Chapter Mission Statement
The mission of The Pontian Phoenix Society of Cleveland is to:
1. Preserve, teach, and promote the history of Pontian Hellenism to future generations.
2. Coordinate activities and events which support the preservation of the culture, language, and dance ethnocentric to Pontian Hellenism locally, regionally, and nationally.
3. Partner with the Pan-Pontian Federation Association in its endeavors to maintain national identity for those of Pontian Greek Descent and those in the diaspora.
The mission of The Pontian Phoenix Society of Cleveland is to:
1. Preserve, teach, and promote the history of Pontian Hellenism to future generations.
2. Coordinate activities and events which support the preservation of the culture, language, and dance ethnocentric to Pontian Hellenism locally, regionally, and nationally.
3. Partner with the Pan-Pontian Federation Association in its endeavors to maintain national identity for those of Pontian Greek Descent and those in the diaspora.
History of the Pontian Greeks
Who are the Pontian Greeks?
“Pontus,” an ancient Greek word for “sea,” refers to the Black Sea and surrounding coastal areas. The presence of Greeks at the Black Sea dates back to early times. Research suggests that in the period around 1000 B.C., the first trading adventures in this area took place, searching mainly for gold and other minerals. The voyage of Jason and the Argonauts to Colchis, the adventures of Odysseus in the country of the Cimmerians, the punishment of Prometheus by Zeus on the Caucasus mountains, the voyage of Hercules to the Pontus, the land of Amazons, and other Greek myths related to this area testify to the existence of ancient Greek trading routes.
During the 8th Century B.C., Greeks from Miletos colonized this area, founding cities like Sinope, Amisos (Samsun), and Trapezus (Trebizond) and contributing great thinkers such as the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope and the geographer Strabo of Amasia. After Alexander the Great’s death in 323 B.C., the city-states of the Pontus formed a kingdom under the Mithridates family that lasted until defeated by the Romans in 63 B.C.
In 313 A.D., Roman Emperor Constantine granted Christians religious freedom. In 330 he renamed the Greek city of Byzantium “Constantinople” and made the city the new capital of the Christian Roman Empire. The emergence of Christianity as the official religion of Rome led to the creation of great monasteries that served as centers of Christian and Hellenic (Greek) learning. A number of saints, patriarchs, and bishops of the Orthodox Church were from the Pontus.
As part of the Eastern Roman Empire (also known as the Byzantine Empire, or Byzantium), the Pontus was a busy trading center, with the Black Sea as well as land routes, such as the Silk Road, which stretched as far as China. The Pontus also served as a military base against Persians and, later, Arabs. As Byzantium weakened, the Greek Empire of Trebizond was established in the Pontus in 1204. In 1461, the Ottoman Turks conquered Trebizond, the last independent Greek state until the modern nation of Greece would be established in the 19th Century.
How did the Ottoman Empire affect the Pontus?
After the fall of Trebizond, Pontian Greeks suffered large-scale massacres and deportations. In the 17th and 18th Centuries, approximately 250,000 Pontian Greeks were forced to convert to Islam. Many others fled the area.
In the 19th Century, the central government of the Ottoman Empire increased its power over local rulers. To some extent, government laws improved the lives of non-Muslims and encouraged new economic opportunities based around the Black Sea and Persia (present day Iran). Though most Greeks remained in the Pontus, over 250,000 migrated into areas of the Caucasus and northern shores of the Black Sea controlled by Russia. This movement into Russian territory was encouraged by Russia, which preferred that fellow Christians populate this area. Pontian Greeks also fled there to escape Turkish rule.
This era fostered a renaissance in Pontian Greek society, which numbered approximately 800,000. Over one thousand churches and one thousand Greek schools were built, Greek newspapers and books flourished, as did cultural and scientific societies. Heartened by the independent Kingdom of Greece, Pontian Greeks grew more nationalistic and assertive of equal rights in an empire where they had frequently faced oppression.
What was the “Megali Idea” (“Great Idea”)
When an independent Greece was established in 1828, it held less than one-third of the Greeks who had lived within the Ottoman Empire. Many Greeks within both Greece and the Ottoman Empire came to believe in the “Megali Idea,” or “Great Idea,” a concept of creating a greater Greece that included all the areas of Greek settlement in Asia Minor and Eastern Thrace, with Constantinople as its capital.
