By Alex Aliferis
9/29/2026
September 14 is the official Day of National Remembrance for the Genocide of the Greeks of Asia Minor, Pontos, and Thrace.
September 1923 holds the bitter memory of how Muslim Turkish forces set fire to Smyrna.
Thousands of Greeks died that day for being Greek Christians.
From 1914 to 1923, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the butcher of Anatolia, pursued a campaign of ethnic cleansing of the Christian Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks. By 1923, the Young Turks mass murdered over 3 million Christian Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks. The Greek survivors were exchanged to Greece.
The German army played a role in helping the Turkish army commit atrocities against Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians. Why? The Germans did not want Greeks and Armenians to access the Middle East’s oil resources. Greeks and Armenians were part of the Ottoman Empire’s business class. The British played a major role in denying the Greek Army in 1917 the opportunity to annex Constantinople and all of European Thrace.
Greeks worldwide honor the 1.4 million Greeks murdered by Muslim Turks. May 19th honors the Greeks from the Pontos region who were mass murdered by Turks. April 6th honors the Greeks killed in Thraki. September 14th honors all Greeks of Asia Minor and Thrace.
This set the course for the final ethnic cleansing of Greeks that remained in Imbros, Tenedos, and Constantinople. Then, the Turks invaded and ethnically cleansed half of Cyprus.
Half of Athens and Northern Greece are Greek, and their ancestors came from Asia Minor. In Athens, entire suburbs like Nea Smyrna are inhabited by Greeks who came from Asia Minor.
Turkey will commit more ethnic cleansing by trying to invade Greek Aegean islands. It is time to retake our lands. Greek political leaders must not visit the grave of the Butcher of Anatolia, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, in Turkey. Maps of Greece include Imbros, Tenedos, Thrace (Constantinople), and the whole of Cyprus.
Greeks worldwide must not spend one dollar or euro on Made in Turkey products or trips to Turkey (unless your ancestors are from Anatolia).
Never again.
Let this be a call to Greeks worldwide to honor the victims of the Greek Genocide by Turkey on September 14th.
Alex Aliferis has worked in Washington, D.C., on issues linked to Greece and Cyprus.
For More Information:
Greek Genocide
Greek Genocide Resource Center
Let me add a few words about a couple of villains who helped to make the horrors of the 1922 Asia Minor Catastrophe disappear from the historical consciousness of the English-speaking world.
There was the historian Arnold Toynbee who wrote in 1922 about the Turkish victory in a very celebratory style.
Following that there was the British politician Winston Churchill who shamefully wrote in 1928, concerning the Greeks and Turks in the 1920-1922 war, that “right had changed sides” as Churchill sought to promote an acceptance of the British betrayal of Greece in the 1920-1922 war.
Both Toynbee and Churchill, still relatively young in the 1920s, went on to have long careers. Their 1920s support for the Turks was not an impediment to them in their subsequent endeavors.
It should be an axiom of the Greek diaspora that any future historians, journalists, or politicians in the English-speaking world who would support future Turkish outrages will NOT have such an easy time of it!
I would add American high commissioner at Constantinople Admiral Mark Bristol.
Bristol was against the Greeks and suppressed reports of the slaughter of Greeks and Armenians at Smyrna.