September 14 is Greece's official Day of National Memory for the Asia Minor Catastrophe, the genocide of Greeks carried ...

September 14 is Greece's official Day of National Memory for the Asia Minor Catastrophe, the genocide of Greeks carried out by the Turkish state in August and September of 1922. The Greek Parliament designated the date to mark one of the deadliest chapters in modern Greek history, when hundreds of thousands of Greeks were killed or uprooted from lands their ancestors had inhabited for millennia. Ta Nea, working with the Centre for Asia Minor Studies, published survivor testimonies that put human faces on the statistics. These are the accounts of people who lived through the massacres, the burning of Smyrna, and the forced flight to the sea. One man from Tsantarli, a coastal town of 2,000 people north of Smyrna, described loading his valuables onto a small motorboat and sailing for Mytilene, convinced he would return for his family. He did not make it back in time. Turkish forces locked the remaining residents inside the town fortress and killed them. His four children and his wife died there. "My child was calling out to me, 'Father, take us,'" he recalled. "And I, foolish as I was, kept saying, 'I'll come back.' As if it were up to me." A fifteen-year-old girl from Hatzileri described the chaos on the roads outside Smyrna as the Greek army collapsed. Crowds poured into the streets in nightgowns and underwear after a false rumor spread that Greek forces were holding the line. She walked on foot from Bournova to Basmahane with her neighbors, eventually reaching the Evangelical School, which caught fire the same night she arrived. She spent three days and two nights on the Smyrna waterfront among the dead, sleeping on corpses because there was nowhere else to go. At one point, a mother handed her a starving infant and disappeared into the crowd in search of flour. People told her to abandon the child. She refused. The mother found her at dawn. "Would my soul have found peace anywhere if I had thrown it away?" she said. The testimonies were originally recorded decades after the catastrophe and first published in Ta Nea on September 4, 2023, drawn from the historical archive of To Vima and Ta Nea. #AsiaMinerCatastrophe #GreekGenocide #September14