The 1923 Greco-Turkish Population ‘Exchange’ Revisited

The 1923 Greco-Turkish Population ‘Exchange’ Revisited: The Case of the Psychiatric Ward of the Aiginiteion Hospital This CCEH Seminar is taking place both in-person and online. Seminar Abtract: The infamous protocol of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which dictated the ‘exchange’ of Ottoman Christians and Muslim Greeks between Greece and Turkey, became a blueprint in international diplomacy and emerged as a potential ‘solution’ to ethnic conflicts. However, the long-term social and medical dimensions of this ‘solution’ have eluded the relevant scholarship. This paper seeks to address this issue by investigating the aftermath of the ‘exchange’ and the ways that the Greek state assumed responsibility for the care of those populations. Drawing on more than 300 case files of refugee patients, the paper moves in three parts. The first section provides a brief overview of the history of the Aiginiteion Hospital, which was one of the earliest and biggest private psychiatric hospitals in Athens from the early 20th century. It situates the foundation of the hospital within the fin-de-siècle psychiatric debates and shows how mental illness was a matter of private health initiatives, which, however, excluded lower social strata. The second part delves into the individual case files and demonstrates how the experience of displacement is largely absent from the individual histories of the patients. These detailed interpretations deemed displacement to be a negligent factor in the development of psychiatric illness, paying much attention to heredity and more individualistic ‘moral strains’, such as the loss of a job or a love disappointment. The last part explores how an against-the-grain reading of these files reveals wider social anxieties and expectations around refugees and exchangees and their position within the conservative Greek social order. Overall, this paper seeks to revisit the history of the Greco-Turkish population exchange through a socio-medical perspective, which goes beyond the analytical paradigm of trauma.