In his greeting during the opening ceremony of the monument to the families of refugees from Asia Minor Anavyssos, the former President of the Republic and Honorary Professor of the Faculty of Law of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Mr. Prokopios Pavlopoulos stressed, among other things, the following:

“With a feeling of holy compunction, I am with you today to honor the history and sacrifices of the expelled — those who escaped the “fire and knife” of the barbaric and harsh Genocide carried out by the Turkish hordes at the expense of the Hellenism of Asia Minor, in the middle of 1922-1923. – Greeks who left as refugees mainly from Phocaea to Asia Minor to get here, to Anavyssos. And in their memory to honor in general the history and victims of all the victims of the Genocide and the eradication of Hellenism, after millennia, from the land of Asia Minor.

I. I must also pay tribute to our great writer Ilias Venezis – the “child of eradication” from Kydonia (Ayvali) in Asia Minor – who fictionalized the Genocide and the refugee in his unofficial trilogy The Number 31328 (1931). ), “Calm” (1937) and “Windy Land” (1943). Let me focus my salutation for a moment on “Galini”, which describes how some of the refugees from Phocaea came to the then barren “sand” of Anabyssos in the autumn of 1924, with representative examples of two families: Dr. Dimitris Veni and farmer Fotis Glaros. And how, faced with fate itself and the heavy human “price”, they laid here, in Anavyssos, the foundations for the next generations: refugees in the “fatherland”, from “Golgotha” to “Resurrection”.

II. I said at the beginning that we are gathered today to honor in general the history and sacrifices of the Greeks of Asia Minor. And for this we are obliged to admit this: 100 years later, we owe them, among other things, of course, for the fact that they indelibly and beneficially “damaged” our modern history, and above all, the economic and especially the spiritual life of Our place. In other words, our debt to them is enormous for the economic progress of our Greece to date and for the “flourishing” of our Culture, primarily through the invaluable contribution of their own intellectual creativity.

III. However, we must go back many centuries, mainly to the 6th and 5th centuries BC, in order to appreciate the historical significance of another, albeit completely different, “escape”. It was then that the Ionian Greeks, especially through the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, most of all contributed to the “glorious flow” of the free and creative Greek Spirit and the “birth” of the Sciences, they carried the “torch” this symbolic path both to Ancient Greece – and above all to Ancient Athens, in order to start the “Golden Age” – and to the Black Sea, where they founded colonies that “wrote” some of the most brilliant mosaics of our History and our Culture.
IV. Of course, and as I have already found out, the historical circumstances were quite different under which the Tragedy – in the ancient sense of the word – of the eradication of the Greeks of Asia Minor between 1922-1923 occurred. But in a way, the “parallel” stories I’ve been talking about agree that we Greeks, as the guardians of our Culture as a whole, but also of our pan-European Culture, which owes its birth to Ancient Greece, Its democracy and its Culture – we must not allow oblivion to cover the glorious but bloody History of Hellenism in Asia Minor in its entirety, from antiquity to the present.
And this is because History must remain alive in order to teach even the future, to quote the saying attributed to Lamartine. And this teaching is irreplaceable and priceless.

Eternal memory to them.