Originally published 2020-09-29.
On the night of 6 September 1955 and into the next day, organised mobs swept through Istanbul and attacked the city's Greek community. In a matter of hours they wrecked homes, shops, churches, schools and cemeteries. Armenians and Jews were also targeted. Greeks remember these days as the Septemvriana; in English the events are usually called the Istanbul pogrom.
The violence was set off by a false report that Greeks had bombed the house in Thessaloniki where Atatürk was born. It is now widely documented that the riots were planned in advance with the involvement of the ruling party and state security networks. The pogrom accelerated the near-disappearance of one of the oldest Greek communities in the world.
What happened on 6–7 September 1955
On 6 September, a small bomb went off in the grounds of the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, next to Atatürk's birthplace. The damage was minor, but Istanbul newspapers quickly spread the story, in some editions with exaggerated claims that the house had been badly damaged and that Greeks were responsible.
That evening, crowds gathered in Taksim Square and along the main streets. Many had been brought into the city by truck and supplied with tools such as crowbars, shovels and axes. They moved through Greek neighbourhoods street by street, smashing shop fronts, looting goods, burning churches and setting upon anyone who tried to resist.
The police largely stood back for hours. Martial law was finally declared and the army deployed, but by then much of the damage had been done.
Who was behind it
Later investigations and trials point to a planned operation rather than a spontaneous outburst. The governing Democrat Party of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes worked with security structures, including the Tactical Mobilisation Group, the special-warfare unit linked to the Counter-Guerrilla, and the National Security Service. The role of the Tactical Mobilisation Group became public only in 2005, when a retired general described the operation in an interview as "a magnificent organisation".
The bomb itself has its own tangled story. Accounts agree that it was a provocation and not a Greek attack. A Turkish usher at the consulate was arrested and confessed to planting it. During the later Yassıada trials, prosecutors said a Thessaloniki university student, Oktay Engin, had been sent to place the device. Engin was arrested in Greece, fled to Turkey before a Greek court sentenced him in absentia, went on to a long police career and has always denied any part in it.
Earlier retellings sometimes say "the student confessed". That is not what the record shows: it was the usher who confessed, while Engin denied involvement.
The human and material cost
Estimates of the number killed vary. Figures commonly cited range from about 13 to 16 Greeks, including two clergymen, plus at least one Armenian, while other researchers count 30 or more; one compiled list names 37 victims. More than a thousand people were injured. Survivors and historians also record sexual violence against women and boys and assaults on clergy.
Detailed tallies cited on Wikipedia list some 5,317 properties damaged, almost all Greek-owned, including:
- 4,214 homes
- 1,004 businesses
- 73 churches and 26 schools
- two monasteries and a synagogue
Other contemporary counts give somewhat different numbers, for example around 4,000 shops and dozens of schools, depending on how damage was categorised. Estimates of the financial loss ranged from about 25 million US dollars (the Turkish government's figure) to 500 million (Greece's). Compensation later paid by Turkey covered only a small part of the claims.
How the Greek community of Istanbul shrank
Istanbul's Greeks, known as Rum, had lived in the city for many centuries before the Ottoman conquest. They were exempted from the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, and in 1955 numbered somewhere between about 65,000 and 100,000, depending on the source.
The pogrom broke the community's confidence. Thousands left in the following years, and in 1964 the Turkish government expelled Greek citizens living in Istanbul. About 40,000 people were deported, allowed to take only 20 kilos of belongings and a small sum of money. Many Turkish-citizen relatives followed them.
Today estimates of the community's size range from about 2,500 to 4,000, mostly older people. Empty churches and schools across districts such as Beyoğlu and the Bosphorus villages are visible reminders of how large it once was.
Trials, recognition and memory
After the 1960 military coup, Menderes, Foreign Minister Fatin Rüştü Zorlu and others were tried at Yassıada. The charges included organising the 1955 riots, which the accused denied. Menderes and Zorlu were executed in 1961 on a range of charges, which means the pogrom never received a trial of its own focused on the victims.
In 1995 the US Senate passed a resolution calling for 6 September to be marked as a day of remembrance. Some scholars, such as the international lawyer Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, argue that the events meet the definition of genocide under the 1948 convention; that classification is debated among historians. A 2005 photo exhibition in Istanbul marking the 50th anniversary was attacked by nationalists, showing how sensitive the subject remained. Films and series, including the 2009 film Pains of Autumn and the Netflix series The Club, have since brought the events to wider audiences in Turkey.
The wider story of Greek–Turkish relations
The pogrom sits within a long and difficult history. It followed the 1923 population exchange and preceded the 1964 expulsions. In 1974, after a coup in Cyprus backed by the military junta in Athens, Turkey invaded the island, which had been an independent republic since 1960. Turkey still occupies the north, and only Turkey recognises the breakaway administration there.
Tensions have flared repeatedly since, from the Imia crisis of the mid-1990s to disputes over gas exploration in contested waters of the eastern Mediterranean, which led the European Union to impose sanctions over drilling by the Turkish vessel Oruç Reis. There have been warmer periods too: the "earthquake diplomacy" of 1999 and a declaration on good-neighbourly relations signed in December 2023. Many observers, however, say lasting change depends on resolving the Cyprus issue.
Why it matters to remember
For the families who lost homes, livelihoods and loved ones, September 1955 was the moment the city they belonged to turned on them. Remembering it honestly, with careful use of evidence and respect for survivors' testimony, is part of understanding how prejudice, rumour and state power can combine to destroy a community in a single night.
Sources: Wikipedia: Istanbul pogrom; Wikipedia: Greece–Turkey relations; Wikipedia: Cyprus.
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