Cappadocian Greeks

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Cappadocian Greeks
Έλληνες-Καππαδόκες
Kapadokyalı Rumlar
Cappadocian Greek dance.JPG
Cappadocian Greeks in traditional clothing, Greece
Total population
(unknown)
Regions with significant populations
Greece (especially northern Greece)
 Greece 44,432 (More than 50,000 including descendants)[1] - around 50,000 (1920s estimate)[2]
Languages
Greek language, Cappadocian Greek, Karamanli Turkish
Religion
Greek Orthodoxy
Related ethnic groups
other Greeks

Cappadocian Greeks also known as Greek Cappadocians (Greek: Έλληνες-Καππαδόκες, Ελληνοκαππαδόκες, Καππαδόκες; Turkish: Kapadokyalı Rumlar)[3] or simply Cappadocians are a Greek community native to the geographical region of Cappadocia in central-eastern Anatolia,[4][5] roughly the Nevşehir Province and surrounding provinces of modern Turkey. There had been a continuous Greek presence in Cappadocia since antiquity,[6] and the native Indo-European populations of Cappadocia, some of whose languages (cf. Phrygian) may have been closely related to Greek, were entirely Greek in their language and culture by at least the 5th century.[7] 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.

Historical background[edit]

Mount Aktepe near Göreme and the Rock Sites of Cappadocia (UNESCO World Heritage Site)

Early migrations[edit]

Apollonius of Tyana (1st century ad), a Greek Neopythagorean philosopher from the town of Tyana in Cappadocia

The area known as Cappadocia today was known to the Ancient Persians as Katpatuka, a name which the Greeks altered into Kappadokia (Cappadocia).[8]

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,[9] 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.[7]

After the death of Alexander the Great, Eumenes of Cardia, one of the Diadochi of Alexander the Great, was appointed satrap of Cappadocia, where he set up Greek settlements and distributed cities to his associates.[10] Eumenes left behind administrators, judges and selected garrison commanders in Cappadocia. In the following centuries the Seleucid Greek Kings founded many Greek settlements in the interior of Asia Minor,[10] and this region would become popular for the recruitment of soldiers. Unlike other regions of Asia Minor where Greeks would settle in cities, most of the Greek settlements in Cappadocia and other interior Anatolian regions were villages,[11] the Hellenistic Kings would make new Greek settlements in Cappadocia and other surrounding regions in order to secure their hold on this volatile region,[12] under their rule Greek settlements would increase in the Anatolian interior.[12]

Greek Kings of Cappadocia. (left) Ariarathes V of Cappadocia (ca. 163-130 BC) who is considered to have been the greatest king of Cappadocia and was predominantly Greek by descent. (right) Archelaus of Cappadocia (36 BC – 17 AD) was the last king of Cappadocia and was of Greek descent.

In the centuries following Alexander the Great's death, Ariarathes, the son of a Persian satrap who formerly controlled Cappadocia, gained control of Cappadocia and left it to a line of his successors, who mostly bore the name of the founder of the dynasty, these kings began to intermarry with neighboring Greek Hellenistic kingdoms, such as the Seleucids. During their reign Greek towns were beginning to appear in the southern regions of Cappadocia.[13] Ariarathes V of Cappadocia who reigned from 163 to 130 BC is considered to have been the greatest of the Kings of Cappadocia.[14] He was predominantly Greek by descent, his father Ariarathes IV of Cappadocia was half Greek Macedonian[13] and Persian and his mother was Antiochis, was the daughter of the Seleucid Greek King Antiochus III[15][16] of the Seleucid dynasty.[17] By the 1st century BC, regions of Cappadocia had been ravaged by Armenian King Tigranes the Great, who had relocated a great number of Cilician and Cappadocian Greeks to Mesopotamia[18] (geographically in modern Iraq, eastern Syria and south-eastern Turkey.)

Roman Period[edit]

Archelaus who was a Roman client prince was the last to rule as a king of Cappadocia. He was a Cappadocian Greek nobleman,[19][20] possibly of Macedonian descent and was the first king of Cappadocia of wholly non-Persian blood.[21] He ruled over Cappadocia for many years before being deposed by Tiberius who took possession of Cappadocia for Rome,[21] the region of Cappadocia produced some notable Greek individuals in antiquity, such as Apollonius of Tyana (1st century ad) who was a Greek Neo-Pythagorean philosopher[22] who became well known in the Roman Empire and Aretaeus of Cappadocia (81-138 AD) who was a native Greek, born in Cappadocia and is considered to have been one of the foremost surgeons on antiquity.[23][24][25] He was the first to distinguish between diabetes mellitus and diabetes insipidus, and the first to provide a detailed description of an asthma attack.[25][26]

Medieval Byzantine fresco in a Cappadocian rock-cut church at Göreme depicting Jesus Christ with the twelve apostles.

By late antiquity the Cappadocian Greeks had largely converted to Christianity,[27] they were so thoroughly devout to Christianity that by the 1st century AD, the region of Cappadocia served as a stronghold for Christian Monasticism[28] and was of significance importance in the history of early Christianity.[27] In the early centuries of the Common Era Cappadocia produced three prominent Greek patristic figures, known as the three hierarchs,[29] they were Basil the Great (c. 330-79), Bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia.[30] Gregory of Nazianzus (c.330-c.389 AD)[31] (later known as Saint Gregory the Theologian) and Gregory of Nyssa (died c. 394).[32] These Cappadocian Greek fathers of the fourth century[33] revered the ancient Greek cultural pursuit of virtue, even studying Homer and Hesiod and “stood squarely in the tradition of Greek culture”.[34]

Byzantine Period[edit]

By the fifth century the last of the Indo-European native languages of Anatolia ceased to be spoken, replaced by Koine Greek,[7] at the same time the Greek communities of central Anatolia were becoming actively involved in affairs of the Byzantine Empire and some Greek Cappadocians such as Maurice Tiberius (r.582-602) and Heraclius would even serve as Emperors.[35][36]

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 (cf kleisoura and thughur) 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 (see Karbeas of Tephrike), 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.[27][37][38] As late as the 20th century the local Cappadocian Greeks were still using the underground cities as refuges (Greek: καταφύγια) from periodic waves of Ottoman persecution,[39] 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.[27]

Gregory of Nazianzus (c.330-c.389 AD).

