On September 6-7, 1955, carefully staged government-sponsored riots caused irreparable harm to the Greek community in Istanbul, Turkey.
The events began after false news spread that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki had been bombed the day before. The consulate was the house where Turkish Republic founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was born in 1881.
Well documented by Greek and Turkish historians alike, the Istanbul pogroms are detailed in an article by Speros Vryonis Jr., a late Greek-American historian who specialized in Byzantine, Balkan and Greek history and author of various works on Byzantine and Greek-Turkish relations.
Vyronis carefully investigates the incident in his book titled “The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom of September 6 – 7, 1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul.”
Dozens of photos from various Turkish news archives that have only recently been made public from the September 1955 riots against the Greek community
