In March 1921, as the last Greek refugees fled Kars, clergy and laypeople did something remarkable. They took down the m...

In March 1921, as the last Greek refugees fled Kars, clergy and laypeople did something remarkable. They took down the massive bell of the Greek Orthodox Church of the Transfiguration, hauled it by train to Batumi, and loaded it onto the final ship leaving for Thessaloniki. The bell weighed somewhere between 3.2 and 4.2 tonnes, stood nearly two metres tall, and was cast from copper and brass with reliefs of the Transfiguration, the Virgin and Child, and St George on horseback. Its weight made the ship list so badly that timber cargo had to be shifted, and the original clapper was lost at sea during loading. The bell was Russian-made, cast before 1917, and carried two rows of Cyrillic inscriptions. Tradition holds it was a gift from the tsar, though accounts split between Alexander III and Nicholas II, and no deed of gift has ever been found. Kars had been part of the Russian Empire since 1878, and thousands of Pontic Greeks had settled there, building 67 churches and 78 schools across the region. By March 1921 that world was gone, and this bell was one of the few things they managed to take with them. It sat in Thessaloniki's port for years. Around 1929, the Pontic-Caucasian Greeks of Kalamaria passed it for a symbolic sum to the community in Kilkis. On 23 November 1930, four to six pairs of oxen and buffalo dragged it up St George Hill, with journalist Lazaros Felekis reporting that more than 5,000 people climbed the hill to watch. By 1952 it had cracked and its sound had changed. In 1956, Metropolitan Ioakeim Smyrniotis of Polyani and Kilkis ordered it cut up. The pieces went to a foundry in Thessaloniki, where they were recast into seven new bells totalling over 3,450 kg. A cantor named Paraskevas Kotidis offered to donate a replacement bell to save the original. The offer was refused. Historian and anthropologist Katerina Seraidari, in a 2026 study published by EKPA, raises a question that has never been answered: the bell's Russian origin and its Cyrillic inscriptions may have made Greek authorities less inclined to preserve it. In 1985, a writer named Aristeidis Sideris described what happened to it as a "slaughter." The church it came from was demo...