Greeks

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Greeks, known to themselves as Hellenes, have spoken the same language continuously since the Bronze Age. That language is the oldest recorded living language on earth, and its vocabulary has shaped English and international scientific terminology alike. The New Testament of the Christian Bible was first written in Greek. Today roughly 93% of the population of the modern Greek state and 78% of Cyprus are ethnic Greeks, yet the Greek world has never been contained by any single border.

  Who are the Greeks? That question turns out to have no simple answer. Over three millennia, the people who called themselves Hellenes have lived under their own city-states, under Macedonian kings, under Rome, under Byzantium, under the Ottoman Empire, and finally under a modern republic founded in 1829. Each era forced them to renegotiate what being Greek actually meant: language, religion, ancestry, custom, or some shifting combination of all four. The threads that hold this story together are the Greek language and the sea, and they have held for a very long time.

• 2. Origins in Bronze Age Greece

  ›

  Proto-Greek tribes arrived in the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula sometime during the 3rd millennium BC, during the European Bronze Age. Scholars reconstruct those earliest migrations by working backward through the dialects of later antiquity, a task complicated by the centuries that separate the migrations from the first written records.

  Around 1600 BC, the Mycenaean Greeks borrowed a syllabic writing system from the Minoan civilization, adapting it into a new script called Linear B. Linear B provides the first and oldest written evidence of Greek. By the 15th century BC, Mycenaean culture had spread to Rhodes, Crete, Cyprus, and the shores of Asia Minor. Then, around 1200 BC, a period of disruption set in. Raids by groups known in historiography as the "Sea Peoples" struck the eastern Mediterranean around 1180 BC, and the Mycenaean palace civilization collapsed. The Greek Dark Ages followed. By 800 BC, the landscape of Archaic and Classical Greece was discernible again.

  The Greeks of classical antiquity looked back on the Mycenaean period as a golden age of heroes and divine closeness. The Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, became the vehicle for that reverence, and the gods of Mycenaean Greece, including Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, carried forward into the Olympian pantheon of later times.

• 3. The Classical Age and Alexander

  ›

  The ethnogenesis of the Greek nation as a shared identity is linked by some scholars to the first Olympic Games, held in 776 BC, when the idea of a common Hellenism was translated into a shared cultural experience. In the same century, the works of Homer and Hesiod were written down, forming the basis of a national religion, history, and mythology. The Oracle of Apollo at Delphi was also established in this period.

  The Classical period ran from the early 5th century BC to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC. At the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea, an alliance of Greek city-states repelled Persian invasion. Athens led the subsequent Delian League, and the city became the center of philosophy, architecture, and political experiment. Yet the Greeks' first loyalty was always to their own city, not to any pan-Hellenic idea; Athens and Sparta tore themselves apart in the Peloponnesian War, leaving both severely weakened.

  Philip of Macedon drew the fractured city-states into the Hellenic League with the slogans of freeing Greeks in Asia and punishing the Persians for past sacrileges. His son Alexander carried the campaign forward after Philip was assassinated in 336 BC. Alexander's victories at the Granicus, Issus, and Gaugamela toppled the Achaemenid Empire, and his armies pushed as far as modern-day Pakistan and Tajikistan. Greek became the lingua franca of a vast region, a position it held even into Roman times.

• 4. Byzantium: Romans Who Spoke Greek

  ›

  From the early centuries of the Common Era, the Greeks of the Eastern Roman Empire self-identified as Rhomaioi, meaning Romans. The term Hellenes had, by that point, come to denote pagans. Emperor Heraclius, who reigned from approximately 610 to 641 AD, made Greek the empire's official language, cementing the cultural shift that had been underway for centuries.

  After Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as the "Roman Emperor" on the 25th of December 800, the Latin West began calling the Eastern Empire the "Empire of the Greeks," a term the Byzantines themselves found derogatory and barely used. A distinct Greek identity began to re-emerge in educated circles in the 11th century, strengthened after the fall of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade in 1204. In the Empire of Nicaea that followed, the Nicaean emperor John III Doukas Vatatzes, who ruled from 1221 to 1254, wrote to Pope Gregory IX emphasizing his "Hellenic" descent.

  Byzantine Greek scholars played a decisive role in transmitting classical knowledge westward. Byzantine grammarians carried ancient Greek grammatical and literary studies to Europe in the 15th century, giving the Italian Renaissance major impetus. The Aristotelian philosophical tradition ran nearly unbroken in the Greek world for close to two thousand years, until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. The two monks Saints Cyril and Methodius, brothers from the port city of Thessalonica, created the first Slavic alphabet, carrying Greek learning into a completely different cultural sphere.

