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Featured Item of the Month
THE CAUCASUS a chapter in Report to Greco
by Nikos Kazantzakis
Click here - Greek Version
**Our Society is grateful to Dr. Patroklos Stavrou and his daughter Niki, publishers of N. Kazantzakis books, who gave us their permission to post the chapter “Caucasus” from the book Report to Greco, written in Greek. We are also grateful to Mr. P. A. Bien who gave his permission to post the English version. Mr. Bien worked extensively to translate N. Kazantzakis book Report to Greco.
**In May 1919, the Greek Government created a special delegation under the leadership of writer and philosopher Nikos Kazantzakis to reach the Greeks of the Caucasus. Kazantakis' mission was to save thousands of destitute refugees who were trying to escape from the areas of the Caucasus that were falling to the Turkish army. In the interior of Southern Russia, thousands of other Greeks were trying to reach the cities of Tiflis (Tbilisi) and Batumi before the advancement of the Bolshevik army.
In1920, Greece received 110,000 refugees from the Caucasus
 I was still in Italy when I received a telegram from the Ministry of Social Welfare in Athens asking if I would consent to undertake the Ministry's General Directorship, with the specific mission of going to the Caucasus, where more than a hundred thousand Greeks were in danger. I was to try and find some means by which they could remove to Greece and be saved.
It was the first time in my life I had been presented with the opportunity to engage in action, to wrestle with living, flesh-and-blood men instead of having to struggle any longer with theories, ideas, Christs, and Buddhas. I was delighted. I had grown weary of this shadowboxing, of wandering from place to place carrying questions and seeking an answer. The questions kept constantly renewing themselves; the answer kept constantly shifting. Question had heaped upon question, serpent upon serpent, asphyxiating me. The moment was ripe to test whether action, by slicing its sword through the insoluble knots of speculation, was alone capable of giving an answer.
I consented for another reason as well: I pitied my eternally crucified race, once more endangered in the mountains of Prometheus, the Caucasus. Once more the State and Violence had nailed not Prometheus now but Greece herself to the Caucasus. This was her cross and she was calling, calling not on the gods but on men, her children, to save her. Thus, identifying today's adversities with Greece's eternal suffering, elevating the contemporary tragic vicissitudes into symbols, I consented.
I left Italy, stopped at Athens, took ten choice colleagues with me (mostly Cretans), and departed for the Caucasus to see at first hand how these thousands of people might be saved. On the south, the Kurds were nailing horseshoes onto every Greek they caught; on the north, the Bolsheviks were descending with fire and the axe. Naked, hungry, ill, the Greeks of Batum, Sukhumi, Tiflis and Kars stood in the mid- dle and awaited death, the noose growing ever tighter around their necks. Once again it was the State on the one hand, Violence on the other—the eternal allies.
What a great joy to depart for a difficult objective surrounded by ardent and honest colleagues. We left the Greek coast behind us; one morning Constantinople came palely into view on the shadowy horizon.
A gentle rain was falling; the white minarets and black cypresses pierced the fog like masts from a sunken city. Saint Sophia, the palaces, and the half-crumbled imperial walls were lost in the silent, despairing rain. Crowding all together at the ship's bow we struggled to make our gaze bore through the thick mist in order to see.
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Featured Item of the Month
The following article is an excerpt from the one volume synopsis of a fourteen-volume set entitled The Genocide of the Greeks of Pontus by Dr. Constantine Fotiadis, Professor of History at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki Greece.
Members of the Pontian Greek Society of Chicago have translated the two articles from Chapter E’, that are posted here with the permission of Dr. Fotiadis.
 THE PONTIAN GREEK GENOCIDE DURING THE RULE OF THE YOUNG TURKS (1915-1918)
Click here for the Greek version
* Please note –references listed in the Greek version of the articles
1. The German policy in Asia Minor (1915)
The condition of the Greeks of Pontus and of Ionia had deteriorated by early 1915. Under the pretext of security measures dictated by the ongoing war, the government of the Young Turks deemed it necessary to remove the Christian population from the coastal areas to inner Anatolia. The Greeks correctly interpreted the decision of their displacement under the German plan as the beginning of their destruction.
According to S. Ioakeimidis, "Kaiser's Germany is the instigator of crimes against the Christians in Turkey, especially towards the Greeks. If the Germans had not offered encouragement or suggested the expulsion of the Greeks from the shores to inner Turkey in 1914 (soon to be implemented against the other Greeks in Asia Minor), the Turks would never have conceived and carried out such a plan. The Turks would not have dared to refuse the capitulations set forth by the Entente. The audacity of the Turks was due largely to the Germans who, as we stated, were the instigators of the destruction of Hellenism in Turkey during the First World War.”
Geopolitically and economically, the Near East was definitely turning into an "Apple of Discord" as a result of its rich natural resources. Germany’s efforts were directed towards achieving their objectives in this crucial region, and the Germans did not hesitate to give in to the demands of Pan-Turkism at the expense of the Christian peoples.
Above all, the shared responsibility of Germany in the genocide of the Armenians and Greeks is evident by the unpublished archives in the foreign ministries of the countries involved in the war [Austria, England, France]. The German commander Liman Von Sanders suggested to the hesitant Turks, the removal of the Greeks from the coast, ostensibly for military purposes by accusing them of serving as agents of the Entente. To undermine the progress of Asia Minor Hellenism, the German leadership did not hesitate to openly display hostility towards the Greeks, considering the Greek presence as an obstacle to the implementation of its plans.
