The Meanings of Home: The Case of the Vinan Refugee Families and the 1923 Greek-Turkish Population Exchange

Abstract

With drastic changes in borders and regimes in the post-World War I period, what meaning did home have for those on the ground? How can we understand different conceptualizations of “home” and “homeland”? The 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange enshrined a notion of “unmixing” that rested on a presumed overlap between religion and ethnicity: Orthodox Christians in Anatolia would be deported to Greece and Greek Muslim nationals would be deported to Turkey. The reduction of identity left other communities that necessarily did not understand themselves as “Turks” or “Greeks” vulnerable to deportation. This article examines the case of an Albanian-speaking Muslim village in Greece, Vinan (Vineni), and the people from there who were deported to Turkey as part of the exchange process. This case illuminates the ways refugees navigated consulates and new national regimes in an attempt to return to their original village. New migration pathways and concepts of home and homeland were negotiated through the process with and for the refugees. This article takes the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange as an ongoing process of forging new migration pathways and conceptions of home, as opposed to understanding the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange as a singular event.

Introduction

Empires have utilized deportations and population exchanges to protect their sovereignty and power over regions. ¹ Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, imperial powers and nation-states have used deportations and population exchanges to homogenize their borders. What set the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange apart from previous treaties and agreements is the language of compulsory movement linked with the nation-state. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne marked the last of the World War I treaties. Lausanne intended to provide a diplomatic solution to the Greek-Turkish War of 1919–1922, offer a solution to the “Eastern Question,” and promote “future peace” in the region. The treaty set several important aspects in motion that included the following: Lausanne recognized Turkey as a state, fixed minority statuses for Muslims in Western Thrace in Greece and Orthodox Christians in Constantinople, settled Ottoman debts amongst new successor states, and sanctioned a compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey (Conlin and Ozavci, eds. 2023.) ² Recent scholarship has shown how Eleutherios Venizelos, Turkish delegates, and European imperial powers all played critical roles in coming up with plans of “unmixing” (Yıldırım 2006, 1–22; Blumi 2013, 2–4; and Iğsız 2022, 272–275; Cowan 2008, 347). Venizelos, leader of the Greek delegation at Lausanne, held on to the idea that a Christian nation such as Greece had not been interested in governing Muslim citizens. Venizelos believed that Christians could not be governed by “inferior Muslim civilization” (Venizelos 1919, 2–3). During the peace conference in 1913 after the Balkan Wars, Venizelos proposed the idea of the exchanging of populations between the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria. In 1919, Venizelos initially proposed the idea of a Greek-Bulgarian exchange during discussions that led to the signing of the Treaty of Neuilly (Weitz 2008, 1335). Turkish delegates at Lausanne were keen to ratify a population exchange with Greece to expel all its non-Muslim minorities in the wake of the Greek-Turkish War (1919–1922) and the 1915 Armenian genocide (Kiesar 2023, 2–11).

The 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange provided a systematic and legalized form of ethnic cleansing that persisted in previous decades of state policies by the Ottomans, Turkish nationalists, and Greek nationalists. Examples of previous policies of ethnic cleansing include, but not limited to, the massacres and forced deportations of Pontic Greeks across Anatolia (1913); massacres of Armenians and Assyrians in Adana (1909); and multiple waves of Muslim refugees from the Balkans who fled local violence beginning in the 1860s, through the two brutal Balkan Wars, and after the WWI agreements had been finalized (1919–1923) (Astourian 2011, 55–81). The two Balkan Wars transformed the demography of the region. The burning of villages and exodus of the defeated population had been common practices during both Balkan Wars (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 1914, 71; Zürcher 1993, 166). The violence of the First Balkan War produced over 400,000 Muslim refugees. By September 1912, another 135,000 Balkan Muslim refugees reached the port of Salonika (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 1914, 279). Over one million refugees lost their lives either in flight, through massacres, starvation, or epidemics (Pekesen 2012, 7).

Historian Michelle Tusan states it best: “The main innovation that the peace process yielded at the Lausanne Conference was the reimagining of empire in an anti-imperial age” (Tusan 2023, 198). Delegates at Lausanne, Lord Curzon, and Fridtjof Nansen believed a compulsory exchange would provide a solution to the Eastern Question and “future peace” in the Eastern Mediterranean. Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Minister who led the Military and Territorial Commission at the Lausanne conference, understood this moment of exchange as a process of “unmixing peoples,” built on a regional precedence that utilized deportation agreements and population exchanges in the 19th and 20th centuries to resolve violence (Dragostinova 2011; Weitz 2008, 1326; Philliou 2008, 672; Smith 2018, 177; and Robson 2017, 18–27; Shields 2016, 138). As Aslı Iğsız notes, Curzon and other political figures understood that the process of “unmixing peoples” would be a “bad and vicious solution for which the world will pay a heavy penalty for hundred years to come,” but it did not stop delegates at Lausanne to advocate for the exchange (Iğsız 2018, 1–3). On January 30, 1923, Greek and Turkish representatives signed the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations. The exchange enshrined the notion of unmixing, which rested upon a presumed overlap between religion and ethnicity: Orthodox Christians in Anatolia became categorized as Greeks and would be deported to Greece, and Muslims of Greece became categorized as Turks and would be deported to Turkey.

