The Greeks of Turkey are referred to in Turkish as Rumlar, meaning "Romans". This derives from the self-designation Ρωμαίος (Rhomaîos, pronounced ro-ME-os) or Ρωμιός (Rhomiós, pronounced ro-meeos or rom-yos) used by Byzantine Greeks, who were the continuation of the Roman Empire in the east. The ethnonym Yunanlar is exclusively used by Turks to refer to Greeks from Greece and not for the population of Turkey. In Greek, Greeks from Asia Minor are referred to as Greek: Μικρασιάτες or Greek: Ανατολίτες (Mikrasiátes or Anatolítes, lit. "Asia Minor-ites" and "Anatolians"), while Greeks from Pontos (Pontic Greeks) are known as Greek: Πόντιοι (Póntioi). Greeks from Constantinople (Istanbul) are known as Greek: Κωνσταντινουπολίτες (Konstantinoupolítes, lit. "Constantinopolites"), shortened to Greek: Πολίτες (Polítes, pronounced po-lee-tes). Those who arrived during the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey are also referred to as Greek: Πρόσφυγες (Prósfyges, i. e. "Refugees"). The Greeks were a self-conscious group within the larger Christian Orthodox religious community established by the Ottoman Empire. They distinguished themselves from their Orthodox co-religionists by retaining their Greek culture, customs, language, and tradition of education. Throughout the post-Byzantine and Ottoman periods, Greeks, as Orthodox members of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, nationaly declared themselves as Graikoi (Greek: Γραικοί, "Greeks") and Romaioi or Romioi (Greek: Ρωμαίοι/Ρωμηιοί, "Romans").
Greeks have been living in what is now Turkey continuously since the middle 2nd millennium BC. Following upheavals in mainland Greece during the Bronze Age Collapse, the Aegean coast of Asia Minor was heavily settled by Ionian, Aeolian and Dorian Greeks and became known as Ionia and Aeolia. During the era of Greek colonization from the 8th to the 6th century BC, numerous Greek colonies were founded on the coast of Asia Minor, both by mainland Greeks as well as settlers from colonies such as Miletus. The city of Byzantium, which would go on to become Constantinople and Istanbul, was founded by colonists from Megara in the 7th century BC. Following the conquest of Asia Minor by Alexander the Great, the rest of Asia Minor was opened up to Greek settlement. Upon the death of Alexander, Asia Minor was ruled by a number of Hellenistic kingdoms such as the Attalids of Pergamum. A period of peaceful Hellenization followed, such that the local Anatolian languages had been supplanted by Greek by the 1st century BC. Asia Minor was one of the first places where Christianity spread, so that by the 4th century AD it was overwhelmingly Christian and Greek-speaking. For the next 700 years, Asia Minor and Constantinople which eventually became the capital of the Byzantine Empire would be the centers of the Hellenic world, while mainland Greece experienced repeated barbarian invasions and went into decline. Following the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, the Seljuk Turks swept through all of Asia Minor. While the Byzantines would recover western and northern Anatolia in subsequent years, central Asia Minor was settled by Turkic peoples and never again came under Byzantine rule. The Byzantine Empire was unable to stem the Turkic advance, and by 1300 most of Asia Minor was ruled by Turkic beyliks. Smyrna (İzmir) fell in 1330, and Philadelphia (Alaşehir), fell in 1390. The last Byzantine Greek kingdom in Anatolia, the Empire of Trebizond, covering the Black Sea coast of north-eastern Turkey to the border with Georgia fell in 1461, surrendered the city.
Constantinople fell in 1453, marking the end of the Byzantine Empire. Beginning with the Seljuk invasion in the 11th century, and continuing through the Ottoman years, Anatolia underwent a process of Turkification, its population gradually changing from predominantly Christian and Greek-speaking to predominantly Muslim and Turkish-speaking. A class of moneyed ethnically Greek merchants (noble Byzantine descent) called Phanariotes emerged in the latter half of the 16th century and went on to exercise great influence in the administration in the Ottoman Empire's Balkan domains in the 18th century. They tended to build their houses in the Phanar quarter of Constantinople in order to be close to the court of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, who under the Ottoman millet system was recognized as both the spiritual and secular head (millet-bashi) of all the Orthodox subjects (the Rum Millet, or the "Roman nation" meaning Orthodox) of the Empire, often acting as archontes of the Ecumenical See. For all their cosmopolitanism and often western education, the Phanariots were aware of their Hellenism; according to Nicholas Mavrocordatos Philotheou Parerga: "We are a race completely Hellenic".
