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Category: History
Why didn’t the Greeks convert to Catholicism under the Latin Empire?
InB4 Dimitris Almyrantis The good news for you, OP, is that not only have I read up a fair bit on conversions of Greeks to Catholicism or Islam, I’ve even published academically on the subject. The bad news is, I’m familiar with a number of circumstances where Greeks did or didn’t convert, but 13th century […]
How do Greeks feel about the hadith analysis by Imran Hosein that the “Al-Rum” of the end times is to be analysed as Russia?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4SzkI4H2U8 Having listened to 6 mins of Sheikh Imran N. Hosein’s lecture, and done some Googling: There is a Hadith that predicts that, in the end times, the “Rum” and Islam will form a truce to fight a common enemy, before they fight each other in Armageddon. To cite the hadith: Conquest of Constantinople You […]
How come the Greek peninsula remained Orthodox Christian and Greek, but Anatolia and Thrace/Constantinople got ‘Islamified’ and ‘Turkified?’
Pre-1453 and Post-1453 policy. Before 1453, Christians were given the status of Christians anywhere in Islamdom as dhimmis, and were subject to missionary activity, as described in Nick Nicholas’ answer to When and how did modern Turkish become the majority in Anatolia?. Even so, intense conversion of Christians to Islam in Anatolia only happened in […]
Did the Greeks in Athens see the Anatolian Greek refugees as Turks after the Greece-Turkey population exchange?
There was indeed nativist animus against the Anatolian Greeks arriving in Greece in 1922. The term used wasn’t Turks, but it was τουρκόσποροι, “Turk seed” (i.e. born among or from Turks). Ο Αγκόπ στην Αφγανιστανούπολη reproduces some anti-refugee rhetoric in the Vradyni newspaper of 1923. To translate: It is incredible how quickly these myriads upon […]
What percentage of Greek Macedonians were Slavophones in the early 1900’s?
We have statistics published in a Belgian magazine from 1912 (De Godsdiensten op den Balkan.), just before the Balkan wars divided up Macedonia, and cited in Manastir Vilayet – Wikipedia and Salonica Vilayet – Wikipedia. Of course, the Ottoman Vilayets do not coincide with the modern borders: Salonica Vilayet is now 3/4 Modern Greece, 1/4 […]
How do Greeks feel about the fall of Constantinople?
I’m somewhat confused by several answers talking about the present day status of Istanbul, or Golden Dawn’s vision of retaking the City. Greeks may continue to refer to Istanbul as Constantinople (except for the Rum that actual live there), but most of them do know the difference between the Byzantine city of yore and the […]
Does the village of Lapi, presumably in the Messinia province of Greece, still exist?
Ριζοχώρι – Μεσσηνία | Terrabook The village name was Lapi, which was believed to refer to the Lab tribe of Albanians (normally rendered in Greek as Liapis, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a folk etymology). As inevitably happened with most foreign-looking village names, the village was renamed to Rizochori in 1940. The […]
Is it true that most of the Greeks in Anatolia and Thrace converted to Islam and became Turks during the Seljuk and Ottoman years?
The received wisdom in academia is yes, although several users here (Dimitris Almyrantis and Dimitra Triantafyllidou) have questioned how feasible this is. The argument made by Speros Vryonis Jr, and summarised in Nick Nicholas’ answer to When and how did modern Turkish become the majority in Anatolia?, is that any deurbanisation and mass migration happened […]
It’s really amazing how Greek-speaking Muslims in Turkey and Turkish-speaking Christians in Greece got assimilated. How long did it take?
tl;dr: Pre-modern communities took centuries to assimilate, either linguistically or religiously; some didn’t assimilate at all. Modern communities, under the pressure of state nationalism, assimilate within a generation. We don’t have good data on language in Turkey. We know that the religious assimilation of the existing population there seems to have taken something like three […]
Why shouldn’t Greece’s regions have autonomy?
The fact that Greece modelled itself after France, as a strongly centralising state, is not a reason why there shouldn’t be autonomy. Autonomy can work financially, after all; the autonomy of the Val d’Aosta after WWII, forced on Italy by de Gaulle proposing to invade, was part of the reason the Valley did so well […]