after the end of the First World War, the Ottoman Empire was dissolved
and then,
the Greeks together with the Armenians of Pontus,
consider it their chance to try to create an autonomous Greek-Armenian state.
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so they begin contacts with the Venizelos government for support...
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Kemal's Young Turks, which was a nationalist organisation within the Ottoman Empire,
they realize that this will be the tombstone of their plans to create a neo-Turkish state.
and
they decide to intervene...
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On 19 May 1919, Mustafa Kemal Pasha,
with the guidance and support of German consultants,
disembarked in Samsun and began an unprecedented massacre.
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the Greeks of Pontus at that time exceeded 700,000 souls,
in those areas
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about half of them are slaughtered by Kemal's completely enraged hajjars,
while
the rest, about 400,000, flee either to southern Russia
or in northern Greece.
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are the ones who, together with the Asia Minor people, after the catastrophe,
will decisively change the population ratio in northern Greece...
(until then Macedonia was a classical province of an empire inhabited by every nutshell of an empire
e.g.
there was a huge ethnic mosaic in the area, Greeks, Slavs, Muslims, Jews)
………………………………………..
now,
Since 1994, the Greek Parliament has unanimously voted to declare May 19,
as the Day of Remembrance for the Genocide of the Pontic Hellenism.
………………………………………..
the massacres of the Young Turks on all the minorities in those regions,
is one of the most horrific crimes in the history of the world...
………………………………………..
one of the most shameful pages of our country's history was written immediately afterwards.
when these people came and settled in,
They came to mother Greece to be able to rebuild their lives,
a life
who suddenly, overnight, had had it ripped out of them by genocide
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and in Greece they found only racism and poison....
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what the Pontian refugees suffered is impossible to describe...
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By Vassilis Rafailidis:
«In 1925 they manage to elect a small group of Pontian deputies,
under Leonidas Iasonidis, to defend their rights.
And that's when the local badness makes up some jokes
which have since become an “institution” in Greek society...
the so-called Pontian jokes...
mocked, mocked and mocked (to this day)
the refugees of Pontus and not only (the Asia Minor refugees were called Turkish spores)
without the fools thinking no without them Greece would probably not exist...
when you suspect that the food will be scarce because you will share it with others, you say whatever you feel like, even though you are a ’genuine« Greek patriot...»
………………………………………..
NARRATED BY A GRANDMOTHER MOUSE...
«...as soon as we arrived in Greece we were quarantined for two months in Makronissi.
My grandmother didn't last long.
She died and we buried her there.
Then we sat in tents at Lipasmata in Piraeus. From there we went to Agrinio.
Our poverty was very great.
In the beginning we were begging for a living.
From Agrinio we went to Kilkis, to a village called Stavrochori.
Those were very difficult years.
Thousands of refugees died.
As soon as we recovered a little economically, the war happened.
My husband was killed fighting in the mountains of Albania...»
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P.S. Genocides by foreigners are easily passed unanimously in parliament,
to see when we'll talk about our treatment of the refugees,
us,
of people with sensitivity and empathy...
imagine a few years ago, some schools in northern Greece (where the Pontian and Asia Minor refugees settled)
they marched,
against refugees....!!!!!
