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
Greek genocide
Greek genocide
Population exchange between Greece and Turkey