The book by Pantelis H. Valioulis, Pages from the Disaster of Pontus 1921–1924, was first published in Athens in 1957. Valioulis was not from Pontus. He was from Skopos in Eastern Thrace, a town near the Forty Churches. The Greeks of the area, like those from other regions of Eastern Thrace, were mass exiled by the Young Turks to Asia Minor during World War I. He ended up in Amisos (Samsun) in Western Pontus as a theology professor.

The author himself characterizes his work as "Memoirs about the extermination of Pontic Hellenism by the Young Turks" and dedicates it "to the sacred and undying memory of the ethnic martyrs of Pontus." In a brief preface, he outlines the purpose of his writing, which is twofold and relates to preserving the memory concerning "the shameful behavior on one hand of the bloodthirsty tyrant President of the Independence Court in the Province of Sebastia Emin and the equally abhorrent guilt of the Turkish leadership in Ankara and its agents, an indelible mark of barbarity and murder, and on the other hand the glory of the self-sacrifice of the Ethnic Martyrs and other victims of the martyred Pontus during the new '21."

In this way, the author believes he is fulfilling his duty by conveying the sacred memory "to the contemporary and future Christian Greek generations and the civilized international community." He even estimates that however much reconciliation acts, such as the Greek-Turkish friendship pact of 1930, aim to relieve the later generations "from the burden of the painful past," so that they may be free to confront the present and the future, nevertheless "the obligation of due honor to their Christian beliefs and national traditions and the lives of those who offered them keeps us captive to the past and strengthens the memory of those"…

The main part of Valioulis's memoirs refers to the events related to the activities of the so-called Independence Court, which operated in 1921 in Amasya under the presidency of the lawyer and former MP Emin Bey Gaotzioglu, and condemned to death by hanging select members of Amisos and Merzifon. The author himself was an eyewitness of the events, having been arrested, tried, and sentenced to many years of imprisonment.

Prior to their trial, they had been transferred to the military court of Amasya, and subsequently to the newly established Independence Court, which imposed death sentences on sixty-nine individuals who were already detained and in absentia on another four, including the metropolitan of Amasya Germanos Karavangelis. The justification was that "the present ones and some of the absent ones were considering and acting to establish a Republic of Pontus, detaching a large part of the Ottoman State, from Trabzon to Zonguldak and inward to Sebastia…". Although the charges were legally unfounded, the conditions of the time and the plans of Kemalist nationalism led without many procedures to the extermination of the political, social, spiritual, and religious leadership of real or imagined enemies…

Excerpt from the preface by Dimitris Mavroskoufis, Professor of Didactic Methodology and History of Education, Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.