Greeks in Turkey
The Greeks in Turkey constitute a small population of Greek and Greek-speaking Eastern Orthodox Christians who mostly live in Istanbul, as well as on the two islands of the western entrance to the Dardanelles: Imbros and Tenedos. Greeks are one of the four ethnic minorities officially recognized in Turkey by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, together with Jews, Armenians, and Bulgarians.
They are the remnants of the estimated 200,000 Greeks who were permitted under the provisions of the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations to remain in Turkey following the 1923 population exchange, which involved the forcible resettlement of approximately 1.2 million Greeks from Anatolia and East Thrace and of half a million Turks from all of Greece except for Western Thrace. After years of persecution, emigration of ethnic Greeks from the Istanbul region greatly accelerated, reducing the Greek minority population from 119,822 before the 1955 pogrom to about 7,000 by 1978. The 2008 figures released by the Turkish Foreign Ministry places the current number of Turkish citizens of Greek descent at the 3,000–4,000 mark.
However, according to the Human Rights Watch the Greek population in Turkey is estimated at 2,500 in 2006. The Greek population in Turkey is collapsing as the community is now far too small to sustain itself demographically, due to emigration, much higher death rates than birth rates and continuing discrimination.
Since 1924, the status of the Greek minority in Turkey has been ambiguous. Beginning in the 1940s, the government instituted repressive policies forcing many Greeks to emigrate. Examples are the labour battalions drafted among non-Muslims during World War II, as well as the Fortune Tax levied mostly on non-Muslims during the same period. These resulted in financial ruination and death for many Greeks. The exodus was given greater impetus with the Istanbul Pogrom of September 1955 and the 1964 expulsion of Istanbul Greeks which led to thousands of Greeks fleeing the city, eventually reducing the Greek population to about 7,000 by 1978 and to about 2,500 by 2006. According to the United Nations, this figure was much smaller in 2012 and reached 2,000. As of 2023, according to The Economist, "Turkey's Greeks are on the verge of extinction".
A minority of Muslim Pontic Greek speakers, using a dialect called "Romeyka" or "Ophitic", still live in the area around Of in north-eastern Anatolia.
Name
The Greeks of Turkey are referred to in Turkish as Rumlar, meaning "Romans". This derives from the self-designation Ῥωμαῖος or Ρωμιός used by Byzantine Greeks, who were the continuation of the Roman Empire in the east.The ethnonym Yunanlar is exclusively used by Turks to refer to Greeks from Greece and not for the population of Turkey.
In Greek, Greeks from Asia Minor are referred to as or , while Greeks from Pontos are known as .
Greeks from Istanbul are known as , most often shortened to .
History
Background
Greeks have been living in what is now Turkey continuously since the middle 2nd millennium BC. Following upheavals in mainland Greece during the Bronze Age Collapse, the Aegean coast of Asia Minor was heavily settled by Ionian and Aeolian Greeks and became known as Ionia and Aeolia. During the era of Greek colonization from the 8th to the 6th century BC, numerous Greek colonies were founded on the coast of Asia Minor, both by mainland Greeks as well as settlers from colonies such as Miletus. The city of Byzantium, which would go on to become Constantinople and Istanbul, was founded by colonists from Megara in the 7th century BC.Following the conquest of Asia Minor by Alexander the Great, the rest of Asia Minor was opened up to Greek settlement. Upon the death of Alexander, Asia Minor was ruled by a number of Hellenistic kingdoms such as the Attalids of Pergamum. A period of peaceful Hellenization followed, such that the local Anatolian languages had been supplanted by Greek by the 1st century BC. Asia Minor was one of the first places where Christianity spread, so that by the 4th century AD it was overwhelmingly Christian and Greek-speaking. For the next 600 years, Asia Minor and Constantinople, which eventually became the capital of the Byzantine Empire, would be the centers of the Hellenic world, while mainland Greece experienced repeated barbarian invasions and went into decline.
Following the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, the Seljuk Turks swept through all of Asia Minor. While the Byzantines would recover western and northern Anatolia in subsequent years, central Asia Minor was settled by Turkic peoples and never again came under Byzantine rule. The Byzantine Empire was unable to stem the Turkic advance, and by 1300 most of Asia Minor was ruled by Anatolian beyliks. Smyrna fell in 1330, and Philadelphia, fell in 1398. The last Byzantine Greek kingdom in Anatolia, the Empire of Trebizond, covering the Black Sea coast of north-eastern Turkey to the border with Georgia, fell in 1461.
Ottoman Empire
fell in 1453, marking the end of the Byzantine Empire. Beginning with the Seljuk invasion in the 11th century, and continuing through the Ottoman years, Anatolia underwent a process of Turkification, its population gradually changing from predominantly Christian and Greek-speaking to predominantly Muslim and Turkish-speaking.Ottoman Empire followed the Sharia rules and there were restrictions regarding the building and restoration of churches. Ottoman documents display that restriction on non-Muslims applied differently depending on the regions. After the Tanzimat reforms in 1839, the Christians could get a permission to repair an old church easier, but still they had to follow specific procedures and were supervised by the local Muslim authorities and population.
