19th May – ANNIVERSARY OF THE PONTIAN GENOCIDE/19 Μαΐου – Επέτειος της Γενοκτονίας των Ποντίων

BLACK LETTER ANNIVERSARIES - THE GREEK PONTIAN GENOCIDE

19^th May – ANNIVERSARY OF THE PONTIAN GENOCIDE

 

By Vassilis C. Militsis

Source :diiphilo.blogspot.com

Introduction

 

The history of a people is as significant as the function of memory of an individual. Loss of memory entails loss of the individual’s identity. In the same way, oblivion or falsification of a people’s history results to the loss of the people’s identity itself. The Greek people in particular ought to preserve their historical memory and to have a good command of historical events, whether good or bad, which are of historical importance.

A crucial capital of our history we should be well informed of is the one that concerns the history of the Greeks of Pontus and the Greco-Turkish relations. Such knowledge may be painful, but disagreeable and unfavorable historical events must be also recorded, for it is in this way that a historian can be impartial and unbiased.

After 71 years of oblivion, at last on 24^th of February 1994 the Greek Parliament unanimously passed the 2193 bill, which sanctions the 19^th of May a memorial day of the Pontus Greeks genocide perpetrated by the Turks. Although the world community has recognized the Holocaust of the Jews and the Armenian genocide, the Pontian genocide remains still to be recognized as such. On the other hand, Turkey continues to deny that her people have committed crimes against humanity.

The Greeks in Pontus

The Greek presence around the Black Sea maritime line is dated back to the prehistorical times and continues its career uninterruptedly through the classical, Roman, Hellenistic and mainly Byzantine periods. After the Fall of Constantinople in 1953, the Trebizond Empire was founded by the Komnenoi dynasty – the last flare of Hellenism – before it also fell into the Ottomans in 1461¹.

Enslaved as they were, the Pontus Greeks prospered in all fields – in letters, arts, agriculture, shipping and commerce, preserving at the same time their national identity and orthodox faith. In 1914 the Pontus Greeks numbered 700,000 people and were represented at the Turkish parliament by seven deputies. Next to the orthodox Greeks, there were also 190,000 Moslem converted Greeks and 43,000 secret Christians². However, this thriving Hellenism was bound to be violently uprooted from Pontus in 1923. What is left in those parts is a scant number of Moslem converted Greeks, who, like Cavafy’s Poseidonians³, still preserve elements of the Pontus Greek dialect and customs without realizing why.

The Chronicle

Since the end of the 19^th century in the already shaky Ottoman Empire, over the collapse of which the Great Powers were gloating in order to dismember it, in 1908 the Young Turk movement appeared on the historical scene bearing a liberal mask but with the utmost goal to purge Turkey from the Armenians and the Greeks. At the 1911 Young Turk convention the following was decided: “Turkey must remain a purely Moslem power and any other religious conscience has to be suppressed. National minorities left over from the old empire have to be liquidated so that the country can be purged”.

This sorting out was put into effect with the commencement of World War I, during which the Turks allied with the Germans. The latter had always coveted Asia Minor for its markets and its raw materials as well as for the control of the commercial thoroughfares of the Orient. Those fields were at the hands of the Greeks and the Armenians. Therefore, by the blessings of the Germans in 1915 the extermination of 1,500,000 Armenians began and soon the genocide of the Pontus Greeks followed.

In 1914 Turkey declared general mobilization of both Moslems and Christians. At first Christians were allowed to buy off their military service. Later all Christian soldiers were disarmed and sent to the notorious Amele Taburları, work battalions, which were virtually forced labor camps. There a host of conscripted Greeks in brutal conditions of malnutrition and scant clothing, sometimes in freezing conditions and other times under unbearable scorchers worked at quarries breaking rocks to construct roads and other means of infrastructure. The flower of the Pontus Hellenism was wiped out in those horrible Turkish hellholes. Many could not stand those torments and escaped. Then the Turks under the pretext of retaliations burned their villages, schools and churches, pillaged homes and took to all sorts of brutality such as rapes, mutilations and plain murder. In reaction to all those Turkish atrocities, in 1916 20,000 armed guerrillas were formed by the Pontus Greeks which had a pointed national liberating character.

