Greeks:

The Greeks (Greek: IPA:), also known as Hellenes, are a nation and ethnic group native to Greece, Cyprus and neighbouring regions who can also be found in a plethora of Omogenia communities around the world.

Greek colonies and communities have been historically established in most corners of the Mediterranean but Greeks have always been centred around the Aegean Sea, where Greek has been spoken since antiquity. Until the early 20th century, Greeks were uniformly distributed between the Greek peninsula, the western coast of Asia Minor, Pontus, Cyprus and Constantinople, regions which coincided to a large extent with the borders of the Byzantine Empire of the late 11th century and the Eastern Mediterranean areas of the ancient Greek colonization.

In the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922), a large-scale population exchange between Greece and Turkey transferred and confined ethnic Greeks almost entirely into the borders of the modern Greek state and Cyprus. Other ethnic Greek populations can be found from Southern Italy to the Caucasus and in diaspora communities in a number of other countries. Today, the vast majority of Greeks are at least nominally adherents of Greek Orthodoxy.

Historyof Greek:

The Greeks are an Indo-European people and their language forms its own unique branch of the IE language family tree. They are part of a group of pre-modern ethnies that have managed to survive for millennia and are described as an archetypal Diaspora people.

The modern Greek state was created in 1832 when the Greeks liberated a part of their historic homelands from the Ottoman Empire. The large Greek Diaspora and merchant class were instrumental in transmitting the ideas of western Romantic nationalism and Philhellenism, which together with the conception of Hellenism formulated during the last centuries of the Eastern Roman Empire, formed the basis of the Greek Enlightenment and the current conception of Hellenism.

Mycenaean

Proto-Greeks are thought to have emerged in Central Europe, in what is today called the Pannonian Plain. They probably arrived in the area now referred to as "Greece" (the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula) at the end of the third millennium BC.Due to the paucity of physical evidence in support of this theory, it has been suggested that the proto-Greeks were present there since Neolithic times.The Mycenaeans were the first Greek-speaking people attested through historical sources, especially through their written records in the Linear B script, and through their literary echoes in the works of Homer, a few centuries later.

The Mycenaeans quickly penetrated the Aegean and by the 15th century BCE had reached Rhodes, Crete, Cyprus where Teucrus (a characteristic Cypriot name) is said to have founded the first colony, and the shores of Asia Minor.From 1200 BCE the Dorians, another Greek-speaking people, followed from Epirus The Dorian Migration was followed by a poorly attested period of migrations, appropriately called the Greek Dark Ages, but by 800 BCE the landscape of Classical Greece was discernible.

In the Homeric epics, the Greeks of prehistory are viewed as the forefathers of the early classical civilization of Homer's own time, while the Mycenaean pantheon included many of the divinities (e.g. Zeus, Poseidon and Athena) attested in later Greek religion.

Classical Greek:

The classical period of Greek civilization covers a time span from the early fifth century BCE to the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 BCE. It is so named because it set the standards by which Greek civilization would be judged in later eras. The ethnogenesis of the Greek nation is marked by the first Olympic Games in 776 BCE when the idea of a common Hellenism among the Greek-speaking tribes was first translated into a shared cultural experience and Hellenism was supremely a matter of common culture.

This is attested in Herodotus who writes that the Athenians declared, before the battle of Plataea, that they would not go over to Mardonius, because in the first place, they were bound to avenge the burning of the Acropolis; and, secondly, they would not betray their fellow Greeks, to whom they were bound by:

Later, the rhetorician Isocrates, after speaking of the Greeks’ common origin and religion, would say: "the name Hellenes suggests no longer a race but a culture and education,...the title Hellenes is applied best to those who share our culture rather than to those who share our common blood". While the Greeks of the Classical era understood themselves to belong to a common Greek genos their first loyalty was to their city and they saw nothing incongruous about warring, often brutally, with other Greek Polis. The Peloponnesian War, the large scale Greek civil war between Athens and Sparta and their allies, is a case in point as there was nothing civil about it, either metaphorically or literally. This local patriotism, (topikismos) remains a part of Greek culture.

Most of the feuding Greek city-states were, in some scholars' opinions, united under the banner of Philip's and Alexander the Great's pan-Hellenic ideals, though others might generally opt, rather, for an explanation of "Macedonian conquest for the sake of conquest" or at least conquest for the sake of riches, glory and power and view the aforementioned "ideal" as useful propaganda directed towards the city-states.

In any case, Alexander's toppling of the Persian Empire --following victories at the battles of Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela-- and advance as far as modern day India and Tajikistan, provided an important outlet for Greek culture, via the creation of colonies and trade routes along the way. While the Alexandrian empire did not survive its' creator's death intact, the cultural implications of the spread of Hellenism across much of the Middle East and Asia were to prove long lived as Greek became the lingua franca, a position it retained even in Roman times.Two thousand years later, there are still communities in Pakistan and Afghanistan who claim to be descended from Greek settlers.

Hellenistic Greek :

The Hellenistic age was the next period of Greek civilization, the beginnings of which are usually placed at Alexander's death. This Hellenistic age, so called because it witnessed the partial Hellenization of many non-Greek cultures and a combination of Greek, Middle Eastern and Indian elements, lasted until the conquest of Egypt by Rome in 30 BCE.

