Toponym
Erbaa means ‘four’ in Arabic. According to the official records of the Ottoman Empire, this name started to be used beginning from the early 18th century. The original full name was Nevahi-i Erbaa, ‘the four Nahiyes’. This name originated in 1848, when Herek (Erek), Karayaka, Sonisa (Reşadiye-Uluköy) and Taşabad (Taşova) were united into a common judicial district (nahiye).
Christian Population
According to the census of the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople, there lived 6,948 Armenians in nine localities of the kaza of Erbaa, maintaining 6 churches and two schools with an enrolment of 460 pupils.[1] “Half of the kaza’s Armenians lived in its principal town, Herek, located on the left bank of the Iris River 55 kilometer from Tokat. In addition to their traditional crafts, the Armenians in Herek, who were Turkish-speaking, cultivated hemp and opium. The kaza’s eight Armenian villages were all inhabited by Armenian-speakers from Hemşin [Hamshen] who had settled in the region early in the eighteenth century: Ağabağ (pop. 279), Çozlar (pop. 292), Ayvaza (pop. 313), Sankaya (pop. 263), Sarıkaya (pop. 263), Saharça (pop. 180), Hayatgeriz (pop. 120), Gerasan (pop. 220) and Cibrayl (pop. 320).”[2]
Based on a 1911 survey Greek villages in Pontos, Ioannis Sianloglou gave in 1923 the number of Greeks in the Erbaa kaza with 30,000, residing in 63 localities with an equal number of schools and churches.[3]
Destruction
Armenians
In the end of June 1915 nearly 7,000 Armenians were executed on the spot (men), or were deported (women and children) along the Sivas-Kangal-Hasançelebi-Fırıncılar axis.[4]
Greeks
On 12 March 1911, the Greek Orthodox metropolitan of Amasya, Germanos Karavangelis, protested to both the Ecumenical Patriarch and the Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the “unspeakable atrocities“, committed in the village of Alancik in the kaza of Erbaa, by the müdir of the town of Destek and a squad of policemen, who “thought that the dishonour of innocent Christian women was a duty stemming from constitutional liberty”.[5]
Foreign eyewitnesses confirmed that after WW1 the persecution and elimination policies were continued by Kemalist authorities and Muslim mob. In a report to his Foreign Office of 25 July 1919, British lieutenant S.J. Perring described the Erbaa area as resembling a state of war:
“This area is replete with robbers. This situation is encouraged by the local Turks, civilians and soldiers alike. There is an agreement whereby the local military authorities supply the Turkish bands with guns and provisions. Captain Izzet Bey, second in rank, visits the robbers’ villages continuously….
They continue to hold orphans and women and children who have become Muslim, despite the fact that there are orders to do otherwise. Since it is impossible to execute such orders while war rages, the Christian population is awaiting the right moment to leave en mass following the failure of the Allied landings. However, at the moment, it is not possible to do such a thing given the state of the roads.
I received urgent appeals to send military aid here. I request the compiling of a catalogue of culpable Turks, against whom the entire Christian population is prepared to give evidence. There is no doubt that such arrests and removals would be to the considerable benefit of the remaining populace, and might perhaps stop further blood being shed in the future.
The leader of a Greek resistance corps, who recently surrendered, was murdered in the local market, and there is no doubt it was carried out on the orders of the military authorities. The local administrator, who is a hard-working and intelligent man, is of no use whatsoever in this situation as he is an Armenian.
The Greek population today: 7,743. Pre-war: 18,000.
Many hundreds have been hanged. Those remaining died of hunger and disease. They informed us that their situation worsens by the day, that they are unable to cultivate their fields, that they dare not travel even a short distance after dark, and that they are threatened by the Turks all the time.”[6]
On 14 February and 1 March 1920, Efthymios, Bishop of Zela (Amasya) sent two letters to S.J. Perring. In the first, he described the murder of five Greek villagers from Taflanköy and another 15 in the villages of Fundarkli and Zaman, which were near Amasya and Hidiye, and the village of Ferizdağ (Hirizdağ) near Erbaa. In the second letter, together with a detailed description of the crimes, he also reveals the names of the murderers and the instigators.[7]
From 2-15 February 1921, following Christ’s Reception Day, regular and irregular Kemalist forces surrounded and besieged the Greek villages in the environs of Samsun, Amasya, Bafra, Erbaa and Merzifon with the aim of disarming all Greeks. The Turks “started to torment Christian families, so that they would betray those who had fled to the mountains”.[8]
During his raid against the small town of Erbaa, the commander of irregular Nationalist units in the Black Sea region since spring 1915 and self-appointed mayor of Giresun, Feridunzade Osman Ağa (alias ‘Topal’ Osman), killed approximately 700 Greeks. He committed similar crimes in the villages of the Erbaa kaza. “The victims, mostly the sick and elderly who could not escape to the mountains and the protection of the Greek partisans, numbered in their hundreds.”[9]
The orphans of Pontos: The Testimony of Lazaros Iliadis, born in the Youzalan village (Erbaa)
Many contemporary authors mention the orphans from the Pontos, including Georgios Andreadis, who estimated them at 100,000. US relief organizations collected around 25,000 Greek children. 10,000 of these were released to families in the U.S. for adoption. 15,000 were forwarded to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate and taken to orphanages on the Cycladic island of Syros and Ionian islands.
The question here is what happened to the remaining 75,000 children. According to Andreadis, these children ended up in Turkish orphanages and grew up with the Turkish propaganda that they became orphans because Greeks had killed their parents. This turned the children against their original ethnic group.
It is important to remember that the forcible transfer of children from one group to another is a crime of genocide.