After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when the Sultan virtually replaced the Byzantine emperor among subjugated Christians, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople was recognized by the Sultan as the religious and national leader (ethnarch) of Greeks and the other ethnicities that were included in the Greek Orthodox Millet. The Patriarchate earned a primary importance and occupied this key role among the Christians of the Ottoman Empire because the Ottomans did not legally distinguish between nationality and religion, and thus regarded all the Orthodox Christians of the Empire as a single entity. The position of the Patriarchate in the Ottoman state encouraged projects of Greek renaissance, centered on the resurrection and revitalization of the Byzantine Empire. The Patriarch and those church dignitaries around him constituted the first centre of power for the Greeks inside the Ottoman state, one which succeeded in infiltrating the structures of the Ottoman Empire, while attracting the former Byzantine nobility.
The first Greek millionaire in the Ottoman era was Michael Kantakouzenos Shaytanoglu, who earned 60.000 ducats a year from his control of the fur trade from Russia; he was eventually executed on the Sultan's order. It was the wealth of the extensive Greek merchant class that provided the material basis for the intellectual revival that was the prominent feature of Greek life in the second half of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. Greek merchants endowed libraries and schools; on the eve of the Greek War of Independence the three most important centres of Greek learning, schools-cum-universities, were situated in Chios, Smyrna and Aivali, all three major centres of Greek commerce. The outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in March 1821 was met by mass executions, pogrom-style attacks, the destruction of churches, and looting of Greek properties throughout the Empire. The most severe atrocities occurred in Constantinople, in what became known as the Constantinople Massacre of 1821. The Orthodox Patriarch Gregory V was executed on April 22, 1821 on the orders of the Ottoman Sultan, which caused outrage throughout Europe and resulted in increased support for the Greek rebels. By the late 19th and early 20th century, the Greek element was found predominantly in Constantinople and Smyrna, along the Black Sea coast (the Pontic Greeks) and the Aegean coast, and a few cities and numerous villages in the central Anatolian interior (the Cappadocian Greeks). The Greeks of Constantinople constituted the largest Greek urban population in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Given their large Greek populations, Constantinople and Asia Minor featured prominently in the Greek irredentist concept of Megali Idea (lit. "Great Idea") during the 19th century and early 20th century. The goal of Megali Idea was the liberation of all Greek-inhabited lands and the eventual establishment of a successor state to the Byzantine Empire with Constantinople as its capital. During World War I and its aftermath (1914–1923), the government of the Ottoman Empire instigated a violent campaign against the Greek population of the Empire. The campaign included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches, and summary expulsions. According to various sources, several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period. Some of the survivors and refugees, especially those in Eastern provinces, took refuge in the neighbouring Russian Empire. Following Greece's participation on the Allied side in World War I, and the participation of the Ottoman Empire on the side of the Central Powers, Greece received an order to land in Smyrna by the Triple Entente as part of the planned partition of the Ottoman Empire. On May 15, 1919, twenty thousand Greek soldiers landed in Smyrna, taking control of the cityand its surroundings under cover of the Greek, French, and British navies. Legal justifications for the landings was found in the article 7 of the Armistice of Mudros, which allowed the Allies "to occupy any strategic points in the event of any situation arising which threatens the security of Allies." The Greeks of Smyrna and other Christians, greeted the Greek troops as liberators. By contrast, the majority of the Muslim population saw them as an invading force. Greece was subsequently awarded Eastern Thrace up to the Chatalja lines at the outskirts of Constantinople, the Aegean islands of Imbros and Tenedos, and the city Smyrna and its vast hinterland by the Treaty of Sèvres, all of which contained substantial Greek populations.
