Republic of Pontus
| Autonomous Republic of Pontus | ||||||||||
| Αυτόνομη Δημοκρατία του Πόντου | ||||||||||
| Independence | ||||||||||
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 Map of Pontus
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| Capital | Samsounta | |||||||||
| Languages | Greek | |||||||||
| Religion | Eastern Orthodox | |||||||||
| Political structure | Independence | |||||||||
| Primary leader | Leonidas Iasonidis | |||||||||
| History | ||||||||||
| • | Independence | 1917 | ||||||||
| • | Pontic Greek population expelled from Turkey | 1922 | ||||||||
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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 Pontos 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. Neither state came into existence and the Pontic Greek population was expelled from Turkey after 1922 and resettled in the Soviet Union or in Greek Macedonia. This state of affairs was later formally recognized as part of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923.
Greek colonies were established on the Pontus coast in 800 BC, and by the time of the conquests of Alexander the Great the local inhabitants were already heavily Hellenized. By the 4th century AD Greek had become the sole spoken language in the region, and it would remain so for a thousand years, first under the Byzantine Empire and then the Empire of Trebizond, a Byzantine successor state. In 1461 the Ottoman Empire conquered Pontus, but the remote mountainous region remained predominately Greek speaking for centuries more.
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Wikipedia