This paper investigates the repercussions of the compulsory population exchange between Turkey and Greece in 1923 upon a town situated on the western Aegean coast of Turkey, Ayvalik. Many scholars have noted that during the population exchange, while the Greek-Orthodox population which left Turkey was mostly bourgeois, the newcomers were almost all peasants and this resulted in the existence of a weak bourgeoisie during the formative years of the republic. Besides the devastating effects on the Turkish economy, the prevailing literature mainly focuses on the trauma and loss behind the population exchange. This paper, while admitting the devastating and traumatic character of the population exchange, claims that both the state and refugees have developed strategies in their own interest to overcome and mitigate this migration process. On the one hand, the state, as an all-powerful actor, in addition to its settlement vision, conducted cultural policies in line with its modernization project in order to facilitate the integration of this population and, hence, national homogenization. On the other hand, the middle class refugees were not merely dispossessed and victimized but had developed survival strategies and even gained significant economic, social, cultural and political roles within their new habitat. They used their bourgeois history, social capital and negotiation capacity to cooperate or conflict with the state whenever it is necessary; build or participate into voluntary and leisure institutions in order to organize the quotidian realities of the town, and enter local politics in order to seize political power first at the micro and, then, macro level. Hence, this paper aims to juxtapose the state-refugee relations with class-state relations while highlighting the refugees’ active agency and aims to defy its portrayal as a victimized and dominated one vis-à-vis the state.