Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922)

Between May 1919 and October 1922, the Kingdom of Greece and the Turkish National Movement led by Mustafa Kemal fought for control of western Anatolia as the defeated Ottoman Empire was being carved up after the First World War. Greek armies advanced deep into Anatolia before being checked and then routed. In Greece the war is remembered as the Asia Minor Campaign or the Asia Minor Catastrophe; in Turkey it is the Western Front of the War of Independence.

The two sides have long told the story differently. Greek governments presented the campaign as the protection of a large Orthodox Christian population that had lived in Asia Minor since antiquity and had suffered violence during the war years, and many Greeks saw it as a step towards the Megali Idea, the vision of a greater Greece on both shores of the Aegean. The Turkish national movement saw a foreign invasion of the Turkish heartland and fought what it regarded as a defensive war for survival. The size of the Greek population around Smyrna was itself disputed, with estimates ranging from a large minority to the largest single group.

Britain's prime minister, David Lloyd George, backed Greek claims, and on 15 May 1919 Greek troops landed at Smyrna, now İzmir. By the end of summer 1920 they held most of western Anatolia. The Treaty of Sèvres, signed by the Sultan's government on 10 August 1920, gave Greece eastern Thrace and the administration of Smyrna, but it was never ratified. In Greece, the election of November 1920 removed Eleftherios Venizelos, and a plebiscite restored King Constantine, who replaced many experienced officers.

The nationalists, now building a regular army, halted Greek attacks at the two battles of İnönü in January and March 1921. Greece won at Kütahya–Eskişehir in July and pushed towards Ankara, but in the 21-day Battle of the Sakarya, from 23 August to 13 September 1921, Turkish forces under Mustafa Kemal held their ground and the exhausted Greeks withdrew. France and Italy came to terms with Ankara, and Soviet Russia supplied it with money and arms.

On 26 August 1922 the Turks launched their Great Offensive. The Greek army was decisively beaten at Dumlupınar on 30 August, still marked in Turkey as Victory Day, and fled to the coast; Turkish cavalry entered Smyrna on 9 September. Days later fire destroyed the Greek and Armenian quarters while the Turkish and Jewish districts survived. Responsibility is disputed, with some sources blaming Turkish forces and others Greeks or Armenians, and some 50,000 to 100,000 Greeks and Armenians are estimated to have died in the fire and accompanying killings. The Armistice of Mudanya, agreed on 11 October and accepted by Greece on 14 October, ended the fighting.

Commonly cited figures give about 19,000 Greek and 9,000 Turkish soldiers killed in action, with many more wounded, missing or captured. Civilians suffered on both sides. The political scientist R. J. Rummel estimated that 264,000 Greek civilians were killed by Turkish forces between 1919 and 1922, and atrocities against the Pontic Greeks are recognised in Greece and Cyprus as a genocide. An Inter-Allied commission found in 1921 that Greek and Armenian bands, sometimes aided by regular troops, had systematically destroyed Muslim villages on the Yalova–Gemlik peninsula, and the retreating Greek army burned towns such as Manisa. Estimates of Turkish civilian deaths vary widely, from at least 15,000 to far higher figures put forward by Turkish negotiators and some historians whose work has been heavily criticised.

Greece abandoned its claims in Anatolia and eastern Thrace. The Treaty of Lausanne of 1923 replaced Sèvres and recognised the new Republic of Turkey, and a separate agreement imposed a compulsory population exchange that uprooted more than a million Orthodox Christians and around half a million Muslims. In Greece, defeat triggered the 11 September 1922 Revolution and the political trial known as the Trial of the Six.

Our 1920 map shows the Ottoman Empire during the war, and our 1930 map shows the Republic of Turkey within the borders confirmed at Lausanne.