One of the orphans who survived the genocide and reached Greece in 1925 was Lazaros Iliadis, born in 1914 in the village of Youzalan from the district of Erbaa, in Greek Eupatoria. He lost his parents as an infant and grew up with his grandmother. He could not remember his parents, but he could remember the hunger and hardships he suffered.
“From the time I was born until the beginning of May 1922, I experienced terrible hunger and deprivation in the village, like everyone else, because the men from our village were annihilated by the Turks and the field work was taken over by the women. In my family, my aunt Despina did the field work, the wife of my father’s brother. My father’s brother was also destroyed by the Turks when he was young. He too was a victim of the Kemalist curse.”
Although Lazaros Iliadis was very young, he remembered the day his village Youzalan was destroyed until the end of his life.
“On April 30, 1922, the great calamity came to all the villagers. Armed Turks from the villages nearby circled the village and pushed everyone to the central square. We were around 120 people, young and old. There we spent the night and the next day, May 1, we took the path of exile, our Golgatha, whose purpose was to exterminate the Greeks.
Around noon we were urged by the guards to get up and continue walking to our doom. Everyone wailed and cried as we were forced to leave our village, our homes, our livestock, everything… forever. No one knew where we were going and what awaited us.
In the evening we reached the Turkish village of Kalé, where we were forced into a pen where we spent the night. The next day we walked on to a small Turkish town where we had to sleep in a pen on the dung of sheep. Also because of the fleas we could not sleep. The next day we had to march on without a destination.
In the evening we arrived in Neokaisareia (Niksar). We stayed in the church that had already been looted by the Turks. The next day, while marching, we were attacked by robbers. We continued walking and were attacked again, this time my uncle’s father was shot and killed because he had nothing left for the robbers to take.
We marched every day, from morning to night, sober and many died on the way….
One day we reached Tokati (Tokat, in Greek also Eudokiada). There we were locked up in a ransacked Greek church where half the floor was full of human excrement from our predecessors. We remained locked in this room for a few days while almost suffocating from the stench. During this period we had no provisions left and the terrible hunger was an additional torture.
After a week we had to continue the endless march. While we were walking through the city, Turkish women threw us pieces of bread from the windows. Here we could see that even among this violent people there were women and men who showed empathy and helped us.
When we left the city, the only thing we could eat was endives that we found on the way. These everyone hastily plucked out and greedily ate them with mud and soil. At one point along the way, a woman fell on the endives to still get them and more villagers fell on her so that she died under their weight.
After a very long march we arrived in Sevasteia (Sivas) where we were put in barracks. The stench was unbearable. Here we stayed for several days without food. We were not allowed out and had to use the same chamber as a toilet.
There I saw terrible things happening. Every morning the Turkish guards came into the chamber and grabbed the prisoners who had not yet died of hunger and deprivation. They dragged the prisoners by their feet out of the chamber and into a ditch 100 meters from the barracks. One day the guards allowed me and my cousin Paulos to fetch water from a neighboring spring. On the way there, we heard dogs barking. We looked in their direction, frightened, and saw a small mound of corpses and skeletons and sheepdogs eating them. It was the place where they threw the half-dead from our chamber.”
Every day Lazaros saw people dying whom he was not allowed to help because the half-dead prisoners were accompanied by Turks. A new march began in Sevasteia (Sivas), but Lazaros couldn’t take it anymore. “When we left from Sevasteia, I could not walk anymore. Because of the hunger and weakness, I was a skeleton. I fell into the ditch next to the road without the guard seeing me.”
The other displaced people had to march on. Hours later, Turkish peasants going to Sevasteia with carts found Lazaros and took him in. They gave him bread to eat and took him to Sevasteia, where a Turkish family took him in.
“I had to watch over the garden of the Turkish family and stayed with them until autumn. By chance, one day I met three women and a man who were Greek. When they realized I was Greek, they sent me to the U.S. orphanage. That’s where I learned that the genocide and the war were over and that the population exchange was taking place. Together with another 2,000 orphans, we were sent to the orphanage of Syros, in the capital Ermoupoli. In May 1925, I was found by my mother’s sister, Aunt Parthena, through the Red Cross. We went to Kastanoussa in Serres, where she had settled.”
There he attended elementary school until fourth grade, fifth grade in the neighboring village of Agia Paraskevi and sixth grade in Platanakia. In 1929, Lazaros moved to Thessaloniki to attend secondary school because he was a good student. To finance his expenses, he had to work on the side. In 1936 he finished school and started his law studies in Thessaloniki as one of the best. He could not finish his studies because the Second World War broke out and he was recruited. In 1941 he married a girl from Serres, Niki, with whom he had four children.
After the liberation, Lazaros Iliadis worked as a secretary in the local court, but because the salary was too low, he came to Germany as a guest worker in 1960. In 1983 he returned to Greece as a pensioner. He died in Thessaloniki at the age of 79. His daughter Despina recalls, “I remember when we were children, he would bring us together and tell his story. How an orphan managed to survive the genocide and World War II. He told us that so we wouldn’t forget his example and keep fighting in life.”
Excerpted and translated from Ηλιάδης Λάζαρος, Ηλιάδου Μαρία: Τα ορφανά του Πόντου. Ασλανίδης, Νίκος: Μάρτυρες 100 χρόνια μετά…. Θεσσαλονίκη 2019, σελ. 120-126 (Iliadis, Lazaros; Iliadou, Maria: The orphans of Pontos. In: Martyres – Witnesses, 100 years after! A historical document with oral survivor testimonies of the first generation of the genocide against the Greeks in the Pontos. Edited by Nikos Aslanidis. Thessaloniki 2019, pp. 120-126