"Hellenic Genocide": A Misconception

"Hellenic Genocide" is a term which has been used to refer to the systematic policy of physical annihilation perpetrated against the indigenous Greek minority of the Ottoman Empire between 1914 and 1923.  This term, quite unequivocally, implies that Hellenes were subjected to a genocidal campaign.  Regrettably, numerous difficulties arise from its usage.  The principal difficulty being that the Greeks of the Ottoman Empire are generally understood not to be Hellenes.  Indeed, Hellenes are Greeks but, confusingly, Greeks are not necessarily always Hellenes.

The principal goal of this short text is to, firstly, outline why the term "Hellenic Genocide" exists as an erroneous entity and, secondly, to provide simple and practical justification as to why “Greek Genocide” is the most appropriate term to describe the annihilation of the Greek element in Ottoman Turkey.

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It was in 1998 in the realms of the Internet that the term "Hellenic Genocide" came to exist.  It was 'coined' by Roberto Lopes, a computer scientist from Sao Paulo, Brazil when he began an Internet-orientated campaign in collaboration with the Hellenic Electronic Center (HEC) organization to draw attention to the genocidal plight of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks of the Ottoman Empire. 

However honorable his intentions as a part-time genocide awareness advocate, Lopes' term, which initially gained an audience in web forums but later picked up concerning pace, was a gravely erroneous creation.  Presumably, his calculation, or more precisely, miscalculation, derives from the assumption that "Hellenes" and "Greeks" are synonymous and interchangeable; an assumption which happens to be furthest from the truth when dealing with matters related to the Greeks of Asia Minor.  Unsurprisingly, almost ten years on and the term "Hellenic Genocide" has yet to find a home in any published work.  Its existence is now reliant on the tolerant and passive nature of the Internet and its dominions.

It should be noted that the terms “Hellenocide” and “Hellenic Holocaust” are two recently-formed entities that, likewise, seem to have been conceived based on a similarly flawed argument and are therefore equally erroneous.

As pointed out, the Greeks of Ottoman Turkey were known not as Hellenes but simply as Greeks.  Consider the following:

• As early as January 1947, twenty-three months prior to the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and four years after Lemkin’s coining of the word genocide, the massacres of “Greeks” by Turkey were understood to be punishable as genocide.¹
• The earliest comprehensive publications dealing with the plight of the Greeks in Turkey, such as: Persecution of the Greeks in Turkey 1914-1918, The Black Book of the Suffering of the Greek People in Turkey, Persecutions of Greeks in Turkey Before the European War, and Persecutions of Greeks in Turkey since the Beginning of the European War, all refer to the population as ethnically “Greek.”  This has been maintained in contemporary works like Professor Gerasimos Augustinos’ comprehensive scholarly study The Greeks of Asia Minor: Confession, Community, and Ethnicity in the Nineteenth Century.²
• International archival documentation and press reports related to the Ottoman Greek population refer to this ethnic group as Greek, and not Hellenic.  Press reports would commonly refer to the population as "Greeks", "Asiatic Greeks" or "Ottoman Greeks", but never as Hellenes.³
• In the two most significant Twentieth Century treaties related to the Asia Minor Greeks, namely the Treaties of Sèvres (1920) and Lausanne (1923), the official title given to Greece's head of state was "the King of the Hellenes".  Originally, the royal title for the head of the Hellenic state was the "King of the Greeks" but this title was deemed to be improper due to the implication that it spoke not just for Greeks of Greece but also for the Greeks of the Ottoman Empire and hence the titles "King of Greece" and later "King of the Hellenes" were adopted instead, specifically because they would not imply a claim over the millions of Greeks in the Ottoman Empire.
• Some Hellenes did migrate to the Ottoman Empire but they numbered at a few thousand, while estimates for the Ottoman Greek population ranged from 2 to 3 million.  For example, Leon Dominian in his 1915 study of The Peoples of Northern and Central Asiatic Turkey records the "Greek" population of Asiatic Turkey as numbering 2,000,000 but notes that “Hellenes, or subjects of the King of Greece, number about 20,000.”⁴  As we see in this instance, population statistics on the Greeks of Asia Minor make use of the distinction between Greek and Hellene in order to clarify the citizenship and/or origin of the population group in question.
• The Ottoman Greek population did not consider themselves of Hellenic origin but rather as descendants of the Greco-Roman Byzantine Empire and would often refer to themselves as Romioi (Greek: Ρωμιοί) accordingly.
• Today, Hellenes are considered to be the subjects of the Hellenic Republic and historically were the subjects of the Kingdom of Greece.⁵
• In 2007 the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) affirmed the Greek Genocide and idenfitied the target group as "Greeks".

