Lazaros Jeannopoulos had been warning the Anatolian Greeks about what was coming for at least seven years before the catastrophe came. His 1915 Athens-published polemic — titled, plainly, Η Εθνική Τραγωδία Θράκης και Μικράς Ασίας (The National Tragedy of Thrace and Asia Minor) — was written under his self-designation as an exiled Asia-Minor-Greek. He had already been condemned, commuted, and ejected once. He knew what the trajectory looked like from the inside.
In 1922, the trajectory completed. His own family escaped Soma to Mytilene on a Garrison Command laissez-passer. The Greek-state compensation committees would later assess his abandoned Soma estate at roughly 3,330 Turkish gold pounds — about $2.5 million in today’s gold-equivalent wealth. The personal loss is documented to the level of the olive grove and the rose field.
The loss to his wife Eftyhia’s family is documented more sparingly, and only now coming into focus.
What Aline was told
“I know that her family was from Pergamon. I know that Lazar warned the people there including her family to leave and they did not. And a massacre followed. I always got the impression that her family members were among those lost.”
“Except for while going thru photos with my father of a young couple with children and my asking who they were my father saying his aunts uncles and his poor cousins ‘killed by the Turks’ ‘Favorite grandmother, killed by the Turks’ maternal.”
“Also I was told by aunt that a set of twins young girls in our family were killed by Turks but while speaking with a man with close family ties that it was twin girls taken by Turks.”
— Aline Pepe, 2026-05-24
Eftyhia survived a catastrophe in which she lost, at minimum:
- her mother — “Favorite grandmother, killed by the Turks (maternal),” per Aline’s father John Lazare
- her sister and her sister’s children — “his aunts uncles and his poor cousins killed by the Turks”
- twin girls — disputed between killed and taken by Turkish forces, the latter pattern (abduction into Turkish households, often as servants or as converts) being a well-documented WWI-era practice
- at least one infant daughter of her own — who died of malnutrition in the Mytilene refugee camp during the family’s 1922-24 refuge
The Karamitrou family Lazaros had warned was Eftyhia’s blood family. They were the ones who didn’t leave.
Why this reframes Lazaros’s life
It re-binds everything he did afterward into one continuous forty-year arc. The 1915 National Tragedy polemic was not the work of a writer scratching at a topic; it was a doctor warning his community about the violence he had survived and seen coming. The 1922 evacuation effort — the laissez-passer out of Soma, the refuge year in Mytilene — was his second-front response to the same warning, after the first front had failed. The 1924 emigration to New York was the third. And the next fifteen years of his American life — the 1925 Soma estate assessment, the parallel Pergamon assessment work for Eftyhia’s Bergama property, the 1927 NYC fundraising for the Soma diaspora, the 1932-35 directorship of Aletheia — were the same project from a different chair.
He was, for forty years, trying to make a record of what was happening to the Anatolian Greeks. First prophetically. Then memorially.
The Pergamenes did not listen. He buried his wife’s mother’s memory in his own paper trail instead.