185 Author’s Note: Research for this article was funded by grants from the Kokkalis Program on Southeast and East-Central Europe at Harvard University, the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Historical Association. An early draft of this article was presented at the History-Migration-Anthropology: New Perspectives on European Migration and Migration History conference (University of Erfurt, Germany, November 2002). I wish to thank Andrea Klimt and Urlich Raiser for comments on the article. East European Politics and Societies Volume 23 Number 2 Spring 2009 185-212 © 2009 SAGE Publications 10.1177/0888325408326787 http://eeps.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com Navigating Nationality in the Emigration of Minorities between Bulgaria and Greece, 1919–1941 Theodora Dragostinova Ohio State University, Columbus The 1919 Convention for Emigration of Minorities between Bulgaria and Greece was an important prototype for minority handling and population exchange in Eastern Europe after World War I. Based on research in Bulgarian and Greek archives, this article offers a comparative analysis of the conflicting pursuits of the two countries and the multiple opinions of various groups affected by displacement. Despite the optimism of the League of Nations that the Convention would solve ethnic conflict by bolstering individual rights, people’s unwillingness to prioritize nationality undermined the exe- cution of voluntary exchange. Instead, emigration occurred as an “actual exchange,” and refugees fled their birthplaces under harsh circumstances. Yet individuals inven- tively navigated their nationality and often defied the priorities of the nation-states to further their personal strategies. Because of the failure of this first international exper- iment of voluntary exchange in Eastern Europe, future proponents of population man- agement adopted the principle of compulsory exchange. Keywords: Bulgaria; Greece; nationalism; minorities; refugees F ollowing World War I, in conjunction with the Neuilly Peace Treaty from 27 November 1919, the defeated Bulgarian government signed the Convention for Voluntary and Reciprocal Emigration of Minorities between Bulgaria and Greece. The mission of the Convention was “to regulate the reciprocal and voluntary emigra- tion of the racial, religious, and linguistic minorities between Greece and Bulgaria, [and] to facilitate emigration . . . by securing for the emigrants the payment of the real property that they leave behind.” 1 The resettlement of minorities occurred between 1924 and 1925 while the property compensation, under the supervision of