Literature on the study of the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange has often taken the lens of “unmixing” to understand the processes of deportation and nation-building projects in the post-World War I period. While “unmixing” can provide scholars with the tools to understand methods of nation-building in the early twentieth century, it often relies on dichotomies such as religion/ethnicity, Muslim/Christian, and Greece/Turkey, which – when examined through case studies – reveals the complexities of identities. ³ A critical intervention in the scholarship of the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange, this article utilizes unused archival materials from the Albanian Foreign Ministry archives to provide a non-elite perspective of the experience of those implicated in the exchange. Understanding the Greek-Turkish population exchange through the perceptions of the Albanian archives – both the presence of perspectives and silencing of others – reveals the complex entanglements of nation-building tools, such as population exchanges, in the Eastern Mediterranean. Secondly, this article engages with the historiography of transformation of conceptions of “homeland” in the post-World War I period. Wilsonian principles of “self-determination” and drawing of new national borders in Southeastern Europe and colonial borders in the Middle East equated “homeland” to ethno-cultural or ethno-religious identities (Smith 2011, 183–186; Weitz 2008, 1326–1333; Filippidou 2020, 146).

These conceptions of placemaking are often inscribed by national elites and European colonial powers. Nevertheless, there is a growing body of literature on perspectives regarding visions of the future as it pertains to placemaking, homeland, and community in the post-Ottoman space (Thompson 2020; Fraser 2015; Philliou 2021; Fahrenthold 2019; Stuckey 2021, 79–103; and Fahrenthold 2013, 32–57). ⁴ This article provides a case study perspective of a non-elite village – predominantly farmers – along the Prespa lakes who navigated ideas of home in the unfolding Greek-Turkish population exchange.

This article uses the village of Vinan (Vineni), Greece, to elucidate the complex processes of migration in the post-Ottoman period. I take the case of two hundred refugees of Vinan to illuminate the ways refugees navigate consulates and new national regimes in the post-World War I period. I argue that even through the process of “unmixing” and under a compulsory population exchange, refugees navigated and negotiated new pathways of migration and new ideas of “homeland.” I ask: How do refugees contest and shape the landscape of the process of population exchange and mass deportations? How do we understand the broader impacts of the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange through the Vinan refugee case? In what ways do the Vinan refugees challenge or affirm changing understandings of “repatriation” in the early 20th century?

This piece is divided into three different sections to answer these questions. First, I take a national approach to understand the perspective of Albanian, Greek, and Turkish diplomats during the negotiations and implementation of the Treaty of Lausanne. The section illuminates the important and invested role the Albanian state took in negotiations around the population exchange and its implementation. Understanding the stakes and importance of the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange had on Albanian politics and their own processes of state-building provides a context for understanding how the Albanian diplomats helped the Vinan refugees navigate their deportation from Greece to Turkey. Further, this section illuminates Turkish delegates’ apprehension of accepting any Albanian Muslims in the exchange. At the table, Greek delegates agreed to the exclusion of Albanians. The second section examines the deportation of Albanian-speaking Muslim families from Vinan to their first settlement in Ezine, Turkey. The section discusses the ways Vinan refugees petitioned, negotiated, and navigated a range of actors including the Albanian Consulate, representatives of the Mixed Commission, and the Turkish government. The third section examines the process of the “repatriation” of Vinan refugees to Albania. As Katy Long states, “in part because the compulsory population exchange recognized that the new form of nation-state political organization required a more abstract form of ‘repatriation,’ that replaced ‘home’ with a more abstract concept of national belonging to the territorial state” (Long 2011, 236). Repatriation stressed the natural affinity between ethno-cultural identities and home in the broader sense of “homeland.” I utilize the term “repatriation” as it pertains to how the Albanian consulates and Albanian Foreign Ministry viewed the migration process of these Albanian refugees. Albanian archival materials utilize the term to discuss the migration of Albanian Muslim refugees in Turkey, who had previously been Greek nationals, to Albania. I place the term “repatriation” in quotes to signal the multiple understandings of the term for both the Albanian state and the Vinan refugees. As this section illuminates, the Albanian state and the Vinan refugees did not share the same conceptions of “home” and “belonging.” Finally, I aim to understand how following always incomplete forms of migration can help scholars rewrite the entangled histories of nation-building processes in post-Ottoman successor states and other post-imperial states. I conclude that the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange is not a singular event but an ongoing rupture that continues to shape local politics in the Mediterranean today.

From the Conference Table to the Mixed Commission’s Survey

Albanian representatives only sat at the table in Lausanne to settle Ottoman war debt with other Ottoman successor states. ⁵ When discussions came to the implementation of a population exchange between Greece and Turkey, Albanian representatives often discussed their opposition in the halls of Lausanne with Greek and Turkish delegates, while Italian delegates represented their points and concerns at the table. Ongoing negotiations regarding a population exchange between Greece and Turkey remained a topic of concern and interest amongst Albanian politicians. Albanian politicians worried about the compulsory stipulation of the exchange, the narrow criteria and conflation between religion and ethnicity, and fear that Albanian nationals and Çams in the Epirus region would be deported (Özcan 2011, 101–105).

