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The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey is the first large-scale population exchange, or agreed mutual expulsion in the 20th century. It involved some two million people, most of them forcibly made refugees and de jure denaturalized from their homelands of centuries or millennia. The "Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations" was signed at Lausanne, Switzerland, on the 30th January 1923, by the governments of Greece and Turkey. The exchange took place between Turkish citizens of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory, and of Greek citizens of the Muslim religion established in Greek territory. In Greece, it was called the Asia Minor Catastrophe (Greek ????as?at??? ?atast??f?). Significant refugee displacement and population movements had already occurred following the Balkan Wars, World War I, and the Greco-Turkish war (1919-1922). These included exchanges and expulsion of about 500,000 Turks from Greece and about 1.500.000 Greeks from Asia Minor, Anatolia and Eastern Thrace to Greece. 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), Prusa (Bursa), the Bithynia region (e.g., Nicomedia (Izmit), Chalcedon (Kadiköy), East Thrace, and other regions were either expelled or formally denaturalized from Turkish territory, numbering up to 1.2 million people. About 500,000 people were expelled from Greece, predominantly Turks, but including other Muslims, Muslim Roma, Pomaks, Cham Albanians, and Megleno-Romanians. The Turks and other Muslims of Western Thrace were exempted from this transfer as well as the Greeks of Istanbul and the Aegean Islands of Imbros (Gökçeada) and Tenedos (Bozcaada). Due to punitive measures carried out by the Republic of Turkey, such as the 1932 parliamentary law which barred Greek citizens in Turkey from a series of 30 trades and professions from tailor and carpenter to medicine, law, and real estate,[2] the Greek population of Istanbul began to decline, as evidenced by demographic statistics. The Varlik Vergisi capital gains tax imposed in 1942 on wealthy non-Muslims in Turkey also served to reduce the economic potential of ethnic Greek businesspeople in Turkey. Furthermore, violent incidents as the Istanbul Pogrom (1955) directed against the ethnic Greek community greatly accelerated emigration of Greeks, reducing the 200,000-strong Greek minority in 1924 to just over 5,000 in 2005.[3]
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