In the Middle Ages Cappadocia had hundreds of settlements and Byzantine rock-cut churches were carved out of the volcanic formations of eastern Cappadocia and decorated with painted icons, Greek writing and decorations, over 700 of these Churches have been discovered[40] and date from the period between the 6th century to the 13th century,[27] many of these monasteries and churches continued to be used until the population exchange between Greece and Turkey 1920s.[28] The Greek inhabitants of these districts of Cappadocia were called Troglodytes; in the 10th century Leo the Deacon recorded a journey to Cappadocia by Nikephoros Phokas, in his writings he mentions that its inhabitants were called Troglodytes, in view of the fact that they “went underground in holes, clefts and labyrinths, as it were in dens and burrows”.[41] The Byzantines re-established control of Cappadocia between the 7th and 11th centuries, during this period churches were carved into cliffs and rock faces in the Göreme and Soğanlı region;[38] in the Middle Ages the Cappadocian Greeks would bury their religious figures in and around monasteries. In recent years mummified bodies have been found in abandoned Greek monasteries of Cappadocia, and many, including bodies of mummified babies, are on display in the Nigde Archaeological Museum. A well-preserved mummified corpse of a young Christian woman is popular with tourists; the blonde haired mummy is believed to be a nun and dates from the Byzantine era, from the 6th to the 11th century.[42][43] It was discovered in a sixth-century Greek chapel in the Ihlara Valley of Cappadocia,[44] during the tenth century the Byzantine Empire had pushed east into formerly Arab-ruled lands, including most of Armenia, and had resettled thousands of Armenians into various regions of Cappadocia. This population shift intensified ethnic tensions between the Cappadocian Greeks and the Armenian newcomers in Cappadocia,[45] and left Armenia largely devoid of native defenders.[45]

Turkish Cappadocia[edit]

Basil Giagoupes (Bασίλειος Γιαγούπης), a 13th-century Cappadocian Greek feudatory lord who held the court title of general (amir arzi) in the army of Mesud II, Sultan of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum.

In 1071 AD the Byzantine Empire suffered a considerable defeat at the Battle of Manzikert in Armenia,[46][47] this defeat would open the interior of Anatolia to invasion by Central Asian Seljuq Turks who would overrun most of Byzantine Asia Minor.[46] This began the transformation of Asia Minor from an entirely Christian and overwhelmingly Greek-populated region to a primarily Muslim and Turkish center.[46][47] Several Armenian royal families, which included Gagik of Ani and Adom and Abu Sahl of Vaspurakan, sought vengeance on the local Greek Orthodox population after persecutions of the Armenians and Syriac Monophysites by the Byzantines.[48] They used the opportunity provided by the Seljuq conquest to target the Greeks, they tortured and then assassinated the Greek Orthodox metropolitan of Kayseri and pillaged wealthy Greek owned estates,[48] the local Greek landowners eventually killed the Armenian royal Gagik.[48]

By the 12th century all of Anatolia was overrun by Turkmen tribes from Central Asia,[7] these invading nomads had cleared many regions of Anatolia of indigenous Greeks,[49] the Anatolian Greek population rapidly diminished under Turkish rule owing to mass conversions to Islam, slaughter or exile to Greek territories in Europe.[50] 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 researchers[51] largely 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.,[51] although in the beginning of the 20th century, the proportion of Christians in Anatolian population was more than 20%.[52] During the centuries of Turkish rule in Asia Minor many Greeks and other peoples of Anatolia such as Armenians and Kurds adopted the Turkish language, converted to Islam, and came to be identified as Turks.[53] Despite the turmoil in Anatolia, by the 13th century the Greeks of Cappadocia, Lycaonia and Pamphylia remained numerous, even under the pressure of the Turkmen nomads, possibly constituting majorities in some urban centers.[49] During this chaotic period there is evidence that some native Cappadocian Greeks had joined the invading Turkish nomads, some even managing to rise to levels of prominence in the Seljuq Sultanate of Rum, such as Basil Giagoupes (Bασίλειος Γιαγούπης), a wealthy Cappadocian Greek feudatory lord of a strongly Greek district who held the court title of general (amir arzi) in the army of the Seljuq sultan of Konya, Mesud II.[54] He dedicated a church in the Peristrema (Belisirma) valley where his portrait, which was painted from life still survives to this day. 13th century Cappadocian Greek artists were renowned for their naturalistic paintings and were employed throughout the Seljuk Empire.[55]

Abandoned Greek Orthodox churches carved into a solid stone cliff face, Göreme Open Air Museum, Cappadocia, Nevşehir/Turkey.

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,[38] 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,[56][57] as a result many Greeks of Cappadocia had accepted the Turkish vernacular and later became known as ‘Karamanlides’. This name derives from the region of Cappadocia which was called Karaman by the Turks in honor of the Turkish chieftain Karamanoglu, though the Cappadocian Greeks continued to call the region ‘Laranda’, its ancient Greek name.[58] These Turcophone Greeks lived primarily in the region of Karamania although there were also significant communities in Constantinople and in the region of the Black Sea.[59][60] 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,[61][62] the Greek Cappadocians retained the original Greek names of many regions of Cappadocia which were renamed Turkish names during the Ottoman era, such as the town known as ‘Hagios Prokopios’ in the Middle Ages, and renamed ‘Urgup’ by the Turks was still called ‘Prokopion’ by the local Greeks of the early 20th century.[63]

Frescoes in St. John (Gülşehir) Church, Cappadocia, Turkey.

