Published by The National Herald, October 8, 2004

Remembering the Asia Minor Holocaust

By Zoe Tsine
Special to The National Herald

NEW YORK. – When Ms. Pam (Panayiota) Makricostas talks about her father’s accounts of how Kemalist Turkish forces set Greek Churches on fire in Smyrna in mid-September of 1922, burning alive the Greeks who had searched for asylum inside, she breaks down. "He told me about seeing Turks pouring gasoline in ditches in the Christian quarters and about Greeks being pushed back from foreign ships into the water," Ms. Makricostas told The National Herald, crying on the other end of the telephone line. "Asia Minor Greeks were martyred simply because they were Christians. My father would tell me he kept seeing these images in his dreams. He told me he could still smell the burning churches," she added, trying to collect herself.

What Ms. Makricostas’ father spoke to her about was the "Mikrasiatike Catastrophe," the "Asia Minor Destruction." Eighty-two years ago, in mid-September 1922, Kemal Attaturk-led Turkish forces culminated years of brutal post-WWI persecutions against Christian populations with a deadly, premeditated blow: Smyrna’s Christian quarters burned to the ground and its quaint waterfront turned into a giant Greek cemetery. Over half-a-million Greeks from that prosperous ancient capital and its surroundings flocked the city’s port, packing their belongings within a matter of hours in a final attempt to escape death. Few succeeded and most were brutally killed on the spot, as foreigners onboard western ships stood and watched a national tragedy unfold. Those who survived were captured and led to martyrdom in labor battalions across Asia Minor, most to never return.

Ms. Makricostas, a literacy coordinator at the public library in Weirton, West Viriginia is one of many Greek descendants of Asia Minor survivors left with that legacy of horror. This past September, her State’s Asia Minor Society held its annual commemoration liturgy of the destruction.

Ms. Makricostas’ mother came from Palaies Fokies—a prosperous merchant town on the Asia Minor coast—and was deported with her family in 1914. As for her father Nicholas, he witnessed the massacre in the port of Smyrna as a young boy.

The Turkish government still officially denies the events of the destruction as it denies the 1915 Armenian genocide, despite numerous accounts from survivors, foreign observers and reporters that together with black and white photographs of a smoking Smyrna speak to us of acts of unbelievable cruelty.

This denial is perhaps the reason why today, the events leading to, and in that month of September remain an open national wound that many descendants are still trying to close by keeping the painful memory alive.

Ms. Makricostas for instance is not one to abandon herself in tears of family trauma. For the past several years, she has been speaking about her mother’s family story in front of small and big audiences in schools and Churches in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania, in an original way. She takes a bundle of family belongings, the same bundle her grandmother had hastily packed herself in the hours preceding the "diogmo" (deportation) of Greeks from her village; Ms. Makricostas then speaks to her audiences in the first person playacting as her grandmother, a woman she never met.

"I say, ‘Hello I am Panayiota Diamantidou Koukoulis and I was born in Palaies Fokies." She then talks about "her" village’s glorious ancient and recent past. Her salt-merchant ancestors, she says, had founded more than 20 colonies around the Black Sea and the Mediterranean in ancient times. Behind Ms. Makricostas, a projection of slides showing tall, stone buildings and beautiful churches—pictures her grandfather had taken before WWI—help the Greek-American tell the story of her homeland’s pre-deportation prosperity.

Then, when the time comes to talk about how her mother’s family survived the deportation, she starts taking out the items from inside the bundle: slippers, sheets and a pillowcase her grandmother had knitted as future dowry objects; a baby’s nightshirt, a handmade baby vest, her grandmother’s journal with her poetry, a traditional "tagari," a purse said to have belonged to a woman from the historic Greek town of Souli, a velvet-covered gospel her family had saved from a Greek Church and brought with them to the U.S.

Her family was rescued by a group of French archaeologists who overheard local Turks talk about their plans of persecution. "The French put out French flags outside their homes and told the Greeks to go over there and hide and that they would then take them to the French ships, to safety," she recalled her mother saying. Makricostas now dreams of her next "project," that of locating descendants of those French saviors. "I have one of the names and I will locate them in France," she said.

