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Topic ClosedGenocide of the Pontian Greeks

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Direct Link To This Post Topic: Genocide of the Pontian Greeks
    Posted: 14-May-2006 at 06:58
Pontus means "sea" in Greek and is located in the south-eastern littoral of the Black Sea. Its connection with Hellenism stretches back to pre-historic times to the legends of Jason and the Argonauts quest for the Golden Fleece and to Heracles obtaining the Amazon Queen's girdle. The coastal region was colonised by the Ionians, especially the city of Miletus which founded Sinope (785 BC), Trapezunta (756 BC) and the numerous other cities along the coast from Heracleia to Discurias in the Caucasus.

The Hinterland was gradually Hellenised and this was completed after Alexander's conquests. Its contribution to Hellenism in those 2800 years has been enormous: Diogenes hailed from Sinope and Strabo from Amaseia, it was here that Xenophon found a safe haven, that the great Comneni dynasty reigned, the home of Cardinal Bessarion and the Hypsilandis family; it was also the last Greek territory to fall to the Turks (in 1461). Many famous churches, monasteries and schools are a testament to the resilience of Hellenism. The Pontians are a distinct Greek people with their own dialect, dances, songs and theatre.

For the Pontian Greeks all ended in tragedy in the years 1914-22. Of the 700,000 Greeks living in Pontus in 1914, 353,000 were killed as a result of Turkish government policy and the remainder became refugees. Three millenia of the Greek presence was wiped out by a deliberate policy of creating a Turkey for the Turks. The Pontian people were denied the right to exist, the right of respect for their national and cultural identity, and the right to remain on land they had lived on for countless generations.

The turning point in the treatment of Greeks in Turkey was the alliance between Germany and the Sultan that commenced after the Treaty of Berlin 1878. Germany regarded Anglo French protection of Christians as an obstacle to its interests and convinced the Turkish authorities that the Greeks were working for the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Germany opened the Berlin Academy to Turkish military officers and General Gotz was appointed to restructure the Ottoman armed forces.

The successful national movements in the Balkans posed a threat that the same would occur in Asia Minor. After the Balkan Wars the Young Turks decided that Asia Minor would be a homeland for Turks alone and that the Greeks and Armenians had to be eliminated.
 
The outbreak of World War I made this possible and Germany willingly sacrificed the Christian minorities to achieve its aim in the Middle East. However, it is the German and Austrian diplomats reports that confirm that what took place was a systematic and deliberate extermination of the Christian population. Genocide. Not security or defence measures, not relocations of population (why forcibly relocate populations?) not war, not retaliation in response to the activities of Pontian guerillas or Russian invasion but GENOCIDE.

Terrorism, labour battalions, exiles, forced marches, rapes, hangings, fires, murders, planned, directed and executed by the Turkish authorities. This can be corroborated by the German and Austrian archives now made public:

24 July 1909 German Ambassador in Athens Wangenheim to Chancellor Bulow quoting Turkish Prime Minister Sefker Pasha: "The Turks have decided upon a war of extermination against their Christian subjects."
26 July 1909 Sefker Pasha visited Patriarch Ioakeim III and tells him: "we will cut off your heads, we will make you disappear. It is either you or us who will survive."

14 May 1914 Official document from Talaat Bey Minister of the Interior to Prefect of Smyrna: The Greeks, who are Ottoman subjects, and form the majority of inhabitants in your district, take advantage of the circumstances in order to provoke a revolutionary current, favourable to the intervention of the Great Powers. Consequently, it is urgently necessary that the Greeks occupying the coast-line of Asia Minor be compelled to evacuate their villages and install themselves in the vilayets of Erzerum and Chaldea. If they should refuse to be transported to the appointed places, kindly give instructions to our Moslem brothers, so that they shall induce the Greeks, through excesses of all sorts, to leave their native places of their own accord. Do not forget to obtain, in such cases, from the emigrants certificates stating that they leave their homes on their own initiative, so that we shall not have political complications ensuing from their displacement.

31 July 1915 German priest J. Lepsius: "The anti-Greek and anti-Armenian persecutions are two phases of one programme - the extermination of the Christian element from Turkey.

16 July 1916 German Consul Kuchhoff from Amisos to Berlin: "The entire Greek population of Sinope and the coastal region of the county of Kastanome has been exiled. Exile and extermination in Turkish are the same, for whoever is not murdered, will die from hunger or illness."

30 November 1916 Austrian consul at Amisos Kwiatkowski to Austria Foreign Minister Baron Burian: "on 26 November Rafet Bey told me: "we must finish off the Greeks as we did with the Armenians . . . on 28 November. Rafet Bey told me: "today I sent squads to the interior to kill every Greek on sight." I fear for the elimination of the entire Greek population and a repeat of what occurred last year" (meaning the Armenian genocide).

13 December 1916 German Ambassador Kuhlman to Chancellor Hollweg in Berlin: "Consuls Bergfeld in Samsun and Schede in Kerasun report of displacement of local population and murders. Prisoners are not kept. Villages reduced to ashes. Greek refugee families consisting mostly of women and children being marched from the coasts to Sebasteia. The need is great."

