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Category: Culture
How do Greeks feel about references to Ancient Greece?
Depends, as with many of these things. Yes, there is the reaction you mention. You will occasionally get Greeks (and non-Greeks) reminding you that the Roman Empire kept going for 1000 years after 476, thank you very much—though the relation of Greeks to Byzantium is more complicated than that. There is the haunting feeling that […]
How do you feel when a foreigner speaks in your local accent/dialect? Are you offended when a foreigner imitates your local accent?
Intellectually, I want to love it. Regrettably, being human, I freak out. Not much, just slightly, Uncanny valley-style. Ross Daly for example is an Irishman who has lived in Crete for four decades, and a practitioner of Cretan folk music (among others). Having gone to the Cretan highlands to learn Cretan music, he speaks Greek […]
What do Greeks of Greece and Cypriot Greeks think about each other?
Greece Greeks about Greek Cypriots: * They talk funny.* They drive on the wrong side of the road.* They forget to mention them a lot of the time. (I’ve done that myself in a Quora answer.) See America–Canada, Australia–N.Z., etc. Greek Cypriots about Greece Greeks: * They talk like penpushers. (Because they speak standard Greek. […]
Why are Greeks called Greek in English, Yunan in Turkish and Arabic, Ellines in Greek?
Thx for A2A. The Wikipedia treatment of the topic, Names of the Greeks, is pretty damn good. Basic story: The Classical Greek term for Greeks, Hellenes, had not generalised until early Classical times. Before then, Greek tribes used local terms for themselves, and any peoples that came in touch with them would pick up those […]
“Neighbouring Bulgaria” project
In a previous blog post, I went through Shishmanov’s listing of erstwhile Bulgarian villages in Asia Minor, and tried to map their location—to get a sense of how isolated Kızderbent was, and whether that would account for the heavy Turkicisation that Trakatroukika reportedly underwent. Stoyan Shivarov, of the Ottoman Archive in the Bulgarian National Library, […]
Closing Kızderbent
Having exhausted the online resources for Kızderbent and its language, I’m closing off the posts on it, for now at any rate. So what have we learned about Kızderbent? The people who lived in Kızderbent speak a Slavonic-based language, called Trakatroukika, with a significant Turkish admixture. The Turkish admixture is definitely there in the vocabulary; […]
Slavophone refugees to Greece
To check further on Kızderbent, I got hold of the 2001 book Γλωσσική Ετερότητα στη Ελλάδα [Linguistic Otherness in Greek], to see what it said about Trakatroukika. The book is a transcription of a series of panels on linguistic minorities in Greece. Most sessions passed without incident, except for the Vlach session (which the organisers […]
Stazybo’s harvest on Kızderbent
I am wrapping up the series of posts on Kızderbent with the rich harvest of material that Stazybo Horn found for me, which I present with the odd comment. Then I’ll put up a post on what the material found online—thanks to Butcher of Yore and Stazybo Horn more than me—seems to be telling us. […]
Old accounts of Kızderbent
After Ververidis’ account of Kızderbent, I turn to Shishmanov’s, from his 2001 book Необикновената история на малоазийските българи (The Extraordinary History of the Anatolian Bulgarians). This is mediated through Google Translate, and I’m happy to take corrections on my lack of Bulgarian. Shishmanov turns out to mostly talk about the early accounts of Kızderbent; I […]
Ververidis’ account of the Trakatroukides
A Trakatroukis, Nikolaos I. Ververidis, has written three non-academic books on the Trakatroukides/Rokatzides and Kızderbent: Οικογένειες Κιζδερβενιωτών Μικράς Ασίας: Families of Kizderveniotes of Asia Minor Η έξοδος των Κιζδερβενιωτών της Μικράς Ασίας: The Exodus of the Kizderveniotes of Asia Minor Οι Ροκατζήδες: The Rokatzides Based on the last book, Ekaterini Asteriou-Kavazi has written summaries in […]