Revisiting the legal infrastructure for the confiscation of Armenian and Greek wealth: an analysis of the CUP years and the early modern Republic

Properties belonging to Ottoman Armenians and Greeks were seized through various laws, decrees and other legal regulations passed by the Committee of Union and Progress (hereafter CUP) government, and later the cadres of the Republican regime. Both governments concocted ways of making this illegal process look legitimate by using the legal veil of the law. Central to this process were the economic outcomes of violence committed against Armenians and Greeks. The aim of this article is to analyze these laws and statutes, which were known as the Abandoned Properties Laws, and discuss the impact of this legislation on the process of the changing of hands of Armenian and Greek properties. It attempts to elucidate the dominant logic of the laws, decrees, and regulations concerning the abandoned properties in the periods of 1915–1923 and post-1923.