a Includes those of ancestral descent. b Includes people with "cultural roots". c Those whose stated ethnic origins included "Greek" among others. The number of those whose stated ethnic origin is solely "Greek" is 145,250. An additional 3,395 Cypriots of undeclared ethnicity live in Canada. dApprox. 60,000 Griko people and 30,000 post WW2 migrants. e "Including descendants". f Including Greek Muslims.
In recent times, most ethnic Greeks live within the borders of the modern Greek state or in Cyprus. The Greek genocide and population exchange between Greece and Turkey nearly ended the three millennia-old Greek presence in Asia Minor. Other longstanding Greek populations can be found from southern Italy to the Caucasus and southern Russia and Ukraine and in the Greek diaspora communities in a number of other countries. Today, most Greeks are officially registered as members of the Greek Orthodox Church.[50]
Greeks have greatly influenced and contributed to culture, visual arts, exploration, theatre, literature, philosophy, ethics, politics, architecture, music, mathematics,[51] medicine, science, technology, commerce, cuisine and sports. The Greek language is the oldest recorded living language[52] and its vocabulary has been the basis of many languages, including English as well as international scientific nomenclature. Greek was by far the most widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world since the fourth century BC and the New Testament of the Christian Bible was also originally written in Greek.[53][54][55]
Proto-Greek area of settlement (2200/2100–1900 BC) suggested by Katona (2000), Sakelariou (2016, 1980, 1975) and Phylaktopoulos (1975)Mycenaeanfuneral mask known as "Mask of Agamemnon", 16th century BC
The Greeks speak the Greek language, which forms its own unique branch within the Indo-European family of languages, the Hellenic.[48] They are part of a group of classical ethnicities, described by Anthony D. Smith as an "archetypal diaspora people".[56][57]
The Proto-Greeks probably arrived at the area now called Greece, in the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula, at the end of the 3rd millennium BC between 2200 and 1900 BC.[58][59][a] The sequence of migrations into the Greek mainland during the 2nd millennium BC has to be reconstructed on the basis of the ancient Greek dialects, as they presented themselves centuries later and are therefore subject to some uncertainties. There were at least two migrations, the first being the Ionians and Achaeans, which resulted in Mycenaean Greece by the 16th century BC,[63][64] and the second, the Dorian invasion, around the 11th century BC, displacing the Arcadocypriot dialects, which descended from the Mycenaean period. Both migrations occur at incisive periods, the Mycenaean at the transition to the Late Bronze Age and the Doric at the Bronze Age collapse.
Around 1200 BC, the Dorians, another Greek-speaking people, followed from Epirus.[68] Older historical research often proposed Dorian invasion caused the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization, but this narrative has been abandoned in all contemporary research. It is likely that one of the factors which contributed to the Mycenaean palatial collapse was linked to raids by groups known in historiography as the "Sea Peoples" who sailed into the eastern Mediterranean around 1180 BC.[69] The Dorian invasion was followed by a poorly attested period of migrations, appropriately called the Greek Dark Ages, but by 800 BC the landscape of Archaic and Classical Greece was discernible.[70]
The Greeks of classical antiquity idealized their Mycenaean ancestors and the Mycenaean period as a glorious era of heroes, closeness of the gods and material wealth.[71] The Homeric Epics (i.e. Iliad and Odyssey) were especially and generally accepted as part of the Greek past and it was not until the time of Euhemerism that scholars began to question Homer's historicity.[70] As part of the Mycenaean heritage that survived, the names of the gods and goddesses of Mycenaean Greece (e.g. Zeus, Poseidon and Hades) became major figures of the Olympian Pantheon of later antiquity.[72]
The ethnogenesis of the Greek nation is linked to the development of Pan-Hellenism in the 8th century BC.[73] According to some scholars, the foundational event was the Olympic Games in 776 BC, when the idea of a common Hellenism among the Greek tribes was first translated into a shared cultural experience and Hellenism was primarily a matter of common culture.[46] The works of Homer (i.e. Iliad and Odyssey) and Hesiod (i.e. Theogony) were written in the 8th century BC, becoming the basis of the national religion, ethos, history and mythology.[74] The Oracle of Apollo at Delphi was established in this period.[75]
The classical period of Greek civilization covers a time spanning from the early 5th century BC to the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 BC (some authors prefer to split this period into "Classical", from the end of the Greco-Persian Wars to the end of the Peloponnesian War, and "Fourth Century", up to the death of Alexander). It is so named because it set the standards by which Greek civilization would be judged in later eras.[76] The Classical period is also described as the "Golden Age" of Greek civilization, and its art, philosophy, architecture and literature would be instrumental in the formation and development of Western culture.
While the Greeks of the classical era understood themselves to belong to a common Hellenic genos,[77] their first loyalty was to their city and they saw nothing incongruous about warring, often brutally, with other Greek city-states.[78] The Peloponnesian War, the large scale civil war between the two most powerful Greek city-states Athens and Sparta and theirallies, left both greatly weakened.[79]
Most of the feuding Greek city-states were, in some scholars' opinions, united by force under the banner of Philip's and Alexander the Great's Pan-Hellenic ideals, though others might generally opt, rather, for an explanation of "Macedonian conquest for the sake of conquest" or at least conquest for the sake of riches, glory and power and view the "ideal" as useful propaganda directed towards the city-states.[80]
In any case, Alexander's toppling of the Achaemenid Empire, after his victories at the battles of the Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela, and his advance as far as modern-day Pakistan and Tajikistan,[81] provided an important outlet for Greek culture, via the creation of colonies and trade routes along the way.[82] While the Alexandrian empire did not survive its creator's death intact, the cultural implications of the spread of Hellenism across much of the Middle East and Asia were to prove long lived as Greek became the lingua franca, a position it retained even in Roman times.[83] Many Greeks settled in Hellenistic cities like Alexandria, Antioch and Seleucia.[84]
The Hellenistic civilization was the next period of Greek civilization, the beginnings of which are usually placed at Alexander's death.[85] This Hellenistic age, so called because it saw the partial Hellenization of many non-Greek cultures, extending all the way into India and Bactria, both of which maintained Greek cultures and governments for centuries.[86] The end is often placed around conquest of Egypt by Rome in 30 BC,[85] although the Indo-Greek kingdoms lasted for a few more decades.
This age saw the Greeks move towards larger cities and a reduction in the importance of the city-state. These larger cities were parts of the still larger Kingdoms of the Diadochi.[87][88] Greeks, however, remained aware of their past, chiefly through the study of the works of Homer and the classical authors.[89] An important factor in maintaining Greek identity was contact with barbarian (non-Greek) peoples, which was deepened in the new cosmopolitan environment of the multi-ethnic Hellenistic kingdoms.[89] This led to a strong desire among Greeks to organize the transmission of the Hellenic paideia to the next generation.[89] Greek science, technology and mathematics are generally considered to have reached their peak during the Hellenistic period.[90]
Between 168 BC and 30 BC, the entire Greek world was conquered by Rome, and almost all of the world's Greek speakers lived as citizens or subjects of the Roman Empire. Despite their military superiority, the Romans admired and became heavily influenced by the achievements of Greek culture, hence Horace's famous statement: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit ("Greece, although captured, took its wild conqueror captive").[93] In the centuries following the Roman conquest of the Greek world, the Greek and Roman cultures merged into a single Greco-Roman culture.
