The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks

“Turkey Has Never Committed Any Genocide”

Erdoğan falsely claimed Turkey’s ‘history is free from genocide, massacres, oppression, and colonialism’.

350,000 Dead. Their Villages Burned. Their Women Enslaved. Most People Have Never Heard Of It

Turkey’s Black Sea coast, 1916 to 1923. An ethnic Greek population that had lived there for nearly 3,000 years — since before the Roman Empire existed.
By the time it ended, most of them were gone.
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An Ottoman commander named Rafet Bey told an Austrian diplomat exactly what was coming: “We must finish off the Greeks as we did with the Armenians.” Days later, he confirmed it further — squads had been sent out with orders to kill every Greek on sight.
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By then, the region’s Greek men had already been swept into Ottoman labor battalions, where conditions were so brutal that life expectancy was measured in weeks. What remained in the villages were mostly women, children, and the elderly.

What followed was systematic. Homes burned. Communities forced onto death marches into the Anatolian interior, with documented death rates as high as 90 percent along the way. U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau testified to Congress about what he’d witnessed firsthand: women driven into slavery, girls sold for as little as 80 cents each, entire villages erased from the map.
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By 1923, an estimated 350,000 Pontic Greeks were dead. A population that had called that coastline home for three thousand years was nearly wiped out in less than a decade.
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Turkey still officially denies it happened. Most of the world was never taught it happened at all.
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The Genocide of the Armenian Christians of Turkey

The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks: a New Book Announcement

The recent vote against the denial of the Armenian Genocide held by the French Parliament, and the discussion to recognize the same event by the Israeli Knesset, brings to the fore the issue of the Turkish government’s adverse reaction, reflecting perhaps a deep-seated sense of culpability and apparent unwillingness to accept responsibility for the first genocide of the Twentieth Century, that of the Christians of the Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic.

On February 28, 2012 Aristide D. Caratzas is publishing “The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks,” a collective work by nineteen distinguished international scholars, which addresses one of the lesser known aspects of the extermination of the Ottoman Christians, namely that of the Greeks, and provides a number of approaches for the study of this event.

The period of transition from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to the foundation of the Turkish Republic was characterized by a number of processes largely guided by a narrow elite that aimed to construct a modern, national state. One of these processes was the deliberate and planned elimination, indeed extermination, of the Christian (and certain other) minorities. The numbers are stark: most scholars agree that in 1912 there were about 4-5 million Christians in Asia Minor and Thrace (Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians and others); by 1923 the Christians in the space that became the Turkish Republic were reduced to less than 300,000.

Raphael Lemkin, the legal scholar who introduced the term “genocide” into international law, formulated his early ideas on the definition of this war crime by studying the destruction of the Christians of Asia Minor, while the distinguished (recently deceased) Turcologist Neoklis Sarris has noted that the annihilation of the Christian minorities represented an integral element of the formation of the Turkish Republic.

As the editors of this volume note, the recent resolution by the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) recognizing the Greek and Assyrian genocides (December 2007) reinforces the justification for the study in greater depth of the genocide of the Greek Christian population of Asia Minor and Thrace.

The last two decades have seen a massive amount of research of the genocide of the Armenian population in the Ottoman/Turkish space; our publishing house has produced a number of works, most notable of which was the eyewitness testimony of Leslie A. Davis, US Consul in Harput (The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat’s Report on the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1917).

Much less scholarly work has been done on the genocide of the Greeks of Asia Minor and Thrace; there are many reasons for this, including the fact that Turkish governments have been successful in intimidating diplomats in the context of Turkish-Greek relations of the last generation, and of subverting academic integrity by inducing some scholars (including Greeks) to make a career as denialists supported by international NGOs, in the name of countering “nationalism.”

The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks therefore represents an effort to provide an outline and approaches for more extensive study of the deliberate destruction and elimination of a Greek presence that spanned over three millennia in the space that became the Turkish Republic. It includes fifteen article contributions by scholars from Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States, and three appendices (“A Chronology of Major Events,” “A Glossary of Terms,” and “A Select Bibliography,” the last over forty pages).

