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CHAPTER 2 – HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 
37 
many of its leading cadres was tremendous
23
; and losing them to the former subjects 
was deeply humiliating
24
. Anatolia, more than ever before, became a last frontier. 
But it seemed scarcely a secure one, since Bulgaria had advanced close to the capital 
city and Greece had seized the Greek inhabited islands from Imbros and Tenedos to 
Samos giving it a sea border along an Anatolian coast itself inhabited by a 
substantial Greek population. At the same time the conquests of the Christian states 
in the course of the Balkan Wars uprooted hundreds of thousands of Muslims who 
took refuge in the territories which remained in the Empire. By 1920 they had 
exceeded 400,000 of which 143,000 were from the territories conquered by Greece
25
. 
Whether in retaliation or to create pressure on Greece in furtherance of a claim for 
the return of the offshore islands, a series of anti-Christian pogroms took place along 
the Aegean coast in 1914 with the result that many inhabitants, estimated at around 
150,000, fled as refugees, first to the islands
26
. It was the presence of these refugees, 
not an earlier inspiration from the Great Idea, that ignited “Asia Minor” as a political 
issue in Greece
27
. Military intervention was contemplated and diplomatic 
intervention by the great powers mobilised in May and June to put an end to the 
pogroms
28
and a solution was sought in arrangements for a voluntary population 
exchange with Turkey. These were agreed on 5 July
29
but became a dead letter with 
the start of the war in August and Turkey’s entry as an ally of the Central Powers in 
23
Zürcher 2004, 108-109; Zürcher 2010, 118, 288 
24
Kılıç, 50-54 
25
Toynbee, 138 
26
Toynbee, 140-141; Ploumidis, 90-105 
27
Ploumidis, 113, 135-143 
28
Ploumidis, 100-104, 107-109 
29
Pentzopoulos, 56; Ploumidis 106-107 

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