Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions that Forged Modern Greece and Turkey - Softcover

Clark, Bruce

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674032225 ISBN 13: 9780674032224

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2009

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Bruce Clark is the religion and public policy blog editor of The Economist, and previously edited the international news section, covered religion and politics for the Foreign Department, and was International Security Editor. He has also covered international events for Financial Times, The Times, and Reuters.

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“[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

“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

“[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

“[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

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0674032225
• ISBN 13: 9780674032224
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304