Kayaköy

Kayaköy is an abandoned village in southwest Turkey. It was anciently known in Greek as Carmylessus (Καρμυλησσός), shortened to Lebessos (Λεβέσσος) and pronounced in Modern Greek as Leivissi (Λειβίσσι), lies 8 km south of Fethiye in southwestern Turkey in the old Lycia province. From Ancient Greek the town name shifted to Koine Greek by the Roman period, evolved into Byzantine Greek in the Middle Ages, and finally became the Modern Greek name still used by its townspeople before their final evacuation in 1923. In late antiquity the inhabitants of the region had become Christian and, following the East-West Schism with the Church of Rome in 1054 AD, they came to be called Greek Orthodox Christian. These Greek-speaking Christian subjects, and their Turkish-speaking Muslim Ottoman rulers, lived in relative harmony from the end of the turbulent Ottoman conquest of the region in the 14th century until the early 20th century. Following the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, and the subsequent Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, the town's Greek Orthodox residents were exiled from Livissi. The massacres of Greeks and other Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire during World War I (1914–1918) led to the almost total depopulation of the town's 6,500 Greek inhabitants by 1918. These former inhabitants were deprived of their properties and became refugees in Greece, or they died in Ottoman forced labour battalions (cf. Number 31328, an autobiography by a Greek-speaking novelist from a similar coastal town in Turkey). Following these events the Allied victors in World War I authorized the occupation of Smyrna, which still had many Greek inhabitants, by Greece in May 1919. This led to the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, the subsequent defeat of Greece, and the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. That treaty contained a protocol, the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, which barred permanently the return of any prior Greek Orthodox refugees to their homes in Turkey (including the previous Livissi refugees) and required that any remaining Orthodox Christian citizens of Turkey leave their homes for Greece (with an exception for Greeks living in Istanbul).