Although the Karamanlides abandoned Greek when they learned Turkish they remained Greek Orthodox Christians and continued to write using the Greek Alphabet.[64] They printed manuscript works in the Turkish language using the Greek alphabet, which became known as ‘Karamanlidika’,[60] this was not a phenomenon that was limited to the Cappadocian Greek Karamanlides, as many of the Armenians living in Cappadocia were also linguistically Turkified, although they remained Armenian Apostolic (Orthodox) Christians, they spoke and wrote in the Turkish language although still using the Armenian Alphabet.[60] Some Jewish inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire were also Turkified and although they retained their religion, they also wrote in the Turkish language but using Hebrew script,[65] the Cappadocian Greeks, Armenians and Jewish minorities of the Ottoman Empire had created Graeco-Turkish, Armeno-Turkish, and Judeo-Turkish literatures by developing their own written traditions.[65] Despite the fact that they had lost all knowledge of their own languages after they had been Turkified,[60] the majority of Karamanlides and many Turkophone Armenians eventually revived their original native tongues.[66] While most Cappadocian Greeks had remained Orthodox Christians a significant number of the Karamanlides even converted to Islam during this period,[56] as with other Greek communities, these converts to Islam were considered "Turks",[67] as being a Muslim was synonymous with being Turkish to the Greeks of the Ottoman Empire. Greek writers would erroneously describe Greek converts to Islam as “Tourkeuoun” (Τουρκεύουν) or becoming Turkish.[67] European visitors to the sultans' realms would also subjectively label any Muslim a "Turk" regardless of his or her mother tongue,[68] the Greeks believed that by converting to Islam and ‘losing’ his or her original Christian religion, the individual was also stepping out of the Greek national community. This way of thinking was even popular years after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.[67]

Many shifts of population took place in central Anatolia during the period of Ottoman rule.[69] Subsequent to the 1571 Ottoman conquest of Cyprus, the Ottoman Sultan Selim I decided to transfer Greeks from Cappadocia, particularly from the Kayseri region, to Cyprus.[70][71] During this period the architect Sinan, who was born of Greek parentage and a native of Cappadocia wrote a letter to the Sultan asking for his family to be spared from this population transfer,[71][72] 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 (modern Güzelyurt) many of which can still be seen today,[73][74] the Cappadocian Greeks wrote the earliest published novels in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, using the Greek Alphabet and Turkish language.[57] Cappadocian Greeks from different regions would specialize in a particular profession, such as the caviar trade.[75] Demetrius Charles Boulger later describes their work character, "Each village is connected with some particular guild in Constantinople; one supplies bakals or small storekeepers, another sellers of wine and spirits, another dryers of fish, another makers of caviare, another porters, and so forth."[76]’

Modern[edit]

A Cappadocian Greek wedding in Kermira (Germir), Kayseri, Cappadocia, in 1902.
A passage in the Underground City

In the early 20th century, Greek settlements were still both numerous and widespread throughout most of today’s Turkey,[77][78] 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.[77] The Cappadocian Greeks of the 19th and 20th centuries were renowned for the richness of their folktales and preservation of their ancient Greek tongue.[79]

The underground cities continued to be used as refuges (Cappadocian Greek: καταφύγια) from the Turkish Muslim rulers,[39] as late as the 20th century the locals were still using the underground cities to escape periodic waves of Ottoman persecution.[39] Dawkins, a Cambridge linguist who conducted research on the Cappodocian Greek natives in the area from 1909-1911, recorded that in 1909,

Scholars passing through Cappadocia during the 19th century described the Cappadocian Greeks and their habits; in 1838 British scholar Robert Ainsworth wrote that "The Cappadocian Greeks are, generally speaking, pleasing and unreserved in their manners, and their conversation indicated a very high degree of intelligence and civilization, where there are so few books, and so little education, and consequently, little learning."[80] Sir Charles William Wilson, British consul-general in Anatolia from 1879 to 1882, described their character:

Persecution and population exchange[edit]

By the early 1900s the region of Cappadocia was still inhabited by Christian Cappadocian Greeks as well as Muslim Turks[41] 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.[82] Thousands of Greeks were massacred,[82] approximately 750,000 Anatolian Greeks were massacred in an act of Genocide and 750,000 exiled,[78][83] the Greeks were targeted prior to and alongside the Armenians and Assyrians. Ionian and Cappadocian Greek deaths alone totaled 397,000, while Pontian Greek deaths numbered 353,000 people.[78] Turkish official Rafet Bey was active in the Genocide of the Greeks of the Anatolian interior, on November 1916 he stated "We must finish off the Greeks as we did with the Armenians…today I sent squads to the interior to kill every Greek on sight…"[84] During the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) countless numbers of Greeks were deported by the Turks to the Mesopotamian desert where many perished,[84] on January 31, 1917, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg of Germany reported that:

The indications are that the Turks plan to eliminate the Greek element as enemies of the state, as they did earlier with the Armenians, the strategy implemented by the Turks is of displacing people to the interior without taking measures for their survival by exposing them to death, hunger, and illness. The abandoned homes are then looted and burnt or destroyed. Whatever was done to the Armenians is being repeated with the Greeks.[84]

In 1924, after living in Cappadocia for thousands of years,[6] the remaining Cappadocian Greeks were expelled to Greece as part of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey defined by the Treaty of Lausanne,[5] the descendents of the Cappadocian Greeks who had converted to Islam were not included in the population exchange and remained in Cappadocia,[85] some still speaking the Cappadocian Greek language. Many Cappadocian towns were greatly affected by the expulsion of the Greeks including Mustafapasa (Sinasos), Urgup, Güzelyurt and Nevsehir as the Greeks constituted a significant percentage of the towns population.[73] 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,[73] 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 (see Greek Muslims), although most were of Slavic, Turkish and Gypsy origin. Many of the Cappadocian Greek churches were converted to mosques after the Greeks left in the population exchange of the 1920s, these include the Church of St Gregory known today as "Buyuk Kilise Camii (Big Church Mosque)".[86]

Cappadocian Greek athletic seminary team "Argaios" in Kayseri (1907). The team was named after Mt. Argaios, a famous volcano in Cappadocia.