In the religious sphere, this was a period of profound change. The spiritual revolution that took place, saw a waning of the old Greek religion, whose decline beginning in the 3rd century BC continued with the introduction of new religious movements from the East.[46] The cults of deities like Isis and Mithra were introduced into the Greek world.[88][94] Greek-speaking communities of the Hellenized East were instrumental in the spread of early Christianity in the 2nd and 3rd centuries,[95] and Christianity's early leaders and writers (notably Saint Paul) were generally Greek-speaking,[96] though none were from Greece proper. However, Greece itself had a tendency to cling to paganism and was not one of the influential centers of early Christianity: in fact, some ancient Greek religious practices remained in vogue until the end of the 4th century,[97] with some areas such as the southeastern Peloponnese remaining pagan until well into the mid-Byzantine 10th century AD.[98] The region of Tsakonia remained pagan until the ninth century and as such its inhabitants were referred to as Hellenes, in the sense of being pagan, by their Christianized Greek brethren in mainstream Byzantine society.[99]
While ethnic distinctions still existed in the Roman Empire, they became secondary to religious considerations, and the renewed empire used Christianity as a tool to support its cohesion and promote a robust Roman national identity.[100] From the early centuries of the Common Era, the Greeks self-identified as Romans (Greek: ῬωμαῖοιRhōmaîoi).[101] By that time, the name Hellenes denoted pagans but was revived as an ethnonym in the 11th century.[102]
Scenes of marriage and family life in ConstantinopleEmperor Basil II (11th century) is credited with reviving the Byzantine Empire.Gemistos Plethon, one of the most renowned philosophers of the late Byzantine era, a chief pioneer of the revival of Greek scholarship in Western Europe
During most of the Middle Ages, the Byzantine Greeks self-identified as Rhōmaîoi (Ῥωμαῖοι, "Romans", meaning citizens of the Roman Empire), a term which in the Greek language had become synonymous with Christian Greeks.[103][104] The Latinizing term Graikoí (Γραικοί, "Greeks") was also used,[105] though its use was less common, and nonexistent in official Byzantine political correspondence, prior to the Fourth Crusade of 1204.[106] The Eastern Roman Empire (today conventionally named the Byzantine Empire, a name not used during its own time[107]) became increasingly influenced by Greek culture after the 7th century when Emperor Heraclius (r. 610–641 AD) decided to make Greek the empire's official language.[108][109] Although the Catholic Church recognized the Eastern Empire's claim to the Roman legacy for several centuries, after Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne, king of the Franks, as the "Roman Emperor" on 25 December 800, an act which eventually led to the formation of the Holy Roman Empire, the Latin West started to favour the Franks and began to refer to the Eastern Roman Empire largely as the Empire of the Greeks (Imperium Graecorum).[110][111] While this Latin term for the ancient Hellenes could be used neutrally, its use by Westerners from the 9th century onwards in order to challenge Byzantine claims to ancient Roman heritage rendered it a derogatory exonym for the Byzantines who barely used it, mostly in contexts relating to the West, such as texts relating to the Council of Florence, to present the Western viewpoint.[112][113] Additionally, among the Germanic and the Slavic peoples, the Rhōmaîoi were just called Greeks.[114][115]
There are three schools of thought regarding this Byzantine Roman identity in contemporary Byzantine scholarship: The first considers "Romanity" the mode of self-identification of the subjects of a multi-ethnic empire at least up to the 12th century, where the average subject identified as Roman; a perennialist approach, which views Romanity as the medieval expression of a continuously existing Greek nation; while a third view considers the eastern Roman identity as a pre-modern national identity.[116] The Byzantine Greeks' essential values were drawn from both Christianity and the Homeric tradition of ancient Greece.[117][118]
A distinct Greek identity re-emerged in the 11th century in educated circles and became more forceful after the fall of Constantinople to the Crusaders of the Fourth Crusade in 1204.[119] In the Empire of Nicaea, a small circle of the elite used the term "Hellene" as a term of self-identification.[120] For example, in a letter to Pope Gregory IX, the Nicaean emperor John III Doukas Vatatzes (r. 1221–1254) claimed to have received the gift of royalty from Constantine the Great, and put emphasis on his "Hellenic" descent, exalting the wisdom of the Greek people.[121] After the Byzantines recaptured Constantinople, however, in 1261, Rhomaioi became again dominant as a term for self-description and there are few traces of Hellene (Έλληνας), such as in the writings of George Gemistos Plethon,[122] who abandoned Christianity and in whose writings culminated the secular tendency in the interest in the classical past.[119] However, it was the combination of Orthodox Christianity with a specifically Greek identity that shaped the Greeks' notion of themselves in the empire's twilight years.[119] In the twilight years of the Byzantine Empire, prominent Byzantine personalities proposed referring to the Byzantine Emperor as the "Emperor of the Hellenes".[123][124] These largely rhetorical expressions of Hellenic identity were confined within intellectual circles, but were continued by Byzantine intellectuals who participated in the Italian Renaissance.[125]
These Byzantine Greeks were largely responsible for the preservation of the literature of the classical era.[118][127][128]Byzantine grammarians were those principally responsible for carrying, in person and in writing, ancient Greek grammatical and literary studies to the West during the 15th century, giving the Italian Renaissance a major boost.[129][130] The Aristotelian philosophical tradition was nearly unbroken in the Greek world for almost two thousand years, until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453.[131]
To the Slavic world, the Byzantine Greeks contributed by the dissemination of literacy and Christianity. The most notable example of the later was the work of the two Byzantine Greek brothers, the monks Saints Cyril and Methodius from the port city of Thessalonica, capital of the theme of Thessalonica, who are credited today with formalizing the first Slavic alphabet.[132]
The Byzantine scholar and cardinal Basilios Bessarion (1395/1403–1472) played a key role in transmitting classical knowledge to Western Europe, contributing to the Renaissance.
Following the Fall of Constantinople on 29 May 1453, many Greeks sought better employment and education opportunities by leaving for the West, particularly Italy, Central Europe, Germany and Russia.[129] Greeks are greatly credited for the European cultural revolution, later called the Renaissance. In Greek-inhabited territory itself, Greeks came to play a leading role in the Ottoman Empire, due in part to the fact that the central hub of the empire, politically, culturally, and socially, was based on Western Thrace and Macedonia, both in Northern Greece, and of course was centred on the mainly Greek-populated, former Byzantine capital, Constantinople. As a direct consequence of this situation, Greek-speakers came to play a hugely important role in the Ottoman trading and diplomatic establishment, as well as in the church. Added to this, in the first half of the Ottoman period men of Greek origin made up a significant proportion of the Ottoman army, navy, and state bureaucracy, having been levied as adolescents (along with especially Albanians and Serbs) into Ottoman service through the devshirme. Many Ottomans of Greek (or Albanian or Serb) origin were therefore to be found within the Ottoman forces which governed the provinces, from Ottoman Egypt, to Ottomans occupied Yemen and Algeria, frequently as provincial governors.
For those that remained under the Ottoman Empire's millet system, religion was the defining characteristic of national groups (milletler), so the exonym "Greeks" (Rumlar from the name Rhomaioi) was applied by the Ottomans to all members of the Orthodox Church, regardless of their language or ethnic origin.[133] The Greek speakers were the only ethnic group to actually call themselves Romioi,[134] (as opposed to being so named by others) and, at least those educated, considered their ethnicity (genos) to be Hellenic.[135] There were, however, many Greeks who escaped the second-class status of Christians inherent in the Ottoman millet system, according to which Muslims were explicitly awarded senior status and preferential treatment. These Greeks either emigrated, particularly to their fellow Orthodox Christian protector, the Russian Empire, or simply converted to Islam, often only very superficially and whilst remaining crypto-Christian. The most notable examples of large-scale conversion to Turkish Islam among those today defined as Greek Muslims—excluding those who had to convert as a matter of course on being recruited through the devshirme—were to be found in Crete (Cretan Turks), Greek Macedonia (for example among the Vallahades of western Macedonia), and among Pontic Greeks in the Pontic Alps and Armenian Highlands. Several Ottoman sultans and princes were also of part Greek origin, with mothers who were either Greek concubines or princesses from Byzantine noble families, one famous example being sultan Selim the Grim (r. 1517–1520), whose mother Gülbahar Hatun was a Pontic Greek.[136][137]
The roots of Greek success in the Ottoman Empire can be traced to the Greek tradition of education and commerce exemplified in the Phanariotes.[138] It was the wealth of the extensive merchant class that provided the material basis for the intellectual revival that was the prominent feature of Greek life in the half century and more leading to the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821.[139] Not coincidentally, on the eve of 1821, the three most important centres of Greek learning were situated in Chios, Smyrna and Aivali, all three major centres of Greek commerce.[139] Greek success was also favoured by Greek domination in the leadership of the Eastern Orthodox church.
The movement of the Greek enlightenment, the Greek expression of the Age of Enlightenment, contributed not only in the promotion of education, culture and printing among the Greeks, but also in the case of independence from the Ottomans, and the restoration of the term "Hellene". Adamantios Korais, probably the most important intellectual of the movement, advocated the use of the term "Hellene" (Έλληνας) or "Graikos" (Γραικός) in the place of Romiós, that was seen negatively by him.
The relationship between ethnic Greek identity and Greek Orthodox religion continued after the creation of the modern Greek nation-state in 1830. According to the second article of the first Greek constitution of 1822, a Greek was defined as any native Christian resident of the Kingdom of Greece, a clause removed by 1840.[140] A century later, when the Treaty of Lausanne was signed between Greece and Turkey in 1923, the two countries agreed to use religion as the determinant for ethnic identity for the purposes of population exchange, although most of the Greeks displaced (over a million of the total 1.5 million) had already been driven out by the time the agreement was signed.[b][141] The Greek genocide, in particular the harsh removal of Pontian Greeks from the southern shore area of the Black Sea, contemporaneous with and following the failed Greek Asia Minor Campaign, was part of this process of Turkification of the Ottoman Empire and the placement of its economy and trade, then largely in Greek hands under ethnic Turkish control.[142]
The terms used to define Greekness have varied throughout history but were never limited or completely identified with membership to a Greek state.[143]Herodotus gave a famous account of what defined Greek (Hellenic) ethnic identity in his day, enumerating
shared descent (ὅμαιμον, hómaimon, 'of the same blood')[144]
shared language (ὁμόγλωσσον, homóglōsson, 'speaking the same tongue')[145]
shared sanctuaries and sacrifices (θεῶν ἱδρύματά τε κοινὰ καὶ θυσίαι, theôn hidrúmatá te koinà kaì thusíai, 'common foundations, common sacrifices to gods')[146][147]
shared customs (ἤθεα ὁμότροπα, ḗthea homótropa, 'customs of like fashion').[148][149][150]
By Western standards, the term Greeks has traditionally referred to any native speakers of the Greek language, whether Mycenaean, Byzantine or modern Greek.[133][151]Byzantine Greeks self-identified as Romaioi ("Romans"), Graikoi ("Greeks") and Christianoi ("Christians") since they were the political heirs of imperial Rome, the descendants of their classical Greek forebears and followers of the Apostles;[152] during the mid-to-late Byzantine period (11th–13th century), a growing number of Byzantine Greek intellectuals deemed themselves Hellenes although for most Greek-speakers, "Hellene" still meant pagan.[102][153] On the eve of the Fall of Constantinople the Last Emperor urged his soldiers to remember that they were the descendants of Greeks and Romans.[154]
Before the establishment of the modern Greek nation-state, the link between ancient and modern Greeks was emphasized by the scholars of Greek Enlightenment especially by Rigas Feraios. In his "Political Constitution", he addresses to the nation as "the people descendant of the Greeks".[155] The modern Greek state was created in 1829, when the Greeks liberated a part of their historic homelands, Peloponnese, from the Ottoman Empire.[156] The large Greek diaspora and merchant class were instrumental in transmitting the ideas of western romantic nationalism and philhellenism,[139] which together with the conception of Hellenism, formulated during the last centuries of the Byzantine Empire, formed the basis of the Diafotismos and the current conception of Hellenism.[119][133][157]
