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A recent statement by a Turkish mayor belonging to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) was particularly noteworthy in the wake of the US Senate's December 12 resolution to "commemorate the Armenian Genocide through official recognition and remembrance."
Mayor Hayrettin Güngör of Kahramanmaraş was caught on camera telling a woman from Trabzon, "We made you Muslim."
He seems to have been referring to the fact that Trabzon, as other provinces in the Black Sea region, used to be a Greek Orthodox Christian city, which is now Muslim -- in spite of the thousands of people in the area who still speak the Pontic Greek dialect.
After an angry public response to the statement, Güngör phoned the mayor of Trabzon to apologize. As offensive as his claim may have been, however, he was actually revealing a tragic truth: that many Turkish citizens are descendants of forcibly Islamized Christians.
Prior to the Turkish invasion of Asia Minor in the 11th century -- and the fall of Constantinople (Istanbul) to Ottoman Turks in the 15th century -- the lands that comprise contemporary Turkey were part of the Greek-speaking Christian Byzantine Empire.
When the Ottoman Turks captured the Greek Empire of Trebizond (today's Trabzon) in 1461, there were virtually no Muslims in the region. In the decades and centuries following the Ottoman conquest, many Christians converted to Islam. The local Muslim derebeys (valley lords) and the Ottoman state and army, via periodic acts of violence, special taxation (jizya), social segregation, systematic mistreatment and humiliation inexorably pushed the Christian population to Islamization for the sake of survival.
The Asia Minor and Pontos Hellenic Research Center reports:
"The Turkish persecution of Pontian Greeks and other Christian peoples began after the fall of Trabzon, starting slowly at first and gradually becoming more widespread and terrifying. Massacres and deportations became more frequent and intense. Many Christians reluctantly converted to Islam to avoid oppression and discrimination and merely to survive. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, approximately 250,000 Pontian Greeks were forced to convert to Islam and speak Turkish. Almost 250,000 migrated to areas of the Caucasus and the northern shores of the Black Sea that Russia controlled."
The conquests by Turks resulted in the violent and destructive Islamization of the Byzantine civilization. Historian Professor Speros Vryonis Jr writes:
"The [Turkish] conquests in Anatolia were prolonged, repeated (lasting from the 11th-15th centuries), quite destructive and disruptive of life and property.
"The conquest of Asia Minor virtually destroyed the Anatolian Church. The ecclesiastical administrative documents reveal an almost complete confiscation of church property, income, buildings, and the imposition of heavy taxes by the Turks."
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