Following the population exchange there was still a substantial community of Cappadocian Greeks living in Turkey, in Constantinople,[60] they had settled there during the Ottoman era and formed enclaves of their native communities,[59] the majority of whom also migrated to Greece following the Anti-Greek Istanbul Pogrom riots of 1955. On their arrival in mainland Greece, many Cappadocian Greeks settled in villages similar to their original Cappadocian villages; the new settlements were named after towns and villages left behind in Cappadocia, with the addition of the word “Nea” (New). For example, Cappadocian Greeks from Sinasos (present Mustafapaşa near Ürgüp) who settled in the northern part of the island of Euboea in Greece named their new settlement Nea Sinasos "New Sinasos". Other examples include Nea Karvali in northern Greece, and Neo Prokopi in central Greece,[1] the regions of Greece with significant settlements of Cappadocian Greeks include the cities of Karditsa, Volos, Kilkis, Larisa, Chalkidiki, Kavala, Alexandroupoli and Thessaloniki.[87] Today the descendents of the Cappadocian Greeks can be found throughout Greece, as well as in countries around the world particularly in Western Europe, North America and Australia as part of the Greek diaspora.

The modern region of Cappadocia is famous for the churches carved into cliffs and rock faces in the Göreme and Soğanlı valleys,[38] the region is popular with tourists,[40] many of whom visit the abandoned underground cities, houses and Greek churches carved and decorated by Cappadocian Greeks centuries ago. The formerly Greek town of Güzelyurt (Karvali) has become popular with tourists who visit the abandoned stone mansions built centuries ago by wealthy Cappadocian Greek businessmen.[74] Today, more than 700 Greek Orthodox churches[40] and over thirty rock-carved chapels, many with preserved painted icons, Greek writing and frescos, some from the pre-iconoclastic period[38] that date back as far as the 6th century, can still be seen.[27] As of 1985 these Greek cave churches were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.[88]

Language[edit]

Anatolian Greek dialects until 1923. Demotic in yellow. Pontic in orange. Cappadocian in green, with green dots indicating individual Cappadocian Greek speaking villages in 1910.[89]
Greek inscription in Mustafapasa, Cappadocia.
Main article: Cappadocian Greek

The Cappadocian Greeks traditionally spoke a dialect of the Greek language known as Cappadocian Greek. Cappadocian Greek diverged from the other Byzantine Greek dialects early, beginning with the Turkish conquests of central Asia Minor in the 11th and 12th centuries, and so developed several radical features, such as the loss of the gender for nouns.[90] However, having been isolated from the crusader conquests (Fourth Crusade) and the later Venetian influence of the Greek coast, it retained the Ancient Greek terms for many words that were replaced with Romance language ones in Demotic Greek,[90] after centuries of Ottoman rule the Turkish language began to emerge as the dominant language of Cappadocia. Many Greeks began to speak Turkish as a second language and became bilingual, this was the case with the “Kouvoukliotes” who were always Greek speakers and spoke Turkish with a strong Greek accent,[91] and there were Cappadocian Greeks who only spoke the Turkish language and had given up the use of Greek centuries earlier, known as the Karamanlides.[64] At the beginning of the 20th century, the Cappadocian Greek language still had a strong presence at Gülşehir (formerly Arabison/Arapsu) north-west of Nevsehir, and in the large region southward as far down as Niğde and Bor.[27] Greek was also still spoken at Silli north-west of Konya, in Pharasa[27] and other villages in isolated communities in the interior of central Turkey prior to the Genocide of 1915 and subsequent population transfers.[83] Many Cappadocian Greeks completely abandoned Greek when they learned Turkish, although in the western regions of Cappadocia many Greeks still retained their native language. John Robert Sitlington Sterrett travelled through Cappadocia in 1884 and noted: "Melegobi is a large and flourishing village, inhabited almost exclusively by Greek-speaking Greeks, the Greeks are numerous all through the western part of Cappadocia, and generally cling to their language with great tenacity, a fact worthy of notice, inasmuch as the Greeks in other parts of Asia Minor speak only Turkish. Instances of Greek-speaking towns are Niğde, Gelvere, Melegobi (Μελοκοπια), and Ortakieui in Soghanli Deressi."[92] In the early 20th century scholars and linguists studying the Cappadocian Greeks observed that many Cappadocian Greek villages had begun to replace their native Greek language for the Turkish language, during the 19th-century British scholar John Pinkerton was informed by the Turkish-speaking Greeks that past Turkish rulers of Anatolia had caused them to lose the knowledge of the Greek language,[93] Pinkerton reported that:

..."the cruel persecutions of their Mahomedan masters have been the cause of their present degraded state of ignorance, even in regard to their native tongue; for that there was a time when their Turkish masters strictly prohibited the Greeks in Asia Minor even from speaking the Greek language among themselves, and that they cut out the tongues of some, and punished others with death, who dared to disobey this their barbarous command. It is an indisputable fact, that the language of their oppressors has long since almost universally prevailed, and that in a great part of Anatolia even the public worship of the Greeks is now performed in the Turkish tongue, the following works, in the Turkish language, but all in the Greek character, afford further proof of what I have now stated...” (John Pinkerton, 1817)[93]

In the 1920s when the Cappadocian Greeks arrived in Greece, the Cappadocian Greek spoken by them was hardly intelligible with the Demotic Greek used in mainland Greece, as it had been cut off from the rest of the Greek-speaking world for centuries, the Cappadocian Greeks were more linguistically Turkified then the Greeks in Pontus and the western coastal regions of Turkey.[60] Once in Greece though, they started using the modern Greek language,[66] causing their ancestral Greek dialect, the Cappadocian Greek language, to go to the brink of extinction, the Cappadocian Greek language was believed by some scholars to have been extinct for many years. The language was then declared alive in 2005, when descendants of Cappadocian Greeks were discovered still speaking the language fluently in central and northern Greece.[62] Today it is still spoken by mainly elderly Cappadocian Greeks in various regions of Greece including in Karditsa, Volos, Kilkis, Larisa, Thessaloniki, Chalkidiki, Kavala, and Alexandroupoli,[87] some Cappadocian Greeks who converted to Islam, allowing them to avoid the population exchanges of 1923, still speak the language in their traditional homeland in Turkey.

