You're sad that Greece didn't get to perform ethnic cleansing, if not outright genocide, in Anatolia?
Or maybe he's sad that Turkey got to perform ethnic cleansing in both Anatolia and Eastern Thrace, after the Ottomans had already committed outright genocide?
The Asia Minor Catastrophe refers to the destruction of the millennia-old Greek society and civilization in Asia Minor. Look up the fire of Smyrna.
So then why did Greece agree to leave Eastern Thrace instead of fighting on?
Difficult to say. Probably the combination of the effects of the defeat - both in terms of casualties and also of demoralization - made Greece unwilling to fight further, as well as the lack of foreign support. Britain in particular would not have looked too kindly on Greece breaking an armistice negotiated by them.
Well then your nation already politically unstable, would now have to fight a war while your benefactors have made their opposition clear.
The Greek Navy was strong enough that the Turks had little chance of being able to conquer Eastern Thrace outright.
More than enough to ship weapons and supplies to the large number of Turks who made up a majority of the region's population. Greece didn't have the political will to hold onto the region in the face of local opposition from the populace.
In 1912, there were slightly more Greeks than Turks, but neither group was a majority. (39% Greek, 36% Turkish, 4% Bulgarian, the rest was "others").
This is a moot point because a successful Greek campaign of conquest against Ottoman territories in Thrace and Western Anatolia would have required ethnic cleansing to prepare the land for Greek settlers, eliminate pockets of resistance, and enforce Greek rule over the area.
Nice to whom? Not to the local Turks who for centuries had coexisted with the Greeks, isn't that for sure?
Transporting supplies against a hostile navy doesn't seem like a recipe for success. On top of that, most ships in the Marmara Sea at the time had apparently Greek crews, which are hardly going to be helpful.
Of course these figures are questionable at best (they were certainly a lot more Bulgarians, for example). It depends of course on who made them to say in which favor they were distorted most. By 1923 there would of course be significant changes. The Bulgarians were expelled (or exterminated) in 1913 and a large number of Muslims from the Balkans were settled in Eastern Thrace, so there was certainly a Muslim majority by then.
Not getting expelled from their homes would certainly be better for the Greeks of Eastern Thrace and for Greece which had to accommodate all these refugees. It's also not at all clear that Greece would have needed to expel the Muslims to stabilize their rule. In this scenario, there still would be the mass expulsion of Greeks from Anatolia and Greece could easily gain a majority in Eastern Thrace by settling some of them there. In OTL, Greece has never had any trouble with holding on to Western Thrace with its large Muslim minority, so it's certainly wouldn't be impossible in this timeline. Taking this into acount, it's not out of the question that the total number of people
I don't buy that. Expulsions of Muslims from the Balkans was a time honored tradition at this point. I see no reason the Greeks wouldn't attempt it and likely fail given the state of Greece at the time.
It was not at all a time honored tradition. Consider the huge Muslim population in Bulgaria, Serbia after the Balkan wars or more relevantly Greece itself. After all, how could there have been a population exchange between Greece and Turkey if the Muslims had been expelled after the Balkan Wars? Even in OTL, it was Turkey that demanded the population exchange, not Greece.
I wouldn't put it past the Greek military to enact a campaign of ethnic cleansing and population exchange in TTL given that the precedents for it were already being set in the OTL war which saw several urban massacres perpetrated by both sides. The reason why Western Thrace's Muslims are tolerated is because they are a minority in a border zone -- in the case in which Greece conquers Western Anatolia and both sides of the Sea of Marmara, they will have many more Turks and restive minorities at their hands to deal with, which they will be compelled to repress given the strategic importance of Constantinople and the area in general.
Just because there were Muslim populations there doesn't mean that expulsions were not a common occurrence. One could say the same thing about Russian Jews.
