Pontic Greeks
EthnicityWikipedia
19
MENTIONS
9
EPISODES
9
PODCASTS
Search complete. 19 mentions across 9 episodes found for "Pontic Greeks".
Sep 30, 2026
Conrad FranzHOST
I don't even really know.
Conrad FranzHOST
Is this like Pontic? So that's like up here.
Conrad FranzHOST
Yeah, Pontic.
Conrad FranzHOST
East Mediterranean type sometimes associated with ancient Scythians, Kurgan and other steppe peoples, common in the Balkans, especially Bulgaria, Macedonia, Greece.
Conrad FranzHOST
Yeah, Trabzon.
Simon Sebag MontefioreGUEST
I think the key thing about the word genocide is that it's historically an incredibly important and sensitive word for the most supreme and total of crimes in world history.
Simon Sebag MontefioreGUEST
And in this book, I chronicle the genocides that were suffered by the Armenian people, by the Pontic Greeks, to some extent by the Maronite Christians during the Ottoman period, the Yazidis under ISIS, the Kurds under Saddam Hussein, and so on.
Simon Sebag MontefioreGUEST
And of course, the ultimate genocide, the Holocaust against the Jewish people in World War II.
Simon Sebag MontefioreGUEST
Therefore, I think it's very dangerous to use the word genocide as a hyperbolic ideological insult on a banner, which is how it's often being used now.
Simon Sebag MontefioreGUEST
But what happened was the Western powers, Britain and France, had decided to really to take, not to give the Turks anything more than a tiny rump state around Ankara.
Simon Sebag MontefioreGUEST
And this was punishment for what they regarded as the Turkish massacres of Armenians, of Maronite Christians, of Pontic Greeks.
Simon Sebag MontefioreGUEST
The Ottoman Empire, far from being the sort of lovely, tolerant, poetry-spouting Kumbaya Empire that often appears in Western historiography, had ended up as a brutal catastrophe.
Simon Sebag MontefioreGUEST
a proto-Nazi, eugenicist, social Darwinist narrative where they had believed that war and the massacre of outsiders and traitors from within, mainly the Armenians, was the only way to save the Ottoman state and to harden the Turkish people.
Simon Sebag MontefioreGUEST
And he was going to have an Armenian Republic that was going to be controlled by America and protected by America.
Simon Sebag MontefioreGUEST
And this explains the approach of these great powers to the Middle East, because In World War I, they had seen how the Ottoman Turks had launched a series of genocidal massacres against the Armenians and the Pontic Greeks and other Christians.
Simon Sebag MontefioreGUEST
And over a million people had been killed.
Simon Sebag MontefioreGUEST
It was a colossal and bloody enterprise.
Nikos MichailidisGUEST
This is an extremely dangerous ideology.
Nikos MichailidisGUEST
And what are the roots of that ideology is Ottomanism and the fact that, uh, this political culture was never punished, it was never stigmatized as a genocidal culture that led to the genocide of the Pontic Greeks.
Nikos MichailidisGUEST
So contemporary Turkish revisionism and expansionist foreign policy is based on a certain political culture, and a political culture that has a certain understanding of history.
Nikos MichailidisGUEST
And what is that understanding of history? That we did not commit a genocide.
Nikos MichailidisGUEST
And the more they started to search and the more they started to realize that this dialect is part of the broader Greek language family, of course, this was a kind of cultural shock for them because they used to believe until a few decades ago that they are the only ones who speak this dialect in Turkey, an isolated group that they inherited from their ancestors.
Nikos MichailidisGUEST
Depending on the political affiliation of each of my interviewees, you would listen to different stories about the origins of this dialect.
Nikos MichailidisGUEST
If someone was a strict Turkish nationalist, he would tell you that if you would ask them, "Where did the language come from?" He would tell you, "We, we learned it from our neighbors, the Romans, the Pontic Greeks, and that's how we maintained it." But if you talk to people who are more educated in Turkey from that region and they are more politically moderate, they will accept that this is a dialect of the Greek language and that they...
Nikos MichailidisGUEST
our ancestors used to speak the dialect and then they became Muslims, but we continue to maintain this dialect and they are very, very proud of that.
CarolinaNARRATOR
They speak their own language and wear Scythian clothing, and their food comes from trees.
CarolinaNARRATOR
The tree by which they live is called Pontic.
CarolinaNARRATOR
It is about the size of a fig tree and bears a fruit as big as a bean with a stone in it.
CarolinaNARRATOR
When this fruit is ripe they strain it through cloth and a thick black liquid comes from it, which they call ashu.
Simon Sebag MontefioreGUEST
They also killed 300,000 Maronite T- Maronite Christians in Lebanon.
Simon Sebag MontefioreGUEST
They also killed over 400,000 Greeks in, um, or Pontic Greeks who were, who were on the, on the Black Sea coast, and in Ionia.
Simon Sebag MontefioreGUEST
Um, they also killed several hundred thousand Assyrian Christians who lived on the borders of what is now Turkey and Iraq.
Simon Sebag MontefioreGUEST
And so this was a deliberate purge, and there are, um, there is evidence, there are directives, there are orders from Talat Pasha and the other leaders to either, uh, massacre these people, men, women, and children, or to drive them out into the desert to starve.
29 MINS LATER
Simon Sebag MontefioreGUEST
When, when I think of the word genocide, as a historian, my duty is not to forget the millions of people killed in the successive genocides in the Middle East that I cover in, in "The Cauldron." And this really starts with the million Armenians.
Simon Sebag MontefioreGUEST
But it goes on all the way through, and we've touched on some of those, some of those stories.
Simon Sebag MontefioreGUEST
The Maronite Christians, the Pontic Greeks, uh, the Ionian Greeks, and all the way through to the Yazidis under the IS- under the ISIS terror in our, in very recent history.
Simon Sebag MontefioreGUEST
Saddam Hussein's killing of, of the Kurds and, um, using of poison gas to try and exterminate the Kurds.
GeorgeGUEST
ministry? My grandfather was interested in the ministry and so was his dad, but none of them were.
GeorgeGUEST
I have a great-granduncle that was part of the genocide with the young Turks back in the day from the Pontians, and he was a bishop, and he was killed for trying to take icons out of the country to rescue them.
GeorgeGUEST
And so there's some history, but my grandfather was a great churchman.
GeorgeGUEST
And so, in fact, he met a saint named Nectarius, which is a healing saint.