Those sharing this concept viewed the Russian Empire as sympathetic to the “Great Idea.” As an Orthodox Christian nation, Russia considered itself the protector of the Ottoman sultan’s Orthodox Christian subjects, among whom were the Pontian Greeks. During the Crimean War, Greece supported Russia against the Ottoman Empire.
In 1912 Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria declared war (Balkan War) on the Ottoman Empire and defeated it. As a result, Greece grew in size by 70%, including Macedonia (northern Greece) and the island of Crete, and increased in population from 2,800,000 to 4,800,000.
What caused the Pontian Greek Genocide?
Turkish nationalists, called the “Young Turks,” gained control of their government in 1908, only to watch the Ottoman Empire fall apart. In a series of wars between 1908–1913, the Empire lost about 500,000 square miles of territory, in which approximately six million people lived. In January 1913, after the Ottoman Empire was defeated in the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), an extreme nationalist group of Young Turks, took control of the government. Its wish was to achieve the Turkification or Islamization of the Empire (also called “Turkism”) and to eliminate ethnic minority communities such as the Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontian Greeks.
As early as 1911, the Young Turks already had banned the ethnic, cultural, and political associations of minority groups. Greek schools were placed under the government control, and Turkish was to be the language studied therein. In the Pontus, teachers from mainland Greece were forbidden to work in Greek schools. One of the worst government orders was compulsory military service for all religious communities. Christian recruits were treated brutally, leading to large numbers of deserters, many of whom found their way into the mountains or neighboring Russia. Under the pretense of searching for these deserters, bands of Turkish marauders broke into Greek homes, robbing, raping, and/or murdering their inhabitants.
During World War I, what forms did the Pontian Greek Genocide take?
After the beginning of World War I in 1914, Turkey joined the Central Powers led by Germany and, therefore, fought the Allies, including Russia. When the Armenian Genocide began in 1915, persecutions of Pontian Greeks increased dramatically. The government organized boycotts of Greek businesses and encouraged Turkish irregular forces and Turkish neighbors to attack Greek villagers. With the excuse that the southern coast of the Black Sea was vulnerable to Russian attack, the government ordered mass deportations, forcing many to travel on foot in the middle of winter, as far south as the Syrian Desert. Tens of thousands died. Turkish police and vigilante mobs, again under the guise of hunting down deserters, were granted free reign to steal, rape, and murder. Between 1914–1918, over 100,000 unarmed Pontian Greek civilians were deported; most died. A few Pontian Greek guerrilla bands, called “Andartes,” formed resistance groups in the mountains to protect themselves and their families, but they could do little to stop these mass murders.
An example of this genocide is the testimony of Ioannis Koktzoglou who lived in the village of Ada, near Samsun. In May of 1919, when Koktzoglou was fourteen years old, Turkish irregular forces surrounded his village, killing everyone. According to Koktzoglou’s testimony, Those who survived the first round of killings were forced into three big houses. There were women, children, and older adults. The perpetrators poured fuel onto the houses and set them on fire. Those who attempted to escape were either shot, stabbed, or strangled using ropes. I was extremely fortunate because the day before the massacre I left the village and went to join my uncle and his ‘Andartes’ . . . No one escaped out of approximately 340 people who were in the village.
How did the idea of an independent nation affect the Pontian Greeks?
In 1916 Russia occupied Trebizond and allowed the area to be governed by local Greek religious and civic leaders. Many Pontian Greeks believed that the Russians would stay, allowing the Pontus to be an autonomous state within the Russian Empire. However, after the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks (Communists) ended Russia’s involvement in the Russian-Turkish war and left the Pontus in 1918. As Turkish troops reentered the area, thousands of Pontian Greeks followed the Russian army into the Caucasus.
In 1919 at the Versailles Conference, Greece’s Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos wanted control of the city of Smyrna, which had a larger Greek population than Athens, as well as more land in Asia Minor, and either international control or a U.S. mandate over Constantinople. Bishop Chrysanthos of Trebizond urged the victorious Allies to create an autonomous Pontus as a British protectorate, as opposed to what the Allies offered— guarantee of minority rights by the Turkish government. Although the Allies knew of the Turkish massacres of the Pontian Greeks, they refused to intervene.
