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Category: History
Does Italian administration in the Dodecanese prevent the expulsion of Muslim citizens, contrary to Crete?
Self-evidently yes. The population exchanges of 1923 dictated that all Muslims in Greece move to Turkey, with the exception of Thrace, and that all Greek Orthodox in Turkey move to Greece, with the exception of Istanbul, Imbros and Tenedos. In 1923, Crete was part of Greece—though the Muslims of Crete were already fleeing the island […]
What Is a Byzantine Catholic?
A follower of one of the Eastern Catholic Churches. These churches are doctrinally Roman Catholic, but their ritual practice is a continuation of Eastern Christian practice (Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and the Church of the East). Byzantine Catholic in particular refers to a follower of a church that is doctrinally Catholic, but whose ritual is […]
Who composed the National Hymn of Palestine. Not an Arab?
There’s plenty of evidence online that Arafat got Mikis Theodorakis to write A National Hymn of Palestine, when he visited Greece in 1981: The Jewish problem, according to Theodorakis (Haaretz interview, 2006) THEODORAKIS, A MAN OF PEACE (Theodorakis website) Μίκης Θεοδωράκης (Theodorakis website) PLO Commissions ‘national Anthem’ by Greek Composer (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 1982) It’s […]
What is the importance of Megasthenes in the Greek short book “Indika”?
This is a very poorly phrased question, Anon; hard to tell what you’re after. Wikipedia: Megasthenes Megasthenes (/mᵻˈɡæsθᵻniːz/ mi-gas-thi-neez; Ancient Greek: Μεγασθένης, c. 350 – c. 290 BC) was a Greek ethnographer and explorer in the Hellenistic period, author of the work Indika. He was born in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) and became an ambassador […]
Are there any true Spartans in Greece today?
There are two subgroups of Greeks in the general neighbourhood of Sparta, which were isolated from the Greek mainstream for a while, and who speak more archaic variants of Greek. You’ll hear people call them the descendants of Spartans. I don’t think it’s a meaningful thing to say; there’s been a lot of DNA traffic […]
Why does Grecani language not exist in Sicily (Magna Grecia)?
We know from Salvatore Cusa’s collection of church deeds from Sicily that Greek remained in use in official contexts until at least the 1300s—with the “correctness” of the Greek gradually degrading. We know that the use of Greek in Calabria and Salento steadily declined, with much wider areas using Greek in the 16th century. If […]
Which area of modern Greece, proceeded in preparation for statehood (independance), that was cancelled, in later stages?
Crete was autonomous, though the Cretans always intended union with Greece as far as I can tell. Samos was autonomous as well, though I have no reason to think they intended statehood. There was a very short lived Provisional Government of Western Thrace, set up in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars, to try and […]
Why didn’t Turkey claim any Greeks island near their shores?
They did: Imbros and Tenedos. Like the other islands, they were substantially ethnic Greek, but they remained in Turkey under the Treaty of Lausanne, presumably because of their strategic importance outside the Dardanelles. Of the other Aegean islands near the shores of Turkey, the islands from Samos up were ceded to Greece by the Ottoman […]
Was Antonis Samaras a cooler Prime Minister than Alexis Tsipras?
Well, let’s see. On the one hand, a sixty-five year old who looks like an undertaker, who brought down a government and formed his own party over being More-Patriotic-Than-Thou, who presided over austerity, and who saw some economic indicators nudge upwards but failed to raise anyone’s hopes that anything would ever change for the better. […]
What do you know about Greek speaking Muslims (e.g. those in Hamidiyah, Syria)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Hamidiyah Hello, Aziz, and thank you for A2A. I found out about Al-Hamidiyah a few years ago, and posted about my emotional reactions on my blog: opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr: Al-Hamidiyah. I know that the settlers of Al-Hamidiyah fled Crete after Crete gained autonomy, and Christian Cretans started reprisals against Muslim Cretans. (In fact, as I found on […]