Twice A Stranger: The Mass Expulsions That Forged Modern Greece and Turkey (review)

After Greece won its independence in 1829, when the newly formed state with a population of approximately 800,000 comprised less than one-third of the 2.5 million Greek inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire, one of the overarching goals of its foreign policy for the ensuing century was the Μεγhλη Ιδ\α, Greek for "Great Idea." This concept of Greek nationalism was the force behind the expansion of Greece's boundaries (largely at the expense of the Ottoman Empire) so as to encompass all ethnic Greeks still living in the "unredeemed" territories of Epirus, Thessaly, Macedonia, Thrace, the Aegean Islands, Crete, Cyprus, parts of Anatolia, and the major commercial center and strategic waterway of Constantinople. This city was to become the Greek capital, replacing Athens, which in the nineteenth century was something of a sleepy town, hardly resembling its former glory or today's modern metropolis. The Ottoman Empire, on the other hand, which had come to be known as the "Sick Man of Europe," was a power in decline as its presence in southeastern Europe deteriorated over the next century. As Greek territory slowly increased northward up the Balkan peninsula, and other nationalities in southeastern Europe eventually gained their independence from the sultan, large numbers of Turkish Muslim minorities were left behind in the retreating empire's wake.

While Greece's reclamation project proceeded at a measured pace throughout the nineteenth century, Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, born under Ottoman rule on the island of Crete, quickly expanded Greek territory during and after the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. As one of the victorious powers in World War I, Greece appeared to be on the verge of fulfilling its irredentist dream during the Greek-Turkish War of 1919–22, while well over four hundred years of Ottoman rule in southeastern Europe and Asia Minor was pushed to the point of collapse. Therefore, there is perhaps some irony in the fact that Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, born in Salonika when it was still in Ottoman hands but which later switched to Greek control under Venizelos, formed the Turkish National Movement, prevented the complete partition of the Ottoman Empire, expelled the Greek forces from Anatolia, and formed the modern Republic of Turkey based on Kemalist ideology.

The Ottoman Empire's defeat in World War I followed by its successful defense by Ataturk's Turkish revolutionary forces, resulted in the international conference held in Lausanne, Switzerland, between October 1922 and July 1923. This concluded one of the most bitter chapters in the history of modern Greece and Turkey. Ratified after difficult negotiations, the Treaty of Lausanne bound the signatories to recognize the sovereignty of the new Republic of Turkey as the legitimate successor to the Ottoman Empire and delineated the boundaries of Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey. It also provided for a massive population exchange of approximately 1.2 million ethnically Greek Orthodox Christians living in Turkey and approximately 400,000 ethnically Turkish Muslims living in Greece. This controversial, though little-known, population exchange is the subject of an elegantly written and impressively researched book by Bruce Clark, the international security editor of the Economist magazine and formerly the diplomatic correspondent of the Financial Times and Reuters' Athens correspondent.

Twice a Stranger is the story of the Greek Orthodox Christian and Turkish Muslim minorities that were forcibly uprooted from their ancestral homes in order to remove from the political equation the primary source of irritation that had so frequently brought Greece and Turkey into conflict during the previous century. The title reveals one of the key themes of Clark's book, that neither minority felt entirely accepted either in their place of birth, where their families had lived for countless generations, or in their forcibly adopted nations after the population exchange, where they were strangers among their ethnic and religious kin.

This book, however, is not merely a simple rehashing of the bitter experience...