Asia Minor, also called Anatolia (from the Greek for “sunrise”), is a geographic and historical term for the westernmost part of Asia. Pontus (Pontos), an ancient Greek word for “sea”, refers to the Black Sea and the surrounding coastal areas. From the 9th century BC to the 15th century AD, Asia Minor played a major role in the development of western civilization. Since 1923, Asia Minor has comprised the majority of the Republic of Turkey. Greek settlements in Asia Minor date as far back as 11th century BC when Greeks emigrated from mainland Greece. They founded cities such as Miletus, Ephesus, Smyrna, Sinope, Trapezus, and Byzantium (later knows as Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire). These cities flourished culturally and economically. Miletus was the birthplace of pre-Socratic Western philosophy and of the first great thinkers of antiquity, such as Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. As the intellectual and business capital of the Greek world a century before Athens, Miletus has been called the birthplace of the modern world.

From the 6th century BC, Asia Minor was successively conquered and ruled by the Persians, Alexander the Great, and the Romans. In the 4th century AD, Asia Minor became part of the Eastern Roman Empire, later referred to as the Byzantine Empire, with Greek as the official language. Greek was a strong influence throughout the Empire. From the 4th century AD until the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Empire played an important role in the development of Christianity. It also defended Europe from a number of Muslim attempts to invade the continent from the East. During the following two centuries of Ottoman rule, the 16th and 17th centuries, Greek communities in Asia Minor resisted constant pressures to convert to Islam. Most managed to preserve their religion, ethnic traditions, and culture. During the 17th and 18th centuries, however, thousands of Greeks were forced to convert to Islam, among them 250,000 Pontian Greeks. Thousands of Greek fled to Christian Russia to escape Turkish persecution, particularly following the numerous Russian-Turkish wars in the 19th century. New Ottoman laws introduced in the 19th century were an attempt to modernize the Ottoman State and bring it into the world economy. The lives of Ottoman subjects, including Christian minorities, were temporarily improved. Unfortunately, the resulting social, religious and economic renaissance in the Christian communities came to an end at the beginning of the 20th century.

Pontic Greeks continuously inhabited the southern coast of the Black Sea in northern Anatolia since pre-Byzantine times. The ethnic cleansing of the Pontic Greeks followed the same pattern as the Armenian deportations and massacres: Citing security threats and suspicions of possible cooperation with the Russians, in the spring of 1916 the Ottoman government ordered that all Pontic Greeks be removed from the Black Sea coastal towns to 50 kilometers inland. Of course, in the case of the Armenians, the deportation orders were not only in the eastern war zone, but applied to every region in Turkey. The Pontic Greek deportations were carried out by the Special Organization (Teskilat-i Mahsusa), the same governmental organization that carried out the Armenian massacres, manned by convicted killers released from prisons. Documents show that the longer the prison term, the higher the rank given by the government for these criminals in carrying out their destructive tasks. Naturally, the Greek deportations soon transformed from relocation to robbery to mass murders. But because the Pontic Greeks had observed the fate of the Armenians a year ago, they got their defences organized and resisted the deportations by taking to the mountains wherever they could. As a result, the deportations and massacres in this “First Phase Massacre” resulted in 150,000 deaths, eliminating a third of the Pontic population until the end of the war.

The “Second and Real Phase of Massacre” that saw the organized destruction of the Pontic Greeks started in earnest with the arrival of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in Samsun on May 19, 1919. He met with the well-known mass murderers of the Armenians of the Black Sea region, such as Topal (Lame) Osman and Ipsiz Recep, and secured their cooperation in starting a terror campaign to get rid of the Pontic Greeks from northern Turkey. These two murderers, originally smugglers of illegal goods, had gained notoriety in 1915 when they rounded up Armenian men, women, and children in large boats, took them out to sea, and dumped them overboard to drown, then boasted that the “smelt season will be bountiful this year with lots of food for them.” As the Pontic Greek men had taken to the mountains, these two murderers went after the Greek women and children who had remained in the villages. Various methods of mass murder were implemented. It was common to take the entire population of villages to caves nearby, seal the entrance of the cave, and burn them alive, or use gas to suffocate them inside. Any male Greeks caught were thrown, alive, into the coal furnaces of steamships through the funnels. Churches became incinerators to burn alive as many Greeks as could be stuffed into the building.

There were also the so-called “Liberation Courts” (Istiklal Mahkemeleri) set up in cities across the Black Sea region to try Greek rebels. These courts passed arbitrary decisions that almost invariably resulted in death sentences, with no defence or appeals allowed, and hangings carried out immediately. Among the victims of these courts were hundreds of Greek teachers in the American and Greek schools of the region, prominent community leaders, clergymen, and, tragically, entire members of the Merzifon Greek high school football team, only because the team was named Pontus Club, which was deemed sufficient reason to label them a rebel terrorist organization. Ataturk then appointed Nurettin Pasha as commander of the Central Army to mop up any resisting Greeks from the entire Black Sea region.

This man, also known for his sadistic tendencies, destroyed thousands of defenceless Greek villages. Among his “accomplishments” was the arrest of a Turkish opposition journalist who had criticized Ataturk; Nurettin Pasha then had his soldiers tear the journalist alive limb by limb. He was also at the head of the army units that entered Izmir (Smyrna) in 1922, where he arranged for the lynching of the Greek head of the clergy in the same manner, and then began the Great Fire that destroyed the entire city (Great Fire of Smyrna).

On September 13, 1922,  Turkish soldiers at the end of the three-year-long Greco-Turkish War lit fire to Smyrna’s Greek and Armenian quarters and went on a rampage of rape, pillage, and mass murder. Soon, all but the Turkish quarter of the city was in flames as hundreds of thousands of refugees crowded the waterfront, desperate to escape. The Great Fire of Smyrna or the Catastrophe of Smyrna, destroyed much of the port city of Smyrna in September 1922. Eyewitness reports state that the fire began on 13 September 1922 and lasted until it was largely extinguished on September 22nd. It occurred four days after Turkish forces regained control of the city on 9 September 1922, effectively ending the Greco-Turkish in the field, more than three years after the Greek army had landed troops at Smyrna on 15 May 1919. Estimated Greek and Armenian deaths stand at around 100,000.

Approximately hundreds of thousands of Greek and Armenian refugees crammed the waterfront to escape from the fire. They were forced to remain there under harsh conditions for nearly two weeks. Turkish troops and irregulars had started committing massacres and atrocities against the Greek and Armenian population in the city before the outbreak of the fire. Many women were raped, tens of thousands of Greek and Armenian men were subsequently deported into the interior of Anatolia, where many of them died in harsh conditions.

The subsequent fire completely destroyed the Greek and Armenian quarters of the city; the Muslim and Jewish quarters escaped damage

With the passing of the 100th year commemorating the Pontic genocide, there has been little international recognitions of the atrocities that the Greeks faced. Turkey has remained adamant that these events are exaggerated and Greek politicians and groups raise “imaginary claims”. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has even stated that, “We [Turkey] are the victims. There has been no genocide and no action to make this nation feel ashamed.” Without remorse, without regret for the deaths of Pontic Greeks,  this attitude is unacceptable and provides no acknowledgment or amelioration to Turkey’s actions against the Christian Pontic Greeks.