, the civil service, judiciary, etc., and tended to treat "new Greece" like it was a conquered country. In general, people from "old Greece" tended to be more royalist in their sympathies while people from "new Greece" tended to be more Venizelist. The fact that in 1916 King Constantine I had contemplated giving up "new "Greece" to Bulgaria as

5236-621: Is evident in the first article of the Convention which states: "As from 1st May, 1923, there shall take place a compulsory exchange of Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory, and of Greek nationals of the Moslem religion established in Greek territory." The agreement defined the groups subject to exchange as Muslim and Greek Orthodox . This classification follows

5423-532: Is particularly true in the case of ethnic Albanians who inhabited the Çamëria (Greek: Τσαμουριά) region of Epirus . During the deliberations held at Lausanne, the question of exactly who was Greek, Turkish or Albanian was routinely brought up. Greek and Albanian representatives determined that the Albanians in Greece, who mostly lived in the northwestern part of the state, were not all mixed, and were distinguishable from

5610-471: The Aegean Islands of Imbros (Gökçeada) and Tenedos (Bozcaada). In the event, those Greeks who had temporarily fled these regions, particularly Istanbul, before the entrance of the Turkish army were not permitted to return to their homes by Turkey afterwards. Greece, with a population of just over 5,000,000 people, had to absorb 1,221,489 new citizens from Turkey. The punitive measures carried out by

5797-454: The Aegean Sea be recorded in lists; these lists were to be submitted to both governments for reimbursement. After a commission was established to deal with the particular issue of belongings (mobile and immobile) of the populations, this commission would decide the total sum to pay persons for their immovable belongings (houses, cars, land, etc.) It was also promised that in their new settlement,

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5984-647: The Arabs , Albanians , Russians , Serbs , Romanians of the Greek Orthodox religion; the Albanian , Bulgarian , Greek Muslims of Epirus , and the Turkish-speaking Greek Orthodox. In Thessaloniki, which had the largest Jewish population in the Balkans, competition emerged between the Sephardic Jews who spoke Ladino and the refugees for jobs and businesses. Owing to an increase in antisemitism, many of

6171-720: The Balkan Wars , World War I , and the Turkish War of Independence . The convention affected the populations as follows: almost all Greek Orthodox Christians (Greek- or Turkish-speaking) of Asia Minor including the Greek Orthodox populations from middle Anatolia ( Cappadocian Greeks ), the Ionia region (e.g. Smyrna , Aivali ), the Pontus region (e.g. Trabzon , Samsun ), the former Russian Caucasus province of Kars ( Kars Oblast ), Prusa (Bursa),

6358-522: The Bithynia region (e.g., Nicomedia ( İzmit ), Chalcedon ( Kadıköy ), East Thrace , and other regions were either expelled or formally denaturalized from Turkish territory. On the other hand, the Muslim population in Greece not having been affected by the recent Greek–Turkish conflict was almost intact. Thus c. 354,647 Muslims moved to Turkey after the agreement. Those Muslims were predominantly Turkish, but

6545-488: The Free Republican Party in 1930 could not prolong the rule of a single-party without an opposition. Transition to multiparty politics depended on the creation of stronger economic groups in the mid-1940s, which was stifled due to the exodus of the Greek middle and upper economic classes. Hence, if the groups of Orthodox Christians had stayed in Turkey after the formation of the nation-state, then there would have been

6732-554: The Greco-Turkish War and two days after their accession of the Armistice of Mudanya . The request intended to normalize relations de jure , since the majority of surviving Greek inhabitants of Turkey had fled from recent massacres to Greece by that time. Venizelos proposed a "compulsory exchange of Greek and Turkish populations," and asked Fridtjof Nansen to make the necessary arrangements. The new state of Turkey also envisioned

6919-544: The Istanbul Pogrom (1955) directed primarily against the ethnic Greek community, and against the Armenian and Jewish minorities, greatly accelerated emigration of Greeks, reducing the 200,000-strong Greek minority in 1924 to just over 2,500 in 2006. The 1955 Istanbul Pogrom and the 1964 expulsion of Istanbul Greeks , caused most of the Greek inhabitants remaining in Istanbul to flee to Greece. The population profile of Crete

7106-597: The Kahta highlands, would have found gorges already filled with corpses from previous convoys. Many others were held in tributary valleys of the Tigris , Euphrates , or Murat and systematically executed by the Special Organization. Armenian men were often drowned by being tied together back-to-back before being thrown in the water, a method that was not used on women. Authorities viewed disposal of bodies through rivers as

7293-512: The Khabur valley, where their bodies would not create a public health hazard. The massacres killed most of the Armenians who had survived the camp system. The Ottoman Empire tried to prevent journalists and photographers from documenting the atrocities, threatening them with arrest. Nevertheless, substantiated reports of mass killings were widely covered in Western newspapers . On 24 May 1915,

7480-461: The Ottoman census of 1910 which included Western Thrace , Macedonia and Epirus based on the number of Greeks who left for Greece just before World War I and the 1.3 million who arrived in the population exchanges of 1923, and the 300–900,000 estimated to have been massacred. A revised count suggests 620,000 in Eastern Thrace including Constantinople (260,000, 30% of the city's population at

7667-456: The Republic of Turkey , such as the 1932 parliamentary law which barred Greek citizens in Turkey from a series of 30 trades and professions from tailor and carpenter to medicine, law, and real estate, correlated with a reduction in the Greek population of Istanbul, and of that of Imbros and Tenedos. Most property abandoned by Greeks who were subject to the population exchange was confiscated by

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7854-669: The Soviet occupation of Armenia prevented another genocide. The victorious nationalists subsequently declared the Republic of Turkey in 1923. CUP war criminals were granted immunity and later that year, the Treaty of Lausanne established Turkey's current borders and provided for the Greek population's expulsion . Its protection provisions for non-Muslim minorities had no enforcement mechanism and were disregarded in practice. Armenian survivors were left mainly in three locations. About 295,000 Armenians had fled to Russian-controlled territory during

8041-469: The Triple Entente (Russia, Britain, and France) formally condemned the Ottoman Empire for " crimes against humanity and civilization", and threatened to hold the perpetrators accountable. Witness testimony was published in books such as The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (1916) and Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (1918), raising public awareness of the genocide. The German Empire

8228-429: The Turkish War of Independence after World War I, carried out by Turkish nationalists . This genocide put an end to more than two thousand years of Armenian civilization in eastern Anatolia . Together with the mass murder and expulsion of Assyrian/Syriac and Greek Orthodox Christians, it enabled the creation of an ethnonationalist Turkish state, the Republic of Turkey . The Turkish government maintains that

8415-578: The Turkish War of Independence . The surviving Christian minorities within Turkey, particularly the Armenians and the Greeks, had sought protection from the Allies and thus continued to be seen as an internal problem, and as an enemy, by the Turkish National Movement . This was exacerbated by the Allies authorizing Greece to occupy Ottoman regions ( Occupation of Smyrna ) with a large surviving Greek population in 1919 and by an Allied proposal to protect

8602-625: The Turks . The government in Ankara still expected a thousand "Turkish-speakers" from the Çamëria to arrive in Turkey for settlement in Erdek , Ayvalık , Menteşe , Antalya , Senkile , Mersin , and Adana . Ultimately, the Greek authorities decided to deport thousands of Muslims from Thesprotia , Larissa , Langadas , Drama , Edessa , Serres , Florina , Kilkis , Kavala , and Thessaloniki . Between 1923 and 1930,

