Forced or state‑organized returns and removals (population exchanges, expulsions, wartime deportations) systematically wipe out multilingual, multi‑faith city cultures and their material traces, producing a homogenized civic memory. Thessaloniki’s transformation from Ottoman Salonica to Greek Thessaloniki — accelerated by the 1917 fire, the 1923 Lausanne exchange and the 1943 removal of Jews — is a clear historical example.
— Seeing remigration as a mechanism of cultural erasure reframes contemporary policy debates about returns, deportations, and nationalist 'remigration' campaigns as matters of heritage, social cohesion, and human rights, not only border control.
Boyd Tonkin
2026.04.19
100% relevant
The article cites the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne population exchange, the Great Fire of 1917, and the 1943 deportations to Auschwitz as the concrete events that converted a cosmopolitan port into a homogenized provincial city.
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