Originally published 2019-05-19.
The Pontic Greek genocide was the destruction of the Greek Orthodox communities of Pontus, the mountainous Black Sea coast of today's northeastern Turkey, between roughly 1914 and 1923. Through labour battalions, deportations, death marches and massacres, the Ottoman and then Kemalist authorities killed an estimated 300,000 to 360,000 Pontic Greeks. The survivors were expelled, most of them to Greece in the 1923 population exchange. Every year on 19 May, Pontic Greeks around the world mark the anniversary, and 2019 marked one hundred years since the date chosen for remembrance.
This article explains who the Pontic Greeks are, how nearly three thousand years of life on the Black Sea came to an end, and how a scattered diaspora has kept its memory alive.
Who are the Pontic Greeks?
"Pontus" comes from the ancient Greek name for the Black Sea. Greek settlers from the Ionian city of Miletus founded Sinope on its southern shore in the eighth century BC, the earliest known Greek colony in the region. Ancient writers said that sailors had once called the sea Axeinos, "inhospitable," and that after the colonies took root it became Euxeinos, "hospitable." Over the following centuries Greek towns spread around the coast, in lands that now belong to Turkey, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Romania.
Pontic Greek descendants carrying the icon of the Panagia Soumela, the most important symbol of their heritage.
In the Byzantine period Pontus was a prosperous frontier province. It was the homeland of the Komnenos family, whose emperors ruled Byzantium from 1082 to 1185 and recovered much of Anatolia from the Seljuks. When Crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204, a Komnenos descendant, Alexios I, founded the Empire of Trebizond on the Pontic coast. It outlasted Constantinople and fell to Sultan Mehmed II only in 1461, eight years after the Byzantine capital. Greek-speaking communities in the mountains held on to their language and faith under Ottoman rule for centuries afterwards.
Pontic Greeks speak a distinctive form of Greek, traditionally called Romeika by its speakers, and have their own music and dances. The lyra, or kemenche, a small bowed fiddle, carries most Pontic melodies, and the fast serra, also called pyrrhichios, is a war dance still performed at festivals today.
A flourishing community before 1914
By the late nineteenth century the Greek population of Pontus had grown considerably. Greek estimates from the period speak of several hundred thousand people, with community figures rising towards 700,000 by the early twentieth century, though Ottoman and Greek statistics differ. Christians made up roughly a quarter of the region's inhabitants.
Most Pontic Greeks were farmers and herders, but Trebizond, Samsun, Kerasunda and other ports also had a confident Greek merchant and professional class. Communities supported schools, printing presses, newspapers, clubs and theatres, and literacy around Trebizond was unusually high for the Ottoman Empire. Many families also had relatives across the sea: as the Russian Empire expanded into the Caucasus in the nineteenth century, it encouraged Christian settlers, and large numbers of Pontic Greeks moved to southern Russia, Georgia and the Kars region.
From persecution to genocide, 1914–1923
The turning point came with the Young Turk regime, which took power after the 1908 revolution and moved increasingly towards a nationalist programme of "Turkification." Historians generally date the campaign against Ottoman Greeks from 1912–1913, when expulsions began in eastern Thrace and the Aegean coast. Its main phases were:
- Labour battalions (from 1914). Greek men of military age were drafted into amele taburları, labour units sent to build roads, work mines and quarries in harsh conditions. Hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Greeks died in them from hunger, exposure and disease.
- Deportations (1916–1917 and after). Whole villages along the Black Sea were forced inland on winter marches, accused of sympathising with Russia. Many people died on the roads.
- Massacres and village burnings (1919–1923). After Mustafa Kemal landed at Samsun on 19 May 1919 to organise the nationalist movement, violence in Pontus intensified. Regular troops and irregular bands, among them the forces of the notorious Topal Osman, attacked villages, while men were sent to labour units from which few returned.
Some Pontic Greeks fled to the mountains and formed armed groups to protect their families; at their peak around 1920 these numbered about 18,000 fighters. Metropolitan Chrysanthos of Trebizond, the region's senior churchman, argued at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference for an autonomous or independent Pontic state, but the idea won no lasting support from Greece or the Allied powers.