8789-678: The fourth century CE , establishing the Armenian Apostolic Church . Following the end of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, two Islamic empires—the Ottoman Empire and the Iranian Safavid Empire —contested Western Armenia , which was permanently separated from Eastern Armenia (held by the Safavids) by the 1639 Treaty of Zuhab . The Ottoman Empire was multiethnic and multireligious, and its millet system offered non-Muslims

8976-734: The " Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations " signed at Lausanne , Switzerland , on 30 January 1923, by the governments of Greece and Turkey . It involved at least 1.6 million people (1,221,489 Greek Orthodox from Asia Minor , Eastern Thrace , the Pontic Alps and the Caucasus , and 355,000–400,000 Muslims from Greece), most of whom were forcibly made refugees and de jure denaturalized from their homelands. On 16 March 1922, Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Yusuf Kemal Tengrişenk stated that "[t]he Ankara Government

9163-471: The "Temporary Law of Expropriation and Confiscation", stating that all property, including land, livestock, and homes belonging to Armenians, was to be confiscated by the authorities. Population exchange between Greece and Turkey The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey ( Greek : Ἡ Ἀνταλλαγή , romanized :  I Antallagí ; Ottoman Turkish : مبادله , romanized :  Mübâdele ; Turkish : Mübadele ) stemmed from

9350-465: The "Temporary Law on Expropriation and Confiscation"), the Ottoman government took possession of all "abandoned" Armenian goods and properties. Some Ottoman parliamentary representatives like, Ahmed Riza protested this legislation: It is unlawful to designate the Armenian assets as "abandoned goods" for the Armenians, the proprietors, did not abandon their properties voluntarily; they were forcibly, compulsorily removed from their domiciles and exiled. Now

9537-422: The 19th century are vague though it seems that the state did not utilize population transfer as much during this time period as it had earlier. The Armenian genocide entailed the forcible relocation of almost all Armenians from Anatolia to the Syrian desert. This relocation was inherently genocidal as those who ordered it did not intend for Armenians to survive; and one of their goals was to ensure in all parts of

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9724-404: The ARF incite Russian Armenians to intervene on the Ottoman side. Instead, the delegates resolved that Armenians should fight for the countries of their citizenships. During its war preparations, the Ottoman government recruited thousands of prisoners to join the paramilitary Special Organization , which initially focused on stirring up revolts among Muslims behind Russian lines beginning before

9911-411: The Ankara Government as the sole governing entity in Anatolia. The Ankara Government, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, moved swiftly to implement its nationalist programme, which did not allow for the presence of significant non-Turkish minorities in Western Anatolia. In one of his first diplomatic acts as the sole governing representative of Turkey, Atatürk negotiated and signed the " Convention Concerning

10098-416: The Armenian leadership and anyone capable of organizing resistance, eventually resulted in the murder of most of those arrested. The same day, Talaat banned all Armenian political organizations and ordered that the Armenians who had previously been removed from Cilicia be deported again, from central Anatolia—where they would likely have survived—to the Syrian Desert . We have been blamed for not making

10285-411: The Armenians had to be eliminated to save the empire. Massacres of Armenian men were occurring in the vicinity of Bashkale in Van vilayet from December 1914. ARF leaders attempted to keep the situation calm, warning that even justifiable self-defense could lead to escalation of killing. The governor, Djevdet Bey , ordered the Armenians of Van to hand over their arms on 18 April 1915, creating

10472-455: The Armenians with their Russian oppressors. Nomadic Kurds committed many atrocities during the genocide, but settled Kurds only rarely did so. Perpetrators had several motives, including ideology, revenge, desire for Armenian property, and careerism . To motivate perpetrators, state-appointed imams encouraged the killing of Armenians and killers were entitled to a third of Armenian movable property (another third went to local authorities and

10659-430: The CUP in the perpetration of genocide. The Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants (IAMM) coordinated the deportation and the resettlement of Muslim immigrants in the vacant houses and lands. The IAMM, under the control of Talaat's Ministry of the Interior , and the Special Organization, which took orders directly from the CUP Central Committee, all closely coordinated their activities. A dual-track system

10846-534: The CUP's increasingly repressive governance. When news of the countercoup reached Adana , armed Muslims attacked the Armenian quarter and Armenians returned fire. Ottoman soldiers did not protect Armenians and instead armed the rioters. Between 20,000 and 25,000 people, mostly Armenians, were killed in Adana and nearby towns. Unlike the 1890s massacres, the events were not organized by the central government but instigated by local officials, intellectuals, and Islamic clerics, including CUP supporters in Adana. Although

11033-465: The Communists led to a rebellion that saw the government lose control of Thessaloniki for a time. Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas , with the support of the King, responded to the communists by establishing an authoritarian regime in 1936, the 4th of August Regime. In these ways, the population exchange indirectly facilitated changes in the political regimes of Greece and Turkey during the interwar period . Many immigrants died of epidemic illnesses during

11220-448: The Dardanelles continued, the reigns of Murad II (d. 1451) and Mehmet II (d. 1481) concentrated on the demographic reorganization of the empire's urban centers. Murad II's conquest of Salonika was followed by its state-enforced settlement by Muslims from Yenice Vardar and Anatolia. Mehmet II's transfers focused on the re-population of the city of Istanbul following its conquest in 1453, transporting Christians, Muslims, and Jews into

11407-465: The Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations " on 30 January 1923 with Eleftherios Venizelos and the government of Greece . The convention had a retroactive effect for all the population exchanges that took place since the declaration of the First Balkan War on 18 October 1912 (article 3). However, by the time the agreement was to take effect on 1 May 1923, most of the pre-war Greek population of Aegean Turkey had already fled. The exchange involved

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11594-414: The Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations at the Lausanne Conference of January 30, 1923, was based on ethnic identity. The population exchange made it legally possible for both Turkey and Greece to cleanse their ethnic minorities in the formation of the nation-state . Nonetheless, religion was utilized as a legitimizing factor or a "safe criterion" in marking ethnic groups as Turkish or as Greek in

11781-409: The First World War, Nansen had also created a new travel document for displaced persons of the World War in the process. He was chosen to be in charge of the peaceful resolution of the Greek-Turkish war of 1919–22. Although a compulsory exchange on this scale had never been attempted in modern history, Balkan precedents, such as the Greco-Bulgarian population exchange of 1919, were available. Because of

11968-408: The Hamidiye regiments in reserve. CUP leaders feared that these reforms, which were never implemented, could lead to partition and cited them as a reason for the elimination of the Armenian population in 1915. The 1912 First Balkan War resulted in the loss of almost all of the empire's European territory and the mass expulsion of Muslims from the Balkans. Ottoman Muslim society was incensed by

12155-450: The Jews of Thessaloniki became Zionists and immigrated to the Palestine Mandate in the interwar period . Because the refugees tended to vote for the Venizelist Liberals, the Jews and remaining Muslims in Thrace and Macedonia tended to vote for the anti-Venizelist parties. A group of refugee merchants in Thessaloniki founded the republican and anti-Semitic EEE ( Ethniki Enosis Ellados - National Union of Greece ) party in 1927 to press for

12342-439: The October 1918 Armistice of Mudros . From 1918 to 1920, Armenian militants committed revenge killings of thousands of Muslims, which have been cited as a retroactive excuse for genocide. In 1918, at least 200,000 people in Armenia, mostly refugees, died from starvation or disease, in part due to a Turkish blockade of food supplies and the deliberate destruction of crops in eastern Armenia by Turkish troops, both before and after

12529-415: The Ottoman Empire during the Second Balkan War in mid-1913, there was a campaign of looting and intimidation against Greeks and Armenians, forcing many to emigrate. Around 150,000 Greek Orthodox from the Aegean coast were forcibly deported in May and June 1914 by Muslim bandits , who were secretly backed by the CUP and sometimes joined by the regular army . Historian Matthias Bjørnlund states that

