Dendias marks genocide of Asia Minor Greeks
Greeks marked National Day of Remembrance of the Genocide of the Greeks of Asia Minor on Saturday with Defense Minister Nikos Dendias paying tribute to the victims in a post on X.
“Today we commemorate the National Day of Remembrance of the Genocide of the Greeks of Asia Minor by the Turkish state, which was established by a unanimous resolution of the Greek Parliament on 24/4/1998,” he said. “Despite the hundreds of victims and the difficulties, the Asia Minor Greeks managed to recover from the Catastrophe and contributed greatly to the development of Greece,” he added.
The horrific culmination of the tragedy was the destruction of Smyrna (modern-day Izmir) and the annihilation of hundreds of thousands of Greek and Armenian inhabitants in 1922.
The genocide of the Greeks, including the Genocide of Pontus, is defined as the deliberate and systematic extermination, up to 1923, of the Greek populations of Eastern Thrace and Asia Minor beginning in 2013 by the mechanisms of the Ottoman government of the nationalist Young Turks and the Turkish nationalist movement of Mustafa Kemal.