The Greeks today are a nation in the meaning of an ethnos, defined by possessing Greek culture and having a Greek mother tongue, not by citizenship, race, and religion or by being subjects of any particular state.[158] In ancient and medieval times and to some extent today the Greek term was genos, which also indicates a common ancestry.[159][160]
Map showing the major regions of mainland ancient Greece, and adjacent "barbarian" lands
Greeks and Greek-speakers have used different names to refer to themselves collectively. The term Achaeans (Ἀχαιοί) is one of the collective names for the Greeks in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (the Homeric "long-haired Achaeans" would have been a part of the Mycenaean civilization that dominated Greece from c. 1600 BC until 1100 BC). The other common names are Danaans (Δαναοί) and Argives (Ἀργεῖοι) while Panhellenes (Πανέλληνες) and Hellenes (Ἕλληνες) both appear only once in the Iliad;[161] all of these terms were used, synonymously, to denote a common Greek identity.[162][163] In the historical period, Herodotus identified the Achaeans of the northern Peloponnese as descendants of the earlier, Homeric Achaeans.[164]
Homer refers to the "Hellenes" (/ˈhɛliːnz/) as a relatively small tribe settled in Thessalic Phthia, with its warriors under the command of Achilleus.[165] The Parian Chronicle says that Phthia was the homeland of the Hellenes and that this name was given to those previously called Greeks (Γραικοί).[166] In Greek mythology, Hellen, the patriarch of the Hellenes who ruled around Phthia, was the son of Pyrrha and Deucalion, the only survivors after the Great Deluge.[167] The Greek philosopher Aristotle names ancient Hellas as an area in Epirus between Dodona and the Achelous river, the location of the Great Deluge of Deucalion, a land occupied by the Selloi and the "Greeks" who later came to be known as "Hellenes".[168] In the Homeric tradition, the Selloi were the priests of Dodonian Zeus.[169]
The English names Greece and Greek are derived, via the Latin Graecia and Graecus, from the name of the Graeci (Γραικοί, Graikoí; singularΓραικός, Graikós), who were among the first ancient Greek tribes to settle southern Italy (the so-called "Magna Graecia"). The term is possibly derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *ǵerh₂-, "to grow old",[171][172] more specifically from Graea (ancient city), said by Aristotle to be the oldest in Greece, and the source of colonists for the Naples area.[173]
Continuity
Alexander the Great in Byzantine Emperor's clothes, by a manuscript depicting scenes from his life (between 1204 and 1453)
The most obvious link between modern and ancient Greeks is their language, which has a documented tradition from at least the 14th century BC to the present day, albeit with a break during the Greek Dark Ages from which written records are absent (11th- 8th cent. BC, though the Cypriot syllabary was in use during this period).[174] Scholars compare its continuity of tradition to Chinese alone.[174][175] Since its inception, Hellenism was primarily a matter of common culture and the national continuity of the Greek world is a lot more certain than its demographic.[46][176] Yet, Hellenism also embodied an ancestral dimension through aspects of Athenian literature that developed and influenced ideas of descent based on autochthony.[177] During the later years of the Eastern Roman Empire, areas such as Ionia and Constantinople experienced a Hellenic revival in language, philosophy, and literature and on classical models of thought and scholarship.[176] This revival provided a powerful impetus to the sense of cultural affinity with ancient Greece and its classical heritage.[176] Throughout their history, the Greeks have retained their language and alphabet, certain values and cultural traditions, customs, a sense of religious and cultural difference and exclusion (the word barbarian was used by 12th-century historian Anna Komnene to describe non-Greek speakers),[178] a sense of Greek identity and common sense of ethnicity despite the undeniable socio-political changes of the past two millennia.[176] In recent anthropological studies, both ancient and modern Greek osteological samples were analyzed demonstrating a bio-genetic affinity and continuity shared between both groups.[179][180] There is also a direct genetic link between ancient Greeks and modern Greeks.[181][182]
Today, Greeks are the majority ethnic group in the Hellenic Republic,[183] where they constitute 93% of the country's population,[184] and the Republic of Cyprus where they make up 78% of the island's population (excluding Turkish settlers in the occupied part of the country).[185] Greek populations have not traditionally exhibited high rates of growth; a large percentage of Greek population growth since Greece's foundation in 1832 was attributed to annexation of new territories, as well as the influx of 1.5 million Greek refugees after the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey.[186] About 80% of the population of Greece is urban, with 28% concentrated in the city of Athens.[187]
Greeks from Cyprus have a similar history of emigration, usually to the English-speaking world because of the island's colonization by the British Empire. Waves of emigration followed the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, while the population decreased between mid-1974 and 1977 as a result of emigration, war losses, and a temporary decline in fertility.[188] After the ethnic cleansing of a third of the Greek population of the island in 1974,[189][190] there was also an increase in the number of Greek Cypriots leaving, especially for the Middle East, which contributed to a decrease in population that tapered off in the 1990s.[188] Today more than two-thirds of the Greek population in Cyprus is urban.[188]
Around 1990, most Western estimates of the number of ethnic Greeks in Albania were around 200,000 but in the 1990s, a majority of them migrated to Greece.[191][192] The Greek minority of Turkey, which numbered upwards of 200,000 people after the 1923 exchange, has now dwindled to a few thousand, after the 1955 Constantinople Pogrom and other state sponsored violence and discrimination.[193] This effectively ended, though not entirely, the three-thousand-year-old presence of Hellenism in Asia Minor.[194][195] There are smaller Greek minorities in the rest of the Balkan countries, the Levant and the Black Sea states, remnants of the Old Greek Diaspora (pre-19th century).[196]
The total number of Greeks living outside Greece and Cyprus today is a contentious issue. Where census figures are available, they show around three million Greeks outside Greece and Cyprus. Estimates provided by the SAE – World Council of Hellenes Abroad put the figure at around seven million worldwide.[197] According to George Prevelakis of Sorbonne University, the number is closer to just below five million.[196] Integration, intermarriage, and loss of the Greek language influence the self-identification of the Greek diaspora (omogenia). Important centres include New York City, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Sydney, Melbourne, London, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Auckland, and Sao Paulo.[196] In 2010, the Hellenic Parliament introduced a law that allowed members of the diaspora to vote in Greek elections;[198] this law was repealed in early 2014.[199]
In ancient times, the trading and colonizing activities of the Greek tribes and city states spread the Greek culture, religion and language around the Mediterranean and Black Sea basins, especially in Southern Italy (the so-called "Magna Graecia"), Spain, the south of France and the Black sea coasts.[200] Under Alexander the Great's empire and successor states, Greek and Hellenizing ruling classes were established in the Middle East, India and in Egypt.[200] The Hellenistic period is characterized by a new wave of Greek colonization that established Greek cities and kingdoms in Asia and Africa.[201] Under the Roman Empire, easier movement of people spread Greeks across the Empire and in the eastern territories, Greek became the lingua franca rather than Latin.[108] The modern-day Griko community of southern Italy, numbering about 60,000,[17][18] may represent a living remnant of the ancient Greek populations of Italy.
During and after the Greek War of Independence, Greeks of the diaspora were important in establishing the fledgling state, raising funds and awareness abroad.[202] Greek merchant families already had contacts in other countries and during the disturbances many set up home around the Mediterranean (notably Marseilles in France, Livorno in Italy, Alexandria in Egypt), Russia (Odesa and Saint Petersburg), and Britain (London and Liverpool) from where they traded, typically in textiles and grain.[203] Businesses frequently comprised the extended family, and with them they brought schools teaching Greek and the Greek Orthodox Church.[203]
As markets changed and they became more established, some families grew their operations to become shippers, financed through the local Greek community, notably with the aid of the Ralli or Vagliano Brothers.[204] With economic success, the Diaspora expanded further across the Levant, North Africa, India and the USA.[204][205]
While official figures remain scarce, polls and anecdotal evidence point to renewed Greek emigration as a result of the Greek financial crisis.[207] According to data published by the Federal Statistical Office of Germany in 2011, 23,800 Greeks emigrated to Germany, a significant increase over the previous year. By comparison, about 9,000 Greeks emigrated to Germany in 2009 and 12,000 in 2010.[208][209]
Greek culture has evolved over thousands of years, with its beginning in the Mycenaean civilization, continuing through the classical era, the Hellenistic period, the Roman and Byzantine periods and was profoundly affected by Christianity, which it in turn influenced and shaped.[210]Ottoman Greeks had to endure through several centuries of adversity that culminated in genocide in the 20th century.[211][212] The Diafotismos is credited with revitalizing Greek culture and giving birth to the synthesis of ancient and medieval elements that characterize it today.[119][133]
Greek demonstrates several linguistic features that are shared with other Balkan languages, such as Albanian, Bulgarian and Eastern Romance languages (see Balkan sprachbund), and has absorbed many foreign words, primarily of Western European and Turkish origin.[216] Because of the movements of Philhellenism and the Diafotismos in the 19th century, which emphasized the modern Greeks' ancient heritage, these foreign influences were excluded from official use via the creation of Katharevousa, a somewhat artificial form of Greek purged of all foreign influence and words, as the official language of the Greek state. In 1976, however, the Hellenic Parliament voted to make the spoken Dimotiki the official language, making Katharevousa obsolete.[217]
Greek-speaking Muslims live mainly outside Greece in the contemporary era. There are both Christian and Muslim Greek-speaking communities in Lebanon and Syria, while in the Pontus region of Turkey there is a large community of indeterminate size who were spared from the population exchange because of their religious affiliation.[224]
Greek art has a long and varied history. Greeks have contributed to the visual, literary and performing arts.[225] In the West, classical Greek art was influential in shaping the Roman and later the modern Western artistic heritage. Following the Renaissance in Europe, the humanist aesthetic and the high technical standards of Greek art inspired generations of European artists.[225] Well into the 19th century, the classical tradition derived from Greece played an important role in the art of the Western world.[226] In the East, Alexander the Great's conquests initiated several centuries of exchange between Greek, Central Asian and Indian cultures, resulting in Indo-Greek and Greco-Buddhist art, whose influence reached as far as Japan.[227]
Byzantine Greek art, which grew from the Hellenistic classical art and adapted the pagan motifs in the service of Christianity, provided a stimulus to the art of many nations.[228] Its influences can be traced from Venice in the West to Kazakhstan in the East.[228][229] In turn, Greek art was influenced by eastern civilizations (i.e. Egypt, Persia, etc.) during various periods of its history.[230]
The Greeks of the Classical and Hellenistic eras made seminal contributions to science and philosophy, laying the foundations of several western scientific traditions, such as astronomy, geography, historiography, mathematics, medicine, philosophy and political science. The scholarly tradition of the Greek academies was maintained during Roman times with several academic institutions in Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and other centers of Greek learning, while Byzantine science was essentially a continuation of classical science.[231] Greeks have a long tradition of valuing and investing in paideia (education).[89]Paideia was one of the highest societal values in the Greek and Hellenistic world while the first European institution described as a university was founded in 5th century Constantinople and operated in various incarnations until the city's fall to the Ottomans in 1453.[232] The University of Constantinople was Christian Europe's first secular institution of higher learning since no theological subjects were taught,[233] and considering the original meaning of the word university as a corporation of students, the world's first university as well.[232]
The national flag of Greece is commonly used as a symbol for Greeks worldwide.The flag of the Greek Orthodox Church is based on the coat of arms of the Palaiologoi, the last dynasty of the Byzantine Empire.