During a meeting in the Albanian National Council in December 1922, local Albanian politicians expressed concerns that the ratification of a population exchange between Greece and Turkey would result in the deportation of Albanian Muslims in Greece, particularly Çam Muslims in Epirus (Manta 2015; Katsikas 2021; Sheme 2014, 9; Balta, Yilmaz, and Yaşar 2009, 245; and Kretsi 2002, 171–195; Hart 1999, 201–202). ⁶ In the 1920s, about 25,000 Çams lived in the region of Epirus (Manta 2015, 20; Katsikas 2021, 104). ⁷ Albanian officials worried that the compulsory nature of the exchange and the imperfect conflation between religion and ethnicity would result in the deportation of thousands of Çam Muslims from Greece to Turkey. During sessions in the Albanian National Council, Albanian politicians recognized that some Çams could potentially be willing to declare themselves as Turks and gladly be deported to Turkey. Shefqet Daji, a local politician, referred to these individuals as “those from spoiled blood.” ⁸ Despite arguments made in the Albanian National Council, Mid’hat Frasheri had little to no luck having delegates at Lausanne incorporate Albania’s perspectives into the official legal agreement of the Greek-Turkish population exchange. Frasheri’s experience in international conference went back to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and he represented Albania again at Lausanne.

Turkish and Greek delegates were not interested in including Albanians in the exchange. During a sub-commission session on January 19, 1923, the Italian delegation advocated on behalf of the Albanian delegates at the Lausanne Conference. The Italian delegate, Giulio Cesar Montagna, argued that Albanians in Epirus should be excluded. Demetrius Caclamanos, the Greek representative, assured that Athens had no intentions of deporting any Albanians from the region of Epirus. Riza Nur, one of the Turkish delegates, reiterated that Ankara is not interested in accepting any Albanians – only “Turkish-speakers.” Caclamanos reassured Turkish delegates that Albanian Muslims mostly reside in the Çamëria region and are distinguishable from Turks (Michalopoulos 1986, 303; Baltsiotis 2011, 7–8). The Greek delegation estimated that only one thousand Turks would be sent from Epirus to Anatolia. Nur’s hesitation toward Ankara accepting more Albanian refugees stemmed from the problems local administrators faced when Albanian Muslim refugees fled during the Balkan Wars. While Albanian Muslim refugees took up positions as officials, merchants, or labor workers in Anatolia, some Albanians resorted to banditry as a form of survival, and their reputation as a criminal class had been reinforced amongst other locals in Anatolia. Like Circassians, Nur believed that Albanians were bandits, thieves, and criminals who had no place within the new Turkish state (Gingeras 2009, 157–158; Nur 1991, 145–148).

On January 20, 1923, the President of the Minorities section at Lausanne explained to Mid’hat Frasheri that both Turkish and Greek delegates agreed to exclude any Albanian minorities in Greece or Turkey from the exchange. ⁹ Regardless of the verbal agreement made at Lausanne, Albanian officials feared the simplified usage of religion would still result in the accidental or intentional deportation of Albanian Muslims out of Greece. Albanian officials worried about the resettlement of Asia Minor refugees fleeing Smyrna (Izmir), and the influx of Orthodox Christian refugees would result in further dispossession of Albanian properties in Greece. Once the exchange process began in May 1923, the Albanian Foreign Ministry and Interior Ministry received reports and information from the Albanian legation in Athens that Çams had been encouraged to leave for Turkey. ¹⁰ Further, the Albanian Foreign Ministry and Frasheri, who had assumed the position of Albanian ambassador to Athens, received letters from Çam community leaders expressing their concerns about losing their properties and the pressures community members faced by local Greek officials to leave for Turkey. To take preventative measures against local pressure, Çam elites petitioned the Mixed Commission and Athens arguing that being autochthonous qualified Çams from automatic exclusion. ¹¹ Athens met Çam claims of being autochthonous to Çamëria with dissatisfaction and upheld the stipulations of the exchange agreement: Muslim Greek nationals would be deported to Turkey. The Greek government argued that Çams would have to prove their Albanian ethnicity through documentation, which became a significant issue for majority of Çams because they had no legal connection to the Albanian state (Kretsi 2002, 173–174; Rama 2007, 74). Çams became Greek nationals after the 1913 Treaty of London and Treaty of Athens.

Based on negotiations at Lausanne, Athens agreed to exclude Albanians from Çamëria from the exchange process, per the request of the Turkish delegation. Why would Athens need Çams to prove their Albanian ethnicity? How did Greek political elites view the question of nationalities around Greece? Recent scholars have argued that central to Greek national identity in the late 19th and 20th centuries had been a consensus around the mono-religious (Greek Orthodox) and monolingual (Greek-speaking) definition of the nation (Aktürk and Lika 2020, 20–21; and Katsikas 2021, 31–40). In the 19th century, the terms “Turk” and “Turco-Albanian” turned into a pejorative terminology to identify both people of Turkish descent and local Albanian Muslims. The term “Turco-Albanian” was adopted in official Greek and League of Nations documents to refer to Çams and other Muslim Albanians (Millas 2006, 50; and Blumi 2013, 149–150). Venizelos believed that Albanians were inferior to Greeks, and the only resolve for the Greeks would be to separate the populations geographically. Albania, as Venizelos understood, could not exist as an independent state except through foreign rule. He understood that the Greek majority that lived in Northern Epirus (southern region of Albania) could not “submit to a minority with an inferior civilization” (Venizelos 1919, 1–2). During World War I, Venizelos’s government pursued a policy to limit Muslims’ land and property ownership. On the contrary, Ioannis Eliakis, Governor-General of Western Macedonia, believed in pursuing friendly treatment toward Muslim Albanians since many did not look to Istanbul for protection. Eliakis understood that Albanians had economic interests that would benefit Greece (Mylonas 2012, 127–129).