12716-512: The Ottoman Empire, of which 2,084 were in the Armenian highlands adjacent to the Russian border. Armenians were a minority in most places where they lived, alongside Turkish and Kurdish Muslim and Greek Orthodox Christian neighbors. According to the Patriarchate's figure, 215,131 Armenians lived in urban areas, especially Constantinople , Smyrna , and Eastern Thrace . Although most Ottoman Armenians were peasant farmers, they were overrepresented in commerce. As middleman minorities , despite

12903-489: The Ottoman armies for the invasion of Russian territory, and tried to encircle the Russian Caucasus Army at the Battle of Sarikamish , fought from December 1914 to January 1915. Unprepared for the harsh winter conditions, his forces were routed, losing more than 60,000 men. The retreating Ottoman army destroyed dozens of Ottoman Armenian villages in Bitlis vilayet, massacring their inhabitants. Enver publicly blamed his defeat on Armenians who he claimed had actively sided with

13090-414: The Ottoman economy; Muslims were disadvantaged by the deportation of skilled professionals and entire districts fell into famine following their farmers' deportation. The Ottoman and Turkish governments passed a series of Abandoned Properties Laws to manage and redistribute property confiscated from Armenians. Although the laws maintained that the state was simply administering the properties on behalf of

13277-411: The Qizilbash continued until at least the end of the 16th century. Selim I (d. 1520) ordered merchants, artisans, and scholars transported to Istanbul from Tabriz and Cairo . The state mandated Muslim immigration to Rhodes and Cyprus following their conquests in 1522 and 1571, respectively, and resettled Greek Cypriots on the Anatolia coast. Knowledge on the practice throughout the 17th through

13464-581: The Republicans. In the elections of the 1920s most of the newcomers supported Eleftherios Venizelos . In December 1916, during the Noemvriana , refugees from an earlier wave of persecution in the Ottoman Empire had been attacked by royalist troops as Venizelists , which contributed to the perception in the 1920s that the Venizelist side of the National Schism was much friendlier to refugees from Anatolia than

13651-475: The Russians, a theory that became a consensus among CUP leaders. Reports of local incidents such as weapons caches, severed telegraph lines, and occasional killings confirmed preexisting beliefs about Armenian treachery and fueled paranoia among CUP leaders that a coordinated Armenian conspiracy was plotting against the empire. Discounting contrary reports that most Armenians were loyal, the CUP leaders decided that

13838-505: The Special Organization, and those farther away also involved local militias, bandits, gendarmes, or Kurdish tribes depending on the area. Within the area controlled by the Third Army , which held eastern Anatolia, the army was only involved in genocidal atrocities in the vilayets of Van, Erzerum, and Bitlis. Many perpetrators came from the Caucasus ( Chechens and Circassians), who identified

14025-403: The Turkish government by declaring them "abandoned" and therefore state owned. Properties were confiscated arbitrarily by labeling the former owners as "fugitives" under the court of law. Additionally, real property of many Greeks was declared "unclaimed" and ownership was subsequently assumed by the state. Consequently, the greater part of the Greeks' real property was sold at nominal value by

14212-506: The Turkish government. Sub-committees that operated under the framework of the Committee for Abandoned properties had undertaken the verification of persons to be exchanged in order to continue the task of selling abandoned property. The Varlık Vergisi capital gains tax imposed in 1942 on wealthy non-Muslims in Turkey, also served to reduce the economic potential of ethnic Greek business people in Turkey. Furthermore, violent incidents such as

14399-436: The Turks is of displacing people to the interior without taking measures for their survival by exposing them to death, hunger, and illness. The abandoned homes are then looted and burnt or destroyed. Whatever was done to the Armenians is being repeated with the Greeks. At the end of World War I one of the Ottomans' foremost generals, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk , continued the fight against the attempted Allied occupation of Turkey in

14586-478: The U.S. Congress, which sharply limited the number of immigrants the United States was willing to take annually, which removed one of the traditional "safety valves" that Greece had in periods of high unemployment. In the 1920s, the refugees, most of whom went to Greek Macedonia, were known for their staunch loyalty to Venizelism . According to the 1928 census 45% of the population in Macedonia were refugees, while

14773-408: The absent Armenians, there was no provision to return them to the owners—it was presumed that they had ceased to exist. Historians Taner Akçam and Ümit Kurt argue that "The Republic of Turkey and its legal system were built, in a sense, on the seizure of Armenian cultural, social, and economic wealth, and on the removal of the Armenian presence." The proceeds from the sale of confiscated property

14960-581: The age range of conscription. Unlike the earlier massacres of Ottoman Armenians, in 1915 Armenians were not usually killed in their villages, to avoid destruction of property or unauthorized looting. Instead, the men were usually separated from the rest of the deportees during the first few days and executed. Few resisted, believing it would put their families in greater danger. Boys above the age of twelve (sometimes fifteen) were treated as adult men. Execution sites were chosen for proximity to major roads and for rugged terrain, lakes, wells, or cisterns to facilitate

15147-531: The area around Konya in central Anatolia. In late March or early April, the CUP Central Committee decided on the large-scale removal of Armenians from areas near the front lines. During the night of 23–24 April 1915 hundreds of Armenian political activists, intellectuals, and community leaders were rounded up in Constantinople and across the empire . This order from Talaat, intended to eliminate

15334-461: The armistice. Armenians organized a coordinated effort known as vorpahavak ( lit.   ' the gathering of orphans ' ) that reclaimed thousands of kidnapped and Islamized Armenian women and children. Armenian leaders abandoned traditional patrilineality to classify children born to Armenian women and their Muslim captors as Armenian. An orphanage in Alexandropol held 25,000 orphans,

15521-629: The army , but many soldiers of all ethnicities and religions deserted due to difficult conditions and concern for their families. At least 10 percent of Ottoman Armenians were mobilized, leaving their communities bereft of fighting-age men and therefore largely unable to organize armed resistance to deportation in 1915. During the Ottoman invasion of Russian and Persian territory , the Special Organization massacred local Armenians and Assyrian/Syriac Christians . Beginning in November 1914, provincial governors of Van, Bitlis, and Erzerum sent many telegrams to

15708-538: The atrocities committed against Balkan Muslims, intensifying anti-Christian sentiment and leading to a desire for revenge. Blame for the loss was assigned to all Christians, including the Ottoman Armenians, many of whom had fought on the Ottoman side. The Balkan Wars put an end to the Ottomanist movement for pluralism and coexistence; instead, the CUP turned to an increasingly radical Turkish nationalism to preserve

15895-415: The autumn of 1922, around 900,000 Greeks arrived in Greece. According to Fridtjof Nansen , before the final stage in 1922, of the 900,000 Greek refugees , a third were from Eastern Thrace , with the other two thirds being from Asia Minor . The estimate for the Greeks living within the present day borders of Turkey in 1914 could be as high as 2.130 million, a figure higher than the 1.8 million Greeks in

16082-512: The beginning of 1916 some 500,000 deportees were alive in Syria and Mesopotamia. Afraid that surviving Armenians might return home after the war, Talaat Pasha ordered a second wave of massacres in February 1916. Another wave of deportations targeted Armenians remaining in Anatolia. More than 200,000 Armenians were killed between March and October 1916, often in remote areas near Deir ez-Zor and on parts of

16269-667: The camps to buy them from their parents. In the western Levant , governed by the Ottoman Fourth Army under Djemal Pasha, there were no concentration camps or large-scale massacres, rather Armenians were resettled and recruited to work for the war effort. They had to convert to Islam or face deportation to another area. The ability of the Armenians to adapt and survive was greater than the perpetrators expected. A loosely organized, Armenian-led resistance network based in Aleppo succeeded in helping many deportees, saving Armenian lives. At

