Farewell Anatolia: refugees & the rise of the Greek left

The population exchange of 1923 between Greece and Turkey consolidated the influx of more than 1.5 million refugees from Anatolia and East Thrace into Greece. In this article, we exploit the regional distribution of refugees at the sub-prefectural (province) level as a natural experiment in order to delineate the political effects of what the Greeks call the Asia Minor Catastrophe. We find that the settlement of refugees produced positive persistent effects on the electoral share of left-wing parties in the interwar and postwar periods. This is particularly the case for provinces with a high settlement rate of refugees originating from Asia Minor rather than from East Thrace or the Black Sea region. However, the refugee impact on the left-wing vote disappears completely in the post-dictatorship period