The Mechanism of Catastrophe:
The Turkish Pogrom of September 6 - 7, 1955 and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul
Speros Vryonis Jr.
Greekworks 2005.
Available at Amazon
At 10 minutes past midnight on the 6th of September 1955, an explosion occurred in the courtyard of the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, Greece adjacent to the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was supposedly born. The Turkish press immediately blamed the Greeks (it was later found that the explosion had been carried out under orders from the Turkish Government).
Beginning around 5pm that same day, Turkish mobs devastated the Greek, Armenian and Jewish quarters of Istanbul killing an estimated 37 Greeks, raping some 200 Greek women and destroying their places of worship. Greek men (mostly priests) were beaten and forcibly circumcised in the streets. Over 4,000 Greek businesses and 3,000 Greek homes were destroyed. The pogrom resulted in the flight and emigration of the Greek populace of Istanbul which once numbered almost 300,000 and was reduced to a few thousand following the attacks.
In his 650-page book titled, The Mechanism of Catastrophe (Greekworks 2005), Professor Speros Vryonis, one of the most eminent historians of Hellenic and Turkic history in the 20th century, proves that the Istanbul Pogrom against the ethnic Greek residents of the city, was a state-executed plan orchestrated by the then Turkish Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and his Demokrat Parti. Vryonis, who also used Turkish archival material (Vryonis was fluent in Turkish), proved that Menderes orchestrated the violence in an attempt to re-direct attention away from his party's failed economic policies and to highlight Turkey's opposition to a mooted unification of Cyprus with Greece. Vryonis argues that the pogrom was a continuation of the Young Turks' program of removing all minorities in order to achieve the Turkification of the country.
In her critique of the book, Fatma Müge Göçek, professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan stated: "Every nation's history contains events it would rather forget, whose memory it attempts to mute, silence and bury forever. The September 6-7, 1955, aggression instigated by the Turkish state against the Christian minorities in Istanbul is one such event in contemporary Turkish history."
The late Vahakn Dadrian, former director of genocide research at the Zoryan Institute added: "The persecution of the Greeks in modern Turkey was and still is an extension of the Ottoman empire's inexorable policy of ethnic cleansing... In this remarkable comprehensive, meticulously documented and massive tome... the distinguished scholar, Speros Vryonis, Jr., underscores a central fact; that the events of September 6-7, 1955, were carefully organised and orchestrated by the highest authorities in Ankara but that, as usual, they went out of control."
According to Alfred de Zayas, a leading expert in the field of human rights and International law and a retired UN official, the Istanbul Pogrom can be characterized as a "crime against humanity" and was comparable in scope to the November 1938 Kristallnacht in Germany perpetrated by the Nazis against Jewish civilians. According to de Zayas, the Istanbul Pogrom also satisfies Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention.
The Greek Government estimated the losses to be over $500 million.
