Repost: @HomerPavlos on How Constantinople regressed into Istanbul
Why I'm Reposting
This is a short repost from X. I’m certainly no expert on the Young Turks, the late Ottoman Empire, or the long and complicated history that produced modern Turkey. I do know their history is extraordinarily brutal, particularly for the Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians, and other Christian minorities who once formed a much larger part of the population of Anatolia.
It is especially frustrating to hear how this history is discussed against the background of an increasingly intolerant Turkish state, regressing into Sharia Law. Six years ago, The Hagia Sophia, is a Byzantine cathedral, was reverted into a mosque to remember the Ottoman legacy. Similarly, just this week, Turkish authorities carried out sweeping raids against LGBT+ organizations and venues, detaining dozens of people.
The post below concerns the Istanbul pogrom of September 6–7, 1955, when organized mobs attacked the city's Greek community, destroying and looting thousands of homes and businesses as well as churches, schools, and cemeteries. The violence greatly accelerated the disappearance of a Greek community that had lived in Constantinople/Istanbul for centuries, a process that continued with the mass expulsions of Greeks in 1964.
I’ve covered the similarities between Greece and Israel before, but not the extent of the violence the “Free Palestine” group committed on local Greek populations.
I was also unfamiliar with the poster, Homer Pavlos, who describes himself on X as a philosopher and author and writes extensively about Greek history and identity. His account is written from a Greek nationalist and anti-Islam perspective. I don’t endorse his sweeping statements about Turks, and love my Turkish friends, who understand better than any what radical Islam can do to a country, and the dangers it poses to so-called Western ideology.
The discussed event is not obscure fringe history. The pogrom happened, it was devastating, and there is substantial historical evidence that the violence was organized rather than simply an eruption of spontaneous public anger. Read it here or below: https://x.com/HomerPavlos/status/2089778156710646269
X Post
Aug 18, 2026
Most people never read about the pogroms against the Greek Christians of Constantinople carried out by Muslim Turks that took place in 1955, just 70 years ago. These events took place roughly 30 years after the Greek-Armenian-Assyrian genocide, which was motivated by both religious and racial hatred. By then, the goal was to completely erase every remaining Greek element from Asia Minor.
Their next target was the once-Greek Constantinople. It was a warm September evening in 1955, in the heart of Constantinople, a city still echoing with the ghosts of its Greek-Byzantine past.
The Greek community was already marginalized by years of discriminatory policies, felt the weight of suspicion. After the fall of Constantinople, thousands were slaughtered, but they tried to keep the flame alive. But, on September 6 (1955), a false report spread like a spark in dry grass: a bomb had allegedly damaged the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, near the house where Mustafa Kemal was born.
The bombing was a staged provocation, orchestrated by Turkish authorities to incite rage. By dusk, Constantinople was a tinderbox. Mobs, organized and armed with clubs, knives, and gasoline, poured into the streets, targeting Greek homes, businesses, and churches. The government’s role was clear; lists of Greek properties had been prepared in advance, and the police stood by, complicit or indifferent. It was all staged. A plan with only one purpose. To murder innocent Greek Christians that were living peacefully in the land of their ancestors, in the City that was built by their fathers.
A crowd, chanting Kemalist slogans just like the days of the Genocide of 1922, smashes windows, looting everything; shelves, ovens, even family photos. The mob moves with precision, targeting Greek-owned properties. Churches, like the Zoodochos Pigi in Balat, are desecrated; holy icons are shattered, and altars burned. The Greek cemetery in Şişli is vandalized, graves defiled in an orgy of destruction.
4,348 Greek businesses, 110 hotels, 27 pharmacies, 23 schools, and 73 churches were damaged or destroyed.
Many Greeks were killed, hundreds injured and numerous women assaulted. The mobs, often transported from outside Constantinople, carried out their rampage over two days, September 6–7, leaving the Greek community in ruins.
The pogrom was a death knell. Many lost everything; homes, livelihoods, security. Greeks of Constantinople were reducing over time already after the fall in 1453. But that was the final hit.
The exodus of Greeks from Turkey, reduced the community of over 250.000 to fewer than 2.000 today.
As dawn broke on September 7, Constantinople became "Istanbul".
The last Greeks, descendants of those who found the City, who built the city, who defended the City, who had history in this City, were expelled from their ancestral homeland.
Streets were littered with broken glass and shattered dreams. The Greek community, a cornerstone of the city’s history, was left to pick up the pieces.
That was, the anti-Greek "Istanbul pogrom" that took place on 6–7 September 1955.
These events are fresh in our memories.
How can we forget all the thing they did to us?
They came and they expelled Greeks from their homes, their ancestral lands.
Constantinople, Asia Minor, Cappadocia, Pontus, Cyprus, Ionia. We will never forget, everything they did to us.
We will never coexist with them.
Homer Pavlos
Thoughts?
Can Greeks and Turks forgive each other if the increasingly Islamist Turkish state refuses to even recognize their history? I doubt it. But I do predict Turkey’s economy falling further and further, the state regressing further and further, and then the easy choice to go to war against their neighbors to deflect from taking responsibility.
There are certain groups that you simply can’t live next to. At least until they admit guilt.
