Subscribe to Blog via Email
November 2024 M T W T F S S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
Category: History
What do you know about ethnically or linguistically Greek Muslims?
Well, I’ve already answered the related question What do you know about Greek speaking Muslims (e.g. those in Hamidiyah, Syria)? I was tempted to merge the two questions, but the focus on Al-Hamidiyah is useful, because they’ve been so prominent in Greek media. Outside of Al-Hamidiyah: I know that some Muslims in Greece that were […]
What is the importance of the Hellenistic culture?
Thx4A2A, Anon. As my fellows have asked, we’ll need more detail on what you’re asking. I’m going to stab at a related question, which is the legacy of Hellenistic culture. In fact, that might be a good approach to vague questions like this, my fellow respondents: we grab a bit each of the possible answers […]
How do modern Greek Orthodox feel about the Iconoclastic events?
Well, let me put it this way (answering the related question, “how do I feel about Iconoclasm”.) The town of Agios Nikolaos, Crete is named after an old church of St Nicholas. The church is still around, now built into the grounds of a hotel: Byzantine Temple of Agios Nikolaos – Travel Guide for Island […]
Did the era of the ancient Greeks happened before the flood or during the biblical period and how long did their time last?
Without getting into the issue of how much of Genesis is historical and how much is wishful thinking: The Babylonian captivity, which can be independently verified from archaeology, was 580 to 530 BC. That’s when the Hebrew Scriptures as we know them were consolidated. Omri is the first independently verified King of Israel, and he […]
Why is it that most of the brilliant philosophers are Germans if the history tells us that philosophy came from Greece?
Why are the best tomato-based pasta sauces Italian, if history tells us that tomatoes came from the Americas? 2500 years is a long time; and in at least some ways, what the Germans were doing with philosophy in the 18th and 19th century was far from what the Greeks did in the 5th century BC […]
How was Athens chosen as capital for the Greece?
Ancestor worship. The first capital of Greece was Nafplio (Nauplia), which was an important port in Ottoman times, while Athens was an insignificant village that attracted the odd Western tourist. In 1834, King Otto (himself a Western tourist) decreed that the capital of Greece shall be the most important city of Ancient Greece. For after […]
Are Greeks an ethnoreligious group?
Weeell… in the Ottoman Empire (and in the Byzantine Empire before it), identity was primarily credal, organised as Millets (Ottoman Empire). As far as everyone in the Ottoman Empire was concerned, there were: Muslims Franks (Catholic) Romans (Orthodox) Armenians Jews See Albanians or Bulgarians in that list? Me neither. In fact, Bulgarians were only able […]
Why isn’t Cyprus part of Greece?
Greece got most of the Aegean islands from the Ottoman Empire in 1913, after the Balkan Wars. There were three exceptions: Greece did not get Imbros and Tenedos (Gökçeada and Bozcaada), because of their strategic importance right outside the Dardanelles. When the invasion at Gallipoli happened, the British (and ANZACs) were based at the next […]
How did Greece manage to hold on to all of their islands throughout all of the wars?
Good answers from my fellow respondents. So: For a long time, there was no Greece, so there was noone to do the holding on. For a long time after that, Greece didn’t have most of the islands: it had to get hold of them: The Cyclades and Euboea, and the Saronic Gulf islands, were part […]
Where is Minoa today?
Um. Per Minoa, there are several sites that have been known as Minoa, mostly in the Aegean. But in the sense Minoa is used on Quora, as a shorthand for “site of the Minoan civilisation”, that would be Crete. In fact, since the Classical survival of non-Hellenic Eteocretan language was in easternmost Crete, where I […]