Berlin Commemorates Victims of Iznik Massacres 1920

The violence escalated and on August 27, hundreds of Greek Orthodox inhabitants of Iznik were massacred by Turkish irregular bands. Their bodies were thrust down wells, others burned and piled up outisde the town. Women were raped on the altar of the town‘s church, which was then destroyed. Another massacre took place at the end of September. The Greek High Commissioner estimated there were 600 victims.

Hofmann quoted from an interview with one survivor, Thomas Anastasiadis. “For 75 days the chettes [Tr. çeteler] had blocked off the Greek neighborhood of Nicea. Nobody could leave. They had placed objects barring the four exit gates of Nicea. The entire town was closed in. On the 14th of August, on the eve of the feast of the Virgin Mary, the day on which our church celebrated, the chettes gathered all the Greeks of Nicea, 87 families, and led them out of Lefke Kapusu [Gate to Levke], eastwards, to the pastures. There they were all slaughtered with German bayonets. They threw the bodies inside a cave and burnt them. They didn’t spare the church either; they destroyed it. They raped women on the altar. Twenty days after the slaughter, the Hellenic Army entered the town and stayed for 3 days and left. They did not retaliate on the local Turks who were not to blame for what happened.“

A further eyewitness report came from Stathis Lolosidis, who had taken refuge behind a bush. He was able to see how girls and women were raped before being killed with knives. “From my family,“ he reported, “they killed my wife Olga, my mother Sofia, my brother Kostas and my child Sofia. I had no one else.“

The testimony of a member of the Greek army, Haralampos Pliziotis, depicted the dimensions of the massacre. He and his company walked around the city in search of victims, and found body parts strewn about everywhere. “Anyone who had witnessed the massacre had fallen into a state of delirium,“ he wrote. Wells were filled with bodies, as were caves. Dizzied and sickened by the sight, the men went into the Greek quarter, “that was incredibly quiet, and then went to the church of Saint Sophia, an old Byzantine church, but we could not tell whether it was a church or a barn.“

The last report cited by Hofmann was that of a British officer who visited the ruins of the city in October. He confirmed that “the entire Greek population of Iznik had been massacred“ in late August and the end of September, before the Greeks captured the city. He estimated the number of victims at “130 families, or 400-500 men, women and children. Djemal Bey is considered responsible for this massacre.“ He added that the church in Iznik, built in 332 A.D., “was smashed to smithereens, only the walls remained standing.“ Reportedly people had been massacred inside the church.

When one reads accounts of such massacres, with the estimated numbers of persons killed, one must not lose sight of the fact that behind each number is a discrete, unique, irreplaceable human being. In closing her remarks, Hofmann made reference to information that one survivor, Thomas Anastasiadis, provided on the victims. She read from his report, “the Greek war correspondent Konstantinos Faltaits assembled a list of the victimized families from Iznik, whose names and numbers we will now read out, as a reminder and commemoration.”