Subject
title
Proclamation Declaring May 19, 2025, as Greek Genocide Remembrance Day in Rockville, Maryland
end
Department
City Clerk/Director of Council Operations Office
Recommendation
Staff recommends Mayor and Council read and approve the proclamation.
Discussion
The City of Rockville is home to many diverse ethnic and religious communities who came to the United States seeking refuge from war, ethnic and religious persecution.
The Genocide of the Anatolian Greeks is a tragedy that took the lives of an estimated 900,000 Greeks during World War I and is noted by scholars as the model used by the Nazis for the Holocaust.
These Greeks, whose ancestors had lived in communities in Turkey for three millennia, were singled out by the Turkish authorities for expulsion along with Armenians, Assyrians, Circassians, Georgians, Jews, Kurds, Laz, and Zazas people from 1915-1923.
Anatolian Greeks endured immeasurable cruelty during a Turkish Government-sanctioned campaign to displace them including massacres, forced deportations involving death marches through the Syrian Desert, expulsions, summary executions, and the destruction of Eastern Orthodox cultural, historical, and religious monuments.
Henry Morgenthau, the United States ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916, accused the "Turkish government" of a campaign of "outrageous terrorizing, cruel torturing, driving of women into harems, debauchery of innocent girls, the sale of many of them at 80 cents each, the murdering of hundreds of thousands and the deportation to and starvation in the desert of other hundreds of thousands, [and] the destruction of hundreds of villages and many cities", all part of "the willful execution" of a "scheme to annihilate the Armenian, Greek and Syrian Christians of Turkey."
The Turkish perpetrators of genocide in Asia Minor were notably brutal when executing their campaign to displace Greeks from their ancestral lands; the former's attack on the latter was widely noticed but largely unchecked by the global community.
Those who survived were exiled from Turkey, and today their descendants live throughout the Greek diaspora including here in Rockville.
Acknowledgment and awareness of the Greek Genocide will not only teach future generations, but also will help prevent such atrocities from being repeated.
Mayor and Council History
This is the second time the Mayor and Council have presented this proclamation.