Republic of Pontus Δημοκρατία του Πόντου | |||||||||
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| Capital | Trebizond | ||||||||
| Common languages | Turkish, Pontic Greek, Armenian, Laz, Modern Greek (in education and print media). Minority languages in urban centers: French, Georgian, Persian, Italian, Russian. | ||||||||
| Religion | Orthodox Christianity | ||||||||
| Government | Republic | ||||||||
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The Republic of Pontus (Greek: Δημοκρατία του Πόντου, Dimokratía tou Póntou) was a proposed Pontic Greek state on the southern coast of the Black Sea. Its territory would have encompassed much of historical Pontus in north-eastern Asia Minor, and today forms part of Turkey's Black Sea Region. The proposed state was discussed at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, but the Greek government of Eleftherios Venizelos feared the precarious position of such a state and so it was included instead in the larger proposed state of Wilsonian Armenia. Ultimately, however, neither state came into existence and the Pontic Greek population was massacred and expelled from Turkey after 1922 and resettled in the Soviet Union or in Macedonia, Greece. This state of affairs was later formally recognized as part of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. In modern Greek political circles, the exchange is seen as inextricable from the contemporaneous Greek genocide.