The Greeks were the second largest population group in the Ottoman Empire before the Asia Minor Catastrophe. What other peoples disappeared?

In such days in Smyrna in 1922, Hellenism, which had been present in Asia Minor for millennia, forcibly bid farewell to its ancestral land. The Asia Minor catastrophe, combined with the end of the Ottoman Empire and the need for a new, more homogeneous state, led to the cleaning of Constantinople from the Roman element in the following decades.

The map clearly shows (in blue) the areas where Greeks were the dominant population: Part of present-day European Turkey and Constantinople, the entire coastal front to the Aegean, the banks of the Black Sea, the Asian part of the Marmara Sea, in the region of Bithynia, and several parts in the south, in the region of Cilicia and in the interior.

According to 1912 statistics, Hellenism accounted for nearly 20% of the Asia Minor and was the largest minority in the Ottoman Empire. At a time when censuses were conducted mainly by religion and dogma, the number of Muslims (Turks, Kurds, Circassians, Arabs and Albanians) was 7.2 million, Greeks 2 million, Armenians 649 thousand, Jews 78 thousand, Bulgarians 6 thousand, Gypsies 19 thousand and the foreign population 220 thousand. According to the census, the total population of Asia Minor then reached 10.2 million people.

In less than 100 years and according to unofficial data, of the 2 million Greeks, we have now reached a population estimated at 5 thousand, living mainly in Constantinople.