The documentary 'Twice a Stranger' was based on Bruce Clark's book. This is really the best starting point for reading about the exchange of populations.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=kVZ3sLBEPEcC&pg=PA21&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=falseFrom the reviews on Amazon:
This is the best book I have read on the tragic Greek-Turkish "population exchange" of the 1920s. I found the book remarkable for several reasons: One is its organization. Chapters alternate between diplomatic history and human suffering stories, many of them based on interviews with survivors of that era. This has a powerful effect on the reader who sees how people were dying while "diplomats talked." Another is its fairness in discussing the responsibilities of each side. (The official Greek and Turkish positions place all the blame on the other side.) And finally the coverage of the suffering of the Muslims that were sent from Greece to Turkey as part of the "exchange." As the books states on p. 161 "In most cases, the fate of these migrants was not as terrible as that of the Anatolian Christians who fled either in the heat of war, or as a result of forced marches followed by forced embarkations on ships riddled with disease; but the Muslim exodus was bad enough."
I have a special interest in the history of the region because both of my parents were born in Turkey and their families ended up in Greece as part of the exchange. My mother's family had to flee with a few hours notice following the retreating Greek army so they would not be slaughtered by Turkish irregulars. My father's family were Cappadocian Turkish speaking Christians. While their departure was more orderly they found themselves strangers in their new country. About 10 years or so ago I met a young Turkish college student who had a summer job in a hotel. He spoke some Greek and I asked him how he learned it. He told me his grandparents were Greek speaking Muslims from Crete and he described the difficulties they had in adjusting in Turkey, a story that mirrored exactly that of my father's family. I also realized that his grandparents must have had fond memories of Greece to teach their grandson the language. For what it is worth, what Clark describes seems to fit exactly my personal experience and my family's oral history.
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My maternal grandparents were Orthodox Christians from Cappadocia. As a child I was told I was Greek; they were Greek, yet they spoke mostly Turkish. I noticed the other Greeks I met in the community were different than my grandparents. When I got to high school, after having lived in Greece for a year, I began asking questions of my grandmother, who told me many details of their Christian lives in a small town outside of Kayseri,then of the march out of Cappadocia, the ship to Greece that ran out of food as they had nowhere to put the refugees, finally debarking and being housed on the floor of a church until the parishioners got angry. She told me they were lucky; her father got a job as a teacher in orphange, as he was educated, a teacher certified by the patriarchate and so ended up on Evia at an American run orphanage. My grandfather and great uncle had escaped with false visas more than ten years earlier. I never fully understood why, based on my reading, the accounts of my grandfather and his brother having to escape at age 14. Now I do. Now I understand why the accounts that I've read from different regions of Anatolia are so different. I appreciated the author's methodology to get to every ethnic and regional group, and all the political parties that put their two cents in and influenced all these people who didn't want to go anywhere.
I have read all the history books and personal accounts I could find but all were clearly heavily biased and didn't reflect all of my grandparents' accounts. My grandparents never spoke ill of the Turkish people, only the Turkish soldiers. I wondered why my grandmother constantly referenced clothing, music, food, or anything to being Turkish-like. I wondered how they came to be called Greeks when my grandfather's written family history shows them having lived in the same valley for at least three hundred years. His ancestors were Persian; my grandmother's were from one of the -stahn countries, southeast of the Caspian Sea. Their family photos looked Mongolian, not Greek.
I once asked my grandmother how she could leave her home, her parents and siblings in Greece to marry a man she'd never met in the United States. (She never saw her parents again and didn't see her siblings for forty five years.)Her answers were forever etched in my mind.
First: She didn't like the Greek "boys" and where they were living wasn't "home." The man she was to marry was from her own village, and although she didn't know him other than to have seen him at church he was their kind.
Second was a lesson for my own marriage and a theme discussed in the book when refugee Christians moved into Muslim homes and shared their homes until the Muslims were deported. "Any two people can live together forever and be happy, if they both work at it." It seems that any two peoples can live together forever and be happy, if there are no politicians involved.
To bear out the last point I remember walking in the Ihlara valley in Cappadocia in the late 80s and coming across a couple of old women dressed in black and talking in Greek, the typical Greek grandmothers really. It turned out they were sisters who lived in Piraeus, but this was their home village. Their family had been expelled in the population exchange when they were small children. At some point they had decided to visit, made friends with the villagers who now lived there, themselves the descendants of Muslim refugees from Bulgaria, and since then had returned for a couple of weeks every summer as their guests. As Cappadocians their first language as children would have been Turkish rather than Greek so communication wouldn't have been a problem.
Topic: Greek island refugee crisis