Mass Grave Discovered in Samsun, Turkey
In March 2008 a mass grave of Greeks was discovered in Yazılar, a village in Samsun’s Tekkeköy district, northern Anatolia.
The discovery was made during the reconstruction of a primary school wall which had recently collapsed as a result of a land slide. It was then that residents of Yazılar discovered human remains; at first a number of jaw, spine, arm and leg bones but soon after some five or six human skeletons were discovered in one grave alone arousing suspicion that it was in fact a mass burial site.
Turkish press agencies first reported the discovery on 22 March 2008 but undermined the possibility that the bodies were of massacred Greeks from the 1914-1923 Genocide period by claiming the mass burial site was merely an old cemetery.
Yazılar is an inland village situated twenty kilometers from Tekkeköy and thirty-four kilometers from Samsun. The village inhabitants number only a few hundred. The residents say the village was previously inhabited by Greeks and that a Greek Church once stood in the place of the primary school. The ruins of four Greek churches still stand in the village.
The residents said that wherever they dug they found more bones. Şehriye Yılmaz, whose father built the primary school, said: “If you dig a little, you’ll find bones.” Musa Aydın, one of the residents present during the excavation, said: “No one knew there were graves here but as we dug graves were uncovered. It might be an historical or old cemetery. We moved the skeletons to the roadside so that the authorities could see them, but no one came.”
The excavation was conducted by the local residents and as a result the original scene was not preserved and a lot of the evidence was destroyed or lost in the process. Selim Aydın, another resident of the village, said: “Some of the skeletons, from the graves, fell into the river during the excavation.” However, the residents of Yazılar village had informed all the appropriate authorities in the Tekkeköy district about the discovery but no one showed any interest in the matter.
It should be noted that this is not the first time mass graves have been unearthed in Turkey. In 2006, for example, a mass grave, also believed to be from the Genocide period, was discovered in Mardin province.
Compiled for Greek-Genocide.org, 2 July 2008