Defining borders

At the beginning of the 20th century, Greece managed through the victorious Balkan Wars of 1912–13, to double its territory and unite Greeks that remained under Ottoman rule. The Treaty of Sèrves, signed after the end of the World War I, fulfilled the wish of the Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos for a country spread over two continents. However, in 1922, the “Asia Minor catastrophe” ended his vision for the creation of a “Great Greece”: around 1.5 million Greeks, uprooted from their homes in Asia Minor (Anatolia), became refugees after the signing of the Lausanne Treaty. The Greek State had little choice but to request help from abroad and, with great effort, did its best to incorporate the tens of thousands of people that had arrived from the other side of the Aegean Sea.