The most widely used symbol is the flag of Greece, which features nine equal horizontal stripes of blue alternating with white representing the nine syllables of the Greek national motto Eleftheria i Thanatos (Freedom or Death), which was the motto of the Greek War of Independence.[235] The blue square in the upper hoist-side corner bears a white cross, which represents Greek Orthodoxy. The Greek flag is widely used by the Greek Cypriots, although Cyprus has officially adopted a neutral flag to ease ethnic tensions with the Turkish Cypriot minority (see flag of Cyprus).[236]
The pre-1978 (and first) flag of Greece, which features a Greek cross (crux immissa quadrata) on a blue background, is widely used as an alternative to the official flag, and they are often flown together. The national emblem of Greece features a blue escutcheon with a white cross surrounded by two laurel branches. A common design involves the current flag of Greece and the pre-1978 flag of Greece with crossed flagpoles and the national emblem placed in front.[237]
Another highly recognizable and popular Greek symbol is the double-headed eagle, the imperial emblem of the last dynasty of the Eastern Roman Empire and a common symbol in Asia Minor and, later, Eastern Europe.[238] It is not part of the modern Greek flag or coat-of-arms, although it is officially the insignia of the Greek Army and the flag of the Church of Greece. It had been incorporated in the Greek coat of arms between 1925 and 1926.[239]
Classical Athens is considered the birthplace of Democracy. The term appeared in the 5th century BC to denote the political systems then existing in Greek city-states, notably Athens, to mean "rule of the people", in contrast to aristocracy (ἀριστοκρατία, aristokratía), meaning "rule by an excellent elite", and to oligarchy. While theoretically these definitions are in opposition, in practice the distinction has been blurred historically.[240] Led by Cleisthenes, Athenians established what is generally held as the first democracy in 508–507 BC,[241] which took gradually the form of a direct democracy. The democratic form of government declined during the Hellenistic and Roman eras, only to be revived as an interest in Western Europe during the early modern period.
The European enlightenment and the democratic, liberal and nationalistic ideas of the French Revolution was a crucial factor to the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence and the establishment of the modern Greek state.[242][243]
Greek surnames began to appear in the 9th and 10th century, at first among ruling families, eventually supplanting the ancient tradition of using the father's name as disambiguator.[244][245] Nevertheless, Greek surnames are most commonly patronymics,[244] such those ending in the suffix -opoulos or -ides, while others derive from trade professions, physical characteristics, or a location such as a town, village, or monastery.[245] Commonly, Greek male surnames end in -s, which is the common ending for Greek masculine proper nouns in the nominative case. Occasionally (especially in Cyprus), some surnames end in -ou, indicating the genitive case of a patronymic name.[246] Many surnames end in suffixes that are associated with a particular region, such as -akis (Crete), -eas or -akos (Mani Peninsula), -atos (island of Cephalonia), -ellis (island of Lesbos) and so forth.[245] In addition to a Greek origin, some surnames have Turkish or Latin/Italian origin, especially among Greeks from Asia Minor and the Ionian Islands, respectively.[247] Female surnames end in a vowel and are usually the genitive form of the corresponding males surname, although this usage is not followed in the diaspora, where the male version of the surname is generally used.
With respect to personal names, the two main influences are Christianity and classical Hellenism; ancient Greek nomenclatures were never forgotten but have become more widely bestowed from the 18th century onwards.[245] As in antiquity, children are customarily named after their grandparents, with the first born male child named after the paternal grandfather, the second male child after the maternal grandfather, and similarly for female children.[248] Personal names are often familiarized by a diminutive suffix, such as -akis for male names and -itsa or -oula for female names.[245] Greeks generally do not use middle names, instead using the genitive of the father's first name as a middle name. This usage has been passed on to the Russians and other East Slavs (otchestvo).
The traditional Greek homelands have been the Greek peninsula and the Aegean Sea, Southern Italy (the so called "Magna Graecia"), the Black Sea, the Ionian coasts of Asia Minor and the islands of Cyprus and Sicily. In Plato's Phaidon, Socrates remarks, "we (Greeks) live around a sea like frogs around a pond" when describing to his friends the Greek cities of the Aegean.[249][250] This image is attested by the map of the Old Greek Diaspora, which corresponded to the Greek world until the creation of the Greek state in 1832. The sea and trade were natural outlets for Greeks since the Greek peninsula is mostly rocky and does not offer good prospects for agriculture.[46]
Notable Greek seafarers include people such as Pytheas of Massalia who sailed to Great Britain, Euthymenes who sailed to Africa, Scylax of Caryanda who sailed to India, the navarch of Alexander the Great Nearchus, Megasthenes, explorer of India, later the 6th century merchant and monk Cosmas Indicopleustes (Cosmas who sailed to India), and the explorer of the Northwestern Passage Ioannis Fokas also known as Juan de Fuca.[251] In later times, the Byzantine Greeks plied the sea-lanes of the Mediterranean and controlled trade until an embargo imposed by the Byzantine emperor on trade with the Caliphate opened the door for the later Italian pre-eminence in trade.[252]Panayotis Potagos was another explorer of modern times who was the first to reach Mbomu and Uele River from the north.
The Greek shipping tradition recovered during the late Ottoman rule (especially after the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca and during the Napoleonic Wars), when a substantial merchant middle class developed, which played an important part in the Greek War of Independence.[119] Today, Greek shipping continues to prosper to the extent that Greece has one of the largest merchant fleets in the world, while many more ships under Greek ownership fly flags of convenience.[187] The most notable shipping magnate of the 20th century was Aristotle Onassis, others being Yiannis Latsis, Stavros G. Livanos, and Stavros Niarchos.[253][254]
Admixture analysis of autosomalSNPs of the Balkan region in a global context on the resolution level of 7 assumed ancestral populations: African (brown), South/West European (light blue), Asian (yellow), Middle Eastern (orange), South Asian (green), North/East European (dark blue) and Caucasian/Anatolian component (beige).Factor correspondence analysis comparing different individuals from European ancestry groups
In their archaeogenetic study, Lazaridis et al. (2017) found that Minoans and Mycenaean Greeks were genetically highly similar, but not identical; modern Greeks resembled the Mycenaeans, but with some additional dilution of the early Neolithic ancestry. The results of the study support the idea of genetic continuity between these civilizations and modern Greeks, but not isolation in the history of populations of the Aegean, before and after the time of its earliest civilizations. Furthermore, proposed migrations by Egyptian or Phoenician colonists was not discernible in their data, thus "rejecting the hypothesis that the cultures of the Aegean were seeded by migrants from the old civilizations of these regions." The FST between the sampled Bronze Age populations and present-day West Eurasians was estimated, finding that Mycenaean Greeks and Minoans were least differentiated from the populations of modern Greece, Cyprus, Albania, and Italy.[181][182] In a subsequent study, Lazaridis et al. (2022) concluded that around ~58.4–65.8% of the ancestry of the Mycenaeans came from Anatolian Neolithic Farmers (ANF), while the remainder mainly came from ancient populations related to the Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers (CHG) (~20.1–22.7%) and the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) culture in the Levant (~7–14%). The Mycenaeans had also inherited ~3.3–5.5% ancestry from a source related to the Eastern European Hunter-Gatherers (EHG), introduced via a proximal source related to the inhabitants of the Eurasian steppe who are hypothesized to be the Proto-Indo-Europeans, and ~0.9–2.3% from the Iron Gates Hunter-Gatherers in the Balkans. Mycenaean elites were genetically the same as Mycenaean commoners in terms of their steppe ancestry, while some Mycenaeans lacked it altogether.[255][256]
A genetic study by Clemente et al. (2021) found that in the Early Bronze Age, the populations of the Minoan, Helladic, and Cycladic civilizations in the Aegean, were genetically homogeneous. In contrast, the Aegean population during the Middle Bronze Age was more differentiated; probably due to gene flow from a Yamnaya-related population from the Pontic–Caspian steppe. This is corroborated by sequenced genomes of Middle Bronze Age individuals from northern Greece, who had a much higher proportion of steppe-related ancestry; the timing of this gene flow was estimated at ~2,300 BCE, and is consistent with the dominant linguistic theories explaining the emergence of the Proto-Greek language. Present-day Greeks share ~90% of their ancestry with them, suggesting continuity between the two time periods. In the case of Mycenaean Greeks however, their steppe-related ancestry was diluted. The ancestry of the Mycenaeans could be explained via a 2-way admixture model of such MBA individuals in northern Greece, and either an EBA Aegean or MBA Minoan population; the difference between the two time periods could be explained by the general decline of the Mycenaean civilization.[257]
