ArmInfo.Deputies of the Armenian parliament, led by Vice- Speaker Eduard Sharmazanov, honored the memory of the victims of the genocide of the Pontic Greeks.
On May 19, Eduard Sharmazanov, a number of Armenian deputies, representatives of the Greek Embassy in Armenia, as well as the clergy and the Greek community visited the Tsitsernakaberd memorial complex where they laid flowers to the eternal fire and paid a minute of silence to commemorate the victims the genocide of the Pontic Greeks in the Ottoman Empire in the period from 1915-1923.
Sharmazanov, severely condemning the crime committed by Ottoman Turkey in Asia Minor in the early 20th century, noted that the genocide of the Pontic Greeks is a logical continuation of the Armenian Genocide.
May 19 is the Day of Memory of the Genocide of the Minor Asian Greeks by the Turks. In March 1915, in the vicinity of the city of Smyrna (now Izmir) and in the Black Sea region of the Pontic region, the Young Turks massacred the Greeks, who were called up to the Turkish army shortly before. Ethnic cleansing against the Greek population of Turkey was actively carried out by Turkish nationalists and under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) during the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922. It was on May 19, 1919, that the day of Kemal's landing in Samsun and the beginning of the second wave of massacres is the day of the Genocide of the Pontic Greeks. The number of victims of the genocide of the Greeks by different estimates ranges from 350 thousand to 1.2 million people.