by Benny Morris
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
authority— prob ably Angora,” and carried out, at least in part, by soldiers.181 A purported eyewitness stated that villa gers around Bafra were subjected to “incendiarism, shooting, slaying, hanging and outraging” and that the villages
were “turned to heaps of ruins.”182 The American officers quoted an American
missionary to the effect that about a hundred Greek villages south of Bafra had
been destroyed. Villa gers were being killed and “the priests . . . crucified.”183
By summer, the campaign reached the towns. In Bafra, it kicked off with
an ancient ploy, according to the Greek Patriarchate. Greek notables were in-
vited to a dinner party at the house of one Efrem Aga, arrested, and mur-
dered. The Turks then rounded up and massacred young Greek men.184 On
June 5 Bafra was surrounded by gendarmes, brigands, and Turkish troops—
“a special corps . . . formed for the purpose of exterminating the Greek
ele ment”— who demanded that the men give themselves up.185 Some hid.
The Turks then searched the houses, pillaging and violating “the prettiest and
best bred” women. The men were marched off in a succession of convoys.
The first headed for the nearby village of Blezli. Seven Bafra priests were
axed to death and the rest of the men killed thereafter. One, Nicolas Jordano-
glon, gave the Turks 300 Turkish lira for the privilege of being shot rather
than butchered with an axe or bayonet. Another 500 men, from a second
convoy, were reportedly burnt alive in the church in Selamelik. And another
680 were murdered in a church at Kavdje- son.186 Five convoys left Bafra that
summer. At least two, according to the Greek representative to the League of
Nations, were shot up by their escorts near Kavak Gorge, outside Samsun,
killing at least 900. The survivors were sent naked, “like wandering spirits,”
to Malatya, Charnout, Mamuret, and Alpistan.187 A western report claimed
1,300 Greeks were murdered in the gorge on August 15 or 16.188 The gov-
ernment claimed those dead at Kavak had been killed justifiably in battle,
after Greek bands allegedly attacked Turks.189
On August 8 the Turks collected the Bafran women and girls, “stripped
and violated them and by torture compelled many to adopt Mohammed-
anism.” Those who refused conversion were led off “to diff er ent unknown
places, where many died on the way . . . and the children were slaughtered.”190
The only Greeks allowed to stay were the sick people who paid bribes.191 Some
6,000 Greek women and children were deported from Bafra around August 31
and a further 2,500 on September 19.192
Turks and Greeks, 1919–1924
A party of Americans encountered a column of 4,000 Bafran women and
children, near Sivas. They had “ little clothing, many were without shoes and
apparently there was no food. Their faces were haggard. . . . There were about seventy old men in the party.”193 According to a Greek observer, “a small
number of [Bafra] women offered to become Mohammedan in order to save
their daughters and young sons but were refused. Some on the ground
that they were beautiful and were to be reserved for public use and others
because they were too ugly, poor, or old.” Other women hid; “when they
venture to come out into the streets they are seized. . . . If fine looking they
are taken to harems, if not, are got rid of.” Any Turk could enter Greek homes
with the excuse of searching for men in hiding. But, in fact, they came to
plunder, “even cutting off fin gers and ears for jewelry.”194
At nearby Çarşamba, the “good- looking women” were “rounded up at
night with no clothes . . . and were being held for the plea sure of the troops
under Osman Ağa.” The other women were “marched off ” into the interior.195
According to a Greek observer, Osman gathered the women and children next
to the Tersakan River and slaughtered them. “Eigh teen brides and girls se-
lected for their beauty . . . were distributed among the chiefs of the bandits
who after indulging in their beastly lust for several days shut them up in a
house in [the nearby town of ] Kavza and burned them alive.”
