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The following article is from an event by the Pontian Greek Studies Committee, held on November 13, 2011, in Athens Greece to honor the Pontian Greek and Phanariot family of Ypsilanti. It provides important information on the history, accomplishments, and contributions of this great family to the Greek War of Independence of 1821. Picture above is a file licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alexander2.jpg
Translated by members of the Pontian Greek Society.
Day of Tribute to the Ypsilanti Family
The Pontian Studies Committee (PSC) held a successful presentation on Sunday, November 13, 2011 at the "House of Hellenic heirlooms in Pontus" building. The presentation was a tribute to the "Ypsilanti family" who were a great Phanariot family of Constantinople, natives of Ypsila in Trebizond whose members distinguished themselves in politics and the military; most notably the brothers Alexander and Dimitrios Ypsilantis who played an important role in the Greek revolution of 1821.
In a brief address by the President of PSC Mr. Christos Galanidis stated:
“Welcome to today's event which is a tribute to the Ypsilantis, who were a great Pontian Greek family.
‘On January 31, 1828 he confessed, said the Lord ’s Prayer, the Nicene Creed, and crossed himself. Then he whispered, "I want to sleep." And he fell asleep, forever nestled in the arms of history. In the bosom of Greece. His soul traveled to the Pontic coasts and ascended to the “parcharia” or great plains. Then he made his way up high and from there found himself in the City of Constantine. As a little child on the streets of the Phanar, he sought the minimal hope in the ‘Megali Idea’ that had blown in the nation’s soul. And he then rested forever...
The Greeks of Vienna carried the body of the prince to the chapel of St. George. Around his face, a wreath of laurel and roses decorated the black uniform of the sacred battalion’s dead."
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Featured Article
Event honoring humanitarian Nansen held at the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago
May 24, 2012
 On May 24,2012, 170 people gathered at the National Hellenic Museum to honor Fridjof Nansen and to present Dr. H. J. Psomiades’ final book, Fridtjof Nansen and the Greek Refugee Crisis 1922. The Asia Minor and Pontos Research Center, the Pontian Greek Society of Chicago and the National Hellenic Museum sponsored the event, which attracted many outside of the Greek community, including representatives of the Norwegian, Swedish, Armenian, and Assyrian communities. Judges of Cook County, officials from the Haitian Consulate and representatives of the Holocaust and Genocide Commission were also present.
Kathy Hareas, a board member of the Asia Minor and Pontos Research Center, introduced the following people who each gave a short greeting: Stephanie Vlahakis, President of the National Hellenic Museum; Maria Lampros, trustee of the Museum, Anastasia Spiridis –Skoupas, President of the Pontian Greek Society, and Ioanna Efthymiadou, Consul General of Greece.
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A Tribute to The Late Dr. H. J. Psomiades |
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 Review of Fridtjof Nansen and the Greek Refugee Crisis 1922-1924: A Study on the Politics of International Humanitarian Intervention and the Greek-Turkish Obligatory Population Exchange Agreement by Harry J. Psomiades.
Reviewed by Elaine Thomopoulos Copyright 2011
My muscles ached the day after dancing to the haunting but lively music of the lyra and daouli at the Pontian Society of Chicago dinner dance on November 12, 2011. Children, some as young as three years old, initiated the dancing dressed in traditional costumes, with the boys brandishing bandoliers across their chests. They keep alive their culture in a country far removed from the land of their ancestors, Pontos, on the coast of the Black Sea in Turkey.
From in 1914 through 1922, thousands of Greeks from Pontos, as well as thousands of other Greeks living in Asia Minor and Eastern Thrace, were deported by Turkish authorities or fled their homes in the face of Turkish atrocities. In 1922, following the defeat of the Greek forces in the Greek-Turkish war and the burning of Smyrna by the Turkish army, any Greeks remaining in Turkey, except those in Constantinople and the islands of Imbros and Tenedos, were forced to leave Turkey in what is called the “exchange of populations.” All together, more than a million Greeks left Turkey.
