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Acts of Genocide against Greek populations have been recorded ever since the Seljuk Turks first set foot in the lands of the Byzantine Empire, after the battle of Mantzikert in 1071. The forced removal of Christian children from their families, their compulsory conversion to the Muslin faith under threat of death or imputation, their use for the Turkish Army as "Jenitsaroi", the massacres of the civil population on the Island of Chios, ordered by the Sultan, the attrocities and mass killings of Sultan Hamid in the 1890's, can all be considered to be acts of genocide under the modern definition of the UN resolution 260 of 1948.
It would be very interesting to examine what the toll of the Hellenic Genocide is, in terms of human loss. It is not easy to find out the exact number, since the perpetrators tried very carefully to conceal all possible evidence. Researchers are reaching various conclusions but what is documented by the Turkish census of 1912 is that the Hellenic Millet (nation) of Anatolia amounted to 2.7 million people. This number is definitely an underestimation because for military, tax and registration fee purposes, heads of families avoided registering all their children. Therefore, a fair estimate would be that the Hellenes of Anatolia were over 3 million in 1912.
About 1.3 million old men, women and children came in 1922 to Greece, from Anatolia, Ionia, Thrace, Pontos, to avoid annihilation. What happened to the missing 1.4 million? What happened to the men from 16 to 60 years of age that did not make it back? They were casualties of the Hellenic Genocide. Therefore, we can estimate the victims of the Hellenic Genocide since 1908 to be between 1.5 and 2 million.
