“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. Continue reading The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks