At the conclusion of a bloody war in 1923, Greece and Turkey agreed to a "population exchange" that sent over a million Turkish Orthodox Christians to Greece and nearly half a million Greek Muslims to Turkey.

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Product Description

In the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, nearly two million citizens in Turkey and Greece were expelled from homelands. The Lausanne treaty resulted in the deportation of Orthodox Christians from Turkey to Greece and of Muslims from Greece to Turkey. The transfer was hailed as a solution to the problem of minorities who could not coexist. Both governments saw the exchange as a chance to create societies of a single culture. The opinions and feelings of those uprooted from their native soil were never solicited.

In an evocative book, Bruce Clark draws on new archival research in Turkey and Greece as well as interviews with surviving participants to examine this unprecedented exercise in ethnic engineering. He examines how the exchange was negotiated and how people on both sides came to terms with new lands and identities.

Politically, the population exchange achieved its planners' goals, but the enormous human suffering left shattered legacies. It colored relations between Turkey and Greece, and has been invoked as a solution by advocates of ethnic separation from the Balkans to South Asia to the Middle East. This thoughtful book is a timely reminder of the effects of grand policy on ordinary people and of the difficulties for modern nations in contested regions where people still identify strongly with their ethnic or religious community.

(20060917)

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #586139 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
At the conclusion of a bloody war in 1923, Greece and Turkey agreed to a "population exchange" that sent over a million Turkish Orthodox Christians to Greece and nearly half a million Greek Muslims to Turkey. The result, argues this absorbing study, was a humanitarian nightmare that sheds light on the conundrums of religion, ethnicity and identity in the modern age. Drawing on archival research and (sometimes rambling) oral histories from aging survivors, journalist Clark recounts the political wranglings between two countries intent on ridding themselves of potentially troublesome minorities and consolidating a shaky sense of national unity. The author surveys the traumatic exoduses and revisits the cosmopolitan Ottoman communities—where Christians and Muslims had coexisted for centuries—that were torn apart by the expulsions. The story abounds with ironies, as Turkish-speaking Christians are uprooted and shipped overseas to assume an unfamiliar but supposedly truer Greek nationality, crossing paths along the way with Greek-speaking Muslims reluctantly on their way to take over the Christians' vacated Turkish homes. Clark contends that the mass expulsions were a model for similar, sometimes de facto, transfers after WWII in Europe, India and Palestine; his gripping, sensitive history highlights the costs of such expedient policies. 14 b&w photos, 3 maps. (Sept.)
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Review
"'From one end of the island to the other, groans of the Turks preparing to leave were heard, mingling with those of the refugees who had just been uprooted; and one asked oneself what profit there could be in such distress for the monsters who held human grief at nothing' Pandelis Prevelakis"

Review
At the conclusion of a bloody war in 1923, Greece and Turkey agreed to a "population exchange" that sent over a million Turkish Orthodox Christians to Greece and nearly half a million Greek Muslims to Turkey. The result, argues this absorbing study, was a humanitarian nightmare that sheds light on the conundrums of religion, ethnicity and identity in the modern age...Clark contends that the mass expulsions were a model for similar, sometimes de facto, transfers after WWII in Europe, India and Palestine; his gripping, sensitive history highlights the costs of such expedient policies. (Publishers Weekly 20060605)

In Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions that Forged Modern Greece and Turkey, Bruce Clark, the international security editor of The Economist, explores...the population exchange that helped create modern-day Greece and Turkey. Weaving together a rich variety of sources--interviews with some of the last surviving eyewitnesses, documents and accounts from the time, research by local historians in Greece and Turkey--Clark tells both the diplomatic and human stories of the exchange. He shows how 20th-century nationalist ideology affected the lives of ordinary people caught in its wake, raising complicated issues of identity that transcended each side's claims about who was "Turkish" and who was "Greek."
--Belinda Cooper (New York Times Book Review 20060618)

A book about something that happened in the 1920s cannot always be expected to raise acute questions about the world today; the power of this book is the terrifying way that it does...Clark has tracked down nonagenarian Greeks and Turks who remember the pre-exchange world.These reminiscences, plus the story of the exchange, are judiciously intertwined to make for a pacy read, which also explains how the exchanges forged modern Greece and Turkey.
--Tim Judah (The Observer 20060108)