16456-588: The central government pressing for more severe measures against the Armenians, both regionally and throughout the empire. These requests were endorsed by the central government already before 1915. Armenian civil servants were dismissed from their posts in late 1914 and early 1915. In February 1915, the CUP leaders decided to disarm Armenians serving in the army and transfer them to labor battalions . The Armenian soldiers in labor battalions were systematically executed, although many skilled workers were spared until 1916. Minister of War Enver Pasha took over command of

16643-407: The cities were seen by the authorities as centers of poverty and crime that might also become centers of social unrest. About 50% of the refugees were settled in urban areas. Regardless of whether they settled in urban or rural areas, the vast majority of the refugees arrived in Greece impoverished and often sickly, placing enormous demands on the Greek health care system. Tensions between locals and

16830-429: The concealment or disposal of corpses. The convoys would stop at a nearby transit camp, where the escorts would demand a ransom from the Armenians. Those unable to pay were murdered. Units of the Special Organization, often wearing gendarme uniforms, were stationed at the killing sites; escorting gendarmes often did not participate in killing. At least 150,000 Armenians passed through Erzindjan from June 1915, where

17017-715: The demographics of Anatolia. Armenian homes, businesses, and land were preferentially allocated to Muslims from outside the empire, nomads, and the estimated 800,000 (largely Kurdish) Ottoman subjects displaced because of the war with Russia. Resettled Muslims were spread out (typically limited to 10 percent in any area) among larger Turkish populations so that they would lose their distinctive characteristics, such as non-Turkish languages or nomadism. These migrants were exposed to harsh conditions and, in some cases, violence or restriction from leaving their new villages. The ethnic cleansing of Anatolia—the Armenian genocide, Assyrian genocide , and expulsion of Greeks after World War I—paved

17204-519: The departed Greek populations have abandoned. The departure from Greece of its Muslim citizens would create the possibility of rendering self-supporting a great proportion of the refugees now concentrated in the towns and in different parts of Greece". Nansen recognized that the difficulties were truly "immense", acknowledging that the population-exchange would require "the displacement of populations of many more than 1,000,000 people". He advocated: "uprooting these people from their homes, transferring them to

17391-531: The departure of the independent and strong economic elites, i.e. the Greek Orthodox populations, left the dominant state elites unchallenged. In fact, Caglar Keyder noted that "what this drastic measure [Greek-Turkish population exchange] indicates is that during the war years Turkey lost ... [around 90 percent of the pre-war] commercial class, such that when the Republic was formed, the bureaucracy found itself unchallenged". The emerging business groups that supported

17578-549: The deportation of Armenians was a legitimate action that cannot be described as genocide . As of 2023, 34 countries have recognized the events as genocide , concurring with the academic consensus. The presence of Armenians in Anatolia has been documented since the sixth century BCE , about 1,500 years before the arrival of Turkmens under the Seljuk dynasty . The Kingdom of Armenia adopted Christianity as its national religion in

17765-551: The deportation of all Armenians throughout the empire, even Adrianople , 2,000 kilometers (1,200 mi) from the Russian front. Following the elimination of the Armenian population in eastern Anatolia, in August 1915, the Armenians of western Anatolia and European Turkey were targeted for deportation. Some areas with a very low Armenian population and some cities, including Constantinople, were partially spared. Overall, national, regional, and local levels of governance cooperated with

17952-538: The deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to robbery, rape , and massacres. In the Syrian Desert, the survivors were dispersed into concentration camps . In 1916, another wave of massacres was ordered, leaving about 200,000 deportees alive by the end of the year. Around 100,000 to 200,000 Armenian women and children were forcibly converted to Islam and integrated into Muslim households. Massacres and ethnic cleansing of Armenian survivors continued through

18139-416: The deportees, although some circumvented these prohibitions. Survivors testified that some Armenians refused aid as they believed it would only prolong their suffering. The guards raped female prisoners and also allowed Bedouins to raid the camps at night for looting and rape; some women were forced into marriage. Thousands of Armenian children were sold to childless Turks, Arabs, and Jews, who would come to

18326-476: The diet of Armenian refugees, to raise money for humanitarian efforts. Between 1915 and 1930, Near East Relief raised $ 110 million ($ 2 billion adjusted for inflation) for refugees from the Ottoman Empire. Intentional, state-sponsored killing of Armenians mostly ceased by the end of January 1917, although sporadic massacres and starvation continued. Both contemporaries and later historians have estimated that around 1 million Armenians died during

18513-412: The eastern provinces after 1908 and the CUP took steps to reform the local gendarmerie , although tensions remained high. Despite an agreement to reverse the land usurpation of the previous decades in the 1910 Salonica Accord between the ARF and the CUP, the latter made no efforts to carry this out. In early 1909 an unsuccessful countercoup was launched by conservatives and some liberals who opposed

18700-620: The emergence of the Armenian question in international diplomacy as Armenians were for the first time used by the Great Powers to interfere in Ottoman politics. Although Armenians had been called the "loyal millet" in contrast to Greeks and others who had previously challenged Ottoman rule, the authorities began to perceive Armenians as a threat after 1878. In 1891, Abdul Hamid created the Hamidiye regiments from Kurdish tribes, allowing them to act with impunity against Armenians. From 1895 to 1896

18887-461: The empire Armenian population did not exceed 5 to 10 percent (a goal that could not be accomplished without mass extermination). Talat Pasha explained, "They can live in the desert but nowhere else." In May 1915, Mehmed Talaat Pasha requested that the cabinet and Grand Vizier Said Halim Pasha legalize a measure for the deportation of Armenians to other places due to what Talaat Pasha called "the Armenian riots and massacres, which had arisen in

19074-540: The empire and found only limited support from Ottoman Armenians. Russia's decisive victory in the 1877–1878 war forced the Ottoman Empire to cede parts of eastern Anatolia, the Balkans , and Cyprus . Under international pressure at the 1878 Congress of Berlin , the Ottoman government agreed to carry out reforms and guarantee the physical safety of its Armenian subjects, but there was no enforcement mechanism; conditions continued to worsen. The Congress of Berlin marked

19261-437: The empire as the Balkans had. In January 1913, the CUP launched another coup , installed a one-party state , and strictly repressed all real or perceived internal enemies. After the coup, the CUP shifted the demography of border areas by resettling Balkan Muslim refugees while coercing Christians to emigrate; immigrants were promised property that had belonged to Christians. When parts of Eastern Thrace were reoccupied by

19448-832: The empire officially entered the war. On 29 October 1914, the empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers by launching a surprise attack on Russian ports in the Black Sea . Many Russian Armenians were enthusiastic about the war, but Ottoman Armenians were more ambivalent, afraid that supporting Russia would bring retaliation. Organization of Armenian volunteer units by Russian Armenians, later joined by some Ottoman Armenian deserters, further increased Ottoman suspicions against their Armenian population. Wartime requisitions were often corrupt and arbitrary, and disproportionately targeted Greeks and Armenians. Armenian leaders urged young men to accept conscription into

19635-511: The empire saw widespread massacres ; at least 100,000 Armenians were killed primarily by Ottoman soldiers and mobs let loose by the authorities. Many Armenian villages were forcibly converted to Islam. The Ottoman state bore ultimate responsibility for the killings, whose purpose was violently restoring the previous social order in which Christians would unquestioningly accept Muslim supremacy, and forcing Armenians to emigrate, thereby decreasing their numbers. Abdul Hamid's despotism prompted