What happened to the Pontian Greeks after World War I?
In 1919, when Italy sent an army toward Smyrna, the Allies (France, Great Britain, and the United States) encouraged Greece to land troops there first. In taking Smyrna, some Greek troops committed criminal acts against Turkish civilians and prisoners. When order was restored, the guilty were punished. The Turkish army, under the command of Mustafa Kemal (later called “Ataturk”—the father of Turkey) struck back. During fierce fighting, the Allies abandoned the Greek army and Turkish forces defeated them. Kemal’s forces went on to burn most of Smyrna. The need for Turkey to secure ports on the Black Sea to help its trade with communist Russia, and the desire for Turkification (“Turkey for the Turks”) were excuses used to eliminate the remaining Greek population of the Pontus. Kemal, who succeeded the Young Turks, continued the massacres. On May 19 Kemal’s forces entered Samsun to start the second phase of the genocide throughout the Black Sea coastal area. Between 1919 and 1922, nearly 150,000 Pontian Greeks were murdered. The leader of these massacres was Topal Osman Pasha, who, with government support, led paramilitary forces that destroyed unarmed Pontian Greek villages and massacred innocent men, women, and children. Small bands of Greek fighters called “Andartes” continued to use guerrilla warfare to defend themselves and their people against overwhelming Turkish forces.
With the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), Greece lost all the land it had gained earlier in Asia Minor. It also resulted in a huge population exchange based on religion. Approximately 1,100,000 Christian Greeks living in Turkey were relocated to Greece, while 380,000 Muslims living in Greece were moved to Turkey. Of approximately 750,000 Pontian Greeks living in Turkey at the start of World War I, as many as 353,000 had died by 1923, and almost all the rest had been uprooted. So, ended one of the great civilizations of Asia Minor.
Genocide
The Armenians are not the only subject people in Turkey which have suffered from this policy of making Turkey exclusively the country of the Turks. The story, which I have told about the Armenians, I could also tell with certain modifications about the Greeks and Syrians [Assyrians]. Indeed, the Greeks were the first victims of this nationalizing idea . . .
—From The Murder of a Nation, by Henry Morgenthau, American Ambassador to Turkey, 1913–1916
The horrors of the Holocaust have largely obscured the first genocide of the 20th Century, which was committed by Turkey against its Christian minorities. While the Armenian experience, often called the “Forgotten Genocide,” has gained wider recognition, few today know what happened to the Greeks of the Pontus region, also known as Pontian Greeks, and the Assyrians, who together may have lost over one million people. They were murdered by different methods and many more were driven into exile. The need to understand the nature of genocide grows ever stronger, as evidenced by what has happened in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and now Darfur. In addition, genocide denial, which Elie Wiesel has called the final stage of genocide, is today being used by the nation of Turkey, which has yet to recognize the crimes committed against its Christian minorities in the years before, during, and after World War I.
The Pontian Greeks, like the Armenians and Assyrians, they created a long and vibrant culture as a Christian minority in a Muslim world. During this genocide, Greeks in other parts of the Ottoman Empire—such as Cappadocia, Constantinople (Istanbul), and Smyrna— were also victims of Turkish atrocities.
Americans were leaders in relief efforts to help Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontians. Like the Nazis, the Turks did not begin mass murders immediately; it was a gradual process. And both the Turkish government and the Nazis tried to hide their crimes from international organizations such as the Red Cross.
Maybe a map of Pontus and Asia Minor here
Chronology of Major Events
10th–12th Century Ottoman Turks migrate from central Asia to Asia Minor
1204 Fourth Crusade; Crusaders sack Constantinople; Greek Empire of Trebizond established
1453 Constantinople falls to the Ottoman Empire
1458–1460 Turks occupy mainland Greece
1461 Fall of Trebizond to the Turks
1821–1828 Ottoman Empire defeated in Greek War of Independence; Greece is formed
1894–97 Hamidian Massacres of Armenians by the Turks
1908 Young Turks revolt, transforming the multicultural Ottoman Empire to a nationalistic Muslim state
1912–1913 First and Second Balkan Wars
1914–1919 World War I; first phase of Pontian Greek genocide; Assyrians also subjected to genocide
1915–1923 Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire
1914–1922 Pontian Greek fighters resist Turkish persecutions and massacres of Pontian Greeks
1918 Allies defeat the Ottoman Empire
1919 (May) Greek Army lands in Smyrna
1919–1922 Nationalist movement of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk); second phase of Pontian Greek genocide; attempts by Pontian Greeks to establish an independent state
1922 (August–September) Turkish Army defeats the Greek Army and destroys Smyrna
1923 Exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey; Treaty of Lausanne
1924 Last survivors of Pontian Greek genocide leave Turkey
Who are the Pontian Greeks?