Eventually Ms. Makricostas’ mother’s family was shipped to the island of Mitilini and from there to the port of Piraeus. "My grandfather was already in the States and located his wife and children in a refugee place in Athens and sent for them," Makricostas told the Herald. As for her father, he and his family were saved by the Japanese, the only ones at Smyrna’s port who took Greeks onboard their ships during the destruction; he later joined the Greek navy and after spending time as a WWII prisoner, he came to New York to work in a restaurant and later met her mother.

"Every time he watched refugees on the evening news he got upset," Makricostas recalls of her father. His accounts and those of other survivors she has interviewed through the years and hopes to someday publish, have left her with a strong sense of a legacy that she says mustn’t be lost. "History has been rewritten," she said. "American encyclopedias refer to a ‘peaceful transfer’ of Greek and Turkish populations." The "peaceful" exodus, known as the exchange of populations, did indeed happen but only after the Destruction in 1922.

"We have to tell this story and make sure it doesn’t happen again," Makricostas added. Then she spoke with evident frustration in her voice. "A lot of people tell me, ‘you Greeks, you hate the Turks.’" She protested: "I always tell them that the Jewish holocaust is not a story told by Jews because they hate the Germans."

Not all non-Greeks would have doubted Ms. Makricostas’ story. On January 29, 2000, The National Herald published in a special issue about the destruction, a formerly classified September 27, 1922 report written by George Horton, the American Consul General in Smyrna, which was addressed to the U.S. State Department. That official outsider’s view of the events was documented in his report as, "a revolting massacre."

Horton wrote of, "…looting and pillaging and rape and massacre (that) went on a large scale immediately after the entry of the Turks (in Smyrna), their vengeance first breaking upon the Armenians, (who were being killed) in the most revolting manner by being shot, stabbed, hacked to death or having their throats cut publicly in the streets."

The American Consul had distinguished between Greek army pre-destruction atrocities against Turks and Greek massacres, saying the Turks had unleashed, "a methodical extermination," "expulsion and elimination," "of Christian races" adding that there is a difference between, "the excesses of a furious and betrayed (Greek) army, retreating through a country which it had held for several years and without its officers, and the conduct of the victorious Turkish army, which instead of protecting the helpless people which it had in its power, deliberately set about massacring and outraging it."

"After the destruction," continued Horton, "the whole Christian population was forced upon the quay, where it remained for days stretching its hands to the (Allies’) battleships in the harbor, screaming and pleading for help and dying of hunger and thirst, the conduct of the Turks was abominable." Kemalism, the American Consul noted elsewhere, had been, "built up by the Allies by their weakness and dissension," as Kemal controlled the rich oil fields of Mosul, now a part of Iraq.

In that report, Horton also expressed his conviction that, "the truth is sure to come out" about the events as, "there were too many reliable witnesses."

"The Turks did a fine job killing us," said another Asia Minor descendant, Bill Theodosakis, whose mother Evgenia, came from a wealthy family outside of Smyrna. Mr. Thedosakis is now the outspoken chairman of the New York-based Holocaust Memorial Observance Committee. Despite its long, grave name, the committee is a small, humble group of Asia Minor descendants, who like Ms. Makricostas are trying to piece together a memoir of their parents’ era and pass it on to their children. The committee has been holding memorials and lectures for the past decade and shares its growing archive of photos and documents with exhibits held in various communities across the New York area.

This October 17, they will be holding their annual memorial service after the Divine Liturgy at the Three Hierarchs Church in Brooklyn. "The more you look, the more fascinating this story is," said Mr. Theodosakis. His mother, he told the Herald, lost two brothers and a sister in the Asia Minor holocaust. Her father kept checking bulletin boards in Athens and asking around for word of his children for years. Mr. Theodosakis said it was his aunt Anna that told him the story of his lost ancestors. Unlike Ms. Makricostas’ father, neither his mother nor his father ever talked about their past. "They didn’t talk but you felt it. I never pushed my parents when they were alive," he said with a tone of regret. Asia Minor survivors had fled to America not only to prosper, but also to forget.

Now Mr. Theodosakis makes up for lost time by actively trying to disseminate his parent’s story. He firmly believes that Turkish denial is strengthened by Greek inaction. "The Armenian community is the only one that puts real pressure on the Turkish government to acknowledge the 1915 genocide," he added. "More Greeks know about the Jewish holocaust than about the events leading to and during September 1922. I get letters from people all the time requesting information."