19822-419: The empire's eastern provinces. Ottoman records show the government aimed to reduce Armenians to no more than five percent of the local population in the sources of deportation and ten percent in the destination areas. This goal could not be accomplished without mass murder. The deportation of Armenians and resettlement of Muslims in their lands was part of a broader project intended to permanently restructure

20009-603: The empire, a belief that was crucial to deciding on genocide in early 1915. At the same time, the war provided an opportunity to enact what Talaat called the "definitive solution to the Armenian Question". The CUP wrongly believed that the Russian Empire sought to annex eastern Anatolia, and ordered the genocide in large part to prevent this eventuality. The genocide was intended to permanently eliminate any possibility that Armenians could achieve autonomy or independence in

20196-485: The empire. CUP leaders such as Talaat and Enver Pasha came to blame non-Muslim population concentrations in strategic areas for many of the empire's problems, concluding by mid-1914 that they were internal tumors to be excised. Of these, Ottoman Armenians were considered the most dangerous, because CUP leaders feared that their homeland in Anatolia—claimed as the last refuge of the Turkish nation—would break away from

20383-477: The end of 1922, the vast majority of native Pontian Greeks had already fled Turkey due to the genocide against them (1914–1922), and the Ionian Greek Ottoman citizens had also fled due to the defeat of the Greek army in the later Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) , which had led to reprisal killings. The most common estimates for Ottoman Greeks killed from 1914 to 1923 range from 300,000 to 900,000. For

20570-408: The expansionist reign of Mehmet I forced migration was used as a method of strengthening border regions and exerting influence in newly conquered areas. With Mehmet's takeover of Constantinople in 1453. Mehmet also brought in a large population from previous outlying Ottoman cities. In 1356 Sultan Orhan displaced a large group of "dark skinned Arab nomadic households" or "kara göçer arap evleri" to

20757-595: The figure was 35% in Greek Thrace, 19% in Athens , and 18% in the islands of the Aegean Sea; overall, the census showed that 1,221,849 people or 20% of the Greek population were refugees. The majority of the refugees who settled in cities like Thessaloniki and Athens were deliberately placed by the authorities in shantytowns on the outskirts of the cities in order to subject them to police control. The refugee communities in

20944-402: The fittest , not eldest, son." During their father's lifetime, all of the adult sons of the reigning sultan would hold provincial governorships. Accompanied and mentored by their mothers, they would gather supporters while ostensibly following a Ghazw ethos. Upon the death of their father, the sons would fight among themselves until one emerged triumphant. How remote a province the son governed

21131-593: The formation of an opposition movement, the Young Turks , which sought to overthrow him and restore the 1876 Constitution of the Ottoman Empire , which he had suspended in 1877. One faction of the Young Turks was the secret and revolutionary Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), based in Salonica , from which the charismatic conspirator Mehmed Talaat (later Talaat Pasha ) emerged as a leading member. Although skeptical of

21318-558: The genocide , with figures ranging from 600,000 to 1.5 million deaths. Between 800,000 and 1.2 million Armenians were deported, and contemporaries estimated that by late 1916 only 200,000 were still alive. As the British Army advanced in 1917 and 1918 northwards through the Levant , they liberated around 100,000 to 150,000 Armenians working for the Ottoman military under abysmal conditions, not including those held by Arab tribes. As

21505-710: The genocide and ended up mostly in Soviet Armenia . An estimated 200,000 Armenian refugees settled in the Middle East, forming a new wave of the Armenian diaspora . In the Republic of Turkey, about 100,000 Armenians lived in Constantinople and another 200,000 lived in the provinces, largely women and children who had been forcibly converted. Though Armenians in Constantinople faced discrimination, they were allowed to maintain their cultural identity, unlike those elsewhere in Turkey who continued to face forced Islamization and kidnapping of girls after 1923. Between 1922 and 1929,

21692-478: The genocide endured exploitation, hard labor without pay, forced conversion to Islam, and physical and sexual abuse . Armenian women captured during the journey ended up in Turkish or Kurdish households; those who were Islamized during the second phase of the genocide found themselves in an Arab or Bedouin environment. The rape , sexual abuse, and prostitution of Armenian women were all very common. Although Armenian women tried to avoid sexual violence, suicide

21879-507: The genocide of Syriacs, Assyrian, Greeks, Armenians, and Chaldeans, and the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. The Greek–Turkish population exchange came out of the Turkish and Greek militaries' treatment of the Christian minorities and Muslim majorities, respectively, in Asia Minor during the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) that followed the Allied Powers' authorization of

22066-423: The government through its efforts is selling their goods ... If we are a constitutional regime functioning in accordance with constitutional law we can't do this. This is atrocious. Grab my arm, eject me from my village, then sell my goods and properties, such a thing can never be permissible. Neither the conscience of the Ottomans nor the law can allow it. On 13 September 1915, the Ottoman parliament also passed

22253-606: The immigrants to shift their allegiance to the Communist Party and contributed to its increasing strength. The impoverished slum districts of Thessaloniki where the refugees were concentrated became strongholds of the Greek Communist Party in the Great Depression together with the rural areas of Macedonia where tobacco farming was the main industry. In May 1936, a strike of the tobacco farmers in Macedonia organized by

22440-490: The indigenous Orthodox Christian peoples of Turkey (the Rûm " Roman/Byzantine " millet ), including even Armenian- and Turkish-speaking Orthodox groups, and on the other side most of the native Muslims of Greece, including even Greek-speaking Muslim citizens, such as Vallahades and Cretan Turks , but also Muslim Roma groups, such as Sepečides . Each group comprised native peoples, citizens, and in cases even veterans of

22627-451: The influx of immigrants of the population exchange. As a result, it was quite difficult to settle refugees in Anatolia, since many of these homes had been occupied by people displaced by war before the government could seize them. The more than 1,250,000 refugees who left Turkey for Greece after the war in 1922, through different mechanisms, contributed to the unification of elites under authoritarian regimes in Turkey and Greece. In Turkey,

22814-419: The infusion of these refugees into Turkey would dramatically alter Anatolian society. By 1927, Turkish officials had settled 32,315 individuals from Greece in the province of Bursa alone. According to some sources, the population exchange, albeit messy and dangerous for many, was executed fairly quickly by respected supervisors. If the goal of the exchange was to achieve ethnic-national homogeneity, then this

23001-592: The international community, saw the resulting ethnic homogenization of their respective states as positive and stabilizing since it helped strengthen the nation-state natures of these two states. Nevertheless, the deportations brought significant challenges: social, such as forcibly being removed from one's place of living, and more practical such as abandoning a well-developed family business. Countries also faced other practical challenges: for example, even decades after, one could notice certain hastily developed parts of Athens, residential areas that had been quickly erected on

23188-468: The largest number in the world. In 1920, the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople reported it was caring for 100,000 orphans, estimating that another 100,000 remained captive. Following the armistice, Allied governments championed the prosecution of Armenian genocide perpetrators. Grand Vizier Damat Ferid Pasha publicly recognized that 800,000 Ottoman citizens of Armenian origin had died as

23375-574: The last stages of the war cemented the hatred of the refugees towards the monarchy. Aristeidis Stergiadis , the Greek High Commissioner in Smyrna remarked in August 1922 as the Turkish Army advanced upon the city: "Better that they stay here and be slain by Kemal [Ataturk], because if they go to Athens they will overthrow everything". However, increasing grievances of the refugees caused some of

23562-466: The last to the CUP). Embezzling beyond that was punished. Ottoman politicians and officials who opposed the genocide were dismissed or assassinated. The government decreed that any Muslim who harbored an Armenian against the will of the authorities would be executed. Although the majority of able-bodied Armenian men had been conscripted into the army, others deserted, paid the exemption tax, or fell outside

