Migration in the Southern Balkans: From Ottoman Territory to Globalized Nation States

Front matter

[08 * ag eee > IMISCOE Research Series

Hans Vermeulen Martin Baldwin-Edwards Riki van Boeschoten® Editors

Migration in the Southern Balkans

Preface

The idea for the current volume emerged in a working group on migration of the Via Egnatia Foundation (www.viaegnatiafoundation.eu).! This working group was established during a conference the Foundation held in Bitola in February 2009. One of the purposes of the Foundation is to promote communication and understanding between the countries belonging to the ‘catchment area’ of the Via Egnatia—that is, Albania, the (former Yugoslav) Republic of Macedonia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey. In this book the term ‘Southern Balkans’ refers to these five countries.

In the early nineteenth century the Southern Balkans was still part of the Ottoman Empire. This started to change when the small Greek state was founded in 1830. Almost 50 years later the region saw the birth of another new nation state— Bulgaria (1878). In the period up to the Balkan Wars both states gained new territory, but the Ottomans still controlled a broad corridor from the Albanian coast on the west to Istanbul in the east (Fig. 1). This corridor or belt—consisting mainly of Albania, Macedonia and Thrace—might be called the Via Egnatia region since the Via Egnatia runs straight through it from Dürres in the west to Istanbul in the east. The countries of the Via Egnatia region share a memory of a fairly recent Ottoman past involving at least part of their national territories. It can be considered a distinctive region especially in terms of the population movements during and following the Balkan Wars (1912-1913).

' For the results of the conference see Via Egnatia Foundation (ed.) (2010), Via Egnatia Revisited: Common Past, Common Future. Skopje: Kolektiv.

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Fig. 1 The Ottoman Empire in the Balkans before the First Balkan War (1912)

As social scientists and others have remarked, the history of the region—both the narrower Via Egnatia region and the Southern Balkans as a whole—has resulted in conflicting interpretations of the past and the present which are often the product of narrow national(ist) frameworks. The linguistic diversity of the region also makes it difficult to widen one’s horizons and take other national perspectives into account. Researchers from outside the region confront these problems as well. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, both communication and mutual understanding have slowly started to improve. The increasing internationalization ofthe social sciences and the associated increase in the use of English in scientific publications in past decades has also contributed to these positive developments.

This book contains three maps. The first two black-and-white maps were made by Vasilis Soliopoulos who did this with dedication and without remuneration. We thank him for his excellent contribution to this book. The third map is in colour and is placed at the end of the book. We have included this well-known map by Carl Sax to give the reader a strong impression of the ethnic complexity of the Southern Balkans—a complexity with tremendous consequences for the character and volume of intra-regional migration.

Note on Transliteration

In transliterating Greek words and texts we have followed the system used by the Journal of Modern Greek Studies with one exception: we have left out the stress accents. For the transliteration of texts in Cyrillic script we use the ISO standard of transliteration, as used by the Ethnologia Balkanica journal. In the case of names of authors and institutions we have usually maintained the way these names are spelled in Latin script by these persons or institutions, so as to make it easier for the reader to find these in bibliographies.

Contents

1 Untroduction iiss. nieis sein Sie ba eee ten ee 1 Martin Baldwin-Edwards, Riki van Boeschoten and Hans Vermeulen

Petko Hristov

Raymond Detrez

Chapter 1 Introduction Martin Baldwin-Edwards, Riki van Boeschoten and Hans Vermeulen

