George Valavanis

George Valavanis was a Pontic Greek journalist and author born in Giresun.

He is remembered for his work titled The Contemporary General History of Pontus (Greek: Η Σύγχρονος Γενική Ιστορία του Πόντου) which was published in 1925 and covered the ethnic cleansing of Greeks in Pontus and the subsequent population exchange between Greece and Turkey. While Valavanis's work is a significant foundational text for Pontian memory, his methodological neutrality has been questioned. Modern scholarship, including the work of Erik Sjöberg (historian) , describes his casualty estimates as lacking a statistical basis. His 1925 publication in which he claimed that 353,000 Pontic Greeks had died is viewed by historians as an act of national advocacy and memorialization rather than an objective demographic study, written in the immediate aftermath of the population exchange to highlight the scale of the catastrophe to a global audience. According to Andrekos Varnava, Valavanis provided no verifiable empirical evidence for this number. He adopted a figure from an earlier propaganda pamphlet and arbitrarily increased it by 50,000. Scholars such as Tasos Kostopoulos and Nicholas Doumanis argue that based on a comparative analysis of Ottoman census data and refugee records, a more realistic estimate for the death toll in the Pontus region between 1912 and 1923 lies at around 100,000.^[1]

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