The Real Ethnic Composition of Modern Greece

[Carlin]

That article is from Rubin Zemon, after reading some of his press releases lately i'm hesitant to take anything he says as credible.

Duly noted.

I remember him now! Zemon wrote the preface to the Macedonian edition of Bernal's Black Athena. I purchased this edition many years ago.

Here is Zemon's Preface:

http://www.academia.edu/9078927/%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BE%D1%80_%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD_%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%BA%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%BE_%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%B4%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%A6%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%90%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%BE%D0%B4_%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BD_%D0%91%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BB

[Carlin]

[Carlin]

The following are direct quotations from the Greek article GREECE THROUGH THE AGES: A historical and socio-political overview.

Link here:

https://www.freeinquiry.gr/single-post.php?id=4192

- The Greek war of Independence didnʼt take place because the Greek subjects re-discovered their past which was completely forgotten. The “new comers” that had become subjects of the Ottoman Empire were mere savages that survived by getting ransom after blackmailing and kidnapping both Muslims and Christians and by looting villages. Kyriakos Simopoulos, a noted Greek author in his multi-volume work titled:“Foreign Sight-Seers in Greece” and ”How The Foreign Visitors Saw Greece in 1821” which is based on the narrations of European visitors presents the completely distorted ideas that the European Romantics had about the “modern population” of Greece. They chartered ships to bring clothing and food to the “Greeks” who were supposedly suffering from the “Ottoman yoke” but they ended up returning to their ships not only disappointed but also completely naked since the minute they disembarked, they were attacked by local (mainly of Albanian and Wallachian origin) uncouth mobs who violently stole all of their possessions including their clothes.

- The majority of modern Greeks today traces its origin from the mixture of Albanians, Wallachians, Northern Africans and Anatolians who had infested the land of Greece back then along with Slavs and some Francs and Venetians. Unfortunately even today, most modern Greeks are oblivious to their true historic and genetic origin. They think that they are the offsprings of ancient Greeks who suddenly saw the “light” and became Christians. Quite the opposite is true; they were Christians who were made to believe that their ancestors were the ancient Greeks.

[Carlin]

The Byzantine writer Cecaumenos, in his Strategicon of 1066 wrote that the Vlachs of Epirus and Thessalia came from North of the Danube and from along the Sava and that they were the descendants of the Dacians and the Bessi.

Bessi was general name of all Thracian tribes around Rhodope Mountains in Roman Empire time. Romans used name "Bessi" to describe other subgroups of Thracians in Rhodope such as Dii,Satrae,Maedi..etc. too.

https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/ftdna-thracian-i-y13338/about/background

We know that Pachymeres called the Vlachs of Thessaly Myrmidons as he wrote that they descend from Achilles. (Phrantzes also calls Myrmidons the inhabitants of Tzaconia.)



Why did Kekaumenos and Pachymeres have such differing opinions?


PS:

In the 14th century, Ephraim reports in his chronicle about ACHAIA VLACHIA (unsure what this might refer to precisely; perhaps it also refers to Thessaly but that does not seem to make sense as Thessaly and neighboring areas were (consistently) known as Great Vlachia, as reported by several authors).

[Carlin]

The Encyclopaedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, ... , 1911:

"In A.D. 395 a Gothic horde under Alaric devastated Laconia, and subsequently it was overrun by large bands of Slavic immigrants."


URL:

https://books.google.ca/books?id=UylLAQAAMAAJ&q=laconia+devastated&dq=laconia+devastated&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjzv8z08ePgAhUMVa0KHUX-AN4Q6AEITjAH

https://www.google.ca/search?tbm=bks&hl=en&q=laconia+devastated

The Illustrated History of Rome: From the Founding of the City by, ... , George A. Smith - 1884:



URL:

https://books.google.ca/books?id=jEsMAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA70&lpg=PA70&dq=Goths+Sunium&source=bl&ots=UOL61Imho9&sig=ACfU3U3Vj-RzjKQ55DiTgt9SzF0im7RS-Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjG493Z9OPgAhWCm4MKHaTiBaUQ6AEwBnoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

[Carlin]

- Between 1480 and 1546, the city of Athens had been vacated by epidemics, as evidenced by the anonymous chronicle of Oxford (Ectesis chronica and chronicon Athenarum, London, 1902).

