After the mass killings of Greeks and Armenians in Asia Minor, the atrocities did not end with death. Kemalist forces co...

After the mass killings of Greeks and Armenians in Asia Minor, the atrocities did not end with death. Kemalist forces collected the remains of the victims and sold them to Western European industries, where they were ground into fertilizer and used to bleach sugar and tobacco. Historical accounts document at least 400 tons of human remains, representing the bones of more than 50,000 people. The victims were the survivors of death marches that stretched thousands of kilometers across Anatolia. Greek and Armenian civilians, many of them barefoot and barely clothed, were driven through the ravines of Magnesia and other regions, beaten along the way. Many died of thirst in those same ravines. Their bones did not stay there. In Smyrna, witnesses described hundreds of corpses rotting in the streets after Turkish forces and irregulars moved through the city in September 1922. Women were raped, men were killed, and those who survived the initial violence were herded into concentration camps outside the city. Entire villages that had stayed behind, expecting mercy from neighbors they had lived alongside for generations, were executed in full. Survivors who made it through were conscripted into labor battalions and put to work rebuilding Turkish infrastructure under conditions that continued to kill them. After the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, roughly 1.5 million refugees arrived in Greece looking for family members who would never come home. The genocide targeting Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians was orchestrated by Mustafa Kemal and the Young Turks and was racially and religiously motivated. Historical scholars note that the only populations permitted to remain in Turkey were those who converted to Islam. The Christian populations of Asia Minor, communities with deep roots stretching back millennia, were erased. The bones were sold. The names became numbers. The record exists. #GreekGenocide #SmyrnaDisaster #AsiaMinor