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Pontian Genocide
19th of May is the Commemoration day of Pontian Genocide. For the past two weeks, I have been preparing an article on this subject; now it it ready, and you can read it below. You are welcome to comment on my English - your help will be much appreciated!

Pontian genocide of 1916-1922 is the most tragic page of Pontian Greek history. It is a pain that cannot be forgotten, a wound in the heart that cannot be healed. Pontian Hellenism had suffered a lot throughout its history of nearly 3.000 years, but the genocide was the most terrible of misfortunes, for it deprived the Greeks of the Black sea not only of their friends and relatives, but of their very homeland, too. Except for Pontians themselves, few people in the world know and remember of this tragedy today: the 20th century has been creating and destroying powerful empires, shaking the world with monstrous World Wars and revolutions, and against this terrible background the ruin of an ethnicity in the north of Asia Minor – alas! – passed almost unnoticed. Yet the remembrance of genocide is necessary not only for the relatives and descendants of the lost – such terrible facts of the human history should be known to all. For if one forgets about the other’s pain, if one passes it by with indifference, one kills inside one’s soul a part of one’s “humanity” – and this should not be allowed to happen, lest tragedies of this kind might be repeated…

1. Pontian Greeks – who are they?

1.1. A brief historical overview

Euxinos Pontos (Εύξεινος Πόντος) or just Pontos (Πόντος) – this is how the Greeks used to call the Black sea from times immemorial. The first Greek settlements appeared on its southern coast (today’s Turkey and Caucasus) 800 years already before the birth of Christ. They were founded by Ionian Greeks, natives of Attica, Anatolia and the islands of the Aegean. The first city, Sinop, was built in 785 BC, followed by many other. Very soon not only the southern, but also the northern Black sea coast was completely Hellenized; many renowned Greek men of Antiquity, such as Diogenes and Strabo, stemmed from Pontos.

In the 4th century BC Pontos became a part of the Empire of Alexander the Great. After the death of Alexander in 323 BC and the division of his empire, Pontian Kingdom was formed under the rule of king Mithridates I; from this day – 301 BC – Pontos began to develop independently from other Greek states.

The dynasty founded by Mithridates ruled in Pontos successfully till the 1st century BC. Pontian Kingdom prospered, science and arts flourished in its cities. The last king of the dynasty was Mithridates VI Eupator, who ruled from 120 until 63 BC. He resisted the Roman expansion, which began at that time, much longer than other Greek rulers, but was finally defeated, and Pontos lost its independence once again – this time, to Romans.

In 35 AD St. Andrew preached Christianity in Pontos; this marked the beginning of the new, Christian era of Pontian history. Pontos gave many great Saints to the world, the best known of whom is St. Basil the Great. In 386 on the Mount Melas in western Pontos one of the first Christian monasteries was founded – the cloister of Our Lady of Sumela (Panagia Sumela, from Pontian Greek "σου Μελά", which means “on the Melas”). In the 9th century Stt. Barnabas and Sophronius brought to the monastery from Athens an ancient thaumaturgic icon of the Virgin Mary, Panagia Athiniotissa, which, according to the tradition, was painted by St. Lucas. From that time, the icon is known as the image of Our Lady of Sumela; it became the greatest relic of Pontos, and during the terrible years of the genocide – about which we will talk later – “went into exile” together with the Pontian people.

During the Middle Ages, Pontos formed a part of the Romaic Empire (better known to European historians as “Byzantine Empire” or “Byzantium”, though Greeks themselves never used this name for their state). In 1204, when Constantinople was sacked by the Crusaders, the Emperor Alexius Komnenos and his army retreated to Pontos, where they founded a new state – the so-called Trebizond Empire (from the name of the capital, the city of Trebizond). This Empire continued to exist even after Constantinople had been freed from the Crusaders, until the complete defeat of the Romaic Greek state by Ottoman Turks in 1461.

Throughout the hard years of Turkish occupation Pontian Greeks spared no effort to keep alive their faith, language, and culture, despite numerous and often very cruel attempts of the Turks to convert them to Islam and otherwise assimilate the local population. Only a small portion of Pontian Greeks – the inhabitants of Oflu – succumbed to the Turkish repressions and became Muslims; but even among these people most continued to worship Christ in secret, having become the so-called “Crypto-Christians”. The Greeks of Oflu continued speaking Greek and observing Pontian customs, too.