Previous studies of migration in the Southern Balkans have been fragmented not only along national but also along disciplinary lines. Moreover, the fields of study of ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’ migration have been separate, with few interconnections. Our collection intends to bring these different traditions together, and in addition aims to promote mutual understanding between the citizens of the countries of the region, who are now increasingly linked through transnational and globalized networks. In order to achieve this goal, the volume adopts a dual approach to the study of migration in the area. On the one hand, it focuses on migration flows and intercultural exchanges exclusively within the region; on the other hand, it looks at contemporary migration against the background of historical developments during the last two centuries, while at the same time proposing alternative readings of this history. From a methodological point of view, this study reserves a special place for aspects of cultural history often lacking in the literature of migration—most notably, religion, personal name strategies, gender, family strategies, and ‘memory’. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to migration—with insights from history, anthropology, sociology, economic geography, political economy, and oral history— and utilizes empirical studies of the societies and polities under examination rather than more theoretical elaborations. Our aim is to go beyond the narrow focus of national narratives that have dominated historiography in the region, by identifying transnational or trans-regional bonds from Ottoman times until the present day and also by bringing in comparative perspectives, where appropriate. We consider that

M. Baldwin-Edwards (<) Former Director, Mediterranean Migration Observatory, Athens, Greece e-mail: mbe@mmo.gr

R. van Boeschoten Department I.A.K.A., University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece e-mail: riboush@uth. gr

H. Vermeulen University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: vermeulen.milies@gmail.com

© The Author(s) 2015. This book is published with open access at SpringerLink.com 1 H. Vermeulen et al. (eds.), Migration in the Southern Balkans, IMISCOE Research Series, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-13719-3_ 1 migration patterns, coping strategies of individual migrants, and public discourses on migration in the present cannot be explained solely by contemporary developments, since they are deeply influenced by cultural traditions from the past.

The remainder of this chapter—like the contributions that follow—is organized historically. We start with a short discussion of migration in the Ottoman Empire, also considering some aspects of the late Ottoman Empire that are relevant to issues of migration in subsequent historical periods (such as heterogeneity versus homogeneity and the issue of nationalism). This is followed by a brief discussion of the implications of World War II and its aftermath for migration in the region. Next, we look at migration during the Cold War period and developments since the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. We conclude by looking briefly at some consequences for intra-regional migration of the economic crisis that started in 2008.

1.1 Migration in Ottoman Times

Immigration, emigration, and internal migration all played a crucial role in the history of the Ottoman Empire. Immigration was a characteristic of the hey-day of the Ottoman Empire when many people found a safe haven and better economic prospects there. A typical case was that of the Spanish Jews who fled persecution in Spain and arrived in large numbers in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, settling in urban centres in the Balkans—especially in Salonika and Constantinople (Mazower 2004, pp. 47-52). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Empire was in decline and disintegrating, many Ottoman subjects (mainly Christians and Jews) left for the USA (Ipek and Cagayan 2008). From the very beginning the Ottoman Empire was a ‘moveable empire’, as Kasaba (2009) phrases it, and the diverse populations in the Empire were frequently on the move—either voluntarily or forced by the authorities. The remarkable population transfers (sürgün) organized by the Ottoman authorities in the early period of the Ottoman Empire involved transfers of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish populations within the Empire (see, e.g., Hoerder 2002, pp. 111, 113, 117), while the devsirme—the levy of young Christian boys for service in the Ottoman army—also implied migration over large distances within the Empire, in this case of individuals (Lucassen 2009, pp. 21—22).

Besides these population movements between different parts of the Empire, there was also considerable movement within the (Southern) Balkans itself. Seasonal movements of agricultural labourers or of shepherds between winter and summer pastures, as well as the migration of itinerant artisans and traders, were all part of everyday experience. Part of this itinerant population subsequently settled in new locations. In Chap. 2, Petko Hristov describes these traditional forms of migrant labour, focusing on the Slavic-speaking part of the Southern Balkans and more specifically on Sopluk and Mijak, two mountainous border regions with a long tradition of migrant labour. There was also an almost continuous movement from the mountains to the plains, or in the opposite direction, depending on the security and health conditions prevailing in the Empire. The late Ottoman period saw new migration movements. Following the growth of trade in the late seventeenth century, thousands of Greek merchants established themselves in the cities in the northern part of our region as well as in the Northern Balkans, Central Europe, and southern Russia (Vermeulen 1984, p. 230). During the nineteenth century, cities in the Slavic-speaking regions—previously inhabited mainly by Turks, Greeks and Jews—saw their religious and ethnic composition transformed owing to the increasing migration of Slavic and Vlach speakers (Sahara 2011).