23749-529: The laws known as the Temporary Law of Deportation (" Tehjir Law "). These laws gave the Ottoman government and military authorization to deport anyone it "sensed" as a threat to national security. The "Tehjir Law" brought with it some measures regarding the property of the deportees, but during September a new law was put forth. According to the new "Abandoned Properties" Law (Law Concerning Property, Dept's and Assets Left Behind Deported Persons, also referred as

23936-414: The lines drawn by the millet system of the Ottoman Empire. In the absence of rigid national definitions, there was no readily available criteria to yield to an official ordering of identities after centuries long coexistence in a non-national order. The Treaty of Sèvres imposed harsh terms upon Turkey and placed most of Anatolia under de facto Allied and Greek control. Sultan Mehmet VI 's acceptance of

24123-644: The logistics of the Ottoman Army. By late 1915, the CUP had extinguished Armenian existence from eastern Anatolia. On 23 May 1915, Talaat ordered the deportation of all Armenians in Van, Bitlis, and Erzerum. To grant a cover of legality to the deportation, already well underway in the eastern provinces and Cilicia, the Council of Ministers approved the Temporary Law of Deportation , which allowed authorities to deport anyone deemed suspect. On 21 June, Talaat ordered

24310-450: The massacres went unpunished, the ARF continued to hope that reforms to improve security and restore lands were forthcoming, until late 1912, when they broke with the CUP and appealed to the European powers. On 8 February 1914, the CUP reluctantly agreed to reforms brokered by Germany that provided for the appointment of two European inspectors for the entire Ottoman east and putting

24497-443: The memories that ought to have been recorded without delay. Eighty years have passed, and the memories are warring with another, ripe for distortion. But the core of every migrant's statement remains the same. Birth in one place, growing old in another place. And feeling a stranger in the two places". The Turks and other Muslims of Western Thrace were exempted from this transfer as were the Greeks of Constantinople ( Istanbul ) and

24684-565: The men were killed immediately, many women and children were kidnapped by local Kurds, and others marched away to be killed later. By the end of June, there were only a dozen Armenians in the vilayet. The first deportations of Armenians were proposed by Djemal Pasha , the commander of the Fourth Army , in February 1915 and targeted Armenians in Cilicia (specifically Alexandretta , Dörtyol , Adana, Hadjin , Zeytun , and Sis ) who were relocated to

24871-488: The mid-nineteenth century, Armenians faced large-scale land usurpation as a consequence of the sedentarization of Kurdish tribes and the arrival of Muslim refugees and immigrants (mainly Circassians ) following the Russo-Circassian War . In 1876, when Sultan Abdul Hamid II came to power, the state began to confiscate Armenian-owned land in the eastern provinces and give it to Muslim immigrants as part of

25058-514: The middle class. Confiscation of Armenian assets continued into the second half of the twentieth century, and in 2006 the National Security Council ruled that property records from 1915 must be kept closed to protect national security. Outside Istanbul, the traces of Armenian existence in Turkey, including churches and monasteries, libraries, khachkars , and animal and place names , have been systematically erased, beginning during

25245-517: The new capital from across the empire. To this day, the huge Belgrade Forest, to the north of Istanbul and named after re-settled people from Belgrade , is a reminder of those times. But, the Belgrade Gate is on the east side of the city, on the way to Serbia . Beginning in the reign of Bayezid II (d. 1512), the Ottoman state used to manage the difficulty with the heterodox Qizilbash ( kizilbas ) movement in eastern Anatolia. Forced relocation of

25432-467: The newly subjugated region of Rumeli at the request of his son Suleiman Pasha , in order to better secure a fortress captured in Thrace so he could move forward. Movements like this where commonplace through the expansion of the empire. In the early period (from the 14th through the late 16th centuries), the Ottomans practiced open succession, or what historian Donald Quataert has described as " survival of

25619-466: The number of available acres. When the Commission arrived in Greece, the Greek government had already settled provisionally 72,581 farming families, almost entirely in Macedonia , where the houses abandoned by the exchanged Muslims and the fertility of the land made their establishment practicable and auspicious. In Turkey, the property abandoned by the Greeks was often looted by arriving immigrants before

25806-537: The other hand, the Greek populations that left were skilled workers who engaged in transnational trade and business, as per previous capitulations policies of the Ottoman Empire. While current scholarship defines the Greek-Turkish population exchange in terms of religious identity, the population exchange was much more complex than this. Indeed, the population exchange, embodied in the Convention Concerning

25993-422: The perceived success of the Greek deportations allowed CUP leaders to envision even more radical policies "as yet another extension of a policy of social engineering through Turkification ". A few days after the outbreak of World War I, the CUP concluded an alliance with Germany on 2 August 1914. The same month, CUP representatives went to an ARF conference demanding that, in the event of war with Russia ,

26180-453: The population exchange as a way to formalize and make permanent the flight of its native Greek Orthodox peoples while initiating a new exodus of a smaller number (400,000) of Muslims from Greece as a way to provide settlers for the newly depopulated Orthodox villages of Turkey; Greece meanwhile saw it as a way to provide propertyless Greek Orthodox refugees from Turkey with lands of expelled Muslims. Norman M. Naimark claimed that this treaty

26367-473: The population exchange. As a result, the Greek-Turkish population exchange did exchange the Greek Orthodox population of Anatolia, Turkey and the Muslim population of Greece. However, due to the heterogeneous nature of these former Ottoman lands, many other ethnic groups posed social and legal challenges to the terms of the agreement for years after its signing. Among these were the Protestant and Catholic Greeks,

26554-403: The populations, the possessions left behind by the Greek elite of the economic classes in Anatolia was greater than the possessions of the Muslim farmers in Greece. The Refugee Commission had no useful plan to follow to resettle the refugees. Having arrived in Greece for the purpose of settling the refugees on land, the commission had no statistical data either about the number of the refugees or

26741-446: The possibility of provocation coming from outside'. This could be achieved most effectively with an exchange, and 'the best guarantees for the security and development of the minorities remaining' after the exchange 'would be those supplied both by the laws of the country and by the liberal policy of Turkey with regard to all communities whose members have not deviated from their duty as Turkish citizens'. An exchange would also be useful as

26928-817: The process also required the eradication of Armenian names , language , and culture , and for women, immediate marriage to a Muslim. Although Islamization was the most feasible opportunity for survival, it also transgressed Armenian moral and social norms. The CUP allowed Armenian women to marry into Muslim households, as these women would lose their Armenian identity. Young women and girls were often appropriated as house servants or sex slaves . Some boys were abducted to work as forced laborers for Muslim individuals. Some children were forcibly seized, while others were sold or given up by their parents to save their lives. Special state-run orphanages were also set up with strict procedures intending to deprive their charges of an Armenian identity. Most Armenian children who survived

27115-588: The refugees for jobs sometimes turned violent, and in 1924, the Interior Minister, General Georgios Kondylis , used a force of refugees as strike-breakers. In rural areas, there were demands that the land that once belonged to the Muslims that had been expelled should go to veterans instead of the refugees. Demagogic politicians quite consciously stoked tensions, portraying refugees as a parasitical class who by their very existence were overwhelming public services, as

27302-425: The refugees would be provided with new possessions totaling the ones they had left behind. Greece and Turkey would calculate the total value of a refugee's belongings and the country with a surplus would pay the difference to the other country. All possessions left in Greece belonged to the Greek state and all the possessions left in Turkey belonged to the Turkish state. Because of the difference in nature and numbers of

