Pontus

Pontus (Greek: Πόντος) is a historic region on the Turkish Black Sea coast that was home to a large Greek population, known as Pontic Greeks or Pontians, before the Greek Genocide took place. Pontus is a region of Asia Minor.

Greek Population

At the start of the Twentieth Century the Greek population of Pontus numbered several hundred thousand. Many Greeks lived in the coastal towns, such as Trebizond, Samsoun, Ordou and Kerassund, while others lived inland. American sources place the 1914 pre-genocide population at 457,000 while the 1912 Greek Patriarchate statistics record a population of at most 478,000. Ottoman Turkish statistics record the population as 363,000. Other sources, such as those of the Central Council of Pontus, claim there were as many as 700,000 Greeks in Pontus. In a February 1919 memorandum calling for their self-determination, the National League of the Euxine Pontus described the Pontus Greek population as follows:

"According to the most recent information received from the different dioceses, the orthodox Greek population can be evaluated at about 700,000 souls, without counting the 350,000 who, fleeing from Turkish persecution, took refugee several years ago in foreign countries, there are about 250,000 in the Caucasia and the remainder are in other countries."

Pontus during the Greek Genocide

As with all Greek-inhabited regions of Ottoman Turkey, the Greeks of Pontus were subject to a genocidal campaign. At the end of 1921 Greek sources placed the Pontus death toll at 303,238 but by 1923 Pontic Greek deaths in the Greek Genocide were estimated to have surpassed 350,000. Only 182,169 Greeks of Pontus were ever recorded as having reached Greece which indicates that the death toll in the Pontus region was no less than 50% of the total population.

On 29 December 1918, the Archbishop of Amassia and Samsoun, Germanos, wrote:

"Towards the middle of December, 1916, began the deportations from Amissos (Samsoun). First of all the army reduced to ashes all the region round about. ... A large number of women and children were killed, the young girls of the nation outraged, and immediately driven into the Interior. ... The majority of course died on the road and none of the dead at all being buried, vultures and dogs feasted on human flesh. ... Believe me ... that out of 160,000 people of Pontus deported, only a tenth and in some places a twentieth have survived. In a village, for example, that counted 100 inhabitants, five only will ever return; the others are dead. Rare indeed are those happy villages where a tenth of the deported population has been saved."

According to figures compiled by the Greek Patriarchate in Constantinople by 1918 257,019 Greeks from the Pontus region of Asia Minor had been deported to the Interior.

In 1922 the Central Council of Pontus stated:

"Since the year 1914 the Ottoman Government, on the lines of a plan organised and premeditated has caused more than 1,500,000 Greeks and Armenians of Asia Minor to be massacred by its local agents. The infortunate Greek populations of Pontus have been decimated by murder and privation, have witnessed their churches profaned, their daughters violated, their wives dishonoured, babies snatched from the arms of their mothers and hurled against the walls, old men and children burned within the churches and priests massacred under the portals."

Unlike elsewhere in the Empire, there were times when the Greeks of Pontus took up arms in an act of self defense to resist the massacres being perpetrated against them. In this respect Pontus makes an interesting case study of the Greek Genocide, much like the resistance demonstrated at Van by Armenians during the Armenian Genocide.

In 1925 George K. Balabanis wrote: "... the total human loss of Pontians from the [beginning] of the General [Great] War until March 1924 can be estimated at three hundred and fifty three thousand [353,000] [persons], murdered, hanged and dead through punishment, illness and privations."

Regional Isolation in the Greek Genocide Thesis

In recent years a number of historians of Pontic Greek descent have marginalized the genocidal plight of other Ottoman Greeks by promoting the thesis of an exclusive and distinct genocide against the Greeks of Pontus, a “Pontic Greek Genocide” or “Pontian Genocide” (Greek: Η Γενοκτονία των Ελλήνων του Πόντου) - a thesis which is not historically viable as a solitary event when treated in absolute isolation from the fate of all other Ottoman Greeks.

For example, Konstantinos Photiades (Greek: Κωνσταντίνος Φωτιάδης), an academic at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, has produced a fourteen volume publication titled The Genocide of the Greeks of Pontus [Η Γενοκτονία των Ελλήνων του Πόντου] (Thessaloniki: Ηρόδοτος, 2004) which largely consists of transcribed archival documentation sourced from more than half a dozen countries.  Photiades' publication is undoubtedly an immense contribution to scholarship of the Greek Genocide which embodies years of research.  However, despite the title of his work, Photiades systematically uses documentation extrinsic to Pontus to support the “Pontian Genocide” thesis.