Many Greek patriots of the time came from Pontos: for example, Prince Alexander Ypsilantes, one of the chief leaders of the 1821 War of Independence, stemmed from an old Pontian family. Unfortunately, this War did not bring freedom to Pontos, as it did to many other Greek territories. Yet the defeat of the Turks somewhat eased the situation for the Pontians: after this defeat, Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire were partly granted civil rights, which allowed Pontian Greeks to open in their cities a lot of Greek schools and even some institutions of higher education.

Thus, by the beginning of the 20th century the Pontian Greeks had been living on the shores of Black sea for nearly 3,000 years already. Along with Armenians and Kurds, they form the indigenous population of the northern Asia Minor and Southern Caucasus.

1.2 Pontian language and culture

As has been mentioned above, due to the historical circumstances and the remoteness of Pontos from continental Greece, Pontian Greeks developed almost independently from the rest of the Greek nation already from the times of late Antiquity. As a result, the Pontian people shaped their own original culture, which differs in many ways from that of Greece, although there are many common features, too. The dialect of the Greek language, spoken by Pontians today, also differs a lot from common Modern Greek – so much in fact, that some linguists refer to it as “Pontian language” instead of “dialect”.

Pontian Greek developed from the ancient Ionian (Attic) dialect. Due to its partial isolation in the Black sea region, Pontian language retains many archaic features: its grammar and vocabulary have much more in common with Ancient Greek than with the language of modern Greece. Generally speaking, Pontian is much more archaic than common Modern Greek; it can be placed between the Byzantine koine and today’s demotic. On the other hand, during the long years of contact with other ethnicities of Asia Minor and Caucasus, Pontian Greek borrowed many words from Persian, Turkish and various Caucasian languages. All the above make it very difficult - in fact almost impossible – for a Greek from Greece to understand Pontian.

Pontian culture is also quite archaic. This is a vast subject, which requires a separate profound study, so I shall limit myself to mentioning traditional Pontian dances. Most of them can be traced back to the “pyrric” (“fire”, i.e. warrior) dances of Ancient Greece: for example, the famous warrior dance “serra” is mentioned by Strabo and Plato under the name “pyrrikhios”, while the dance with daggers (“masher”, “ti masheri” or “khajarts”) is described by Xenophon in Anabasis.

2. Genocide: how it happened

By the beginning of the 20th century, Greeks formed the overwhelming majority of population in northern (Pontos) and western (Anatolia) regions of Asia Minor, as well as the province of Cappadocia; as has been mentioned before, Greeks were the native inhabitants of these territories and, besides that, strongly resisted conversion to Islam and assimilation with the Turks. Turkish government seriously feared that Pontos and Anatolia might declare independence from Turkey, just as it had already happened with Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria; this was aggravated by the fact that a substantial percentage of the Greek population in Turkey consisted of highly educated intellectuals and successful businessmen, who occupied a prominent position in society and exerted considerable influence upon the Turkish economy. Therefore “drastic measures” on extermination of the Greek element had been planned by Turkey long ago – and were put into practice after 1908, when the party of “Young Turks” came into power and advanced the slogan of “Turkey for the Turks”. In September 1911, the participants of the Young Turks conference in Thessalonica openly discussed the issue of extermination of the ethnic minorities in Turkey, especially the Christian ones, the most important of which were Greeks and Armenians.

“The Turks have decided upon a war of extermination against their Christian subjects.”
German Ambassador Wangenheim to German Chancellor von Bulow, quoting Turkish Prime Minister Sefker Pasha, July 24, 1909.

The martyrdom of the Pontian people began in 1914, when Turkey entered the World War I as an ally of Germany. Under the pretext of being “politically unreliable”, a great number of Pontian men from 18 to 50 years old were convoyed to the so-called “labour battalions” (“amele taburu”) far inland. These ‘battalions” were in fact concentration camps, where people were forced to labour under inhuman conditions, almost without food, water or medical care. For a slightest fault, any worker could be shot dead by the guards. The “amele taburu” became a common grave for thousands of Pontian Greeks, as well as men of other Christian minorities.