Bruce Clark's fascinating account of these turbulent events draws on new archival research in Greece and Turkey, and interviews with some of the surviving refugees, allowing them to speak for themselves for the first time. (New Europe 20060305)

While Greece and Turkey remain antagonistic, there lingers a deep cultural and emotional tie between them which is puzzling to outsiders, and which Clark's excellent book does much to explain...The story Clark tells is complex, but it reminds us that ethnic homogeneity--the dream of nationalists throughout the last century--is illusory. Multiculturalism is not new, it is a return to what was the normal state of affairs before the upheavals of the 20th century.
--Andrew Crumey (Scotland on Sunday 20060305)

A wise new book...Clark is particularly good on the human cost of the exchange, which he illustrates with first-hand testimony, much of it new, of almost unbearable poignancy.
--Brendan Simms (Sunday Times 20060304)

[A] brilliant book...Coming from Northern Ireland, Clark is well placed to comment on this riot of religious, ethnic, historical and political tensions. His analysis of the broad picture and the horse-trading at Lausanne is fair and unsentimental...Twice a Stranger is a book that needed to be written, and Bruce Clark has achieved it superbly. He has made a complex subject accessible. Anyone with an interest in Greece or Turkey ought to read it.
--John de Falbe (Daily Telegraph 20060319)

Absorbing and thorough...Clark's history is welcome for shedding light upon this 'giant divorce settlement,' an event that is barely known beyond the Aegean, largely because its architects were quick to close the book on a pitiless exercise in political expediency...With Turkey's ongoing interest in joining an insistently multicultural European Union, and the current state of relations between Muslims and the West, Twice a Stranger cannot fail to ring with topical resonance...This is a welcome and readable account of what it means to be twice a stranger: both in the place where you were born and in the place where you grow old.
--Jeremy Seal (Sunday Telegraph 20060405)

[An] excellent new book...The power of Clark's book lies not in its diplomatic history, which is concise and balanced, but in his sympathy for the communities and individuals wrenched from their real homes and dumped in alien 'homelands'...Clark finds abundant space for the complex communities whose religion, language and customs no longer fitted in a world re-ordered by the dreadful simplicity of nationalist ideology.
--Daniel Howden (The Independent 20060401)

[Clark] knows Greece and Turkey deeply and at first hand, and shows admirable fair-mindedness as well as the clever manner of presentation which you have to have if these complicated matters are to be explained to a foreign readership...Bruce Clark brings up the factual baggage-train, and good for him.
--Norman Stone (Literary Review 20060325)

[A] meticulously researched and balanced account...This book is an important piece of history, for Clark has captured some of the memories of the last, nonagerian, survivors of the expulsion. His knowledge of Greek brings alive recollections that will soon go to the grave.
--Marcus Tanner (The Tablet 20060401)

[A] thoughtful and deeply moving book.
--Michael Kerrigan (The Scotsman 20060408)

In this marvellous book, Bruce Clark contrives to interleaf the macro (or megalo) story with the micro one. He presents a lucid summary of the events that led to this state-sponsored deportation...Clark has a real sympathy for his subjects as well as his subject, he has a true facility in Greek dialects and he manages to evoke a genuine melancholy while avoiding the sentimental...In Bosnia and in Kosovo most recently, international statecraft has been concerned more with redressing previous cleansings than with cementing or confirming them, and the Lausanne precedent is often cited as the negative one. Bruce Clark's book furnishes ghostly and ghastly evidence that for all its difficulties this policy is probably more practical as well as more ethical. I must add that he writes in that almost invisibly good and clear English that I thought had begun to die out of our journalism.
--Christopher Hitchens (The Spectator 20060602)

Clark's book is a timely reminder not only of man's inhumanity to man, and of our duty to avoid it, but also of the fact that throughout most of modern history it was considered right and natural that war and conflict should be ended by treaty, and that unless and until someone was able and willing to reverse the situation on the ground, the treaty would normally follow the maxim 'what you have you hold' (uti possidetis). While making explicit the price that had to be paid for peace between Greece and Turkey, Bruce Clark does not shirk from what he calls 'a truth that is awkward from a liberal, modern point of view'--the fact that the price was not wasted. He has written a book that can be read, not with pleasure, but with interest, and certainly with profit.
--Andrew Mango (Times Literary Supplement 20060331)

