Armenians being deported from Turkey during the Armenian genocide, circa 1915. Narek/Flickr. Some rights reserved.Being of Armenian descent, I was born into the history of Asia Minor, an exotic sounding nomenclature used by my grandfather’s generation when speaking of their homeland. Asia Minor was used interchangeably with Anatolia, and Smyrna (Izmir).
Exact numbers vary, but prior to WWI and the Turkification of the region, Asia Minor had for thousands of years been home to several million Greeks, several million Armenians, and other non-Turkish ethnic groups. A series of ill-fated events have marked this time in history as the “Asia Minor Disaster”. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, culminating with the end of the Greek-Turkish War and the burning of Smyrna in 1922, Greeks, Armenians, and other minority Christians indigenous to the region were all but expunged. A compulsory population exchange brokered by WWI Allies removed the remaining Greek Orthodox Christians of Anatolia to Greece. In exchange, the Turkish-Muslim population that had been in Greece was moved to Turkey.
At this time Greece was in financial straights. Exhausted by wars, debt bondage, the Depression, and oppressive unemployment, approximately 1.3 million Greek refugees were added to Greece’s demoralized population. And then Greece defaulted on its national debt. Sound familiar?