While the creation of nation states erected barriers to the free movement of shepherds, itinerant merchants, and all those who wanted to try their luck across state borders, it is difficult to get a clear picture of the volume and state regulation of cross-border migration within the Southern Balkans in the early phases of state formation. Some sources suggest that cross-border migration greatly diminished. Fatsea (2011), for example, found no evidence of the presence of foreign labour in the Athenian labour market during the founding phase of modern Athens (1830- 1850).! A clear case of cross-border movement is the migration from the small and poor Greek state to Asia Minor in the years immediately after independence (1832). This migration—a continuation of migration flows since the eighteenth century— contributed significantly to the growth of the Greek population there (Adanır 2009, p. 64; Kitromilides 2008, p. 287).

1.2 Heterogeneity and Homogeneity in the Southern Balkans During the Last Period of Ottoman Rule

The frequent migrations during the Ottoman period contributed to the heterogeneity of the Southern Balkans in terms of language, religion and the origin of its inhabitants. The ‘ethnic’ diversity of the Southern Balkans in Ottoman times is often perceived as being due to two factors. The first factor is the large number of ‘ethnic’ groups living there—a complex situation that many authors describe using the same ethno-national categories as we use today, such as Greeks, Turks, Bulgarians, Serbians, Montenegrins, Albanians, Gypsies and Jews. Second, these groups did not live side by side in neatly separated territories, but were to a large degree intermingled, especially in Macedonia and Thrace (see Sax map in the Appendix). Though such a picture gives some idea of the ‘ethnic’ complexity and cultural diversity of the region, it is potentially misleading, because it applies present-day categories to the

' Most of the skilled labour force in the building sector at that time was recruited from the Greek islands (Cyclades). Several authors, however, mention the presence of Bulgarian and Macedonian workers (masons) in Greece in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see, e.g., Miller 1905; Grigorova and Zaimova 2012).

? Brunnbauer and Esch (2006, p. 14) make the same point for both the Ottoman and Habsburg empires.

past. People at the time did not see themselves in terms of such categories, although they slowly learned—and were taught and obliged—to do so.

How did the peasants—the overwhelming majority of the population—see themselves before the nationalist world-view reached them? Let us look briefly at the Orthodox population of the Balkans.* Simple peasants at the time would have seen themselves first of all as members of a family and village. Next, they would have identified themselves as members of a religious community—in our case, the Christian Orthodox one. The Ottoman Empire was organized into religious communities, the so-called millets. The Orthodox millet was known as the Rum millet and those who belonged to it called themselves Christians or—less frequently—Rum (in Turkish), Romios (in Greek), or some equivalent in another Balkan language. Though a religious label, the term also had a Greek connotation. The Orthodox millet was dominated by a Greek-speaking elite and the Greek language, called Romeika in Greek at the time, was the language of the church or millet and of the schools run by it. Besides the Orthodox millet, there were Jewish, Armenian and Muslim ones: each consisted of people speaking different languages. However, peasants were not only members of families, villages and religious communities. There were many named groups at an intermediate level, between village and religious community, such as the Hashiots (very poor, Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians), Dönme (Jewish Muslims), Vallahades (Greek-speaking Macedonian Muslims), Gagauzes (Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians), and Pomaks or Torbesh (Slav-speaking Muslims).

Before the rise of nationalism the term ‘Bulgar’ (or some variant of it) did exist, but usually had the connotation of ‘poor Slav-speaking peasant’. Upwardly mobile Slav-speakers became Hellenized and no longer considered themselves Bulgars. Greek-speakers usually referred to themselves as Romios, but a Bulgar as a member of the Greek-dominated Orthodox Church or Rum millet could do so as well (see, e.g., Detrez 2013). The notion of ‘Turk’ also had a different meaning than it has today—being used for Muslims, even when their native language was not Turkish but Albanian, Greek or Slav. It also had connotations of status. For the Ottoman elite, the Osmanlı, the term ‘Turk’ had the connotation of country bumpkin (see, e.g., Lewis 1971, pp. 19-20; Mazower 2001, p. 51).

