In what had been described as Turkey’s Kristallnacht, riots that lasted two days on September 6 and 7 1955 targeted the Greek, Jewish and Armenian communities in Constantinople in a crisis carefully fabricated by the Turkish Security Services.
The riots were triggered by the news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, in northern Greece—the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had been born in 1881—had been bombed on 5 September.
The bomb was planted by a Turkish employee of the consulate, who was arrested and confessed, with the aim to incite ethnic violence. The Turkish press obliged by conveying the news in Turkey but omitting to mention the arrest, insinuating that Greeks had set off the bomb.
Then, on Sept. 6 and 7 orchestrated riots devastated the Greek, Armenian, and Jewish districts of Istanbul, killing an estimated 37 Greeks. They destroyed and looted the homes, offices, shops, and schools of non-Muslims, as well as their places of worship. According to case records, 4,214 homes, 1,004 workplaces, 73 churches, 1 synagogue, 2 monasteries, 26 schools, and 5,317 places including factories, hotels, and bars were attacked.
The pogrom greatly accelerated emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, and the Constantinople region in particular. The Greek population of Turkey declined from 119,822 people in 1927, to about 7,000 in 1978.
Historians now assess that the Sept. 6-7 pogrom aimed to further homogenize the “Turkish nation,” an open objective of the Turkish regime, and to create a national economy by ending the involvement or leadership of the Greek, Armenian, and Jewish citizens in Turkey’s economy.
It was seen as the inevitable conclusion in a series of events such as the forcible population exchange in 1924 between Turkey and Greece, the laws that excluded non-Muslims from certain professions; the 1934 anti-Jewish pogrom in Eastern Thrace; the Wealth Tax of 1942 imposed on non-Muslims; and the recruitment of non-Muslims into work battalions of the Turkish Army during World War II were all manifestations of Turkey’s discriminatory policies against its non-Muslim citizens.
armenianweekly.com
