In a few hours in the evening of 6 September and early 7 September 1955, guided mobs of Turks attacked savagely the Greeks of Istanbul and, by means of fire and the crowbar, left forty-five Greek communities in ruins. The Turks, in a performance reminiscent of the 1453 capture of Constantinople by their Ottoman ancestors, terrorized the Greeks while smashing their homes, businesses, churches, cemeteries, schools, libraries, newspapers, and medical clinics. This pogrom effectively ended millennia-old Greek civilization in Asia Minor.

The organized Turkish violence against the Greeks of Istanbul in 1955 is like a mirror revealing the Turkish, Greek, British, and American interests and policies toward each other. The pogrom expressed the massive fury of the Turks who, in about nine hours, wrecked the Greek communities of Istanbul. This act was full of hatred and rage as well as religious fanaticism and economic envy—all having roots in a former empire that had decimated Greece and Greek civilization for centuries. Adamantios Koraes, the father of the Greek Revolution of 1821 and a seminal thinker...