The favourite newspaper of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the ultra-nationalist Yeni Şafak, has doggedly stayed loyal to the Turkish propaganda model of simultaneous denial of genocide but also blaming Armenians for massacres against Greeks.
It is recalled that earlier this week the Turkish President said that “Armenian gangs did not hesitate to massacre even Greek Ottoman citizens in the area of Trapezounta (Τραπεζούντα, Turkish: Trabzon)."
This time however, Yeni Şafak produced reports by the Fire Brigade Manager of the Smyrna Insurance Company, Austrian-Serb Paul Greskovic, who blames the Armenians for the Great Fire of Smyrna.
At the end of the Greco-Turkish War, just as Greek soldiers were leaving Anatolia to return to Greece, Turkish forces set first to the Smyrna (Σμύρνα, Turkish: İzmir), killing up to 100,000 Greeks and Armenians.
Greskovic wrote in a report that Armenians started the fire.
He even claimed that Greek women and children cursed the Armenians and asked soldiers to blockade the Armenian neighbourhoods.
However, what Erdoğan's favourite newspaper omits is that 92% of Greek, Armenian and Italian wealth in Smyrna, the richest city in the Mediterranean, was insured with the Austrian company.
As they did not want to pay damages to the victims, Greskovic attempted to blame the victims themselves for the Great Fire.
Greskovic's report of the Great Fire of Smyrna runs contrary to accounts by not only the victims themselves, but several high profile European and American diplomats, journalists, businessmen and missionaries, as extensively reported.
In fact, the Turks cannot seem to decide who to blame for the fire.
Another one of their unfounded theories is that Greeks started the fire.
So which one is it?
READ MORE: Erdoğan’s games: “Armenians killed Greeks in Pontus.”
