CONSTANTINOPLE 1955 POGROM: THE CASE FOR GENOCIDE

 

The memory of the Greeks of Constantinople stirs the heartstrings of our people. It evokes an ever absent presence, a community whose voices, though long silenced, continue to haunt the boulevards of Pera, the shores of the Bosporus, the sokaks of Fanari. Their absence is palpable, for they remain everywhere in memory while scarcely present in fact. The calamity that befell them in September of 1955 is often called by us a διωγμός, a violent expulsion, one in a series of many. At times it is even described as a pogrom, a word that hints at mob violence yet conceals the deeper design behind the catastrophe. Increasingly, however, legal and genocide scholars argue that what took place in Constantinople over the course of those harrowing September days constitutes a form genocide, orchestrated with intent to destroy a people whose roots in the City stretched back to its very founding.

International jurisprudence and critical theory alike remind us that memory is never static. It is contested, framed, and given form through power. The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, far from being an inert legal document, functions as a living instrument of moral judgment. Article 2 does not measure crimes against humanity through the number of corpses or through the erection of exterminatory camps. Instead, it identifies the essence of genocide as intent, the demonstrable will to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.

It is precisely here that the 1955 Constantinople pogrom becomes relevant. Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, jurist and scholar of international law, has argued persuasively in his The Genocide against the Armenians 1915–1923 and the Relevance of the 1948 Genocide Convention that the destruction of minorities in Turkey, including the events of 1955, satisfies the criteria set forth by the Convention. The orchestrated nature of the pogrom, conceived within the apparatus of the Menderes government, is a matter of record. The systematic targeting of Greek property was no spontaneous eruption of popular anger. It was state-sponsored devastation designed to terrorise a community into flight, and to erase its historical presence in the Queen of Cities.

The framework of genocide that emerges from the scholarship of Raphael Lemkin, William Schabas, Leo Kuper, Helen Fein, and Jacques Semelin illuminates the meaning of the September catastrophe. Lemkin, in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), who gave the world the very term genocide, insisted that cultural annihilation was as central to the crime as physical extermination. In Constantinople, churches were desecrated, cemeteries such as that at Valoukli defiled, and schools attacked, acts intended to sever the continuity of a community. The pogrom therefore exemplifies precisely the kind of cultural and spiritual destruction that Lemkin feared and sought to define.

Later jurists such as William Schabas, in Genocide in International Law (2000, 2009), have demonstrated that numbers cannot serve as the decisive criterion in defining genocide. What matters is intent, the demonstrable aim to extinguish a community’s existence. The Greek deaths in 1955 may have been limited in number, yet the terror unleashed, the displacement that followed, and the creation of conditions that made continued residence impossible align exactly with the principles Schabas identifies. By this measure, the pogrom speaks unmistakably of genocidal purpose.

The orchestrated nature of the pogrom also reflects Leo Kuper’s observation in Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (1981) that genocide often conceals itself under the mask of public disorder while being directed from above. The provision of vehicles to carry looters, the preparation of lists of Greek owned shops, and the studied paralysis of the police reveal an operation coordinated by the state itself. Far from being the product of mob frenzy, the pogrom demonstrates Kuper’s insight that the state frequently operates through the guise of popular tumult in order to achieve its destructive ends. Critical theorists of violence, from Hannah Arendt to Giorgio Agamben, agree, having demonstrated that the power of the state often manifests itself through the creation of zones of exception, in which law is suspended in order to annihilate the other.

Helen Fein’s characterisation of genocide as the destruction of a collectivity, articulated in Accounting for Genocide (1979) and later in Genocide: A Sociological Perspective (1993), captures the longer trajectory of Hellenism in Constantinople. Already weakened by the confiscatory wealth tax of 1942 and continuing restrictions on property and professional life, the Greek community faced in 1955 a blow that destroyed the foundations of its social viability. The demolition of homes, businesses, and sacred institutions ensured that communal life could no longer be sustained, forcing thousands into exile and leaving only fragments of a once flourishing presence in the city.

