Members of a nongovernmental organization marched toward the Greek Consulate in the northwestern province of Edirne and laid a black wreath there on Tuesday, on the anniversary of the massacre of Turks by Greeks in the Peloponnese in 1821.
The massacre where Jews and Albanians were also slaughtered is a dark chapter in Greece’s war for independence from Ottoman rule.
On the 204th anniversary of the incident, the Edirne branch of the Confederation of Balkan Rumelian Turks staged a march carrying a banner reading “We will never forget the Mora massacre,” using another name for the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece.
Speaking on behalf of the activists, Gülsüm Kaynaklar reiterated that not a single Muslim Turk was left in Mora after the massacre, where women and children were also slaughtered. Kaynaklar said the Greek gangs also went after Albanians and Jews and indiscriminately killed them. “This terror took place in so-called ‘modern’ Europe. The history will not forgive the massacre of tens of thousands of Turks and the unspeakable torture they suffered,” she said.
She stated that Greece to this day continues to violate human rights with its approach to the Turkish minority in the Western Thrace region. “They shut down minority schools of Turks with made-up excuses, they deny the right to the Muslim community to elect their own leader, they deny the minority to use the name 'Turkish' in their associations,” Kaynaklar said. She added that they invited Greece to confront its past and apologize for the massacre and safeguard the basic human rights of the Turkish minority, in line with the Treaty of Lausanne.
