On the night of October 26, 1921, a rescue boat from the Greek warship Naxos crept toward the shoreline at Kara Bogaz, w...

On the night of October 26, 1921, a rescue boat from the Greek warship Naxos crept toward the shoreline at Kara Bogaz, west of Amisos on the Black Sea, and pulled ashore families who had spent months living like hunted animals in the forests and caves above the coast. That night was exactly 105 years ago. The people on that beach had fled because they understood what deportation meant. From spring 1921, Kemalist authorities had been rounding up Christians from coastal villages and marching them inland. Theodoros Georgiou, a 35-year-old tobacco grower, testified that in late May around 1,200 villagers were taken toward Kavak and most were executed. On June 7, gunmen surrounded his group and shot seven women dead. His seven-year-old son Avraam carried a bullet wound below his left shoulder blade when he stepped onto that rescue boat. Savvas Karakolidis, 56, had lived in the mountains from April to October, moving only at night and eating wild greens to survive. Ioannis Michailidis, 26, a shoemaker, was rescued with his wife and their two-month-old son Dimitrios, a boy who had been born and baptised somewhere in the dark of those hills. On October 27, 1921, exactly 105 years ago today, two officers aboard the Naxos, Lieutenant Commander Emmanouil Kortesis and paymaster Konstantinos Athanasiadis, sat down with five of the survivors and recorded their testimonies in a five-page report. The document survives in the archive of the Euxeinos Club of Thessaloniki under reference AE 1533. The other two witnesses were Ilias Tsolakoglou and Angeliki Tyrtikoglou. Even the American side saw what was happening. In July 1921, US High Commissioner Admiral Mark Bristol warned that deporting roughly 10,000 women, children and elderly from Samsun could not be justified as military necessity. The warning changed nothing. The five-page report sat in an archive for over a century. The families it describes had no country to go to, no army protecting them, and nothing left but the hope that a ship would appear on the water. One did. #PonticGreeks #BlackSeaMassacre #GreekHistory