Gellner (1997, p. 20) argues that cultural diversity or differentiation as well as its maintenance over time was central to agrarian societies like the Ottoman Empire:

Agrarian society encourages cultural differentiation within itself. Such differentiation greatly helps in its daily functioning. Agrarian society depends on the maintenance of a complex system of ranks, and it is important that these be both visible and felt, that they be externalised and internalised. If they are clearly seen in all external aspects of conduct, in dress, commensality, accent, body posture, limits of permissible consumption and so forth, this eliminates ambiguity and thus diminishes friction.

Notwithstanding the enormous cultural differentiation and complexity, the student of the Southern Balkans can hardly miss the cultural similarities that also existed across linguistic and religious boundaries (Detrez 2013), and in this case migration

3 The following description is mainly based on Vermeulen (1995, 1984). See also Detrez (2013).

played a role as well. Weakley (1993, p. 130) provides us with a good example. Writing about the houses constructed by Greek itinerant builders over a vast area in the Southern Balkans, he comments on people speaking different languages and professing different religions:

The differences are seen in slight variations in plan and in certain detail elements.... The key design element was a single housing form for a pluralistic and diverse culture (ibid., italics original).*

This unity of Balkan culture can be observed not only in architecture, but also in music, cuisine, kinship, religious beliefs and practices, and in other cultural domains.> Perhaps most remarkable are the linguistic similarities. According to specialists like Friedman (2011), the Balkans constitutes a linguistic area with common characteristics: Balkan languages, despite their diverse origins, show many similarities in their grammar, called Balkanisms. Perhaps more important for our introduction is the domain of religion: there is abundant evidence of syncretic religious beliefs and practices in regions where Muslims, Christians and Jews lived in close proximity. Syncretism existed in many places in the Balkans and the rest of the Ottoman Empire.’ Remnants of such syncretism still exist in the region and are visible, for example, in the sharing of sacred places (Albera and Couroucli 2012; Duijzings 2000). In Chap. 7, on Albanian immigrants in Thessaloniki, Ifigeneia Kokkali considers syncretism in Albania and Albanian history. In an attempt to explain the remarkable way in which Albanians integrate into Greek society—and more specifically the role that religion plays in this process—she looks at the context of reception as well as Albanian history and the ‘cultural baggage’ that Albanians bring with them. A certain ‘syncretic attitude’ towards religion is one element of her analysis.

1.3 Creating National Identities

Before the advent of nationalism, the major identity split in the Balkans was between Muslims and Christians. Most Muslims were Turkish-speaking, but those who spoke other languages were often also called Turks and could identify themselves as such. There was a similar correspondence between Christian and Rum.

4 Slav-speaking and Greek-speaking itinerant builders moved roughly in the same geographic region. It could well be that the building styles of Greek and Slav-speaking builders differed only slightly.

> Regarding kinship see Kaser 2008. Kaser’s study includes Albania, Macedonia, northern Greece (Epirus, Thessaly and Macedonia), and the western part of Bulgaria (2008, p. 12). Turkey is not included.

€ Balkan linguistics was the first modern approach that ‘attempted to deal theoretically with the consequences of language contact’. As a consequence ‘no general work on language contact can avoid mentioning the Balkans’ (Friedman 2011, p. 276).

7 Kitromilides (2008, p. 259) refers to the ‘extensive religious syncretism at the grass-roots’ among the Greeks of Anatolia and mentions the well-known early study by Hasluck (1929). For the Balkans see, e.g., Stavro Skendi (1967) and Duijzings (2000).

