FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is genocide?
2. What is the Greek Genocide?
3. How many Greeks died?
4. Who was responsible for perpetrating the Greek Genocide?
5. Why is the Greek Genocide commemorated on September 14th?
6. Does proof exist testifying that the Genocide occurred?
7. How can genocide have occurred if Greece and Turkey were at war?
8. Weren't deportations of Greeks from Turkey part of the agreed demands of the Treaty of Lausanne?
9. What is the Pontian Genocide?
10. How does the Greek Genocide differ from the Armenian and Assyrian Genocides?
See also: Greek Genocide Fact Sheet
1. What is genocide? (top)
The term "genocide" was coined in 1943 by a Polish-Jewish legal scholar, Raphael Lemkin, from the roots genos (Greek for family, tribe or race) and -cide (Latin -occidere, to massacre). Lemkin referred to Ottoman Turkey's policy of annihilation of the Greeks and Armenians, along with the Jewish Holocaust, as definitive examples of genocide. Lemkin described the crime as follows:
"Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objective of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity but as members of the national group."
The internationally accepted legal definition of the crime of genocide can be found in Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly:
Article II:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
In an August 1946 New York Times article introducing the concept of genocide to its readers, the following reference to Greek massacres can be found:
"Genocide is no new phenomenon, nor has it been utterly ignored in the past. ... The massacres of Greeks and Armenians by the Turks prompted diplomatic action without punishment. If Professor Lemkin has his way genocide will be established as an international crime ..."
Again, as early as January 1947, the New York Times reported that massacres of Greeks would be punishable as genocide under the Convention:
"If the members of the United Nations pass appropriate legislation such incidents as the pogroms of Czarish Russia and the massacres of Armenians and Greeks by Turkey would be punishable as genocide."
For the entire text of the 'Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide' please visit: Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
2. What is the Greek Genocide? (top)
The Greek Genocide (Greek: η Γενοκτονία των Eλλήνων or η Ελληνική Γενοκτονία, Turkish: Rum Soykırımı) is a term which refers to the systematic state-organized policy of physical annihilation perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor of modern Turkey, against its indigenous Greek civilian minority population between 1914 and 1923. During this period the Ottoman Greeks were methodically subjected to massacre and forced deportation involving death marches. The Greek Genocide is commemorated annually on September 14th. The Greek Genocide has been affirmed by the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
3. How many Greeks died? (top)
As with all genocides, there is no clear consensus as to exactly how many Greeks perished as a result of Ottoman Turkey's genocidal program but it is generally accepted that more than a million Greeks died during the period 1914-23 as a direct consequence of massacres and deportations. Contemporary estimates have ranged from 730,000 to 1,700,000.
The pre-genocide Ottoman Greek population numbered at least 2.5 million but some sources give figures as high as 5 million. It should be noted that only 1,104,216 Ottoman Greeks were ever recorded as having reached Greece through migration, expulsion or exchange. Therefore, even when taking into account a number of other crucial factors, it is clear that no less than a million Greeks died during the Genocide period.
4. Who was responsible for perpetrating the Greek Genocide? (top)
The Greek Genocide was perpetrated by two consecutive governments of the Ottoman Empire; the Committee for Union and Progress (Turkish: Ittihad ve Terakki Jemiyeti), also known as the Young Turks, and the Kemalists led by Mustafa Kemal "Atatürk".
Ismail Enver, Mehmet Talaat and Ahmed Jemal were the leaders of the Young Turk movement and it was this triumvirate that was responsible for engineering and first implementing the Greek Genocide.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was an officer of the Turkish army and founded the Turkish Nationalist Movement by regrouping both the Ottoman army and Turkish irregulars under his command. He preserved the genocidal policy of the Young Turk regime until Turkey was homogenized.
5. Why is the Greek Genocide commemorated on September 14th? (top)
September 14th, 1922, marks the peak of the Smyrna Holocaust, when the fire which engulfed the city of Smyrna was at its peak and ferocious massacres of Greeks were taking place. The Smyrna Holocaust is widely viewed as the final phase of the near-decade-long genocidal campaign against the Ottoman Greeks. For this reason, September 14th is a symbolic day for all Ottoman Greeks and, therefore, proves a fitting day for commemorating those lost in the Greek Genocide. Greek Law 2645/98 formally designates September 14th as the Greek Genocide day of commemoration.
6. Does proof exist testifying that the Genocide occurred? (top)
The Greek Genocide was widely reported in the international media at the time and the public outcry in the U.S. resulted in a number of humanitarian relief efforts, including the Relief Committee for Greeks of Asia Minor and the Near East Relief. These aid organizations played an important role in relief work and the archival material of these organizations contain hundreds of testimonies from relief workers and missionaries who were witness to the Greek Genocide. The foreign office archives of the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, Austria and even Ottoman Turkey all contain consistent evidence documenting the unrelenting massacre of Turkey's Greek subjects. Hundreds of survivor testimonies, other empirical documents, and photographic material provide an additional dimension to the already indisputable evidence. Some believe that the sudden disappearance of more than a million Greeks in a few short years is testimony in itself.