Before World War I, there were an estimated 1.8 million Greeks living in the Ottoman Empire. Some prominent Ottoman Greeks served as Ottoman Parliamentary Deputies. In the 1908 Parliament, there were twenty-six (26) Ottoman Greek deputies but their number dropped to eighteen (18) by 1914. It is estimated that the Greek population of the Ottoman Empire in Asia Minor had 2,300 community schools, 200,000 students, 5,000 teachers, 2,000 Greek Orthodox churches, and 3,000 Greek Orthodox priests. From 1914 until 1923, Greeks in Thrace and Asia Minor were subject to a campaign including massacres and internal deportations involving death marches. The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) recognizes it as genocide and refers to the campaign as the Greek Genocide.
The Pontic Greeks, or Pontian Greeks are an ethnically Greek group who traditionally lived in the region of Pontus, on the shores of the Black Sea and in the Pontic Mountains of northeastern Anatolia. Many later migrated to other parts of Eastern Anatolia, to the former Russian province of Kars Oblast in the Transcaucasus, and to Georgia in various waves between the Ottoman conquest of the Empire of Trebizond in 1461 and the second Russo-Turkish War of 1828-1829. Those from southern Russia, Ukraine, and Crimea are often referred to as "Northern Pontic [Greeks]", in contrast to those from "South Pontus", which strictly speaking is Pontus proper. Those from Georgia, northeastern Anatolia, and the former Russian Caucasus are in contemporary Greek academic circles often referred to as "Eastern Pontic [Greeks]" or as Caucasian Greeks, but also include the Turkic-speaking Urums. Pontic Greeks have Greek ancestry and speak the Pontic Greek dialect, a distinct form of the standard Greek language which, due to the remoteness of Pontus, has undergone linguistic evolution distinct from that of the rest of the Greek world. The Pontic Greeks had a continuous presence in the region of Pontus (northeastern Turkey), Georgia, and Eastern Anatolia from at least 700 BC until 1922.
Pontus was the birthplace of the Komnenos dynasty, which ruled the Byzantine Empire from 1082 to 1185, a time in which the empire resurged to recover much of Anatolia from the Seljuk Turks. In the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople to the Crusaders of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the Empire of Trebizond was established by Alexios I of Trebizond, a descendant of Alexios I Komnenos, the patriarch of the Komnenos dynasty. The Trebizond empire lasted for more than 250 years until it eventually fell at the hands of Mehmed II of the Ottoman Empire in 1461. However it took the Ottomans 18 more years to finally defeat the Greek resistance in Pontus. During this long period of resistance many Pontic Greeks nobles and aristocrats married foreign emperors and dynasties, most notably of Medieval Russia, Medieval Georgia, or the Safavid Persian dynasty, and to a lesser extent the Kara Koyunlu rulers, in order to gain their protection and aid against the Ottoman threat. Many of the landowning and lower-class families of Pontus "turned-Turk", adopting the Turkish language and Turkish Islam but often remaining crypto-Christian before reverting to their Greek Orthodoxy in the early 19th century. Between 1461 and the second Russo-Turkish War of 1828-29, other Pontic Greeks from northeastern Anatolia migrated as refugees or economic migrants (especially miners and livestock breeders) into nearby Armenia or Georgia, where they came to form a nucleus of Pontic Greeks which increased in size with the addition of each wave of refugees and migrants until these eastern Pontic Greek communities of the South Caucasus region came to define themselves as Caucasian Greeks. During the Ottoman period a number of Pontian Greeks converted to Islam and adopted the Turkish language. This could be willingly, for example so to avoid paying the higher rate of taxation imposed on Orthodox Christians or in order to make themselves more eligible for higher level government and regular military employment opportunities within the empire (at least in the later period following the abolition of the infamous Greek and Balkan Christian child levy or 'devshirme', on which the elite Janissary corps had in the early Ottoman period depended for its recruits). But conversion could also occur in response to pressures from central government and local Muslim militia (e.g.) following any one of the Russo-Turkish wars in which ethnic Greeks from the Ottoman Empire's northern border regions were known to have collaborated, fought alongside, and sometimes even led invading Russian forces, such as was the case in the Greek governed, semi-autonomous Romanian Principalities, Trebizond, and the area that was briefly to become part of the Russian Caucasus in the far northeast. Large communities (around 25% of the population) of Christian Pontic Greeks remained throughout the Pontus area (including Trabzon and Kars in northeastern Turkey/the Russian Caucasus) until the 1920s, and in parts of Georgia and Armenia until the 1990s, preserving their own customs and dialect of Greek.
