Greek diaspora
The Greek diaspora, also known as Omogenia, are the communities of Greeks living outside of Greece and Cyprus.
Such places historically include, Albania, North Macedonia, southern Russia, Ukraine, Asia Minor and Pontus, Georgia, Egypt, Levant, southern Italy, Sicily, Cargèse and Marseille in France.
The term also refers to communities established by Greek migration outside of the traditional areas; such as in the United States, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, New Zealand, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Norway, and others.
In addition, there were significant Greek communities established during the Cold War period in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, following the 1946–1949 Greek Civil War, when Greek Communist refugees and their families were forced to leave Northern Greece and resettle in different parts of the Eastern Bloc.
The Greek diaspora population is estimated at 5 million, which when added to the population of Greece, it gives a total worldwide Greek population of approximately 15 million.
Overview
The Greek diaspora is one of the oldest diasporas in the world, with an attested presence from Homeric times to the present. Examples of its influence range from the role played by Greek expatriates in the emergence of the Renaissance, through liberation and nationalist movements involved in the fall of the Ottoman Empire, to commercial developments such as the commissioning of the world's first supertankers by shipping magnates Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos.History
Antiquity
In Archaic Greece, the trading and colonizing activities of Greeks from the Balkans and Asia Minor propagated Greek culture, religion and language around the Mediterranean and Black Sea basins. Greek city-states were established in Southern Italy, northern Libya, eastern Spain, the south of France, and the Black Sea coast, and the Greeks founded over 400 colonies in these areas. Alexander the Great's conquest of the Achaemenid Empire marked the beginning of the Hellenistic period, which was characterized by a new wave of Greek colonization in Asia and Africa; the Greek ruling classes established their presence in Egypt, West Asia, and Northwest India.Many Greeks migrated to the new Hellenistic cities founded in Alexander's wake, as geographically dispersed as Uzbekistan and Kuwait. Seleucia, Antioch and Alexandria were among the largest cities in the world during Hellenistic and Roman times. Greeks spread across the Roman Empire, and in the eastern territories the Greek language became the lingua franca. The Roman Empire was Christianized in the fourth century AD, and during the late Byzantine period the Greek Orthodox form of Christianity became a hallmark of Greek identity.
Middle Ages
In the seventh century, Emperor Heraclius adopted Medieval Greek as the official language of the Byzantine Empire. Greeks continued to live around the Levant, Mediterranean and Black Sea, maintaining their identity among local populations as traders, officials, and settlers. Soon afterwards, the Arab-Islamic Caliphate seized the Levant, Egypt, North Africa and Sicily from the Byzantine Greeks during the Byzantine–Arab Wars. The Greek populations generally remained in these areas of the Caliphate and helped translate ancient Greek works into Arabic, thus contributing to early Islamic philosophy and science.Fall of Byzantium and exodus to Italy
After the Byzantine–Ottoman Wars, which resulted in the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the Ottoman conquest of Greek lands, many Greeks fled Constantinople and found refuge in Italy. They brought ancient Greek writings that had been lost in the West, contributing to the Renaissance. Most of these Greeks settled in Venice, Florence, and Rome.Fall of the Empire of Trebizond and exodus to Russia and Georgia
Between the fall of the Empire of Trebizond to the Ottomans in 1461 and the second Russo-Turkish War in 1828–29, thousands of Pontic Greeks migrated from the Pontic Alps and eastern Anatolia to Georgia and other southern regions of the Russian Empire, and to the Russian province of Kars in the South Caucasus. Many Pontic Greeks fled their homelands in Pontus and northeastern Anatolia and settled in these areas to avoid Ottoman reprisals after being suspected of supporting the Russian invasions of eastern Anatolia in the Russo-Turkish Wars from the late 18th to the early 20th century. Others resettled in search of new opportunities in trade, mining, farming, the church, the military, and the bureaucracy of the Russian Empire.Modern era
Ottoman Empire
Greeks spread through many provinces of the Ottoman Empire and took major roles in its economic life, particularly the Phanariots. The Phanariots helped administer the Ottoman Empire's Balkan domains in the 18th century; some settled in present-day Romania, influencing its political and cultural life. Other Greeks settled outside the southern Balkans, moving north in service to the Orthodox Church or as a result of population transfers and massacres by Ottoman authorities after Greek rebellions against Ottoman rule or suspected Greek collaboration with Russia in the Russo-Turkish wars fought between 1774 and 1878. Greek Macedonia was most affected by the population upheavals, where the large Ottoman Muslim population, residing there since some generations, could form local militias to harass and exact revenge on the Greek-speaking Christian Orthodox population; this often forced the inhabitants of rural districts, particularly in the more vulnerable lowland areas, to abandon their homes.A larger-scale movement of Greek-speaking peoples in the Ottoman period was Pontic Greeks from northeastern Anatolia to Georgia and parts of southern Russia, particularly to the province of Kars Oblast in the southern Caucasus after the short-lived Russian occupation of Erzerum and the surrounding region during the 1828–29 Russo-Turkish War. An estimated one-fifth of Pontic Greeks left their homeland in the mountains of northeastern Anatolia in 1829 as refugees, following the Tsarist army as it withdrew back into Russian territory. The Pontic Greek refugees who settled in Georgia and the southern Caucasus assimilated with preexisting Caucasus Greek communities. Those who settled in Ukraine and southern Russia became a sizable proportion of cities such as Mariupol, but generally assimilated with Christian Orthodox Russians and continued to serve in the Tsarist army.
