Andonios Dalgas, (1892-1945) was a Rembetiko (Greek Blues) singer of the nineteen twenties and thirties.  Dalgas is the Turkish word for "wave," and was probably the stage name for Andonios Diamandithes.   Dalgas escaped with his life to Greece when fleeing the Ottoman Empire's genocidal campaign in 1919 against the non-Muslim population of Asia Minor. 

As the young child of a Greek Orthodox priest, I would sometimes listen from another room to horrifying stories elder family members and Greek immigrants would tell my father about their lives under the Turkish occupation.  During that dark period of history, speaking Greek in front of a Turk was grounds for death by evisceration, permission to marry (or to be buried) had to be granted by the Turk governing the village, churches were turned into stables and Christian people were forbidden to worship or congregate. 

All these stories stemmed from an incomprehensible event; a time where our people were forcibly evicted from where they lived for generations, of families torn apart, public executions, acts of brutality that fifty years later, still make me sick to think about.  When I asked about what I had heard, my father described this cataclysmic event as the, "diaspora."   

The murdered do not get to tell their stories. 


According to written record, many Christians were burned alive in their homes, driven into the seas to drown, disemboweled in the streets where they lived, crucified - and much, much, worse.  Not unlike the Native American tribes, the Armenian, Assyrian, Kurdish, Chaldean, and Pontian Greek populations suffered to the point of near erasure from history; while the civilized world watched and did nothing. 

Some survived. 

As a child, my great-grandfather was stolen from his family during one of the raids of small islands that contained non-muslim inhabitants.   Gathered with the rest of the village captives, he was separated from his siblings, all of whom were sold at a slave market in Istanbul.  His eventual escape, and search for his family is part of my history.  The difference is that he survived, to write his story in the Book of Life, creating a lineage that would not have come to exist had he been killed, or assimilated into his captor's population. 

While these events happened nearly a lifetime and a half ago, sometimes late at night or when alone in the desert, I am haunted by the unseen faces and forever stilled voices of the family I never knew.   

Who remembers or speaks for the murdered, the victims, the bloodlines severed, the family and friends who never came to be because children, mothers, fathers, all, were put to death by Turkish hands?  

I do.   Others do.