The Hellenic Genocide
Quotes from historical documents and related Photos.
The Hellenic Genocide was the systematic torture, massacre and ethnic cleansing of several millions Hellenes (Greeks) perpetrated by the Turks in Asia Minor, Constantinople (called Istanbul by the Turks), Eastern Thrace, Imvros, Tenedos, Macedonia, Cappadocia and Pontos between the beginning of the 1890's and the end of the 1950's.
Millions of children, men and women were tortured and massacred or expelled from their homes only for being Hellenes. In the same places and often at the same time, were also massacred millions of Armenians and Assyrians.
The only "sin" of those millions of persons was to live where their ancestors had lived for thousands of years before the Turkish invasions. The Turkish rulers carried out with unimaginable cruelty their plan to create a "Turkey for the Turks."
Before and After
Pair 1 of 12.
| Saint Sophia: a painting showing it before to be turned into a mosque. |
| Saint Sophia: after the Turks turned it into a mosque. |
Related quote:
Ambassador Morgenthau's Story
CHAPTER XVI:
"I was told that cans of petroleum had been already stored in all the police stations and other places, ready to fire the town at a moment's notice. As Constantinople is largely built of wood, this would have been no very difficult task. But they were determined to destroy more than these temporary structures; the plans aimed at the beautiful architectural monuments built by the Christians long before the Turkish occupation. The Turks had particularly marked for dynamiting the Mosque of Saint Sophia. This building, which had been a Christian church centuries before it became a Mohammedan mosque, is one of the most magnificent structures of the vanished Byzantine Empire. Naturally the suggestion of such an act of vandalism aroused us all, and I made a plea to Talaat that Saint Sophia should be spared. He treated the proposed destruction lightly." There are not six men in the Committee of Union and Progress," he told me, "who care for
anything that is old. We all like new things!""
|
|