0
She does have a point. To become Greek during the founding of the Greek state it was only required that you be Christian and live in Greece. This was enshrined in the Constitution. No other requirements were levied. This eventually led to easy integration of thousands of Anatolian Christians who most likely had little to do with Balkan Greeks genetically. Greece expelled Muslims of Greece during the population exchange even though they were Greek in blood.
The convention affected the populations as follows: almost all Greek Orthodox Christians (Greek- or Turkish-speaking) of Asia Minor including a Turkish-speaking Greek Orthodox population from middle Anatolia (Karamanlides), the Ionia region (e.g. Smyrna, Aivali), the Pontus region (e.g. Trapezunda, Sampsunta), the former Russian Caucasus province of Kars (Kars Oblast), Prusa (Bursa), the Bithynia region (e.g., Nicomedia (İzmit), Chalcedon (Kadıköy), East Thrace, and other regions were either expelled or formally denaturalized from Turkish territory.The population exchange all in all... was a disaster for Greece as it absorbed a lot of foreign Christians. Greece tossed out its ethnic Greeks just because they followed a different denomination of the Abrahamic religion. It's akin to exchanging Bosnian Muslims for Turkish/Anatolian Christians.About 500,000 people were expelled from Greece, predominantly Greek Muslims, and others including Turks, Muslim Roma, Pomaks, Cham Albanians, Megleno-Romanians, and the Dönmeh.
Bookmarks