Turkish Armenian MP of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), Garo Paylan has called for investigation into the pogroms of September 6/7 in 1955, Ermenihaber reported.
"The Pogrom of September 6/7, 1955 is one of the gravest incidents that took place in the Republic of Turkey and has still not been confronted. According to the official figures, in Istanbul only, 73 churches, 8 sacred springs, 2 monasteries, 5 thousand and 538 houses and shops, 3 thousand and 584 of which belonged to the Greeks from Turkey, were destroyed, vandalized and plundered,” Paylan said in a statement, adding: "It will be an important step for the Republic of Turkey to confront its past by finding the perpetrators of the Pogrom on September 6/7, 1955, identifying the losses of life and property and compensating the material and non-material losses of the victims and/or their families.”
To note, the Istanbul pogrom, also known as the Istanbul riots or September events were organized mob attacks directed primarily at Istanbul's Greek minority on 6–7 September 1955. The events were triggered by the false news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, in northern Greece—the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had been born in 1881—had been bombed the day before. A bomb planted by a Turkish usher at the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed, incited the events. The Turkish press, conveying the news in Turkey, was silent about the arrest and instead insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb.
