ERT News reminded maine of the tragedy Pontic Greeks done archival grounds of deportations, famine, illness and decease successful exile.
May 19V Remembrance Day of the Pontic Greek Genocide, ERT News turned to archival grounds that again shows the quality magnitude of this tragedy. The worldly centers connected a story astir deportations 1916when thousands of Pontians were forcibly sent into the interior Asia Minor.
In work ERT News it is emphasized that May 19 remains 1 of the darkest dates successful past Hellenism. This time is associated with the accomplishment Mustafa Kemal Ataturk V Samsun and the opening of the second, much brutal and monolithic stage of persecution against Pontic Greeks.
— Athens News (@russianathens) May 19, 2026
Video with subtitles successful Russian
The crushed for the worldly was an archival fragment from the programme “My representation is called Pontus” (“Μνήμη μου σε λένε Πόντο”), published connected ERT V 2011. In it Panos Iliadis talks astir the melodramatic destiny of his household during the deportations.
According to him, the δοκιμή for thousands of Pontians has begun November 15, 1916. His father, on with his parents and sisters, was expelled and sent heavy into Asia Minor. People were driven into conditions of winter, hunger, acold and implicit insecurity.
“The extremity was their demolition successful exile. The so-called white death,” leads ERT News grounds from the archive.
The household was sent to an Armenian village successful the interior of the portion Kerasunta. A typhus epidemic broke retired there. Exhausted by hunger, ungraded and deprivation, radical died en masse. According to Iliadis’ account, adjacent the Turkish gendarmes accompanying the exiles near the country for fearfulness of contracting the disease.
In this tragedy the narrator’s gramps and 17 year aged sister his begetter Paraskevi. The past representation of my gramps is associated with a abbreviated but terrible operation astir a mislaid life, location and prosperity: everything that the household had disappeared on with the world successful which they lived.
This testimony is important not lone arsenic a backstage household history. It shows that the deportations of the Pontians were not “relocations,” arsenic convenient versions of past similar to portray, but a mechanics of carnal destruction: done hunger, disease, cold, isolation and the implicit deprivation of people’s quality to survive.
Archival worldly ERT reminds: down the large humanities formulas – genocide, deportation, Asia Minor, Pont — there are specific families, names, children, aged radical and radical who were deprived not lone of their home, but besides of their future.
For Pontic Hellenism May 19 remains much than conscionable a memorable date. This is the time when idiosyncratic testimony returns past to its true meaning. Not a adust enactment successful a textbook, not a diplomatic formulation, but quality symptom that cannot beryllium canceled adjacent by the astir convenient silence.
Source: ERT News
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