In 1788, Ali Pasha of Ioannina destroyed Moscopole. This predominantly ethnic Aromanian settlement historically had an important Greek influence. This is why some members of the Aromanian diaspora that settled in places such as Vienna in Austria have been considered as Greeks and part of a Greek diaspora as well.
19th century
During and after the Greek War of Independence, Greeks of the diaspora established the fledgling state, raised funds and awareness abroad and served as senior officers in Russian armies which fought the Ottomans to help liberate Greeks under Ottoman subjugation in Macedonia, Epirus, and Thrace. Greek merchant families had contacts in other countries; during the disturbances, many set up home bases around the Mediterranean, Russia, and Britain from where they traded. Businesses frequently included the extended family, and they brought schools teaching Greek and the Greek Orthodox Church. As markets changed, some families became shippers. The diaspora expanded across the Levant, North Africa, India and the United States. Many leaders of the Greek struggle for liberation from Ottoman Macedonia and other parts of the southern Balkans with large Greek populations still under Ottoman rule had links to the Greek trading and business families who funded the Greek liberation struggle against the Ottomans and the creation of a Greater Greece.The terrible devastation of the island of Chios in the 1822 massacre caused a great dispersion of the islanders, leading to the creation of a specific Chian diaspora.
After the Treaty of Constantinople, the political situation stabilised; some displaced families returned to the newly independent country to become key figures in cultural, educational and political life, especially in Athens. Financial assistance from overseas was channeled through these family ties, providing for institutions such as the National Library and sending relief after natural disasters.
20th century
During the 20th century, many Greeks left the traditional homelands for economic and political reasons; this resulted in large migrations from Greece and Cyprus to the United States, Australia, Canada, Brazil, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Argentina, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Germany, Norway, Belgium, Georgia, Italy, Armenia, Russia, Chile, Mexico and South Africa, especially after World War II, the Greek Civil War and the Turkish Invasion of Cyprus in 1974.After World War I, most Pontian and Anatolian Greeks living in Asia Minor were victims of Muslim Turkish intolerance for Christians in the Ottoman Empire. More than 3.5 million Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians were killed in the regimes of the Young Turks and Mustafa Kemal, from 1914 to 1923. Greeks in Asia Minor fled to modern Greece, and the Russian Empire was also a major destination.
Mass population transfers in the Soviet Union led to the displacement of thousands of Pontic Greeks and Greek communists in the 1940s, creating a sizable Greek diaspora in Central Asia. Following the persecution and mass killing of the Greek Operation starting in the late 1930s, mass deportations of Soviet Greeks took place throughout the 1940s, forcing over 30,000 Greeks of Crimea and the larger Black Sea region into Central Asia, especially to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. After the defeat of the Democratic Army of Greece and the Communist Party of Greece in 1949, another wave of Greeks entered Central Asia, as the Soviet Union sent around 11,000 refugees of the Greek Civil War to Tashkent. In the early 1980s, with the decriminalisation of the Greek Communist Party, many returned to Greece. However, there is still a Greek community in Uzbekistan which survives to this day.
After the Greek Civil War, many communist Greeks and their families fled to neighboring Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and the Soviet-dominated states of Eastern Europe. Hungary founded a village for Greek refugees, and many Greeks were resettled in the former Sudetenland region of northeastern Czechoslovakia around Krnov. Sweden also admitted large numbers of Greeks, and over 17,000 Greek-Swedish descendants live in the country.
Although many immigrants later returned to Greece, these countries still have a number of first- and second-generation Greeks who maintain their traditions.
With the fall of Communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Greeks of the diaspora immigrated to modern Greece's main urban centers of Athens, Thessaloniki, and Cyprus; many came from Georgia.
Pontic Greeks are Greek-speaking communities originating in the Black Sea region, particularly from the Trebizond region, the Pontic Alps, eastern Anatolia, Georgia, and the former Russian south-Caucasus Kars Oblast. After 1919–1923, most of these Pontic Greek and Caucasus Greek communities resettled in Greek Macedonia or joined other Greek communities in southern Russia and Ukraine.