19 December 1916 Austrian Ambassador to Turkey Pallavicini to Vienna lists the villages in the region of Amisos that were being burnt to the ground and their inhabitants raped, murdered or dispersed.

20 January 1917 Austrian Ambassador Pallavicini: "the situation for the displaced is desperate. Death awaits them all. I spoke to the Grand Vizier and told him that it would be sad if the persecution of the Greek element took the same scope and dimension as the Armenia persecution. The Grand Vizier promised that he would influence Talaat Bey and Emver Pasha."

31 January 1917 Austrian Chancellor Hollweg's report: ". . . the indications are that the Turks plan to eliminate the Greek element 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 illness. The abandoned homes are then looted and burnt or destroyed. Whatever was done to the Armenians is being repeated with the Greeks.

Thus, by government decree and 300,000 Pontian Greeks were annihilated through exile, starvation, cold, illness, slaughter, murder, gallows, axe, and fire. Those who survived fled never to return. The Pontians now lie scattered all over the world as a result of the genocide and their unique history, language (the dialect is a valuable link between ancient and modern Greek), and culture are endangered and face extinction.

A double crime was committed - genocide and the uprooting of a people from their ancestral homelands of three millenia. The Democratic  nations were not only witnesses to this horrible and monstrous crime, which remains unpunished, but for reasons of political expediency and self interest have, by their silence, pardoned the criminal.

more in

http://www.pontiangenocide.org.au/
http://www.aihgs.com/pontus.htm


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-May-2006 at 07:27
I believed it was 200.000  the number of the annihilated Pontian Hellens.But it seems it's bigger.
"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. "
--- Joseph Alexandrovitch Brodsky, 1991, Russian-American poet, b. St. Petersburg and exiled 1972 (1940-1996)
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-May-2006 at 07:40

The Pontian Greek Genocide started in 1916 and came to the final stage in 1919. It cost the lives of at least 300,000 Greeks living in the Black Sea province of Pontus. Survivors fled to nearby Russia and eventually to Greece after the 1922 Asia Minor Catastrophe.

One of the methods used in the systematic elimination of the Greek population was the Labour Battalions (Turkish: Amele Taburu; Greek: Tagmata Ergasias). In them, mostly young and stronger people were captured and forced to exhausting slave labour by the Turkish State, in order to reconstruct various of destroyed areas during the Greco-Turkish War. They were held to concentration camps and amongst the survivors was the well known writer Elias Venezis, who later described the situation in his work the Number 31328 ( 31328).

Another method used by the Turks was to force the weaker population, including women and children, to walk for hundreds of kilometres until they died. This was known as the Light Death.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontian_Greeks_Genocide

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. "
--- Joseph Alexandrovitch Brodsky, 1991, Russian-American poet, b. St. Petersburg and exiled 1972 (1940-1996)
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-May-2006 at 07:41

19 May was the date of the Pontian Genocide.

Below some  some proclamation of some US States.

 

 

and of course soon follow and foreign parliaments such as French, German e.t.c.



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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-May-2006 at 08:11

Pontian Hellen fighters

Pontian fighters

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. "
--- Joseph Alexandrovitch Brodsky, 1991, Russian-American poet, b. St. Petersburg and exiled 1972 (1940-1996)
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-May-2006 at 08:15

Another method used by the Turks was to force the weaker population, including women and children, to walk for hundreds of kilometres until they died. This was known as the Light Death.

"Light Death" in action

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. "
--- Joseph Alexandrovitch Brodsky, 1991, Russian-American poet, b. St. Petersburg and exiled 1972 (1940-1996)
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-May-2006 at 09:13
Originally posted by Spartakus

Isn't this picture used by Armenians?

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-May-2006 at 10:10

Is a known picture from  the National geographic.

Not invovle the Armenians in this thread bg_turk.



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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-May-2006 at 10:13
Originally posted by Spartakus


One of the methods used in the systematic elimination of the Greek population was the Labour Battalions (Turkish: Amele Taburu; Greek: Tagmata Ergasias). In them, mostly young and stronger people were captured and forced to exhausting slave labour by the Turkish State, in order to reconstruct various of destroyed areas during the Greco-Turkish War. They were held to concentration camps and amongst the survivors was the well known writer Elias Venezis, who later described the situation in his work the Number 31328 ( 31328).



Correction:  Labour battallions are not concentration camps composed of enslaved Greeks as has been argued above.  These people were conscribted to the army to fulfill the military service (together with whole male population of the state due to war time needs) .  the problematic part of the story is that they were not considered to be trustable so they were not used in actual war.  Rather, they were used to open roads for the army to pass etc.  their situation can be said to be worse off to a certain extent but i don't think it can be compared to a concentration camp.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-May-2006 at 10:20
Originally posted by pegasusdi



 but i don't think it can be compared to a concentration camp.


In fact it was much worse than in a typical concentration camp for prisoners of war.These people(in the amele tamburu) had to face thurst,hunger,abuse,torture and death in the most cruel ways.