27489-401: The regime insisted on their destruction wherever their numbers exceeded the five to ten percent threshold, or there was a risk of them being able to preserve their nationality and culture. Talaat Pasha personally authorized conversion of Armenians and carefully tracked the loyalty of converted Armenians until the end of the war. Although the first and most important step was conversion to Islam,

27676-420: The reign of Mehmet I (d. 1421) shuttled tribal Turkmen and Tatar groups from the state's Asiatic territories to the Balkans (Rumeli). Many of these groups were supported as paramilitary forces along the frontier with Christian Europe. Simultaneously, Christian communities were transported from newly conquered lands in the Balkans into Thrace and Anatolia . While these general flows back and forth across

27863-528: The remaining Armenians by creating an independent state for them ( Wilsonian Armenia ) within the former Ottoman realm. The Turkish Nationalists' reaction to these events led directly to the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) and the continuation of the Armenian genocide and Greek genocide . By the time of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's capture of Smyrna in September 1922, over a million Greek orthodox Ottoman subjects had fled their homes in Turkey. A formal peace agreement

28050-499: The remaining Greeks of central Anatolia (both Greek- and Turkish-speaking), Pontus and the Caucasus (Kars region). Thus, of the 1,200,000 only about 189,916 still remained in Turkey by that time. In Greece, the population exchange was considered part of the events called the Asia Minor Catastrophe ( Greek : Μικρασιατική καταστροφή ). Significant refugee displacement and population movements had already occurred following

28237-719: The removal of the Jews from the city, whom they saw as economic competitors. However, the EEE never became a major party, though its members did collaborate with the Germans in World War II, serving in the Security Battalions . The heterogeneous nature of the groups under the nation-state of Greece and Turkey is not reflected in the establishment of criteria formed in the Lausanne negotiations. This

28424-456: The rest Greeks, 70% in Constantinople; and by 1927 to 350,000, mostly in Istanbul. In modern times the percentage of Christians in Turkey has declined from 20 to 25 percent in 1914 to 3–5.5 percent in 1927, to 0.3–0.4% today roughly translating to 200,000–320,000 devotees. This was due to events that had a significant impact on the country's demographic structure, such as the First World War ,

28611-608: The roads and their bodies were buried hastily or, more often, simply left beside the roads. The Ottoman government ordered the corpses to be cleared as soon as possible to prevent both photographic documentation and disease epidemics, but these orders were not uniformly followed. Women and children, who made up the great majority of deportees, were usually not executed immediately, but subjected to hard marches through mountainous terrain without food and water. Those who could not keep up were left to die or shot. During 1915, some were forced to walk as far as 1,000 kilometers (620 mi) in

28798-400: The royalist side. For their political stance and their "Anatolian customs" (cuisine, music, etc.), the refugees often faced discrimination by part of the local Greek population. The fact that the refugees spoke dialects of Greek that sounded exotic and strange in Greece marked them out, and they were often seen as rivals by the locals for land and jobs. The arrival of so many people in so short

28985-512: The settlements plundered and in ruins . Meanwhile, after the Balkan Wars , Greece had almost doubled its territory, and the population of the state had risen from approximately 3.7 million to 4.8 million. With this newly annexed population, the proportion of non-Greek minority groups in Greece rose to 13%, and following the end of the First World War , it had increased to 20%. Most of the ethnic populations in these annexed territories were Muslim , but were not necessarily Turkish in ethnicity. This

29172-466: The state which expelled them, and none had representation in the state purporting to speak for them in the exchange treaty. Some scholars have criticized the exchange, describing it as a legalized form of mutual ethnic cleansing , while others have defended it, stating that despite its negative aspects, the exchange had an overall positive outcome since it successfully prevented another potential genocide of Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey . By

29359-512: The status of Ottoman subjects regardless of religion. The reforms to equalize the status of non-Muslims were strongly opposed by Islamic clergy and Muslims in general, and remained mostly theoretical. Because of the abolition of the Kurdish emirates in the mid-nineteenth century, the Ottoman government began to directly tax Armenian peasants who had previously paid taxes only to Kurdish landlords. The latter continued to exact levies illegally. From

29546-436: The summer heat. Some deportees from western Anatolia were allowed to travel by rail . There was a distinction between the convoys from eastern Anatolia, which were eliminated almost in their entirety, and those from farther west, which made up most of those surviving to reach Syria. For example, around 99 percent of Armenians deported from Erzerum did not reach their destination. The Islamization of Armenians, carried out as

29733-450: The survivors sent to Deir ez-Zor. In general, Armenians were denied food and water during and after their forced march to the Syrian desert; many died of starvation, exhaustion, or disease, especially dysentery , typhus , and pneumonia . Some local officials gave Armenians food; others took bribes to provide food and water. Aid organizations were officially barred from providing food to

29920-634: The time), 550,000 Pontic Greeks , 900,000 Anatolian Greeks and 60,000 Cappadocian Greeks . Arrivals in Greece from the exchange numbered 1,310,000 according to the map (in this article) with figures below: 260,000 from Eastern Thrace (100,000 had already left between 1912 and 1914 after the Balkan Wars), 20,000 from the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara , 650,000 from Anatolia, 60,000 from Cappadocia , 280,000 Pontic Greeks, 40,000 left Constantinople (the Greeks there were permitted to stay, but those who had fled during

30107-468: The total number reaching 648,000. Historian Constantine G. Hatzidimitriou writes that "loss of life among Anatolian Greeks during the WWI period and its aftermath was approximately 735,370". The pre-war Greek population may have been closer to 2.4 million. The number of Armenians killed varies from a low of 300,000 to 1.5 million. The estimate for Assyrians is 275–300,000. According to some calculations, during

30294-481: The treaty angered Turkish nationalists , who established a rival government at Ankara and reorganized Turkish forces with the aim of blocking the implementation of the treaty, waging the Turkish War of Independence . By the fall of 1922, the Ankara Government had secured most of Turkey's contemporary borders and replaced the Ottoman Sultanate as the dominant governing entity in Anatolia. Following these events,

30481-465: The unanimous decision by the Greek and Turkish governments that minority protection would not suffice to ameliorate ethnic tensions after the First World War, population exchange was promoted as the only viable option. According to representatives from Ankara , the "amelioration of the lot of the minorities in Turkey' depended 'above all on the exclusion of every kind of foreign intervention and of

30668-414: The voyage and brutal waiting for boats for transportation. The death rate during the immigration was four times higher than the birth rate. In the first years after their arrival, the Turkish immigrants from Greece were inefficient in economic production, having only brought with them agricultural skills in tobacco production. This created considerable economic loss in Anatolia for the new Turkish Republic. On

30855-799: The war and continuing for decades afterward. The first arrivals in mid-1915 were accommodated in Aleppo . From mid-November, the convoys were denied access to the city and redirected along the Baghdad Railway or the Euphrates towards Mosul . The first transit camp was established at Sibil, east of Aleppo; one convoy would arrive each day while another would depart for Meskene or Deir ez-Zor . Dozens of concentration camps were set up in Syria and Upper Mesopotamia . By October 1915, some 870,000 deportees had reached Syria and Upper Mesopotamia. Most were repeatedly transferred between camps, being held in each camp for

31042-539: The war of independence was "intended to complete the genocide by finally eradicating Armenian, Greek, and Syriac survivors". In 1920 Kâzım Karabekir , a Turkish general, invaded Armenia with orders "to eliminate Armenia physically and politically". Nearly 100,000 Armenians were massacred in Transcaucasia by the Turkish army and another 100,000 fled from Cilicia during the French withdrawal . According to Kévorkian, only

