The complete English translation of Lazaros’s 1915 Athens book, Η Εθνική Τραγωδία Θράκης και Μικράς Ασίας — The National Tragedy of Thrace and Asia Minor. The Greek original is reproduced elsewhere in this archive; this translation makes the whole book readable for the first time.
It is far more than an abstract polemic. It is a first-person eyewitness account by a community leader who was himself arrested — and at its center Lazaros tells, in his own voice, the story of his own imprisonment by the Ottoman authorities.
- His arrest. Gendarmes — “over 20… with the spear gun” — surrounded his house, separated him from his family, and dug up his yard and cellar hunting for hidden weapons, carting off four boxes of his scientific books. Finding nothing, they fabricated telegrams to other cities claiming they had found “10,000 weapons, 60,000 cartridges and a box of bombs.” He was jailed about a month on the Soma–Izmir road and released for lack of evidence, “despite the fiery articles of the obscene newspaper ‘Koiullou’ asking for my hanging.”
- Named for expulsion. He quotes Koiullou of February 24, 1914 demanding by name that “Doctor Lazaros Giannopoulos… must leave these places, and if he does not do it alone he must be removed… by the government.”
- A second arrest — “violently separated from my heavily ill child, and sent under police surveillance.”
- Exile and war. Penniless in Greece after his family’s luggage was stolen at the Mytilene customs, he served “10 months… in Serbia… fighting at the risk of my life” as an army doctor. The book itself was written from exile in pieces — datelined “the Monastery, January 1915” and “Thessaloniki, November 1915.”
The book also preserves a detailed, place-by-place record of the 1913–1914 destruction that preceded the great catastrophe — the expulsion of Pergamon, the massacres at Phocaea and Serekoi, and the Metropolitans’ June 1914 memorandum to the Great Powers. Read against the family tradition that Lazaros had once been under an Ottoman death sentence commuted through a pasha’s wife’s difficult labor, this book is the primary-source spine of that story: the “Exiled Asia-Minor-Greek” on its title page was a literal judicial fact.
The full translation is reproduced above. See the Greek original for the scanned 1915 first edition and the full editorial treatment.