“Pontus,” an ancient Greek word for “sea,” refers to the Black Sea and surrounding coastal areas. The presence of Greeks at the Black Sea dates back to early times. Research suggests that in the period around 1000 B.C., the first trading adventures in this area took place, searching mainly for gold and other minerals. The voyage of Jason and the Argonauts to Colchis, the adventures of Odysseus in the country of the Cimmerians, the punishment of Prometheus by Zeus on the Caucasus mountains, the voyage of Hercules to the Pontus, the land of Amazons, and other Greek myths related to this area testify to the existence of ancient Greek trading routes.
During the 8th Century B.C., Greeks from Miletos colonized this area, founding cities like Sinope, Amisos (Samsun), and Trapezus (Trebizond) and contributing great thinkers such as the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope and the geographer Strabo of Amasia. After Alexander the Great’s death in 323 B.C., the city-states of the Pontus formed a kingdom under the Mithridates family that lasted until defeated by the Romans in 63 B.C.
In 313 A.D., Roman Emperor Constantine granted Christians religious freedom. In 330 he renamed the Greek city of Byzantium “Constantinople” and made the city the new capital of the Christian Roman Empire. The emergence of Christianity as the official religion of Rome led to the creation of great monasteries that served as centers of Christian and Hellenic (Greek) learning. A number of saints, patriarchs, and bishops of the Orthodox Church were from the Pontus.
As part of the Eastern Roman Empire (also known as the Byzantine Empire, or Byzantium), the Pontus was a busy trading center, with the Black Sea as well as land routes, such as the Silk Road, which stretched as far as China. The Pontus also served as a military base against Persians and, later, Arabs. As Byzantium weakened, the Greek Empire of Trebizond was established in the Pontus in 1204. In 1461, the Ottoman Turks conquered Trebizond, the last independent Greek state until the modern nation of Greece would be established in the 19th Century.
How did the Ottoman Empire affect the Pontus?
After the fall of Trebizond, Pontian Greeks suffered large-scale massacres and deportations. In the 17th and 18th Centuries, approximately 250,000 Pontian Greeks were forced to convert to Islam. Many others fled the area.
In the 19th Century, the central government of the Ottoman Empire increased its power over local rulers. To some extent, government laws improved the lives of non-Muslims and encouraged new economic opportunities based around the Black Sea and Persia (present day Iran). Though most Greeks remained in the Pontus, over 250,000 migrated into areas of the Caucasus and northern shores of the Black Sea controlled by Russia. This movement into Russian territory was encouraged by Russia, which preferred that fellow Christians populate this area. Pontian Greeks also fled there to escape Turkish rule.
This era fostered a renaissance in Pontian Greek society, which numbered approximately 800,000. Over one thousand churches and one thousand Greek schools were built, Greek newspapers and books flourished, as did cultural and scientific societies. Heartened by the independent Kingdom of Greece, Pontian Greeks grew more nationalistic and assertive of equal rights in an empire where they had frequently faced oppression.
What was the “Megali Idea” (“Great Idea”)
When an independent Greece was established in 1828, it held less than one-third of the Greeks who had lived within the Ottoman Empire. Many Greeks within both Greece and the Ottoman Empire came to believe in the “Megali Idea,” or “Great Idea,” a concept of creating a greater Greece that included all the areas of Greek settlement in Asia Minor and Eastern Thrace, with Constantinople as its capital.
Those sharing this concept viewed the Russian Empire as sympathetic to the “Great Idea.” As an Orthodox Christian nation, Russia considered itself the protector of the Ottoman sultan’s Orthodox Christian subjects, among whom were the Pontian Greeks. During the Crimean War, Greece supported Russia against the Ottoman Empire.
