Pontic Alps in the context of "Pontus (region)"

The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey stemmed from the "Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations" signed at Lausanne, Switzerland, on 30 January 1923, by the governments of Greece and Turkey. It involved at least 1.6 million people (1,221,489 Greek Orthodox from Asia Minor, Eastern Thrace, the Pontic Alps and the Caucasus, and 355,000–400,000 Muslims from Greece), most of whom were forcibly made refugees and de jure denaturalized from their homelands.

On 16 March 1922, Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Yusuf Kemal Tengrişenk stated that "[t]he Ankara Government was strongly in favour of a solution that would satisfy world opinion and ensure tranquillity in its own country", and that "[i]t was ready to accept the idea of an exchange of populations between the Greeks in Asia Minor and the Muslims in Greece". Eventually, the initial request for an exchange of population came from Eleftherios Venizelos in a letter he submitted to the League of Nations on 16 October 1922, following Greece's defeat in the Greco-Turkish War and two days after their accession of the Armistice of Mudanya. The request intended to normalize relations de jure, since the majority of surviving Greek inhabitants of Turkey had fled from recent genocidal massacres to Greece by that time already. Venizelos proposed a "compulsory exchange of Greek and Turkish populations", and asked Fridtjof Nansen to make the necessary arrangements. The new state of Turkey also envisioned the population exchange as a way to formalize and make permanent the flight of its native Greek Orthodox peoples while initiating a new exodus of a smaller number (400,000) of Muslims from Greece as a way to provide settlers for the newly depopulated Orthodox villages of Turkey. Norman M. Naimark claimed that this treaty was the last part of an ethnic cleansing campaign to create an ethnically pure homeland for the Turks. Historian Dinah Shelton similarly wrote that "the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 completed the process of the forcible transfer of the Greeks".

Greeks have been present in what is now southern Russia from the 6th century BC; those settlers assimilated into the indigenous populations. The vast majority of contemporary Russia's Greek minority populations are descendants of Medieval Greek refugees, traders, and immigrants (including farmers, miners, soldiers, and churchmen/bureaucrats) from the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Balkans, and Pontic Greeks from the Empire of Trebizond and Eastern Anatolia who settled mainly in southern Russia and the South Caucasus in several waves between the mid-15th century and the second Russo-Turkish War of 1828–29. As during the Genocide of the Pontic Greeks, the survivors fled to the Upper Pontus (in the USSR).

In former Soviet republics, about 70% are Greek speakers who are mainly descendants of Pontic Greeks from the Pontic Alps region of northeast Anatolia, 29% are Turkish-speaking Greeks (Urums) from Tsalka in Georgia, and 1% are Greek speakers from Mariupol in Ukraine.

The siege of Trebizond from 1205 to 1206 was an attempt by the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm to take the city along the coast of the Black Sea. William Miller explains this action as punishment for "the disobedience of Alexios to his Kaykhusraw I commands."

Michel Kuršanskis explains that this unsuccessful siege was in response to the Trapezuntine ally, Queen Tamar of Georgia, who had attempted to capture Erzurum in 1205 but failed. When Sultan Kaykhusraw began his punitive campaign against Trebizond, he found his route limited to a few passes in the Pontic Alps, where the locals harassed his forces. Further, Alexios could respond to his attacks by "closing the sea" to all merchants, who could neither travel to the Crimea nor return from there. According to Ali ibn al-Athir, merchants from throughout the Middle East suffered a severe injury because of his siege of Trebizond. When they met at the great fair in Sivas, they delivered their complaints to the sultan in loud shouts.

The Vilayet of Trebizond (Ottoman Turkish: ولايت طربزون, romanized: Vilâyet-i Ṭrabzōn; French: Vilayet de Trébizonde) was a first-level administrative division (vilayet) in the north-eastern part of the Ottoman Empire, corresponding to the area along the eastern Black Sea coastline and the interior highland region of the Pontic Alps.

At the beginning of the 20th century, it reportedly had an area of 12,082 square miles (31,290 km), while the preliminary results of the first Ottoman census of 1885 (published in 1908) gave the population as 1,047,700. The accuracy of the population figures ranges from "approximate" to "merely conjectural" depending on the region from which they were gathered.