The Istanbul pogrom , also known as the Istanbul riots , [ 6 ] [ 3 ] were a series of state-sponsored anti-Greek mob attacks directed primarily at Istanbul 's Greek minority on 6—7 September The Turkish press was silent about the arrest, and instead, it insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb.
A Turkish mob, most of whose members were trucked into the city in advance, assaulted Istanbul's Greek community for nine hours. Although the mob did not explicitly call for the killing of Greeks, over a dozen people died during or after the attacks as a result of beatings and arson. Armenians and Jews were also harmed. The pogrom greatly accelerated emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, in particular the Greeks of Istanbul. The Greek population of Turkey declined from , in , [ 13 ] to about 7, in In , Turkish then-Prime Minister Erdogan said that Turkey had committed mistakes, and that: "Those minorities with different ethnic identities were expelled from our country in the past.
It was a result of fascist policy. Constantinople modern Istanbul was the capital of the Byzantine Empire until , when the city was conquered by Ottoman forces. A large indigenous Greek community continued to live in the multi-ethnic Ottoman capital city and enjoyed a relatively protected status under the Ottoman Millet system.
The city's Greek population, particularly the Phanariotes , came to play a significant role in the social and economic life of the city and in the political and diplomatic life of the Islamic but multi-ethnic, multi-religious Ottoman Empire in general. But due to the Greeks' strong emotional attachment to their first capital as well as the importance of the Ecumenical Patriarchate for Greek and worldwide Orthodoxy, the Greek population of Istanbul was specifically exempted and allowed to stay in place.
Punitive Turkish nationalist exclusivist measures, such as a parliamentary law, barred Greek citizens living in Turkey from a series of 30 trades and professions from tailoring and carpentry to medicine , law and real estate. In the early s, Turkey had close relations with Greece. However, the relations soured starting in , when the armed struggle of the Greek Cypriots , the majority of the island's population, aiming for political union of Cyprus with Greece, started.
