Article 2.

The following persons shall not be included in the exchange provided for in article

1.a)The Greek inhabitants of Constantinople

All Greeks who were already established before the 30th October,1918 within the areas under the Prefecture of the city of Constantinople, as defined by the law of 1912, shall be considered as Greek inhabitants of Constantinople.

The above references to the Greek minority in the Treaty of Lausanne were concluded after a long debate. Venizelos, a former (and future) Greek Prime Minister represented Athens at the Peace conference. He and his Turkish counterpart Ismet Pasha agreed that the Greeks of Constantinople and Moslems of western Thrace should be excluded from the population exchange.

The Turks insisted on expelling the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The New York Times reported on January 5, 1923 that:".....the Turks came out flatly with a demand that the Patriarch quit Constantinople, whereas for two weeks they had been considering under what conditions the Patriarchate might remain in Turkey". On this issue, Greece had the support of the allies. Under a compromise plan the Patriarchate renounced the political priveliges granted to it by the Ottomans in exchange for it's right to stay in it's historic homeland.

The Greeks of Constantinople received temporary stability upon the founding of a Republic by Kemal Ataturk. The Revolutionary government in Ankara had it's attention on the Patriarchate. At once, the Turkish Republic began it's obstructionist policies against the Patriarchate which continue today. According to a New York Times report on January 31, 1925 the Turkish authorities deported Ecumenical Patriarch Constantinos VI.

The Times article further reported that the Turkish police sought to deport the Greek Metropolitans of the sees of Cyzicus, Prince's Islands, Caesarea, and Sardis. Steadily, an uneasy relationship between the Patriarchate and the Turkish authorities stabilized. The rumblings of trouble for the Greek community began during the second World war when Turkey imposed an extremely harsh tax on it's non-Moslem populations (Greeks,Jews,Armenians).

In 1948 Turkey accepted under American pressure the election of the American Greek Orthodox Archbishop Athenagoras to the Patriarchate. This period was the early cold war era in which the United States sought to contain the Soviet Union and were the final years of the "golden age of Greek-Turkish relations" begun by Venizelos and Ataturk in 1930 through the Treaty of Greek-Turkish friendship.