But, contrary to the expectations of the Young Turks, the repressions did not break the Greek spirit – quite the reverse, they prompted the Pontian patriots to drastic actions. Many men of the “Turkish” part of Pontos left their homes to go to the mountains, where they formed guerilla troops to resist the Turkish persecutions, while among the Greek intellectuals of Caucasus (which at that time belonged almost entirely to Russia) the decision to establish the independent Pontian Republic finally matured. The chief inspirers of this idea were Constantine Constantinides from Marseille, Vassilios Ioannides and Theophylaktos Theophylaktou from Batumi, Ioannis Pasalides from Sukhumi, Leonidas Iasonides and Philon Ktenides from Krasnodar, as well as Bishop Chrysanthos of Trebizond and Bishop Germanos Karavangelis of Amaseia. Besides the guerilla troops, they also hoped to receive help from the Russian Empire, which was engaged into operations against Turkey, a German ally, in the course of the World War.

In 1916, Russian army entered Trebizond. A few days before this, the Turkish governor Mehmet Djemal Azmi officially handed the city over to Bishop Chrysanthos, saying: “Once we took Trebizond from the Greeks, and now we are giving it back”. When Russian troops approached the city, they were welcomed by the Bishop himself and other inhabitants of Trebizond, who carried flowers. Soon afterwards the establishment of the independent Pontian Republic was declared in the region. Everyone thought that the centuries-old Pontian dreams of freedom were finally coming true.

But the troubles on the Western front hindered the Russians from advancing inland, while the Greek guerillas did not yet possess enough forces and weapons to do it. Therefore, while the Russian troops lied in the Trebizond region, the Young Turks government cruelly dealt with the inhabitants of the Pontian territories that were still under the Turkish control: the Greeks were now officially declared “ traitors” and “Russian accomplices”. According to the government plan, all the urban male population of Pontos should be put to death, and the rest deported inland. This plan was put into practice immediately. Here is just a small part of the existing vast documentary evidence of the time:

“...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.”
Herr Kuchhoff, German consul in Amissos in a despatch to Berlin, July 16, 1916.
“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.” (referring to the Armenian Genocide)
Herr Kwiatkowski, Austro-Hungarian consul in Amissos to Baron von Burian, Foreign Minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, November 30, 1916
“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.”
German Ambassador Kuhlman to German Chancellor Hollweg, December 13, 1916.

Pontian Greeks – women, children, and elderly people – were evicted from their houses in 24 hours, not being allowed to take with them almost anything of their property, and in long columns, under armed convoy, were marched far inland. The deserted villages were plundered and burnt – often before the very eyes of the evicted. On the deportation march, people were treated with utmost cruelty: they did not receive almost any food, were forced to march forward for hours and days on end without rest, over the wilderness, under the rain and the snow, so that many of them, unable to endure the hardships, dropped dead from exhaustion and illnesses. The convoy men raped women and young girls, shot people for a slightest reason, and sometimes without a reason at all. Most of the deported died on the way; but even those who survived the deportation march, found themselves in a no better situation – the places of destination turned out to be real “white death” camps. In one of such places, the village of Pirk, the deported Greeks of Tripoli were kept. One of the survivals, the writer Tatiana Gritsi-Milliex, reports that out of 13.000 Greeks who were sent to Pirk, only 800 survived.

In 1917, the October revolution took place in Russia, and power in the country was seized by the Bolsheviks. The leader of the Bolshevik party, Vladimir Lenin, already in 1916 had entered into alliance with Mustapha Kemal, the leader of the Young Turks. Therefore in 1918, immediately after the signing of the separate peace treaty between Russia and Germany, Russian troops left Trebizond, abandoning its people to the mercy of fate. The Turkish army and the “chet” (criminal gangs, unofficially encouraged by the Turkish government) poured into the city and the surrounding villages, robbing and killing. To escape death, many Pontian families of eastern Pontos (Trebizond and Kars) fled to Caucasus.

The Pontian Republic ceased to exist, but the struggle for independence, once started, could not be stopped. In Caucasus, namely in the city of Rostov, local Pontians formed the Central Pontian Committee; people were donating money and weapons for the struggle, while Constantine Constantinides was sending proclamations from Marseille to the inhabitants of Pontos and the leaders of European states.