A Turkish notable told an American businessman that “what had happened
made him ashamed to be a Turk.”196 There was apparently some local Muslim
opposition to the Bafra deportations.197 An American officer who regularly
visited the Pontus ports wrote that he could understand the deportation of
the adult males “as an inevitable consequence of the war.” But “to treat poor
women and helpless children . . . in such a cruel and inhumane manner is
an . . . unpardonable sin against civilization.”198
Elsewhere around Bafra, the deportations inland were regularly accompa-
nied by mass murder. At Sürmeli, 300 were herded into houses “and burnt
alive.” By August all the men in the Ordu region had been exiled. Ten villages,
including Bey Alan, “bought off ” their harassers. But some of their men were
later deported, and others fled to the hills.199 An American naval report stated
that, in the Bafra area, “as many as 90 percent of deported Greeks have been
killed.”200 In February 1922 the Turks, directed by Fethi, swept Bafra’s hin-
terland and captured those hiding in the mountains. The interior minister
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
allegedly offered rewards to soldiers “who brought in heads. Five sacks full
of heads were brought to him at Baffra; thousands of bodies . . . strewed
the woods and plains of Pontus.”201
Another focus of the campaign was Samsun, the heart of the Pontus. In early
spring 1921 there were nightly murders in the streets, some witnessed by mis-
sionaries. Deportations began on May 28, when 200 Greek men were packed
off, supposedly to Diyarbekir.202 In early June Greek refugees in Samsun were
told that they would soon be deported to the interior.203 But there was local
dissent. Seventy Turkish notables telegraphed Kemal, saying “it was against
their religion to massacre” women and children. The dissenters recommended
that the women and children actually be deported to Greece. Unusually, the
dissenters were backed by the town mufti, who issued a fatwa against mas-
sacres of women and children. Kemal responded by pointing to atrocities com-
mitted by Greek against Turks and described exiling Samsun’s Greeks as “a
merciful act.”204 The dissenters then warned Nureddin Pasha that the depor-
tations would trigger Greek naval bombardment. Nuredddin angrily accused
them of treason. They complained to Ankara.205 The authorities then threat-
ened to charge the dissenters with “disloyalty.” They backed down and
promised not to “take further steps to oppose deportation of women and
children.”206
On June 16 police began to round up Samsun’s Greek males aged 15–50.207
On the 19th, American officers reported, about 2,000 were “marched into the
interior.”208 Some were accompanied by their families.209 By early summer all
non- Ottoman Greeks of military age had been deported to Greece, “inciters”
were under arrest, and Ottoman Greek males aged 18–32 had been mobilized
in labor batt
alions. What remained were those who had paid to avoid mili-
tary ser vice, women, children, the el derly, and Greeks of “bad character.”
Young Greek women reportedly “provided themselves with poison, to commit
suicide rather than be violated. . . . The price of sublimate and cyanide had
gone up in all the drug stores.”210
In mid- July 1921, the remaining Greeks in and around Samsun were in-
formed that the women and children would also have to go, within three days.
“Everywhere in the Greek quarter one hears women and children crying their
lungs out. . . . They know that they were [sic] going to their death,” a U.S.
naval officer reported. “The police have directed that all valuables should be
Turks and Greeks, 1919–1924
turned into the Greek church before leaving.”211 One missionary later recalled,
“Our house was surrounded by these poor women, hammering at our
doors . . . , holding out their children, begging us to take the children. . . .
They threw their arms about our necks and we never felt so helpless.”212
In December a missionary summed up his feelings about the authorities
who sent the Greeks of Samsun to their deaths, “packed into a barn and
burned alive, men, women and children.” He claimed to know the men re-
sponsible. “The officers who carried out this diabolical massacre have been
here again and again in my home drinking tea and telling me that all the sto-
ries about the Turks being cruel were lies,” he explained. “And this at the time
when they were plotting this new atrocity.”213
The villages around Samsun were also cleansed of Greeks. One report de-
scribed Turkish “excesses” as “savage beyond description. According to es-
caped refugees, am informed that villages from which men have been deported
have been surrounded, fired into by troops and [set] afire, women and children
caught escaping being forced back into flames. . . . Turks sneeringly tell Greek
women to get help from Americans.”214 In two nearby towns, Sinop and Gerze,
during September and October 1921, the Turks rounded up and deported
“all the [stray] Christian children . . . between the ages of 9 and 12.”215
The most notorious massacre in the Pontus that summer occurred in Mer-
zifon, just south of the Black Sea coast. The town had a mixed population of
Greeks, Armenians, and Turks, as well as an American missionary contingent,
which returned after the suspension of their activities during WWI. The mis-
sionaries ran a hospital, and many worked at Anatolia College, which itself
had a mixed population of students and faculty.216 It is thanks in large part to
the international missionary network that the slaughter at Merzifon became
so well known.