In the early phases of Balkan nationalism when the Rum millet was still intact, Orthodox Albanian and Slav speakers tended—as Rum—to participate in the Greek struggle for independence, though some of them subsequently became fervent nationalists of their own linguistic nation.’ Whatever assimilation existed in the Ottoman Empire occurred mainly within the millets. Among native Muslim groups this tendency continues to exist in some places to this day. Smaller Muslim groups tend to identify with, and to assimilate to, the dominant Muslim minority within a particular country or region rather than the dominant Christian majority.’ This illustrates that ‘in many ways the legacy of the Ottoman millet system has endured as religion continues to be an important differentiating factor among people’ (Poulton 1997, pp. 20-21).

The unity of the Orthodox community started to break down when the Greek national Church was founded in 1833. The real split came, however, with the foundation of the Exarchist Church in 1878. Although the original goal was ‘only’ to introduce the Bulgarian language in the liturgy, the church soon became an instrument in the Bulgarian national struggle. From that moment, Bulgarian-speaking peasants were confronted with a difficult choice: to remain in the Greek-dominated Patriarchist Church and ‘become Greek’ or to go over to the Exarchist Church and become Bulgarian. Whole villages, particularly in areas to the south bordering on the territory of Greek-speakers, became divided into Greek and Bulgarian parties. Similar processes took place in Albanian-speaking and Aromanian-speaking Orthodox villages (Van der Plank 2004, p. 90; Vermeulen 1984, pp. 242—243). Schools played a major role in inculcating a national identity: during the nationalist campaigns in Macedonia, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, the number of Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian schools increased dramatically.

Greek-speaking Orthodox individuals, belonging to the culturally dominant group within the Rum millet, were confronted with such difficult choices to a much lesser extent, but even they had to learn to be Greek. As Kitromilides (1989, p. 169) writes of the Greek communities in Asia Minor, the identification with the Greek nation ‘had to be instilled and cultivated, or “awakened”, as older nationalist historiography might say, through a crusade of national education’. Dragostinova (2008, 2011) writes in a similar way about the Greeks who lived on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. Though most of these Greeks supported the Greek national idea, they had strong ties to their places of birth, were reluctant to emigrate and some opted for Bulgarian nationality. Moreover, the Greek government organized there ‘a massive enterprise of national persuasion by dispatching activists’ (Dragostinova 2008, p. 167; 2011, pp. 24-31).

8 Examples are Vasil Aprilov (Stavrianos 2000, p. 371) and Grigor Parlitcheff (Grigorova and Zaimova 2012).

° See, e.g., Marushiavoka and Popov (n.d.) for Bulgaria.

1.4 Unmixing Populations and ‘Cleaning’ the National Territory: Forced and ‘Voluntary’ Migration in the Age of Nation State Formation

The rise of nationalism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had great consequences for the Southern Balkans. In the early nineteenth century, the entire region was still part of the Ottoman Empire; by 1923 the Southern Balkans were divided between five nation states—Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania and Turkey. Greece was the first to break away with its War of Independence of 1821—1828, ultimately achieving recognition of a small territorial state (consisting of Attica, the Peloponnese and the Cycladic islands) in 1830—1832. Further territorial expansions included the Ionian Islands (1864) and Thessaly (1881).'° Nevertheless, by 1912 over five million Greeks (mostly Ottoman citizens) remained outside the territory in Macedonia, Epirus, Thrace, Asia Minor, Cyprus, the Aegean Islands, Crete and southern Russia (Petsalis-Diomidis 1978, p. 15). In 1912 the Balkan League, consisting of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro, attacked Ottoman troops in an attempt to expel the Ottomans from the peninsula. This was succeeded by the Second Balkan War, started by Bulgaria (see below). As a result of these two Balkan wars, Greece’s territory expanded massively to include Crete, much of Macedonia, Epirus and the Aegean Islands. Sovereignty of the Aegean Islands was finally confirmed by the Treaty of Sevres (1920), although the disastrous Greco-Turkish war that followed resulted in considerable loss of territory'' as determined by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.

