Postwar Desolation
The Lausanne Peace Treaty of 1923 marked the birth of the Turkish Republic on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. It also instituted Eastern Thrace as Turkey's borderland with Europe. Some scholars regard Lausanne also as the moment when Eastern Thrace was made into Turkish Thrace, arguing that the region became firmly tied to the Turkish Republic in the war's immediate aftermath. However, if Turkification is defined more broadly as a central policy that promoted ethnic nationalism in the interrelated social, economic, and political fields for the success and security of a new nation-building process, Thrace could hardly be considered Turkified. As the following galleries of this exhibit demonstrate, the making and securing of Turkish Thrace for the republic was far from complete – and would remain incomplete well into the Cold War.
Still, if Turkification is construed in the narrowest sense as a demographic matter whereby the relative decrease in non-Turkish populations is considered a sufficient condition for Turkification, it is difficult to take issue with the argument that Eastern Thrace became much more Turkish than it was prior to the ten-year war stretch. Indeed, the ten-year war irrevocably dismantled the multiethnic and multireligious composition of the region.
The Greeks, which had held the majority in some Thracian towns like Çorlu as late as the early 20th century, were uprooted after the Balkan Wars and the Turkish War of Independence. The Bulgarian presence in Eastern Thrace dissipated after the Second Balkan War. And the Armenians of Eastern Thrace, who usually concentrated in larger cities like Tekfurdağı, had been deported to face their almost certain death in 1915, except for those fortunate enough to be spared for their clout or possible contributions to the Ottoman war effort.
Consequently, the local non-Muslim population, which had exceeded half of the regional population in 1870 according to provincial yearbooks, was reduced in postwar Thrace to some ten to twenty thousand Jews scattered across a number of cities, such as Edirne, Kırkkilise, Tekirdağ, Gelibolu, Çorlu, Lüleburgaz, and Uzunköprü.
Alongside the dilution of the non-Muslim population, the local Turkish population in Eastern Thrace was also drained to an extreme, as they faced dislocation, poverty, hunger, epidemic diseases, and endless rounds of conscription under foreign occupations and protracted wartime conditions. Family stories of an assumedly dead soldier returning from his proverbial grave in Gallipoli are more common than one might expect in Thrace, as you can hear in an interview excerpt below:
The depopulation of Eastern Thrace during the ten-year war was also what made Thrace a primary destination for settlement after Turkey and Greece concluded an agreement for a forced population exchange between the Muslim Turks in Greece and the Orthodox Greeks in Turkey. The agreement included an exemption for minority populations in Western Thrace and Istanbul. Most of the Turkish settlers who arrived in Thrace were tobacco and wheat farmers and herders from the Greek Macedonia, hailing from villages and towns around Thessaloniki. In turn, most of the Greeks who left Eastern Thrace were settled in the Greek Macedonia. The Turkification of Eastern Thrace and the Hellenization of the Greek Macedonia thus went hand in hand.
These forced migrants were usually settled on lands abandoned by their counterparts. Their social integration was a complex issue that neither government had thought out thoroughly in their rushed effort to expel populations that they deemed foreign and unreliable. Although pigeonholed by their governments along ethnic lines as either Turks or Greeks, many exchangees could not speak the language of their new surroundings. Some were sent to geographies where climate conditions and economic opportunities were incompatible with their background.
With Thrace being designated a primary settlement zone for exchangees, over 80,000 Turkish migrants, about one-fourth of the region's existing population at the time, were injected into Thrace over 1923 and 1924. Even after the dense settlement of exchangees, Thrace's population constituted, respectively, a mere 3.4 and 3.9 percent of Turkey’s population according to the 1927 and 1935 censuses.
Thrace’s population density was not significantly lower than that of other peripheral regions in Turkey. Yet, it was grossly inadequate to exploit the fertile fields of its softly undulating landscape. Agricultural mechanization was too limited to offset the labor shortage. Even in vaster and more organized plots where the machinery to shore up the forces of production was present, the dearth of fuel and spare parts often made their use economically unviable.
Global market conditions were also unfavorable to the predominant type of agricultural production in Thrace. Because mid and large-scale farming activities in Thrace were oriented towards larger domestic and international markets, the massive drop in crop prices after the Great Depression left many more farmlands deserted. A government report from 1939 revealed, there were 163 agricultural estates of over 182,509 hectares in Thrace that lay in a state of waste and abandonment.
Local agricultural institutions were also under duress, and a network of grain exchanges, welded together to reinvigorate the foundations of regional agriculture, collapsed under the weight of unfolding social and economic crises.
Perhaps more alarming for the new Turkish regime was the question of borderland security because the Lausanne Treaty had introduced one demilitarized zone (DMZ) along Turkey’s border with Greece and Bulgaria and another around the Turkish Straits. The DMZ in Thrace traced along both sides of the frontier to a depth of about 30 kilometers, except for an area around Kırkkilise. It stipulated the removal of all existing fortifications and field works, prohibited the construction of new military installations, and stripped Turkey of the right to station troops within the DMZ, save for a maximum of 5,000 special elements that included border guards, customs officers, police, and gendarmerie forces to safeguard internal order. The latter DMZ extended along the Turkish Straits, enforcing similar conditions in an area that covered the Gallipoli peninsula, some chunks of the Anatolian and European coasts of the Marmara Sea, and both shores of the Bosporus up to a line of 15 kilometers.
The convention also compromised borderland defenses by capping the military forces earmarked for the security of Istanbul at a maximum of 12,000 men and forbidding permanent defensive works within the DMZ, including naval bases, aerial organizations, coastal artillery, and submarine engines of war. The treaty also internationalized aspects of the area’s administration by enacting an international commission to oversee a new regime of the Straits, which allowed the liberal passage of commercial vessels and warships in both peace and wartime with minimal restrictions.
Consequently, the defense of Thrace, which would later require nearly half of the Turkish army during World War II, was entrusted to two infantry divisions and a cavalry division that sought to protect a narrow strip of land that was in flux, devoid of natural defenses, deprived of infrastructure, and short on human resources. As we will see in the following galleries, it was on these shifting sands that the new Turkish regime aimed to build a castle, and the task they set themselves required an overarching regional policy, which I call marshaling development.