- Historians agree: Athens had been forgotten because of the historical vacuum of so many centuries. It was an insignificant castle of Frankish rule. Until the last quarter of the 17th century it was almost non-existent for foreigners. Everyone believed that it was a bunch of ruins if it had not disappeared altogether. Guillet wrote in 1675: "I had read and heard a thousand times that Athens was a desolate place" (Guillet, p. 211).

- The Dutch traveler Favolius described the city of Athens as "a land of poor people". (Hodoeporiki byzantini lib. III auctore Hugone Favolio – Lovanii (Excudebat Servatius Sassenus, 1563).

- Julien Bordier, a French traveler, saw a Turkish village in Athens: "From this pervasive state, there is only a sad Turkish village, called Setina, and it is in the hands of one aga." (Athens was called Satines or Setines or Stines; Acropolis was Castro; Piraeus was called Porto-Draco or Porto-Leone from the marble lion, seized by the Venetians.)

- Genovese captain Francesco - Maria Levanto noted in his chronicle: "Today's Athens is but a deserted, barren place scattered with stones." (Prima parte dello specchio del Mare Mediterraneo dal capitan Francesco – Maria Levanto (In Genova, 1664.).

- "The once glorious Athens is so desolate, it seems incredible, that it was once glorious. I, at least, have not seen a more terrible place. Deserts, marshlands and marshes..." Impressions of the French ambassador, D'Aramon, as noted by his grammatist, the noble Jean Chesneau in 1546. (Jean Chesneau: Le voyage de monsieur d΄Aramon ambassadeur pour le Roy en Levant, escript par un noble homme Jean Chesneau publie et annote par M. Ch. Schefer (Paris, 1887).

URL:

https://diktyoellinwn.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/%CE%B1%CE%BB%CE%B2%CE%B1%CE%BD%CE%B9%CE%BA%CE%AE-%CE%BA%CE%B9-%CF%8C%CF%87%CE%B9-%CE%B5%CE%BB%CE%BB%CE%B7%CE%BD%CE%B9%CE%BA%CE%AE-%CE%B7-%CE%BA%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%B1%CE%B3%CF%89%CE%B3%CE%AE-%CF%84%CF%89/

[Carlin]

"Most of the merchants and leading persons at Janina and Metsovo are Vlachs. These Vlachs of Epirus would esteem it an offence to be considered of a comrade race with the Roumans."

- Papers by Command - Volume 87 - Page 104 (Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons - 1903)

[Carlin]

1) In Cephalonia, the Arvanites were first settled by the Venetian administration in May 1502 (K. Sathas: «Ελληνικά ανέκδοτα», τόμ. Α΄). Theodoros Bouas Grivas clan established in 1502 on the almost deserted and uninhabited Ithaca.

https://diktyoellinwn.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/%CE%B1%CE%BB%CE%B2%CE%B1%CE%BD%CE%B9%CE%BA%CE%AE-%CE%BA%CE%B9-%CF%8C%CF%87%CE%B9-%CE%B5%CE%BB%CE%BB%CE%B7%CE%BD%CE%B9%CE%BA%CE%AE-%CE%B7-%CE%BA%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%B1%CE%B3%CF%89%CE%B3%CE%AE-%CF%84%CF%89/

2) Testimony of De la Guilletiere who wrote in 1672: "All the inhabitants of Mesogeia are called Arvanites." (Georges Guillet de la Guilletiere, Athenes ancienne et nouvelle et l΄etat present de l΄Empire Turc, 1675.)

