The Pontic Genocide and the "disappearance" of a homeland

In an inaccessible, mountainous region of Asia Minor, covering an area of 71,000 square kilometers, with valleys, small plateaus and coastal zones along the coast of the Black Sea, Pontic Hellenism was born and flourished, with a presence that is lost in the myths of the Argonauts and the archaic period (750-480 BC).

The Pontians were the most isolated, but so genuine part of the Greek race, who transferred to their occasional barbarian invaders the Greek thought, language and religion of metropolitan Greece. On the coast of this lost homeland for us, the Myrians of Xenophon (401 BC) ended up deified by their historical course and shouted the famous: “sea, sea” expecting the return to their native land…

​14 Ιουλίου 1993: Οι 6 όροι του Κωνσταντίνου Μητσοτάκη προς την Αλβανική Κυβέρνηση

The Pontic state, founded during the period 363-302 BC with a Greek character and high Persian supervision, went through various phases in its historical course, the most important of which was its heyday in the years of Mithridates VI (120-63 BC), who was a formidable opponent for the Romans at the time, to the point of making two campaigns against them, reaching as far as southern Greece (147 BC the conquest of Macedonia by the Romans and 146 of the rest of Greece).

Much later, in the 3rd century AD, Pontus was Christianized and followed the fate of the rest of Hellenism. When Justinian ascended to the throne of the Byzantine Empire (527-565) and divided it into themes, he gave Pontus an administrative entity, so that it could regionally confront the hostile barbarian tribes.

Pontus was the field of action of great men of the medieval period, such as the Byzantine Akrites, whose works and days are described in relief in the scholarly work “Epic of Digenis Akrites”, which was discovered in 1873 in the monastery of Panagia Soumela on Mount Vermio (Kastania, Imathia).

Since then, Pontus has been "lost" somewhere in the course of history, until it dynamically returns to the forefront with the Empire of Trebizond, founded in the year of the Fourth Crusade against Byzantium (1204) by the Komnenoi (Alexios and David), which marks the beginning of the Frankish rule (1204-1261).

The Greek state of Trebizond, the "state of the Great Komnenoi", lived until 1461, when it too was enslaved by the Turks, who had already conquered Constantinople in 1453. The conquest of the Pontic Empire by the Turks marked the end of the freedom of the Pontians, but not of their national consciousness, since throughout the Ottoman conquest they maintained the main characteristics of their Greekness: their language and their Orthodox faith.

The Ottoman conquest of Pontus went through three turbulent phases, the third of which was the most dramatic because it is associated with the genocide of the Pontians. The first began after the fall of the Pontic Empire (1461) and ended in the mid-17th century, during which the Ottomans attempted to consolidate their empire within the borders of the conquered Byzantine state.

The second phase (1650-1870) marks the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the beginning of relentless persecutions against the Pontians, many of whom were then forced to convert to Islam. From then on, alone and forgotten, they fought an unequal struggle of resistance against their conquerors.

Half of them were exterminated and of the other half that survived, others climbed the mountains (to escape exile and execution), from where they began their epic resistance against the Turks ("Pontic guerrilla"), while others fled to Southern Greece or dispersed.

The second phase was the beginning of the countdown for Pontic Hellenism, after it was literally swept away by the predatory taxation of the sultans and its violent Islamization (the population of Pontus was reduced to 120,000), only to then pass into the period of the Greek Revolution in Greece (1821), during which Pontus was unable to participate due to its geographical location.

Η τρίτη και πιο δραματική φάση (που καλύπτει τα τελευταία 50 χρόνια και έχει υποκινητή τη Γερμανία για οικονομικούς και μεγαλοϊδεατικούς λόγους) περιλαμβάνει τη χρονιά απαρχής της ποντιακής γενοκτονίας (1914, αρχή Α’ Παγκοσμίου Πολέμου: 1914-’18) και φτάνει ως το μοιραίο έτος της Μικρασιατικής Καταστροφής, τουλάχιστον (1922/’23), με πιο τραγική δεκαετία για τους κατοίκους του Πόντου αυτήν που μεσολάβησε με τους Βαλκανικούς πολέμους (1912-13) και τελείωσε με τον βίαιο ξεριζωμό τους απ’ την προγονική γη, για να κορυφωθεί με τη γενοκτονία τους.

The uprooting of the Pontians began gradually after the genocide of 1,500,000 Armenians in 1915 by the Kemalist slaughterers of the "Turkish Republic" created by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (a national state of the Young Turks - "an Auschwitz in flux", according to the university professor Polychronis Enepekidis - which was the result of genocides), causing a European and global uproar over the inhumane event.

This is why the Armenian genocide overshadowed the subsequent Pontic genocide with 353,000 dead (326,000-382,000, according to other sources). In their honor, the celebration of May 19 was established in Greece in 1994 – as a day of remembrance of their genocide (part of the massacre of the Christian populations of the East), by decision of the Greek Parliament.

The process of extermination of the Pontians, it should be noted, did not take place in a limited period of time, but over an extended period. We could say, schematically, that it took place in three consecutive phases:

First: From the beginning of World War I to the occupation of Trebizond by the russian army (1914-1916).

Second: From the occupation of Trebizond by the Russians until the end of World War I (1918). Third: From the end of the “Great War” until the Treaty of Lausanne and the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey (1918-1923).

Of course, the countdown for The greek Christians of pontus Had begun even earlier (1908, the young turk revolution under kemal and the End of the Sultan's Rule). however, the genocidal plan Of the turks began to take shape During The Balkan wars (1912-13), which was the first in which the Young turks expressed their willingness to annihilate the Greeks and Armenians of Asia Minor.

However, the defeat in The Balkan wars and their expulsion from the Balkans changed the turks' plans And made them lash out against the pontians. Thus, In their anti-Hellenic frenzy, they began to slander and demonize not only them, but also the rest of the christians of Asia Minor.

It was then that a proclamation indicative of the hatred they harbored was circulated in Anatolia, which characteristically read:

“We Turks are starving and suffering, because the Greeks hold our trade and livelihood in their own hands…” And he concluded with the exhortation: “… Cut off all contact with the giaouris. Do not buy their products. Do you need their friendship? Do you gain anything from living with them?”

Let us take into account that both this and other documents that were circulated in millions of copies against the Hellenism of Asia Minor at that time bore the signature of the “German Bank of Palestine” and this was further proof that German institutions and banks were the financiers of the Young Turks…

The first cases of violence and massacres against the Pontians, which were a harbinger of what was to follow, occurred in 1914, when units of the regular army entered areas of Pontus with a purely Greek population and engaged in massacres and looting.

Then countless Greeks (especially young people) were captured and conscripted from their villages and led, through death marches in difficult areas, to the labor battalions of Anatolia, where most were decimated, unable to withstand the diseases and hardships of the severe cold.

Faced with these sufferings of the Greeks of Pontus, many mayors at the time did not remain indifferent, but they were unable to change the course of things, since they were constantly indulging in indifference and inhumanity. In fact, at the end of 1915, the black year of the Armenian massacre, the Turks began to methodically prepare the decimation of the Pontians, having at their side, as a morale booster and ally, the Kaiser of Germany...