Estimates of Pontic Greek deaths range from about 300,000 to 360,000; one detailed study put the losses from the start of the First World War to March 1924 at 353,000. Across Anatolia as a whole, academic estimates for all Ottoman Greek deaths between 1914 and 1922 run from roughly 300,000 to well over 700,000. The same period saw the genocide of the Armenians and the Assyrians, and many historians study the three as parts of one process.
Exile, the population exchange and a new diaspora
The Greco-Turkish War ended in 1922 with the burning of Smyrna and the flight of the Greek army and civilians from Asia Minor. In 1923 Greece and Turkey agreed a compulsory exchange of populations, defined by religion rather than language. Almost all remaining Orthodox Christians in Turkey were sent to Greece, and Muslims in Greece were sent to Turkey. The Treaty of Lausanne, signed the same year, said nothing about the killings that had preceded it.
The 1928 Greek census counted about 1.1 million refugees from the former Ottoman lands, of whom 240,695 were identified as Pontic Greeks. Many were settled in Greek Macedonia and Thrace, in districts such as Kilkis, Drama, Pella, Serres and Florina, often on land that had recently been left by departing Muslim and Slavic-speaking populations. Mountain people once again found themselves pioneering a frontier.
The story did not end there. Pontic Greeks who had moved to Russia and the Caucasus faced Stalin-era deportations to Central Asia in the 1940s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, tens of thousands of their descendants, many speaking Russian as a first language, migrated to Greece. Meanwhile, economic hardship in rural Greece after the Second World War sent many Pontic families on to Athens, Thessaloniki, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Australia, Canada and the United States. Today the Pontic diaspora is often estimated at two million people or more, concentrated around Thessaloniki.
Soumela and the symbols of memory
No place means more to Pontic Greeks than the Monastery of Panagia Soumela, built into a cliff about 1,200 metres up in the Pontic Mountains, near Maçka in Trabzon province. Tradition dates its founding to the late fourth century and credits two Athenian monks, Barnabas and Sophronios. It became famous for an icon of the Virgin Mary said to have been painted by the Apostle Luke.
When the Pontic Greeks were forced out, the monastery was abandoned. In 1930 refugees founded a new Panagia Soumela monastery on Mount Vermio, near Kastania in northern Greece, and its treasured icon became the centre of a major pilgrimage every 15 August. Since 2010 the Turkish authorities have also allowed an annual Orthodox liturgy at the original cliffside monastery on that date, attended by pilgrims from Greece and the diaspora.
Other symbols have joined the icon over time: photographs of armed Pontic fighters in traditional dress, the black double-headed eagle flag, and the music and dances performed by cultural associations from Thessaloniki to Melbourne. These associations do not claim territory. Their central demand is acknowledgement of what happened.
Why 19 May, and who recognises the genocide
In 1994 the Greek Parliament affirmed the genocide in Pontus and declared 19 May, the anniversary of Mustafa Kemal's landing at Samsun in 1919, as the day of remembrance. A separate 1998 law set 14 September to remember the Greeks of Asia Minor as a whole.
In 2007 the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution, supported by 83 percent of voting members, recognising the campaign against Ottoman Greeks as genocide and describing it as qualitatively similar to the Armenian genocide. Recognition by states has followed: Greece and Cyprus, Sweden in 2010, the Australian state of New South Wales in 2013, Armenia, the Netherlands and Austria in 2015, among others. Turkey rejects the term.
For descendants, 19 May is both a day of mourning and a family reunion on a global scale. Memorial services, marches and concerts take place in Greek cities and diaspora communities, and grandchildren learn the names of villages their families have not seen for a century.
If you want to learn more, local Pontic associations, the monastery on Mount Vermio and the recorded testimonies of survivors are good places to start. Each story keeps alive a community that lived on the shores of the Black Sea for close to three thousand years.
Sources: Wikipedia: Greek genocide; Wikipedia: Pontic Greeks; Wikipedia: Sumela Monastery. Background on the 2019 centenary was first reported by Greek Reporter.
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