Mesogeia - the term designates since antiquity roughly the inland portion of the Attic peninsula


3) "Leaving Aulis ... we reached a village of Arnaouts. Here they call themselves Arvanites, but I do not know if they come from Albania. They speak their own language that no one understands. Their clothing is different from the clothing of the Greeks. It is more like the costume of the villagers of France. In their shaved head they wear a pointed hat." (Sieur d' Loir, French traveler, 1639.)

4) Traveler Nicholas Biddle, comparing the number of Albanians with the "Greeks", estimated at the end of the 19th century that the Albanians would one day absorb the "Greeks":

"Albanians are very likely to absorb the Greeks, who are decreasing rather than rising."

(«Αθήνα. Το τέλειο πρόσωπο τής ερήμωσης» από το βιβλίο: «Nicholas Biddle in Greece, The journals and letters of 1806», Πενσυλβάνια, 1991.)

https://www.freeinquiry.gr/single-post.php?id=1248

[Carlin]

Piana degli Albanesi = Piana dei Greci

URL:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piana_degli_Albanesi

Piana degli Albanesi was founded in the late 15th century by a large group of Albanian refugees coming from the Balkans during the conquest of the latter by the Ottoman Empire.

King John II of Spain and Sicily allowed the original refugees to occupy the present place and to preserve their Orthodox Christian rite. These Albanian refugees were at the time referred to by the surrounding population as "Greeks" on account of their Orthodox faith and the settlement became known as Piana dei Greci. For example, in 1673, the local priest Domenico Mamola in a note written in Greek refers to the settlement as Piana dei Greci.

In 1941 during Mussolini's invasion of Greece, the name was changed to Piana degli Albanesi so as to gain the locals support for the fascist regime's imperialist intentions toward Albania.



Piana dei Greci - initially "Greeks", as referred to by the surrounding population while local priests were writing notes in Greek.
They might as well have had some form of medieval Greek "identity" -- and yet nothing, absolutely nothing, changes the fact that the totality of these settlers were Albanian-speakers.

[Carlin]

Albanese = Acarnanians

[Carlin]

The Slavs of Arethas of Caesarea

Arethas of Caesarea (circa 860 – circa 939) was the Archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia. In 1912 a Greek schola, Sōcratēs Kougeas, pointed out (in the periodical, Neos Hellenomnemon, Νέος Ελληνομνήμων, 1912, starting at p. 472) a reference to Slavs in scholium written by Arethas in the chronicle of patriarch Nicephorus (in a manuscript written in 932). That scholium discusses the Slavic invasion of Greece:

“On the fourth year of his reign [Nicephorus] took place the transfer of Patras of the Peloponnesus, our country, from the Calabrian city of Rhegium to the ancient city of Patras. For it had been driven away or rather forced to migrate by the nation of the Slavs when they invaded the First and Second Thessaly and in addition the country of the Aeniantes and that of the Locrians, both the Epiknemidian and Ozolians, and also ancient Epirus, Attica and Euboea and the Peloponnesus, driving away and destroying the noble Hellenic nations.”

“They [the Slavs] dwelt there from the sixth year of the region of Maurice [587/588] to the fourth year of that of Nicephorus [805/806] at whose time the governor for the Peloponnesus was sent to the eastern part of the Peloponnesus, from Corinth to Malea, because that part was free of Slavs. One of these governors, a native of Lesser Armenia, and a member of the family called Skleroi, clashing with the Slavic tribes, conquered them in war and obliterated them completely and enabled the ancient inhabitants to recover their own. For the mentioned emperor, having inquired where the colony was, reestablished the people not he ancient soil and granted to Patras, which was a bishopric before this, the prerogatives of a metropolis.”

The above confirms much of what had been written in the (presumably later) Chronicle of Monemvasia which is why Kougeas set the two texts side by side above.

URL:

https://www.jassa.org/?p=7135

[Carlin]

1) "I watched the Koutsovlachi disappear in Thessaly over a period of twenty years. I remember the first time I went up there in 1957, I was stunned, it was another world--it was Rumania. Blond, blue-eyed women wearing incredibly beautiful costumes: white, with about twelve to fifteen inches of thick fringes at the bottom, in saffron, black, and ocher. And everywhere I went, there were ducks and geese, which I didn't see anywhere else in Greece. Ducks and geese and pigs--standard east and central European farm culture. But I saw all of that disappear."