Genetic studies using multiple autosomal, Y-DNA, and mtDNA markers, show that Greeks share similar backgrounds as the rest of the Europeans and especially Southern Europeans (Italians and Balkan populations such as Albanians, Slavic Macedonians and Romanians). A study in 2008 showed that Greeks are genetically closest to Italians and Romanians[258] and another 2008 study showed that they are close to Italians, Albanians, Romanians and southern Balkan Slavs such as Slavic Macedonians and Bulgarians.[259] A 2003 study showed that Greeks cluster with other South European (mainly Italians) and North-European populations and are close to the Basques,[260] and FST distances showed that they group with other European and Mediterranean populations,[261][262] especially with Italians (−0.0001) and Tuscans (0.0005).[263] A study in 2008 showed that Greek regional samples from the mainland cluster with those from the Balkans, principally Albanians while Cretan Greeks cluster with the central Mediterranean and Eastern Mediterranean samples.[264] Studies using mitochondrial DNA gene markers (mtDNA) showed that Greeks group with other Mediterranean European populations[265][266][267] and principal component analysis (PCA) confirmed the low genetic distance between Greeks and Italians[268] and also revealed a cline of genes with highest frequencies in the Balkans and Southern Italy, spreading to lowest levels in Britain and the Basque country, which Cavalli-Sforza (1993) associates with "the Greek expansion, which reached its peak in historical times around 1000 and 500 BC but which certainly began earlier".[269] Greeks also have a degree of Eastern-European-related ancestry which is observed in all Balkan peoples; it was acquired after 700 CE, coinciding with the arrival of Slavic-speaking peoples in the Balkans, but the proportion of this ancestry varies considerably between different studies and subregions.[270][271] A 2019 study showed that Cretans share high IBD with Western (CEU), Central (German and Polish), Northern (CEU, Scandinavian) and Eastern Europeans (Ukrainian, Russian), similar to mainland Greeks who share high IBD with Eastern Europeans. This reflects settlement patterns in Crete, driven by Myceneans and Dorians, Goths and Slavs. Peoples like Andalusians, Near EasternArabs and Venetians left a minimal genetic impact on Cretans. But a PCA analysis shows that Cretans overlap with Peloponneseans, Sicilians and Ashkenazi Jews.[272] A 2022 study discovered high genetic affinities between present-day southeastern Peloponnesian populations and Apulians, Calabrians and southeastern Sicilians, which are "all characterised by a cluster composition different from those displayed by other Greek groups", due to low influence from inland populations such as Slavic-related people and/or genetic drift in Tsakones and Maniots. Individuals from western Sicily additionally show similarities with peoples from the western part of the Peloponnese.[273] A 2023 study states that early Cretan farmers shared the same ancestry as other Neolithic Aegeans but received 'eastern' gene flow of Anatolian origin at the end of the Neolithic Age. From the 17th to 12th centuries BCE, genetic signatures of Central and East European ancestry gradually increased in Crete, indicative of mainland Greek influence.[274]
Physical appearance
Greek warriors, details from painted sarcophagus found in Italy, 350–325 BC
A study from 2013 for prediction of hair and eye colour from DNA of the Greek people showed that the self-reported phenotype frequencies according to hair and eye colour categories was as follows: 119 individuals – hair colour, 11 blond, 45 dark blond/light brown, 49 dark brown, 3 brown red/auburn and 11 had black hair; eye colour, 13 with blue, 15 with intermediate (green, heterochromia) and 91 had brown eye colour.[275]
Another study from 2012 included 150 dental school students from the University of Athens, and the results of the study showed that light hair colour (blonde/light ash brown) was predominant in 10.7% of the students. 36% had medium hair colour (light brown/medium darkest brown), 32% had darkest brown and 21% black (15.3 off black, 6% midnight black). In conclusion, the hair colour of young Greeks are mostly brown, ranging from light to dark brown with significant minorities having black and blonde hair. The same study also showed that the eye colour of the students was 14.6% blue/green, 28% medium (light brown) and 57.4% dark brown.[276]
A 2017 study found that Bronze Age Aegean populations had mostly dark hair (brown to black) and eyes. The genetic phenotype predictions matched the visual representations made by the Greeks of themselves, suggesting that art of this period reproduced phenotypes naturalistically.[182]
Timeline
The history of the Greek people is closely associated with the history of Greece, Cyprus, Southern Italy, Constantinople, Asia Minor and the Black Sea. During the Ottoman rule of Greece, a number of Greek enclaves around the Mediterranean were cut off from the core, notably in Southern Italy, the Caucasus, Syria and Egypt. By the early 20th century, over half of the overall Greek-speaking population was settled in Asia Minor (now Turkey), while later that century a huge wave of migration to the United States, Australia, Canada and elsewhere created the modern Greek diaspora.
Time
Events
c.3rd millennium BC
Proto-Greek tribes from around the Southern Balkans/Aegean are generally thought to have arrived in the Greek mainland.
16th century BC
Emergence of the Achaeans and formation of the Mycenaean civilization, which produced the earliest textual evidence of the Greek language.
15th century BC
Knossos ruled by a Mycenaean elite, who formed a hybrid Mycenaean-Minoan culture on Crete.[277]
The Mycenaean civilization ends with destructions of palaces and internal displacements. The Greek Dark Ages begin. Dorians move into peninsular Greece.
9th century BC
Major colonization of Asia Minor and Cyprus by the Greek tribes.
8th century BC
First major colonies established in Sicily and Southern Italy. The first Pan-Hellenic festival, the Olympic games, is held in 776 BC. The emergence of Pan-Hellenism marks the ethnogenesis of the Greek nation.
6th century BC
Colonies established across the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea.
Slavic conquest of several parts of Greece, Greek migrations to Southern Italy, Roman emperors capture main Slavic bodies and transfer them to Cappadocia. The Bosporus is re-populated by Macedonian and Cypriot Greeks.
8th century
Roman dissolution of surviving Slavic settlements in Greece and full recovery of the Greek peninsula.
9th century
Retro-migrations of Greeks from all parts of the Empire (mainly from Southern Italy and Sicily) into parts of Greece that were depopulated by the Slavic Invasions (mainly western Peloponnesus and Thessaly).
13th century
Roman Empire dissolves, Constantinople taken by the Fourth Crusade; becoming the capital of the Latin Empire. Liberated after a long struggle by the Empire of Nicaea, but fragments remain separated. Migrations between Asia Minor, Constantinople and mainland Greece take place.
15th century – 19th century
Conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire. Greek diaspora into Europe begins. Ottoman settlements in Greece. Phanariot Greeks occupy high posts in Eastern European millets.
Time
Events
1830s
Creation of the modern Greek state. Emigration to the New World begins. Large-scale migrations from Constantinople and Asia Minor to Greece take place.
1913
European Ottoman lands partitioned; unorganized migrations of Greeks, Bulgarians and Turks towards their respective states.
Treaty of Neuilly; Greece and Bulgaria exchange populations, with some exceptions.
1922
The Destruction of Smyrna (modern-day Izmir) more than 40 thousand Greeks killed; end of significant Greek presence in Asia Minor.
1923
Treaty of Lausanne; Greece and Turkey agree to exchange populations with limited exceptions of the Greeks in Constantinople, Imbros, Tenedos and the Muslim minority of Western Thrace. 1.5 million of Asia Minor and Pontic Greeks settle in Greece, and some 450 thousands of Muslims settle in Turkey.
↑ There is a range of interpretations: Carl Blegen dates the arrival of the Greeks around 1900 BC, John Caskey believes that there were two waves of immigrants and Robert Drews places the event as late as 1600 BC.[60][61] Numerous other theories have also been supported,[62] but there is a general consensus that the Greek tribes arrived around 2100 BC.
↑ While Greek authorities signed the agreement legalizing the population exchange this was done on the insistence of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and after a million Greeks had already been expelled from Asia Minor (Gilbar 1997, p.8).
Citations
↑ Maratou-Alipranti 2013, p.196: "The Greek diaspora remains large, consisting of up to 4 million people globally."
↑ Clogg 2013, p.228: "Greeks of the diaspora, settled in some 141 countries, were held to number 7 million although it is not clear how this figure was arrived at or what criteria were used to define Greek ethnicity, while the population of the homeland, according to the 1991 census, amounted to some 10.25 million."
↑ "2011 Population and Housing Census". Hellenic Statistical Authority. 12 September 2014. Archived from the original on 16 July 2016. Retrieved 18 May 2016. The Resident Population of Greece is 10.816.286, of which 5.303.223 male (49,0%) and 5.513.063 female (51,0%)... The total number of permanent residents of Greece with foreign citizenship during the Census was 912.000. [See Graph 6: Resident Population by Citizenship]
↑ "U.S. Relations with Greece". United States Department of State. 10 March 2016. Archived from the original on 21 January 2017. Retrieved 18 May 2016. Today, an estimated three million Americans resident in the United States claim Greek descent. This large, well-organized community cultivates close political and cultural ties with Greece.
↑ "Italy: Cultural Relations and Greek Community". Hellenic Republic: Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 9 July 2013. Archived from the original on 14 May 2016. Retrieved 4 May 2016. The Greek Italian community numbers some 30,000 and is concentrated mainly in central Italy. The age-old presence in Italy of Italians of Greek descent – dating back to Byzantine and Classical times – is attested to by the Griko dialect, which is still spoken in the Magna Graecia region. This historically Greek-speaking villages are Condofuri, Galliciano, Roccaforte del Greco, Roghudi, Bova and Bova Marina, which are in the Calabria region (the capital of which is Reggio). The Grecanic region, including Reggio, has a population of some 200,000, while speakers of the Griko dialect number fewer that 1,000 persons.