In the meantime, the guerrilla resistance movement in the mountains of Pontos gathered force. The regions of Pafra, Sanda, and Ordu became the main centres of the struggle; very soon guerrilla troops appeared in Trebizond and Kars, too. The Pontian palikare (“brave warriors”) of the Resistance fought doughtily: they deeds became legends. The success of the movement was also favoured by the fact that at the head of the troops stood leaders of great experience and talent, such as Vassil-aga (Vassilios Anthopoulos), Anton Chaushides, Stylianos Kosmides, Euclid Kurtides, Pandel-aga (Panteleimon Anastasiades) and many others. In the past some of them had served as officers in the Russian Caucasian army, and had taken part in many battles; for example, Vassil-aga had received a gilded sword from Czar Nicholas II for his courage. As a leader of Pontian guerrilla troops, Vassil-aga became so famous for his valour and military talent, that often his name alone was enough to put a Turkish detachment to flight.

In 1919, Greece started the operations against Turkey, in order to support the Resistance and save the population of Pontos and Anatolia from extermination. But, since Greece did not have an outlet to the Black sea, the Greek army took actions mostly in Anatolia (Smyrna); in addition to this, political disorders and faction-forming in Athens hindered largely in the beginning, and then altogether stopped the Greek advance in Asia Minor. Instead of opening the way to freedom, the year 1919 became for the Pontian Greeks “the beginning of the end”: it was during this year that a new wave of even more cruel, unprecedented repressions started against them.

On the 19th May 1919, Mustapha Kemal arrived to Kerasounda, in order to meet the city governor Topal Osman. In the course of this meeting, Kemal urged Topal Osman “to clear Turkey from the Greeks”, and then made the same appeal to “the whole Turkish nation” through the local Turkish newspapers. This call launched the systematic and final extermination of the Pontian Greeks – virtually, all of them were now officially outlawed. And since the Turkish army was not able to withstand the guerrilla troops, all the fury of the Turks fell upon those who could not put up a resistance: the population of Pontian cities and villages. Unprecedented atrocities – robberies, murders, rapes – started throughout Pontos. Whole Greek families were shut in churches and schools and burnt alive – for example, in the city of Pafra 6.000 (six thousand) people, mostly women and children, were destroyed in this way. Out of those inhabitants of Pafra who escaped the death in fire, about 90% (22.000) were slaughtered; all women and even little girls were raped by the Turkish soldiers before being killed, while babies were disposed of by crushing their heads against walls. In the city of Amaseia and neighbouring villages 134.000 Greeks out of 180.000 were slaughtered; in the city of Mertzifunda, all the inhabitants were killed to a man; in Tripoli, Kerasounda, Ordu and many other places almost the whole male population was destroyed… And these facts are but a small part of what was happening throughout Pontos at that time.

The mass deportations, which never had stopped, continued now on an even larger scale and with greater cruelty. Here is, for example, the testimony of Maria Katsidou-Simeonidou, one of the few who survived in those terrible times:

