Republic of Pontus

Flag design for the Republic of Pontos: Greek flag with the superimposed eagle of Sinope , the symbol of the Pontic Greeks .

The Republic of Pontus or Pontic Republic was 1917-1920 the attempt to establish a Greek state in the Pontus region in the northeast of present-day Turkey . The government of this state, which was proclaimed by Pontic Greeks living in the eastern Black Sea region, remained only a provisional interim government . The state itself did not in fact exist.

The capital of the "republic" should be Trabzon , Greek Τραπεζούντα (Trapezounta). The national emblem was the Pontic eagle , a symbol that can already be found on ancient coins of the kingdom of Pontus from Sinope and was later used by the Komnenos dynasty as ruler of the Trebizond Empire .

history

Charilaos Filippidis , the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan of Trabzon, was convicted by the Turks for attempting secession in 1920, but escaped to Athens.

During the First World War , the Pontic Greeks rebelled against the Ottoman Empire in Trabzon under the leadership of the Metropolitan Chrisanthos (civil Charilaos Filippidis , later Archbishop of Athens) .

Allied call from 1917 to the Pontic Greeks to rise up against the Turks. On it a map of the area, which should represent the planned republic of Pontos.

First of all, the Russians had conquered Trabzon in 1916, which according to British-French-Russian agreements within the Triple Entente was intended to be incorporated into Russia or a semi-autonomous vassal state Russian-Armenia. With the collapse of the Russian front as a result of the revolutions of 1917 and the entry of Greece on the side of the Entente in the same year, plans also began for the creation of an initially autonomous post-war state in the Greek Pontus region populated by Pontos Greeks and the Ponto-Armenian region , which, however, was supported by Russian and Armenian sides were not promoted.

At the beginning of 1918 the Ottomans succeeded in recapturing the area. After the Ottoman surrender in 1919, Armenian nationalists occupied what they considered part of Greater Armenia . British troops landed in Samsun , Greek troops only briefly occupied Zonguldak on the other side of the western border of the Pontos region. When Mustafa Kemal Ataturk landed in Samsun in May 1919, the Greeks proclaimed the "Pontic Republic" in Trabzon. Trabzon and the entire rest of the Pontus region was awarded to the Armenian Republic in the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920. The British soon withdrew, and the Armenians were defeated by Kemalist Turks at the end of 1920, from then on the area remained under Turkish control.

After the Greek troops that had invaded western Turkey were defeated during the Greco-Turkish War in 1921 and 1922, and after a Greek-Turkish population exchange was undertaken in the framework of the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 , the plans for an independent state of the Pontic Greeks finally failed. The Greeks who converted to Islam during the Ottoman period stayed in Pontos, but were absorbed into Turkish society and were assimilated.

See also

• Persecution of Greeks in the Ottoman Empire 1914–1923

Individual evidence

1. ^ Republic of Pontus (Greece, 1917-1919), Flags of the World
2. ^ Akrites Academy of Hellenic Martial Education: Pontian Eagle. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on March 19, 2016 ; accessed on March 29, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ^ The Times History of the War. Volume 20. The Times, London 1920, p. 438 .
4. ^ Edward S. Forster: A Short History of Modern Greece, 1821-1940. Methuen & Co., London 1941, p. 66.
5. ↑ Udo Steinbach: History of Turkey. Beck, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-406-61561-0 , p. 24. Ulrike Tischler: FEZtgefahren. From everyday life in Istanbul and Salonika. Exhibition catalog, January 19 - March 10, 2007, Graz University Library, Graz 2007, p. 117.