The 1923 Greco-Turkish Population Exchange and the end of Asia Minor Hellenism: Greek, Turkish, and Karamanlı narratives of forced displacement from Anatolia

Abstract

This thesis traces the memory of the 1923 Greco-Turkish Population Exchange through a selection of narratives from twentieth-century Greek, Karamanli, and Turkish literature. Focusing particularly on the narratives of displacement from Anatolia, this study aims to shed light on the Population Exchange as a means of fabricating a homogeneous national identity, and as a formative event that shaped the nationalist discourses in Greece and Turkey through a strategy of inclusion and exclusion. The first chapter examines Ilias Venezis’ Land of Aeolia as one of the foundational texts of the Greek ideology of lost homelands, which constitutes a central component of the late twentieth-century Greek nationalist discourse. The second chapter situates itself in the Greek Orthodox villages of Central Anatolia, whose residents recorded their experiences of displacement in the form of poetry in Karamanlidika (i.e., Turkish in the Greek script). A careful examination of Karamanli poetry undermines the ideology of lost homelands and its assumptions of national homogeneity. The final chapter offers an insight into the period of silence surrounding the Population Exchange in the emerging nation‐state of Turkey, and how Sabahattin Ali’s short story on a decaying refugee settlement in Western Anatolia, namely “Çirkince,” breaks this silence in Turkish literature. The experiences of uprooting and resettlement embedded in these texts, I argue, refuse to be incorporated into a single homogeneous narrative, undermining the manipulative efforts of the nationalist discourses on both sides of the Aegean.