by Benny Morris
Mersin: refugees lived in “hovels built of gunny sacks, tin cans and rubbish all
around the town and on the edge of the swamps.” Many were sick.547
A missionary described the authorities’ attitude toward the refugees as
“indifferent,” but this wasn’t quite right. Officials were interested in the refugees, to the extent that they could derive some benefit. Mersin authorities ex-
acted exorbitant fees for passports and allowed the boatmen to charge
outrageous sums for ferrying refugees to steamers.548 In Samsun Armenian
adults who had avoided military ser vice were prevented from leaving until they
paid a fee. Boatmen rifled the refugees’ belongings.549 The Turks often ex-
acted light house and sanitation taxes before allowing departure. At Mersin in
late November 1922, the Turks were charging sixty piastres per orphan for
ferrying them to the steamships.550
Refugees often lacked funds to pay passage on the outbound steamers. This,
in addition to constant arrivals from the interior, resulted in crowding on the
docks. During October 1922– March 1923, there were always more refugees
in the ports than there were berths available. As they waited, they squatted
in alleyways, empty lots, vacant buildings, and churches and other public
spaces. An American officer came away from a Samsun church with a low
opinion of every one involved: “Filth is everywhere. The refugees will do
nothing to help themselves. Women and children are sick and lie on their
packs. . . . All of it is as repulsive [a] sight as I’ve ever seen. . . . The Turks are doing nothing.”551
NER provided a mea sure of relief. In March 1923 NER managed to feed
9,000 refugees in the port of Samsun one hot meal a day. But another 4,000
received no aid. Under NER supervision, most of the Samsun refugees were
vaccinated and deloused at least once. NER paid orphans’ passage and
sometimes covered costs for other refugees. In an effort to speed the removal,
the mutesarrifs constantly pressed NER to appeal to Western governments
and prelates for ships.552
Turks and Greeks, 1919–1924
American officers on gunboats in the Black Sea often helped facilitate em-
barkations, cajoling officials or arranging refugees’ passage aboard Greek,
British, Rus sian, and Turkish steamships. American naval captains might have
shuttled refugees themselves, but Bristol forbade this.
As the months dragged on, the Turks turned to a combination of carrots
and sticks in an effort to complete the exodus. Eventually poor refugees were
allowed to board steamers without charge. So eager were the Turks to see the
Greeks’ backs that they sometimes allowed men of military age to leave if they
paid the exemption tax of 300 Turkish lira, though more often they were de-
tained.553 The Turks also used brute force to maintain the momentum. In
Trabzon and its suburbs in February 1923, 700 families were “turned out of
their houses.”554 In April a recalcitrant captain of a French- flagged steamer
was forced “by the point of the revolver” to take on several hundred refugees.
Something similar occurred in Samsun.555 Turks brandished liberally the
threat of deportation inland, both to get the Greeks moving and to persuade
the Allies to expedite the pro cess.556
By the close of 1922, tens of thousands had fled the country, but there were
still many thousands to go. In January 1923 American diplomats estimated
that 3,000–5,000 refugees from the interior were still arriving at the ports
each week.557 In March some 8,000 refugees were awaiting boats out in Alex-
andretta, and 3,500 in Mersin.558 Ten- thousand awaited passage in Samsun,
3,000 in Trabzon, 1,500 in Ordu, 500 in Ünye, and 300 in Fatsa.559 And
there were still 60,000 refugees in Aleppo, 50,000 of them Armenians, and
23,000 in Constantinople.560 In April embarkations were impeded by the
prob lem of passage fees and Greece’s momentary unwillingness to take in
more refugees. The country was already hosting more than a million and an-
nounced that it would take in no more until an official population exchange
was implemented, with Muslim departures from Greece, Macedonia, and
Thrace creating space in which to absorb Greek refugees.561 In early April
Ankara instructed local governors not to ship refugees to Constantinople on
their way out of the country.562 The city was becoming overcrowded, and
refugees were dying at a rate of nearly 600 a week from smallpox and ty-
phus.563 Local Turkish authorities regarded Constantinople as a way station
and were not interested in holding refugees who could no longer be sent on.
