A Bitter Harvest

In the early twentieth century, the ports of Salonica and Kavala were well-positioned for international agricultural trade. Steam power had transformed regional export industries, with the Austrian-Lloyd Company providing speedy connections to Central Europe, Egypt, and beyond.[1] The relatively underdeveloped railroad system connected some agricultural zones to Salonica, but not to Kavala, further to the east.[2] As a result, merchants used gas-powered trucks to move bales of tobacco — the region’s most valuable export product — from Drama, İskeçe (Xanthi), and other Thracian and Macedonian villages to Kavala for shipment abroad. Tobacco production was an important source of employment for local Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities.

In the wake of the Treaty of Lausanne, however, Muslims begin to disappear from the commercial correspondence of tobacco merchants such as Shemtov Perahia, an employee of the Commercial Company of Salonica Ltd. based in the town of Drama, who wrote regularly to his superiors in Salonica and Kavala. After 1923, the names of Drama-based Muslims transporting tobacco by truck and train become less common in his letters, while the names of Greek Christian employees remain.[3] Opportunities for Muslims in this commercial ecosystem were dwindling as Macedonian society came to terms with the demographic engineering project of the Greek-Turkish population exchange. Muslims were culturally and economically vulnerable in Eastern Macedonian society, therefore, even before being forced to leave.

The memoirs of Kavalalı İbrahimpaşazade Hüseyin Hüsnü — the Turkish representative on the League of Nations’ Mixed Commission for the Exchange of Populations in Kavala —provide another account of the interplay between dispossession and forced relocation. Muslims faced confiscation of their property—especially beasts of burden—by Greek officials, and commercial speculation on their stock of tobacco from the 1922 harvest. According to Hüsnü, Greek Christian merchants sought to “benefit from the opportunity” provided by a Muslim exodus, to purchase as much of the estimated three million kilograms of stock tobacco as possible.[4] Apart from these local pressures, a different kind of pressure came from the Turkish government, which sought to resettle Muslims in tobacco-producing centers in Anatolia, leveraging their expertise to benefit the Turkish national economy.

Hüsnü’s memoirs demonstrate that there was pressure coming from every direction to move Macedonian Muslims as quickly and efficiently as possible. In a 1923 report presented to the League of Nations in Athens and reproduced for his colleagues in Ankara, Hüsnü explained that Muslims from the district (sancak) of Drama should be resettled based on the quality of their labour and the type of tobacco they cultivated.[5] The language used to describe tobacco-producing villages is repetitive and predictable, highlighting the exceptional workforce and the quality of the region’s tobacco.[6] In response to these factors, Hüsnü proposed tobacco-producing towns of Anatolia — mostly those near Samsun and Izmir — as most “suitable” (muvaffak) for resettlement. In his words:.

Unfortunately, since the majority of tobacco artisans are Rum [Greeks], both in Izmir and in Samsun, there is a vacancy (boşluk) in both places since those Rum have left.

Hüseyin Hüsnü, Unpublished Diary (1923), p. 59.

Throughout the report, these “suitable” destinations are presented as a means of reconstituting the labor of Muslim peasants within the new Turkish nation-building project. After all, during Ottoman times, Samsun and Izmir had, since the 1880s, consistently taken second and third place to the massive tobacco industry of Kavala and its hinterlands.[7] Geographic restructuring was certainly problematic, but also provided opportunities for rebuilding the Turkish national economy.

Nevertheless, Hüsnü was faced with a veritable administrative nightmare in relocating Macedonian Muslims across the Aegean Sea. The issue of moveable property quickly became a major problem. Confiscated property was difficult if not impossible to (re-)obtain. Agricultural production required planning around the harvest and planting seasons, which was contrary to hopes of starting the transfers immediately after the treaty came into effect on 1 May 1923.[8]

Hüsnü’s account makes it clear that the infrastructure that facilitated seasonal transportation of limited amounts of stock tobacco was hardly prepared to relocate an entire industry. Ships hired at the port of Kavala to move the population had insufficient storage space for huge amounts of tobacco. In any case, millions of kilograms of unsold tobacco belonging to Muslim agriculturalists could not be quickly moved from the villages to the port, given limited truck and railroad capacity. Even in cases where Muslims successfully brought their tobacco to port, they could find themselves forced to sell at a discounted rate to opportunistic purchasing agents, who knew all too well that the steamships had limited storage.

The limitations of regional infrastructural capacity ultimately contributed to the destitution of refugees in Turkey.

These and similar challenges led to the creation of the Ministry of the Exchange, Reconstruction and Resettlement (Mübadele, İmar ve İskan Vekaleti), established in Turkey in November 1923. This ministry was initially responsible for compensating refugees from Greece and resettling them in Turkey, as Onur Yıldırım and Ellinor Morack have demonstrated.[9] Prior to resettlement, however, it was the limited amount of space on steamships, inefficiencies of land-borne transport, and the ambitions of the Exchange Commission, which led to such dispossession in the first place. While such transportation infrastructure had created a robust supply chain of tobacco from the Balkans to Central and Western Europe in prior decades, it proved incapable of managing the massive exodus of human beings occasioned by the population exchange. Put simply, the limitations of regional infrastructural capacity ultimately contributed to the destitution of refugees in Turkey.

Decisions made by Greek and Turkish bureaucrats prioritized efficiency over a methodical review of property claims. A primary goal of Turkish policy vis-a-vis its incoming refugee population was supplying a reliable labour force to the important tobacco production centers of Samsun and Izmir, revitalizing the precious industry there. Hüseyin Hüsnü highlights the importance of moving Muslims to new places of settlement as soon as possible, so that “they will obtain their own comfort” and “attract wealth to our homeland.”[10] Although hardly part of some master plan by the Greek and Turkish governments, let alone the League of Nations itself, transportation infrastructure was used strategically to move exchanged populations quickly, in spite of unsettled disputes concerning their belongings. Mechanisms of population exchange prioritized productive efficiency and economic development over the protection of refugees’ property rights. The effects would be felt by tobacco producers in Samsun and Izmir for generations to come.