1 2 "Grecia Salentina" (in Italian). Unione dei Comuni della Grecìa Salentina. 2016. Archived from the original on 19 August 2014. Retrieved 4 May 2016. La popolazione complessiva dell'Unione è di 54278 residenti così distribuiti (Dati Istat al 31° dicembre 2005. Comune Popolazione Calimera 7351 Carpignano Salentino 3868 Castrignano dei Greci 4164 Corigliano d'Otranto 5762 Cutrofiano 9250 Martano 9588 Martignano 1784 Melpignano 2234 Soleto 5551 Sternatia 2583 Zollino 2143 Totale 54278).
1 2 Bellinello 1998, p.53: "Le attuali colonie Greche calabresi; La Grecìa calabrese si inscrive nel massiccio aspromontano e si concentra nell'ampia e frastagliata valle dell'Amendolea e nelle balze più a oriente, dove sorgono le fiumare dette di S. Pasquale, di Palizzi e Sidèroni e che costituiscono la Bovesia vera e propria. Compresa nei territori di cinque comuni (Bova Superiore, Bova Marina, Roccaforte del Greco, Roghudi, Condofuri), la Grecia si estende per circa 233km (145mi)q. La popolazione anagrafica complessiva è di circa 14.000 unità."
↑ "Ukraine: Cultural Relations and Greek Community". Hellenic Republic: Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 4 February 2011. Archived from the original on 21 October 2016. Retrieved 19 April 2016. There is a significant Greek presence in southern and eastern Ukraine, which can be traced back to ancient Greek and Byzantine settlers. Ukrainian citizens of Greek descent amount to 91,000 people, although their number is estimated to be much higher by the Federation of Greek communities of Mariupol.
↑ "France: Cultural Relations and Greek Community". Hellenic Republic: Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 9 July 2013. Archived from the original on 21 October 2016. Retrieved 19 April 2016. Some 15,000 Greeks reside in the wider region of Paris, Lille and Lyon. In the region of Southern France, the Greek community numbers some 20,000.
↑ "Belgium: Cultural Relations and Greek Community". Hellenic Republic: Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 28 January 2011. Archived from the original on 11 September 2018. Retrieved 19 April 2016. Some 35,000 Greeks reside in Belgium. Official Belgian data numbers Greeks in the country at 17,000, but does not take into account Greeks who have taken Belgian citizenship or work for international organizations and enterprises.
↑ "Pontic". Ethnologue: Languages of the World. SIL International. 2016. Archived from the original on 6 June 2019. Retrieved 13 May 2016.
↑ "Argentina: Cultural Relations and Greek Community". Hellenic Republic: Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 9 July 2013. Archived from the original on 11 September 2018. Retrieved 15 April 2016. It is estimated that some 20,000 to 30,000 persons of Greek origin currently reside in Argentina, and there are Greek communities in the wider region of Buenos Aires.
↑ "Sweden: Cultural Relations and Greek Community". Hellenic Republic: Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 4 February 2011. Archived from the original on 5 April 2013. Retrieved 5 October 2019. The Greek community in Sweden consists of approximately 24,000 Greeks who are permanent inhabitants, included in Swedish society and active in various sectors: science, arts, literature, culture, media, education, business, and politics.
↑ "Bulgaria: Cultural Relations and Greek Community". Hellenic Republic: Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 28 January 2011. Archived from the original on 11 September 2018. Retrieved 19 April 2016. There are some 28,500 persons of Greek origin and citizenship residing in Bulgaria. This number includes approximately 15,000 Sarakatsani, 2,500 former political refugees, 8,000 "old Greeks", 2,000 university students and 1,000 professionals and their families.
↑ "Georgia: Cultural Relations and Greek Community". Hellenic Republic: Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 31 January 2011. Archived from the original on 23 April 2016. Retrieved 15 April 2016. The Greek community of Georgia is currently estimated at 15,000 people, mostly elderly people living in the Tsalkas area.
↑ "Migranti z Řecka v Česku"[Migrants from Greece in the Czech Republic](PDF). Hellenic Republic: Ministry of Foreign Affairs (in Czech). 9 March 2011. Archived(PDF) from the original on 9 October 2022. Retrieved 25 April 2019.
↑ "Switzerland: Cultural Relations and Greek Community". Hellenic Republic: Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 10 December 2015. Archived from the original on 21 October 2016. Retrieved 19 April 2016. The Greek community in Switzerland is estimated to number some 11,000 persons (of a total of 1.5 million foreigners residing in the country.
↑ "Romania: Cultural Relations and Greek Community". Hellenic Republic: Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 6 December 2013. Archived from the original on 8 August 2016. Retrieved 19 April 2016. The Greek Romanian community numbers some 10,000, and there are many Greeks working in established Greek enterprises in Romania.
↑ "Greeks in Uzbekistan". Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst. The Central Asia-Caucasus Institute. 21 June 2000. Archived from the original on 13 June 2010. Retrieved 24 December 2008. Currently there are about 9,500 Greeks living in Uzbekistan, with 6,500 living in Tashkent.
↑ "Kazakhstan: Cultural Relations and Greek Community". Hellenic Republic: Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 3 February 2011. Archived from the original on 23 April 2016. Retrieved 15 April 2016. There are between 10,000 and 12,000 ethnic Greeks living in Kazakhstan, organized in several communities.
↑ Kurt Aland, Barbara Aland The text of the New Testament: an introduction to the critical 1995 p. 52
↑ Archibald Macbride Hunter Introducing the New Testament 1972 p. 9
↑ Bubenik, V. (2007). "The rise of Koiné". In A. F. Christidis (ed.). A History of Ancient Greek: From the Beginnings to Late Antiquity. Cambridge: University Press. pp.342–345.
↑ Guibernau & Hutchinson 2004, p.23: "Indeed, Smith emphasizes that the myth of divine election sustains the continuity of cultural identity, and, in that regard, has enabled certain pre-modern communities such as the Jews, Armenians, and Greeks to survive and persist over centuries and millennia (Smith 1993: 15–20)."
↑ Smith 1999, p.21: "It emphasizes the role of myths, memories and symbols of ethnic chosenness, trauma, and the 'golden age' of saints, sages, and heroes in the rise of modern nationalism among the Jews, Armenians, and Greeks—the archetypal diaspora peoples."
↑ Burckhardt 1999, p. 168: "The establishment of these Panhellenic sites, which yet remained exclusively Hellenic, was a very important element in the growth and self-consciousness of Hellenic nationalism; it was uniquely decisive in breaking down enmity between tribes, and remained the most powerful obstacle to fragmentation into mutually hostile poleis."
↑ "Ancient Greek Civilization". Encyclopædia Britannica. United States: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. 18 February 2016. Online Edition. Archived from the original on 17 November 2019. Retrieved 21 June 2022.
↑ Burger 2008, pp.57–58: "Poleis continued to go to war with each other. The Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) made this painfully clear. The war (really two wars punctuated by a peace) was a duel between Greece's two leading cities, Athens and Sparta. Most other poleis, however, got sucked into the conflict as allies of one side or the other ... The fact that Greeks were willing to fight for their cities against other Greeks in conflicts like the Peloponnesian War showed the limits of the pull of Hellas compared with that of the polis."
↑ Fox, Robin Lane (2004). "Riding with Alexander". Archaeology. The Archaeological Institute of America. Archived from the original on 2 November 2012. Retrieved 27 December 2008. Alexander inherited the idea of an invasion of the Persian Empire from his father Philip whose advance-force was already out in Asia in 336 BC. Philips campaign had the slogan of "freeing the Greeks" in Asia and "punishing the Persians" for their past sacrileges during their own invasion (a century and a half earlier) of Greece. No doubt, Philip wanted glory and plunder.
1 2 "Hellenistic age". Encyclopædia Britannica. United States: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. 27 May 2015. Online Edition. Archived from the original on 14 April 2020. Retrieved 21 June 2022.
↑ Lucore 2009, p.51: "The Hellenistic period is commonly portrayed as the great age of Greek scientific discovery, above all in mathematics and astronomy."
↑ "Hellenistic religion". Encyclopædia Britannica. United States: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. 13 May 2015. Online Edition. Archived from the original on 27 June 2019. Retrieved 21 June 2022.
↑ Harrison 2002, p.268: "Roman, Greek (if not used in its sense of 'pagan') and Christian became synonymous terms, counterposed to 'foreigner', 'barbarian', 'infidel'. The citizens of the Empire, now predominantly of Greek ethnicity and language, were often called simply ό χριστώνυμος λαός ['the people who bear Christ's name']."
↑ Angelov 2007, p.96; Makrides 2009, Chapter 2: "Christian Monotheism, Orthodox Christianity, Greek Orthodoxy", p. 74; Magdalino 1991, Chapter XIV: "Hellenism and Nationalism in Byzantium", p. 10.
↑ "Byzantine Empire". Encyclopædia Britannica. United States: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. 23 December 2015. Online Edition. Archived from the original on 4 September 2019. Retrieved 21 June 2022.
↑ Klein 2004, p.290 (Note #39); Annales Fuldenses, 389: "Mense lanuario c. epiphaniam Basilii, Graecorum imperatoris, legati cum muneribus et epistolis ad Hludowicum regem Radasbonam venerunt...".
↑ Fouracre & Gerberding 1996, p.345: "The Frankish court no longer regarded the Byzantine Empire as holding valid claims of universality; instead it was now termed the 'Empire of the Greeks'."
1 2 3 4 5 6 "Greece during the Byzantine period (c. AD 300–c. 1453), Population and languages, Emerging Greek identity". Encyclopædia Britannica. United States: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. 2008. Online Edition.