As Ryan Gingeras asserts, the British High Commission in Athens pointed out that there had been no criteria set for those who constituted as an Albanian, and Greece did not have a clear registry documenting the number of Albanians living in Greece (Gingeras 2009, 158). The combination of various factors – the absence of criteria to identify Albanians, petitions from Çam elites, and pressure from the Albanian Foreign Ministry – led to the March 1924 declaration by the Mixed Commission. The declaration read as follows:

Greek nationals of Muslim religion of Albanian origin established in Epirus are excepted from the compulsory exchange of populations provided for by the said convention. The Mixed Commission will, if necessary, entrust a special body with the task of collecting on the spot the elements intended to determine the individuals in this category of the population excepted from the compulsory exchange. While waiting for the Mixed Commission to decide on the special cases which will be submitted to it, the individuals in this category of the population excepted from the compulsory exchange. ¹²

The Mixed Commission trusted that distinctions could be made between Albanians and Turks with a regional survey based on criteria set forth by Çam elites, Albanian officials, and Greek local officials. The Mixed Commission utilized factors such as language, culture, race, religion, and national consciousness to distinguish Albanians from Turks. In April 1924, the Mixed Commission began a three-month regional survey of Epirus and Macedonia to distinguish between Albanians and Turks. ¹³ The results of regional survey became an example of the inherent flaws in population exchanges and imperial practices of “unmixing.” Reports produced by the Mixed Commission in various districts conflicted. Frequently, there were disagreements amongst religious leaders and heads of families whom the Mixed Commission consulted. In each district of Epirus, the Mixed Commission often had two groups of representatives: those who reported that locals were of Turkish national consciousness and those who claimed that locals were of Albanian descent. ¹⁴ However, an overwhelming number of Muftis claimed that Çams were not Albanians, but Turks.

After the survey concluded, the Mixed Commission declared it too difficult to distinguish language and customs among the local Muslim population. According to the Mixed Commission, only 3–5 percent of Muslim Çams declared themselves to be Albanian. ¹⁵ Telegrams and news continued to reach the Albanian Foreign Ministry and the Albanian Legation in Athens of the various cases of harassment and pressure local Muslims faced to declare themselves Turks before the Mixed Commission by local Greek authorities. ¹⁶ Reports that reached the Albanian Foreign Ministry included verbal and physical violence against local Muslim Albanians as a coercive mechanism. ¹⁷ The Mixed Commission’s survey provided a path for a combination of Venizelist staunch ideals on “unmixing” and the incredibly rigid conflation between ethnicity and religion to be put in practice. Since it became too difficult for the Mixed Commission to distinguish Albanians from Turks, national consciousness and desire became indicators. However, the conscious awareness of being Muslim or Ottoman became conflated to being a Turk. Ultimately, Greek authorities followed through with the deportation of several thousands of Çam Muslims and an additional tens of thousands from Macedonian towns, such as Larissa, Langada, Drama, Vodina, Serez, Edessa, Florina, Kilkis, Kavala, and Thessaloniki (Gingeras 2009, 158). ¹⁸

This article focuses on one case study that illuminates the implications of the Mixed Commission’s survey had on the ground. According to a petition sent by Albanian refugees deported from Greece to Turkey, Shemseddin Umer and Raif Ismail, they reported to the League of Nations 35 Albanian villages in the prefectures of Kastoria and Florina, Greece, were deported to Turkey. ¹⁹ In June 1925, Mid’hat Frasheri reported that around 30,000 Albanians from Kastoria and Florina were included in the exchange (Gingeras 2009, 159). ²⁰ Based on records from the Albanian Foreign Ministry Archive, the following Greek villages are mentioned in discussions of Albanian refugees, firstly deported from Greece to Turkey, who later sought to be transferred from Turkey to Albania: Vinan (Vineni), Viçishti (Viçišta), Rambi (Ramba), Revan, Gerlan (Grleni), Limithrof, and Parganjot. While some of these Albanian refugees were relocated to Albania, this article focuses on the case of the Vinan refugees as it is one of the most documented successful cases of migration from Turkey to Albania after the exchange process. Additionally, the petitions Vinan refugees sent to the League of Nations illuminates a rare archival perspective of non-elite refugees of the Greek-Turkish population exchange.

The Case of the Vinan Families

Vinan (Vineni), now renamed Pyli, is a village located along the Prespa lakes in Greece, which borders the southern regions of Albania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. The village was named Vineni – an ode for its Slavophone inhabitants after vino – that is, wine. ²¹ By the mid-1860s, the village had a Slavic population until the early 1900s, when Albanian Muslims resettled into the village. Slavic villagers of Vinan resettled in the nearby village of Mileonas (Vatsikopoulos 2020, 429–432; Van Boeschoten 2002, 137; and Abdullai 2004, 240–250). By the early 1900s, Vinan consisted of around two hundred Albanian Muslims, whose primary occupations were farmers and sheepherders. Farmers focused on the growth of tobacco and beans as primary crops. As scholars Anastasia Karakasidou and Riki van Boeschoten have illuminated, people often did business across the borders into Albania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes as part of economic and social ties created and maintained during the late Ottoman period (Karakasidou 1997, 6–14; Kontogiorgi 2006, 19–22; and Van Boeschoten 1991). This became the case for the people of Vinan as well.

