Greco-Turkish War (1897)
The Greco-Turkish War of 1897, also called the Thirty Days' War and known in Greece as the Black '97 (, "Mauro '97") or the Unfortunate War (Ατυχής πόλεμος, "Atychis polemos") (Turkish: "1897 Osmanlı-Yunan Savaşı" or "1897 Türk-Yunan Savaşı"), was a war fought between the Kingdom of Greece and the Ottoman Empire. Its immediate cause was the question over the status of the Ottoman province of Crete, whose Greek majority long desired union with Greece. Despite the Ottoman victory on the field, an autonomous Cretan State under Ottoman suzerainty was established the following year (as a result of the intervention of the Great Powers after the war), with Prince George of Greece and Denmark as its first High Commissioner.
Fridtjof Nansen
After the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, Nansen travelled to Istanbul to negotiate the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of refugees, mainly ethnic Greeks who had fled from Turkey after the defeat of the Greek Army. The impoverished Greek state was unable to take them in, and so Nansen devised a scheme for a population exchange whereby half a million Turks in Greece were returned to Turkey, with full financial compensation, while further loans facilitated the absorption of the refugee Greeks into their homeland. Despite some controversy over the principle of a population exchange, the plan was implemented successfully over a period of several years.