The 1924 Population Exchange

The uprooting that carried the saint across the sea: under the 1923 Lausanne Convention, the compulsory exchange of Orthodox and Muslim populations between Greece and Turkey emptied Cappadocia of its Greeks. The Christians of Prokopion, leaving their homeland forever, carried the relics of St. John the Russian with them to the island of Evia, where they founded a new village — Nea Prokopi, “New Prokopion.” This file sets the well-documented history of the exchange around the cult’s own account of the transfer.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox confessor (venerated across the Greek world; Pan-Orthodox)

The Catastrophe and the Convention

The world that had venerated John for two centuries ended with the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922 and the “Asia Minor Catastrophe” — the destruction of the Greek Orthodox communities of Anatolia, culminating in the burning of Smyrna and the flight and death of hundreds of thousands. The settlement that followed made the uprooting total and legal. By the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, signed at Lausanne on 30 January 1923, Greece and Turkey agreed to a compulsory exchange of populations defined by religion: Orthodox Christians of Turkey (with limited exceptions, chiefly Istanbul) were to move to Greece, and Muslims of Greece (chiefly excepting Western Thrace) to Turkey (Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions That Forged Modern Greece and Turkey, Harvard University Press, 2006; Renée Hirschon, ed., Crossing the Aegean, Berghahn, 2003, on the Convention and its compulsory, religion-based criterion).

The scale was immense: on the order of 1.2 to 1.5 million Orthodox Christians were moved from Anatolia and Thrace to Greece, and some 400,000–500,000 Muslims from Greece to Turkey — a forced, one-way severance of communities from homelands many had inhabited for millennia, carried out largely in 1923–1924 (Clark, Twice a Stranger, 2006; Hirschon, Crossing the Aegean, 2003). The Cappadocian Greeks, including the Orthodox of Prokopion, were among those compelled to leave; the great Christian civilization of Cappadocia, the country of the Cappadocian Fathers, came to an end (Clark, Twice a Stranger, 2006).

Carrying the Saint

The Christians of Prokopion did not leave their saint behind. As they prepared to abandon Cappadocia forever in the exchange (1924), they took up the relics of St. John the Russian and carried them with them across the Aegean to Greece — one of the most treasured of the sacred possessions the refugees bore out of Anatolia (Holy Shrine of St. John the Russian, Nea Prokopi, oir.gr; Orthodox Church in America, “Saint John the Russian,” oca.org — the relics brought to Euboea by the refugees of Prokopion in the exchange). That a displaced and impoverished people, permitted to carry only what they could, chose to bring the body of their saint is itself a measure of what the cult meant to them: John was not a possession they owned but a father and protector they would not be parted from.

The Founding of Nea Prokopi

The refugees of Prokopion were resettled, with other Anatolian Greeks, in northern Evia (Euboea), the long island off the eastern coast of the Greek mainland. There they founded a new settlement and named it, in memory of the home they had lost, Nea Prokopi — “New Prokopion” (Holy Shrine of St. John the Russian, oir.gr; Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger, 2006, on the refugees’ practice of renaming their new settlements after their lost Anatolian homes). The naming is characteristic of the whole refugee experience: across Greece, the uprooted planted the names of Ionia, Pontus, and Cappadocia on new soil, keeping alive in the map of Greece the memory of a homeland now closed to them (Hirschon, Crossing the Aegean, 2003).

At Nea Prokopi the relics were first housed in a modest existing chapel (in the accounts, dedicated to Saints Constantine and Helen) while the refugee community established itself; the great purpose-built shrine that now holds them would be raised only a generation later, in 1951 (Holy Shrine of St. John the Russian, oir.gr; see The Pilgrimage Church). The saint who had been a Russian in a Turkish household, venerated by Greeks in Cappadocia, was now a Cappadocian refugees’ saint transplanted to a Greek island — carrying with him, in his very relics, the memory of a vanished Christian world.

A Saint of the Refugees

John thus became, in a particular way, a saint of the Asia Minor refugees and their descendants — bound up with the trauma and the endurance of the exchange, a living link to the lost homeland. This bond gives his modern cult on Evia much of its emotional charge, and it connects him to the wider refugee sanctity of twentieth-century Greek Orthodoxy — including to St. Iakovos Tsalikis of Evia, himself a refugee child of the Asia Minor Catastrophe, who settled and became a monk not far from Nea Prokopi and who venerated St. John the Russian (see A Healer Across Two Peoples and the sibling collection, St. Iakovos Tsalikis of Evia).

References

Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, signed at Lausanne, 30 January 1923. (The compulsory, religion-based population exchange.)
Bruce Clark. Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions That Forged Modern Greece and Turkey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. (The Asia Minor Catastrophe and the exchange; the end of Cappadocian Greek Christianity; the refugees renaming their settlements.)
Renée Hirschon, ed. Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey. New York: Berghahn Books, 2003. (The Convention, its scale and criteria, and the refugee resettlement and memory.)
Holy Shrine of St. John the Russian, Nea Prokopi (Evia). “A Brief Life of Saint John the Russian.” oir.gr. (The refugees of Prokopion carrying the relics to Evia; the founding of Nea Prokopi; the first housing of the relics.)
Orthodox Church in America. “Saint John the Russian and Confessor, Whose Relics Are on the Island of Euboia.” oca.org/saints/lives/1953/05/27. (The relics brought to Euboea by the Prokopion refugees in the exchange.)