Abstract:

World War I meant a serious demographic upheaval for the Ottoman lands. Most of the Ottoman Armenians and also a part of Greek population were deported during the war. Besides, the population living in the eastern border regions was forced to migrate to inner Anatolia because of the Russian advance in the Ottoman lands. This great demographic mobility took another form with the end of World War I since the surviving peoples among the mentioned groups began to return to the district governorates and provinces where they had been living before the war. By 1918, the official policy regarding the deportation was changed in the face of the Ottoman defeat in the war, and the Ottoman government gave permission for Armenian and Greek deportees to return in October 1918. With the permission of the government, the surviving deportees began to return to their homelands. It meant a two-sided population movement for many of the localities. On the one side, the deportees in a locality left there for her/his homeland, and also the returnees began to come to that locality. However, the end of World War I not only led to the return of the deportees, but it also brought the rise of insecurity in many localities. The insecurity problems triggered another wave of migration from the localities towards big coastal cities such as Istanbul, Smyrna and Adana. The Armenian population who had not been deported and the returnees began to flight from inner Anatolia after the permission for the free travel of Armenians. Adana became a center of migration during this process. While Armenians tried to gather in the city, the Ottoman government tried to prevent the Armenian migration to Adana. This process also meant the rise of tensions and conflicts between the Muslims and Armenians. The eastern refugees who migrated to inner Anatolia as a result of Russian occupation in the eastern border lands of the Ottoman Empire also began to return to their lands with the signing of ceasefire agreement between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. They became a part of the demographic movement of the post-World War I period. This article aims to analyze the demographic mobility during the return process in an Ottoman locality, the district governorate of Kayseri. By evaluating this process which has not been evaluated in the historiography until now, it will show the impact of post-World War I period in the demographic transformation of a locality from the Ottoman to Republican era. The main sources are documents from the Ottoman Archives, especially the coded telegrams sent from the localities to the Ministry of Interior. In addition, foreign archival documents are utilized in the analysis of post-war population movements in the district governorate of Kayseri

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