Alexandros Anthopoulos and his wife Athena.
The following biographical note on Alexandros Anthopoulos of Samsun is based on information sent to us by his grandson. The GGRC was able to piece together details he provided with information available in various sources to produce the following account.
Alexandros Anthopoulos was from Samsun in Ottoman Turkey. He and his brothers were wealthy merchants involved in importing and exporting goods such as tobacco and mineral resources to places including Hamburg, Germany.
According to tobacco merchant and genocide survivor Antonios Gavriilidis of Bafra, Anthopoulos was massacred at Merzifon in 1921 by Kemalist brigand Feridunoğlu Osman Ağa and his cut-throats.1 Approximately 1,200 Greeks and Armenians were slaughtered in July 1921 at Merzifon in a massacre that lasted four days. The victims were buried in mass graves just outside the city.2
Anthopoulos's wife along with her three young boys were relocated by Kemalist authorities. They endured a 700 mile trek to a location in the interior of Turkey. From there they were expelled to Greece as part of the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. According to Near East Relief physician Mark H. Ward, who was stationed at Harput in the Elazig province of Turkey at the time, 1,230 women and children from Merzifon passed through Elazig in August 1921.3 It's likely Mrs Anthopoulos and her three sons were in this group.
Soon after their arrival in Greece, the mother fell ill with breast cancer and died shortly after. As a result, the three boys were raised in an orphanage in northern Greece.
One of the boys, Philocles went on to become a gifted student and musician. He entered the Hellenic military initially as a musician but when war was inevitable he became part of the regular military and was on the front lines in Albania when the Italians invaded Greece on October 28, 1940.
After Greece's surrender to Germany, Philocles was in Athens and could no longer work as a musician so he attended the Polytechnic Institute and trained as an architect. He arrived in Philadelphia, USA in 1950 as a Fullbright scholar to continue studying architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, and lived in the US for the remainder of his life. Philocles was born in Samsun in 1916 and died in the USA in 2017 at the age of 101. Of the other two brothers, one died in Greece in the 1980's and the other, who worked in the Hellenic military, died in Greece in the 1990's.
1. Gavriilidis, Antonios. Η Μαύρη Εθνική Συμφορά του Πόντου 1914-1922 [The Dark National Tragedy of Pontus 1914-1922]. Athens 1924, p.140.
2. Harvey. U.S. State Department Telegram. Nov 1, 1921.
3. Ward, Mark H. The Deportations in Asia Minor, 1921-1922. London: Anglo-Hellenic League, 1922.
