"History of Pontic Greeks (from the Black Sea region) and a history of the Topalidis and Papadopoulos Family from Turkey to Georgia to Greece and finally to Australia." -- Provided by publisher.
“The harrowing story of the slaughter of two million Pontic Greeks and Armenians in Turkey after WWI comes to vivid life. . . . eloquent and powerful.” —Publishers Weekly Not Even My Name exposes the genocide carried out during and after WWI in Turkey, which brought to a tragic end the 3000-year history of the Pontic Greeks (named for the Pontic Mountain range below the Black Sea). During this time, almost 2 million Pontic Greeks and Armenians were slaughtered and millions of others were exiled. Not Even My Name is the unforgettable story of Sano Halo’s survival, as told to her daughter, Thea, and of their trip to Turkey in search of Sano’s home seventy years after her exile. Sano Halo was a 10-year-old girl when she was torn from her ancient, pastoral way of life in the mountains and sent on a death march that annihilated her family. Stripped of everything she had ever held dear, even her name, Sano was sold by her surrogate family into marriage when she was fifteen to a man three times her age. Not Even My Name follows Sano’s marriage, the raising of her ten children in New York City and her transformation from an innocent girl to a nurturing mother and determined woman in twentieth-century New York City. “An important and revealing book.” —Library Journal “What illuminates the writing is Halo’s heartfelt love for her brave mother. An unforgettable book.” —Booklist
Does injustice have an expiration date? Is it possible to wipe the slate clean of crimes of such magnitude, simply because the victims who suffered them are long dead? What stance is civilized humanity obliged to take towards Turkey, who denies the fact that the actions they perpetrated against Armenians, Pontian Greeks and Assyrians amount to genocide? Does not the absence of severe world condemnation entail a share in the guilt? If responsibility is neither attributed nor admitted regarding the butchery of entire peoples on the fringes of Europe in the opening decades of the 20th century, then political expediency has corrupted the very meaning of justice in the world. What obligation do we citizens of the world have in such a case? In the house of the hanged man, we must examine the rope. And we must pursue the crime, so that no one will again dare to set up the gallows.
The author demonstrates, through the history of the Black Sea area and the disputed regions of Russia, Turkey, Romania, Greece, and Caucasus, that "the meanings of 'community, ' 'nationhood, ' and 'cultural independence' are both fierce and disturbingly uncertain."
The final years of the Ottoman Empire were catastrophic ones for its non-Turkish, non-Muslim minorities. From 1913 to 1923, its rulers deported, killed, or otherwise persecuted staggering numbers of citizens in an attempt to preserve “Turkey for the Turks,” setting a modern precedent for how a regime can commit genocide in pursuit of political ends while largely escaping accountability. While this brutal history is most widely known in the case of the Armenian genocide, few appreciate the extent to which the Empire’s Assyrian and Greek subjects suffered and died under similar policies. This comprehensive volume is the first to broadly examine the genocides of the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks in comparative fashion, analyzing the similarities and differences among them and giving crucial context to present-day calls for recognition.
During and after World War I, over one million Ottoman Greeks were expelled from Turkey, a watershed moment in Greek history that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. And while few dispute the expulsion’s tragic scope, it remains the subject of fierce controversy, as activists have fought for international recognition of an atrocity they consider comparable to the Armenian genocide. This book provides a much-needed analysis of the Greek genocide as cultural trauma. Neither taking the genocide narrative for granted nor dismissing it outright, Erik Sjöberg instead recounts how it emerged as a meaningful but contested collective memory with both nationalist and cosmopolitan dimensions.
In the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, nearly two million citizens in Turkey and Greece were expelled from homelands. The Lausanne treaty resulted in the deportation of Orthodox Christians from Turkey to Greece and of Muslims from Greece to Turkey. The transfer was hailed as a solution to the problem of minorities who could not coexist. Both governments saw the exchange as a chance to create societies of a single culture. The opinions and feelings of those uprooted from their native soil were never solicited. In an evocative book, Bruce Clark draws on new archival research in Turkey and Greece as well as interviews with surviving participants to examine this unprecedented exercise in ethnic engineering. He examines how the exchange was negotiated and how people on both sides came to terms with new lands and identities. Politically, the population exchange achieved its planners' goals, but the enormous human suffering left shattered legacies. It colored relations between Turkey and Greece, and has been invoked as a solution by advocates of ethnic separation from the Balkans to South Asia to the Middle East. This thoughtful book is a timely reminder of the effects of grand policy on ordinary people and of the difficulties for modern nations in contested regions where people still identify strongly with their ethnic or religious community.
The first in-depth study of the field in more than 20 years analyzes the role of various metals in the context of Greek economic life, politics, culture and art, traces the movement of metal from ore to finished objects, including works of art, and shows the relations between the regions where metals were extracted and the centres of metalworking, the structure of the workshops and the connections between them and the role of the workshops in economic life at different stages in Greek history. In doing so it adopts a multidisciplinary approach, defining the role of metals in the history of Greek society using the widest possible variety of sources: the excavated remains of workshops and hoards, archaeometallurgical finds; the results of studies of ancient mines and analyses of ancient metal objects; bronze plastics and jewelry, coins etc. The chronological span of the study is the 8th-1st centuries B.C., i.e. from the beginning of the main period of Greek colonization till the end of the Hellenistic era. The geographical scope of the work is the Greek oikumene. New to most scholars will be Treister's knowledge of objects and technologies in the eastern Greek and Roman world of the Northern Black Sea and Colchis. While this book does not pretend to be a definitive survey of the history of mining and metallurgy in the Greek world, it is a particularly useful interim report.
Mithridates VI Eupator, the last king of Pontos, was undoubtedly one of the most prominent figures in the late Hellenistic period. Throughout his long reign (120-63 BC), the political and cultural landscape of Asia Minor and the Black Sea area was reshaped along new lines. The authors present new archaeological research and new interpretations of various aspects of Pontic society and its contacts with the Greek world and its eastern neighbours and investigate the background for the expansion of the Pontic Kingdom that eventually led to the confrontation with Rome.