Greek Refugees: The Socioeconomic Consequences of the 1923 Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey

Project Outcomes Statement

The United Nations estimates that presently one person every three seconds joins the ranks of the forcibly displaced estimated to be more than 100 million as of 2022. The war in Ukraine, ongoing conflicts in Syria, Yemen and Libya, political tensions in Venezuela and Myanmar, gang violence in Latin America, recurrent strife in the Sahel and Central Africa and more recently in Ethiopia and Mozambique have led to the exodus of millions of people. At the same time, rising temperatures, floods and extreme weather conditions leave many with no choice but to become refugees. The developing crisis has raised many questions including their fate, and their impact on the receiving communities. Despite the importance and relevance of the issue, there is little research on the long-term impacts of forced population displacements. Our work contributes to our understanding of the phenomenon by tracing the short-term and the long-term legacy of the Greek-Orthodox Refugees from Anatolia in Greece.

Historical Context: During and shortly after the Balkan Wars and the Great War (in the 1910s-1920s), Greece experienced an influx of more than 1.5 million Greek Orthodox from Asia Minor, Eastern Thrace, Cappadocia, Pontus, the Caucasus, Bulgaria, Russia and other parts of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire. The 1928 population census reveals that about one in five Greek citizens were refugees, arriving mostly between 1920 and 1924. In many areas of Macedonia and Thrace, refugees were in the majority. Their integration to the Greek society was a decisive and arguably one of the most important achievements of the Greek state. We study the economic, political, and cultural consequences of this cataclysmic event for the Greek economy, polity, and culture over a century.

Economic Impact: In the first study, we examine the impacts of refugee resettlement on human capital and structural economic transformation. We follow over time the universe of settled areas in Greece, approximately 11,000 units, and establish the following. First, refugees who settle in the countryside, start with less education than natives. Nevertheless, they quickly make up the deficit and soon overtake in terms of education the neighboring native communities. After World War II, the refugee villages and towns experience a boom in manufacturing and the textiles industry in particular, and register systematically higher emigration rates abroad as well as the main Greek urban centers. These findings reveal that major displacement shocks can trigger human capital investments, break links with subsistence agriculture and increase the spatial mobility rates of the affected populations’ descendants.

Political and Cultural Impact. In the second study, we trace the political identity of refugee neighborhoods within Greek urban centers over the last 100 years as well as their cultural expression. We capture the latter from the songs of artists of refugee origin. Our results both verify and quantify the overwhelming support of refugees for Venizelos' Liberals. At the same time, however, our empirical analysis, comparing refugee neighborhoods with those of natives a few hundred meters apart, reveals an increase in votes for the communist party. Political affinities to the left survived the Second World War and the restoration of democracy in 1975. The observed political identity runs parallel to an artistic identity. We apply machine learning (ML) techniques to extract the context and sentiment of the universe of Greek songs of the last century, distinguishing on the basis of the refugee or non-refugee origin of the performer, lyricist and composer. During the 1920s-1940s, the songs of refugee artists are much more likely to discuss poverty, social exclusion and misfortune. However, as refugees' education and incomes converge with - and even exceed - those of natives, the importance of poverty as a concept in songs diminishes over time. Nonetheless, artists who trace their origins to the forcibly displaced of the Asia Minor Catastrophe create songs that celebrate perseverance, social justice and equality, revealing a possible mechanism for the transmission of refugee identity.