Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Turkish Studies - Social Sciences , cilt.16, sa.3, ss.1305-1320, 2021 (Hakemli Dergi)
The Lausanne convention concerned approximately two million people, and most of them wereforcibly denaturalized from their homelands. Today, being one of the top immigrant-receiving countries, theimportance of the 1923 Lausanne Peace Treaty and “Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek andTurkish Populations” continues for Turkey. The experiences of the first-generation migrants attracted attentionworldwide however, the stories remained mostly untold until the 1980s. There are numerous studies and booksmade later on, but mostly the migrants around the Istanbul area are not entirely analyzed until very recenttimes. This article examines the experiences and thoughts of the first-generation Lausanne Treaty Exchangemigrants in and around the Catalca area in Istanbul based on data from the fieldwork made for my 2016 datedPh.D. thesis “Influences of 1923 Population Exchange on Second and Third Generation Migrants” (PaközTürkeli, 2016), face to face in-depth interviews with 25 people and oral history books; through the perspectivesof second and third generation Exchange migrants. After providing a literature review and short informationon the history of the events and region included in the treaty with the examples from the interviews, the articlewill provide the theoretical framework of the study. The article will focus on the experiences and thoughts offirst-generation migrants during the migration process and afterward. Their feeling of otherness and measuresto overcome this feeling will be pointed. It will also reveal their double-sided attachment and affinity to thelands they lived/left. The study will also use excerpts from the Ph.D. thesis. The data in the research can beespecially useful for migration and generational studies.