[Clark's] fascinating and moving account of those turbulent times--with first-hand testimony from those involved--sheds new light and meaning on an enormous exercise in ethnic engineering...[An] important new book.
--Keith Richmond (The Tribune 20060529)

A compellingly educational, yet shocking read.
--Natalie Hoare (Geographical 20060317)

The story of this 'population exchange' and its ramifications is evocatively told by Bruce Clark...[He] blends the personal histories of refugees and their descendants with an astute account of the larger diplomatic forces that shaped their lives...The scars of this population exchange are still visible in Greece and Turkey today--in ruined and abandoned churches and mosques, and also in familial ties that span the Aegean...Clark warns us that ethnic resettlement, even with a transparent veneer of respectability bestowed by the international community, is a tragedy with repercussions that last long after families are transplanted and borders redrawn.
--Michael Petrou (Maclean's 20060803)

Clark's impressive work leads us through the negotiations, agreements and aftermath of the 1923 Lausanne Convention...Bruce Clark tells his history with compelling clarity and doesn't neglect the human side. The book's sympathies lie with the ordinary people of all communities, uprooted by forces beyond their control.
--Jimmy Roussounis (Ham and High 20070101)

Clark's refugees are a valuable corrective to the policymakers' fondness for organizing other people's lives, and... the tinge of nostalgia which permeates this lucid analysis offers its own message for the future.
--Mark Mazower (London Review of Books 20070701)

Clark treats brilliantly both the macrohistory of the war and diplomacy leading to the expulsions and the several local histories of those different communities uprooted in order to become Turks living in Turkey and Greeks living in Greece.
--L. Carl Brown (Foreign Affairs 20070101)

Clark presents a nicely written, journalistic narrative history of the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange that followed WW I. He discusses in an engaging and often poignant style the deportation of the nearly two million citizens--Orthodox Christians from Turkey and Muslims from Greece--that was overseen by a recently formulated international community and implemented by the postwar Turkish and Greek governments. Clark does an excellent job of bringing readers into the story at the levels of both what he calls "high politics" and the "lives of ordinary people."
--R. A. Miller (Choice )

Twice a Stranger never loses sight of the painful experience of losing homes and homelands. Clark skilfully presents many poignant firsthand accounts of the population exchange. He draws on both his own interviews with Greeks and Turks and work by local historians such as Iskender Özsoy, a journalist from the town of Tuzla on the Sea of Marmara. Özsoy regrets that his work did not start even sooner; but Clark, Özsoy, and others fortunately did not wait until it was too late altogether. Clark, for his part, has compiled a remarkable body of testimony about the heavy human cost of forced migration...Twice a Stranger is a fascinating book that should be read.
--Ben Lieberman (Journal of Genocide Research )

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Customer Reviews

The Cost of Ethnic Cleansing
This is the best book I have read on the tragic Greek-Turkish "population exchange" of the 1920s. I found the book remarkable for several reasons: One is its organization. Chapters alternate between diplomatic history and human suffering stories, many of them based on interviews with survivors of that era. This has a powerful effect on the reader who sees how people were dying while "diplomats talked." Another is its fairness in discussing the responsibilities of each side. (The official Greek and Turkish positions place all the blame on the other side.) And finally the coverage of the suffering of the Muslims that were sent from Greece to Turkey as part of the "exchange." As the books states on p. 161 "In most cases, the fate of these migrants was not as terrible as that of the Anatolian Christians who fled either in the heat of war, or as a result of forced marches followed by forced embarkations on ships riddled with disease; but the Muslim exodus was bad enough."

I have a special interest in the history of the region because both of my parents were born in Turkey and their families ended up in Greece as part of the exchange. My mother's family had to flee with a few hours notice following the retreating Greek army so they would not be slaughtered by Turkish irregulars. My father's family were Cappadocian Turkish speaking Christians. While their departure was more orderly they found themselves strangers in their new country. About 10 years or so ago I met a young Turkish college student who had a summer job in a hotel. He spoke some Greek and I asked him how he learned it. He told me his grandparents were Greek speaking Muslims from Crete and he described the difficulties they had in adjusting in Turkey, a story that mirrored exactly that of my father's family. I also realized that his grandparents must have had fond memories of Greece to teach their grandson the language. For what it is worth, what Clark describes seems to fit exactly my personal experience and my family's oral history.

