Smoke rises from the burning Smyrna on September 14, 1922. It is the final act of the Genocide of the Greeks and of our Armenian brothers. Muslim Turks raise their flag while others slaughter women and children.
On a single day, near 400.000 refugees & 10.000-125.000 deaths.
Greeks and Armenians were killed in the fire, massacred, drowned, raped, and hanged. The rest were evacuated from their ancestral lands in Anatolia, mainly by Greek ships.
For 3.000 years, Greeks had been living in their ancestral lands, in the cities they founded in Asia Minor, Sea of Marmara and Black Sea (Pontus). Not even the Persians expelled us from Anatolia. But the real barbarians, the Turks, did; and in the most horrific way that no human mind can comprehend.
That was the reason Greece sent an army to Anatolia: to protect the Greek communities and cities, and to protect the Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians whom the Turks were slaughtering simply because they were Christians. If a Greek converted to Islam, they would let him live in Asia Minor. That is the strongest proof that the genocide was religiously and racially motivated. Russia was selling weapons to the Turks. At first, France and Britain were in favor of Greece protecting Anatolia and pushing the Turks back to the steppes. But when they realized that the Greeks wanted to restore the Eastern Roman Empire and retake Constantinople and Asia Minor, they stopped supporting the struggle and created political problems.
Greece, with Constantinople, would have been a worldwide superpower, a nation with the strongest navy in the world. The British Empire, of course, did not want that. They had known since 1821 that the Greeks wanted to restore the Roman Empire. From 1821 to 1919, the Greeks had already tripled their borders and possessed a strong army ready for anything, a dangerous passion to reclaim their ancestral lands. The Great Powers did not like that idea. When they saw in 1922 that the Greeks pushed the Turks and reached 60km outside Ankara (their capital) they understood that the things were serious.
Eventually, Russia, Germany, Britain, and France saved Turkey. There would be no Turkey today, and probably no Islam inside Europe, if Greece had won the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922.
The world should read the history of the events of 1914–1922 and of the Greek, Armenian, and Assyrian genocide carried out under the command of Mustafa Kemal to create his pseudo-nation called Turkey.
This happened only 100 years ago. Never forget that.
Homer Pavlos