It was a huge but little-known milestone in modern history: in 1923, after a long war over the future of the Ottoman world, nearly 2 million citizens of Turkey or Greece were moved across the Aegean, expelled from their homes due to the 'wrong' religion. Orthodox Christians were expelled from Turkey to Greece, Muslims from Greece to Turkey. At the time, world leaders hailed the transfer as a solution to the problem of minorities who could not coexist. Both governments viewed the exchange as an opportunity to create societies where a single culture prevailed. But how did the people who crossed the Aegean for this process of ethnic engineering feel? Bruce Clark's compelling narrative of these tumultuous events is based on new archival research in Greece and Turkey, as well as interviews with some of the surviving refugees, allowing them to speak for themselves for the first time.