The Greek – Turkish population exchange came out of the Turkish military 's reaction against Christian minorities in the late days of the Ottoman Empire and its subsequent massacres of them : Adana massacre of 1909 , Armenian Genocide of 1914-1923 , and Greek genocide 1914-1922 . By January 31 , 1917 , the Chancellor of Germany , allied with the Ottomans during World War I , was reporting that : At the end of World War I one of the Ottoman 's foremost generals , Mustafa Kemal Atatürk , continued the fight against the attempted Allied occupation of Turkey in the Turkish War of Independence . The surviving Christian minorities within Turkey , particularly the Armenians and the Greeks , had sought protection from the Allies and thus continued to be seen as an internal problem , and as an enemy , by the Turkish National Movement . This was exacerbated by the Allies authorizing Greece to occupy Ottoman regions ( Occupation of Smyrna ) with a large surviving Greek minority population in 1919 and by an Allied proposal to protect the remaining Armenians by creating an independent state for them ( Wilsonian Armenia ) within the former Ottoman realm . The Turkish Nationalists ' reaction to these events led directly to the Greco-Turkish War ( 1919 – 1922 ) and the continuation of the Armenian genocide and Greek genocide . After Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 's capture of Smyrna followed by the abolition of the Ottoman Empire on November 1 , 1922 , over a million Greek orthodox Ottoman subjects had fled their homes in Turkey . A formal peace agreement was signed with Greece after months of negotiations in Lausanne on July 24 , 1923 . Two weeks after the treaty , the Allied Powers turned over Istanbul to the Nationalists , marking the final departure of occupation armies from Anatolia and provoking another flight of Christian minorities to Greece
Adana massacre of 1909
Adana massacre of 1909
Population exchange between Greece and Turkey