A viral post on X recently boasted that Turks don't know English because their country was never colonized. Homer Pavlos...

A viral post on X recently boasted that Turks don't know English because their country was never colonized. Homer Pavlos responded with two maps of Anatolia, one from 1900 and one from 2000, and a blunt reply: modern Turkey was built through the religiously and racially motivated destruction of its Greek, Armenian, and Assyrian Christian populations. Around 1900, Anatolia was home to millions of Christians. Greeks dominated the Aegean and Black Sea coasts, Cappadocia, and Constantinople. Armenians populated the east and Cilicia. Assyrians lived across the southeast. Their roots in that land went back thousands of years, predating the arrival of Turkic peoples by centuries. What followed between the 1890s and 1923 was systematic destruction. The Hamidian massacres of 1894 to 1897, the Adana massacre of 1909, and then the full-scale genocides of the First World War killed an estimated 1 to 1.5 million Armenians, several hundred thousand Pontic and Asia Minor Greeks, and hundreds of thousands of Assyrians through massacres, death marches, and forced labor. Before 1915, Anatolia had an estimated 2,300 Armenian churches alone, along with nearly 700 Armenian schools serving roughly 82,000 students. According to research cited by the Armenian Weekly, only 34 Armenian churches and 18 schools remained in Turkey by the early 2000s. The same erasure applies to Greek Orthodox and Assyrian institutions across the region. The burning of Smyrna in 1922 and the population exchange of 1923 finished what decades of massacres had started, ending roughly 3,000 years of continuous Greek presence in Asia Minor. By 2000, Christians represented a fraction of a percent of Anatolia's population, down from millions a century earlier. Turkey was never colonized by a foreign power. But the land it now occupies was cleared of its original Christian inhabitants through a process that historians call genocide. #ArmenianGenocide #GreekGenocide #Anatolia