Greek diaspora

Ancient times

In ancient times, the trading and colonising activities of the Greek tribes from the Balkans and Asia Minor spread people of Greek culture, religion and language around the Mediterranean and Black Sea basins, establishing Greek city states in Sicily, southern Italy, northern Libya, eastern Spain, the south of France, and the Black Sea coasts. Greeks founded more than 400 colonies. 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, with Greek ruling classes established in Egypt, southwest Asia and northwest India.

Many Greeks migrated to the new Hellenistic cities founded in Alexander's wake, as far away as what are now Uzbekistan, the northern Indian subcontinent (including modern-day Pakistan), and Kuwait. The Hellenistic cities of Seleucia, Antioch and Alexandria were among the largest cities in the world during Hellenistic and Roman times. Under the Roman Empire, movement of people spread Greeks across the Empire and in the eastern territories Greek became the lingua franca rather than Latin. The Roman Empire became Christianized in the fourth century AD, and in the late Byzantine period, practice of the Greek Orthodox form of Christianity became a defining 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 a Greek identity amongst local populations as traders, officials and settlers. Soon after, the Arab-Islamic Caliphate conquered 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 in medieval Islam, which in turn contributed to Byzantine 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 Empire's conquest of Greek lands, many Greeks fled Constantinople, (what is now Istanbul) and found refuge in Italy, bringing with them many ancient Greek writings that had been lost in the West. These helped contribute to the European 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 many thousands of Pontic Greeks migrated or fled from the Pontic Alps and Eastern Anatolia to the southern areas of the Russian Empire, Russian occupied Georgia, and later the Russian province of Kars Oblast in the South Caucasus. Many Pontic Greeks fled their homelands in Pontus and northeastern Anatolia to settle in these areas so as to avoid Ottoman reprisals after having collaborated with Russian armies that had invaded Eastern Anatolia in several of the Russo-Turkish Wars from the late-18th to the early-20th centuries. Others resettled simply to seek new opportunities in trade, mining, and farming, or in the church, military, and state bureaucracy of the Russian Empire (see also Caucasus Greeks, Greeks in Russia, and Greeks in Georgia).

Ottoman Empire

Greeks were spread through many provinces of the Ottoman Empire and took a major role in its economic life, particularly through the Phanariots, who emerged as a class of moneyed ethnically Greek merchants (they commonly claimed noble Byzantine descent) 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 - some of them settling in the territory of the present-day Romania and considerably influencing its political and cultural life. Other Greeks settled outside their homelands in the southern Balkans to areas further north through service in the Orthodox church or as a result of population transfers and massacres by the Ottoman authorities following Greek rebellions against Ottoman rule or suspected Greek collaboration with Russia in the many Russo-Turkish wars fought between 1774 and 1878. The areas most effected by such population upheavals lay in Greek Macedonia, where the large, indigenous Ottoman Muslim population (often including those of Greek convert descent; see Greek Muslims) could easily be used to form local militias to harass and exact revenge on the Greek-speaking Christian Orthodox population, often forcing the inhabitants of entire rural districts, particularly in the more vulnerable lowland areas, to abandon their homes.

An even more large scale movement of Greek-speaking peoples in the Ottoman period was of Pontic Greeks from northeastern Anatolia to Georgia and parts of southern Russia, particularly the province of Kars Oblast in the south Caucasus, following 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 mountain uplands of northeast Anatolia in 1829 as refugees, following the Tsarist army as it withdrew back into Russian territory, since many had collaborated with or fought in the Russian army against the Muslim Ottomans as a means of regaining territory for Christian Orthodoxy. The Pontic Greek refugees who settled in Georgia and the south Caucasus assimilated with preexisting communities of Caucasus Greeks, while those who settled in the Ukraine and southern Russia came to make up a sizeable proportion of the population of cities such as Mariupol, but in general assimilated and intermarried with their fellow Christian Othodox Russians and continued to participate in further Russo-Turkish wars through service in the Tsarist army.

19th century

During and after the Greek War of Independence, Greeks of the diaspora were important in establishing the fledgling state, raising funds and awareness abroad and in several cases serving as senior officers in Russian armies that fought against the Ottomans as a means of helping liberate Greeks still living under Ottoman subjugation in Macedonia, Epirus, and Thrace. 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, Calabria and Bari in Italy and Alexandria in Egypt), Russia (Odessa and St Petersburg), and Britain (London and Liverpool) from where they traded, typically in textiles and grain. Businesses frequently comprised the whole extended family, and with them they brought schools teaching Greek and the Greek Orthodox Church. 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. With economic success the diaspora expanded further across the Levant, North Africa, India and the USA. In fact, 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 close links with these same Greek trading and entrepreneurial families, who continued to fund the Greek liberation struggle against the Ottomans and the policy of creating a Greater Greece.