Culture[edit]

The Cappadocian Greeks have been isolated from the rest of the Greek-speaking world for centuries and this has made their culture, way of life, and customs somewhat distinctive, their culture has been strongly influenced by the topography of its different regions. In commercial cities like Kayseri and Malakopea upper level education and arts flourished under the protection of a cosmopolitan middle class, the economy of Cappadocia was largely based upon agriculture and mining and the rural centers which lay upon the valleys and plains. The Cappadocian Greeks have distinctive traditional songs and dances which are still performed in Greece.

Early Cappadocian Greek literature[edit]

Cappadocian Greek children wearing traditional costumes in Greece.

The Persian poet Rumi (1207-1273), whose name means "Roman", referring to his residence amongst the "Roman" Greek speakers of Cappadocia, wrote a few poems in Cappadocian Greek.[94][95][96][97] These verses are one of the earliest literary attestations of the spoken Cappadocian vernacular.

Female traditional costume from Niğde (PFF Collection, Nafplion).

Contemporary literature[edit]

The Cappadocian Greek-American immigrant and renowned Hollywood director Elia Kazan wrote a book "America, America" about his uncle, who grew-up in Cappadocia in an environment of increasing persecution. Sent on foot by his father as a teenager, with the entire family savings, to Istanbul, Elia's uncle was supposed to establish a new life and, eventually, to bring the rest of the family to the city; in the end Elia's uncle traveled much further, to America, later fulfilling his filial duty and bringing his family over as well. Kazan made his book into an Academy Award winning movie America, America in 1963.

Cuisine[edit]

The Cappadocian Greeks continued a number of Anatolian culinary traditions passed down since Byzantine times, these include the preparing of wind-cured meats known as pastirma,[98][99][100] a delicacy called in Byzantine times "paston,"[101][102] along with the use of the ubiquitous Central Anatolian spinach-like herb madimak to make dishes such as a variant of spanikopita.[103]

Notable Cappadocian Greeks[edit]

Twelve notable Cappadocian Greeks: (top row) Elia Kazan, Vasileios Stefanidis, Pantelis Georgiadis, Evgenios of Kayseri, Dimosthenis Daniilidis, Konstantinos Vagiannis (bottom row) Ioannis Pesmazoglou, Pavlos Karolidis, Sofoklis Avraam Choudaverdoglou-Theodotos, Dimitrios Mavrofrydis, Ioakeim Valavanis, Georgios Georgiadis.

Video[edit]

The Cappadocian Greek-American immigrant and renowned Hollywood director Elia Kazan made an Academy Award winning movie America, America about his uncle, who grew-up in Cappadocia and then was sent on foot as a teenager, with the entire family savings, to escape persecution and establish a new life in Istanbul, and eventually, to bring the rest of the family there.

  • Documentary on the Cappadocian Greeks culture, traditional songs and dances:

