Habil's birth date is unknown, but he was known to have been in his forties in 1921. A descendant of victims of the Circassian genocide, he heard various stories about it from his elders in his youth.
Habil owned an estate near Bafra and lived in the village Koşu[tr], where Circassian immigrants had settled among the local Greek population.
Habil warned the inhabitants of a Greek village near Samsun of a planned attack by Turkish irregulars (çetes). He accompanied the villagers into the mountains, where they took shelter alongside Greek resistance fighters.
In June 1921, Hippocrates Dedeoglou, known by his nom de guerre İppok Ağa, sought to remove his relatives and other Greeks from Bafra following reports of the killing of Greek deportees. Dedeoglou worked with Habil and his two nephews, Eyüp and Kadir, to take 122 people out of the town at night. Some were taken to the mountains and others to Habil's estate near the coast.
Habil helped arrange their escape by sea, contacting captains of boats carrying goods to Bafra from Constantinople and personally paying the refugees' fares. The refugees left in two groups of 101 and 21 people, eventually reaching Greece.
When the Turkish authorities began searching for him, Habil abandoned all of his property and fled in disguise through Trabzon to Constantinople. He later travelled to Greece with Eyüp and Kadir and settled in Athens.
Exile and death
Habil developed tuberculosis while living in Athens, Greece. Dedeoglou personally invited him to Kavala in 1926, where he was living among other refugees from Bafra. Habil took up on the offer and settled in the refugee village of Dysvato[el], dying there the same year. The refugees buried him with Muslim rites in their cemetery and placed an inscription on his grave commemorating his rescue of their compatriots. An imam was brought from Xanthi to conduct his funeral. The inscription on his grave reads:
A philhellene Circassian landowner from Bafra, who saved 122 Bafraians from slaughter by the Turks in 1921. Persecuted by the Kemalist authorities, he fled to Athens, where he contracted tuberculosis. In 1926, he came to Dysvato to be near his friend, the resistance commander Hippocrates Dedeoglou, and died. The inhabitants of Dysvato who came from Bafra in Pontus buried him in their cemetery, honouring this philhellene, compassionate and noble man. Eternal be the memory of the philhellene Circassian Habil Bey.
Legacy
Habil's grave continued to be maintained by the local community after his death. On 22 September 2017, descendants of the Bafra refugees held a ceremony in Habil's memory at Dysvato, the village in which he died. In April 2025, the Pontic association of Zygos announced a tribute to Habil as part of its annual celebration of Pontic wedding customs.
Turkish journalist İskender Özsoy called him Bafra's Oskar Schindler.
Andreadis, Georgios (20 June 2024). "Ο Χαμπίλ Μπέης"[Habil Bey]. Excerpt from Μαγκάλι μνήμης – Ιστορίες ξεχασμένες κι απ’ τον Θεό ακόμα. Pontos News (in Greek).