The Mixed Commission completed their survey of the Epirus and Macedonia regions between April 17 and June 2, 1924. In June 1924, the Mixed Commission deported the entire village of Vinan to Turkey – approximately forty houses – under the assumption that these Muslims were also Turks after the completion of the survey. The Mixed Commission liquidated the Vinan families’ properties, and in October 1924, the refugees arrived in Turkey. Once they arrived, the Mixed Commission and Turkish state helped settle the refugees in the town of Ezine – near Çanakkale in the Marmara region – together as a village. The South Marmara had become a central location for Muslim refugees from Macedonia, Epirus, Crete, and Western Thrace during the exchange. Turkey earmarked lands vacated by Greeks and Armenians in Anatolia and Eastern Thrace after the Armenian genocide and massacres of other local Christian populations for incoming Muslim refugees from Greece (Yıldırım 2006, 91). In practice, the properties hastily evacuated by Greeks and Armenians were not always reserved for Muslim refugees from Greece but used for the accommodation and settlement of the local Muslim populations with a “legitimate” claim (Yıldırım 2006, 94). The internal displacement and relocation of other minorities, such as Kurds, Assyrians, and Circassians, further complicated the processes of resettlement of Muslim refugees from Greece. In the southern Marmara region, the new Turkish Republic deported Circassians because it considered Circassians as traitors, bandits, and rebels (Gingeras 2009, 142). What awaited the Vinan refugees in Turkey, like other exchanged peoples, was any available property with little resources or support aside from the value of the liquidation of their properties (Gingeras 2009, 93). Thus, we can see the problems that arise once the rigid categories laid out by the 1923 Greek-Turkish exchange agreement are put into practice.

As colder weather quickly encroached, Vinan refugees sent representatives to the Albanian consulate in Istanbul in late October and early November. The journey took them several weeks to travel from Ezine to Istanbul. In a letter to the Albanian Foreign Ministry, Nezir Leskoviku, the Albanian Consult to Istanbul, reported on two refugee groups who approached the consulate to aid in their repatriation to their villages in Greece. One of these refugee groups had been representatives of Vinan refugees. ²² In a letter to the Albanian Foreign Minister, Leskoviku detailed his meeting with the head delegate of the Mixed Commission to address the “unjust situation” presented to the Albanian refugees. The head delegate of the Mixed Commission expressed how unfortunate the situation was. Nevertheless, the head delegate stated that the Mixed Commission did not complete the exchange between Greece and Turkey, and therefore he could not do anything for the refugees at that very moment. The exchange process needed to be completed before the League of Nations or Mixed Commission could entertain these requests for relocation outside of Turkey. Furthermore, the head delegate of the Mixed Commission specified that those already exchanged were not allowed to return home to Greece. ²³ Regardless of the news, the representatives of the Vinan refugees submitted their petition to the Mixed Commission and made their way back to Ezine to discuss with their fellow villagers their options. ²⁴

In their petition of the Mixed Commission in November 1924, Shukri Rouschit and Tefik Ahmet described their experiences of deportation and petitioned for the refugees to return to their village of Vinan. The process of deportation and communication described in the petition reveals resistance to the Mixed Commission and exchange process. Rouschit and Ahmet stated that when the process of the population exchange had begun, “We decided to stay in our homes… We had plowed and sown all our fields, having grown tobacco, beans, and corn.” ²⁵ The Greek authorities knew that villagers would remain in their homes, since no Orthodox Christian refugees from Anatolia had been resettled in the village of Vinan after the initial influx of Greek refugees from Asia Minor. The villagers had comprehended that Albanians would not be deported to Turkey. The petition continued: “In the beginning of June 1924, we were informed that all Muslims Albanians will be subjected without distinction to the forced exchange.” ²⁶ Frightened by the declaration of the Mixed Commission, people of Vinan had prepared to flee to Albania to avoid being deported to Turkey. Rouschit and Ahmet documented that while only three families managed to cross the lake and seek refuge in Albania, the authorities “had subsequently taken measures to prevent the departure of others.” ²⁷ The process of deportation was described as follows: “[We] were driven from [our] homes with sticks and driven like dogs in three days, abandoning all [our] possessions. This is how on June 21st, we had the unfortunate fate of leaving our centuries-old homeland [Greece]” in exile. ²⁸ Rouschit and Ahmet described how once they arrived in Turkey, they witnessed twenty-five members of their village pass away, “Digging new graves every day for our wives and children so dear to our hearts, despite the kindness and care” provided by the Turkish Republic. They concluded the petition with the following statement: “We are convinced that it is impossible for us to live in this way far from our homeland, and we ask the High Commission to have us repatriated, at its expense, to our village Vinan, by restoring the property we left there.” ²⁹

Rouschit and Ahmet’s recollection in their petition illuminates that there was not one moment of “exchange,” but a protracted and complicated process. The petition highlights the violence of the exchange process and their resettlement in Turkey. Refugees acknowledged the Turkish Republic’s kindness and hospitality the refugees received. Moreover, being Muslim, regardless of whether villagers understood themselves as Albanian, proved to be the primary criterion of deportation that dismissed other complex identities the Mixed Commission’s regional survey set out to disentangle. On the other hand, these experiences should be understood within a larger transition between empires and nation-states: one could no longer be Ottoman and Albanian; Ottoman now equated exclusively to being Turkish. This is made clear in Rouschit and Ahmet’s petition to the Mixed Commission: being Albanian did not exempt locals from being deported from Greece to Turkey. The process of “unmixing” and exchange erased local complexities amongst people in the region. For the Mixed Commission, the process became too tedious to disentangle and remained attentive to the local complexities. Rather, refugees sought to preserve their own complexities in their own lived experiences (Hirschon 1989; Iğsız 2018). ³⁰

