Repopulation and Redevelopment
The regime's demographic objective in Thrace was to bring Thrace's population to a million people within five years. This was impossible to attain endogenously. Thus, Thrace's population was to be doubled through a rigorous settlement program. But even with a sound plan for migrant settlement, where could the republic summon an additional 500,000 people on such short notice? The obvious candidates were Turkish minorities from the old Ottoman territories in the Balkans, particularly from Bulgaria and Romania. To facilitate the settlement process, the government passed a new settlement law in June 1934. Even before the law came into force, Turkish immigrants had begun to fan out across Thrace under IGT’s supervision.
Thrace's repopulation encompassed not only the strengthening of ethnically and culturally Turkish elements in the region but also the dilution of those who remained outside the circle of Turkishness. Shortly after the 1934 Settlement Law came into effect, the Jews of Thrace, particularly those in Çanakkale, Edirne, and Kırklareli, started to face boycotts and physical violence across the region, receiving unsigned letters threatening them to leave or risk harm. As a result of violence, an estimated 3,000 people, roughly one-fifth of the Jewish population in Thrace at the time, liquidated their assets and left the region.
Notwithstanding this episode of violence called the 'Thrace Incidents,' many Jews continued their lives in Thrace. The foundation of the state of Israel resulted in another wave of exodus from Thrace in the late 1940s. By the 1970s, the Jewish population in Thrace came to near extinction. Below you can listen to interview excerpts about the Corlu Jews from both Turkish and Jewish interlocutors. You can also click on the thumbnails to access Turkish transcripts for the interviews.
Settlement required legal and material infrastructures to facilitate the dwelling of newcomers. Because the policy foresaw more than the physical transfer of people across international space and also denoted a process through which immigrants would become productive forces tending and defending the land, the government sought to furnish the migrants with various means of production from land, shelter, and draft animals to seed grains, farm equipment, and credit. Land and shelter were the most crucial to fixing the immigrants in their place, but also the most challenging to provide. A cabinet decree was passed in April 1935 to solve the land question, authorizing the expropriation of 178 private farmlands in line with the settlement plan that sought to accommodate 350,000 immigrants in Thrace over five years.
The absorption of immigrants in such high numbers nonetheless remained a problem for the government. Construction was seasonal and not fast enough to accommodate the waves of immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria. In August 1935, IGT reported that the number of immigrants in Thrace reached 39,124 while predicting 4,000 families would be left without homes with the current pace of construction. Homeless immigrants were temporarily sheltered in existing local houses, but as the number of immigrants piled up, the question of homelessness and temporary accommodations threatened to turn into chronic problems.
In view of the mounting crisis, in 1936, Refik Saydam, Minister of Health and Social Relief, suggested diverting the incoming 25,000 people from Thrace to Anatolia. He justified his recommendation on the grounds that there was already a backlog of 10,000 homeless families awaiting their homes in Thrace. As the number of homeless soared, the slow absorption of homeless immigrants took precedence over the transfer of new ones. Accordingly, 1936 and 1937 were lost years for the cause of rapid settlement in Thrace. In 1938, immigration slowed down to such a trickle that Sukru Kaya, the Minister of the Interior, protested another proposal to settle a portion of migrants in Anatolia instead of Thrace. He flagged the reorientation of settlers away from Thrace as a deviation from the original settlement plan, which was designed in congruence with the General Staff to reinforce cultural unity and defensive strength.
Through its local hand, IGT, the government also needed to support the newcomers in health, education, and infrastructure to facilitate their integration and production. Steeped in the high modernist mindset of the era, government officials drew templates for rural settlements and created model villages. They launched educational campaigns, constructed new schools, and built health facilities to help migrant populations elevate their conditions and reinvent themselves as producers. The education of Pomak settlers from Bulgaria was particularly emphasized to facilitate their transition into Turkishness proper. Many schools built for settlers were shoddily constructed one-story buildings. Local transportation infrastructures also saw an upgrade during the period. A new asphalt road connecting Thrace to Europe was built to lubricate agricultural exports and military logistics.
Another important feature of Thrace's repopulation and redevelopment was its peculiar geometric pattern. Immigrants were settled across Thrace unevenly, in accordance with a logic that skewed distributions in favor of a zone of the interior and against the outer rim of the borderland. This logic, promoted by IGT chiefs such as Ongoren, was informed by security considerations. In a report to his party, Ongoren advised against settling immigrants along the Bulgarian and Greek frontier or on the Black Sea coast because he feared that if threatened by war, the newcomers would likely desert or be quickly driven off of their new homes. His zoning plan instead recommended that immigrants be concentrated near the Straits and inland areas so as to maximize their place attachment.
A later report from Ongoren's successor indicates that Ongoren's zoning vision that split Thrace into different priority zones was active even after his departure. Almost one-third of all the 5,365 migrant homes completed or under construction by late 1935 were corralled in Çorlu, an inland town and the emergent military hub of Thrace. Other inland towns, like Hayrabolu, Lüleburgaz, and Malkara, followed Çorlu’s uncontested lead, whereas the aggregate figure for Edirne and Kırklareli, Thrace’s largest cities at the time, which were near the border, stood at a total of mere ten homes.
The gravity center of Thrace thus started to shift from important border areas, such as the old Ottoman provincial center Edirne and the city of Kırklareli, to modest inland towns like Çorlu, which spatially anchored the policy of marshaling development. Çorlu's agricultural estates transformed into new settlement villages, one launching after another as migrants continued to stream into Thrace. The money disbursed to a single Çorlu-based contractor for his migrant housing construction from 1936 to 1939 alone was almost on par with the provincial budget of Tekirdağ and nearly ten times more than the municipal budget of Çorlu.
