Imagined Communities in Greece and Turkey: Trauma and the Population Exchanges under Ataturk

In 1923 the Turkish government, under its new leader Kemal Ataturk, signed a renegotiated Balkan Wars treaty with the major powers of the day and Greece. This treaty provided for the forced exchange of 1.3 million Christians from Anatolia to Greece, in return for 30,000 Greek Muslims. The mass migration that ensued was a humanitarian catastrophe - of the 1.3 million Christians relocated it is estimated only 150,000 were successfully integrated into the Greek state. Furthermore, because the treaty was ethnicity-blind, tens of thousands of Muslim Greeks (ethnically and linguistically) were forced into Turkey against their will. Both the Greek and Turkish leadership saw this exchange as crucial to the state-strengthening projects both powers were engaged in after the First World War. Here, Emine Bedlek approaches this enormous shift in national thinking through literary texts - addressing the themes of loss, identity, memory and trauma which both populations experienced. The result is a new understanding of the tensions between religious and ethnic identity in modern Turkey.

Author: Emine Yesim Bedlek
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published: 01/26/2023
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.59lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.48d
ISBN13: 9780755649068
ISBN10: 0755649060
BISAC Categories:
- History | Europe | Greece (see also Ancient | Greece)
- Social Science | Emigration & Immigration
- Social Science | Human Geography

About the Author
Emine Yesim Bedlek is Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at Bingol University, Turkey.