1920s

Events and trends

By far, the greatest event to mark this decade for Greece was the Asia Minor Disaster. Over one million Asia Minor Greeks fled their ancestral homeland for mainland Greece while nearly 500,000 Turks went the other way. This created a country at first heavily burdened by such a great influx but soon blessed by such a progessive element. Macedonia, which had a great ethnic admixture in the 1910s became solidly Greek. The Bulgarian-speaking Greeks of that region had to revert to Greek under the influence of their new neighbours. Further south, in Attica, entire suburbs were built to house the refugees. Crete, which had had a population that was nearly 1/3 Turkish, became solidly Greek. New villages were built carrying the names of the cities of Asia Minor that were abandoned by their former inhabitants: Nea Kios, Nea Artaki, Nea Alikarnassos, Nea Moudania, Nea Nikomedia, etc.