Country: Turkey

Group: Greeks

Date Finalized: 10/12/2022

Team: Anusha Natarajan (lead), Alicia Hernandez, Ash Pessaran, Amaya Tanhueco

Content Warning: genocide, torture

Approximate Time Period: 2nd century BC- present

Greeks have lived in the region of present-day Turkey since the 2nd century BC. In the 20th century, they experienced several instances of deportation and removal.  After the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, Turkey expelled much of its Greek-speaking population in an exchange deal made with Greece (Minority Rights Group, 2018). In the 1950s, the Istanbul Pogrom further reduced the Greek population in Turkey.  In 1964, the Turkish government deported a large population of Greek people, while confiscating their Istanbul assets, even if they were married to Turkish citizens (Minority Rights Group, 2018). This was one of the most severe cases of forced migration in recent Turkish history, with around 12,500 Greek being expelled within a matter of months, a number that quadrupled in the following two years (Ors, 2021). Most of these Greeks had Greek citizenship and were affiliated with the Greek Orthodox (Rum) religion (Ors, 2021). By the end of the expulsion, around 60,000 Greeks had been expelled (Eligur, 2020). Today, there are about 2,000 Greeks living in the country today because the population kept decreasing due to the constant forced policies that the Turkish government kept putting on the Greeks. Most of the remaining Greeks live in Istanbul, with some people who are living in Anatolia.

Data Quality: Data quality for the Greek forced away  is rated a 3/3 due to the strong amount of evidence gathered from both unbiased factual sites and peer-reviewed research.

Sources

  1. Ors (2021). “Greeks Living in Turkey Today.” Greeks Living in Turkey, https://www.megarevma.net/GreeksLiving.htm.
  2. Wikipedia. “Greeks in Turkey.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 27 Sept. 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeks_in_Turkey.
  3. Newsroom. (2021, March 16). Remembering forced migrations: The 1964 expulsion of Greeks from Istanbul. eKathimerini.com. Retrieved September 27, 2022, from https://www.ekathimerini.com/society/1157214/remembering-forced-migrations-the-1964-expulsion-of-greeks-from-istanbul/
  4. Minority Rights Group. (2021, February 6). Rum orthodox Christians. Retrieved September 27, 2022, from https://minorityrights.org/minorities/rum-orthodox-christians/
  5. Eligur (2020). The 1964 expulsion of Greek citizens from Turkey: Economic and demographic turkification under ethnocultural nationalism. Taylor & Francis. Retrieved September 27, 2022, from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21520844.2020.1830606?journalCode=ujme20