During World War I and its aftermath (1914-1923), the government of the Ottoman Empire instigated a violent campaign against the Greek population of the Empire. The campaign included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches, and summary expulsions. According to various sources, several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period. Some of the survivors and expelled, especially those in Eastern provinces, took refuge in the neighboring Russian Empire. However, after the end of the 1919-22 Greco-Turkish War most of the Greeks migrated or were transferred to Greece under the terms of the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey.
The government of Turkey, the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, maintains that the large-scale campaign was triggered by the perception that the Greek population was sympathetic to the enemies of the Ottoman state. The Allies of World War I took a different view, condemning the Ottoman government-sponsored massacres as crimes against humanity. More recently, the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution in 2007 affirming that the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities of the Empire, including the Greeks, was genocide. Some other organizations have also passed resolutions recognizing the campaign as a genocide, as have the parliaments of Greece and Cyprus.
From Wikipedia.org
