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You think these events belong to distant history, but most of you do not know that Muslims were killing Greek Christians until 1922, that is, until about 100 years ago, events very fresh in the memories of Greeks, with survivors recounting what they experienced even today. Here is how Muslim Turks Islamized Christian Anatolia and destroyed Hellenism : The first decades of the 20th century are marked by massive refugee flows, with the primary and sole cause being the national and only identity of the persecuted peoples. Among them, the Greeks and Armenians stand out particularly. Especially for us Greeks, we must say that the Genocide, the Uprooting, and subsequently the Refugee problem constitute one of the most dramatic moments in our history. Genocide, Persecutions and Turkification of the Greek element occurred earlier as well. The mass Islamizations and exterminatory persecutions of the 17th century are well known. However, after the proclamation of the Turkish Constitution of 1908, these phenomena, particularly the exterminatory persecutions of the Greek element, became methodical, systematic, and, above all, based on decisions and instructions from the central authority, the Turkish governments. Research has shown that the persecutions were planned and organized from above and had a universal character. 1. In the first period (1908-1912/13), the persecutions were carried out carefully and somewhat sporadically (murders, confiscations of properties, etc.), so as not to reveal the face of the New Turkey, which from then began implementing the program "Turkey for the Turks." 2. In the period 1912-1914, murders and destructions of Greek populations increased noticeably. Particularly after March 1914, mass persecutions and wholesale expulsions to Greece of entire Greek populations from Thrace and the coasts of Asia Minor intensified, under the pretext that the islands of Lesbos and Chios had been occupied by Greece. From this point, the program of the Young Turk Committee clearly began: on one hand, the economic exhaustion of the Greeks and, on the other, their expulsion or forced flight to Greece, in order to replace them with Ottomans from Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as from areas that passed to Serbia and Bulgaria. 3. The situation became unbearable during the period of World War I (1914-18), which was marked by beastly destructions of Greek populations with wholesale massacres, persecutions, burnings of entire cities and villages, and mass exiles of thousands of compatriots to the interior of Turkey. 4. The climax of the drama of the Asia Minor Hellenism, coincided with the Kemalist period (1919-1922), when the persecutions became more exterminatory and beastly. The Greek populations (and the Armenian ones) were not simply killed with knives and weapons, but died after horrific torments, unprecedented in human history. And not only men, but women and children, without distinction of age. In the Pontus region alone, 353,000 people were exterminated. In total, from the Hellenism of the East (Thrace, Asia Minor, Pontus), around 900,000 people were exterminated (1914-1924). For the extermination of the Greek element, the Turkish authorities used the most terrible and barbaric plans: they looted, raped, burned entire villages, tortured, mutilated, slaughtered, burned, and even buried alive men, women, children, elders, and turned extensive Greek Christian communities that until then flourished and radiated their Greek cultural brilliance throughout the East into vast cemeteries. It is worth mentioning the most prominent of these: Smyrna, Aydin, Kydonies, Prousa, Nicaea (Asia Minor region), Trebizond, Kerasounta, Samsounta, Oinoe, Paphra, Ordou, Amaseia (Pontus), provinces of Derkon, Metron, Herakleia, Myriophytou, Kallipoleos, Ainos, Tyrolois, Saranta Ekklision, Adrianople (Eastern Thrace). In Turkey, Islamizations were methodical with the establishment of special orphanages, where orphaned Greek children were gathered - whose parents had been slaughtered or deported - or children who were forcibly abducted from their parents' hands. In these orphanages' young inmates, pure Muslim and Turkish education was provided, which inevitably led to their Islamization. This exact role was played by the orphanage of Panormos, which was founded at the suggestion and instruction of the German general Liman von Sanders.Another method of Islamization was the forced and violent settlement of 5-10 Greek families in compact Turkish villages, from where any exit and communication with Greek populations was prohibited. Senator Damat Ferit Pasha (former Grand Vizier) reveals the following in the session of the Turkish Senate on October 22, 1918: "The annihilation of the Christian populations is attributable as a crime to the Committee of Union and Progress, and it was a crime committed without any reason. The populations were forced to leave under threat and violence and were mercilessly exterminated… The total number of Ottoman subjects deported in this way amounts to 550,000 souls; I fear, however, that this number is lower than the actual one." Furthermore, Valide Edip Hanım, one of the most distinguished journalists in Turkey, writes in the newspaper "Vakit" (October 22, 1918): "We drove away our Greek subjects and did everything to uproot them, as we did with the Armenians, and for this purpose we used methods resembling those of the Middle Ages… The theory of forced Islamization became the cause of a criminal tragedy in the hands of robbers and murderers. Governors, prefects, officials, endowed with absolute power by the Committee, cast upon the shoulders of the innocent Turkish element the entire burden of the unspeakable atrocities." And the Turkish newspaper "Akam" wrote the following: "The Ottoman government committed these unspeakable crimes, and for this reason the government bears full responsibility…"