A class of moneyed ethnically Greek merchants called Phanariotes emerged in the latter half of the 16th century and went on to exercise great influence in the administration in the Ottoman Empire's Balkan domains in the 18th century. They tended to build their houses in the Phanar quarter of Istanbul in order to be close to the court of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, who under the Ottoman millet system was recognized as both the spiritual and secular head of all the Orthodox subjects of the Empire, often acting as archontes of the Ecumenical See. For all their cosmopolitanism and often western education, the Phanariots were aware of their Hellenism; according to Nicholas Mavrocordatos' Philotheou Parerga: "We are a race completely Hellenic".
File:Hellenism in the Near East 1918.jpg|thumb|left|upright=1.2|The Greek Kingdom and the Greek diaspora in the Balkans and western Asia Minor, according to Professor G. Soteiriadis, 1919
The first Greek millionaire in the Ottoman era was Michael Kantakouzenos Shaytanoglu, who earned 60.000 ducats a year from his control of the fur trade from Russia; he was eventually executed on the Sultan's order. It was the wealth of the extensive Greek merchant class that provided the material basis for the intellectual revival that was the prominent feature of Greek life in the second half of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. Greek merchants endowed libraries and schools; on the eve of the Greek War of Independence the three most important centres of Greek learning, schools-cum-universities, were situated in Chios, Smyrna and Aivali, all three major centres of Greek commerce.
The outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in March 1821 was met by mass executions, pogrom-style attacks, the destruction of churches, and looting of Greek properties throughout the Empire. The most severe atrocities occurred in Constantinople, in what became known as the Constantinople Massacre of 1821. The Orthodox Patriarch Gregory V was executed on April 22, 1821 on the orders of the Ottoman Sultan, which caused outrage throughout Europe and resulted in increased support for the Greek rebels.
By the late 19th and early 20th century, the Greek element was found predominantly in Constantinople and Smyrna, along the Black Sea coast and the Aegean coast, the Gallipoli peninsula and a few cities and numerous villages in the central Anatolian interior. The Greeks of Constantinople constituted the largest Greek urban population in the Eastern Mediterranean.
In the first half of 1914, the Ottoman authorities expelled more than 100,000 Ottoman Greeks to Greece.
File:Proportions des populations en Asie Mineure statistique officielle d1914.png|thumb|left|upright=1.2|1914 document showing the official figures from the 1914 population census of the Ottoman Empire. The total population was given at 20,975,345, and the Greek population was given at 1,792,206.
World War I and its aftermath
Given their large Greek populations, Constantinople and Asia Minor featured prominently in the Greek irredentist concept of Megali Idea during the 19th century and early 20th century. The goal of Megali Idea was the liberation of all Greek-inhabited lands and the eventual establishment of a successor state to the Byzantine Empire with Constantinople as its capital. The Greek population amounted to 1,777,146.During World War I and its aftermath, the government of the Ottoman Empire and subsequently the Turkish National Movement, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, instigated a violent campaign against the Greek population of the Empire. The campaign included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches, and summary expulsions. According to various sources, several hundreds of thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period. Some of the survivors and refugees, especially those in Eastern provinces, took refuge in the neighbouring Russian Empire.
Following Greece's participation on the Allied side in World War I, and the participation of the Ottoman Empire on the side of the Central Powers, Greece received an order to land in Smyrna by the Triple Entente as part of the planned partition of the Ottoman Empire.
On May 15, 1919, twenty thousand Greek soldiers landed in Smyrna, taking control of the city and its surroundings under cover of the Greek, French, and British navies. Legal justifications for the landings was found in the article 7 of the Armistice of Mudros, which allowed the Allies "to occupy any strategic points in the event of any situation arising which threatens the security of Allies." The Greeks of Smyrna and other Christians greeted the Greek troops as liberators. By contrast, the majority of the Muslim population saw them as an invading force.
Subsequently, the Treaty of Sèvres awarded Greece Eastern Thrace up to the Chatalja lines at the outskirts of Constantinople, the islands of Imbros and Tenedos, and the city Smyrna and its vast hinterland, all of which contained substantial Greek populations.
During the Greco-Turkish War, a conflict which followed the Greek occupation of Smyrna in May 1919 and continued until the Great Fire of Smyrna in September 1922, atrocities were perpetrated by both the Greek and Turkish armies. For the massacres that occurred during the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922, British historian Arnold J. Toynbee wrote that it was the Greek landings that created the Turkish National Movement led by Mustafa Kemal: "The Greeks of 'Pontus' and the Turks of the Greek occupied territories, were in some degree victims of Mr. Venizelos's and Mr. Lloyd George's original miscalculations at Paris."
After the end of the Greco-Turkish War, most of the Greeks remaining in the Ottoman Empire were transferred to Greece under the terms of the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey. The criteria for the population exchange were not exclusively based on ethnicity or mother language, but on religion as well. That is why the Karamanlides, or simply Karamanlis, who were a Turkish-speaking Greek Orthodox people of unclear origin, were deported from their native regions of Karaman and Cappadocia in Central Anatolia to Greece as well. On the other hand, Cretan Muslims who were part of the exchange were re-settled mostly on the Aegean coast of Turkey, in areas formerly inhabited by Christian Greeks. Populations of Greek descent can still be found in the Pontos, remnants of the former Greek population that converted to Islam in order to escape the persecution and later deportation. Though these two groups are of ethnic Greek descent, they speak Turkish as a mother language and are very cautious to identify themselves as Greeks, due to the hostility of the Turkish state and neighbours towards anything Greek.