The missionary presence may have contributed to the extreme vio lence in
Merzifon, which lasted more than a week and resulted in deportations and
more than a thousand deaths. The Great War had only increased Turkish
animosity toward missionaries. The Turks knew that missionaries had wit-
nessed and reported their war time atrocities, and they may have sought pay-
back. At the very least, the missionary J. Herbert Knapp thought so, alleging
his brother George had been murdered in Harput in 1915 in retaliation for
his testimony about atrocities against Christians.217 Turkish newspapers
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
whipped the people into a frenzy of hostility. As one put it in 1921, “ These
foreign institutions that have crawled like glittering snakes into the bosom of
the fatherland are belching forth all sorts of poison in the name of educa-
tion.”218 Another described “American colonies of crusaders . . . preparing a
place for the culture of the microbes they aimed to produce under the mask
of charity and humanity.”219
Anti- missionary sentiment prevailed among the Merzifon Turks. A Feb-
ruary 1921 incident was a case in point. That month a Muslim teacher at
Anatolia College was murdered by an unknown assailant. The authorities
searched the college and hospital for arms. None were found, but the Turks
did come across lit er a ture they deemed “subversive,” such as a letter from col-
lege President George E. White mentioning Kurdish tribes “reputed to have
been converted from Chris tian ity to Muslimism in the past.”220 On this basis
the Turks arrested four teachers and two students, all involved in the college’s
Greek Literary Society. Two of the teachers and one of the students were later
executed. The college and other missionary institutions were closed, and
twenty- nine of the town’s thirty- two missionaries expelled.221 Even Bristol, de-
spite his sympathies, felt the Turks in this case had been “over- zealous and
unreasonable.” White called the Turks “sedition- mad.”222
It was against this background that the massacres began on July 23–24,
when Osman Aga and his brigands rode into town. They spent four days
pillaging and killing. Then came another four or five days at the hands of
locals, assisted by gendarmes and troops. “The city was comparatively quiet”
during the daytime, as Christians sheltered at home. But at night gangs broke
into houses to steal, rape, and kill. The missionaries could hear “screaming
and crying” from the houses. Hundreds of Greeks and Armenians fled to
Anatolia College. Others sought safety in the city prison, a French school,
and a site described in the rec ord as a “large red house.” Surprisingly, the
refugees were treated well in the prison. But the red house was another story.
Most of the Christians who had fled there were young girls; “all . . . were
violated and many . . . were taken by the brigands when they left the city.”
Brigands also abducted “any desirable girls” from the French school,
which was later torched. The men and boys they took out and shot. Al-
though much of the killing was carried out by townspeople, the local Turkish
Turks and Greeks, 1919–1924
officials said they were “powerless” to stop the massacre. The kaymakam re-
portedly took to his house and stayed indoors until the irregulars left town.
Altogether some 400 Armenian houses were burned down. Curiously,
the Greek quarter was left untouched, perhaps evidence that the affair was
or ga nized and centrally directed. After the brigands left, the rape and killing continued in the army barracks, just outside town. Villa gers and “Turkish
neighbours” went on looting. “From our win dows we saw streams of ox- carts
and wagons bearing away loot of every conceivable description,” Donald
Hosford, a teacher at the college, recorded. Thieves ran off with “wood, cooking
utensils, flour . . . doors and roof tiles.” Wagon- loads of dead bodies were
buried in pits. Some of those interred “ were not entirely dead,” according
to one missionary. Turks moved into intact Christian houses.
Before the massacre, Merzifon was home to 2,000–2,500 Christians. “Al-
most all the men were killed,” along with some women and children. After-
ward, the remaining Greeks were deported. The women and children were
transferred to the villages of Hadji Keuy (Haciköy) and Gumush- Madin
(Gümüş Ma
den), and the men marched off toward Amasya. Some 700 Ar-
menians were left in the town, almost all women and children. The affair was
enough to convince the American missionary Gertrude Anthony that “the
plan of the Young Turk Committee in 1915 has not been abandoned by these
Turks . . . now in power. . . . The Christians in Asiatic Turkey are doomed.”223
The Nationalists initially denied the massacre. “It is not exact that the pop-
ulation of Merzifoun has been massacred and dispersed,” Youssouf Kemal,
the Nationalist minister of foreign affairs, announced. It was a “legend.”224
Later, after telling evidence had surfaced, the Nationalists switched tack and
argued that “the troops simply got from under control.” Alternatively, they also
claimed that brigands were to blame— not the “army.” Besides, if it had been
the army, the offenders were soon sent into battle “and most . . . were killed.”225
Soon afterward Osman and his brigands moved to the area of Tirebolu and
Giresun, where, after killing many Greeks and deporting others, he took the
most beautiful women for himself and his men.226 He was subsequently wel-
comed with great fanfare in Ankara and placed in command of 6,000 men.
According to an American missionary, his portrait appeared on a Nationalist
postage stamp.227
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
The campaign spread quickly from the Black Sea coast to other areas of
Anatolia under Nationalist control. In April 1921, after “incendiary speeches,”
a Turkish mob carried out a pogrom in Adalya, killing thirty Greeks and
wounding 80 others.228 In July 400 were deported.229 In June it was reported
that villages in the Bilecik area had been depopulated, with some villa gers mas-
sacred. South of Izmit, thirty- seven villages were torched; 12,493 Greeks
were reported dead and 2,551 missing.230 In Eskişehir Greeks were hanged
or shot and a portion of the population deported. Women and children “forced
to disavow the Patriarchal authority were saved from deportation and mas-
sacre.”231 During March and April the Turks first deported notables from the
Konya and Şile areas and then all men aged “from 10 to 80 and above” from