↑ Jane Perry Clark Carey; Andrew Galbraith Carey (1968). The Web of Modern Greek Politics. Columbia University Press. p.33. ISBN9780231031707. Archived from the original on 27 September 2023. Retrieved 11 September 2018. By the end of the fourteenth century the Byzantine emperor was often called "Emperor of the Hellenes"
↑ See for example Anthony Bryer, 'The Empire of Trebizond and the Pontus' (Variourum, 1980), and his 'Migration and Settlement in the Caucasus and Anatolia' (Variourum, 1988), and other works listed in Caucasian Greeks and Pontic Greeks.
↑ Harris 1999, Part II Medieval Libraries: Chapter 6 Byzantine and Moslem Libraries, pp. 71–88
1 2 "Renaissance". Encyclopædia Britannica. United States: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. 30 March 2016. Online Edition. Archived from the original on 16 June 2015. Retrieved 21 June 2022.
↑ "Aristotelianism". Encyclopædia Britannica. United States: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. 2016. Online Edition. Archived from the original on 21 October 2019. Retrieved 21 June 2022.
↑ "Cyril and Methodius, Saints". The Columbia Encyclopedia. United States: Columbia University Press. 2016. Online Edition. Archived from the original on 5 June 2016. Retrieved 10 May 2016.
↑ "Phanariote". Encyclopædia Britannica. United States: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. 2016. Online Edition. Archived from the original on 23 October 2019. Retrieved 21 June 2022.
1 2 3 "History of Greece, Ottoman Empire, The merchant middle class". Encyclopædia Britannica. United States: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. 2008. Online Edition.
↑ I. Polinskaya, "Shared sanctuaries and the gods of others: On the meaning Of 'common' in Herodotus 8.144", in: R. Rosen & I. Sluiter (eds.), Valuing others in Classical Antiquity (LEiden: Brill, 2010), 43–70.
↑ Herodotus, 8.144.2: "The kinship of all Greeks in blood and speech, and the shrines of gods and the sacrifices that we have in common, and the likeness of our way of life."
↑ Athena S. Leoussi, Steven Grosby, Nationalism and Ethnosymbolism: History, Culture and Ethnicity in the Formation of Nations, Edinburgh University Press, 2006, p. 115
↑ Feraios, Rigas. New Political Constitution of the Inhabitants of Rumeli, Asia Minor, the Islands of the Aegean, and the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia.
↑ Smith 2003, p.98: "After the Ottoman conquest in 1453, recognition by the Turks of the Greek millet under its Patriarch and Church helped to ensure the persistence of a separate ethnic identity, which, even if it did not produce a "precocious nationalism" among the Greeks, provided the later Greek enlighteners and nationalists with a cultural constituency fed by political dreams and apocalyptic prophecies of the recapture of Constantinople and the restoration of Greek Byzantium and its Orthodox emperor in all his glory."
↑ Psellos, Michael (1994). Michaelis Pselli Orationes Panegyricae. Stuttgart/Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter. p.33. ISBN978-0-297-82057-4.
↑ See Iliad, II.2.530 for "Panhellenes" and Iliad II.2.653 for "Hellenes".
↑ Cartledge 2011, Chapter 4: Argos, p. 23: "The Late Bronze Age in Greece is also called conventionally 'Mycenaean', as we saw in the last chapter. But it might in principle have been called 'Argive', 'Achaean', or 'Danaan', since the three names that Homer does apply to Greeks collectively were 'Argives', 'Achaeans', and 'Danaans'."
↑ Nagy 2014, Texts and Commentaries – Introduction #2: "Panhellenism is the least common denominator of ancient Greek civilization... The impulse of Panhellenism is already at work in Homeric and Hesiodic poetry. In the Iliad, the names "Achaeans" and "Danaans" and "Argives" are used synonymously in the sense of Panhellenes = "all Hellenes" = "all Greeks.""
1 2 Aristotle. Meteorologica, 1.14Archived 29 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine : "The deluge in the time of Deucalion, for instance took place chiefly in the Greek world and in it especially about ancient Hellas, the country about Dodona and the Achelous."
↑ Homer. Iliad, 16.233–16.235: "King Zeus, lord of Dodona... you who hold wintry Dodona in your sway, where your prophets the Selloi dwell around you."
↑ Browning 1983, p.vii: "The Homeric poems were first written down in more or less their present form in the seventh century B.C. Since then Greek has enjoyed a continuous tradition down to the present day. Change there has certainly been. But there has been no break like that between Latin and Romance languages. Ancient Greek is not a foreign language to the Greek of today as Anglo-Saxon is to the modern Englishman. The only other language which enjoys comparable continuity of tradition is Chinese."
↑ Isaac 2004, p.504: "Autochthony, being an Athenian idea and represented in many Athenian texts, is likely to have influenced a broad public of readers, wherever Greek literature was read."
↑ Papagrigorakis, Kousoulis & Synodinos 2014, p.237: "Interpreted with caution, the craniofacial morphology in modern and ancient Greeks indicates elements of ethnic group continuation within the unavoidable multicultural mixtures."
↑ Argyropoulos, Sassouni & Xeniotou 1989, p.200: "An overall view of the finding obtained from these cephalometric analyses indicates that the Greek ethnic group has remained genetically stable in its cephalic and facial morphology for the last 4,000 years."
1 2 Gibbons, Ann (2 August 2017). "The Greeks really do have near-mythical origins, ancient DNA reveals". Science. doi:10.1126/science.aan7200.
↑ "CIA Factbook". Central Intelligence Agency. United States Government. 2007. Archived from the original on 9 January 2021. Retrieved 19 December 2008.
↑ "Census of Population 2001". Γραφείο Τύπου και Πληροφοριών, Υπουργείο Εσωτερικών, Κυπριακή Δημοκρατία. Archived from the original on 3 February 2017. Retrieved 11 June 2016.
↑ "Greece: Demographic trends". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. 2016. Online Edition. Archived from the original on 17 July 2019. Retrieved 21 June 2022.
1 2 3 "Merchant Marine, Tertiary enrollment by age group". Pocket World in Figures (Economist). London: Economist Books. 2006. p.150. ISBN978-1-86197-825-7.
1 2 3 "Cyprus: Demographic trends". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. 2016. Online Edition. Archived from the original on 22 June 2008. Retrieved 21 June 2022.
↑ Yotopoulos-Marangopoulos 2001, p.24: "In occupied Cyprus on the other hand, where heavy ethnic cleansing took place, only 300 Greek Cypriots remain from the original 200,000!"
↑ Bideleux, Robert; Jeffries, Ian (2007). The Balkans: a post-communist history. London: Routledge. p.49. ISBN978-0-203-96911-3. OCLC85373407. Archived from the original on 29 May 2020. Retrieved 17 December 2022. It is difficult to know how many ethnic Greeks there were in Albania before the exodus of refugees during the early to mid-1990s. The Albanian government claimed there were only 60,000, based on the biased 1989 census, whereas the Greek government claimed there were upwards of 300,000. Most Western estimates were around the 200,000 mark
↑ Georgiou, Myria (2004). Mapping Minorities and their Media: The National Context – Greece(PDF). London School of Economics. Archived(PDF) from the original on 14 December 2022. Retrieved 17 December 2022. "The long and adventurous 20th century history of migration in Greece can be drawn by period: .... 1990's: The vast majority of the 200,000 ethnic Greeks from Albania".
↑ "Greek literature". Encyclopædia Britannica. United States: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. 27 August 2014. Online Edition. Archived from the original on 21 June 2020. Retrieved 21 June 2022.
↑ "Freedom of Religion in Greece". International Religious Freedom Report. United States Department of State. 2006. Archived from the original on 9 February 2020. Retrieved 12 May 2016.
↑ Tsokalidou, Roula (2002). "Greek-Speaking Enclaves of Lebanon and Syria"(PDF). Actas/Proceedings II Simposio Internacional Bilingüismo. Roula Tsokalidou (Primary School Education Department, University of Thessaly, Greece). pp.1245–1255. Archived(PDF) from the original on 9 October 2022.
↑ "The Flag". Law 851, Gov. Gazette 233, issue A, dated 21/22.12.1978. Presidency of the Hellenic Republic. Archived from the original on 15 October 2008. Retrieved 19 December 2008.
↑ "Older Flags: 19 December 2008". Flags of the Greeks. Skafidas Zacharias. Archived from the original on 14 May 2010. Retrieved 23 December 2008. [Note: Website contains image of the 1665 original for the current Greek flag.]
↑ "Byzantine Flags". Byzantine Heraldry. François Velde. 1997. Archived from the original on 6 January 2014. Retrieved 13 May 2016.
↑ Wilson, N.G. (2006). Encyclopedia of ancient Greece. New York: Routledge. p. 511. ISBN0-415-97334-1.
↑ R. Po-chia Hsia, Lynn Hunt, Thomas R. Martin, Barbara H. Rosenwein, and Bonnie G. Smith, The Making of the West, Peoples and Cultures, A Concise History, Volume I: To 1740 (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2007), 44.
↑ Harl 1996, p.260: "Cities employed the coins of an empire that formed a community of cities encircling the Mediterranean Sea, which Romans audaciously called "Our Sea" (mare nostrum). "We live around a sea like frogs around a pond" was how Socrates, so Plato tells us, described to his friends the Hellenic cities of the Aegean in the late fifth century B.C."
↑ Ayub, Q (2003). "Reconstruction of human evolutionary tree using polymorphic autosomal microsatellites". American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 122 (3): 259–268. doi:10.1002/ajpa.10234. PMID14533184. S2CID467540.
↑ Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca; Piazza, Alberto (1993). "Human genomic diversity in Europe: a summary of recent research and prospects for the future". Eur J Hum Genet. 1 (1): 3–18. doi:10.1159/000472383. PMID7520820. S2CID25475102.
