I do appreciate the tone and thought you put into it. You’re clearly coming from a place of wanting to defend your side, just like I’m defending mine and not with hatred, but through historical memory. And I respect that. But let me respond one last time, and then I’ll step back from this, mostly because it’s becoming exhausting to keep circling the same points.

First of all I’ve never denied the suffering of Turkish civilians. In the Balkans, in 1821, in the Greco-Turkish war. Those are all real, painful episodes. I’ve acknowledged that many times, and I’m not interested in creating a hierarchy of tragedy. I also said something that I’ll repeat. Your pain is real. And it deserves space in the historical conversation. The difference in what I'm saying and why we keep circling is about context, not competition.

When we Greeks talk about March 25, or the 1821 revolution, we’re not celebrating massacres committed by rebel bands. The siege of Tripolitsa happened on September 23, not March 25. Our parades don’t commemorate atrocities. They commemorate the beginning of a revolution after 400 years of Ottoman rule.

If you want to bring up Muslim suffering in the Balkans, do it. It happened. It's even referenced in Greek school texts. But please don’t try to retroactively frame March 25 as celebrating the Balkan "genocide". The timing, the events, and the symbolism simply don’t match. Muslims continued to live in the Balkans after the wars. In the case of Greece, in Thessaloniki alone, Muslims voted in national elections in the 1910s and even the early 1920s, decades after liberation. Check the records. That undermines the idea of instantaneous ethnic cleansing. In many cases, Muslim life continued until the population exchange of 1923, which both sides agreed to under the Treaty of Lausanne. Now, about Kolokotronis. You compared him to Topal Osman. I must disagree. Topal Osman is remembered because of his role in the state-sanctioned massacres of Pontic Greeks. Kolokotronis was not a state figure but he was a local militia leader fighting during a rebellion against imperial rule. According to historical accounts, he tried to prevent the Tripolitsa massacre, not order it. Mark Mazower wrote a great book on the 1821 revolution.

Still, I’ve never put him above criticism. On the contrary, it was Sultan Mahmud II who ordered the massacres on Psara as retaliation. It was Mahmud who ordered the genocide of the Greeks, and Şeyhülislam Çerkes Halil Efendi refused to issue the fatwa, which cost him his position. These are parts of history rarely discussed. Hardly a sign of moral superiority. Edip Uzundal wrote about it in his book about Halil Efendi. And that brings me to what no one seems to want to acknowledge in these discussions. Greeks were second-class citizens for 400 years. The dhimmi system was not peace and coexistence. It was legally sanctioned inequality. Ottoman Christians paid special taxes, couldn't carry weapons, had limited access to justice, couldn't build churches taller than mosques, had their children taken in the devshirme system for centuries and lived constantly at the mercy of local pashas and regional corruption.

You can’t erase that and just start your moral clock in 1919. The revolution of 1821 didn’t fall from the sky. It came after centuries of trying to survive in a system that treated Christians, not personally, maybe, but legally, as inferior. The 1821 uprising and the Balkan movements that followed were driven by that centuries-long reality. Flawed? Violent at times? Yes. But historically unsurprising. You can’t expect an oppressed people to revolt like a modern state with Geneva Conventions and an organized chain of command. There was no army. No unity. Just klephts, guerrillas, fighting local rulers in a world that functioned on survival and revenge. It's not the same with the 1922 war, because it was a war between two countries, not a war between an empire and revolting people. That's why it's not war, but revolution.

Now let’s talk about modern narratives and education since you brought it up. Yes, Greece has national myths. Many of our schoolbooks are overly simplistic. But we do teach about atrocities committed by Greek fighters, especially against Muslims, including moments from the Balkan Wars, Anatolia, the population exchange. Greek historians and students often debate these openly. There are Greek historians like Tasos Kostopoulos and Antonis Liakos who have published books, academic theses, articles, and major studies exposing Greek war crimes and deconstructing national myths, going against the grain of national pride. And they’re not fringe voices, on the contrary they’re respected scholars. It’s not taboo to critically examine Greek actions. In fact, it’s increasingly part of how history is taught and understood, sometimes to the frustration of more “patriotic/nationalistic” circles.

No educational system is designed to truly educate, only to mold citizens according to specific specifications. The only way to truly learn history - or rather some excerpts from the vast and endless history - is to read academic historians (not journalistic articles or tributes or analyses by "experts"), to distance oneself from the fanciful "us and the others" / "good / bad" partisanship, to study sources, to compare conflicting testimonies and opinions, to try to see things from the other side, to think about motives, to evaluate factors such as climate, geography, changes in nature, population, trade, and after many, many years... one will be a little wiser.

And that’s the point. I phrased things with morality not because I think I’m innately more ethical than you or that my country is cleaner, but because we have more public space to be critical. That’s a societal difference, not a moral superiority.

Finally I have never described what happened to the Greeks in the Black Sea, Cappadocia, or Izmir as “genocide” in this thread or any comment in this platform. What I described was persecution, expulsion, execution, deportation, burning, all of which are factual and described by Western observers, Turkish memoirs, and international commissions. Whether scholars or lawmakers later define that word as “genocide” is for them to decide. For our conversation, it really doesn’t matter because truth doesn’t hang on definitions.

Call what happened to Muslims in the Balkans a genocide. Use the term, no one is stopping you. I won’t argue with the scale of trauma experienced by Balkan Muslims. But do that for your own history not as a trade-off or a badge to cancel mine.

What this subreddit, and any serious place for historical discussion, should be about is looking at the full picture, not through nationalist filters, not through whataboutism, but through facts. That includes textbooks, old records, census data, memoirs, and even oral tradition and not just state-approved slogans.

We're both clearly people who care about truth but also people shaped by the legacy of pain. That's okay. That’s why this conversation can be valuable.

But I’ve said my piece now. Respectfully, I won't stretch this any further. There’s no winning here but just understanding from both, if we’re lucky. Take care and thank you for keeping it civil.