What Happened . . .

The collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires due to the twin forces of nationalism and communism is the short answer to the Greeks’ decline, but not disappearance in the area. Just under 100 years ago, the Balkan League of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro inflicted a crushing defeat on the Ottoman Empire, expelling the Turks from nearly all of Europe minus a small salient around Constantinople. Of course, then the Balkan allies turned on each other, and a combined Greece, Serbia, Romania, and Turkey heavily defeated the Bulgarians.

The result of these Greek victories was the doubling of Greece’s territory and population, but it sparked the beginning of the end for Hellenism in Asia Minor and Bulgaria. Persecutions of Asia Minor and Bulgarian Black Sea Greeks increased, and the first population exchange, between Greece and Bulgaria, resulted in about 50,000 Greeks, many from the Black Sea coast, moving to Greece. Others assimilated into the Bulgarian Orthodox population.

Greece in 1920 had become the “Greece of the Two Continents and the Five Seas,” and, with newly acquired Eastern Thrace, Greece briefly touched the Black Sea shores. What followed, of course, was the Asia Minor Catastrophe, which resulted in the expulsion of approximately 1.5 million Greeks from Eastern Thrace and Asia Minor to Greece, as destitute refugees, often as not without the male head of household. Thriving Ottoman Black Sea ports with large Greek populations for millennia, such as Samsun, Sinope, and of course Trebizond, lay bereft of their Orthodox Greeks, which brought about an economic decline, which only now is being reversed, as Turkey’s economy is going into overdrive.

At roughly the same time, the Russian Empire was dissolving into Civil War, with Lenin’s Bolsheviks gaining the upper hand against Tsarist and other non-Communist forces. International forces supported the anti-Communist forces, including two Greek divisions sent to the Ukraine, in an area with a considerable Greek population. Greek officials also handed out passports to the local Greeks, something that the communists would not soon forget.

Nonetheless, in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War, the Greek populations in the Soviet Union, concentrated overwhelmingly around the Black Sea, while deprived of their international merchant and shipping activities, continued to survive. In certain areas, small autonomous Greek regions were established, as well as Greek schools and newspapers. Interestingly, these newspapers were in a slightly modified Greek alphabet using several Cyrillic characters. Then came the Stalinist purges.

Stalin threw down the hammer on several national groups in the Soviet Union, including the Greeks, uprooting them from their Black Sea homelands and banishing them to Central Asia. It is still unclear why he did so; unlike Germans and Tatars (also subject to expulsion) the Greeks had never been historic enemies of Russia, and further many Greeks (both in the Soviet Union and in Greece) were staunch communists. Stalin’s deportations continued even after World War II, when communists in Greece were fighting to make Greece a Communist state. One theory is that the Georgian Stalin resented the wealth of the large Greek community in Georgia, another is that many Greeks retained Greek nationality which was considered subversive. Perhaps trying to make sense of the sickness of Stalin makes no sense at all.

Whatever the reason, several hundred thousand Greeks were deported from the Black Sea region between 1938 and 1949, and the Greek presence in the Black Sea region has never recovered. Some Greeks trickled back to their ancestral homes, most others left for Greece in the twenty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, often directly from Central Asia. They are still coming. When I served in the Greek Army in 2006, many of my comrades were born and raised in the ex-Soviet Union, including one soldier in his mid 30s (like me at the time) who was from some dusty village in Uzbekistan and could not speak a single word of Greek.

And Today . . . what Remains?

Today, around the Black Sea littoral there are very few active Greek communities. Odessa, the birthplace of the Philike Etairia, still possesses a small Greek community, and the area around the city of Marioupol (Marioupolis) on the Sea of Azov has a Greek population of perhaps thirty thousand. There are other cities with a sizeable Greek population, such as Anapa near Russia’s key Black Sea port of Novorossisk, and certainly hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Russians and Ukrainians possess some Greek ancestry. However, the passing of time, a rather traumatic history, and life among fellow Orthodox nationalities has resulted in most Greeks assimilating. Greek and Russian cooperation in shipping and investment is considerable, once again showing Greek maritime skill and Russian resources, backed by geography and culture, are a symbiotic and profitable pairing.

On the West coast of the Black Sea, in Bulgaria and Romania, most Greeks either left for Greece, or many more assimilated, once again, into the Romanian and Bulgarian Orthodox majority. Several Bulgarian coastal towns, however, bear clear reminders of their Greek roots. Place names, large amounts of Greek words in the local dialect, Byzantine and Ancient Greek sites, and a great fondness for Greek music and culture were what I found when traveling and working on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast, fifteen years ago. I also found that lots of local people could speak Greek, having gleaned it from earlier generations. As Greece is one of the largest investors in Bulgaria, plenty of Greeks now work and live in the country, and the Black Sea coast plays on its Greek heritage to woo tourists.

Immediately south of Russia, on the East coast of the Black Sea, Georgia still has dozens of small Greek-inhabited villages, but many of these Greeks have left for the greater economic opportunities in Greece and to flee Georgia’s political strife. The Greek government and organizations such as the SAE (Symboulio Apodimou Ellinismou) have also contributed to these communities’ welfare and education, though the Greek government’s coffers are now drying up.

And what of the south shore of the Black Sea, Pontus, in Turkey? Officially, there are no Greeks, because all Orthodox Christians were expelled by 1924, in accordance with the Population Exchange of the Treaty of Lausanne. There are, however, plenty of Turkish Muslims of Pontic Greek descent, many of whom still speak Pontic Greek in daily discourse. Some are very recent converts, from the time of expulsion, who converted or married Muslims to avoid the exchange. Some have kept in touch, discreetly, with relatives in Greece. This, of course, gives rise to speculation about their religious and ethnic identity. While this may be the case, and I have heard anecdotal evidence from sources in Greece and Serbia about Crypto-Christianity in Pontus and elsewhere in Turkey, I avoid this speculation, and accept that the vast majority are now quite staunch Turkish patriots and Muslims. What we can say is that these people are also the product of assimilation, though in contrast to the other Black Sea countries, the assimilation was total, as both ethnic and religious identity disappeared, but in many cases language and aspects of culture have remained in Turkey.

In the debris of empires and ideologies and in the attempt to forge mono-ethnic states from a mosaic, these Hellenes without Borders—the Black Sea Greeks, suffered expulsion, at times genocide, and succumbed to assimilation. Nonetheless, the Greeks’ legacy remains in architecture, culture, and in their assimilated descendents, both Orthodox and Muslim. Like tattered standards of an old regime, pockets of highly declarative Greeks still exist around the littoral of this beautiful and haunting inner sea, at times supported by their “mother” country, Greece, and at other times left to fend for themselves.

Postscript: An excellent work in Greek chronicling the odyssey of a Black Sea Greek family in the twentieth Century is Eutyxismenos pou Ekana to Taxidi tou Odyssea, by Marianna Koromyla. Another excellent work with thoughtfully portrayed material about the Greek heritage of the area is Black Sea, by Neal Ascherson, a Scottish parliamentarian and author.