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Greek Genocide In Greece

Satisfactory Essays

Greeks began settling Asia Minor or Anatolia which means “east” in Greek in the 12th Century BCE. They mainly settled along the Aegean littoral although some traveled farther east and settled along the southern shores of the Black Sea and the surrounding coastal areas. This area was known as Pontus or Greek Pontus. Pontus is an ancient Greek word for sea. Pontus and the Pontian hinterland were once the most powerful city-states until its defeat by the Romans in 63 B.C.
In the first millennium CE Turkic people began migrating into Anatolia. They had established the Ottoman Empire by the 14th Century. For over the next five centuries the Empire’s ethnically diverse population was organized into a “millet system, thereby ensuring cultural and religious pluralism” (Rutgers, 2013). …show more content…

This established the current Greek state at the tip of the Balkan Peninsula however the Greeks living in Anatolia broke off from the Balkan State. There were over two million Greeks living in Anatolia that would take the punishment for the Greeks defeating the Turkish state.
The Pontian Greeks were the victim of Turkish genocide during 1914 to 1923 when the Young Turks and of Mustafa Kemal tried to rid the Ottoman Empire of all Christian minorities. This genocide affected the Greek nation greatly by killing over half of the population and making the rest of the population leave their homeland. As horrific as this genocide was, it is equally horrific to realize that these genocides were not an isolated

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