↑ McEnroe, John C. (2010). Architecture of Minoan Crete: Constructing Identity in the Aegean Bronze Age. Web: University of Texas Press. pp.117–120, 122, 126–130.
↑ Beckman, Gary; Bryce, Trevor; Cline, Eric (2012). The Ahhiyawa Texts. Brill. pp.268–270. ISBN978-1589832688. The archaeological and textual evidence clearly demonstrates that there were well-established connections between the Aegean and western Anatolia during the late-fifteenth through the thirteenth centuries B.C.E
↑ R. J. Rummel. "Statistics of Democide". Chapter 5, Statistics of Turkey's Democide Estimates, Calculations, And Sources. Archived from the original on 25 August 2012. Retrieved 4 October 2006.
↑ Lowen, Mark (29 May 2013). "Greece's young: Dreams on hold as fight for jobs looms". BBC News. Archived from the original on 25 February 2019. Retrieved 25 July 2013. The brain drain is quickening. A recent study by the University of Thessaloniki found that more than 120,000 professionals, including doctors, engineers and scientists, have left Greece since the start of the crisis in 2010.
Greek is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic branch within the Indo-European language family. It is native to Greece, Cyprus, Italy, southern Albania, and other regions of the Balkans, Caucasus, the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor, and the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system is the Greek alphabet, which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Coptic, Gothic, and many other writing systems.
Greece, officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. Located on the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula, Greece shares land borders with Albania to the northwest, North Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to the east. The Aegean Sea lies to the east of the mainland, the Ionian Sea to the west, and the Sea of Crete and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. Greece has the longest coastline on the Mediterranean Basin, featuring thousands of islands. The country comprises nine traditional geographic regions, and has a population of over 10.4 million. Athens is the nation's capital and largest city, followed by Thessaloniki and Patras.
Epirus is a geographical and historical region in southeastern Europe, now shared between Greece and Albania. It lies between the Pindus Mountains and the Ionian Sea, stretching from the Bay of Vlorë and the Acroceraunian Mountains in the north to the Ambracian Gulf and the ruined Roman city of Nicopolis in the south. It is currently divided between the region of Epirus in northwestern Greece and the counties of Gjirokastër and Vlorë in southern Albania. The largest city in Epirus is Ioannina, seat of the Greek region of Epirus, with Gjirokastër the largest city in the Albanian part of Epirus.
Thessaly is a traditional geographic and modern administrative region of Greece, comprising most of the ancient region of the same name. Before the Greek Dark Ages, Thessaly was known as Aeolia, and appears thus in Homer's Odyssey.
Lemnos or Limnos is a Greek island in the northern Aegean Sea. Administratively the island forms a separate municipality within the Lemnos regional unit, which is part of the North Aegean region. The principal town of the island and seat of the municipality is Myrina. At 477.583 square kilometres (184.396 sq mi), it is the 8th-largest island of Greece.
The Ionians were one of the four major tribes that the Greeks considered themselves to be divided into during the ancient period; the other three being the Dorians, Aeolians, and Achaeans. The Ionian dialect was one of the three major linguistic divisions of the Hellenic world, together with the Dorian and Aeolian dialects.
The history of Greece encompasses the history of the territory of the modern nation-state of Greece as well as that of the Greek people and the areas they inhabited and ruled historically. The scope of Greek habitation and rule has varied throughout the ages and as a result, the history of Greece is similarly elastic in what it includes.
Hellenization is the adoption of Greek culture, religion, language, and identity by non-Greeks. In the ancient period, colonisation often led to the Hellenisation of indigenous peoples; in the Hellenistic period, many of the territories which were conquered by Alexander the Great were Hellenized.
Greek Cypriots are the ethnic Greek population of Cyprus, forming the island's largest ethnolinguistic community. According to the 2011 census, 659,115 respondents recorded their ethnicity as Greek, forming almost 99% of the 667,398 Cypriot citizens and over 78% of the 840,407 total residents of the area controlled by the Republic of Cyprus. These figures do not include the 29,321 citizens of Greece residing in Cyprus, ethnic Greeks recorded as citizens of other countries, or the population of Northern Cyprus.
Greek is an Indo-European language, the sole surviving descendant of the Hellenic sub-family. Although it split off from other Indo-European languages around the 3rd millennium BCE, it is first attested in the Bronze Age as Mycenaean Greek. During the Archaic and Classical eras, Greek speakers wrote numerous texts in a variety of dialects known collectively as Ancient Greek. In the Hellenistic era, these dialects underwent dialect levelling to form Koine Greek which was used as a lingua franca throughout the eastern Roman Empire, and later grew into Medieval Greek. For much of the period of Modern Greek, the language existed in a situation of diglossia, where speakers would switch between informal varieties known as Dimotiki and a formal one known as Katharevousa. Present-day Modern Standard Greek is largely an outgrowth of Dimotiki, with some features retained from Katharevousa.
The Greek diaspora, also known as Omogenia, are the communities of Greeks living outside of Greece and Cyprus.
The Macedonians were an ancient tribe that lived on the alluvial plain around the rivers Haliacmon and lower Axios in the northeastern part of mainland Greece. Essentially an ancient Greek people, they gradually expanded from their homeland along the Haliacmon valley on the northern edge of the Greek world, absorbing or driving out neighbouring non-Greek tribes, primarily Thracian and Illyrian. They spoke Ancient Macedonian, which is usually classified by scholars as a dialect of Northwest Doric Greek, and occasionally as a distinct sister language of Greek or an Aeolic Greek dialect. However, the prestige language of the region during the Classical era was Attic Greek, replaced by Koine Greek during the Hellenistic era. Their religious beliefs mirrored those of other Greeks, following the main deities of the Greek pantheon, although the Macedonians continued Archaic burial practices that had ceased in other parts of Greece after the 6th century BC. Aside from the monarchy, the core of Macedonian society was its nobility. Similar to the aristocracy of neighboring Thessaly, their wealth was largely built on herding horses and cattle.
The Greeks have been identified by many ethnonyms. The most common native ethnonym is Hellene, pl. Hellenes (Ἕλληνες); the name Greeks was used by the ancient Romans and gradually entered the European languages through its use in Latin. The mythological patriarch Hellen is the named progenitor of the Greek peoples; his descendants the Aeolians, Dorians, Achaeans and Ionians correspond to the main Greek tribes and to the main dialects spoken in Greece and Asia Minor (Anatolia).
The Byzantine Greeks were the Greek-speaking Eastern Romans throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. They were the main inhabitants of the lands of the Byzantine Empire, of Constantinople and Asia Minor, the Greek islands, Cyprus, and portions of the southern Balkans, and formed large minorities, or pluralities, in the coastal urban centres of the Levant and northern Egypt. Throughout their history, the Byzantine Greeks self-identified as Romans, but are referred to as "Byzantine Greeks" in modern historiography. Latin speakers identified them simply as Greeks or with the term Romaei.
Greek nationalism, otherwise referred to as Hellenic nationalism, refers to the nationalism of Greeks and Greek culture. As an ideology, Greek nationalism originated and evolved in classical Greece. In modern times, Greek nationalism became a major political movement beginning in the early 19th century, which culminated in the Greek War of Independence (1821–1829) against the Ottoman Empire.
Greeks in Italy have been present since the migrations of traders and colonial foundations in the 8th century BC, continuing down to the present time. Nowadays, there is an ethnic minority known as the Griko people, who live in the Southern Italian regions of Calabria and Apulia, especially the peninsula of Salento, within the ancient Magna Graecia region, who speak a distinctive dialect of Greek called Griko. They are believed to be remnants of the ancient and medieval Greek communities, who have lived in the south of Italy for centuries. A Greek community has long existed in Venice as well, the current centre of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Italy and Malta, which in addition was a Byzantine province until the 10th century and held territory in Morea and Crete until the 17th century. Alongside this group, a smaller number of more recent migrants from Greece lives in Italy, forming an expatriate community in the country. Today many Greeks in Southern Italy follow Italian customs and culture, experiencing assimilation.
The Greeks in Syria arrived in the 7th century BC and became more prominent during the Hellenistic period and when the Seleucid Empire was centered there. Today, there is a Greek community of about 4,500 in Syria, most of whom have Syrian nationality and who live mainly in Aleppo, Baniyas, Tartous, and Damascus, the capital. There are also about 8,000 Greek-speaking Muslims of Cretan origin in Al-Hamidiyah.
Epirus was an ancient Greek kingdom, and later republic, located in the geographical region of Epirus, in parts of north-western Greece and southern Albania. Home to the ancient Epirotes, the state was bordered by the Aetolian League to the south, Ancient Thessaly and Ancient Macedonia to the east, and Illyrian tribes to the north. The Greek king Pyrrhus is known to have made Epirus a powerful state in the Greek realm that was comparable to the likes of Ancient Macedonia and Ancient Rome. Pyrrhus' armies also attempted an assault against the state of Ancient Rome during their unsuccessful campaign in what is now modern-day Italy.
The Roman people was the body of Roman citizens (Latin: Rōmānī; Ancient Greek: Ῥωμαῖοι Rhōmaîoi) during the Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic, and the Roman Empire. This concept underwent considerable changes throughout the long history of the Roman civilisation, as its borders expanded and contracted. Originally only including the Latins of Rome itself, Roman citizenship was extended to the rest of the Italic peoples by the 1st century BC and to nearly every subject of the Roman empire in late antiquity. At their peak, the Romans ruled large parts of Europe, the Near East, and North Africa through conquests made during the Roman Republic and the subsequent Roman Empire. Although defined primarily as a citizenship, "Roman-ness" has also and variously been described as a cultural identity, a nationality, or a multi-ethnicity that eventually encompassed a vast regional diversity.
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