Piyush Kulshreshtha

🇬🇷☦️ Never forget the #Greek Genocide. Tears still fall when we see this rare archival footage of the forced exile of the #Christian #Greeks from their own ancestral lands. This is a historical/educational tweet about the Greek Genocide. The Ottoman Empire, under the Young Turk government (Committee of Union and Progress) and later Kemalist forces, carried out a systematic campaign of persecution, mass murder, and expulsion against the native Greek population of Asia Minor, Pontus, and Eastern Thrace. This formed part of a broader effort to eliminate Christian minorities and create an ethnically and religiously homogeneous Turkish state. Over 350,000 Pontian Greeks are estimated to have been killed, with total Greek deaths across regions ranging from several hundred thousand to as many as 1 million, according to various scholarly estimates. Persecutions began intensifying in 1914 with boycotts, arbitrary arrests, property seizures, and forced conscription of men into lethal labor battalions (Amele Taburları), where most perished from exhaustion, starvation, disease, and execution. The physical destruction was accompanied by a systematic economic campaign. Under the pretext of laws dealing with "abandoned goods" (Emval-i Metruke), the state seized the homes, lands, businesses, and bank accounts of the deported and murdered Greeks. This mass expropriation stripped the Christian communities of centuries of wealth to build a new national economy. Beyond physical and economic destruction, this campaign constituted a profound cultural genocide. The perpetrators aimed to erase all historical traces of the Greek presence. Ancient towns were systematically renamed, schools were shut down, and thousands of centuries-old monuments, churches, and monasteries were either destroyed, desecrated, or converted. Women, children, and the elderly endured death marches designed to kill without pulling a trigger. Deportees were forced to walk for weeks across brutal terrain without food, water, or shelter. Anyone who collapsed from hunger or exposure was either shot on the spot or left to die by the roadsides. Thousands died from disease and attacks by irregular forces. Entire villages were burned. These atrocities occurred alongside the Armenian Genocide and massacres of Assyrians, as part of the same late Ottoman campaign against Christian populations. Contemporary evidence is extensive: reports from American consuls and ambassadors, Western missionaries, European diplomats, and relief organizations documented the events in real time. The violence deliberately targeted Christian clergy. A prominent example is Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Smyrna, who refused to abandon his flock in 1922. He was arrested, tortured, and lynched by a mob - an act of martyrdom that symbolizes the tragedy. In 2007, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) officially recognized the Greek Genocide, affirming that the Ottoman campaign against Pontian and Anatolian Greeks constituted genocide, alongside those against Armenians and Assyrians. This was the violent erasure of a civilization with roots stretching back three millennia. Eternal memory to the blessed martyrs. May the blessed Christian martyrs rest in peace.