In 1912 Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria declared war (Balkan War) on the Ottoman Empire and defeated it. As a result, Greece grew in size by 70%, including Macedonia (northern Greece) and the island of Crete, and increased in population from 2,800,000 to 4,800,000.
What caused the Pontian Greek Genocide?
Turkish nationalists, called the “Young Turks,” gained control of their government in 1908, only to watch the Ottoman Empire fall apart. In a series of wars between 1908–1913, the Empire lost about 500,000 square miles of territory, in which approximately six million people lived. In January 1913, after the Ottoman Empire was defeated in the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), an extreme nationalist group of Young Turks, took control of the government. Its wish was to achieve the Turkification or Islamization of the Empire (also called “Turkism”) and to eliminate ethnic minority communities such as the Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontian Greeks.
As early as 1911, the Young Turks already had banned the ethnic, cultural, and political associations of minority groups. Greek schools were placed under the government control, and Turkish was to be the language studied therein. In the Pontus, teachers from mainland Greece were forbidden to work in Greek schools. One of the worst government orders was compulsory military service for all religious communities. Christian recruits were treated brutally, leading to large numbers of deserters, many of whom found their way into the mountains or neighboring Russia. Under the pretense of searching for these deserters, bands of Turkish marauders broke into Greek homes, robbing, raping, and/or murdering their inhabitants.
During World War I, what forms did the Pontian Greek Genocide take?
After the beginning of World War I in 1914, Turkey joined the Central Powers led by Germany and, therefore, fought the Allies, including Russia. When the Armenian Genocide began in 1915, persecutions of Pontian Greeks increased dramatically. The government organized boycotts of Greek businesses and encouraged Turkish irregular forces and Turkish neighbors to attack Greek villagers. With the excuse that the southern coast of the Black Sea was vulnerable to Russian attack, the government ordered mass deportations, forcing many to travel on foot in the middle of winter, as far south as the Syrian Desert. Tens of thousands died. Turkish police and vigilante mobs, again under the guise of hunting down deserters, were granted free reign to steal, rape, and murder. Between 1914–1918, over 100,000 unarmed Pontian Greek civilians were deported; most died. A few Pontian Greek guerrilla bands, called “Andartes,” formed resistance groups in the mountains to protect themselves and their families, but they could do little to stop these mass murders.
An example of this genocide is the testimony of Ioannis Koktzoglou who lived in the village of Ada, near Samsun. In May of 1919, when Koktzoglou was fourteen years old, Turkish irregular forces surrounded his village, killing everyone. According to Koktzoglou’s testimony, Those who survived the first round of killings were forced into three big houses. There were women, children, and older adults. The perpetrators poured fuel onto the houses and set them on fire. Those who attempted to escape were either shot, stabbed, or strangled using ropes. I was extremely fortunate because the day before the massacre I left the village and went to join my uncle and his ‘Andartes’ . . . No one escaped out of approximately 340 people who were in the village.
How did the idea of an independent nation affect the Pontian Greeks?
In 1916 Russia occupied Trebizond and allowed the area to be governed by local Greek religious and civic leaders. Many Pontian Greeks believed that the Russians would stay, allowing the Pontus to be an autonomous state within the Russian Empire. However, after the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks (Communists) ended Russia’s involvement in the Russian-Turkish war and left the Pontus in 1918. As Turkish troops reentered the area, thousands of Pontian Greeks followed the Russian army into the Caucasus.
In 1919 at the Versailles Conference, Greece’s Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos wanted control of the city of Smyrna, which had a larger Greek population than Athens, as well as more land in Asia Minor, and either international control or a U.S. mandate over Constantinople. Bishop Chrysanthos of Trebizond urged the victorious Allies to create an autonomous Pontus as a British protectorate, as opposed to what the Allies offered— guarantee of minority rights by the Turkish government. Although the Allies knew of the Turkish massacres of the Pontian Greeks, they refused to intervene.
What happened to the Pontian Greeks after World War I?
