of the Greek population were refugees. The majority of the refugees who settled in cities like Thessaloniki and Athens were deliberately placed by the authorities in shantytowns on the outskirts of the cities in order to subject them to police control. The refugee communities in the cities were seen by the authorities as centers of poverty and crime that might also become centers of social unrest. About 50% of the refugees were settled in urban areas. Regardless if they settled in urban or rural areas, the vast majority of the refugees arrived in Greece impoverished and often sickly, placing enormous demands on the Greek health care system. Tensions between locals and the refugees for jobs sometimes turned violent, and in 1924, the Interior Minister, General Georgios Kondylis, used a force of refugees as strike-breakers. In rural areas, there were demands that the land that once belonged to the Muslims that had been expelled should go to veterans instead of the refugees. Demagogic politicians quite consciously stoked tensions, portraying refugees as a parasitical class who by their very existence were overwhelming public services, as a way to gain votes. As the largest number of refugees were settled in Macedonia, which was part of the "new Greece" (i.e the areas gained after the Balkan Wars of 1912–13), they shared in the resentment against the way that men from "old Greece" (i.e the area that was Greece before 1912) dominated politics, the civil service, judiciary, etc, and tended to treat "new Greece" like it was a conquered country. In general, people from "old Greece" tended to be more royalist in their sympathies while people from "new Greece" tended to be more Venizelist. The fact that in 1916 King Constantine I had contemplated giving up "new "Greece" to Bulgaria as a way of weakening the Venizelist movement had greatly increased the hostility felt in "new Greece" towards the House of Glücksburg. Furthermore, the fact that it was under King Constantine's leadership that Greece had been defeated in 1922 together with the indifference shown by Greek authorities in Smyrna (modern İzmir, Turkey) towards rescuing the threatened Greek communities of Anatolia in the last stages of the war cemented the hatred of the refugees towards the monarchy. Aristeidis Stergiadis, the Greek High Commissioner in Smyrna remarked in August 1922 as the Turkish Army advanced upon the city: "Better that they stay here and be slain by