• 5. Greeks Under Ottoman Rule

  ›

  The Fall of Constantinople on the 29th of May 1453 sent many Greeks westward, to Italy, Central Europe, Germany, and Russia, where they contributed to the Renaissance in the arts and sciences. Those who remained in Ottoman-controlled territory navigated the empire's millet system, under which religion defined national identity. The Ottomans applied the label "Greeks" to all members of the Orthodox Church, regardless of ethnic origin.

  Greeks rose to influential positions within the Ottoman state. In the first half of the Ottoman period, men of Greek origin made up a significant share of the army, navy, and bureaucracy. The Phanariotes, an educated merchant class in Constantinople, exemplified a Greek tradition of education and commerce that the source credits as the foundation of the intellectual revival that preceded the Greek War of Independence in 1821. On the eve of that war, the three most important centers of Greek learning were Chios, Smyrna, and Aivali, all major commercial centers.

  Some Greeks escaped the second-class status imposed on Christians by converting to Islam, often superficially and while remaining crypto-Christian. Sultan Selim the Grim, who reigned from approximately 1517 to 1520, was one of several Ottoman rulers of partial Greek origin; his mother, Gulbahar Hatun, was a Pontic Greek. The Greek War of Independence broke out in 1821, and the modern Greek state was formally recognized in 1829, after Greeks liberated part of their historic homelands, including the Peloponnese, from the Ottomans.

• 6. Diaspora, Genocide, and the Modern Scatter

  ›

  The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne between Greece and Turkey formalized a population exchange using religion as the determinant of identity. More than a million of the 1.5 million Greeks displaced had already been driven out before the agreement was signed. The Greek genocide, particularly the harsh removal of Pontian Greeks from the southern shore of the Black Sea, was part of a broader Turkification of Ottoman territory.

  World War Two brought further catastrophe. In October 1940, Fascist Italy demanded the surrender of Greece, which refused and initially repelled Italian forces into Albania. German forces then overran the country. Over 100,000 civilians died of starvation during the winter of 1941-1942. The Germans executed around 21,000 Greeks, the Bulgarians 40,000, and the Italians 9,000. Hundreds of villages were systematically torched and nearly one million Greeks were left homeless. Most Greek Jews, numbering in the tens of thousands, were deported and murdered in Nazi concentration camps.

  The Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 triggered another wave of displacement and emigration. Today the Greek minority in Turkey, which numbered over 200,000 after the 1923 exchange, has dwindled to a few thousand following the 1955 Constantinople Pogrom and other state-sponsored discrimination. The total Greek diaspora is contested: official census figures suggest around three million Greeks living outside Greece and Cyprus, while the World Council of Hellenes Abroad estimates roughly seven million worldwide. Cities from New York and Chicago to Sydney and Melbourne to Sao Paulo hold significant Greek communities.

• 7. Language, Identity, and Continuity

  ›

  Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BC, defined Greek identity through four elements: shared descent, shared language, shared sanctuaries and sacrifices, and shared customs. Modern scholars note that Greeks themselves have always been far more settled on the cultural and linguistic aspects than on any racial or state-based definition. Today Greeks are understood as a nation in the sense of an ethnos, defined by Greek culture and a Greek mother tongue rather than by citizenship, race, or religion.

  The Greek language has the longest documented history of any living language. The oldest inscriptions in the Linear B script date to around 1450 BC. After the Dark Ages, the Greek alphabet, derived from the Phoenician, reappeared in the 9th-8th century BC and became the parent alphabet of the Latin, Cyrillic, and several other writing systems. Scholars compare the continuity of the Greek literary tradition only to that of Chinese.

  The name "Greeks" itself reached Europe through a roundabout path: it derives, via the Latin Graecus and Graecia, from the Graeci, one of the first ancient Greek tribes to settle in southern Italy, the region later called Magna Graecia. Aristotle traced the word to Graea, which he described as the oldest city in Greece and the source of colonists for the Naples area. The name the Greeks used for themselves, Hellenes, traces in mythology to Hellen, son of Pyrrha and Deucalion, survivors of the Great Deluge, said to have ruled around Phthia in Thessaly. Both names carried the same people across more than three thousand years of history, into the Griko community of southern Italy numbering about 60,000 today, a possible living remnant of the ancient Greek populations of Italy.