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
Officials reacted to the temporary closures of Greece and Constantinople
by threatening to deport to the interior the Greeks waiting at the ports. “Since
the city [of Constantinople] is not desirous of more people, and because a con-
tagious disease has broken out lately among these people, therefore all those
who intend to leave the country ought to do so in a few days’ time,” read an
official proclamation plastered on the walls of Samsun in mid- March 1923
“Other wise they will be compelled to return to their homes.”564 Such internal
deportations would result in a death rate of “fifty per cent or more,” the Amer-
icans feared.565 They lodged protests, and the Turkish officials agreed to
wait.566
The Christians, of course, overwhelmingly were eager to leave. “They live
in constant fear,” as one missionary put it. “They know that at any time they
may be dragged from their homes and suffer” massacre or deportation in-
land.567 There were occasional exceptions, though. Some wealthy Greeks in
Sivas, it was reported, preferred to stay.568 After all, the journey was impover-
ishing; émigrés forfeited their real estate and had no choice but to sell off per-
sonal effects at great loss. What faced them in exile was at best unclear.569
In some re spects the condition of the waiting emigrants in the Pontus ports
gradually improved. At the end of 1922 the Turkish authorities launched a
vaccination campaign. In Samsun, in spring 1923, missionaries cut the refu-
gees’ hair: “close cuts on males and bobbed on females.” Missionaries also
“delouse[ed] all clothes and effects,” washed scalps in kerosene for the same
purpose, and gave refugees “hot baths.”570 In May American officers reported
that refugee buildings in Samsun were “scrubbed clean.” Although the refu-
gees were “in rags,” they were “clean” and healthy, especially the Armenians.
“Many of these people are better off than they have ever been,” the officers
judged.571 Local authorities sometimes provided shelter in disused mills,
khans, school buildings, and other spaces but rarely supplied food or water.
Occasionally, they provided medical ser vices, but almost never in Turkish
hospitals.572 By summer refugees in Ünye, Fatsa, and Giresun were reported
to be well- fed and almost disease- free. Many even found work.573
But on the Mediterranean coast, severe prob lems persisted. In Turkish-
ruled Mersin in April 1923, about 20 percent of the 3,500 refugees were sick
and others “w
eak and anemic.” A few died each day.574 In French- ruled Al-
exandretta, where most of the 14,000 Armenian refugees lived in two camps
Turks and Greeks, 1919–1924
on the edge of a swamp, malaria and typhus were rife. Children were “dis-
tressingly undernourished and many have dropsy.” The refugees lived in huts
“built of straw, old boards, old sheet iron.” They slept on boards “resting on
stakes” to keep off the water- logged ground.575 Armenian refugees were grad-
ually moving out to villages.576
Sanitary conditions were also poor in Constantinople. While the town’s
5,000 or so Armenian refugees were properly cared for, the 25,000 Greeks,
it was reported in March 1923, were uniformly filthy. Many arrived diseased
and were crammed into “draughty, barn- like buildings,” with barely enough
food. Babies and the el derly died off rapidly. Some 6,000 Greeks living next
to the Selimiye barracks were dying at rates of up to seventy a day. Arthur
Ringland, who would go on to found the international relief agency CARE,
described conditions as “shocking, scandalous and a reproach.” Corpses lay
unburied for days, perhaps because the Turks charged fifty piastres to bury a
child and a lira per adult.577 Thousands lived in ships in the harbor, which
were little better. “The filth and offal thrown from disease- laden ships is de-
voured by fish which in turn are eaten by the people of the city,” Post wrote.578
By early summer 1923 there remained about 81,000 Christian refugees in
Asia Minor, of whom 60,000 were Greek. There were large concentrations
in the ports and in some inland locations such as Gümüşhane and Kayseri
and its surroundings. There was also the 50,000 Armenian refugees in Aleppo,
along with 12,000 Greeks.579 By August most of the Greeks had been shipped
off to Greece, though “the poorest and weakest in health, mostly women and
children,” remained, begging.580
In December 1922 the Greek Government reported that it had taken in
868,186 refugees.581 By March 1923 the total had reached 1,150,000.582 The
deportees from Ionia and the Pontus included few young women and almost
no able- bodied men between the ages of fifteen and fifty. An American who
toured the Aegean islands that November reported, “ There are scarcely five
per cent of males over 14 years of age. The men are such pathetic wrecks,
blind, more helpless than the women. . . . Of girls there are [very few] between the ages of 14 and 18.”583 The refugees from Eastern Thrace, however, included a normal proportion of able- bodied men and young women.584
The deportations resulted in a refugee- maintenance prob lem well “beyond
[the] power” of a small, poor country such as Greece.585 At the end of 1922,
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
the Greek and Armenian refugees lived in public buildings, tent camps, and
under trees in the Aegean islands and on the Greek mainland. In Athens the
ruins of the Parthenon accommodated some, as did the velvet- lined boxes and
the orchestra in the National Opera House.586 The government even forced
some homeowners to take in and feed refugees, gratis.587
In Salonica, where some 30,000 refugees were accommodated in October
1922 in huts on the grounds of the old British Army hospital, “practically
all . . . are crawling with vermin, having no clothes to change into. There is no water for washing and hardly enough for drinking. There is no soap. There
are no disinfectants. . . . The very rudiments of sanitation . . . do not exist.”