Congratulations akritas for bringing this issue up!


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-May-2006 at 10:24
Good work akritas and Spartakus, i hope this thread's ok when i get back

I want to contribute to.


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-May-2006 at 10:26
Originally posted by akritas

Not invovle the Armenians in this thread bg_turk.

But the image that you give is an image of Armenian deportations and it is presented as such by many Armenian sources. Shall I suppose then that the people on theimage are then both Pontian and Armenian. What does the national geographic article say?

I hope maybe Mamikon or ArmenianSurvival can clear this up, because I really do not have the time to search through Armenian webpages now but I am quite sure i have seen that same image there.

 



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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-May-2006 at 10:32

Originally posted by RomiosArktos


Congratulations akritas for bringing this issue up!

Also congratulations  and thanks to the Turkish PM that arise memories via his aggressive policy. US Ambassador Morgenthau's  said that the Greeks were the first victims of this nationalizing idea (policy of making Turkey exclusively the country of the Turks).

Germany has confronted its genocidal past and apologised to its victims for the crimes of World War Two. Turkey continues to refuse to follow the example of its traditional ally, preferring to deny any responsibility for the suffering and deaths of so many innocent people.

 

 



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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-May-2006 at 10:40
Originally posted by akritas

Originally posted by RomiosArktos


Congratulations akritas for bringing this issue up!

Also congratulations  and thanks to the Turkish PM that arise memories via his aggressive policy. US Ambassador Morgenthau's  said that the Greeks were the first victims of this nationalizing idea (policy of making Turkey exclusively the country of the Turks).

 

 



Well, as a person who has studied some International Relations, i think it is not fair to say that it is an agressive policy.  History has been a political tool especially in the couple of years regarding Turkey and its relationship to EU.  Thus, the reaction does not seem to be quite irrelevant if we think about the context.  therefore, i don't think that Greek PM was very surprised to this reaction.
  Moreover, let's not go into the debate  of who are the first victims of nationalizing policies because i am sure we would be stuck at that point  if we start to discuss emergence of nationalism in the Balkans and its victims
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-May-2006 at 10:44
Originally posted by RomiosArktos

Originally posted by pegasusdi



 but i don't think it can be compared to a concentration camp.


In fact it was much worse than in a typical concentration camp for prisoners of war.These people(in the amele tamburu) had to face thurst,hunger,abuse,torture and death in the most cruel ways.


Congratulations akritas for bringing this issue up!

well, i didn't think that POW camps were meant by concentration camp because it  immediately reminded me of the concentration camps of Jews in WWII since the issue is about genocide.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-May-2006 at 10:55

Originally posted by Leonidas

Good work akritas and Spartakus, i hope this thread's ok when i get back

I want to contribute to.


Leonidas the investigation of genocide of Pontian Greeks   from the Young Turks and Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) arrangement constituted a question taboo for the Greek historical and political science. The Greek-Turkish pact of friendship 1930, the simultaneous integration of Greece and Turkey in the NATO in 1952, but also simultaneously the called approach of two states, constituted points stations and for the Pontian question. They are these parameters that the Genocide of Hellenism of Pontos did not acquire the compurgation that it was imposed it acquires .

But when the Turkish PM ask from the Greeks to stop mention this issue because "disturb" he thinks that talk in his political  partie funs!!!

On one side because the political climate did not allow is investigated the crime of mass murders of against Greeks, on the other side when this became after initiative of scientists and intellectual as minimal debt against the collective memory, faced a very hostile environment.

Greek Parliament publishes the book of professor Konstantinos Fotiadis, which argued the murders of 353000 Greeks in the Pontos the interval 1916-1923.The book is separated in 13 chapters which cover the history of Greeks of Pontos, the ethnological situation in the region, the Ottoman reforms and the Young Turks arrangement, that was turned against the Greeks program of Mustafa Kemal arrangement for the crimes in the Pontos. The book includes primary sources, the result of research of writer in government and owned files of former USSR, France, Germany, Great Britain, Austria, Italy, Vatican, Society of Nations and Greece, while is mentioned also rich bibliography in Greek and other languages.



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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-May-2006 at 10:55
Originally posted by pegasusdi


  Moreover, let's not go into the debate  of who are the first victims of nationalizing policies because i am sure we would be stuck at that point  if we start to discuss emergence of nationalism in the Balkans and its victims

tut tut ,

to bring some context to that nationalism we have to include the uninvited imperialism with all its victims and subjects


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-May-2006 at 10:58
'uninvited' imperilaism??  I have never heard of an invited imperialism
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-May-2006 at 12:34
Originally posted by bg_turk

Originally posted by Spartakus

Isn't this picture used by Armenians?

Here you can find the same image

http://www.armeniapedia.org/index.php?title=Image:Geno14.JPG 

So whoever put this image here, answer please who are the people on the image? Who is the one lying here Turks, Greeks or Armenians - or maybe all of them?!



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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-May-2006 at 12:57
353.000 Greeks... murdered by Turks?

No necessary to discuss on a nonsense.

Does anyone know Mr.Nakratzas here?
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