ATHENS – “Defending historic knowledge through the recognition of this horrific crime is the self evident duty of the international community,” the President of the Hellenic Republic Katerina Sakellaropoulou said on Thursday, in a message for the Remembrance Day of the Genocide of the Pontian Greeks.
“This anniversary, in particular, at a conjuncture when authoritarian revisionism is directly threatening our world’s stability, acts as a deterrent so that we do not live through similar atrocities again,” Sakellaropoulou underlined.
The anniversary commemorates the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of indigenous ethnic Greeks then living in present-day Turkey, especially the region of Anatolia. The killings were carried out by Ottoman Turks and the government of Kemal Ataturk at the start of the 20th century, mainly between the start of WWI up until the formal expulsion of Greeks by Turkey in 1922, in a policy that also targeted other Christian groups, such as Assyrians and Armenians.