-- "A Point of Contact: An Interview with Nikos Stavroulakis," by Peter Pappas in The Greek American (January 9, 1988)


2) "In this same period [early 17th century], many people settled down on the outskirts of Thessalonica in Asvestochorion (Kirets-Kioi) to the south of a church beside the rill known as Vlachikos Lakkos. Apparently they still spoke Vlach. They were craftsmen--tailors, dyers, jewellers, shoemakers, and so on. They were also more civilized than the local inhabitants, to whom they referred disparagingly as "peasants."

The people of the Agrafa...moved to the east across the Sea of Marmara and colonized villages along the coast of Asia Minor. Others went north and settled in Philippopolis (now Plovdiv) where there were also Greek immigrants from Epirus, Moschopolis (the exodus from this city was occasioned by its destruction), Rhodes, and the district of Stenemachos. However, most of the migrants from the Agrafa went even further north to the Danubian principalities, where their Latin dialect apparently facilitated intercourse with the indigenous peoples of those lands. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as evidence of their prosperity, these expatriates built handsome homes and beautiful churches in the Agrafa, the Aspropotamos, and generally throughout the Pindus and its spurs. These churches still serve as reminders of the close relationships between the Greeks from the Agrafa and the countries to which they migrated, notably Rumania."

-- The Greek Nation: 1453-1669, Apostolos E. Vacalopoulos (New Jersey, 1976).


3) "The triumph of Vlach cooking however is Pita, which may be considered the Vlach national dish ... All kinds of pita are good, but perhaps the best is that made with leeks, nettles or some similar vegetable. For some obscure reason this dish is practically confined to the Vlachs, and is rarely to be seen in any Greek village."

-- Wace & Thompson, The Nomads of the Balkans (New York, 1913)


4) "I have seen the excellent Greek school for girls at Monastir where Vlach maidens are painfully taught to construe their Xenophone. The ludicrous mistakes of grammar which one heard in the lower forms were enough to show that the teachers were drilling these children in a foreign tongue. It is easy to taboo every word of Vlach within the schoolroom walls. But outside on the steps when Urania quarrels with Aspasia over her broken doll, she expresses her feelings in fluent and natural Vlach."

-- H.N.Brailsford, Macedonia (London, 1903)


5) "Whenever a stranger appears, Metsovo does its best to disguise its Vlach origin, and pretends to be purely Greek. An interesting paper by a Greek doctor, Mr. Spiridhon Sokolis, who practised there in 1861 shews how great a change has taken place in recent years. At that time with only a few exceptions none of the women or boys up to the age of ten knew Greek at all, so that Dr. Sokolis had to employ an interpreter. The men, however, could speak Greek freely as it was an essential language for commerce."

-- Wace & Thompson, Nomads of the Balkans (NY, 1914)


6) "Nevertheless the Vlachs were regarded as regular subjects, served in the army and were required to pay the same taxes as the rest of the country population. There was something in their attitude and activities, however, that marked them as hostile aliens. For instance, in the uprising of the Bulgarians during the reign of Isaac Angelus, Vlachs seem to have taken the initiative. And when in 1284 Andronicus II learned that the Bulgarians were about to invade Thrace, his first measure of defense was to remove the Vlachs in Thrace ... to Asia Minor."

-- Peter Charanis, "The Formation of the Greek People" (1975)

[Carlin]

[Carlin]

Joannes Kinnamos (or John Cinnamus, born shortly after 1143 & died after 1185) connects the Vlachs with the settlers from Italy.

[tchaiku]

"...Kekaumenos explains in the eleventh century that the Vlachs are spread over Epirus and Macedonia but that most of them live in Hellas.”

URL:
https://books.google.ca/books?id=Yyk...hellas&f=false

I think Hellas means Thessaly in this context.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellas_(theme)