R. Schofer participated in an organized dispatch of German scientists in Asia Minor and was an agent of both Pan-Germanism and Pan-Turkism. Facing the reality first hand, Schofer rejected his role in spreading propaganda and objectively reported the situation on the ground: "The Christian population in Turkey is only a third of the whole population but its importance is very great in the economic and cultural fields. 90% of trade and crafts are controlled by Christians, while only 10% are in the hands of Muslims.” The flourishing Greek economy was to pass into German hands at any cost and the war certainly facilitated this transition.
Taking advantage of war, the Germans used every opportunity to gain favor with the Muslim population. W. Bihl notes that "an important tool in maintaining influence in Turkey resulted from German connections to the Ottoman press,” a view confirmed by Wangenheim’s report to the German chancellor on September 26, 1914; for this purpose, Wangenheim accordingly paid the sum of 1,000 pounds to ten Turkish newspapers.
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Dr. Fotiadis 14 Volume Series |
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The flyer lists the title of each volume in this work by Dr. Constantinos E. Fotiadis, History Professor,
Aristotle
University,
Thessaloniki,
Greece. The 14-Volume series contain archival material and documents from the ministries of foreign countries that were key players during the great tragedy in Asia Minor and Pontus at the beginning of the 20th century.
[Click image to view 4 page flyer in Greek - Adobe Acrobat PDF - 2.35 MB]
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View details of 14-Volume series in English
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Feature Article of the Month
From the
Mediterranean Quarterly
Winter 2010 of Mediterranean Quarterly Volume 21, included a Rober J. Pranger book review of The Great Betrayal. The Mediterranean Quarterly is published by Duke University Press under the editorial direction of Mediterranean Affairs.
The Great Betrayal was reprinted by our Society in March 2008.
Click here to read in Greek
Edward Hale Bierstadt, with the editorial assistance of Helen Davidson Creighton: The Great Betrayal: Economic Imperialism and the Destruction of Christian Communities in Asia Minor. Chicago: Pontian Greek Society of Chicago, 2008. 345 pages. ISBN 978-1-934703-11-3. $35. Originally published by Robert M. McBride Company of New York, 1924. Reviewed by Robert J. Pranger.
(Robert J. Pranger is a private consultant with extensive experience in national security affairs. He was formerly associate/managing editor of Mediterranean Quarterly).
The publishing pedigree of this book (first published in 1924 with the subtitle "A Survey of the Near East Problem") indicates that it is a reprint sponsored by the Pontian Greek Society of Chicago, with the support of the Pan-Pontian Federation of USA and Canada, a book "dedicated to the memory of all victims of ethnic cleansing and genocide." In the twentieth century, billed as the age of modernism and the apotheosis of enlightenment, we witnessed such carnage of innocents as to prompt one of the century's most astute students, Albert Camus, to express the horrors of its "polemic and insult" as a veritable rebellion against the always finite (or "absurd") essence of the human condition itself. Agitation for human rights becomes more and more futile as the mass graves of innocents expand everywhere — no measure of best intentions can match the alarming escalation of victims. To this dark realm belongs the fate of Christians—Greek and Armenians—who perished or were displaced in the years immediately after the First World War, the "war to end all wars," amid the ruins of the Ottoman Empire in the Anatolian peninsula and its immediate environs. They were sacrificed in the shadow of the Lausanne Conference and the stillborn Treaty of Sevres, put to death and scattered at the hands of Turkish nationalists led by a foremost proponent of twentieth-century secular modernism in the Mediterranean region, Ataturk, aka Mustafa Kemal.
The author of this book, Edward Hale Bierstadt, was neither Greek nor Armenian but the executive secretary of the Emergency Committee of Near East Refugees as well as an author, drama critic, and criminologist living in New York City. The emergency committee he headed comprised US nonprofits (as we would call them today) representing churches and other charitable societies operating to relieve those in the Near East suffering from dislocations following the First World War and the redrawing of its regional map by the Great Powers after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. To-be sure, many of these victims were Greek and Armenian Christians.What Bierstadt noted about US policy toward Near Eastern chaos after the Treaty of Versailles was a sharp contrast between long-standing humanitarian and economic interests in the region, with economic imperialism most often trumping humanitarian-ism. This was especially evident in dramatic changes following the defeat of the Democratic Party by Warren Harding in the 1920 presidential election, which marked a shift of Washington policy toward the economic side of US interests. Quite simply, this proved a major change in direction vis-a-vis Greece and Greeks in Anatolia from the State Department headed by Robert Lansing to that of Charles Evans Hughes, later to become chief justice of the US Supreme Court. Not only was this shift evident in US positions at the Lausanne Conference—positions that seemed closer to the British and French than was the case at Versailles—but in the "hands-off" orders from Hughes to US diplomats and soldiers in the region. They were advised to adopt a so-called neutral position on Kemal's offensive against the Greek military expedition in Anatolia when it came to the way Turkish forces treated Greeks — military and civilians alike — as Kemal transformed himself from a mere army general into supreme leader Ataturk, after the slaughter, displacement, and enslavement of tens of thousands at Smyrna.
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