Turkey has launched a new tourist route built around one of the most celebrated stories in Greek history, Xenophon's Ana...

Turkey has launched a new tourist route built around one of the most celebrated stories in Greek history, Xenophon's Anabasis and the march of the Ten Thousand, while scrubbing nearly every reference to the Greeks who actually lived there. The "Anabasis Northern Route" was announced by the Türkiye Tourism Promotion and Development Agency under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and promoted through the state-run Anadolu Agency. It links four northeastern provinces: Erzurum, Bayburt, Gümüşhane and Trabzon. Official descriptions speak of "ancient Anatolian heritage" and a "multicultural past." The word Pontus barely appears. The story Turkey is selling begins in 401 BC, when roughly 10,000 Greek soldiers, stranded deep inside the Persian Empire after the death of their employer Cyrus the Younger, elected new commanders and fought their way north through Mesopotamia and the Armenian highlands. When the front of the column crested Mount Theches, above modern Trabzon, the men began to shout. The cry spread down the column: "Thalatta! Thalatta!" ("The sea! The sea!"). They were cheering because the Black Sea meant they were almost home, and home meant Greeks. Their destination was Trapezus, a Greek city. Trabzon is Trapezus, named in Greek after the flat hill on which it was built. It remained a Greek city through the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods, and from 1204 to 1461 it was the capital of the Empire of Trebizond, the last Greek state to fall to the Ottomans, eight years after Constantinople. The route's stop listed as the "Girls' Monastery" is the Greek Orthodox monastery of Panagia Theoskepastos. The far more famous Monastery of Panagia Soumela, founded in the fourth century, does not appear on the official itinerary at all. The "Süleymaniye quarter of old Gümüşhane" is old Argyroupolis, a Pontic Greek silver-mining centre whose displaced residents later founded Argyroupoli in Athens. The "Santa ruins," more than 300 abandoned stone houses, were Pontic Greek villages whose population was driven out in the early 1920s and resettled in northern Greece, founding Nea Santa in Kilkis. That expulsion was not incidental. Between 1916 and 1923, Pontic ...