Finally, Jacques Semelin, in his Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide (2007), has emphasised the symbolic dimension of genocidal violence, where the annihilation of cultural and religious symbols becomes a means of erasing the identity of a group. The profanation of Orthodox altars, the desecration of holy icons, and the violation of tombs during the pogrom cannot be dismissed as vandalism. They were ritualised gestures of destruction, calculated to declare that the Greek community was to be erased both physically and spiritually.

Contemporary genocide scholars such as Dominik Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer have located the crime within broader structural processes of state formation and ethnic homogenisation. In Late Ottoman Genocides (2009), Schaller examines the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek cases as interrelated strategies of the late Ottoman and early Republican elite, aimed at dissolving pluralism and producing a homogeneous nation. Zimmerer, in Colonial Genocide and the Holocaust (2008), likewise interprets genocide as a recurring instrument of statecraft, used to eliminate perceived obstacles to national or imperial projects. Within this framework, the 1955 pogrom in Constantinople cannot be read as an isolated episode. It represents the continuation of policies of ethnic cleansing that had begun with the destruction of Armenians in 1915 and extended through the expulsions of Greeks from Asia Minor. The September catastrophe emerges as part of a continuum of state-directed attempts to forge a culturally uniform polity through the elimination of minorities, rather than as an aberration of mob violence. It is, a genocide.

Accepting the events of 1955 as genocide carries significant implications for international law. Such a recognition would confirm that astronomical body counts or the infrastructure of extermination camps are not required for the crime of genocide to be established. In the case of Akayesu, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda affirmed that rape and forced displacement, when carried out with the intent to destroy a community, fall within the definition of genocide. In its judgments on Srebrenica, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia underscored that the destruction of even a part of a group within a geographically confined space could constitute genocide. Precedents of this kind demonstrate that the pogrom of Constantinople belongs squarely within established jurisprudence, where intent carries decisive weight and the method of destruction is legally secondary.

The recognition of the pogrom also sharpens the kinds of questions that must be asked about conflicts in our own time. When communities are uprooted en masse, when their cultural symbols are deliberately obliterated, and when language is deployed to dehumanise them or to call for their disappearance, does this not raise the same legal and moral concerns? Ongoing debates over whether the violence in Ukraine or in Gaza should be framed in terms of genocide, together with similar questions arising from conflicts elsewhere in the world, illustrate how contested and fraught such determinations remain. The case of Constantinople demonstrates that genocide can take the form of devastation directed at homes, churches, and livelihoods as readily as it can manifest through mass killing. Recognition strengthens the principle that international law must guard against every form of annihilation, regardless of scale or method.

The legacy of 1955 also invites reflection on the broader Hellenic experience. The invasion of Cyprus in 1974 brought mass displacement, the destruction of cultural heritage, and the long-term severance of communities from ancestral homes. Can such events be understood through a similar lens? Scholarship has rarely addressed this question within the framework of genocide studies, yet the echoes are undeniable. Raising the question does not collapse distinct histories into one. Instead it underscores the importance of applying legal categories consistently and confronting difficult truths about intent, destruction, and accountability. This is particularly pertinent considering that in 2020, the Turkish Parliamentary Speaker’s Office rejected a draft bill seeking to have the pogrom recognised as a national day of mourning. Parliamentary Speaker Mustafa Şentop noted that he found the wording used in the draft bill as “rough and hurtful.”

Calling the Constantinople pogrom a genocide is an act that demands coherence and integrity in international law. Such a step would affirm that smaller-scale yet decisive campaigns of eradication fall within the scope of the Genocide Convention. It would confirm that the destruction of a group, whether achieved through displacement, humiliation, or cultural annihilation, is no less grievous than the destruction of life itself. In an age when international bodies hesitate to apply the word genocide for fear of political repercussions, Constantinople offers a touchstone: an insistence that international law must speak clearly against any intent to destroy a people.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 20 September 2025