Pontian Greek Society of Chicago

Featured Item of the Month

THE CAUCASUS a chapter in Report to Greco
by Nikos Kazantzakis

Click here - Greek Version

**Our Society is grateful to Dr. Patroklos Stavrou and his daughter Niki, publishers of N. Kazantzakis books, who gave us their permission to post the chapter “Caucasus” from the book Report to Greco, written in Greek. We are also grateful to Mr. P. A. Bien who gave his permission to post the English version. Mr. Bien worked extensively to translate N. Kazantzakis book Report to Greco.

**In May 1919, the Greek Government created a special delegation under the leadership of writer and philosopher Nikos Kazantzakis to reach the Greeks of the Caucasus. Kazantakis' mission was to save thousands of destitute refugees who were trying to escape from the areas of the Caucasus that were falling to the Turkish army. In the interior of Southern Russia, thousands of other Greeks were trying to reach the cities of Tiflis (Tbilisi) and Batumi before the advancement of the Bolshevik army.

In1920, Greece received 110,000 refugees from the Caucasus

I was still in Italy when I received a telegram from the Ministry of Social Welfare in Athens asking if I would consent to undertake the Ministry's General Director­ship, with the specific mission of going to the Caucasus, where more than a hundred thousand Greeks were in danger. I was to try and find some means by which they could remove to Greece and be saved.

It was the first time in my life I had been presented with the opportunity to engage in action, to wrestle with living, flesh-and-blood men instead of having to struggle any longer with theories, ideas, Christs, and Buddhas. I was delighted. I had grown weary of this shadowboxing, of wandering from place to place carrying questions and seeking an answer. The questions kept constantly renewing themselves; the answer kept constantly shifting. Question had heaped upon question, serpent upon serpent, asphyxiating me. The moment was ripe to test whether action, by slicing its sword through the insol­uble knots of speculation, was alone capable of giving an answer.

I consented for another reason as well: I pitied my eternally crucified race, once more endangered in the mountains of Prometheus, the Caucasus. Once more the State and Violence had nailed not Prometheus now but Greece herself to the Caucasus. This was her cross and she was calling, calling not on the gods but on men, her children, to save her. Thus, iden­tifying today's adversities with Greece's eternal suffering, ele­vating the contemporary tragic vicissitudes into symbols, I consented.

I left Italy, stopped at Athens, took ten choice colleagues with me (mostly Cretans), and departed for the Caucasus to see at first hand how these thousands of people might be saved. On the south, the Kurds were nailing horseshoes onto every Greek they caught; on the north, the Bolsheviks were descending with fire and the axe. Naked, hungry, ill, the Greeks of Batum, Sukhumi, Tiflis and Kars stood in the mid- dle and awaited death, the noose growing ever tighter around their necks. Once again it was the State on the one hand, Violence on the other—the eternal allies.

What a great joy to depart for a difficult objective sur­rounded by ardent and honest colleagues. We left the Greek coast behind us; one morning Constantinople came palely into view on the shadowy horizon.

A gentle rain was falling; the white minarets and black cypresses pierced the fog like masts from a sunken city. Saint Sophia, the palaces, and the half-crumbled imperial walls were lost in the silent, despairing rain. Crowding all together at the ship's bow we struggled to make our gaze bore through the thick mist in order to see.

Click here for English version  

Click here for Greek version

Created by The Pontian Greek Society of Chicago with the help of Ron Levitsky, a teacher at Sunset Ridge School in Northfield, Illinois, The Pontian Greek Genocide Teaching Unit introduces middle schooland high school students to the tragedy of the Pontian Greeks who were subjected to the first genocide of the 20th Century. Available to download in English and in Greek.

From 1914 to 1923, Christian minorities were forcibly expelled from their homes to comply with Turkish nationalist visions of an ethnically pure homeland inhabited only by Turks.  Villages, cities, and farmlands across Pontus were emptied and the inhabitants subjected to atrocities under carefullyconcealed orders by government and party officials until the population exchange of 1923.

The Pontian Greek Society of Chicago with the support of the Pan-Pontian Federation of USA and Canada has reissued The Great Betrayal , which was originally published in 1924. Contact us to receive a copy of the book with your US$35 donation to our organization or order online at Amazon.com.

First published in 1924, author Edward Hale Bierstadt exposes the rivalries and competing economic interests of the Allied Powers in the aftermath of World War I, how the Allied Powers failed to demand from Turkey the protection of her Christian minorities, and how they chose, instead, to negotiate economic treaties with her rather than hold her accountable for the premeditated destruction of her own citizens. Bierstadt's account of these events is drawn from his experience as the Executive Secretary of the US Emergency Committee that provided humanitarian aid to Christian refugees deported by the Turkish nationalist regime.