The huts had no floors; doors and win dows were absent as well, carried off
by previous inhabitants. Others in Salonica lodged in mosques, schools,
and synagogues.588 Conditions were such that some refugees were “very
anxious to get back to Asia Minor,” even “willing to swim.” By February 1923
the city had 120,000 refugees.589
Western aid agencies took on part of the burden, and were nearly over-
whelmed themselves. The American Red Cross was feeding about half a mil-
lion.590 During the initial weeks of the exodus, the camps were “appalling.”591
The director of the American Red Cross in Constantinople described a camp
outside Salonica, inhabited mostly by Greeks from the Caucasus, as “one great
hospital.” Many of the residents “we found lying in the barracks absolutely
nude with nothing but a quilt thrown over them. Many were suffering from
typhus, influenza and pneumonia, the death rate averaging 40 persons per
day. . . . This is a death rate of over one hundred per cent a year.”592 The Greek government supplied a little bread and sometimes cooked meals. Little
work was available. Armenian clerics provided refugees with “olives [and]
medicine.”593
In summer 1923 there was a mini- crisis when the Greek government re-
fused to take in additional refugees. In response the Turks stopped transfers
from the interior, and NER threatened to pull out of the Pontus and stop re-
lief.594 The Greeks immediately relented.595 The Turks then renewed the
movement of Christians from the interior to the coastal towns.596 A party of
179 that reached Trabzon told “horrible tales of the atrocious treatment they
received. They claim that many young girls and boys still remain[ed] in the
Kurdish villages, held as slaves.”597
Turks and Greeks, 1919–1924
By late 1923 the refugee situation in Greece had improved. Refugees were
siphoned off to empty Bulgarian and Muslim farms in Western Thrace and
Macedonia, where they were permanently resettled. A year after Smyrna, an
American relief committee thought it “obvious that the refugees from Turkish
territory . . . have demonstrated almost unbelievable ability to assimilate them-
selves with the help of the Greek Government.” The relief agencies had pro-
vided sustenance and health care, and the government shelter and stability.598
Altogether between 1919 and summer 1923, about 1.5 million Greeks were
cleansed from Asia Minor and Eastern Thrace. Almost all were resettled in
Greece. But several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks had died. Either
they were murdered outright or were the intentional victims of hunger, dis-
ease, and exposure. Without doubt, the exodus badly disrupted the Turkish
economy, at least at first.599 On the other hand, the state and its Muslim in-
habitants gained vast amounts of property. Across the sea the refugee influx
strained Greece’s resources to the limit and no doubt caused much economic
grief. But, in the long run, the vast increase in manpower was a boon to the
Greek state and economy.
Exchange
The last stage of the Greek evacuation of Anatolia began in October–
November 1923 with the implementation of a population- exchange agree-
ment (mübadele) between Greece and Turkey. Rendel considered the notion
of an agreed “exchange” to be “ironic,” given that, by the time it was signed,
most of “the Greeks were already expelled.” 600
Nonetheless, despite the killings and coerced removals, a few had re-
mained in Turkey. The Turks were intent on clearing out these stragglers.
Their position was bluntly set out in an article, “The Conversion of Senator
Borah,” publis
hed in The International Interpreter, during the Lausanne
negotiations:
Of all the germs of disturbance, the Greek is by far the most dangerous.
He is foreign in blood and religion; in buying and in selling he is inces-
santly active, and together with the Armenian he gathers in the piasters
of the ‘Faithful.’ In one way and another this leads to trou ble, to
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
accusation— false of course—of massacres, and to interference from
without. And, even worse than this, the Greek is a near neighbor who
actually claims the soil. Who declares that he had an empire in Anatolia
centuries before the Turks were heard of, when they were just wandering
bands of horse men in Khorassan, in Armenia, or along the upper streams
of the Euphrates. He goes so far as to pretend that the city of Istanbul,
which he names Constantinople, is by rights his, and the great mosque
on the Bosporus, St. Sophia he calls it, the metropolitan cathedral of his
faith. Therefore he must go, and go at once, and as quickly from Con-
stantinople as from Smyrna.601
The population exchange was settled within the context of the Lausanne
negotiations, on January 30, 1923, with implementation to begin May 1. The
agreement provided for the compulsory removal of the minority popula-
tions from Turkey and Greece, except Greeks from Constantinople and
Muslims from Western Thrace. All “able- bodied” Greek detainees in Turkey
were also to be released. “The exchange of populations was a horrible thing,”
Bristol wrote, but there was “a silver lining, being the means for fi nally
solving the race prob lem in this part of the world.” 602
The population exchange was a long time in coming. Venizelos, who signed
the agreement on behalf of Greece, had been pursuing such a deal since at
least 1914.603 Talk of the idea was fitfully renewed in late 1919 against the
backdrop of the investigation into Greek atrocities during the occupation of
Smyrna.604 Article 143 of the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres provided for “a special
arrangement relating to the reciprocal and voluntary emigration of the popu-
lations of Turkish and Greek race in the territories transferred to Greece and