Greeks in Turkey

[18] A minority of Muslim Pontic Greek speakers, using a dialect called "Romeyka" or "Ophitic", still live in the area around Of in north-eastern Anatolia.

Following upheavals in mainland Greece during the Bronze Age Collapse, the Aegean coast of Asia Minor was heavily settled by Ionian and Aeolian Greeks and became known as Ionia and Aeolia.

For the next 600 years, Asia Minor and Constantinople, which eventually became the capital of the Byzantine Empire, would be the centers of the Hellenic world, while mainland Greece experienced repeated barbarian invasions and went into decline.

The last Byzantine Greek kingdom in Anatolia, the Empire of Trebizond, covering the Black Sea coast of north-eastern Turkey to the border with Georgia, fell in 1461.

After the Tanzimat reforms in 1839, the Christians could get a permission to repair an old church easier, but still they had to follow specific procedures and were supervised by the local Muslim authorities and population.

They tended to build their houses in the Phanar quarter of Istanbul in order to be close to the court of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, who under the Ottoman millet system was recognized as both the spiritual and secular head (millet-bashi) of all the Orthodox subjects (the Rum Millet, or the "Roman nation") of the Empire, often acting as archontes of the Ecumenical See.

[24] The first Greek millionaire in the Ottoman era was Michael Kantakouzenos Shaytanoglu, who earned 60.000 ducats a year from his control of the fur trade from Russia;[25] he was eventually executed on the Sultan's order.

The Orthodox Patriarch Gregory V was executed on April 22, 1821 on the orders of the Ottoman Sultan, which caused outrage throughout Europe and resulted in increased support for the Greek rebels.

The goal of Megali Idea was the liberation of all Greek-inhabited lands and the eventual establishment of a successor state to the Byzantine Empire with Constantinople as its capital.

Subsequently, the Treaty of Sèvres awarded Greece Eastern Thrace up to the Chatalja lines at the outskirts of Constantinople, the islands of Imbros and Tenedos, and the city Smyrna and its vast hinterland, all of which contained substantial Greek populations.

On the other hand, Cretan Muslims who were part of the exchange were re-settled mostly on the Aegean coast of Turkey, in areas formerly inhabited by Christian Greeks.

Article 14 of the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) also exempted Imbros and Tenedos islands from the population exchange and required Turkey to accommodate the local Greek majority and their rights.

For the most part, the Turks disregarded this agreement and implemented a series of contrary measures which resulted in a further decline of the Greek population, as evidenced by demographic statistics.

The events were triggered by the news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, north Greece—the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was born in 1881—had been bombed the day before.

The Turkish press conveying the news in Turkey was silent about the arrest and instead insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb.

Although the mob did not explicitly call for Greeks to be killed, over a dozen people died during or after the pogrom as a result of beatings and arson.

[14] In 1964 Turkish prime minister İsmet İnönü unilaterally renounced the Greco-Turkish Treaty of Friendship of 1930 and took actions against the Greek minority that resulted in massive expulsions.

For example, Greeks could not be doctors, nurses, architects, shoemakers, tailors, plumbers, cabaret singers, iron-smiths, cooks, tourist guides, etc.

It was named Fatih Camii (Conqueror's Mosque) and was built on an expropriated Greek Orthodox communal property at the capital of the island.

[61][60] In August 2002, a new law was passed by the Turkish parliament to protect the minorities rights, because of Turkey's EU candidacy.

This annual ritual continues, although it often sparks debate in Turkey for “keeping foreign traditions alive on the day Trabzon was captured by the Turks.”.

In the Fener district of Istanbul where the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople is located, fewer than 100 Greeks live today.

The majority of the Antiochian Greeks moved to Syria and Lebanon at 1939, when Turkey took control of the Hatay region, however a small population remained at this area.

A 1971 law nationalized religious high schools, and closed the Halki seminary on Istanbul's Heybeli Island which had trained Orthodox clergy since the 19th century.

In this context, problems affecting the Greek minority on the islands of Imbros and Tenedos continue to be reported to the European Commission.

[66] In July 2011, Istanbul's Greek minority newspaper Apoyevmatini declared that it would shut down due to financial difficulties.

[70] On the other hand, Turkish courts provided legal legitimacy to unlawful practices by approving discriminatory laws and policies that violated fundamental rights they were responsible to protect.

[71] As a result, foundations of the Greek communities started to file complaints after 1999 when Turkey's candidacy to the European Union was announced.

[71] A government decree published on 27 August 2011, paves the way to return assets that once belonged to Greek, Armenian, Assyrian, Kurd or Jewish trusts and makes provisions for the government to pay compensation for any confiscated property that has since been sold on, and in a move likely to thwart possible court rulings against the country by the European Court of Human Rights.

However, after the Istanbul Pogrom orchestrated by Turkish authorities against the Greek community in that year, their number was dramatically reduced to only 48,000.

Phanar Greek Orthodox College is a Greek minority school that was founded in the Ottoman Empire in 1454.
Distribution of Anatolian Greeks in 1910. Demotic Greek speakers in yellow. Pontic in orange. Cappadocian Greek in green. [ 22 ] Shaded regions do not indicate that Greek-speakers were a majority.
Agia Triada Greek Orthodox church in Beyoğlu , Istanbul
Pontian Greek ladies and children of Trebizond , early 20th century
The Greek Kingdom and the Greek diaspora in the Balkans and western Asia Minor , according to Professor G. Soteiriadis, 1919
1914 document showing the official figures from the 1914 population census of the Ottoman Empire . The total population (sum of all the millets ) was given at 20,975,345, and the Greek population was given at 1,792,206.
Greek soldiers taking their posts in Smyrna amidst the jubilant ethnic Greek population of the city, 15 May 1919.
The main targets of the Istanbul pogrom ; 6–7 September 1955.
Greek population in Istanbul (1844-1997) and percentage of the total city population
Ethno-religious groups in Istanbul (1896-1965). A multicultural city in 1896, with a 50.5% Muslim population, turned into a predominantly Muslim one after 1925.
Greek population in Istanbul and percentages of the city population (1844–1997). The Turkish policies, after 1923, led virtually to the elimination of the Greek community.