Homeland as Terra Pericolosa: Post-Catastrophe Homecoming Narratives of Smyrniote Greeks in Early Republican Turkey

Abstract:The Great Fire of Smyrna (Izmir) in September 1922 and the subsequent population exchange had fatal consequences for Ottoman Christian communities, namely Orthodox Greeks (Rums) and Armenians. The 1930 Convention of Settlement, Commerce, and Navigation, a treaty between Greece and Turkey (the Greco-Turkish Ankara Convention), would later permit individual resettlement of persons but not of groups en masse. In the early 1950s, some Smyrniote Greeks, including Giorgos Seferis, Olga Vatidou, and Giorgos Tzavelopoulos, managed to visit their ethnically cleansed homeland and write (or in some cases, orally transmit) their memoirs. These individuals, former Ottoman citizens who were excluded from Turkish national identity and returned to a "new and wholly Turkish Izmir," embarked on personal pilgrimages that haunted the contours of the young Turkish Republic's national identity.