Another measure taken by the Turks at the promptitude of the German General Otto Liman von Sanders is the notorious displacement of Greek populations under the pretext of national security. This measure prescribed the deportation of the Greeks fifty kilometers to the hinterlands of Anatolia away from the warring zones. The Turks pledged the protection of their estates and the provision of secure transport. On their way the deported masses – mostly women and children – would be safely accompanied by the Turkish gendarmerie. They could also take along some possessions or sell them. However, that did never happen. On the contrary, people were forced to wander from place to place and in this way the majority was decimated. A typical instance has been documented of the Sivas (Sevasteia) governor Ahmet Muammer bey concerning the displaced populace of the Giresun (Kerassous) villages.

The wayworn trekkers, who managed to come to the province alive, had hardly had time to rest when the governor issued the order that they return to their homes; they were told their hardships were over. Therefore, they set off again through snow and frost walking for twenty days; they dragged themselves on, they pined away and most died. Upon arriving, those that survived were met by madding gendarmes.

-       Yasak! You can’t go on.

-       Why not? We have the order by the Sivas governor.

-       Clear off and go back.

The hardships of the Greeks went on until the end of World War I, while the Pontus Guerrilla Movement was at its peak.

Turkey ended up vanquished in the war and the British military that was stationed in the Pontus vainly tried to disarm the guerrilla troops. During that time an extensive revolutionary and political movement was formed for the founding of an independent Greek state in Pontus. Despite the repeated appeals of the partisans for assistance, Greece had not sent even a round of ammunition.

On 19^th May 1919 with the full approval of the English, Mustafa Kemal, the founder of modern Turkey, disembarked on the Pontus coast to suppress the Pontian movement. There, Kemal rescinded from the Ottoman authorities and contacting the Turkish brigand bands he formed the cete corps, an army of irregulars. The cetes were the scum of society, unscrupulous jail inmates, who wreaked havoc, horror and death on their passage. The slaughterer par excellence of the Pontian Hellenism was the feral and bloodthirsty Topal Osman. In 1919 Topal Osman at the head of 2,500 cetes raided the villages of Colonia-Nikopolis (Şebinkarahisar) and after gathering the inhabitants, he hideously massacred all, leaving one on purpose to become a witness of the atrocity.

In other places he burned people inside their houses. In another town he arrested all the men and youths and butchered them in front of the women and children, whom he intended to put to death later. While he was about to burn them alive, the local Turkish authorities intervened and their lives were spared. However, they had to cover barefoot a distance of 20 kilometers to the next village.

Topal Osman was so depraved that he took to carousing and musical entertainment in front of his writhing and slowly dying victims. Mustafa Kemal also had similar propensities. His biographer and admirer Patrick Kinross relates that Kemal would often run berserk and howl like a wolf.

Two prominent church figures greatly contributed to the succor and relief of the afflicted Pontians: the Trebizond Bishop Chrysanthos and the Amisos (Samsun) Bishop Germanos Karavangelis. These two divines upheld and protected the Greeks from the Turkish wolverines. The ultimate blow to the Asia Minor Hellenism was struck in 1923.  One of the most important mass migrations was the compulsory migration resulting from the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, signed in Lausanne by the Turkish and Greek governments. The Asia Minor Greeks were compelled to abandon the land of their forefathers and seek their luck in Greece. This migration took
the toll of many lives. Out of 700,000 – according to some historians around 850,000 – 350,000 refugees perished. Migrants carried only their portable possessions and their culture, traditions, customs and manners to their new homelands. 

Epilogue

A vanquished Turkey, coming out of the war, was obliged to pay. Not so much because she was defeated but because she had committed atrocious crimes against humanity. The massacres of the Greeks and Armenians robbed her of all rights of protest and reaction. And yet the powerful states of Europe, then our allies, in the name of their interests, aided Kemal, allowing thus Turkey to rear her ugly head and threaten with her expansive policy to encroach upon the half of the Aegean archipelago and stick to the half of Cyprus. In our days, Turkey’s leader, Tayyip Recep Erdogan, has even brazenly questioned the Treaty of Lausanne and covets lands according to “the borders of his heart” allegedly extending beyond the country’s physical borders. Turkey has become the recalcitrant child of the Mediterranean. She does not cease to arrogantly question Greece’s EEZ. Consequently, one may wonder: which will finally be the winner and which will be the loser?