This age saw the Greeks move towards larger cities and a reduction in the importance of the city-state. These larger cities were parts of the still larger Kingdoms of the Diadochi. Greeks however remained aware of their past, chiefly through the study of the works of Homer and the Classical authors. An important factor in maintaining Greek identity was contact with barbarian (non-Greek) peoples which was deepened in the new cosmopolitan environment of the multi-ethnic Hellenistic Kingdoms. This led to a strong desire among Greeks to organize the transmission of Hellenic paideia to the next generation.

In the religious sphere, this was a period of profound change. The spiritual revolution that took place saw a waning of the old Greek religion, whose decline beginning in the 3rd century BCE continued with the introduction of new religious movements from the East. The cults of deities like Isis and Mithra were introduced into the Greek world.

In the Indo-Greek and Greco-Bactrian kingdoms, Greco-Buddhism was spreading and Greek missionaries would play an important role in propagating it to China. Further east, the Greeks of Alexandria Eschate became known to the Chinese as the Dayuan.

Byzantine Greeks:

Of the new Eastern Religions introduced into the Greek world the most successful was Christianity. While ethnic distinctions still existed in the Roman Empire, they became secondary to religious considerations and the renewed empire used Christianity as a tool to maintain its cohesion and promoted a robust Roman national identity. Concurrently the secular, urban civilization of late antiquity survived in the Eastern Mediteranean along with the Greek educational system, although it was from Christianity that the culture's essential values were drawn.

The Eastern Roman Empire (which was later misnamed by Western historians as the Byzantine Empire, a name that would have meant nothing to Greek speakers of the era),[61] became increasingly influenced by Greek culture following the 7th century when Emperor Heraclius (575 CE-641 CE) decided to make Greek the Roman Empire's official language. Certainly from then on, but likely earlier, the Roman and Greek cultures were virtually fused into a single Greco-Roman world. Although the Latin West recognized the Eastern Empire's claim to the Roman legacy for several centuries, after Pope Leo III crowned King of Franks Charlemagne as the "Roman Emperor" on 25 December 800, (an act which eventually led to the formation of the Holy Roman Empire) the Latin West started to favour the Catholic Franks and began to refer the Eastern Roman Empire largely as the Empire of the Greeks (Imperium Graecorum). Greek speakers at the time however referred to themselves as Rhomaioi (Romans) and were conscious and proud of their Roman Imperial and Christian heritages.

These Roman Greeks were largely responsible for the preservation of the literature of the Classical era. Byzantine grammarians were those principally responsible for carrying, in person and in writing, ancient Greek grammatical and literary studies to early Renaissance Italy to which the influx of Greek scholars gave a major boost. The Aristotelian philosophical tradition was virtuall unbroken in the Greek world for almost two thousand years, until the Fall of Constantinople in the 15th century.

To the Slavic world, Roman era Greeks contributed by the dissemination of literacy and Christianity. The most notable example of the later was the work of the two Greek brothers Saints Cyril and Methodius from Thessalonica, who are credited today with formalizing the first Slavic alphabet.

A distinct Greek nationalism re-emerged in the 11th century in educated circles and became more forceful after the fall of Constantinople to the Crusaders of the Fourth Crusade in 1204 so that when the empire was revived in 1261, it became in many ways a Greek national state. That new notion of nationhood engendered a deep interest in the classical past culminating in the ideas of the Neo-Platonist philosopher George Gemistus Plethon who abandoned Christianity. However it was the combination of Orthodoxy with a specifically Greek identity that shaped the Greeks notions of themselves in the empire's twilight years.

Ottoman Greeks:

Following the Fall of Constantinople in the 15th century, many Greeks sought better employment and education opportunities by leaving for the West, particularly Italy, Central Europe, Germany and Russia.

For those that remained under the Ottoman Empire's millet system, religion was the defining characteristic of "national" groups (milletler), so the exonym "Greeks" (Rumlar from the name Rhomaioi) was applied by the Ottomans to all members of the Orthodox Church, regardless of their language or ethnic origin. The Greek speakers were the only ethnic group to actually call themselves Romioi, (as opposed to being so named by others) and, at least those educated, considered their ethnicity (genos) to be Hellenic.

The roots of Greek success in the Ottoman Empire can be traced to the Greek tradition of education and commerce. It was the wealth of the extensive merchant class that provided the material basis for the intellectual revival that was the prominent feature of Greek life in the half century and more leading to the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821. Not coincidentally, on the eve of 1821 the three most important centres of Greek learning, were situated in Chios, Smyrna and Aivali, all three major centres of Greek commerce.

Greek identity:

The terms used to define Greekness have varied throughout history but were never limited or completely identified with membership to a Greek state. By Western standards, the term Greeks has traditionally referred to any native speakers of the Greek language, whether Mycenaean, Byzantine or modern Greek. Byzantine Greeks called themselves Romioi and considered themselves the political heirs of Rome, but at least by the 12th century a growing number of those educated, deemed themselves the heirs of ancient Greece as well, although for most of the Greek speakers, "Hellene" still meant pagan. On the eve of the Fall of Constantinople the Last Emperor urged his soldiers to remember that they were the descendants of Greeks and Romans.

Before the establishment of the Modern Greek state, the link between ancient and modern Greeks was emphasized by the scholars of Greek Enlightenment especially by Rigas Feraios. In his "Political Constitution", he addresses to the nation as "the people descendant of the Greeks".

The Greeks today are a nation in the meaning of an ethnos, defined by possessing Greek culture and having a Greek mother tongue, rather than by citizenship, race, religion or by being subjects of any particular state. In ancient and medieval times and to a lesser extent today the Greek term was genos, which also indicates a common ancestry.