ESCAPE FROM ASIA MINOR
The Memoir of a Native Greek Pharmacist who served in the Ottoman and Kemalist Armies during the Greek Genocide
By Michail Angelou
Greek Genocide Resource Center, 2024.
282 pages.
Even the most loyal of Ottoman subjects were not spared persecution.
After serving valiantly in the Ottoman Army during World War 1, native Greek pharmacist Michail Angelou of Küplü in Asia Minor was expecting a peaceful life after the war. Instead, he was arrested and imprisoned for no reason. During a period of persecution and genocide in Ottoman Turkey and with the fear of massacre and relocation constantly on his mind, Angelou joined the newly-formed Kemalist army, thinking he would be protected from ill-treatment. But that wasn't the case.
As a paid member of the Kemalist army, Angelou was privy to the policies of the Kemalists. So after learning of the Kemalist plan to exterminate the remaining Christians in Turkey, Angelou knew that his only chance of survival, was to escape from Asia Minor.
"Angelou’s first hand account of the Genocide of Greeks and other indigenous Christian communities during the period – as an insider – provides a unique but crucial dimension to our understanding of the events."
— Vicken Babkenian, co-author of Armenia, Australia and the Great War (Newsouth Publishing, 2016).
"This detailed, matter-of-fact memoir of the genocide of the Greeks and other indigenous Christian populations in the Ottoman Empire shows better than most other contemporary sources how the Asia Minor tragedy was indeed a tragedy on many levels."
— Matthias Bjørnlund, author of The Armenian Genocide From the Beginning to the End (Copenhagen 2013), co-editor of The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks: Studies of the State-Sponsored Campaign of Extermination of the Christians of Asia Minor (1912-1922) and Its Aftermath; History, Law, Memory (2012).