Το Αλάτι Της Γης - Καππαδοκικό Γλέντι

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b Hirschon, Renée (2003). Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange Between Greece and Turkey. Berghahn Books. pp. 180–191. ISBN 978-1-57181-562-0. Under the terms of Lausanne Convention, signed on 30 January 1923, an approximate total of over 1.2 million Turkish nationals of Greek Orthodox religion were exchanged for 354,647 Greek nationals of Muslim religion. As part of the final phase of this agreement, 44,432 Greek Orthodox Cappadocian refugees were expelled from Turkey and came to Greece as exchanged persons, since they had not fled under conditions of military conflict, the experience for them was different from that of the earlier waves of refugees who arrived in Greece in 1922. In this chapter, I describe two Cappadocian settlements: New Karvali in eastern Macedonia, northern Greece, and New Prokopi in central Greece, on the island of Evia; in choosing to study these particular settlements two factors proved decisive: their name and their culture significance. Both settlements were named after places left behind in Cappadocia, with the addition of the word ‘New’. […]Aside from the religious dimension, the other main factor that helped the Cappadocian refugees transform their settlements from ‘space’ into a meaningful ‘place’ was that many of them were settled as communities and were not broken up and dispersed. This allowed the transplanted people to name their settlements in Greece after their villages in Cappadocia. […] In the case of the Cappadocians, the notion of keeping a discrete refugee community together as one unit in the settlement process played a significant role in the refugees’ process of adaptation. By settling near relatives and their fellow villagers from Cappadocia, these refugees were encouraged to re-create their neighborhoods. 
  2. ^ Blanchard, Raoul. "The Exchange of Populations Between Greece and Turkey." Geographical Review, 15.3 (1925): 449-56.
  3. ^ Özkan, Akdoğan (2009). Kardeş bayramlar ve özel günler. Inkılâp. ISBN 978-975-10-2928-7. Evlerin bolluk ve bereketi şu veya bu sebeple kaçmışsa, özellikle Rumların yoğun olarak yaşadığı Orta ve Kuzey Anadolu'da bunun sebebinin karakoncolos isimli iblis olduğu düşünülürmüş. Kapadokyalı Rumlar yeni yılın başında sırf ... 
  4. ^ Balta, Evangelia (2003). Ottoman studies and archives in Greece. The Isis Press. p. 48. ISBN 978-975-428-223-8. 'The so called "Asia Minor Folklore Studies" initially focused on Ottoman Cappadocia and its ethnic Greek inhabitants. 
  5. ^ a b Baum, Wilhelm (2006). The Christian minorities in Turkey. Kitab. p. 162. ISBN 978-3-902005-62-5. On October 11, 1922, Turkey concluded an armistice with the allied forces, but not with the Greeks. The Greeks in the other settlement areas of Asia Minor were also expelled at that time, like e.g. the Kappadocian Greeks in the Goreme area and the other Greeks in Pontus, in the Trabzon area and on the west coast. 
  6. ^ a b Bichakjian, Bernard H. (2002). Language in a Darwinian perspective. Peter Lang. p. 206. ISBN 978-0-8204-5458-0. Cappadocia is an ancient district in east central Anatolia, west of the Euphrates River, where there had been a Greek presence from the Hellenistic period to the beginning of this century, when the minority group was submitted to a “population exchange”. As the Cappadocians returned to Greece, they became absorbed by the local population and their dialect died out. 
  7. ^ a b c d Swain, Simon; Adams, J. Maxwell; Janse, Mark (2002). Bilingualism in Ancient Society: Language Contact and the Written Word. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press. pp. 246–266. ISBN 0-19-924506-1. 
  8. ^ Bevan, Edwyn Robert (1966). The house of Seleucus, Volume 1. Barnes & Noble. p. 76. OCLC 313659202. The eastern and northern part of the country beyond the Taurus was known to the Persians as Katpatuka, a name which the Greeks transformed into Cappadocia (Kappadokia). 
  9. ^ Avi-Yonah, Michael (1978). Hellenism and the East: contacts and interrelations from Alexander to the Roman conquest. University Microfilms International. p. 119. ISBN 978-0-8357-0301-7. The Ptolemies also kept close control of the cities on their domain, but as - apart from Naucratis - their cities were new foundations, the relations between them and their cities belong properly to the next subject to be dealt with, the foundation of new cities… Between these two areas cities were set up along the old Persian 'royal road' from Sardis to Cilicia. This strip of Greek colonies was located between the mountainous regions of Pisidia, Cilicia and Cappadocia, which remained largely unconquered or were ruled by native vassals. Another row of cities lined the seacoast from Rhodes eastwards. 
  10. ^ a b Cohen, Getzel M. (1995). The Hellenistic Settlements in Europe, the Islands, and Asia Minor. University of California Press. pp. 43–44. ISBN 978-0-520-08329-5. Turning to the interior regions of Asia Minor, where incidentally his rule was remembered with great nostalgia, we are faced with a lack of unequivocal evidence for any kind of colony founding activity by him. This contrasts sharply with the extensive evidence for Seleucid activity in the region. How many of these Seleucid settlements originated as foundations of Antigonos (or of Lysimachos) is unknown. There is also evidence for colonies of Macedonians in Lydia and Phrygia. … He could, of course, recruit Greek soldiers from Asia Minor and the regions of Greece under his control. But the only Macedonians he could recruit were those already in Asia Minor and Asia. … In short the available evidence makes clear that the Seleucids were very active founding settlements in the interior of Asia Minor. It says nothing about a similar Antigonid effort. There were, of course, other means available to control area, According to Plutarch, when Eumenes was appointed satrap over Cappadocia he distributed cities to his friends, left behind judges (dikastai). And administrators (dioiketai), and appointed garrison commanders. 
  11. ^ Dueck, Daniela (2000). Strabo of Amasia: A Greek Man of Letters in Augustan Rome. Psychology Press. pp. 4–5. ISBN 978-0-415-21672-2. The region is topographically divided into two large sections, the coastline and the mountainous inland region. Most of its cities were originally early Greek settlements founded along the seacoast, such as Sinope, Amisus and Pharnacia, whose economy and character were determined by maritime commerce. Amasia was the largest inland urban centre. Most of the other settlements in the interior were villages, generally more affected by earlier Iranian–Anatolian culture…The constant border movements are reflected in the name of the region, called also ‘Cappadocia near the Pontus’ or ‘Cappadocia on the Euxine’. 
  12. ^ a b Ashmore, Harry S. (1961). Encyclopædia Britannica: a new survey of universal knowledge, Volume 11. Encyclopædia Britannica. p. 406. Asia Minor … But under the dynasties of his successors a great work of colonization went on as each rival dynasty of Greek or Macedonian kings endeavoured to secure its hold on the country by founding fresh Greek settlements. While new Greek cities were rising in the interior, the older Hellenism of the western coast grew in material splendour under the munificence of Hellenistic kings. 
