Greek minority in the successor states of the Soviet Union

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Greek style architecture in Essentuki

The Greek minority in Russia and other successor states of the Soviet Union is an ethnic minority that today consists of several hundred thousand people of Greek origin. In the course of the collapse of the Soviet Union , a large part of the Greek minority emigrated to Greece and Western Europe .

history

Greek colonies on the northern Black Sea coast , 450 BC. Chr.

The Greek minority in Russia and other successor states of the Soviet Union is very heterogeneous. The Pontic Greeks were partly set in ancient times, more than a thousand years before the founding of the state of Russia, the Black Sea region. Even Euripides ' Iphigenia in Tauris plays on the Crimea , on which there was already then Greek settlements. Also Cyril and Methodius , which significantly to the Christianization of the Eastern Slavs contributed came from Greece, the Russian culture was largely influenced by Greek culture.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, a significant Pontic migration from the Ottoman Empire began, especially to Russia and the Caucasus region . As a result, a second Pontic culture was formed there, which existed and developed independently alongside that on the Turkish Black Sea coast. The Greek dialects of these areas are now considered to be the most vital form of Pontic .

Due to the persecution of the Greeks in the Ottoman Empire in 1914–1923 , thousands of Greeks again immigrated to Russia and the Soviet Union .

Even after the end of the Greek civil war in 1949, another wave of migration towards the Soviet Union began, around 10,000 Greek communists settled there during this time.

In the Soviet Union, Greek culture, like the culture of many other minorities, was initially promoted, but under Josef Stalin this turned into the opposite from the 1930s. Many Greeks fell victim to the Ethnic Cleansing during the Great Terror in the late 1930s. During the Second World War and shortly thereafter, hundreds of thousands of Greeks were deported to Central Asia on the territory of the Soviet Union. In the course of the de-Stalinization , however, they were able to return to their traditional settlement areas.

In the course of time a large part of the Greek minority assimilated and today speaks predominantly Russian , but there are still parts of the minority who speak Pontic Greek , an even smaller part, the Urum , are Turkophonic.

In 1989 there were 40,000 speakers of Pontic Greek in Russia, including 15,000 each in the Krasnodar region and near Stavropol . Even then, however, the majority of the Greek population groups no longer spoke Greek.

In 1988 the Greek minority in the Soviet Union was estimated at just under 500,000. The majority of them lived in Georgia and Abkhazia , in the Russian regions of Stavropol and Krasnodar , in the Ukrainian Donetsk Oblast , in Moscow and in Kazakhstan . There were several predominantly Greek settlement areas throughout the Union. Particularly noteworthy is the city of Zalka in Georgia and its surroundings . Greeks made up the majority of the population there until the 1990s.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union , a large number of people of Greek origin have emigrated from the entire Soviet Union to Greece and Western Europe, especially from the non-Russian successor states. Many traditionally Greek settlements in the post-Soviet area have since lost their Greek character. For example, while around 100,000 Greeks still lived in Georgia in 1989, their number had fallen to around 15,000 by 2002. In the Zalka area, the proportion of Greeks fell from around 62% to 22% and has continued to fall since then. The majority of the Greek population can still be found near the Russian city of Essentuki , especially around the town of Sanamer . There was a similar trend among Germans from Russia and, to a lesser extent, among the Korean minority in the successor states of the Soviet Union.

The Russian census of 2010 showed almost 100,000 Greeks in Russia, with the Greek Foreign Ministry assuming a number up to twice as high. In the Ukraine , around 91,500 people stated Greek as their nationality in the 2001 census, although here too unofficial estimates are significantly higher. In Kazakhstan , the number of Greeks was estimated at just under 13,000 in 2010. There is also a Greek minority of around 6,000 in Uzbekistan. In countries like Armenia, Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan, the number of Greeks living there has now fallen to less than 1,000 people.

Well-known people of Greek origin from the successor states of the Soviet Union

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ David Levinson: Ethnic Groups Worldwide. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998, ISBN 9781573560191 , p. 34. Limited preview in Google Book Search
  2. ↑ Christopher Moseley: Encyclopedia of the world's endangered languages. 2007, p. 265.
  3. ^ T. Nikolaidou: The Greek Pontians of the Former Soviet Union (Legal Aspects). University of Hanover
  4. ^ Statistical Yearbook of Georgia 2007
  5. ↑ ТГО Греческой Культуры (Республика Узбекистан). (No longer available online.) In: greeks-su.com. Archived from the original on March 4, 2016 ; accessed on January 2, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.greeks-su.com