More than a century after Türkiye and Greece signed a landmark agreement forcing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, the trauma of the population exchange continues to echo across generations, according to a senior official from a foundation representing the descendants of those uprooted.
Speaking to Anadolu Agency (AA) reporters, Foundation of the Lausanne Population Exchange (Lozan Mübadilleri Vakfı) Secretary General Esat Halil Ergelen said the 1923 agreement, signed on Jan. 30 as part of the postwar settlement following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, left scars that remain deeply embedded in family histories on both sides of the Aegean.
Under the accord, Muslim populations living in Greece and Orthodox Christians living in Türkiye were compelled to relocate based on religious identity. About 1.5 million Orthodox Christians were sent from Anatolia to Greece, while roughly 500,000 Muslim Turks were moved from Greece to Türkiye.
"These people were not numbers,” Ergelen said. "The pain of forced migration did not end with the first generation. Their children and grandchildren continue to carry that trauma.”
Ergelen said the roots of the exchange predated the agreement itself, pointing to the Balkan Wars of 1912 and the Greco-Turkish War that followed World War I. After Turkish forces defeated the Greek army in August 1922, he said, nearly 1 million Orthodox Christians fled Anatolia alongside retreating Greek troops, initially seeking refuge on Aegean islands before moving to Athens.
At the time, Greece’s population stood at roughly 5 million, Ergelen said, making the sudden influx a major security and social challenge. Greek authorities, he added, dispersed the newcomers to northern regions inhabited by Muslim Turks, forcing local families to share their homes with refugees.
"This was the most sensitive issue heading into Lausanne,” Ergelen said. "Greece said, ‘These are your citizens, take them back.’ Türkiye agreed, but Greece also demanded that they not be prosecuted. Because of that dispute, many remained in Greece under refugee status until the exchange was formalized.”
Ergelen described the agreement as unprecedented, saying it marked one of the first times in modern history that an international treaty sanctioned what he called an "exchange of people,” a term traditionally used for goods.
Many of those expelled from Anatolia were Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians from central regions such as Cappadocia, he said. Others departed to southern ports like Mersin before boarding ships for Greece. Muslim Turks from Greece, meanwhile, traveled by sea and rail to Anatolia and were resettled in areas vacated by departing Christians and Armenians.
Ergelen, himself a third-generation descendant of exchange migrants, said his family arrived by sea from Kavala and settled in Istanbul. As a child, he recalled hearing elders describe their former homes as paradise. When he later visited the area, he said he realized how the exchange had also spared his family from later conflicts, including World War II and Greece’s civil war.
He said descendants often travel to ancestral villages, guided by oral histories and archival research. Since 2000, the foundation has organized trips to Greece under the banner "Hello, My Birthplace,” helping families trace their roots.
Years of research culminated in the publication of an atlas documenting former Turkish place names in northern Greece, allowing many descendants, Ergelen said, to finally locate the villages their grandparents were forced to leave behind.