  13. ^ a b Boyce, Mary; Grenet, Frantz (1991). A History of Zoroastrianism: Zoroastrianism Under Macedonian and Roman Rule. BRILL. pp. 267–8. ISBN 978-90-04-09271-6. The coins of Ariaramnes and Ariarathes III, with their mint-names and Greek lettering, have been taken to indicate a scattering of Greeks in the towns of south Cappadocia. […] His son Ariarathes IV (220–c.162), thus half-Macedonian by blood, set the title “king” on his coins, and attached to his name the cognomen Philopator. He also introduced the device of Athena holding Nike, which became the standard reverse type of the Ariarathid coinage. […] His son Ariarathes V (c.162–130), with the cognomen Eusebes, was an ardent philhellene, and no longer wears the tiara on any of his coins. In his youth he studied in Athens, where he became friends with the future Attalus III, the last king of Pergamum, he in his turn married a Seleucid princess, his cousin Nysa, daughter of Antiochus III; and he refounded Mazaka and Tyana as Greek poleis… 
  14. ^ Newell, Edward Theodore (1968). Royal Greek portrait coins. Whitman Pub. Co. p. 52. OCLC 697579. ... Ariarathes V was probably the greatest of the Cappadocian kings. 
  15. ^ Gera, Dov (1998). Judaea and Mediterranean Politics, 219 to 161 B.C.E. BRILL. p. 259. ISBN 978-90-04-09441-3. Antiochis, a daughter of Antiochus III, and aunt to both Antiochus V and Demetrius. Antiochis had been married to Ariarathes IV, the king of Cappadocia, at the time in question, her son Ariarathes V, the reigning king of Cappadocia asked Lysias’ permission to rebury his mother’s and sister’s bodies in the family plot of the Cappadocian royal house. 
  16. ^ Zion, Noam; Spectre, Barbara (2000). A Different Light: The Big Book of Hanukkah. Devora Publishing. p. 57. ISBN 978-1-930143-37-1. Antiochus III, the Greek Seleucid Dynasty of Greater Syria captures Judea. 172 or 171–163 
  17. ^ Glubb, John Bagot (1967). Syria, Lebanon, Jordan. Thames & Hudson. p. 34. OCLC 585939. Although the Ptolemies and the Seleucids were perpetual rivals, both dynasties were Greek and ruled by means of Greek officials and Greek soldiers. Both governments made great efforts to attract immigrants from Greece, thereby adding yet another racial element to the population. 
  18. ^ Plutarch (1871). Plutarch's Lives, Volume 2. Harper. p. 71. There he had orders to wait for Tigranes, who was then employed in reducing some cities of Phoenicia; and he found means to bring over to the Roman interest many princes who submitted to the Armenian out of pure necessity… He had colonized Mesopotamia with Greeks, whom he draughted in great numbers out of Cilicia and Cappadocia. 
  19. ^ Eder, Walter; Renger, Johannes; Henkelman, Wouter; Chenault, Robert (2007). Brill's chronologies of the ancient world New Pauly names, dates and dynasties. Brill. p. 111. ISBN 978-90-04-15320-2. Of greater historical importance are the Archelai, the descendants of an officer of Greek origin (Archelaus). […] The grandson, Archelaus, was the first to have some success in Cappadocia 
  20. ^ Plutarch (2007). Plutarch's Lives, Volume 2 (of 4). Echo Library. p. 312. ISBN 978-1-4068-2330-1. This Archelaus was a native of Cappadocia, and probably of Greek stock. 
  21. ^ a b Boyce, Mary; Grenet, Frantz (1991). A History of Zoroastrianism: Zoroastrianism Under Macedonian and Roman Rule. BRILL. p. 269. ISBN 978-90-04-09271-6. …36 B.C., when Mark Antony put Archelaus, a great-grandson of one of Mithradates’ generals, on the throne – perhaps Cappadocia’s first king of wholly non-Iranian blood. He appears to have been an able and energetic ruler, who enjoyed a long reign before being deposed in 17 A.C., when senile, by Tiberius, who annexed Cappadocia for Rome. 
  22. ^ a b Haughton, Brian (2009). Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries. ReadHowYouWant. p. 448. ISBN 978-1-4429-5332-1. Apollonius was born around AD2 in Tyana (modern day Bor in southern Turkey), in the Roman province of Cappadocia. He was born into a wealthy and respected Cappadocian Greek family, and received the best education, studying grammar and rhetoric in Tarsus, learning medicine at the temple of Aesculapius at Aegae, and philosophy at the school of Pythagoras. 
  23. ^ a b Toledo-Pereyra, Luis H. (2006). Origins of the knife: early encounters with the history of surgery. Landes Bioscience. p. 100. ISBN 978-1-57059-694-0. Aretaeus the Cappadocian (81-138 AD) was the fourth surgeon of distinction considered during the times between Celsus and Galen. He was a Greek, born in Cappadocia, a Roman province in Asia Minor. 
  24. ^ a b Talbott, John Harold (1970). A biographical history of medicine: excerpts and essays on the men and their work. Grune & Stratton. p. 15. ISBN 978-0-8089-0657-5. Aretaeus, a Greek, was born in Cappadocia, a Roman province in Asia Minor, several centuries after Hippocrates. 
  25. ^ a b Poretsky, Leonid (2002). Principles of Diabetes Mellitus. Springer. p. 20. ISBN 978-1-4020-7114-0. Aretaeus of Cappadocia, a Greek physician who practiced in Rome and Alexandria in the second century AD, was the first to distinguish between what we now call diabetes mellitus and diabetes insipidus. 
  26. ^ Cantani, Arnaldo (2008). Pediatric Allergy, Asthma And Immunology. Springer. p. 724. ISBN 978-3-540-20768-9. Aretaeus of Cappadocia, a well-known Greek physician (second century AD), is credited with providing the first detailed description of an asthma attack, and to Celsus it was a disease with wheezing and noisy, violent breathing. 
  27. ^ a b c d e f g h Horrocks, Geoffrey C. (2010). Greek: A History of the Language and Its Speakers. John Wiley & Sons. p. 403. ISBN 978-1-4051-3415-6. None the less, at the beginning of the 20th century, Greek still had a strong presence in Silli north-west of Konya (ancient Ikonion), in Pharasa and other villages in the region drained by the Yenice river (some 100 km (62 mi) south of Kayeri, ancient Caesarea), and in Cappadocia proper, at Arabison (Arapsu/Gulsehir) north-west of Nevsehir (ancient Nyssa), and in the large region south of Nevsehir as far down as Nigde and Bor (close to ancient Tyana). This whole area, as the home of St Basil the Great (329-79), his brother St Gregory of Nyssa (335-94) and his friend St Gregory of Nazianzos (330-89), was of great importance in the early history of Christianity, but is perhaps most famous today for the extraordinary landscape of eroded volcanic tufa in the valleys of Goreme, Ihlara and Soganh, and for the churches and houses carved into the 'fairy chimneys' to serve the Christian population in the middle ages. Many of the rock cut churches, which range in date from the 6th to the 13th centuries, contain magnificent frescos. Away from the valleys, some of the villages have vast underground complexes containing houses, cellars, stables, refectories, cemeteries and churches, affording protection from marauding Arabs in the days when the Byzantine empire extended to the Euphrates, and serving later as places of refuge from hostile Turkish raiders, the most famous of these are at Kaymakli and Derinkuyu, formerly the Greek villages of Anaku (Inegi) and Malakopi (Melagob), where the chambers extended down over several levels of depths of up to 85 metres. 
