“The goal was destruction”: evidence of the Pontian genocide (video)

ERT News reminded me of the tragedy Pontic Greeks through archival evidence of deportations, famine, disease and death in exile.

May 19V Remembrance Day of the Pontic Greek Genocide, ERT News turned to archival evidence that again shows the human dimension of this tragedy. The material centers on a story about deportations 1916when thousands of Pontians were forcibly sent into the interior Asia Minor.

In publication ERT News it is emphasized that May 19 remains one of the darkest dates in history Hellenism. This day is associated with the arrival Mustafa Kemal Ataturk V Samsun and the beginning of the second, more brutal and massive stage of persecution against Pontic Greeks.

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— Athens News (@russianathens) May 19, 2026

Video with subtitles in Russian

The reason for the material was an archival fragment from the program “My memory is called Pontus” (“Μνήμη μου σε λένε Πόντο”), published on ERT V 2011. In it Panos Iliadis talks about the dramatic fate of his family during the deportations.

According to him, the test for thousands of Pontians has begun November 15, 1916. His father, along with his parents and sisters, was expelled and sent deep into Asia Minor. People were driven into conditions of winter, hunger, cold and complete insecurity.

“The goal was their destruction in exile. The so-called white death,” leads ERT News evidence from the archive.

The family was sent to an Armenian village in the interior of the region Kerasunta. A typhus epidemic broke out there. Exhausted by hunger, dirt and deprivation, people died en masse. According to Iliadis’ account, even the Turkish gendarmes accompanying the exiles left the area for fear of contracting the disease.

In this tragedy the narrator’s grandfather and 17 year old sister his father Paraskevi. The last memory of my grandfather is associated with a short but terrible phrase about a lost life, home and prosperity: everything that the family had disappeared along with the world in which they lived.

This testimony is important not only as a private family history. It shows that the deportations of the Pontians were not “relocations,” as convenient versions of history like to portray, but a mechanism of physical destruction: through hunger, disease, cold, isolation and the complete deprivation of people’s ability to survive.

Archival material ERT reminds: behind the big historical formulas – genocide, deportation, Asia Minor, Pont — there are specific families, names, children, old people and people who were deprived not only of their home, but also of their future.

For Pontic Hellenism May 19 remains more than just a memorable date. This is the day when personal testimony returns history to its true meaning. Not a dry line in a textbook, not a diplomatic formulation, but human pain that cannot be canceled even by the most convenient silence.

Source: ERT News

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