The thematic approaches developed in The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks include: A group of eight studies under the section titled “Historical Overview, Documentation, Interpretation;” and two more in a section titled “Representations and Law,” one of which outlines Lemkin’s studies of the Christian genocide based on his personal archive. In addition there are sections titled “Genocide Education,” “Memorialization,” and “Conceptualization,” which include studies exploring, a) an outline syllabus for the teaching of the Greek genocide on the secondary level in the US (in Chicago), b) the erection of monuments in Greece commemorating the loss of life and homelands, c) the role of genocide in the creation of nationality, and d) a critical approach in the use of photographic evidence for the study of the genocide of the Christian peoples in what is now the space occupied by the Turkish Republic.

Publication Information:
Title: The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks
Studies on the State–Sponsored Campaign of Extermination of the Christians of Asia Minor (1912-1922) and Its Aftermath: History, Law, Memory
Edited by Tessa Hofmann, Matthias Bjørnlund and Vasileios Meichanetsidis
Publisher: Aristide D. Caratzas/Melissa International Ltd.
http://www.caratzas.com
Publication Date: February 28, 2012
Hardcover xii+508 pages, 37 photographs, maps (including a foldout)
ISBN 978-0-89241-615-8
Price: US$75.00

Here’s the full text for the first video above:

1955, just 70 years ago. These events took place roughly 30 years after the Greek-Armenian-Assyrian genocide, which was motivated by both religious and racial hatred. By then, the goal was to completely erase every remaining Greek element from Asia Minor.

Their next target was the once-Greek Constantinople. It was a warm September evening in 1955, in the heart of Constantinople, a city still echoing with the ghosts of its Greek-Byzantine past.

The Greek community was already marginalized by years of discriminatory policies, felt the weight of suspicion. After the fall of Constantinople, thousands were slaughtered, but they tried to keep the flame alive.

But, on September 6 (1955), a false report spread like a spark in dry grass: a bomb had allegedly damaged the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, near the house where Mustafa Kemal was born.

The bombing was a staged provocation, orchestrated by Turkish authorities to incite rage. By dusk, Constantinople was a tinderbox. Mobs, organized and armed with clubs, knives, and gasoline, poured into the streets, targeting Greek homes, businesses, and churches. The government’s role was clear; lists of Greek properties had been prepared in advance, and the police stood by, complicit or indifferent. It was all staged. A plan with only one purpose. To murder innocent Greek Christians that were living peacefully in the land of their ancestors, in the City that was built by their fathers.

A crowd, chanting Kemalist slogans just like the days of the Genocide of 1922, smashes windows, looting everything; shelves, ovens, even family photos. The mob moves with precision, targeting Greek-owned properties. Churches, like the Zoodochos Pigi in Balat, are desecrated; holy icons are shattered, and altars burned. The Greek cemetery in Şişli is vandalized, graves defiled in an orgy of destruction.

4,348 Greek businesses, 110 hotels, 27 pharmacies, 23 schools, and 73 churches were damaged or destroyed.

Many Greeks were killed, hundreds injured and numerous women assaulted. The mobs, often transported from outside Constantinople, carried out their rampage over two days, September 6–7, leaving the Greek community in ruins.

The pogrom was a death knell. Many lost everything; homes, livelihoods, security. Greeks of Constantinople were reducing over time already after the fall in 1453. But that was the final hit.

The exodus of Greeks from Turkey, reduced the community of over 250.000 to fewer than 2.000 today.

As dawn broke on September 7, Constantinople became “Istanbul”. The last Greeks, descendants of those who found the City, who built the city, who defended the City, who had history in this City, were expelled from their ancestral homeland.

Streets were littered with broken glass and shattered dreams. The Greek community, a cornerstone of the city’s history, was left to pick up the pieces.

That was, the anti-Greek “Istanbul pogrom” that took place on 6–7 September 1955.

These events are fresh in our memories. How can we forget all the thing they did to us? They came and they expelled Greeks from their homes.

Constantinople, Asia Minor, Cappadocia, Pontus, Cyprus, Ionia.

We will never forget, everything they did to us.

We will never coexist with them.

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