Cappadocian Greeks also known as Greek Cappadocians or simply Cappadocians are a Greek community native to the geographical region of Cappadocia in central-eastern Anatolia, roughly the Nevşehir Province and surrounding provinces of Turkey. There had been a continuous Greek presence in Cappadocia since antiquity, and the native Indo-European populations of Cappadocia, some of whose languages (cf. Phrygian) closely related to Greek, were entirely Greek in their language and culture by at least the 5th century.Following the terms of the Greek–Turkish population exchange of 1923 the remaining Cappadocian Greek natives were forced to leave their homeland and resettle in modern Greece. Today their descendants can be found throughout Greece and the Greek diaspora worldwide. The area known as Cappadocia today was known to the Ancient Persians as Katpatuka, a name which the Greeks altered into Kappadokia (Cappadocia). Before Greeks and Greek culture arrived in Asia Minor, the area was controlled by another Indo-European people, the Hittites. Mycenaean Greeks set up trading posts along the west coast around 1300 B.C. and soon started colonizing the coasts, spreading Hellenic culture and language. In the Hellenistic era, following the conquest of Anatolia by Alexander the Great, Greek settlers began arriving in the mountainous regions of Cappadocia at this time. This Greek population movement of the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC solidified a Greek presence in Cappadocia. As a result, Greek became the lingua franca of the region's natives. It would become the sole spoken language of the region's inhabitants within three centuries and would remain so for the next one thousand years.
The region became a key Byzantine military district after the advent of Islam and the subsequent Muslim conquest of Syria led to the establishment of a militarized frontier zone on the border of Cappadocia. This lasted from the mid-7th to the 10th century during the Arab–Byzantine wars, immortalized in Digenis Akritas, the Medieval Greek heroic epic set in this frontier region. During this period Cappadocia became crucial to the empire and produced numerous Byzantine generals, notably the Phokas clan, warlords, and intrigue, most importantly the Paulician heresy. Because they were living in such a volatile region, the Cappadocian Greeks created elaborate underground cities in the volcanic formations of eastern Cappadocia and would take refuge in them during times of danger. The Cappadocian Greeks hid in these rock-cut underground towns from many raiders over the next millennium, from 9th century Arab invaders to 11th century Turkish conquerors to 15th century Mongols. As late as the 20th century the local Cappadocian Greeks were still using the underground cities as refuges from periodic waves of Ottoman persecution. The most famous of these ancient underground cities are at the Cappadocian Greek villages of Anaku-Inegi (Ανακού) and Malakopi-Melagob (Μαλακοπή). The Greeks were removed from these villages in 1923, and they are now known as Derinkuyu and Kaymakli. These underground cities have chambers extending to depths of over 80 meters. In 1071 AD the Byzantine Empire suffered a considerable defeat at the fatal for the Greeks Battle of Manzikert in Armenia. This defeat would open the interior of Anatolia to invasion by Central Asian Seljuq Turks who would overrun most of Byzantine Asia Minor. This began the transformation of Asia Minor from an entirely Christian and overwhelmingly Greek-populated region to a primarily Muslim and Turkish center. By the 12th century all of Anatolia was overrun by Turkmen tribes from Central Asia, these invading nomads had cleared regions of Anatolia of indigenous Greeks. The Anatolian Greek population rapidly diminished under Turkish rule owing to mass conversions to Islam, slaughter or exile to Greek territories in Europe. Before the Turkish migration into Anatolia, Greeks as well as smaller numbers of Armenians, Syrians, and Georgians were all Christians, by the 15th century more than 90% of Anatolia was Muslim, according to some researcherslargely because of Christian conversions to Islam. Many Byzantine Greek leaders were also tempted to convert to Islam in order to join the Ottoman Turkish aristocracy., although in the beginning of the 20th century, the proportion of Christians in Anatolian population was more than 20%. Over the course of the 15th century the Ottoman Turks conquered Cappadocia from the Seljuk Turks, the Cappadocian countryside remained largely Greek populated, with a smaller