Following the Greek pattern, Bulgarian revolutionaries engaged in a series of uprisings against the Ottomans, but were unable to dislodge Ottoman power. It was not until Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire that the peace of the San Stefano Treaty (1876) created the first Bulgarian state. This was bitterly opposed by the Austro-Hungarian and British empires, and in 1878 the Treaty of Berlin reduced the new Bulgarian state to a ‘principality’ that was 37.5 % of its original size, returned Macedonia to Ottoman rule and created a new autonomous state of Eastern Rumelia—also Ottoman territory (Crampton 2005, pp. 81-83). Just seven years later, Eastern Rumelia’s military coup of 1885 reunited it with Bulgaria; this was formalized in Bulgaria’s declaration of full independence in 1908. As a result of the subsequent First Balkan War, Bulgaria greatly expanded. Dissatisfied with the division of the spoils in Macedonia, however, Bulgaria then attacked Greek and Serbian positions, thus starting the Second Balkan War. It lost this war, as well as most of the

10 For a detailed exposition of the evolution of the Greek Kingdom, see Wagstaff (2002, p. 65-112). 1 As a result of Greek military conquest in Western Anatolia after World War I, the Treaty of Sèvres confirmed acquisition of most of the Aegean islands and the entirety of Eastern Thrace excluding Constantinople, established procedures for the transfer of all Dodecanese islands to Greece, and awarded autonomy of Smyrna and the Asia Minor littoral to Greek administration under Ottoman sovereignty, along with a procedure for its incorporation into Greece after a period of five years (Wagstaff 2002, p. 90).

territorial gains obtained as a result of the first war. The net result of both wars was not insignificant, though: Bulgaria had obtained Eastern Thrace and its access to the Aegean Sea. Ten years later, at Lausanne, it would lose this as well.

Albanian nationalism had no equivalent of the Philhellenism of the European elites, or even the pan-Slavist movement in Russia (Vickers and Pettifer 1997, pp. 1-2); with no support from the ‘Great Powers’ (i.e., the international community), Albanian independence was to be both delayed and fractured.'? From the very outset, Albanian aspirations conflicted with Greek ones, and initially this strengthened Albanian support for the Ottomans. After the 1908 rise to power of the ‘Young Turks’, by 1909 the Albanian Kosovars were in revolt, and by 1911 Kemal had agreed in principle to Albanian demands for autonomy—in line with those conceded to other Balkan nationalities (Kondis 1976, p. 54). However, an Albanian provisional government was achieved only as a consequence of the two Balkan wars and the 1913 Treaty of Bucharest. After a period of anarchy, the borders of Albania were finally settled with the Corfu Protocol of 1914.1 Before this could be applied, World War I broke out, leaving a poorly-equipped new Albanian state to cope with it (Kondis 1976, pp. 132-133, 137).

What is now the Republic of Macedonia!‘ was for a very short time part of ‘San Stefano Bulgaria’ until it was returned to the Ottoman Empire by the Congress of Berlin in 1878. After the Balkan Wars, with the Treaty of Bucharest (1913), Macedonia was divided between Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria. When the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was formed after World War I, it became part of the federal state that during World War II was transformed into the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. During both world wars the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia—as well as Greek Eastern Macedonia and Thrace—was temporarily occupied by Bulgaria, which still claimed it as its own. Macedonia gained its independence only in 1991, after the break-up of Yugoslavia.

The modern Republic of Turkey is, of course, what remains of the former Ottoman Empire. As a member of the Axis Powers, the Ottoman Empire belonged to the camp of the losers of World War I. In 1919, Kemal Ataturk started a revolt against both the Ottoman government and the occupying allied forces: the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923) resulted in the end of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of modern Turkey.

