5/19/2013 Pontian Genocide Memorial Day. A genocide without recognition...

The Greek genocide, part of which is known as the Pontic genocide, was the systematic extermination of the Christian Greek population from its historic homeland in Asia Minor, central Anatolia, and Pontus during World War I and its aftermath (1914–23). It was instigated by the government of the Ottoman Empire against the Greek population of the Empire and it included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches, summary expulsions, arbitrary executions, and destruction of Christian Orthodox cultural, historical and religious monuments. According to various sources, several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period. Some of the survivors and refugees, especially those in Eastern provinces, took refuge in the neighbouring Russian Empire. After the end of the 1919–22 Greco-Turkish War, most of the Greeks remaining in the Ottoman Empire were transferred to Greece under the terms of the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Other ethnic groups were similarly attacked by the Ottoman Empire during this period, including Assyrians and Armenians, and some scholars consider those events to be part of the same policy of extermination.

The Pontian genocide of 1916-1922 is the most tragic page of Pontian Greek history. The Pontians had suffered a lot throughout their history of nearly 3.000 years, but the genocide was the most terrible of their misfortunes, for it deprived the Greeks of the Black sea not only of their friends and relatives, but also of their native land. And it is evident that remembrance of the genocide is necessary not only for relatives and descendants of the lost – such terrible facts of human history must be known to all. For if people forget about the pain of other people, if they pass it by with indifference, they kill inside their souls a part of their “humanity” – and this must not be allowed to happen, lest tragedies of this kind might be repeated…