Twice A Stranger | Granta

  • Published: 04/11/2021
  • ISBN: 9781783789023
  • Granta Books
  • 304 pages

Twice A Stranger

Bruce Clark

It was a massive, yet little-known landmark in modern history: in 1923, after a long war over the future of the Ottoman world, nearly 2 million citizens of Turkey or Greece were moved across the Aegean, expelled from their homes because they were of the ‘wrong’ religion. Orthodox Christians were deported from Turkey to Greece, Muslims from Greece to Turkey. At the time, world statesmen hailed the transfer as a solution to the problem of minorities who could not coexist. Both governments saw the exchange as a chance to create societies where a single culture prevailed. But how did the people who crossed the Aegean feel about this exercise in ethnic engineering? Bruce Clark’s fascinating account of these turbulent events draws on new archival research in Greece and Turkey and interviews with some of the surviving refugees, allowing them to speak for themselves for the first time.

Twice a Stranger is a book that needed to be written, and Bruce Clark has achieved it superbly. Anyone with an interest in Greece or Turkey ought to read it

Daily Telegraph

[A] wise new book ... fascinating

Sunday Times

The Author

Bruce Clark is an author, journalist and lecturer from Northern Ireland. He writes on European affairs and religion for The Economist. He has been diplomatic correspondent of the Financial Times, Moscow correspondent for The Times and Athens correspondent for Reuters.

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