What follows is a story about the uprooting of Greeks from their ancestral homeland in Pontos, the Black Sea coastal region. Greeks began trading here in about 1,000 BC, with the first permanent settlements being established some 200 years later. So this region was as much a part of the Greek world as mainland Greece, until the events of the early 20th century. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire saw the rise of the nationalist Young Turks, but also the Balkan Wars. Then came World War I. The Treaty of Lausanne (1923) arranged for an exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. This could hardly have come at a worse time. In other circumstances, many Pontic Greeks would have gone ...