Armenian population even after the Ottoman conquest. During the reign of Ottoman Sultan Murad III (1574 to 1595) the region of Cappadocia became largely Turkified in culture and language through a gradual process of acculturation, as a result many Greeks of Cappadocia had accepted the Turkish vernacular and later became known as ‘Karamanlides’. Cappadocian Greeks living in remote less accessible villages of Cappadocia remained Greek-speaking and Christian, as they were isolated and consequently less affected by the rapid conversion of the bordering districts to Islam and Turkish speech. The Greek Cappadocians retained the original Greek names of many regions of Cappadocia which were renamed Turkish names during the Ottoman era. Although the Karamanlides abandoned Greek when they learned Turkish they remained Greek Orthodox Christians and continued to write using the Greek Alphabet. They printed manuscript works in the Turkish language using the Greek alphabet, which became known as ‘Karamanlidika’. During the Ottoman era, Cappadocian Greeks would migrate to Constantinople and other large cities to do business. By the 19th century, many were wealthy, educated and westernized. Wealthy Cappadocian Greek businessmen built large stone mansions in regions of Cappadocia such as Karvali (Güzelyurt) many of which can still be seen today. The Cappadocian Greeks wrote the earliest published novels in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, using the Greek Alphabet and Turkish language. Cappadocian Greeks from different regions would specialize in a particular profession, such as the caviar trade. In the early 20th century, Greek settlements were still both numerous and widespread throughout most of today’s Turkey. The provinces of Cappadocia and Lycaonia had a large number of Greek settlements and sizeable populations in urban centres such as Kayseri, Nigde, and Konya. The Cappadocian Greeks of the 19th and 20th centuries were renowned for the richness of their folktales and preservation of their ancient Greek tongue.
By the early 1900s the region of Cappadocia was still inhabited by Christian Cappadocian Greeks as well as Muslim Turks and also communities of Armenians and Kurds. By the beginning of the First World War, the Greeks of Anatolia were besieged by the Young Turks. In 1924, after living in Cappadocia for thousands of years, the remaining Cappadocian Greeks were expelled to Greece as part of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey defined by the Treaty of Lausanne, the descendents of the Cappadocian Greeks who had converted to Islam were not included in the population exchange and remained in Cappadocia, some still speaking the Cappadocian Greek language. Many Cappadocian towns were greatly affected by the expulsion of the Greeks as the Greeks constituted a significant percentage of the towns population. The Cappadocian Greeks were taken to the coastal town of Mersin in order to be shipped to Greece. Many would lose all of their belongings due to corrupt officials and looters. The Cappadocian Greeks who were migrating from Cappadocia were replaced by Muslims migrating from mainland Greece, mainly from Thrace; some of these Muslims were Greeks, although most were of Slavic, Turkish and Gypsy origin.
Greek Muslims, also known as Greek-speaking Muslims, are Muslims of Greek ethnic origin whose adoption of Islam dates to the period of Ottoman rule in the southern Balkans. They consist primarily of the descendants of the elite Ottoman Janissary corps and Ottoman-era converts to Islam from Greek Macedonia (Vallahades), Crete, northeastern Anatolia and the Pontic Alps. They are currently found mainly in western Turkey and northeastern Turkey. Apart from their elders, sizable numbers, even the young within these Grecophone Muslim communities have retained a knowledge of Greek and or its dialects such as Cretan Greek and Pontic Greek. In Turkey, where most Greek-speaking Muslims live, there are various groups of Grecophone Muslims, some autochthonous, some from parts of present-day Greece and Cyprus who migrated to Turkey under the population exchanges or immigration.
Πηγή : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeks_in_Turkey
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolian_Greeks
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Greeks
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontic_Greeks
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cappadocian_Greeks
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Muslims
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