Events in memory of the anniversary of the Genocide of the Pontiacs are planned for Thursday, May 19th, by the Pontiac organizations and clubs. With concentrations in Thessaloniki and Athens, the Pan-Pontiac Federation of Greece (WTO) and the Pan-Hellenic Federation of Pontiac Societies (POPS) will honor on Thursday afternoon, May 19th, the memory of victims of the Pontiac Greeks. The main meeting in Thessaloniki will be held at 7:30 p.m. at St. Sophia Square and will follow a parade which will head to the Turkish consulate. At 6:30 p.m., the local Pontiac clubs will be gathered in Syntagma, Athens. Speakers at the gathering of WTO in Thessaloniki will be Michael Charalambides and Greek-American politician Leonidas Raptakis and in Athens, the MP of the Swedish parliament, Nick Papadopoulos. Earlier in the afternoon there will be a bike ride on the “Run for Life, Run for the Memory”, inspired by the Chortiatis in Thessaloniki which will end at the time of the gathering at Saint Sophia Square. The bike ride will be also held by the Pontiac clubs in Athens a day earlier, on May 18th. This ride will start from the Acropolis and will end at the monument of the Unknown Soldier, where the Evzones of the Republican Guard will make the shift, dressed in the traditional costume of the Pontiac Greeks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide
Greek genocide also known as the Pontic genocide, was the systematic killing of the Greek population of the Ottoman Empire during World War I and its aftermath (1914–1923). It was instigated by the government of the Ottoman Empire against the Greek population of the Empire and it included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches, summary expulsions, arbitrary executions, and destruction of Christian Orthodox cultural, historical and religious monuments. According to various sources, several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period.[1] Other sources put the number at around 2 million. [2] [3]Some of the survivors and refugees, especially those in Eastern provinces, took refuge in the neighbouring Russian Empire. After the end of the 1919–22 Greco-Turkish War, most of the Greeks remaining in the Ottoman Empire were transferred to Greece under the terms of the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Other ethnic groups were similarly attacked by the Ottoman Empire during this period, including Assyrians and Armenians, and some scholars consider those events to be part of the same policy of extermination.[4][5][6]