Peter wrote his master’s thesis about his own family — without ever naming it that. Submitted in 1972 for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of History at Hunter College in the City University of New York, it is titled “The Plight of the Anatolian Greeks: The Role of Smyrna in Allied Diplomacy 1919.”
For years this thesis was known to the family only from a secondhand catalogue entry — a 1974 Greek academic bibliography that listed it under “Peter G. Jeannopoulos.” In 2026 the full bound manuscript resurfaced in Peter’s own papers, and it answers every question the catalogue entry left open.
The dedication
The manuscript opens with a single-line dedication that makes the family connection explicit:
“To my grandfather Dr. Lazare Jeannopoulos, who lived Anatolian politics of 1919.”
That is Lazaros Jeannopoulos — the Soma physician, community leader, and author who had been arrested and exiled by the Ottoman authorities, who published his own polemic on the Asia Minor tragedy in Athens in 1915, and who was finally driven with his family to New York in 1924. Peter, his grandson, chose for his graduate thesis the single most consequential diplomatic moment in his own family’s history, and dedicated the work to the man who had lived it.
What the manuscript settles
- “Peter Constantine,” not “Peter G.” The title page reads plainly Peter Constantine Jeannopoulos. The middle initial “G.” in the 1974 bibliography was a transcription error, nothing more.
- Advisor: William O. Shanahan, the historian who signed the thesis approval on May 17, 1972.
- Typed by his cousin. The acknowledgements thank “Miss Mya Jeannopoulos for her patient and careful typing of this thesis” — Mya, Peter’s first cousin, the adopted daughter of his uncle John Lazare. A small, warm detail: family typed family.
The argument
The thesis runs to roughly 186 pages — an introduction, fourteen chapters, six appendices, and a bibliography. Its case is direct and unsparing. Greece’s claim to Smyrna rested on self-determination (Woodrow Wilson’s Twelfth Point), on Allied wartime promises, and on the sacrifices Hellenism had made during the war. The Supreme Council’s decision of May 1919 — authorizing the (nominally inter-Allied, overwhelmingly Greek) landing at Smyrna on May 15, 1919 — implicitly awarded the city to Greece.
But having committed Greece, the Allies would not stand behind the commitment. War-weariness, colonial self-interest, and the traditional Franco-British rivalry in the Near East let the Turkish Nationalist movement grow; France and Italy quietly armed and encouraged the Kemalists while Britain offered only half-measures. Peter’s verdict is that the Great Powers were “guilty of moral callousness” — they sent Greece into Anatolia and then deserted it, a chain of decisions that ran straight to the September 1922 Smyrna catastrophe (the flight of some 1,400,000 refugees) and the Treaty of Lausanne of July 24, 1923, which stripped away everything the Treaty of Sèvres had pledged. “The history of Greece’s claims to Smyrna and the ignominious desertion by the Allies,” he concludes, “represents international diplomacy at low ebb.”
Why it matters to the family
The disaster the thesis dissects is the same one that scattered the Jeannopouloi. Peter’s father Constantine was a child of the Smyrna–Mytilene world made a refugee by these very 1919–1922 events; Peter’s grandfather Lazaros had spent thirty years practicing medicine in exactly the Anatolian region Greece was trying, and failing, to hold. The thesis is thus two things at once — a work of academic diplomatic history, and a grandson’s scholarly reckoning with the catastrophe that shaped his family. The same instinct to preserve and understand would later lead Peter to scan and safeguard the entire Lazaros archive from which much of this family record is drawn.
The 1974 bibliography
The thesis was catalogued in Georgios Giannaris’s Bibliography of Doctoral Dissertations and Master’s Theses about Greece, published in the journal Επιθεώρησις Κοινωνικών Ερευνών (Review of Social Research) of the Greek National Centre for Social Research (EKKE), Athens, 1973–74. That listing — the family’s only trace of the thesis for decades — is preserved separately as a research clue.
The complete bound manuscript — all 192 pages, from title page through bibliography — is reproduced above.