Twice a Stranger

Written by British journalist Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger tells the epic story of the massive population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. At the end of World War I, Greece invaded Turkey’s Anatolia region in an attempt to enlarge the Greek nation by including the numerous Greek Orthodox Christians residing in Turkey. This population of Christians had lived for centuries in this area of the old Ottoman Empire before World War I. The invasion was the culmination of a long-held Greek dream, called the Megali Idea (Great Idea), to reconstitute the Byzantine Empire.

Following Greece’s defeat and the burning of the port city of Smyrna, which was reported by a young foreign correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star named Ernest Hemingway, a conference was held in Lausanne, Switzerland. Under the auspices of the League of Nations, it was agreed by both Greece and Turkey to conduct a social experiment of monumental proportions: approximately 1.2 million Greek Orthodox Christians were to be sent from Turkey to Greece, and about 400,000 Greek Muslims were to be sent from Greece to Turkey. Both of these groups had resided for centuries in their respective towns and villages. Clark interviews a number of people on both sides of this exchange who were young children during this event. The irony of this exchange is that many of the Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey did not speak Greek, especially those from the Cappadocia region of Anatolia. Furthermore, many of the Greek Muslims sent from Crete to Turkey did not speak Turkish. Hence the book’s title, Twice a Stranger.

The implications of this population exchange resonate till this day as both Greece and Turkey are now experiencing a return to a more multi-ethnic population. With the fall of Communism in Europe, a massive influx of Albanians, most of whom are Muslim, has flooded Greece’s underground labor market. In Turkey, they are still grappling with the identities of their Kurdish and Armenian citizens. How Turkey resolves this question will go a long way in determining whether it still wants to join, or will be accepted in, the European Union. A NATO member, Turkey could possibly decide that its fate rests more with the Muslim world and will no longer be the only secular Muslim government in the region.

So two nation-states once defined by their religion and language are once again facing challenges to their identities in a modern globalizing world.