Mid’hat Frasheri had been present when the Vinan refugees visited the Albanian Consulate in Istanbul and during the meetings Leskoviku with the head delegate of the Mixed Commission as well. It is important to mention again that Frasheri had been at Lausanne during the negotiations between Greek and Turkish delegates in 1922–1923. In his November 1924 letter to the Albanian Foreign Ministry, Frasheri stated, “these individuals [Vinan refugees] submitted a request to the Mixed Commission and would like to be ‘repatriated’ to Albania and be installed within properties in the Prefecture of Bilisht.” ³¹ In their original petition to the Mixed Commission, the Vinan refugees did not mention or request to be resettled in the prefecture of Bilisht in Albania, but rather in their own village in Greece. Reading these documents together, one can deduce the possibility that the conversation between Frasheri and Leskoviku concluded that the exchanged refugees would not be allowed to return to their homes in Greece because they already had their properties liquidated. Between their meetings with the head of the delegate of the Mixed Commission, Leskoviku and Frasheri could potentially have emerged with a solution to reinstate the refugees in Albania. The prefecture of Bilisht in the southeastern region of Albania bordered the Prespa lakes and is a region where Vinan villagers had socioeconomic networks across villages on the Albanian side. If the Vinan refugees could not return to their homes, the best option would be to resettle them on lands close to the Prespa lakes, where they had established networks. ³²

As winter turned harsher in December 1924 and the Mixed Commission did not respond to the refugees’s original petition, Vinan refugees sent two additional people back to Istanbul. ³³ On December 2, 1924, Shemseddin Umer and Raif Ismail sent a second petition, this time to the League of Nations. The petition detailed the violence of the deportation process once again. This time, the refugees requested for permission to be resettled to Albania. For the Vinan refugees, they understood their ability to relocate to Albania by following the “recourse to absolute justice” of the League of Nations as they waited “for two hundred women, children and elderly to be saved from certain death.” ³⁴ Once at the Albanian Consulate, the Vinan representatives asked the Albanian consulate to request permission from the Mixed Commission in Turkey for their transportation to Albania. Besides ten people who did not have the monetary means, the rest of the Vinan refugees were willing to pay for their relocation to Albania. After the conversation, the Albanian Consulate scheduled a meeting with Tevfik Rushdi Aras Bey, the head of the Turkish delegation for the Mixed Commission. Rushdi Aras Bey wrote directly to Turkish officials in Ankara regarding the request of Albanian refugees who are seeking to be “repatriated” to Albania. ³⁵ The refugees willingly offered to pay for their own journey to Albania. From the archives, there is no indication that the Albanian Foreign Ministry or the Albanian Consulate in Istanbul had offered, or even had the funds, to address the costs for the Vinan refugees’ transportation to Albania.

However, in a December 1924 meeting with Rushdi Aras Bey and Leskoviku, Frasheri had been firm in his convictions that the Mixed Commission should pay for the travels of Albanian refugees to Albania due to mistaken deportation. ³⁶ In a telegram to the Albanian Foreign Ministry, Leskoviku reported that once the consulate received a response from Ankara, they would need to get in contact with agents of Lloyd-Triestino to provide the refugees with discounted ship tickets. ³⁷ On the day the refugees departed from Çanakkale, Leskoviku reported that the Albanian Foreign Ministry would be notified with a telegram. ³⁸ The process of relocation would take more than nine months before the Vinan refugees – and other Albanian refugee families like them – would be allowed by the Turkish government to migrate and resettle in Albania.

“Repatriated” to Albania

Katy Long writes:

The repatriation of refugees – that is, their return to “home” in their state of origin – purports to offer a near solution to the crises posed by refugee exoduses. As the international community’s ‘preferred solution’ to the problem of displacement, repatriation offers a pathway to the apparent restoration of the refugee’s right. Yet it also reaffirms the essential ethno-cultural component of contemporary international political organization by stressing the ‘natural’ affinity between place and people. (Long 2012, 369)

The Paris Peace Conference and the Wilsonian moment transformed the international system to equate “belonging” and “homeland” of individuals and communities based on ethno-national identity. In other words, self-determination became a right extended to refugees based on the conception that nation-states superseded former ideas of home (Weitz 2008, 1326–1333). The Wilsonian moment also provided ethnic lobbies with the opportunity to present their concepts of home at Versailles, although these lobbies often formed of elites. The case of the Vinan refugees is a case of non-elite understanding of “homeland” and “belonging.”

Based on Wilsonian principles of self-determination, for Muslims in Greece, Turkey would constitute as a new homeland. For the Vinan refugees who identified as Albanian Muslims, only Albania could constitute as their new homeland. The utilization of the word “repatriation,” as I will show below, fits within new international conceptions that connect refugees’ rights with national imagination – in this case, the Albanian state for the Vinan refugees (Long 2012, 373). ³⁹ For the Albanian state, repatriation meant the settlement of all Albanian refugees wrongfully deported to Turkey or Greece during the exchange process. For refugees, such as the families from Vinan, “repatriation” to Albania did not eliminate the hope of future reinstatement to their home village in Greece. This section teases out how these two contrasted understandings of “repatriation” and how states often prescribed their understandings of homeland over refugees’s understandings of homeland.

