PERSECUTIONS OF THE GREEKS IN TURKEY SINCE THE ...

PERSECUTIONS OF THE GREEKS 39
intended to mislead public opinion and to justify their
monstrosities. The human heart is torn in the face of
the tragical scenes of these deportations. In order to
understand the magnitude of this tragedy it is sufficient
to note that the deported persons, after being expelled
from their villages, had no right to take with them even
things of absolute necessity. Naked and barefooted,
without food or water, beaten and insulted by the gangs
that escorted them, they were, provided they were not
murdered, led by their executioners to the mountains.
But most of them died on their way as a result of tjheir
sufferings, or were left in the road half dead; women gave
birth to children as they marched along arid abandoning
their newly born babes at once, continued the journey
as well as they could, because those that marched slowly
were beaten by the escorting gendarmes. The end of the
journey of these unfortunate persons did not terminate
their sufferings, because the wild inhabitants of the
Turkish villages admitted them to their villages only to
deal them the final blow.
The deportations from the coast of the Black Sea
and the city of Cydonia (Aivali) which were carried
out toward the end of the year 1916 and during the
year 1917, were of the most cruel and inhuman character.
Besides other cruelties, they resorted also to
arson and burned all the evacuated villages so that no
traces of their existence might be left and that the
ethnological character of these most Hellenic regions
might be entirely altered.
The crimes there committed are of such a nature that
nothing like them is recorded in the pages of history.
In place of any further description of these occurrences
the following extracts from the reports of the Greek
Legation at Constantinople, show, district by district,
the savagery of the persecutions and the annihilation of
the Greek population which was brought about by these
means.