May 19: Remembrance Day of the Pontic Greek Genocide

May 19 and the Remembrance of the Pontic Greek Genocide

Every year on 19 May, Greece and Pontic Greek communities around the world remember the Greeks of Pontus who were killed, deported or driven from their homeland on the Black Sea coast of Anatolia between 1914 and 1923. The most widely cited death toll is 353,000. The date was fixed by a Greek law passed unanimously in 1994, and it marks the day in 1919 when Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk) landed at Samsun, opening the phase of the persecution that finally emptied Pontus of its Greek population.

This page explains who the Pontic Greeks were, what happened to them, why this particular date was chosen and how the Pontian Genocide is recognised today.

Who the Pontic Greeks are

Pontus is the historical name for the mountainous coast of north-eastern Anatolia, along the southern shore of the Black Sea. Greek colonists settled there from about 700 BC, founding cities such as Sinope, Amisos (today's Samsun) and Trapezous (Trabzon). For more than two and a half thousand years, Greek-speaking communities lived in the coastal towns and high valleys of the region.

After the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204, a branch of the Komnenos dynasty founded the Empire of Trebizond, which survived until the Ottomans conquered it in 1461. Under Ottoman rule many Pontic Greeks remained Orthodox Christians, kept their distinctive dialect, which its speakers call Romeika, and centred their religious life on places such as the Panagia Soumela monastery above Maçka.

What happened between 1914 and 1923

The destruction of Pontic Hellenism was part of a wider campaign against the Christian peoples of the late Ottoman Empire, which also struck the Armenians and Assyrians and the Greeks of Thrace, Ionia and Cappadocia. It unfolded in stages over almost a decade.

During the First World War, Greek men of military age were drafted into labour battalions, where huge numbers died from overwork, hunger, cold and disease. From late 1916, Ottoman authorities deported Greek villagers from the Black Sea coast, including the Samsun area, inland on foot. Women, children and the elderly were marched through the mountains in winter, and many did not survive. Some Pontic Greeks fled into the hills and formed armed bands to protect their villages; by 1920 these groups numbered around 18,000 men.

After the Ottoman defeat in 1918, the persecution did not stop. It continued during the war between Greece and the Turkish nationalist movement, now under the government of the Grand National Assembly led by Mustafa Kemal, with fresh deportations, the burning of villages and killings. The wider catastrophe ended with the burning of Smyrna in September 1922 and the compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey agreed in 1923.

How many died

The figure of 353,000 Pontic Greek victims comes from a tally by the historian George Valavanis, based on records of the Central Pontian Council, covering the period up to March 1924. Other estimates for Pontus range from about 300,000 to 360,000. For all the Greeks of Anatolia, academic estimates run from roughly 289,000 to 750,000 deaths, and some contemporary claims were higher.

Why 19 May was chosen

On 19 May 1919, Mustafa Kemal stepped ashore at Samsun, the main port of Pontus. In Turkey that landing is celebrated as the start of the national struggle that led to the Republic, and the day is a public holiday dedicated to Atatürk, youth and sport. For Pontic Greeks it carries the opposite meaning: it marks the beginning of the final stage of their uprooting, when the nationalist movement completed what the wartime deportations had begun.

The choice of date is therefore deliberate. It places Greek remembrance alongside the Turkish founding story and asks that both be told honestly.

Recognition in law and scholarship

Greece recognised the genocide of the Pontic Greeks with Law 2193/1994, passed unanimously by parliament, which set 19 May as the Day of Remembrance. A later decree in 1998 established 14 September as a day of remembrance for the Greeks of Asia Minor as a whole, recalling the destruction of Smyrna.

Cyprus officially commemorates the "Greek Genocide in Pontus of Asia Minor". Sweden's parliament recognised the genocide of Greeks, Armenians and Assyrians in March 2010, and both Armenia and the Netherlands recognised the Greek and Assyrian genocides in 2015. In December 2007 the International Association of Genocide Scholars adopted a resolution recognising the Assyrian and Greek genocides together with the Armenian Genocide.

Turkey still rejects the term genocide for these events. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which ended the conflict, made no mention of the killings and included an amnesty, so no one was ever held to account under its terms.

Survival and remembrance today

Hundreds of thousands of Pontic refugees reached Greece in the early 1920s, most of them settling in Macedonia in the north, around Thessaloniki, Kozani, Drama and Kilkis. They arrived with almost nothing, yet built new villages and neighbourhoods, often naming them after the towns they had lost.

Their culture survived the uprooting. The Pontic lyra, a small upright bowed instrument, still leads dances such as the serra, also known as pyrrhichios, at weddings and festivals. The Pontic dialect is still spoken, though fewer young people grow up with it. Today the Pontic Greek diaspora is estimated at around two to two and a half million people, with the largest communities in Greece, the United States and Germany.

On 19 May, memorial services are held in churches across Greece, flags fly at half mast on public buildings, and Pontic associations from Thessaloniki to Melbourne and Stuttgart hold marches and lay wreaths. The aim is not to keep hatred alive but to keep memory accurate: to name what happened, honour those who died on the roads and in the labour battalions, and recognise how a scattered people rebuilt their lives.

Common misunderstandings

"It all happened in 1919." The persecution of the Pontic Greeks began in 1914 and lasted until 1923. The date of 19 May marks a turning point, not the whole story.
"It was a side effect of war." Deportations of civilians, death marches and labour battalions targeted people because of their ethnicity and faith, which is why scholars of genocide include them alongside the Armenian and Assyrian cases.
"The refugees came from Turkey, so they were Turks." Pontic Greeks were an indigenous Greek-speaking Orthodox population whose presence in the region predated the Ottoman conquest by about two thousand years.

Sources: Wikipedia: Greek genocide; Wikipedia: Pontic Greeks. Earlier report by The Pappas Post.

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