"The Turkish Pogrom of September 6-7, 1955"

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Title: The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom of September 6-7, 1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul
Author:Speros Vryonis, Jr., Ph.D.
Publisher: Greekworks.com
Place and Date of Publication: New York, 2005
ISBN: 978-0-9747660-3-4
Price: $75.00 clothbound
Description:

The Historical Event

On the night of September 6-7, 1955, the Greek community of Istanbul was violently struck thoughhout the expanse of Turkey's most important metropolis. Within a matter of hours, businesses, homes, and even the churches of the Greeks were in ruins, with the British press calculating the damage at 100 million Britsh pounds. It was the beginning of the end for the ethnic descendants of the city's founders, who had first settled this eastern tip of Europe over two and a half millennia earlier.

This vicious and unprovoked attack quickly became entangled in the Cold War politics of the time, and the truth of it was just as quickly suppressed and, in the end, buried. Now, half a century after the event, Speros Vryonis has painstakingly reconstructed the mass destruction that took place that night in his magisterial work.


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The Book

This spring, 50 years after the tragic events that devastated the Greeks of Turkey's greatest city, greekworks.com has published The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom of September 6-7, 1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul by Speros Vryonis, Jr. This monumental study of a decisive moment in modern Turkish and Greek history is the first work of its depth and range to be published on this critical subject in any language. Without a doubt, it will soon take its place as the definitive study of hte violence it so meticulously describes and examines.

The volume includes an extensive section with remarkable photographs of the attacks taken by Demetrios Kaloumenos, the Ecumenical Patriarchates' official photographer at the time. This extraordinary visual documentation lends additional weight to the archival testimony presented by Speros Vryonis, and to his historical analysis of the pogrom, its aftermath, and its broader consequences.

How a Minority became Community in the Peace Time.