Carving out more or less homogeneous nation states was not an easy task, especially in the Via Egnatia region with its mosaic of cultures characterized by hybridity and syncretism. No wonder it became an arduous and cruel process, notwithstanding the emphasis on heroism and national glory in the historiography of

12 By 1914, Albania had the support of both Austria-Hungary and Italy, who were keen to limit the size and power of a Russian-backed Serbia (Kondis 1976, p. 137).

13 However, this agreement left substantial Albanian minorities in Serbia (Kosovo) and Bulgaria (Macedonia).

14 Tt should be noted that the name of the country remains disputed by Greece, and its constitutional name—Republic of Macedonia—is not recognized by Greece or the UN. The provisional name agreed in 1993 was the ‘former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’, which Greece abbreviates as FYROM.

the individual nations. Creating homogeneous nation states and national cultures required a lot of work in many domains: a national history had to be written and the national language, religion and landscape had to be purified—freed from ‘foreign’ elements. Religion and national identity became strongly linked, especially in Turkey and Greece, with Albania constituting the only real exception. There, the continuing co-existence of Islam and Christianity in its Orthodox and Catholic variants prevented a close link between national identity and religion while leaving some space for the continuation of syncretic attitudes and practices.

Purifying the nation also implied demographic engineering, the unmixing of ethno-religious populations, or the ethnic cleansing of the new national territories’ ‘foreign populations’ (Sigalas and Toumarkine 2008; Zürcher 2008). Landscapes were nationalized by giving places with ‘foreign’ names new, ‘national’ names. Cultural monuments that evoked the presence of others were often used for new purposes or neglected, if not destroyed. Forced migration and other, more obnoxious, ways of ethnic cleansing such as massacres and the burning of villages were recurrent phenomena.

In the Southern Balkans, the Greek War of Independence marked the beginning of this process, leading to the deaths not only of soldiers but also of many civilians. The Greeks, perceiving they were on the winning side, seized their chance and cruelly murdered many Turkish civilians—for example, at the massacre of Tripolitsa. The Turks took revenge in Constantinople, Smyrna and on the island of Chios (see, e.g., Rodogno 2012, p. 66), with this last massacre, especially, gaining much attention in Europe at the time. Woodhouse (1977, p. 136) concludes, ‘On both sides atrocities were appalling.” Those Muslims who had been able to save their lives fled the small independent Greek state and migrated northwards to Ottoman-held territory (McCarthy 1995, pp. 10-13). In the Russian-Turkish War (1877—1878) the victorious Russian troops, supported by Bulgarian irregulars, took revenge on the Turks (McCarthy 1995, pp. 65-81). Large numbers were killed and many fled to Ottoman territories. Cities like Thessaloniki and Istanbul were flooded by masses of refugees (see Akyalgin-Kaya 2011 for Thessaloniki). According to Mazower (2001, p. 11), over the period 1878-1913 some 1.7—2 million Muslims migrated voluntarily or involuntarily from the Balkans to what later would become the Republic of Turkey. By the 1880s, the Ottoman administration had already sent experts to sensitive border areas such as Thrace to see if refugees could be settled there to make these areas more Turkish (Adanir 2006, p. 177).

The two Balkan Wars (1912—1913) mentioned above were a combination of fighting, burning villages, massacring people and putting people to flight. As the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars wrote, ‘The Turks are fleeing before the Christians, the Bulgarians before the Greeks and the Turks, the Greeks and Turks before the Bulgarians, the Albanians before the Servians’ (Carnegie 1914, p. 154).

World War I (1914-1918) brought new population movements, mainly as a result of changing state borders, and was followed by the Greco-Turkish War which was at least as violent as the Balkan Wars. Until the Balkan Wars, the main (forced) migration movement had been that of Muslims from the Balkans to Turkey. As a result, by 1923 over 20% of the population of Turkey consisted of people with muhacir (that is, refugee) background (Zürcher 2003, p. 6). The wars ‘caused a staggering refugee problem that was estimated by independent observers to have involved up to three million people’ (Kitromilides 2008, p. 256).