Armenians and Greeks in 1900 & 2000

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Thousands of ethnic Greeks who lived on the southern coasts of the Black Sea for centuries were exiled from Turkey during the conflicts that accompanied the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the appearance of the modern Turkish state.

Armenia claimed that about 2 million of its compatriots were sufferers of genocide under the Ottoman Empire during WWI.

Ankara denies the “genocide” charge, countering that 300-500 thousand Armenians and at least as considerable Turks died in civil conflict when Armenians rioted against their Ottoman sovereigns and sided with occupying Russian forces.

Approximately 1.5 million Greeks lived in Anatolia and East Thrace before 1923. Nowadays, the Greeks in Turkey make up a tiny population of Greek and Greek-speaking Eastern Orthodox Christians who mainly live in Istanbul (about 2,000, according to the United Nations) and on the two islands in the Aegean Sea (Imbros and Tenedos).

Armenians in Turkey today have an estimated population of 60,000, down from a bulk population of over 2 million Armenians between the years 1914 and 1921.

As a result, the Christian population of Turkey proper decreased from 4.4 million in 1912 to 700,000 in 1924.

Below is another version of the map showing the number of Greeks and Armenians by Turkish provinces in 1914 and at present.

Resettlement affected the Turks, too. After signing the “Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations” at Lausanne (Switzerland) on 30 January 1923 by the governments of Greece and Turkey, according to official documents, at least 1,221,489 Greek Orthodox from Asia Minor, Eastern Thrace, the Pontic Alps, and the Caucasus, and 355,000–400,000 Muslims from Greece were resettled.

Below is the map created by Reddit user bilalselim which illustrates Greek and Turkish populations before the exchange. Turks and Greeks who were unaffected by the exchange are shown in bold.

Are you interested in the topic of the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange? You might be interested in the book “Humanism in Ruins Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange” by Aslı Iğsız, Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. In this book, Aslı Iğsız weaves together past and present, making perceptible the effects in Turkey across the following century of the 1923 exchange.