Category: Cultural Enrichment

Homer Pavlos

The genocide in Anatolia, particularly against the Greek population, occurred mainly between 1914 and 1923, during and after World War I, and was characterized by systematic killings, deportations, and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire. This campaign targeted various Christian minorities, including Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians, leading to significant loss of life and cultural heritage in the region.

I will explain to you, in a long and historically accurate post, exactly how Muslim Turks treated Christians.

In the 1.300 years of Muslim-Arab slave trade, approximately a million Greek Christians were sold as slaves. I am Greek, so I will write you about how Islam and Muslim Turks treated Greek Christians.

On March 30, 1822, the Chios Massacre took place. The Muslim Turks slaughtered 42,000 Greek Christians: women, men & children. Additionally, 52,000 were sold as slaves in the markets of Smyrna & Constantinople.

On September 1, 1821, Samothrace was devastated by the Ottomans through a general massacre led by the Turkish Kara Ali. Approximately 10,000 men & boys were slaughtered. Women & children were sold in the markets of Constantinople & Smyrna (Holocaust of Samothrace).

On June 4, 1821, the Turks carried out a massacre against the Greeks of Kydonies in Asia Minor (modern-day Ayvalık). They did pogroms at shops and homes, looting them, while seizing women and children to sell as slaves. Simultaneously, they conducted a general massacre of the population, and the town was set ablaze and completely destroyed.

In Crete muslims carried chains with them to tie up Greek Christian women so they could take them away. They were enslaving and converting the Greek Christians of Crete for centuries.

For 300 years (1380-1680) the muslim Turks were stealing kids from their mothers. This was the most brutal thing humanity ever witnessed. They were waiting for women to birth, raise their kids, and then at the age of 8 were collecting the them. The devşirme known as “collection of children” or “blood tax” or in Greek as “paidomazoma”. The devshirme was the greatest wound inflicted on Hellenism during the period of Turkish rule. The children who were seized were considered definitively lost. In Epirus, in fact, on the first Sunday after the abduction, their parents would go to church dressed in black, where a funeral service was chanted. In this service, the names of the children were read aloud as if they were dead. Once taken, boys were circumcised, renamed with Muslim names, and forbidden from contact with their families. They were raised as Muslims, effectively erasing their Greek cultural and religious identity to foster loyalty to the sultan.

After the Ottoman conquest of Crete (1669), local officials and governors began to oppress the Christian population in every way: killing, abducting and abusing women, demanding money, and preventing the performance of the subjects’ religious duties.

We Greeks, called the Muslim Turks, “The grand masters of torture.” In 1821, in Patras, they captured a father and son and, after impaling them, lit a fire and forced the other captives to roast them like lambs. Ali Pasha at that point was more inventive: When he impaled Christians, he forced their relatives to turn the spit, threatening that otherwise he would impale them too. Continue reading How Muslim Turks Treated Christians