A formal declaration issued on the letterhead of the Association of Refugees of the Region of Vryoula (Σύλλογος Προσφύγων Περιφερείας Βρυούλλων), a “Recognized Society” headquartered at Thucydides Street 7, Athens. Protocol No. 53. Dated March 12, 1924.
Vryoula (modern Turkish: Urla, also known historically as Vourla) was a coastal town immediately south of Smyrna, with a substantial Greek population before the 1922 catastrophe. After the expulsion, displaced Vryoulites organized a refugee association in Athens — one of dozens of such town-specific émigré societies that grew up around the post-1922 Anatolian Greek diaspora.
The declaration is signed by the Protosynkellos (Chief Vicar) of the Holy Metropolis of Ephesus — the senior pastoral authority of the diocese that, before 1922, had encompassed Soma, Pergamos, Vryoula, Kinik, Kirkağaç, Akhisar, and the broader western Anatolian Greek world. Like the Smyrna Metropolitanate (which testified to Lazaros the next day), the Diocese of Ephesus had lost its physical see in 1922; the Protosynkellos was carrying on the diocesan authority from exile in Athens.
The text is a first-person testimony:
“Having had the good fortune to know in difficult days for the nation the scientist physician Mr. Lazaros Yannopoulos, originating from the city of Soma of the Province of Ephesus, and to follow — as Protosynkellos of the Holy Metropolis of Ephesus — his arbitral and pioneering action, due to which he was harshly and savagely persecuted by the Turkish Government…worked with zeal and devotion in favor of our nation until the last day.”
The declaration paired with the Smyrna Metropolitanate testimonial dated March 13, 1924 (file smyrna-metropolitanate-lazaros-testimonial-1924) gave Lazaros formal vouching from the two most senior ecclesiastical authorities of the western Anatolian Greek exile world. Combined with the March 6, 1924 testimonials from the Soma Community Elders and the Medical Association of Lesbos, these four documents amount to a deliberately assembled credentials portfolio Lazaros carried with him to New York on the SS Themistocles on March 18, 1924 — proof of his pre-emigration standing, his persecutions, and his community-leader career across thirty years in Asia Minor.