31229-504: The war were not allowed to return). Additionally, 50,000 Greeks came from the Caucasus , 50,000 from Bulgaria and 12,000 from Crimea , almost 1.42 million from all regions. About 340,000 Greeks remained in Turkey, 220,000 of them in Istanbul in 1924. By 1924, the Christian population of Turkey proper had been reduced from 4.4 million in 1912 to 700,000 (50% of the pre-war Christians had been killed), 350,000 Armenians, 50,000 Assyrians and

31416-422: The way for the formation of an ethno-national Turkish state. In September 1918, Talaat emphasized that regardless of losing the war, he had succeeded at "transforming Turkey to a nation-state in Anatolia". Deportation amounted to a death sentence; the authorities planned for and intended the death of the deportees. Deportation was only carried out behind the front lines, where no active rebellion existed, and

31603-428: The wealth of some Armenians, their overall political power was low, making them especially vulnerable. Armenians in the eastern provinces lived in semi- feudal conditions and commonly encountered forced labor , illegal taxation , and unpunished crimes against them including robberies, murders, and sexual assaults. Beginning in 1839, the Ottoman government issued a series of reforms to centralize power and equalize

31790-480: The whole of the period between 1914 and 1922 and for the whole of Anatolia, there are academic estimates of death toll ranging from 289,000 to 750,000. The figure of 750,000 is suggested by political scientist Adam Jones . Scholar Rudolph Rummel compiled various figures from several studies to estimate lower and higher bounds for the death toll between 1914 and 1923. He estimates that 384,000 Greeks were exterminated from 1914 to 1918, and 264,000 from 1920 to 1922, with

31977-416: Was "organized and carried out by the top leaders of CUP". Eighteen perpetrators (including Talaat, Enver, and Djemal) were sentenced to death, of whom only three were ultimately executed as the remainder had fled and were tried in absentia . The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres , which awarded Armenia a large area in eastern Anatolia , eliminated the Ottoman government's purpose for holding the trials. Prosecution

32164-416: Was a military ally of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. German diplomats approved limited removals of Armenians in early 1915, and took no action against the genocide, which has been a source of controversy. Relief efforts were organized in dozens of countries to raise money for Armenian survivors. By 1925, people in 49 countries were organizing "Golden Rule Sundays" during which they consumed

32351-580: Was achieved by both Turkey and Greece. For example, in 1906, nearly 20 percent of the population of present-day Turkey was non-Muslim, but by 1927, only 2.6 percent was. The architect of the exchange was Fridtjof Nansen , commissioned by the League of Nations . As the first official high commissioner for refugees, Nansen proposed and supervised the exchange, taking into account the interests of Greece, Turkey, and West European powers. As an experienced diplomat with experience resettling Russian and other refugees after

32538-582: Was acquitted by a German jury. The CUP regrouped as the Turkish nationalist movement to fight the Turkish War of Independence , relying on the support of perpetrators of the genocide and those who had profited from it. This movement saw the return of Armenian survivors as a mortal threat to its nationalist ambitions and the interests of its supporters. The return of survivors was therefore impossible in most of Anatolia and thousands of Armenians who tried were murdered. Historian Raymond Kévorkian states that

32725-551: Was hampered by a widespread belief among Turkish Muslims that the actions against the Armenians were not punishable crimes. Increasingly, the genocide was considered necessary and justified to establish a Turkish nation-state. On 15 March 1921, Talaat was assassinated in Berlin as part of a covert operation of the ARF to kill the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide. The trial of his admitted killer, Soghomon Tehlirian , focused on Talaat's responsibility for genocide. Tehlirian

32912-462: Was implemented primarily through the mass murder of around one million Armenians during death marches to the Syrian Desert and the forced Islamization of others, primarily women and children. Before World War I, Armenians occupied a somewhat protected, but subordinate, place in Ottoman society. Large-scale massacres of Armenians had occurred in the 1890s and 1909 . The Ottoman Empire suffered

33099-424: Was intended to permanently forestall the possibility of Armenian autonomy or independence. On 24 April 1915, the Ottoman authorities arrested and deported hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and leaders from Constantinople . At the orders of Talaat Pasha , an estimated 800,000 to 1.2 million Armenians were sent on death marches to the Syrian Desert in 1915 and 1916. Driven forward by paramilitary escorts,

33286-406: Was not ethno-nationalism , but rather, a "question" that "demanded 'quick and efficient' resolution without a minimum of delay." He believed that economic component of the problem of Greek and Turkish refugees deserved the most attention: "Such an exchange will provide Turkey immediately and in the best conditions with the population necessary to continue the exploitation of the cultivated lands which

33473-413: Was of great significance. The closer the region that a particular son was in charge of the better the chances were of that son succeeding, simply because he would be told of the news of his father's death and be able to get to Constantinople first and declare himself Sultan. Thus a father could hint at whom he preferred by giving his favorite son a closer governorship. Ottoman population transfers through

33660-509: Was often the only alternative. Deportees were displayed naked in Damascus and sold as sex slaves in some areas, constituting an important source of income for accompanying gendarmes. Some were sold in Arabian slave markets to Muslim Hajj pilgrims and ended up as far away as Tunisia or Algeria . A secondary motivation for genocide was the destruction of the Armenian bourgeoisie to make room for

33847-403: Was often used to fund the deportation of Armenians and resettlement of Muslims, as well as for army, militia, and other government spending. Ultimately this formed much of the basis of the industry and economy of the post-1923 republic, endowing it with capital . The dispossession and exile of Armenian competitors enabled many lower-class Turks (i.e. peasantry, soldiers, and laborers) to rise to

34034-545: Was only possible in the absence of widespread resistance. Armenians who lived in the war zone were instead killed in massacres. Although ostensibly undertaken for security reasons, the deportation and murder of Armenians did not grant the empire any military advantage and actually undermined the Ottoman war effort. The empire faced a dilemma between its goal of eliminating Armenians and its practical need for their labor; those Armenians retained for their skills, in particular for manufacturing in war industries, were indispensable to

34221-591: Was signed with Greece after months of negotiations in Lausanne on July 24, 1923. Two weeks after the treaty, the Allied Powers turned over Istanbul to the Nationalists, marking the final departure of occupation armies from Anatolia and provoking another flight of Christian minorities to Greece. On October 29, 1923, the Grand Turkish National Assembly announced the creation of the Republic of Turkey ,

34408-404: Was significantly altered as well. Greek- and Turkish-speaking Muslim inhabitants of Crete ( Cretan Turks ) moved, principally to the Anatolian coast, but also to Syria, Lebanon and Egypt . Conversely, Greeks from Asia Minor, principally Smyrna, arrived in Crete bringing in their distinctive dialects, customs and cuisine. According to Bruce Clark , leaders of Greece and Turkey, and some circles in

34595-450: Was strongly in favour of a solution that would satisfy world opinion and ensure tranquillity in its own country", and that "[i]t was ready to accept the idea of an exchange of populations between the Greeks in Asia Minor and the Muslims in Greece". Eventually, the initial request for an exchange of population came from Eleftherios Venizelos in a letter he submitted to the League of Nations on 16 October 1922, following Greece's defeat in

34782-399: Was the last part of an ethnic cleansing campaign to create an ethnically pure homeland for the Turks. Historian Dinah Shelton similarly wrote that "the Lausanne Treaty completed the forcible transfer of the country's Greeks." This major compulsory population exchange , or agreed mutual expulsion, was based not on language or ethnicity, but upon religious identity, and involved nearly all

34969-408: Was used to communicate orders; those for the deportation of Armenians were communicated to the provincial governors through official channels, but orders of a criminal character, such as those calling for annihilation, were sent through party channels and destroyed upon receipt. Deportation convoys were mostly escorted by gendarmes or local militia. The killings near the front lines were carried out by

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