100 YEARS SINCE THE GENOCIDE OF THE GREEKS OF PONTOS BY THE TURKS

The Greek genocide and the Pontic genocide was the methodical slaughter of the Christian Greek population, "according to religion and ethnicity", which took place in Anatolia, during World War I (1914-1922), and its after-effects.

This religious and ethnic cleansing was controlled by the Government of the Ottoman Empire and Turkish National crusades against the indigenous population of the Empire including massacres, forced deportations, involving “death marches, summary expulsions, arbitrary executions and the destruction of Eastern Orthodox cultural, historical and religious monuments”.  According to veritable sources, several hundreds of thousands of Greeks, living in Turkey died during this period.   Most of the refugees and survivors fled to Greece, while others took refuge in the neighbouring Russian Empire.  By late 1922, most Greeks had either been forced to flee or had been killed, and those remaining were transferred to Greece under the terms of the 1923 so-called population exchange, which "formalized the exodus" and prohibited the return of the refugees.

The Allies of World War I condemned the Ottoman government-sponsored massacres as crimes against humanity.  Much later in 2007, the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution recognising the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities, including the Greeks, as genocide.  Other organisations have, also, passed resolutions, recognising the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities as genocide, as have the parliaments of Greece, Cyprus, Sweden, Armenia, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic.

At the outbreak of World War I, Asia Minor was ethnically dissimilar, its population being Turks as well as the native groups that inhabited the region before the Turkish invasion, including Greeks, Armenians, Kurds, Georgians, Assyrians, Jews and various other ethnicities.   Among the causes of the Turkish campaign against the Greek-speaking population was the dreaded suspicion that they would be liberated by the Ottoman Empire’s enemies.   Moreover, the conviction of the so-called Neo-Turks under the leadership of Kemal Ataturk to form a modern country, it was necessary “to purge from their territories all minorities who  could threaten the integrity of an ethnically based Turkish nation”.

According to the German military attaché, the Ottoman minister of war, Ismail Enver, had declared, in October 1915, that he wanted “to solve the Greek problem, during the war",…..in the same way, he believed he had solved the "Armenian problem” referring to the Armenian genocide.   Germany and the Ottoman Empire were allies before and during World War I.   By January 1917, the German Chancellor, Theobald von Benthamian-Hellweg reported that “The Turks plan to eliminate the Greek elements as enemies of the state, as they did earlier with the Armenians.  The strategy implemented by the Turks is of displacing people to the interior, without taking measures for their survival by exposing them to death, hunger and illnesses.  Their abandoned homes were then looted and burnt or destroyed.   Whatever was done with the Armenians is now done with the Greeks".

(“The Killing Trap: Genocide of the Twentieth Century” by Manus I. Midlarsky.)

According to Wikipedia, the Greek presence in Asia Minor dates at least from the Late Bronze Age. Homer lived in the region around 800 BC, the ancient Greek geographer Strabo referred to Smyrna as the first Greek city in Asia Minor.  Numerous famous ancient Greeks were natives of Anatolia, including the mathematician Thales from Miletus, the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus from Ephessos and the founder of cynicism Diogenes of Sinope.  


The Greeks called the Black Sea “Euxinos Pontos” (friendly sea) and by the 8^th century BC, they started navigating around its shores and settling along its Anatolian coast.   Even an ancient Greek myth recounts how Phrixus was flown to safety to Colchis, a Greek town on the Asia Minor shores of the Black Sea by a golden-fleeced ram.   His twin sister Helle, however, slipped off the ram's back into the sea, which was named after her "Hellespondos" and she was, later, saved by Poseidon. 

Phrixus Trying to Help Helle

During the Hellenistic Period (334 BC – 1^st century AD), which followed the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek culture and language began to dominate even the interior of Asia Minor.  "The Hellenization of the region accelerated during the Roman and early Byzantine rule, and by the early centuries AD, the local Indo-European Anatolian languages disappeared being replaced by Koine Greek language".  From this period until the Middle Ages and the Renaissance all the indigenous inhabitants of Asia Minor were Greek Orthodox Christians, after the East-West schism with the Catholics, and Greek was their native language.  Therefore Greek culture flourished during the millennium rule (330 AD - 1453 AD) under the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire and its citizens were knowns as Byzantine Greeks.  Thus, many renowned Greeks, during late antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were natives of Asia Minor, including Saint Nicholas, the rhetorian John  Chryssostomos, the architect of Agia Sophia Isidore of Miletus and the Renaissance intellectuals George of Trezibond and Bassilios Bessarion.  Thus, when the Turks arrived in Asia Minor, the Byzantine Greeks were the largest ethnic group.      

A century has passed since the brutal genocide of the Greeks of Pontos, by the Ottoman Turks.   Today is a day of memory and of profound grief for the unnecessary massacre and tragic death of over 400.000 innocent victims.

We shall never forget and we shall incessantly strive until these despicable atrocities are recognised, internationally as a  barbarous genocide and a crime against humanity.

  

We Must Never Forget

Candles for the Victims, a Hundred Years after the Genocide