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Twice A Stranger: Greece, Turkey And The Minorities They ExpelledEditions
ReviewThis is a brilliant book. Coming from Northern Ireland, Clark is well placed to comment on the riot of religious, ethnic, historical and political tensions produced before, during and after the Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923. His analysis of the broad picture and the horse-trading at the Lausanne Conference is fair and unsentimental and he never loses sight of what many exchangees continued to believe: that, however unpleasant, the divorce was necessary, a matter of survival. But Clark is interested in the complexity of the exchange, and he weaves into his narrative an account of the costs to individuals and communities. Were Turkish-speaking Anatolians made Greek by bringing them to Greece? Were Cretans made into Turks by dumping them in Ayvalik? What of those who were far from war zones – 50,000 Cappadocian Christians, for example – who were summarily expelled? The squalor, disease and chaos of vast numbers of refugees arriving in destitute Greece was relieved in part by international aid – and especially by a few selfless American nurses. But the long-term implications are still unfolding. Clark gives a particularly vivid portrait of the Black Sea Greeks, who often had much stronger affiliations with Russia than with Greece. In modern Greece, these Pontic Greeks are regarded as different, and they are liable to find more in common with Black Sea Turks in Hamburg than with Athenians: football team (Trabzon), cuisine, music; even, perhaps, a grandmother. Twice A Stranger is a book that needed to be written, and Bruce Clark has achieved it superbly. Anyone with an interest in Greece or Turkey ought to read it, but it has lessons too for contemporary issues about refugees and the rights of minorities caught in political conflict. From a review in the Daily Telegraph - review by Johnny de Falbe |
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