Losing a Homeland, 1923–1924 lims may be considered as completely terminated from said date,” the
French official in charge of the population exchange at Thessaloníki told
the governor-general of Macedonia.^9 The Treaty of Lausanne, signed on
July 24 , 1923 by Britain, France, Italy, Greece, and a Turkish delegation,
was the final outcome of the civil war between Orthodox Christians (with
foreign assistance from Greece and Britain) and Muslims (Turks and
Kurds primarily).^10 After three years of warfare and political organizing,
by 1922 , the movement led by Atatürk had succeeded in its aim of win-
ning political independence from occupation by Britain and France and
their Greek allies. Atatürk had been one of the founders of a branch of the
Ottoman Freedom Society—which played a key role in the revolution of
1908 ,^11 and which was closely related to Freemasonry, like the CUP being
based in a Salonikan Masonic lodge.^12 Atatürk was a native of Ottoman
Salonika. The future leader of Greece, Eleuthérios Venizélos, was a native
of Ottoman Crete. The two leaders, despite being raised in cosmopolitan
imperial environments, or because of it, sought to rule over homogeneous
populations in their respective nation-states.
The treaty Greece and Turkey signed contained several key clauses
that would serve this end. Non-Muslims in Turkey gave up the privi-
leges of communal autonomy in order to be treated as equal citizens. As
Clermont-Tonnerre proposed in revolutionary France in 1789 , the prin-
ciple was to the individual member of a religious community, everything,
to the community, nothing.^13 Turkey became a secular republic, in which
Islam was disestablished; soon afterward, the caliphate and sultanate were
abolished. Most important, the Lausanne Treaty included the Lausanne
Convention, signed January 30 , 1923 , which compelled an “exchange” of
populations between Greece and Turkey. British Foreign Secretary Lord
Curzon labeled the process “the unmixing of peoples.”^14 New nations
sought an imagined authenticity; cultural mixing was seen as negative
and decadent, a threat to the purity of the nation. As a Greek staff officer
wrote soon after his army took Salonika from the Ottomans, “How can
one like a city with this cosmopolitan society, nine-tenths of it Jews. It
has nothing Greek about it, nor European.”^15 Sami Zubaida notes how
“Cosmopolitanism is abhorred by nationalists,” which was “echoed by
Atatürk.”^16 To Roel Meijer, analyzing trends in Alexandria, Beirut, and
Istanbul, “The revolution that sounded the death knell of cosmopolitan-
ism was proclaimed in the name of ‘authentic’... indigenous values.
After the fall of the cosmopolitan elite and the exodus of Greeks, Italians,