Ankara hosts panel discussion on 1821 Tripolitsa massacre

A panel discussion on the 1821 Tripolitsa massacre by Greek militias was held in the Turkish capital Ankara on Wednesday.

On Sept. 23, 1821, tens of thousands of Muslims and Jews were killed by Greeks in Tripolitsa, a strategic city in the Peloponnese region.

The massacre was a deliberate and planned part of an ethnic cleansing campaign that targeted Turks and Jews, said Ilber Ortayli, an established Ottoman studies scholar.

These atrocities were repeated when Greek armies occupied Thessaloniki in 1912, which was predominantly inhabited by Turks and Jews at the time, according to Ortayli, who joined the event at Ankara University's School of History, Geography and Languages via video link.

Ali Fuat Gonenc, a scholar of modern Greek studies at Istanbul University, said around 40,000 Turks, including infants, women and the elderly, were brutally massacred, along with some 1,600 Jews.

In Greek historiography, there has been a concerted effort to legitimize the massacre by presenting it as some sort of uprising after "centuries of frustration and anger against Ottoman rule," he said.

Huseyin Avni Botsali, a retired senior Turkish diplomat, said the massacre paved the way for Turkophobia to become "one of the main pillars of the state and nation" in modern Greece.

The vitriol against Turks and Muslims has been evident in the way they have been killed and expelled from Greece, as well as the manner in which all symbols of its Ottoman past, including mosques, buildings, and monuments, have been systematically destroyed, he added.