Gisteren werd de Kristallnacht van 1955 tegen Griekse Turken herdacht

A belated commemoration — 60 years late, in fact — was held on September 6 at Istanbul’s Panagia Greek Orthodox Church. It was in memory of the victims of the 1955 pogrom targeting the Polites, short for Konstantinoupolites, namely the Greeks of Istanbul. This was the first divine liturgy-cum-memorial service ever to remember what’s known in Turkey as “the events of September 6 and 7”. In what some refer to as the “Kristallnacht in Constantinople”, 71 churches, 41 schools, eight newspapers, more than 4,000 stores and 2,000 residences were looted or destroyed overnight. The human toll and suffering were even more catastrophic, with more than 30 dead, 300 injured and 400 raped. As one Greek Orthodox community leader recently argued, the greatest damage of the pogrom was to the ideal of equal citizenship in Turkey, not only for the Polites but also for the country’s other non-Muslim minorities. The 1955 pogrom was not a clash of civilizations pitting Muslims against Christians. On the contrary, amid rising Turkish-Greek tension over the future status of the then British colony of Cyprus, the riots were carefully planned by the Turkish government to cleanse Istanbul of the approximately 100,000 Polites, who were excluded from the Turkish-Greek population exchange of 1923-24. Chauvinist thugs, as history has repeatedly demonstrated, happen to be an imperfect tool for social engineering. As one assailant told a Greek Orthodox victim of the 1955 pogrom, the thugs had permission “not to kill but only to break things”. By the time martial law and curfew were declared in Istanbul the next day, however, the death toll exceeded 30. Of the stores looted by the out-of-control mobs, only 59 percent belonged to the targeted Polites, with the remaining establishments belonging to the Armenians and Jews.

Aykan Erdemir in The Turkish Kristallnacht (Politico)