Pontian Greek Genocide Monument

This afternoon Ceridwen & I rode our bikes out to the Friends Sothwest Burial Ground just outside Philadelphia's city limits. An unexpected discovery for us (along woth more mushrooms than we know what to do with) was this Pontian Genocide Monument, across the street from the cemetery entrance at a Greek Orthodox Church.

Ottoman Turkish minister of war Ismail Enver declared in October 1915 that he wanted to "solve the Greek problem during the war... in the same way he believe[d] he solved the Armenian problem."

I've known about the Armenian Genocide since my childhood because my friend's grandmother, very old when I knew her, had survived it as a little girl. I have also met Turkish people who deny that it happened, and the hair on the back of my neck sometimes stands on end when I listen to NPR commentators go on for up to an hour about the pros & cons of Turkey joining the European Union --without mentioning that government's continuing denial of the Armenian Holocaust! But I've never known much about this.

In 2006 I & Ceridwen attended the dedication of an Armenian Holocaust monument in Cardiff, Wales, and a group of flag-waving Turkish nationalists were jeering at the Armenians from behind a police cordon. About a year later, the monument was smashed apart with hammers in the night.

The foot of this monument reads:
"Dedicated to the everlasting memory of the 353,000 Greeks of Pontius exterminated by the Ottoman Turks during the genocide of 1916-1923."

Constantine G. Hatzidimitriou writes that "loss of life among Anatolian Greeks during the WWI period and its aftermath was approximately 735,370." Edward Hale Bierstadt states that "According to official testimony, the Turks since 1914 have slaughtered in cold blood 1,500,000 Armenians, and 500,000 Greeks, men women and children, without the slightest provocation."

One side-issue for historians of the period is that the Armenian genocide overshadows that of the Pontian Greeks in terms of the number of deaths, and the Armenian Genocide itself is in many ways dwarfed by the Jewish Holocaust, which had more deaths and more survivors. That said, people who deny that any of these happened are our shit-souled enemies, and they cannot be excused as ignorant dupes. There is an overwhelming amount of proof (it gets far worse as you go closer in on the details), and it can be denied only by way of malice and a wish for it to happen again.

I'll leave it at that because it's time to eat chicken risotto with the fungi we picked today at the cemetery. It sure smells good, too.