05 — The Population Exchange

The end of St. Arsenios’ world and his final pastoral act: the compulsory Greco-Turkish population exchange of 1923–24, which uprooted the entire Orthodox population of Anatolia, and the old priest’s leading of the Farasiots out of Cappadocia to Greece — together with his celebrated foretelling that he would live only forty days after reaching the new land.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Cappadocian)

This section joins a firmly documented historical catastrophe — the Lausanne-mandated exchange that ended two millennia of Anatolian Christianity — to the hagiographic tradition of St. Arsenios’ completion of his pastoral office. The exchange itself is reported from the historical scholarship; the leading of Farasa and the forty-day prophecy are pinned to St. Paisios’ Life and reported as its testimony (§3.5), with the contested reckoning of the interval flagged.

Contents

  • the-uprooting-of-1924.md — the compulsory exchange under the Treaty of Lausanne; the end of Cappadocian Christianity; St. Arsenios, in his eighties, organizing and leading the Farasiot exodus to Greece.
  • the-prophecy-of-forty-days.md — his foretelling that he would live only forty days after reaching Greece; the fulfilment in his repose on Corfu; the reading of his death as a task exactly completed.

See Also