Herman is finishing his dissertation on the political economy of tobacco in late- and post-Ottoman Macedonia and Thrace. Drawing on a long-standing interest in comparative genocide studies, he has incorporated sources in Greek, Ottoman Turkish, and a number of other languages: such sources have ranged from business correspondence and personal memoirs to commercial court records, conference proceedings, and official reports. These records are allowing Herman to explore the ways that tobacco became enmeshed in territorial disputes, nation-building, and demographic engineering projects. By analyzing the tobacco trade during and after the Ottoman period through the lens of political economy, he hopes to contribute to a budding cultural history of capitalism, which accounts for the multiplicity of social fissures within the context of agricultural production for global consumer markets.

Notes

[1] Matteo Barbano, “Steamers for the Empire: Austrian Lloyd and the Transition from Sail to Steam in the Austrian Merchant Marine (1836–1914),” in Mediterranean Seafarers in Transition: Maritime Labour, Communities, Shipping and the Challenge of Industrialization 1850s-1920s (Leiden: Brill, 2022), pp. 447-477.

[2] The railroad bypassed Kavala to the North on an East-West axis. See Basil C. Gounaris, Steam Over Macedonia, 1870-1912: Socio-Economic Change and the Railway Factor (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1993), pp. 42-62.

[3] Shemtov Perahia and his brother Judah Perahia were employees of the Commercial Company of Salonica Ltd., which was established by the Allatini Brothers in 1895. It became one of the most important firms exporting oriental tobacco from Macedonia and Thrace at the turn of the century and continued to dominate much of the industry until after the Balkan Wars when export dynamics changed dramatically due to the Bulgarian occupation and the subsequent Greco-Turkish War. Ben Zvi Institute, Jerusalem. Judah Perahia Collection. In particular, see Box 8, Folder 7.

[4] “Türklerin gideceklerini bildikleri için fırsattan istifade tütünlerini… almak istiyorlar….” İbrahimpaşazade Hüseyin Hüsnü, Unpublished Diary (1923), 59.

[5] Tobacco was such a major part of the local economy that the type of tobacco and its value within each village were the determining factors in deciding where villagers should be transplanted. Furthermore, the extent to which other agricultural products fueled the local economy was measured in relation to tobacco, as Hüsnü used the generic “grains” (hububat) to describe them when relevant. Ibid., 59.

[6] For example, the people in villages near Sarışaban (modern Chrysoupoli) were “very hardworking and distinguished by their artisanship in tobacco” [ahalisi çok çalışkan ve tütün sanʿatında temeyyüz etmişlerdir] while those near Drama “produced tobacco of the first degree” [birinci derecede tütün yetiştirirler]. Likewise, “the strong people” of Pürsiçan and other villages near Pravişte (modern Eleftheroupoli) “which produce more tobacco than other regions” ought “to be united to the Bafra villages [in Samsun] which produce good tobacco” [kuvvetli insanları çalışkan ve diğer arazilere nispetle fazla tütün yetiştiren köylerin Bafra’nın iyi tütün yetiştiren köylerine birleştirilmeleri münasibdir]. Ibid., 56-61.

[7] J. Freih v. Schwegel, “Das Türkische Tabakmonopol” [The Turkish Tobacco Monopoly], in Oesterreichische Monatsschrift für den Orient [Austrian Monthly of the Orient], 3.5 (15 March 1884), 65.

[8] Société des Nations, Recueil des Traités et des Engagements Internationaux enregistrés par le Secrétariat de la Société des Nations: No 807. Grèce et Turquie Convention concernant l’échange des populations grecques et turques et Protocole, signés à Lausanne, le 30 janvier 1923, art. 1, 76-77.

[9] On the Ministry of the Exchange, Reconstruction and Resettlement, see Onur Yıldırım, Diplomacy and Displacement Reconsidering the Turco-Greek Exchange of Populations, 1922–1934 (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 125-178. For more on the problematic politics of compensation, see Ellinor Morack, The Dowry of the State: The Politics of Abandoned Property and the Population Exchange in Turkey, 1921-1945 (Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press, 2017),249-322; idem, “Refugees, Locals and ‘The’ State: Property Compensation in the Province of Izmir Following the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange of 1923,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, 2.1 (2015): 147-166. On the issue of labor in the post-exchange years, see idem, “Turkifying Poverty, or: the Phantom Pain of Izmir’s Lost Christian Working Class, 1924–26,” in Middle Eastern Studies 55:4 (2019), 499-518. For a recent perspective on the Refugee Settlement Commission in Greece, which took on some of the same duties, and issues related to agricultural labor and land in Macedonia, see Ραϋμόνδος Αλβανός, Σλαβόφονοι και Πρόσφυγες: Κράτος και Πολιτικές Ταυτότητες στη Μακεδονία του Μεσοπολέμου [Slavic-Speakers and Refugees: State and Political Identities in Macedonia in the Interwar Period] (Θεσσαλονίκη: Επίκεντρο, 2019), 45-74.

[10] “…hem kendileri na’il rifah olacaklar hem de memleketimize… bir servet celb edecekler.” Hüsnü, Diary, 62.

FEATURE IMAGE: THE POPULATION EXCHANGE COMMISSION IN KAVALA WITH HÜSEYIN HÜSNÜ SEATED THIRD FROM RIGHT. COURTESY AHMET CULLU.

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