Twice a Stranger

bruce clark

It was a massive, yet little-known landmark in modern in 1923, after a long war over the future of the Ottoman world, nearly two million citizens of Turkey or Greece were moved across the Aegean, expelled from their homes because they were the 'wrong' religion. Orthodox Christians were deported from Turkey to Greece, Muslims from Greece to Turkey. At the time, world statesmen hailed the transfer as a solution to the problem of minorities who could not co-exist. Both governments saw the exchange as a chance to create societies where a single culture prevailed. But how did the people who crossed the Aegean feel about this exercise in ethnic engineering? Bruce Clark's fascinating account of these turbulent events draws on new archival research in Greece and Turkey, and interviews with some of the surviving refugees, allowing them to speak for themselves for the first time.

Genres historynonfictiongreecehistorical20th centurybook clubeuropean historyacademicturkish

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,2006

Literary awards

runciman book prize,

This edition

Format: 304 pages, Paperback
Published: January 1, 2007 by Granta Books
ISBN: 9781862079243
ASIN: 1862079242
Language: English

About the author

bruce clark

Bruce Clark is the international security editor of The Economist, and notable as the author of Twice A Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey.

He studied Philosophy at St John's College Cambridge. His writing for The Economist is usually focussed on religion or defence.

His book Twice A Stranger is a history of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey which took place in the early 1920s following the Treaty of Lausanne. The book won the Runciman Award in 2007.