After the Treaty of Constantinople the political situation stabilised somewhat, and some of the displaced families moved back to the newly independent country to become key figures in cultural, educational and political life, especially in Athens. Finance and assistance from overseas were channelled through these family ties, and helped provide institutions such as the National Library, and sent relief after natural disasters.

20th century

In the 20th century, many Greeks left the traditional homelands for economic reasons resulting in large migrations from Greece and Cyprus to the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Belgium, Australia, Canada, Georgia, Armenia, Italy, Russia, Chile, Argentina, Mexico and South Africa, especially after World War II (1939–45), the Greek Civil War (1946–49) and the Turkish Invasion of Cyprus in 1974.

After World War I most Pontian and Anatolian Greeks living in Asia Minor, now modern-day Turkey, were victims of Muslim Turkish intolerance for Christian populations throughout the Ottoman Empire. More than 3.5 million people, including Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians were killed under the regimes of the Young Turks and of Mustafa Kemal around the years 1914 to 1923. Greek populations living in Asia Minor fled to modern Greece, but The Russian Empire (later USSR) was also a major destination.

After the Greek Civil War many communist Greeks and their families were forced to flee to neighboring Yugoslavia and the Soviet dominated states of Eastern Europe, especially the USSR and Czechoslovakia. Hungary even founded a whole new village, Beloiannisz for Greek refugees, while a large concentration of such Greeks were resettled in the former Sudeten German region of northern Czechoslovakia centred around Krnov (Jegendorff).

Another country to admit Greeks in large numbers was Sweden, where today over 15,000 Greek-Swedish descendants live (see Greeks in Sweden). While many immigrants returned later, these countries still have numerous first and second generation Greeks who maintain their traditions.

The Arab nationalism of President Nasser of Egypt led to the expulsion of a large Greek population as well as other European /Asiatic disapora.

With the fall of Communism in eastern Europe and the USSR, numbers of Greeks of the diaspora whose Greek ancestry was "removed" for many generations, immigrated to modern Greece's main urban centres of Athens and Thessaloniki, and also to Cyprus. Movements from Georgia were most numerous.

The term Pontic Greeks is used to refer to Greek-speaking communities who originate in the Black Sea region, but particularly from the Trebizond region, Pontic Alps, Eastern Anatolia, Georgia and the former-Russian South Caucasus province of Kars Oblast (see also Greeks in Georgia, Caucasus Greeks, and Greeks in Russia). After 1919-23 most of these Pontic Greek and Caucasus Greek communities resettled in Greek Macedonia or joined other Greek communities in southern Russia and Ukraine.

Greek nationality

Any person who is ethnically Greek born outside Greece may become a Greek citizen through naturalization, providing he/she can prove a parent or grandparent was born as a national of Greece. The Greek ancestor's birth certificate and marriage certificate are required, along with the applicant's birth certificate, and the birth certificates of all generations in between until the relation between the applicant and the person with Greek citizenship is proven.

Greek citizenship is acquired by birth by all persons born in Greece, and all persons born to at least one parent who is a registered Greek citizen. People born out of wedlock to a father that is a Greek citizen and a mother that is a non-Greek automatically gain Greek citizenship if the father recognizes them as his child before they turn 18.

Today

Important centers of the Greek diaspora today are in New York City, Boston, Chicago, London, Melbourne, Sydney, Montreal, and Toronto.

The SAE - World Council of Hellenes Abroad is a dependency of the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and has compiled several studies on the Greeks of the diaspora.

The total number of Greeks living outside Greece and Cyprus today is a contentious issue. Where Census figures are available it shows around 3 million Greeks outside Greece and Cyprus. Estimates provided by the Council of overseas Greeks {SAE} put the figure at around 7 million worldwide. The Greek diaspora is also very active as a lobby defending Greek interests, especially in the USA. Integration, intermarriage and loss of the Greek language also influence the definition and self-definition of Greeks of the diaspora.

To learn more about how factors such as intermarriage and assimilation influence self-identification among young Greeks in the diaspora, and help clarify the estimates of Greeks in the diaspora, the Next Generation Initiative is currently conducting an academically-supervised research study that began in the United States in 2008.

Notable Greeks of the diaspora

Notable people of the Greek diaspora (including also of Greek ancestry):