The Ottoman Empire during the First World War. On the evening of August 9, 1917, warships of Christian Russia set fire to the small town of Ordu on the Black Sea coast. Fearing the revenge of Muslim neighbors, its Greek Christian minority panicked and tried to board the Russian warships.
One of the lucky ones to be saved was fifteen-year-old Alexandra. But she would never see her homeland again. In the postwar years about 1.2 million Greeks were forcibly displaced from the territory of present-day Turkey, marking the end of more than 2,500 years of Greek cultural history there.
A century later, Alexandra’s grandson Mirko Heinemann travels through northern Turkey looking for traces of his family and the last remaining Greeks. He tells how the Christian minority was harassed, persecuted and murdered in the final years of the Ottoman Empire and fell victim to the interests of the great powers after the First World War. It is a story that is almost forgotten in our part of the world, but one that has had a defining influence on the relationship between Turkey and Europe.