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List of publications by Harry J. Psomiades
Fridtjof Nansen and the Greek Refugee Crisis 1922-1924 by Harry Psomiades
Dr. A. Kitroeff's book presentation at the Holy Trinity Orthodox Cathedral in NY, on Friday, September 16, 2011. The event was sponsored by the Pan-Pontian Federation of USA and Canada, the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, and the Asia Minor and Pontos Hellenic Research Center of Chicago.
Good Evening Ladies and Gentlemen,
I thank the Pan-Pontian Federation for the honor of inviting me this evening to present the latest and unfortunately the last book by Professor Harry Psomiades that examines the contribution of the Norwegian humanist Fritjof Nansen, who, as the League of Nations’ first High Commissioner for Refugees and in collaboration with Eleftherios Venizelos contributed to saving thousands of Greek lives with the Greco-Turkish Exchange of Populations of 1923 and the first steps in the reliefof the 1,5 million refugees. This is a remarkable study that completes a set of works by Harry Psomiades that shed light on several aspects of the Asia Minor Disaster. My role here this evening is to help honor the author’s memory by familiarizing you with this study on which he worked on until a little before his death, a book that will become indispensible in our understanding of the immediate consequences of the Disaster of 1922.
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PRESS RELEASE
This is an impeccably written and carefully researched study on a most critical period that has left a permanent mark on the fortunes of 20th century Greece and Turkey. Two powerful personalities dominate the narrative: Eleftherios Venizelos and Fridtjof Nansen. The former was a prominent Greek statesman who modernized his country and managed through carefully crafted regional alliances and insightful decisions to double Greece’s territory during the Balkan Wars and World War I. The latter was a dashing Norwegian adventurer and explorer and Nobel Prize winner, who was a central figure in international humanitarian work through his associations with the League of Nations and the International Red Cross.
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"This is an impeccably written and carefully researched study by a prominent political scientist. Harry Psomiades focuses on a most critical period (1921-23) that has left a permanent mark on the fortunes of 20th century Greece and Turkey. Two powerful personalities dominate the narratice: Eleftherios Venizelos and Fridtjof Nansen."
- Click here for the complete introduction written by Theodore Couloumbis.
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Greek With No Models, History or Standard: Muslim Pontic Greek
Pietro Bortone
"In north-eastern Turkey, in the area known to the Greeks as Πόντος, there used to be a large, high-profile Greek community, which was forcibly expelled en masse in 1923 in the infamous ‘Exchange of Populations’ between Greece and Turkey. It is less well known that there are still a few rather isolated villages in the eastern corner, in the Trabzon area, especially near Of, where the locals speak varieties of a ‘dialect’ that is in fact Greek – akin to the Pontic Greek dialects once spoken there by Greeks. The speakers, of essentially Turkish and Muslim identity, descend in part from Greeks who converted to Islam over 300 years ago, developed a separate identity, came to be regarded as Turks, and were thus able to remain in the area to this day."*
Please click on link below to read entire article:
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~wolf0044/index_files/PietroBortone.pdf
From the book: "Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present."
Edited by Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Michael Silk, King's College London, UK
Copyright 2009 by Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Michael Silk
Published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road,
Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK.
Dr. Pietro Bortone graduated from King's College, University of London, with a First in Classical, Medieval and Modern Greek, and with the Ronald Burrow Studentship award. He then attained three postgraduate degrees at the University of Oxford: a Master's specializing in Linguistic Theory, a further Master's in Comparative Philology, and a Doctorate on semantic developments from ancient to contemporary Greek. Trained as a classicist, as a neohellenist, and as a linguist, his main area of research, teaching, translating and publication is Ancient, Byzantine and Modern Greek, with a general interest in Classics, in Theoretical Linguistics, and in Modern Greece and Turkey. May 2010 saw the release of his book Greek Prepositions. From Antiquity to the Present. He was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics & Mediterranean Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 2003 to 2010. At present, he is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Uppsala, Sweden.
*Permission has been granted by the author to post link from pontiangreeks.org to article found on personal homepage.
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