In 1919, when Italy sent an army toward Smyrna, the Allies (France, Great Britain, and the United States) encouraged Greece to land troops there first. In taking Smyrna, some Greek troops committed criminal acts against Turkish civilians and prisoners. When order was restored, the guilty were punished. The Turkish army, under the command of Mustafa Kemal (later called “Ataturk”—the father of Turkey) struck back. During fierce fighting, the Allies abandoned the Greek army and Turkish forces defeated them. Kemal’s forces went on to burn most of Smyrna. The need for Turkey to secure ports on the Black Sea to help its trade with communist Russia, and the desire for Turkification (“Turkey for the Turks”) were excuses used to eliminate the remaining Greek population of the Pontus. Kemal, who succeeded the Young Turks, continued the massacres. On May 19 Kemal’s forces entered Samsun to start the second phase of the genocide throughout the Black Sea coastal area. Between 1919 and 1922, nearly 150,000 Pontian Greeks were murdered. The leader of these massacres was Topal Osman Pasha, who, with government support, led paramilitary forces that destroyed unarmed Pontian Greek villages and massacred innocent men, women, and children. Small bands of Greek fighters called “Andartes” continued to use guerrilla warfare to defend themselves and their people against overwhelming Turkish forces.
With the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), Greece lost all the land it had gained earlier in Asia Minor. It also resulted in a huge population exchange based on religion. Approximately 1,100,000 Christian Greeks living in Turkey were relocated to Greece, while 380,000 Muslims living in Greece were moved to Turkey. Of approximately 750,000 Pontian Greeks living in Turkey at the start of World War I, as many as 353,000 had died by 1923, and almost all the rest had been uprooted. So, ended one of the great civilizations of Asia Minor.
Genocide
The Armenians are not the only subject people in Turkey which have suffered from this policy of making Turkey exclusively the country of the Turks. The story, which I have told about the Armenians, I could also tell with certain modifications about the Greeks and Syrians [Assyrians]. Indeed, the Greeks were the first victims of this nationalizing idea . . .
—From The Murder of a Nation, by Henry Morgenthau, American Ambassador to Turkey, 1913–1916
The horrors of the Holocaust have largely obscured the first genocide of the 20th Century, which was committed by Turkey against its Christian minorities. While the Armenian experience, often called the “Forgotten Genocide,” has gained wider recognition, few today know what happened to the Greeks of the Pontus region, also known as Pontian Greeks, and the Assyrians, who together may have lost over one million people. They were murdered by different methods and many more were driven into exile. The need to understand the nature of genocide grows ever stronger, as evidenced by what has happened in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and now Darfur. In addition, genocide denial, which Elie Wiesel has called the final stage of genocide, is today being used by the nation of Turkey, which has yet to recognize the crimes committed against its Christian minorities in the years before, during, and after World War I.
The Pontian Greeks, like the Armenians and Assyrians, they created a long and vibrant culture as a Christian minority in a Muslim world. During this genocide, Greeks in other parts of the Ottoman Empire—such as Cappadocia, Constantinople (Istanbul), and Smyrna— were also victims of Turkish atrocities.
Americans were leaders in relief efforts to help Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontians. Like the Nazis, the Turks did not begin mass murders immediately; it was a gradual process. And both the Turkish government and the Nazis tried to hide their crimes from international organizations such as the Red Cross.
Maybe a map of Pontus and Asia Minor here
Chronology of Major Events
10th–12th Century Ottoman Turks migrate from central Asia to Asia Minor
1204 Fourth Crusade; Crusaders sack Constantinople; Greek Empire of Trebizond established
1453 Constantinople falls to the Ottoman Empire
1458–1460 Turks occupy mainland Greece
1461 Fall of Trebizond to the Turks
1821–1828 Ottoman Empire defeated in Greek War of Independence; Greece is formed
1894–97 Hamidian Massacres of Armenians by the Turks
1908 Young Turks revolt, transforming the multicultural Ottoman Empire to a nationalistic Muslim state
1912–1913 First and Second Balkan Wars
1914–1919 World War I; first phase of Pontian Greek genocide; Assyrians also subjected to genocide
1915–1923 Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire
1914–1922 Pontian Greek fighters resist Turkish persecutions and massacres of Pontian Greeks
1918 Allies defeat the Ottoman Empire
1919 (May) Greek Army lands in Smyrna
1919–1922 Nationalist movement of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk); second phase of Pontian Greek genocide; attempts by Pontian Greeks to establish an independent state
1922 (August–September) Turkish Army defeats the Greek Army and destroys Smyrna
1923 Exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey; Treaty of Lausanne
1924 Last survivors of Pontian Greek genocide leave Turkey