All events · The World Wars
The Persecution and Deportation of the Ottoman Greeks (the Greek Genocide)
1913–1923 · Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus
Displacement
Territory Seized
Mass Killing
Sexual Violence
Killing was the defining act
Displaced
500,000
This figure counts the expulsions and deportations of 1913-18 only. Roughly 150,000-200,000 Greeks were driven from eastern Thrace and the Aegean littoral in 1913-14, many crossing to Greece and the islands (the US ambassador Henry Morgenthau put those deported before the war at about 100,000), and deportations of Pontic and Anatolian Greeks into the Anatolian interior followed from 1916. For the total by 1918, the British Foreign Office official George Rendel wrote in 1922 that over 500,000 Greeks had been deported, and Ecumenical Patriarchate figures cited by the Greek Genocide Resource Center give 774,235 relocated from their homes; the atlas's headline figure is Rendel's 500,000, a floor from a source outside the dispute, and the Patriarchate's figure is the upper end. Further deportations of 1921-22 were not separately counted. The flight of 1922, which brought over a million Orthodox refugees into Greece (the 1928 Greek census recorded 1,104,216 Ottoman Greeks), and the compulsory exchange of 1923 are counted in the atlas's entries on the burning of Smyrna and on the Lausanne exchange, not here. Together these movements removed a population that Ottoman and Patriarchate counts placed at between 1.5 and 2.5 million. The figures rest on Ottoman statistics, Ecumenical Patriarchate registers, British and American diplomatic reporting, Greek state refugee records and League of Nations reporting, which differ substantially from one another.
Share of the population affected
28%
of the Greek Orthodox population of the Ottoman Empire on the eve of the First World War, 1914
Killed
300,000–900,000
direct killing
Open on the interactive map →
What happened
From 1913 the Ottoman government pursued a policy of removing Greek populations from strategically sensitive coasts and border districts, beginning with a boycott and then expulsions from eastern Thrace and the Aegean littoral in 1914 in which about 150,000 people crossed to Greece. Greek men of military age were conscripted into unarmed labour battalions where, as Tigran Martirosyan records in 1914-1918-Online, conditions were frequently lethal. From 1916 Pontic Greeks were deported inland in columns comparable to the Armenian deportations, and the fighting of 1919-22 in Pontus and western Anatolia destroyed most of the remaining communities. Greek and diaspora institutions and the International Association of Genocide Scholars characterise the whole sequence as genocide; the Hellenic Parliament established 19 May as a day of remembrance for the genocide of the Greeks of Pontus by Law 2193/1994 and extended commemoration to all Greeks of Asia Minor by Law 2645/1998. Turkey rejects the characterisation and treats the events as part of a reciprocal war between states and communities.
Parties
Ottoman and later Turkish nationalist authorities expelled Greek populations from eastern Thrace and the Aegean coast, deported Pontic and Anatolian Greeks into the interior and into labour battalions, and destroyed Greek communities in Pontus
Disputed
Turkey denies that a genocide occurred and points to Muslim deaths and displacement caused by the Greek army's occupation of western Anatolia in 1919-22; the death toll is disputed, with figures from about 300,000 to 900,000 for the Greek population of the Ottoman Empire in this period, and the greek-genocide.net project places the total victim toll of the whole period at 1 to 1.5 million.
The denominator
The Ottoman census of 1914 recorded 1,792,206 Greek Orthodox subjects; the Ecumenical Patriarchate's own count was higher, at about 2.5 million, and Western estimates cluster around 1.8-2 million. Scholarly estimates of Greek deaths between 1913 and 1923 range from about 300,000 to 900,000, with the survivors leaving in the 1922 flight and the 1923 exchange.
Where the baseline comes from
On the death toll
Estimates of Greek deaths in the Ottoman Empire between 1914 and 1923 range from about 300,000 to 900,000; the greek-genocide.net project puts the toll of the whole period at 1 to 1.5 million. The disagreement turns on the pre-war Greek population, on whether deaths in the 1919-22 war and in the labour battalions are counted, and on whether deaths from hunger and epidemic during deportation are attributed to policy. Turkish accounts give far lower figures and set them against Muslim civilian deaths in the Greek-occupied zone.
Documented forms of violence
Mass KillingSummary ExecutionForced LabourSexual ViolenceDestruction of PropertyCultural DestructionDenationalization
Expulsions, deportation marches, the labour battalions and the destruction of Greek villages and churches are documented in Ottoman records, in Greek and Patriarchate archives, in Allied consular and relief reporting, and in the 1914-1918-Online account of the labour battalions.
Formal findings
- Hellenic Parliament (1994) — Law 2193/1994 designated 19 May as a day of remembrance for the genocide of the Greeks of Pontus; Law 2645/1998 designated 14 September as a day of remembrance for the genocide of the Greeks of Asia Minor as a whole. — source
- International Association of Genocide Scholars (2007) — Resolution of December 2007 holding that the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities between 1914 and 1923 constituted a genocide against Armenians, Assyrians and Pontian and Anatolian Greeks. — source
- Republic of Turkey, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2005) — Turkey rejects the genocide characterisation of the treatment of Ottoman Greeks and frames the events of 1919-23 as a war of national liberation in which Muslim civilians also suffered mass killing and displacement. — source
Movements mapped
- Pontic Greeks -> deportation marches into the Anatolian interior
- Aegean littoral -> expulsion to Lesbos, Chios and mainland Greece, 1914150,000
Countries touched, on present-day borders
Turkey, Greece
Related entries
- Overlaps with: The Burning of Smyrna and the Exodus of the Anatolian Greeks
After the fix, the 1922 flight is counted only in the Smyrna entry, and the 1,000,000 displaced in the genocide entry is replaced by about 775,000 for 1913-18. The remaining overlap is in people, not in counts: survivors of the 1914-18 deportations who fled again in 1922 appear in both entries as two separate displacements. Deaths overlap for 1922 (the Smyrna massacre and the deportation of men inland fall within the genocide entry's 1914-23 death range); the size of that overlap is not separable.
- Overlaps with: The Greek-Turkish Population Exchange under the Treaty of Lausanne
The exchange entry's 1.2 million Orthodox Christians are mostly refugees of the 1922 flight, whom the convention retroactively brought under the exchange; per the Mixed Commission only about 189,916 were transferred from Turkey after it took effect. Once the genocide entry is restricted to the 1913-18 expulsions and deportations (see the Smyrna item), the 1922 flight is no longer in its displacement figure. The only remaining overlap is people deported in 1914-18 who later left in 1922-23, a repeat displacement of the same individuals and not a duplicated count.
Sources
This entry rests only on reference, press or open-edited sources. Treat its figures as indicative and follow the links before relying on them.