Abstract: World War I did not end in 1918 in Greece and Turkey. It took five more years and another war for the two countries to come to terms. Defined by the Treaty of Lausanne, these terms have been in effect since 1923. The compulsory population exchange between the two countries ratified under the treaty, and deemed illegal by today’s standard, has attracted considerable academic attention over the past decades. Adding to this research, this paper proposes a new perspective on this crucial period for the Eastern Mediterranean through the lens of Emmanouil Emmanouilidis’ historical account of “The Last Years of the Ottoman Empire”. Emmanouilidis was a politician and a scholar living in Asia Minor until he fled to Greece. Continuing his political career there, heavily engaged with the refugees’ situation, he published his account of the final years of the Ottoman Empire in Athens in 1924. Account of personal experience, piece of academic writing, or biased point of view? How can we make sense of the various layers of this so far little researched work? Where do the layers permeate each other and, finally, which scale of the interrelated narratives do they offer us insight into?