The final chapter of the book, "The price of success", is particularly noteworthy and I would recommend it even to those who have no special interest in Greece or Turkey. Clark points out that in a way the "exchange" was a success, despite its huge human cost. It allowed Greece and Turkey to become nation states that lived more or less peacefully side by side because of "good fences." But then he goes on to show that such fences are not viable and the linking of religion and ethnicity is a dangerous policy. In the case of Greece and Turkey a new conflict arose because of Cyprus and the two countries came close to war again. Finally, he shows how futile is trying to maintain ethnic and religious homogeneity in the modern era of globalization and extensive labor migration.

It sad to see today that ethnic cleansing (based on one's religion) continues whether in the former Yugoslavia or in Iraq.

The book I've been waiting for the last twenty years!
My maternal grandparents were Orthodox Christians from Cappadocia. As a child I was told I was Greek; they were Greek, yet they spoke mostly Turkish. I noticed the other Greeks I met in the community were different than my grandparents. When I got to high school, after having lived in Greece for a year, I began asking questions of my grandmother, who told me many details of their Christian lives in a small town outside of Kayseri,then of the march out of Cappadocia, the ship to Greece that ran out of food as they had nowhere to put the refugees, finally debarking and being housed on the floor of a church until the parishioners got angry. She told me they were lucky; her father got a job as a teacher in orphange, as he was educated, a teacher certified by the patriarchate and so ended up on Evia at an American run orphanage. My grandfather and great uncle had escaped with false visas more than ten years earlier. I never fully understood why, based on my reading, the accounts of my grandfather and his brother having to escape at age 14. Now I do. Now I understand why the accounts that I've read from different regions of Anatolia are so different. I appreciated the author's methodology to get to every ethnic and regional group, and all the political parties that put their two cents in and influenced all these people who didn't want to go anywhere.

I have read all the history books and personal accounts I could find but all were clearly heavily biased and didn't reflect all of my grandparents' accounts. My grandparents never spoke ill of the Turkish people, only the Turkish soldiers. I wondered why my grandmother constantly referenced clothing, music, food, or anything to being Turkish-like. I wondered how they came to be called Greeks when my grandfather's written family history shows them having lived in the same valley for at least three hundred years. His ancestors were Persian; my grandmother's were from one of the -stahn countries, southeast of the Caspian Sea. Their family photos looked Mongolian, not Greek.

I once asked my grandmother how she could leave her home, her parents and siblings in Greece to marry a man she'd never met in the United States. (She never saw her parents again and didn't see her siblings for forty five years.)Her answers were forever etched in my mind.

First: She didn't like the Greek "boys" and where they were living wasn't "home." The man she was to marry was from her own village, and although she didn't know him other than to have seen him at church he was their kind.

Second was a lesson for my own marriage and a theme discussed in the book when refugee Christians moved into Muslim homes and shared their homes until the Muslims were deported. "Any two people can live together forever and be happy, if they both work at it." It seems that any two peoples can live together forever and be happy, if there are no politicians involved.

A Story Unfamiliar for Many
This book discusses the population exchange between Greece and Turkey that took place in th early 1920's. Many individuals think that all of Greece was liberated in the early 1820's and do not realize that the northern area remained as part of the Ottoman Empire. Once Mustafa Kemal called Ataturk succeeded in his goal to create one unified Turkey after the Balkan Wars and World War I, he sought to have only Turks in Turkey and the Greeks wanted only Greeks in Greece. The European Great Powers of World War I were not able to prevent the concept of one ethnic identity within one national boundary. So Greek speaking Turks in Greece and Turkish speaking Greeks in Turkey were mutually expelled. People were forced from the homes where they had forged bonds over generations and had shared a common language. When each group arrived to the destination purportedly "correct" for them, they were stangers who could not speak the language of their new homeland. The spiritual pathos and psychological suffering was horrific. The author of this book treats the topic with fair and even handed research and he presents a history that few today know. It is a superb retelling of a time receding in memory and Clark has provided a fine accounting for those who went through the repatriation.