Another group, passing on information about the destruction is the Asia Minor Hellenic American Society, based in Akron, Ohio. They will also hold a memorial on October 17 at their town’s Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church. The AMH Society counts more than 800 members in the U.S., Canada and Greece and organizes events throughout the year, awarding four scholarships to second-generation descendants.

AMHAS president Nicholas Topougis said the Society welcomes all descendants of persecuted Asia Minor Greeks as well as Pontian Greeks, who inhabited the northern parts of Asia Minor by the Black Sea and were also systematically exterminated between 1914 and 1922. Mr. Topougis echoed a similar background to that of Mr. Theodosakis. He told the Herald that his parents, Anthony and Katina, never discussed their traumatic past. As they reached an elderly age, he said he started becoming concerned, "because we knew nothing about them. Today, I feel guilty I didn’t ask them about their past before they passed away." He said his mother was an educated high-school graduate in her homeland and his father, who escaped before the destruction at 17 years old, was among the young Greeks who were taken into the Turkish army by force. He said that at the time, the alternative of submitting to Turkish orders was death.

Mr. Topougis’ predecessor and current AMHAS president emeritus Bill Amarides has a great second-hand story to give to his own sons too. Mr. Amarides keeps in his basement a big archive of written accounts, books and audiotaped material, mostly from survivors he interviewed in the past decade. "They were so emotional, they cried as they spoke," he recalls of the people whose voices are documented in those tapes. He said most of those survivors are now either dead or debilitated by old age. (Last September 24, famed Greek author Dido Sotiriou, whose novels "The Bloodied Land" and "Farwell Anatolia" drew on her pre-Destruction childhood memories, passed away in Athens at age 95.)

Mr. Amarides’ father Thoedosios was a mineworker in Asia Minor who came to America to work in the steal mills of Ohio and moved to West Virginia after he lost his job in the crash. "They never gave up," Mr. Amarides said of his ancestors, who as refugees transformed Greece with their entrepreneurial, free mentality. "In Asia Minor the Turks were making the Greeks speak Turkish, they converted them to Islam ‘by the sword’ and the government confiscated their businesses." He added that his search for Asia Minor descendants in America was always muddled by the fact that when survivors entered American ports in the years after the Destruction, they were often registered as Turks.

"It was mad, chaos," added Mr. Amarides, summing up the survivor accounts he has collected after years of work and persistence. "During those days of September 1922, only one Japanese ship (docked at Smyrna’s harbor) collected survivors," he said. "Only after the news of the massacre had broken out in the United States, did American ships take survivors onboard. Before that, they would cut the ropes hanging from the ships so Greeks would not be able to climb up to safety," he added.

Mr. Amarides said many of the survivors he interviewed would always have a story of loved ones left behind. "One man’s family reached the port of Smyrna after having walked the entire length of Turkey from their town. When they got to the port, his mother was exhausted. She died the next day," he said. That man eventually escaped to Chicago.

Another survivor story Mr. Amarides shared with the Herald was that of a man whose parents were captured by Turkish brigands. "Those were not army people, but independent forces that captured people and then asked for ransom from their families. When the survivor and his brother raised the money and looked for their parents, they found out they had been burned alive at the stake."

Mr. Amarides also recalled the story of a survivor named Evangeline, who at 12 years old had rushed to the harbor together with her family to escape.

"The 3-mile harbor, she told me was filled with Greeks. Evangeline’s little sister died at the harbor and their father dug a small grave right there with a piece of iron. She said she remembered her sister’s head was not completely buried but could be seen from the side. She didn’t forget that."

Mr. Amarides said he hopes his archive of such oral accounts as well as numerous written ones that have been sent to him by AMHAS members from both America and Greece would some day be taken from his home and moved to where they belong, "a museum. I hope someone takes it all some day. They’d have to come down here with a truck!"

"We must teach this story in our schools, add it in our curriculum like the Jews do with the holocaust," Mr. Amarides concluded. "Sometimes, Jews get upset when we use the word holocaust to describe the events in Asia Minor. But I tell them it’s a Greek word. And it’s what happened."



Volume 6 Number 40 - Tuesday, October 12th, 2004	A Publication of the ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN LAITY

Volume 6 Number 40 - Tuesday, October 12th, 2004

Remembering the Asia Minor Holocaust