By February 1925, the Albanian Consulate and Albanian officials had not received any news from Ankara regarding the Vinan refugees’ ability to relocate to Albania. Frasheri understood his ability to request and petition on behalf of Albanian refugees who had been deported from Greece to Turkey as an important duty he had to Albanians that remained outside Albania’s borders. For Frasheri, the investment of time and money into these Albanian refugees was important to the Albanian national imagination and to the repopulation of the Albanian nation-state. Although Leskoviku had been the head consult of the Albanian Consulate in Istanbul, Frasheri took a greater role to help “repatriate” Albanian refugees in Turkey to Albania. On February 19, Frasheri sent a letter to the Albanian Foreign Ministry explaining the silence from Ankara. The “Albanians of Vinani” were ready to leave with their own money, Frasheri explained; however, the Turkish government would not provide them visas nor allow the refugees to leave. The winter months continued to have a dire impact on the refugees. Frasheri suggested that an official request should be made by the Albanian government for Ankara to take these requests seriously. ⁴⁰ Additionally, Frasheri appealed to the head of the Mixed Commission in Istanbul to speak with Turkish officials. The head of the Mixed Commission agreed to communicate with the Turkish authorities to help resolve the issue of the exchanged Albanian refugees. ⁴¹

While Frasheri depicted an image to the Albanian Foreign Ministry that Ankara had been apprehensive to grant Albanian refugees visas, that had been far from the reality. Kemalist ideals of Turkishness relied on criteria of uni-ethnic (Turkish), uni-linguistic (Turkish), and uni-sectarian (Sunni). Historians and social scientists of modern Turkey have debated the parameters of Turkish understandings of Turkishness. Scholars have argued that Turkey exercised a notion of ethno-racial understandings of Turkishness, while other scholars argue Kemalist notions of Turkishness functioned as a civil-ethnic category (Yilmaz 2021, 55–56; Aktürk 2009, 894). Muslim refugees fleeing local violence from the two Balkan wars were welcomed in Anatolia. The sufferings of Balkan Muslim refugees fleeing violence at the hands of Balkan Christian states had been utilized as war propaganda to fuel the Young Turks own atrocities against local Christians in Anatolia. As opposed to Bosnians and other Slav-speaking Muslims, early Turkish republic administrators began to view Albanians with incredible distrust. As echoed at Lausanne, Turkish local administrators believed Albanian migrants to be of a criminal class, partaking in thievery, banditry, and destruction of the Anatolian lands that they settled on (Gingeras 2009, 157–159; Nur 1967, 1096–1098). Second, local administrators viewed Albanians with suspicion of allegiances to Albania, making it difficult for them to assimilate into Turks. What caused the Turkish Republic’s delay in granting visas to Vinan refugees and other Albanian refugees can be tied to bureaucracy or the financial logistics of uprooting hundreds of people that the Turkish state had just resettled. Vinan refugees received liquidation certificates, and Mixed Commission had already compensated the refugees. In fact, the refugees had planned to utilize the same funds they received through the liquidation and compensation process by the Mixed Commission to pay for their transportation costs to Albania. Vinan refugees plead to use their own money as an attempt to speed up their visas to leave Turkey. By mid-June 1925, Ankara granted clearance and provided visas for the Vinan refugees to leave Turkey. In a letter to the Albanian Foreign Ministry, Frasheri requested some monetary means be provided for the Vinan refugees, as they had depleted most of their funds in the nine months in Turkey waiting to receive visas to leave. Frasheri requested one hundred napoleons be sent to the Albanian Consulate in Istanbul to help refugees with transportation and provisioning costs. ⁴²

On July 19, the ship “Trente” departed for the Albanian Port of Saranda, with 197 Albanians reported onboard the ship. Before the ship departed, the Vinan refugees were given a letter from the Prefect of Korçë and one thousand drachmas to aid them once they reached Saranda. ⁴³ From the archives, I could not find the exact letter from the Prefect of Korçë in any folder. However, there are a few inferences that can be made from the context of additional archival records. From exchanges between Frasheri, Leskoviku, and the Albanian Foreign Ministry, the plan had been to resettle the Vinan refugees in the Prefecture of Bilisht within the larger administrative Prefecture of Korçë. Being that the refugees had personal and economic ties to the southeastern region of Albania, the Prefecture of Korçë provided an easier transition and resettlement for the Vinan refugees. Once the Vinan refugees arrived at the Port of Saranda, the letter contained further information on the resettlement process. The refugees arrived at the port on July 21–22, 1925, and the Albanian state settled them into camps in the nearby town of Ksmail. The Vinan families would remain in the camps of Ksamil until they had been slowly settled in villages in the region of Korçë, specifically the villages of Zvezdë and Shëngjergj in 1926. According to the Albanian Central State archival records and Foreign Ministry archival records, the resettlement process was not detailed.

Even though the Albanian state supported and resettled the Vinan refugees in villages around the Prefecture of Korçë, in the understanding of the refugees, home remained their village of Vinan. Based on exchanges, the Vinan refugees communicated to the Albanian state their desire to “recollect remaining properties in Greece” or to be reinstated in Greece in the future. Other Muslim refugees from Greece who had found refuge in Albania during the exchange process communicated similar requests to Albanian local officials. Based on the exchange process, the properties in their former villages had been liquidated and the refugees had already been compensated for them. However, the request made by the refugees illuminates that often times refugees did not know that the premise of the exchange process would be no return. This was a critical piece of information that was lost in the process of uprooting and deportations during the exchange. On January 25, 1926, Frasheri informed the Prefect of Korçë that while he had requested the Greek government whether Vinan refugees could regain any remaining property rights in Greece, he had not received any further information. ⁴⁴ When the Vinan refugees met with the Prefect of Korçë, they requested whether it would be possible to be “repatriated” to Greece. In a message enclosed to the Albanian Interior Ministry, the Prefect of Korçë inquired: “Will it be possible for [the refugees] to be repatriated to their own villages in Greece,” and to have their lands returned to them? ⁴⁵ For the Vinan refugees, the preferred outcome for their future would have been to be reinstated to Greece. Nevertheless, the Vinan families had not been aware that Asia Minor refugee families had been resettled in their properties, and the village had been renamed to Pyli in 1926.

