Imagined Communities in Greece and Turkey

ISBN: 9781784531270 出版年：2015 页码：225 Emine Yesim Bedlek Bloomsbury Publishing

In 1923 the Turkish government, under its new leader Kemal Ataturk, signed a renegotiated Balkwith the major powers of the day and Greecprovided for the forced exchange of 1.3 million Christians from Anatolia to Greece, in return for 30,000 Greek Muslims. The mass migratiwas a humanitarian catastrophe - of the 1.3 million Christians relocated it is estimated only 150,000 were successfully integrated into the Greek state. Furthermore, because the treaty was ethnicity-blind, tens of thousands of Muslim Greeks (ethnically and linguisticallinto Turkey against their will. Both the Greek and Turkish leadership saw this exchange as crucial to the state-strengthening projecwere engaged in after the First World War. Here, Emine Bedlek approaches this enormous shift in national thinking through literary texts - addressing the themes of loss, identity, memory and trauma which both populations experienced. The result is a new understanding of the tensions between religious and ethnic identity in modern Turkey.