Race in Circulation: Blood Banks and Forced Mobilities in the Eastern Mediterranean

The emergence of blood transfusion services after the First World War provided new venues for nationalist and racial research. This paper focuses on racial serology in the Turkish Republic during the period between the 1920s and the 1970s, with particular attention to the role of the Greek-Turkish population exchange and the political conflict over Cyprus. These events entailed mass movements of refugees and violence based on communal identities, which were racialized through serological studies. As the blood of recently displaced people circulated through Greek and Turkish blood banks, physicians used data about blood types to substantiate historical hypotheses about past mobility. Through these genetic reconstructions of historical population movements, they took sides in contemporary territorial disputes. Beginning in the 1950s, the transnational conflict over Cyprus gradually transformed Turkish scientists' representation of Greek Orthodox communities' blood group frequencies, portraying them as "racially Turkish" rather than as biological others.