Country: Turkey

Group: Greek

Date Finalized: 10/16/2022

Team: David Hammerle (lead), Nichole Dahlen, Natasha Chandra, Anusha Natarajan

Content Warning:  physical violence, war, murder, forced labor, racism, ethnic discrimination, kidnapping

Approximate Time Period:  1909-1944

The Greeks in Turkey constitute a small population of Greek Eastern Orthodox Christians who speak the Greek language.  Most of them live on in Istanbul and on two islands, Imbros and Tenedos (Wikipedia, Greeks in Turkey, 2022).

In 1909, the Ottoman Empire started drafting Christians, including Greeks, into “labor battalions”, using them as logistical support for the military.  By 1915, they had drafted most Greek men of the appropriate age (Wikipedia, AMPHRC, 2022).  Few survived the brutal conditions (AMPHRC, n.d.; Greek Genocide Resource Center, n.d.). The labor battalions had little access to water or food, and the Ottomans regularly beat them and worked them to exhaustion and sickness (General Overview, n.d.). In one labor battalion in Kydonies only 23 Greeks survived out of 3000 (Greek Genocide Resource Center, n.d.). The Ottoman Empire targeted non-Muslims specifically for forced, unarmed labor because the Ottomans didn’t trust non-Muslims to bear arms (Zurcher, 2013, p. 569-570; Minasidis, 2021, p. 349). In August of 1914, the War Ministry ordered “the labor battalions were to consist as much as possible of non-Muslims” (Zurcher, 2013, p. 570).

In 1941, when Turkey signed the “friendship and cooperation” agreement with Nazi Germany, it selectively mobilized young men of Greek, Armenian and Jewish descent between the ages of 25 and 40 (Hellenic Electronic Center Portal., 2000).  They sent these “conscripts” to forced labor camps in Turkey’s eastern provinces (Hellenic Electronic Center Portal., 2000). In Turkey between 1942 and 1944, the Greeks, Jews, and Armenians, or the non-Muslim inhabitants almost exclusively paid for an emergency property tax. The government sent people who were unable to pay the taxes to forced labor camps (Hellenic Electronic Center Portal., 2000; Wikipedia, Varlık Vergisi, 2022).

We didn’t find specific evidence of Turkey engaging in forced labor against the Greeks after 1944, but the Turkish government only passed laws specifically against slavery in 1964 (Wikipedia, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire, 2022).

Data Quality:   This has a data quality of 3/3 because there was a lot of evidence of forced labor from a variety of reputable sources.

Sources

  1. Greek Genocide Resource Center. (n.d.). General overview. Retrieved October 15, 2022, from http://www.greek-genocide.net/index.php/overview
  2. Hellenic Electronic Center Portal. (2000, October 24). The Greeks of Istanbul. Retrieved October 15, 2022, from http://www.greece.org/genocide/const_greeks4.htm
  3. The Asia Minor and Pontos Hellenic Research Center AMPHRC. (n.d.).The Labor Battalions in the Ottoman Empire. T Retrieved October 15, 2022, from https://hellenicresearchcenter.org/articles/various-articles/the-labor-battalions-in-the-ottoman-empire/
  4. Minasidis, C. (2021). Greek Orthodox citizen soldiers under the Ottoman banner. Archiv Orientální, 88(3), 349–349. https://doi.org/10.47979/aror.j.88.3.341-373
  5. Wikimedia Foundation. (2022, August 12). Labour Battalions (Turkey). Wikipedia. Retrieved October 2, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Battalions_(Turkey)
  6. Wikimedia Foundation. (2022, August 13). Greeks in Turkey. Wikipedia. Retrieved October 14, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Greeks_in_Turkey&oldid=1104207111.
  7. Wikimedia Foundation. (2022, September 19). Varlık Vergisi. Wikipedia. Retrieved October 15, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varl%C4%B1k_Vergisi
  8. Wikimedia Foundation. (2022, September 25). Slavery in the Ottoman Empire. Wikipedia. Retrieved October 2, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empire
  9. Zürcher Erik Jan, & Besikci, M. (2013). Mobilizing military labor in the age of total war Ottoman conscription before and during the Great War. In Fighting for a living: A comparative study of military labour 1500-2000 (pp. 569–570). essay, Amsterdam University Press.