I was born in Mourasoul village, Sevasteia/Sivas district, on August 15 1914. I remember the deportations well. In 1918, I was about four years old, when one day I saw my father in the village square. I ran to him and asked him for the pie he brought me every day from the family-owned mill. He replied: “O my child. The Turks are going to kill me and you will not see me again.” He told me to tell my mother to prepare his clothes and some food for him. That was the last time we saw him. They killed him along with another ten men.
I remember another time when a Turk warned our village, saying that all the young men should leave. This because the next day, Topal Osman would be coming. Indeed, those that left, were saved. They still killed fifteen men, including the teacher, the village president and the priest. Topal Osman had caught three hundred and fifty men from neighbouring villages. He had them bound, murdered and thrown into the river that ran through our village. I still remember the echo of the shots. They were hauling the bodies by ox-cart for nine days to bury them. Most of them were unrecognizable, as their heads had been cut off.
In 1920, around Easter, the Turkish Army came and told us to take with us everything we could. We loaded up the animals, but the saddle-bags tore open and most of us were left without food. On the deportation march, the Turkish guards would rape the women; one of whom fell pregnant. In the Teloukta area, about half our group was lost in a snow storm. From there, they took us to a place without water, Sous-Yiazousou; many died of thirst. Soon afterwards, as we passed a river, all of us threw ourselves at the water; people fell over each other in the rush; many drowned. We reached Phiratrima, which was a Kurdish area and they left us at a village near a bridge. It was here that the pregnant girl gave birth, to twins. The Turks cut the newborns in two and tossed them in the river. On the riverbank, they killed many more of the group…
The Pontians of Caucasus, who had access to the means of communication, were calling to the leaders of the European states for help. But Greece was preoccupied by the political wrangles between the monarchists and the democrats, as well as the failures on the Anatolian front; Great Britain occupied a “neutral” position, which was in fact pro-Kemalist; while France, Italy and especially the Soviets openly supported Kemal’s regime and anti-Greek policy, providing him moral, material, and military aid. The only hope of the Pontian people was now the guerilla Resistance; the guerillas were still fighting heroically, but even they in the existing circumstances, having been left completely without support and lacking even the possibility to supply weapons (while the Kemalist army constantly received money and weapons from the Bolsheviks and other allies), could not change the course of the war. To defend the independence of Pontos, while its inhabitants were facing the danger of total extermination, became practically impossible. The chief goal of the guerillas was now to rescue their people: they fought against the Turkish army for the life of Pontian Christians, and then conveyed whole families of refugees to Caucasus and Greece. Over 135.00 Pontians who found refuge in Caucasus and over 400.000 evacuated to Greece owe their lives to this heroic resistance of the guerillas.
On the 24th July 1923, the peace treaty was signed between Turkey and Greece, which included the convention for the exchange of populations. In accordance with this convention, the remaining Greek population of Pontos and Anatolia was deported to Greece.
This eviction from their homeland was avoided only by the Muslim Greeks of Oflu, who were considered “co-religionists” by the Turks and therefore escaped persecutions, as well as by those few families who managed to pass themselves off as “Turks” (in those times, Turkey did not yet have a developed system of personal identification, as in Europe, and therefore such things were sometimes possible) – but these latter had to lead a double existence of “Crypto-Greeks” ever since, finding themselves in an even more difficult position than other Crypto-Christians. On the whole, according to the estimations of contemporary official sources and modern historians, about 350.000 Pontian Greeks were slaughtered by the Turks between 1914 and 1923. The survivals were expelled from their homeland and live in exile to this day.
Nowadays, compact groups of Pontian Greeks live in Caucasus (Southern Russia, Georgia, Armenia) and northern Greece (the province of Macedonia). Considerably large Pontian diaspora exists in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Germany, Australia, Canada, and USA; Pontian communities can be found in many other countries around the world.
In Pontos itself, according to Turkish sources, about 300.00 Muslim Greek live today; approximately 75.000 of them still retain Pontian language and customs (as mentioned before, many of these Greeks are Crypto-Christians). One can say with certainty that “Crypto-Greeks” also exist in Turkey, although their numbers cannot be estimated due to obvious reasons.

3. Conclusion

At present, the Pontian Genocide is officially recognized only by Greece, Cyprus, Armenia, and the American State of New York. The reason for this is not some doubts as to the historical fact of extermination of the Pontian people (official documents of those times and testimonies of eye-witnesses of various nationalities provide sufficient evidence for the reality of the genocide), but the insufficient awareness and interest of the international community: the issue of international recognition of the Pontian Genocide was raised for the first time only on the 27th September 2006, at a meeting of the EU Parliament.

In Greece, as well as among the Pontian diaspora around the world, 19th May has been established as Commemoration day of the Pontian Genocide. Turkey, which still denies the very fact of the genocide, declared the same day a national holiday – an action that brings out clearly the attitude of the Turkish government towards this and similar historical events.

Pontian Greeks around the world do not lose hope of restoring justice; active work of Pontian communities, organizations, etc. for the National Cause, as well as considerable rise of Pontian national consciousness has become especially noticeable during the recent decade. One can hope that the Pontian genocide will soon be recognized by most countries of the world; one cannot also exclude the possibility that one day the justice will prevail, and the Pontian people will be able to return to the native land of their ancestors.

List of sources
http://www.aihgs.com/pontus.htm
http://www.pontian.info
http://net.lib.byu.edu
http://www.pontos.gr
http://ason-ponto.livejournal.com/95050.html#cutid1
http://pontosforum.4.forumer.com
http://www.karalahana.com
http://www.wikipedia.org
Κ. Φωτιάδης, καθηγητής, «Η Δημοκρατία του Πόντου»
Κ. Φωτιάδης, καθηγητής, «Ποντιακή Γενοκτονία»
Γεώργιος Ανδρεάδης, «Ταμάμα: η αγνοούμενη του Πόντου»
Ανδρέας Β. Μπουτσίκας, "Οι τελευταίοι Αργοναύτες"
Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador, “I Was Sent To Athens”


Disclaimer: This is an article specifically on the genocide of Pontian Greeks, therefore I did not deal at length with the other similar events of the period, such as the Armenian genocide or that of Anatolian Greeks.