Relocation with a vengeance

In 1975, a few months after the two Turkish invasions of Cyprus that had stormed across the northern tier of the island in the preceding summer, I stood in the square of Lawrence Durrell’s old village of Bellapaix and watched the Greek villagers being rounded up for deportation to the south. Within a short space of time, almost 200,000 people had been forcibly expelled, so this little uprooting job was more in the nature of a mopping-up operation, involving those who had been too old or young or ill to be removed the first time round. Many miles to the south, a comparable scene was being enacted in Turkish Cypriot villages near Limassol. With the assistance of British forces, but with very little say in the matter, Turks were escorted to our military bases and flown to Anatolia for onward shipment to the voided Greek villages of the north. The behaviour patterns, if I can employ such a neutral word for such a heart-rending thing, were strikingly similar in each instance. People would tearfully gather handfuls of earth and wrap them in handkerchiefs. They would take leave of their respective Turkish and Greek neighbours, often leaving them the key to the door and receiving tearful promises to look after the old place.

What I was witnessing was the last phase of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, whereby Greece and Turkey, at the prompting of the post-Versailles powers, conducted a rigorous ‘population exchange’. As part of a final settlement of their catastrophic war in Asia Minor, of which our main literary memory is probably Ernest Hemingway’s terse little story ‘On the Beach at Smyrna’, the two countries shipped about two million souls in opposite directions across the Aegean sea. The criterion for removal was religion: the treaty spoke of transferring ‘Orthodox Christians’ in one direction and ‘Muslims’ in another.