Based on a series of recollections published between January and April 1926 in the Izmir-based daily newspaperAhenk(Harmony), this article explores how individual Muslim Turks remembered their emotional responses to the Greek occupation of that city (May 1919–September 1922). Analyzing these recollections, it considers why certain events were remembered while others were almost completely left out. By studying how Muslim Turks described their feelings towards the occupying forces, local non-Muslims, and the eventually victorious Turkish army, the article makes an initial contribution to the history of emotions in early republican Turkey. I argue that the composition and consumption of memories were avenues for connecting emotionally to the Turkish nationalist project. This finding challenges the widespread notion that the early republican period was characterized by collective amnesia of the immediate past, and contributes to the growing body of scholarship on popular participation in early republican nationalism.

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According to the exchange convention signed in Lausanne in January 1923, all people who were ‘subject to the exchange’ between Greece and Turkey were entitled to compensation in the receiving country with property of a value equal to that they left behind. In 1925, the Mixed Commission asked ‘exchangees’ in Turkey to fill in ‘applications for property liquidation’. These documents provide a wealth of information about ‘exchangees’ that was previously unavailable. This article studies a sample of these applications (ṭaṣfiye ṭalebnāme) that were drawn up in 1925 in western Turkey in order to find out how the applicants described their houses, living conditions and belongings back in Greece. Utilizing theoretical approaches from anthropological literature, the article analyses these standardised forms as places of encounter between the bureaucracy and those who were subject to the exchange convention. The property listed is conceptualized as “imagined”, i.e., lost property that people had to present in certain ways in order to be compensated for it. The paper traces different presentation strategies in the documents, showing how social status, bureaucratic literacy and narrative content were utilised in this endeavour.