The subtle distinction between Hellene and Greek can be difficult to comprehend, and even more so for native Greek speakers since the respective terms for "Hellene" and "Greek" do not exist in the Modern Greek language.  It would then seem that the burden of understanding this distinction has been left solely to the English-speaking world but it should be noted that nor the Western World can be held responsible for failing to understand the distinction since Western historians themselves shy away from its intricacy.  Common practice among authors has been to attach a disclaimer to their work informing the reader that rather than baffle them – and more than likely themselves too – with the distinction they will consider the terms for the purposes of simplicity to be synonymous.  Even late eminent American historian George Willis Botsford in A History of the Orient and Greece makes use of this sly tactic by stating: "In this book … Greeks and Hellenes are used synonymously."⁶ As a consequence of this attitude problems have arisen.

In the Turkish language there are also two terms which distinguish between the Greeks of Greece and the Greeks of Ottoman Turkey.  Renée Hirschon in his book Crossing the Aegean stipulates: "The Greek Orthodox citizens of the Turkish Republic ... are known as the Rum Ortodoks or just Rum for short. Citizens of the Greek state ... are known as Yunanli or Yunan."⁷  One would think that this further confirms the existence of a clear-cut distinction but to complicate matters further an ambiguity arises from one of these Turkish words, namely "Yunan".  Yunan actually has its roots in the word Ionia, an ancient region of south-western Anatolia.⁸  Nevertheless, even today Turks associate Yunans as being the Greeks of Greece and Rums as being the Greeks of Turkey.

At some point, one may prefer to take into account the practical implications regarding international comprehension of the term "Hellenic Genocide".  For instance, the "Armenian Genocide" makes transparently clear that the Armenians were the target of a genocidal campaign, as does the "Jewish Holocaust" for the Jews, but the term "Hellenic Genocide" relies upon sheer hope that the individual confronted with this term will be just as familiar with the word "Hellenic" as they are with the word "Greek".  Generally, English speakers would find the country of "Greece" far more recognizable than the country of "Hellas", the "Greek" language far more recognizable than the "Hellenic" language and a "Greek" far more recognizable than a "Hellene".  This basic argument is sufficient enough reason to revert to a comprehendible term to describe the plight suffered by the Ottoman Greeks.

From the above, it follows that the one unimpeachable term to describe the heinous crime of genocide perpetrated against the Greeks of Ottoman Turkey is, quite simply, the Greek Genocide. The Greek Genocide being the systematic policy of physical annihilation orchestrated and perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey's predecessor, against the indigenous Greek minority of the Empire between 1914 and 1923 in order to secure an end to their collective existence as an ethnic group.

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1. “Genocide Under the Law of Nations”, The New York Times, 5 January 1947, p. e11.
2. Augustinos, Gerasimos, The Greeks of Asia Minor: Confession, Community, and Ethnicity in the Nineteenth Century, The Kent State University Press, 1992.
3. See, for example, “Germans Inspired Turkish Atrocities Against Asiatic Greeks”, The New York Times, 29 September 1918; "The Unspeakable Turk", The Irish Times, 16 May 1922.
4. Dominian, Leon, "The Peoples of Northern and Central Asiatic Turkey", Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, Vol. 47, No. 11, 1915, p. 871.
5. Here usage is strictly considered from 1829 onwards.  Indeed, it would be improper to define a Twentieth Century genocide by standards that pertain, for example, to a classical era.
6. Botsford, George Willis, A History of the Orient and Greece, Macmillan,1901, p. 9.
7. Hirschon, Renée, Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey, Berghahn Books, 2003, ISBN: 1571815627, Notes on Terminology and Orthography.
8. Trask, Robert Lawrence, Historical Linguistics, Oxford University Press, 1996, ISBN: 0340607580, p. 371.