Defining the Pontian experience as an exclusive, isolated and distinct event is a relatively contemporary thesis which emerged in the mid 1980s at earliest. The exact set of circumstances which triggered a change to an established sixty-year-old discourse in the historiography of the Greek Genocide is unclear and open to much speculation but many believe that a set of 1986 articles authored by Michalis Charalambidis (Greek: Μιχάλης Χαραλαμπίδης) was the starting point of a new era where the Pontian plight would take precedence over all other Ottoman Greeks or at least in some circles.

It should be noted that not all Pontic Greek scholars restrict themselves to this spurious and fallacious view. For example, Harry Tsirkinidis is one historian of Pontic Greek ancestry who has demonstrated, relying heavily on archival material, that the Greek Genocide encompassed the Greeks of Thrace and Asia Minor, as well as Pontus. See, for instance, his work At last we uprooted them... The genocide of Greeks of Pontus, Thrace and Asia Minor, through the French archives. Likewise, Polihronis Enepekides, a university professor in Vienna, has conducted lectures on the Greek Genocide such as The Holocaust of the Greek Asia Minor Civilization as described in the secret documents of Vienna, Berlin and Vern. Moreover, western historians that have examined the fate of the Ottoman Greek minorities have also concluded that the genocidal campaign encompassed Greeks throughout the Empire and was by no way restricted to Pontus. This is the view of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), an organization of the world’s foremost experts on genocide, as well as many other leading specialists in the field of genocide studies.

More importantly, archival documentation consistently details a program of extermination implemented throughout Ottoman Turkey and which commenced not in Pontus but first in Thrace and Western Anatolia and then later expanded to other regions.

For example, Stanley E. Hopkins, an American relief worker and an eyewitness to the Greek Genocide, wrote:

"The deportation of the Greeks is not limited to the Black Sea Coast but is being carried out throughout the whole country governed by the Nationalists."

Sir Horace Rumbold, the British High Commissioner in Constantinople, informed the British Foreign Office by telegram of the widespread destruction of the Greeks:

"At present fresh deportations and outrages are starting in all parts of Asia Minor, from the Northern Seaports to South Eastern district."

In a 1918 article titled "Massacre of the Greeks in Turkey", the special correspondent of The London Morning Post in Constantinople wrote:

"The populations who were the first to suffer were the Greek colonies of Thrace, of the coast of the Sea of Marmora, and of the coast of Asia Minor."

It is not unknown for other chapters in the history of the Greek Genocide to be examined in isolation; for example, the September 1922 events in Smyrna. Examining aspects and regions of the Greek Genocide as case studies is a legitimate approach to scholarship but defining these events as distinct genocidal campaigns in their own right is bordering revisionism.

In their study, Late Ottoman genocides (2008), Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer claim:

"... the isolated study and emphasis of a single group’s victimhood during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire fails to really understand Young Turks’ motives and aims or its grand design. As part of memory politics, the diverse victim groups’ fates are still dealt with mainly in the context of their own national histories. And since Armenian, Assyrian, Greek and Kurdish national histories are mainly concerned with their own groups’ fate, the wider context is largely ignored, i.e. the interrelations and links between different murderous campaigns led by the Young Turks remain undiscovered. Moreover, the insights won from the concentration on particular groups are lost for a wider historical scholarship as most Kurds won’t study the Greek’s national history and vice versa, to name just one example."

Needless to say, to elevate the regional Pontian plight above and beyond that of all other Ottoman Greeks, contrary to archival material and the reports available, is tantamount to establishing a hierarchy of genocide victims, a practice which should arouse indignation and condemnation. The Greeks of Pontus were indeed subject to a ferocious murderous campaign of genocidal quality but throughout the Empire other Ottoman Greeks were subject to the same campaign and, as such, their plight should be duly acknowledged.

Suggested Reading

• Black Book: The Tragedy of Pontus 1914-1922, Edition of the Central Council of Pontus, Athens, 1922.
• The Turkish Atrocities in the Black Sea Territories: Copy of Letter of His Grace Germanos, Lord Archbishop of Amassia and Samsoun, Delegation of the Pan-Pontic Congress, Norbury, Natzio & Co. Ltd, 1919.
• Γεώργιος Κ. Βαλαβάνης, Σύγχρονος γενική ιστορία του Πόντου, Αθήνα, 1925.
• Αντώνιος Γαβριηλίδης, Η Μαύρη Εθνική συμφορά του Πόντου 1914-1922, Αθήνα, 1924.