Greece naturally suffered irreparable harm. Because of the exchange of populations, Greece has lost the lands of East Thrace, which would have become a bridgehead between the Aegean and the Black Sea. On the other hand, the Greeks of Pontus would have vouchsafed the borders between Europe and Asia. If Hellenism had not received this tragic blow, Greece would number now 30,000,000 inhabitants, would rule over three seas and would be considered a significant power in Eastern Mediterranean.

Turkey, too, suffered damages in the economic and trade fields by the persecution and ousting of Greek traders and self-employed professionals from the Turkish market.

It would not be fair to hush the fact that Greece herself also contributed to her disaster with the advance of the Greek army into the Turkish hinterland in order to capture Ankara. This venture was the turning point for the defeat of the Greek troops and the consequent Asia Minor Catastrophe⁵.

The writer harbors no grudge against the Turkish people. According to Dimitris Psathas, the irrefutable facts themselves have an antiturkish character for they depict the Turks as they were and acted in those years. Nor are we allowed to sacrifice historical truth upon the altar of any expedience. To ignore in this case what transpired then does not help with our relations with Turkey. We ought to forgive but never to forget. It is high time our neighbors learned what their fathers and grandfathers had perpetrated to the Pontian Greeks, the Armenians and the Greek Cypriots in 1974. Thus they may avoid committing the same things.

When there is a solid understanding between the two neighboring countries, then we may soon succeed in building our mutual good relations on a more stable basis. For this reason, on one hand, it is time that the Turks stop falsifying history, and on the other that we also cease to overlook crucial historical facts for the sake of expedience. For such a thing enables the Turks to shamelessly claim that the genocide of the Pontus Greeks was a mere incident. Furthermore, our country ought to wield to the utmost her diplomatic power towards the recognition of the Pontus Greek genocide, as the Armenian and the Jewish genocides have been recognized by the world community.

¹ Η Εκκλησία της Τραπεζούντος «Αρχείον Πόντου», (1933) του μητροπολίτη Τραπεζούντας Χρύσανθου. Επίσης αρχαίοι ιστορικοί που αναφέρονται στον Πόντο: Στράβων – από την Αμάσεια του Πόντου – Αρριανός στο Περίπλους, Ξενοφών στην Κύρου Ανάβαση, Απολλόδωρος κα.

² Φωτιάδης Κ. & Χαραλαμπίδης Μ. (1987), Πόντιοι, δικαίωμα στη Μνήμη, Αθήνα: Ηρόδοτος.

³www.cavafy.com/poems

⁴ Φωτιάδης Κ. & Χαραλαμπίδης Μ. (1987), Πόντιοι, δικαίωμα στη Μνήμη, Αθήνα: Ηρόδοτος. Η έρευνα στα κρατικά αρχεία Αυστρίας, Γερμανίας, Γαλλίας, ΗΠΑ, Ιταλίας και Μ. Βρετανίας για τα γεγονότα έγινε από το Κέντρο Ποντιακών Μελετών. Υπάρχουν επίσης και αποσπάσματα αυστριακών και γερμανικών προξενικών αρχών προς τις κεντρικές τους κυβερνήσεις.

⁵Ιστορία του Ελληνικού Έθνους. Εκδοτική Αθηνών. Τόμος ΙΕ'. Αθήνα 1980

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Μιχάλης Χαραλαμπίδης, Το Ποντιακό Ζήτημα, Ίδρυμα Μεσογειακών Μελετών, 4^η έκδοση.

Δημήτρης Ψαθάς, Γη του Πόντου, Γ΄ έκδοση, Αθήνα, 1999.

Π. Ενεπεκίδης, Οι Διωγμοί των Ελλήνων του Πόντου, (1908-1918) 1961 σε διάλεξη του συλλόγου «Αργοναύται Κομνηνοί».

Giles Milton, Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922, Basic Books, 2008.

Patrick Balfour Kinross, Lord Kinross, Ataturk: A Biography of Mustafa Kemal, Father of Modern Turkey, Amazon.

ΠΑΡΑΡΤΗΜΑ :Γενοκτονία των Ελλήνων του Πόντου/Βικιπαίδεια