Are Greeks Greek?

Articles

Are Greeks Greek?

By Thomas Keyes
Jan. 31, 2005

In the 19th century, an ethnologist whose name escapes me wrote a book whose contention was that the modern Greeks are not direct descendants of the ancient Greeks, but rather constitute an amalgam of many ethnic strains. Many modern Greeks cherish the notion that they are one and the same people as the ancient Greeks, claiming as their exclusive province the heritage of Homer, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Euclid, Pindar and Pythagoras.

Naturally, Greeks didn't cotton to the ideas of the ethnologist, which merely disappeared quickly from the public forum. But I, for one, am inclined to agree. Let me try to compress 4700 years of Greek history into a single paragraph:

Greece and the Greek Isles began to show signs of social organization with the Minoan Civilization, from around 2600 BC, and the Mycenaean Civilization, from around 2000 BC, but usually when people talk about ancient Greece, they are speaking of the Trojan War, of 1184 BC, and subsequent centuries. In the 5th century BC, the Persians, who had occupied Greece, were defeated at Plataea. The Pelopennesian Wars ensued. Greek influence and power culminated in the conquests of Alexander the Great around 325 BC. He was from a people called the Macedonians, closely related to the Greeks. Alexander's empire, mounted on the defeat of Egyptians, Persians, Parthians, Bactrians, Sogdians and others, was divided among several successors, including Ptolemy I, the first of 13 monarchs that ruled Egypt for 300 years. Cleopatra, the last Ptolemy, forming an alliance with Mark Antony, was defeated by Augustus Caesar in 31 BC, whereupon Greece and Egypt were incorporated into the Roman Empire. Albanians, then called Illyrians, had been present just north of Greece throughout the first millennium BC. In 330 AD, Roman Emperor Constantine the Great moved the capital of his realm from Rome to Byzantium, which was called Constantinople thereafter. He also proclaimed Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, convoking the Nicaean Council, where the New Testament was assembled from various writings. From his time on, the Roman Empire is usually called the Byzantine Empire, and was largely Greek, rather than Roman, in character. To this day, Greeks sometimes call themselves Romans. Thus the Byzantine Empire ruled the Mediterranean region, including South Europe and North Africa, though Gothic tribes and Huns made inroads on their sway. In the 7th century, with the rise of Islam, the Byzantines had a rival in the south, and shortly thereafter, the Bulgars, a Turkic tribe, arrived in the north. The Serbs showed up in the vicinity at about the same time. In 988, the Russian Orthodox Church was formed as an outgowth of the church in Constantinople, which, breaking with Rome in 1054, is called the Greek Orthodox Church. The Russian branch went its own way in the 15th century, but there has always been a feeling of Greco-Russian religious kinship. In 1018, the Byzantines conquered the Bulgarians, who reappeared only in 1186. In 1025, the Turks, a semi-Mongoloid people originally from China, who conquered the Arabs around 950, invaded Anatolia. Anatolia, or Turkey in Asia today, was then a Greek homeland. For centuries Turks would make encroachments on Greek lands. Around 1204, the Crusaders, a coalition from Western Europe, supposedly on their way to Jerusalem, began making depredations on Constantinople, and later on in the century, Mongols appeared. In 1453, the Turks captured Constantinople, renaming it Istanbul, as it is still called. Greece, Bulgaria and the rest of the Balkan Peninsula, as far as Vienna, would be incorporated into the Ottoman Empire, which also controlled Southwest Asia and North Africa for over 400 years The Ottomans fostered a Jewish community in Greece. The Greek Revolution of the 1820's and 1830's marked the beginning of Greek independence. The Cretan Revolution of 1866 and other revolutions in the 19th century, as well as WW1, gave Greece its present shape, though Greeks and Turks are still thrashing it out on Cyprus on the threshold of the 21st century. Greeks fought Italians to a standstill in WW2, but Germans occupied it shortly thereafter, deporting thousands of Jews and allowing 300,000 Greeks to die of hunger and epidemics. There have been Blacks in Greece since ancient times.

So over the centuries there have been many nationalities that may have made a contribution to Greek blood, including these:

1.) Persians;
2.) Macedonians;
3.) Parthians;
4,) Bactrians;
5.) Sogdians;
6.) Egyptians;
7.) Romans;
8.) Albanians;
9.) Goths;
10.) Huns;
11.) Arabs;
12.) Bulgarians;
13.) Serbs;
14.) Russians;
15.) Western Europeans;
16.) Mongols;
17.) Turks;
18.) Jews;
19.) Italians;
20.) Germans;
21.) Black Africans.

Today there are also large numbers of Filipinos in Greece. It would be hard to imagine another scenario than that of a 'melting pot' in which many racial and ethnic strains have been mingled to produce today's Greek. I don't consider ownership of the legacy of ancient Greece the exclusive province of modern Greeks, but some people in Greece today look at it that way. I see Homer, Aristotle and the others as being international property. I may be as closely related to Euclid as Nikos Kazantzakis was.

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About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far.

I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents.

Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com

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