After the Paris Peace Conference, imaginations of “homeland” had been dictated by states who worked toward nation-building projects that required the deportation and mass movement of people. Nation-states superimposed their ideas of “home” and the imagination of a “homeland” over minorities and refugees. In this case, the ideas of a future “home” did not align with the vision of the Vinan refugees and the future “home” Albanian state officials understood. For the Vinan families, their present home would be Albania, but their future imagination of home involved their reestablishment to Greece. In a telegram to the Prefect of Korçë, the Albanian Foreign Minister stated the following:

Do not forget that the refugees came here without their possessions. They [came] because of the patriotism they have for Albania. I also want to ask you to always remember that Albania is an empty country that needs people. The example we will give today to these refugees will determine the fate of those who after them, want to come to Albania. ⁴⁶

The Albanian Foreign Minister assumed that the refugees desired to resettle in Albania because of their patriotism, a play on the Wilsonian moment of self-determination. Most importantly, the Albanian state needed people to help facilitate the socioeconomic nation-building process after the two Balkan Wars and World War I. Albania needed a larger population than it had already had to rebuild. In the 1920s, Albanian state officials had been concerned with the increased emigration of Albanian men outside of Albania, particularly to the United States. The possibility that these Albanian men would bring their families to the United States threatened the depopulation of the state. In 1923, the Albanian Interior Ministry drafted a law that banned forms of immigration outside of Albanian – including children and women. It also indicated that families needed to return within five years of leaving for Albania (Boçi 2012, 41–43). ⁴⁷ However, the Vinan refugees’s self-determination emerged from their forced deportation from their lands in Greece to Turkey and not from their national consciousness of being “patriotic” Albanians. The possibility of salvaging the remaining properties or returning to the village of Vinan became impossible with the legal stipulations of the Greek-Turkish population exchange. By 1926, Greeks from Asia Minor settled in Vinan and the Greek government renamed the village to Pyli.

Conclusion

On October 5, 2011, the online Albanian newspaper Panorama reported an incident in the village of Shëngjergj in the city of Korçë. Villagers of Shëngjergj gathered in the center of the village protesting and publicly demanded their recognition as Albanians. A day earlier, news circulated that a few villagers had declared themselves as Greeks for the 2011 Albanian census. One person stated, “This is an outrage, not only for the residents who are of Albanian descent for generations, but also for those whose parents are born in Greece,” primarily from the border village of Vinan. ⁴⁸ Another villager declared: “We want to clarify this matter once and for all, because we were surprised when we heard in the media that our village is Greek.” ⁴⁹ Many people were ready to sign forms publicly to declare that they were Albanians. Despite the fact that a few people in Shëngjergj declared themselves as Greeks, villagers had been outraged that this would result in labeling the entire village as Greek. The newspaper interviewed Fatmir Ahmetlliu, the head elder of the village or Kryeplaku, on his thoughts. Ahmetlliu never saw himself as a Greek. He stated that calling himself a Greek would violate the memory of his parents and grandparents. “My parents were born in Greece, but they are not Greeks” Ahmetlliu continued, “They are of Turkish origins. It is obvious from our Muslim surnames; that is why our ancestors were forcibly expelled from Greece.” Ahmetlliu accounted that the Albanians had the generosity to accept his family among themselves when the Greek state expelled them. “To give us food and land,” Ahmetlliu declared, “so today we are one of them. We feel Albanian and we are Albanians.” ⁵⁰ Being Albanian was related to the support given by the Albanian state and the welcoming reception received from local Albanians in Korçë. Today, second- and third-generation descendants understand themselves as Albanians.

As this article has illuminated, the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange transformed the conception of “home” and “belonging” that encapsulated not just nationals of Greece and Turkey but resonated across post-Ottoman Southeastern Europe. As the case of the Vinan refugees shows, the paths of migration taken by exchanged people did not stop with the deportations sanctioned by the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange. These stories elucidate how the processes of nation-building forced communities, on the ground, to negotiate and make sense of their homes in a new post-Ottoman space. While Vinan refugees wanted to return to their village, which they understood as their homeland, their fates ended up being decided by state, consular, and diplomatic actors. Refugees’s ideas of homeland and local identity had been transplanted by state understandings of homeland that led the Vinan refugees to be resettled in yet another country after being deported to Turkey. Further, belonging for refugees and future generations continues to be debated to the present as the 2011 census incident illuminates.

Historical debates of belonging and homeland are redebated when incidents and critical political moments arise. This framework can allow scholars to continue to think about when and where questions of belonging and homeland, as related to the seismic event of the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange continues to be debated in our present moment in the Eastern Mediterranean. Second, this article has illuminated how nation-building projects and demographic engineering, as Eric Zürcher demonstrates, involved a multitude of post-Ottoman successor states managing its populations (Zürcher 2008). Moreover, this case shows that the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange was not one moment of exchange, but a protracted and complicated process that went on for several years and decades. In other words, the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange should not be treated as a singular event, but rather as the reimagination of a new imperial world that forged new migration pathways for ethnic and religious communities across the former Ottoman world.