Across the Aegean: a scholarly dialogue on the great demographic transfer

The Convention of 30 January 1923 on the compulsory exchange of minority populations between Greece and Turkey was one of the 18 instruments, including the new peace treaty with Turkey, which resulted from the Conference on Near Eastern Questions that met in Lausanne from December 1922 to July 1923. It provided the legal framework for a radical uprooting of populations that has since come to be known as ‘ethnic cleansing’. The Turkish and Greek delegations had both agreed on its necessity. Lord Curzon, the British foreign secretary, who had initially described the proposed solution as a ‘bad and vicious [one] for which the world will pay a heavy penalty for a hundred years to come’, ultimately provided justifications for what he called ‘unmixing peoples’, which the Allies believed would ease the task of ensuring the stability of the new international order. Curzon’s phrase has often been quoted, especially since it was taken up by Roger Brubaker in 1995 to describe a phenomenon that accompanies the ‘aftermath of empire’ and that is part of a long process of ‘unmixing, building and inventing nations’ in eastern Europe. Muslim Circassians had immigrated to the Ottoman Empire in the1860s after the Russian conquest of the Caucasus. Many of them had been planted across a sensitive belt of territory in the Balkans that extended from Dobrudja to Kosovo. As Christians moved into selfgoverning territories in the Balkans from provinces still under Ottoman rule, so Muslims left regions that fell to Christian rule. During the risings of 1875–1878, Circassians and other refugees from ‘infidel’ rule—frequently people who had themselves been victims—wreaked vengeance on Christian peasants. After the Treaty of Berlin of 1878, more Muslims went, from Bulgaria and East Rumelia, and from territories ceded to Serbia, Montenegro and Romania. They also left Thessaly after 1891, when it became Greek, and Crete after 1897, when the island became autonomous. Many left Bosnia-Herzegovina when Austria-Hungary took over, even though they had lost neither their possessions nor their social status. They went even when they spoke little or no Turkish. Many settled as near