7. How can genocide have occurred if Greece and Turkey were at war? (top)
The Greek Genocide amounted to the physical annihilation of an unarmed civilian minority, a minority consisting of men, women, and children, and is completely unconnected with any form of war activity. Greece and Turkey were not at war when the Greek Genocide began in 1914 and it was only in May 1919, five years later, that Greece occupied the district of Smyrna as part of an Allied-sanctioned operation to prevent further massacres of Christians; by which time several hundred thousand Greeks, Armenians and Assyrians had already been killed. It was in 1921 that the Hellenic military launched an offensive against the Kemalists who rejected the Treaty of Sèvres as signed by the Ottoman Empire. It might be noted that a Turkish civilian presence existed within Greece but, despite a war between the Entente states and Turkey, this did not cause the Hellenes to resolve upon the extermination of the Turkish minority. In fact, United States Consul George Horton commented "The conduct of the Greeks toward the thousands of Turks residing in Greece, while the ferocious massacres were going on, and while Smyrna was being burned and refugees, wounded, outraged and ruined, were pouring into every port of Hellas [Greece], was one of the most inspiring and beautiful chapters in all that country's history. There were no reprisals. The Turks living in Greece were in no wise molested, nor did any storm of hatred or revenge burst upon their heads."
8. Weren't deportations of Greeks from Turkey part of the agreed demands of the Treaty of Lausanne? (top)
When considering the fate of Ottoman minorities in the early part of the Twentieth Century, a clear distinction must be made between "deportation" and "expulsion". In another context these terms might be thought of as synonymous but in Ottoman Turkey deportation was a method of destruction employed in order to reduce the minority population in great numbers. Deportation saw men, women and children forced to walk on foot hundreds of kilometers into desert wasteland to die from exhaustion and privation. Deportation was also referred to as a "death march" or "white massacre". Greeks had been subject to this method of destruction since 1914 and it bears no resemblance to an act of expulsion or migration.
The expulsion of Ottoman Greeks, however, refers either to those Greeks who fled the Ottoman Empire induced through persecutions including economic boycotts, pillaging, arson, expropriation and massacre or to those Greeks transferred by means of the 1923 exchange of populations. The Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations was a provision of the later Treaty of Lausanne. This convention, signed on 30 January 1923, saw not only the transfer of Turkey's significantly reduced Ottoman Greek minority to Greece but also the transfer of Greece's Turkish minority, remnants of Ottoman-occupied Greece, to Turkey. The population exchange was agreed upon by the governments of Turkey and Greece and, as such, is by no means categorized as part of the Greek Genocide. Nonetheless, it is a tragic chapter in the history of both people.
9. What is the Pontian Genocide? (top)
The Pontian Genocide, or the Pontic Greek Genocide, (Greek: Η Γενοκτονία των Ελλήνων του Πόντου) is a term used by some Pontic Greek groups to denote the genocidal plight of the Ottoman Greek inhabitants of the northeastern Black Sea region of Asia Minor, also known as Pontus. The Pontian experience is merely one chapter of the Greek Genocide and examining it in isolation does not accurately reflect the magnitude of the genocidal program against the Ottoman Greeks. It is thought that some 350,000 Pontian Greeks perished in the Greek Genocide. A number of Pontian diasporic associations commemorate the Genocide on May 19th rather than on the conventional Greek Genocide Day of Remembrance of September 14th. May 19th is of significance to the Pontian Diaspora as it marks the arrival of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the Black Sea port city of Samsoun in 1919 and the continuation of atrocities in that region.
10. How does the Greek Genocide differ from the Armenian and Assyrian Genocides? (top)
The Greek, Armenian and Assyrian genocides are qualitatively and quantitatively similar in terms of both methods of destruction employed and death toll. The Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks of Ottoman Turkey constituted the Christian element of the Empire and between the years of 1914 and 1923 these indigenous minorities were systematically expunged from their native homeland through massacre, deportation and expulsion.
The program employed to annihilate Turkey's indigenous Christian inhabitants was implemented in three distinct phases. First, able-bodied men, assumed capable of providing a resistance to any massacres, would be singled out and banished to the Interior, where they would be either annihilated by Turkish troops or left to be exposed to enforced privations. Secondly, the dignitaries of the minority were publicly executed without trial, rendering the group mute, destitute and leaderless. Finally, the women, children and elderly fell prey to massacre and ruthless death marches.
The destruction of the Armenian nation began almost one year after the commencement of the Greek Genocide. Henry Morgenthau, who served as United States ambassador to Turkey up until 1916, witnessed and documented the atrocities perpetrated against the Christians of Turkey. Morgenthau acknowledged in his book Ambassador Morgenthau's Story on the Armenian Genocide that "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 the Syrians. Indeed the Greeks were the first victims of this nationalizing idea".
Ioannis Hassiotis, a Greek historian who has written extensively on the Armenian Genocide, has examined the Armenian and Greek experiences from a comparative perspective. In his paper “The Armenian Genocide and the Greeks: response and records (1915–1923)” he writes:
“The calamitous consequences of Turkish chauvinism, especially in the early part of the twentieth century, formed the unvarying common denominator between the Greeks and Armenians. The almost identical fates of the two ethnic elements in Asia Minor drew them together. The similarities were evident in their peaceful and productive activities, as well as in their pursuit of national aspirations, just as they were in the parallel course of their vicissitudes and ultimate elimination.”
“ ... the fact that the first persecutions of the Greeks, which were perpetrated in Eastern Thrace and western Asia Minor, did not spread either to Constantinople or to Smyrna and finally came to an end in the vilayet of Aidin, but continued in the interior of Anatolia, ought perhaps to be linked with the same selective tactics that were employed against the Armenian inhabitants of these areas during the genocide. Moreover, the strategy of deporting the women and children to the interior and … to the inhospitable eastern and south-eastern provinces of the empire was significantly similar in both cases. … Moreover, both Armenian and Greek men who were fit to fight were conscripted into the notorious ‘labor battalions’ (amele taburu) at more or less the same time, the purpose being the biological annihilation of both elements."
"The notion that there was a twofold plan to exterminate both the Greeks and the Armenians was widespread throughout the period of persecution and the First World War. ... the persecutions were carried out almost simultaneously and sometimes were completely coordinated.”