  28. ^ a b Robert C. Ostergren; Mathias Le Bossé (2011). The Europeans: A Geography of People, Culture, and Environment. Guilford Press. p. 184. ISBN 978-1-59385-384-6. The spread of Christianity. During a visit from St. Paul in the first century CE, the inhabitants of Cappadocia in central Anatolia were so thoroughly converted that Cappadocia became the great stronghold of Christian monasticism.. The monasteries and churches, dug deeply into the easily worked volcanic tufa cliffs, continued to fulfill their functions until the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1923. Here we have the Girl’s Monastery, which accommodated some 300 nuns and is called by the Turks the “Virgins Castle.” 
  29. ^ Bury, John Bagnell (1967). The Cambridge medieval history, Volume 9, Part 2. University Press. p. 213. OCLC 25352555. The three great Cappadocian Fathers, called by the Greeks 'the three hierarchs ', belong to the Alexandrian school of thought. They are Basil the Great, Bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia (c. 330-79); Gregory of Nazianzus, a writer of great sensibility with a turn for poetry, the great ‘Theologian’ (as he is called by later writers), for a short time Patriarch of Constantinople (c. 379-c. 390); and Gregory of Nyssa (died c. 394), brother of Basil the Great and Bishop of the small town of Nyssa, a profound thinker and versatile writer. 
  30. ^ a b Marvin Perry; Myrna Chase; James Jacob; Margaret Jacob; Theodore H. Von Laue (2012). Western Civilization: Ideas, Politics, and Society. Cengage Learning. p. 184. ISBN 978-1-111-83168-4. Saint Basil (c. 329 - 379), a Greek who was bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia (eastern Asia Minor), established the rules that became the standard for the monasteries in the East. 
  31. ^ a b Company, Houghton Mifflin (2003). The Houghton Mifflin Dictionary of Biography. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 643. ISBN 978-0-618-25210-7. Gregory of Nazian or Nazianzen, St c.330-c.389 AD * Greek prelate and theologian Born of Greek parents in Cappadocia, he was educated in Caesarea, Alexandria and Athens. 
  32. ^ Prokhorov, Aleksandr Mikhaĭlovich (1982). Great Soviet encyclopedia, Volume 7. Macmillan. p. 412. OCLC 417318059. One of the most prominent Greek patristic figures. Gregory of Nyssa was the brother of Basil the Great and a friend of Gregory of Nazianzus, and with them he formed the so-called Cappadocian circle of church figures and thinkers. 
  33. ^ Clendenin Daniel B. (2003). Eastern Orthodox Christianity: A Western Perspective. Baker Academic. p. 95. ISBN 978-0-8010-2652-2. Only that which is false and sinful must be rejected. Thus the Cappadocian Greek fathers of the fourth century admired Origen; Maximus the Confessor was inspired by Evagrios in his spirituality; Nicodemos of Athos (eighteenth ... 
  34. ^ Woodill, Joseph (2002). The Fellowship of Life: Virtue Ethics and Orthodox Christianity. Georgetown University Press. p. 19. ISBN 978-0-87840-368-4. THE CAPPADOCIANS It was not before the middle of the fourth century "that the province of Cappadocia produced three great theologians, Basil of Caesarea, his friend Gregory Nazianzus and his brother Gregory of Nyssa… It is difficult to find a passage in the Cappadocians that does not make reference to the life of virtue in classical terms and language. This is because the Cappadocian Fathers “stood squarely in the tradition of Greek culture.”…The Cappadocian Fathers both revered the Greek cultural pursuit of virtue found for example in Homer and Hesoid and, yet, despised the myths presented in the same works. 
  35. ^ a b Stark, Freya (2012). Rome on the Euphrates: The Story of a Frontier. Tauris Parke Paperbacks. p. 390. ISBN 978-1-84885-314-0. Byzantium reverted to Greek (Maurice, born in Cappadocia, was its first Greek emperor); and trade and diplomacy were honored from the very founding of the Imperial city as never in Rome before. 
  36. ^ a b Corradini, Richard (2006). Texts and identities in the early Middle Ages. Verl. der Österr. Akad. der Wiss. p. 57. ISBN 978-3-7001-3747-4. Emperor Maurice who is said to be the first emperor "from the race of the Greeks," ex Graecorum genere. 
  37. ^ Kinross, Baron Patrick Balfour (1970). Within the Taurus: a journey in Asiatic Turkey. J. Murray. p. 168. ISBN 978-0-7195-2038-9. Its inhabitants were Cappadocian Greeks, who may have found a refuge here, perhaps from Roman, from Iconoclast, or later from Turkish and Mongol threats. Urgup itself was the Byzantine Prokopion; the Emperor Nicephoros Phocas is said to have passed this way, after his Cilician campaign; and the neighborhood was populous enough to support, at different times, a number of bishoprics. 
  38. ^ a b c d e Darke, Diana (2011). Eastern Turkey. Bradt Travel Guides. pp. 139–140. ISBN 978-1-84162-339-9. The area became an important frontier province during the 7th century when Arab raids on the Byzantine Empire began. By now the soft tufa had been tunneled and chambered to provide underground cities where a settled if cautious life could continue during difficult times. When the Byzantines re-established secure control between the 7th and 11th centuries, the troglodyte population surfaced, now carving their churches into rock faces and cliffs in the Goreme and Sogamli areas, giving Cappadocia its fame today. […] At any rate here they flourished, their churches remarkable for being cut into the rock, but interesting especially for their paintings, relatively well preserved, rich in coloring, and with an emotional intensity lacking in the formalism of Constantinople; this is one of the few places where paintings from the pre-iconoclastic period have survived. Icons continued to be painted after the Seljuk conquest of the area in the 11th century, and the Ottoman conquest did not interfere with the Christian practices in Cappadocia, where the countryside remained largely Greek, with some Armenians, but decline set in and Goreme, Ihlara and Soganli lost their early importance. The Greeks finally ending their long history here with the mass exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece in 1923. 
  39. ^ a b c Dawkins, R.M. (1916). Modern Greek in Asia Minor. A study of dialect of Silly, Cappadocia and Pharasa. Cambridge University Press. p. 16. Retrieved 25 October 2014. their use as places of refuge in time of danger is indicated by their name καταφύγια, and when the news came of the recent massacres at Adana [in 1909], a great part of the population at Axo took refuge in these underground chambers, and for some nights did not venture to sleep above ground. 
  40. ^ a b c Ousterhout, Robert G. (2005). A Byzantine Settlement in Cappadocia. Dumbarton Oaks. p. 1. ISBN 978-0-88402-310-4. The Mysteries of Cappadocia – During the Middle Ages, when Cappadocia was an important province of the Byzantine Empire, It became a vibrant area of habitation, with hundreds of settlements, churches, and monasteries carved into the rocky landscape. More than seven hundred churches alone have been counted in the region, many of them preserving impressive ensembles of fresco decoration. Bringing together the best of the Tertiary and the Byzantine periods, the combination of scenic geological wonder and arcane art history has made Cappadocia a tourist destination of ever increasing popularity. 
  41. ^ a b Rodley, Lyn (2010). Cave Monasteries of Byzantine Cappadocia. Cambridge University Press. p. 1. ISBN 978-0-521-15477-2. The tenth-century historian Leo the Deacon records a journey to Cappadocia made by Nikephoros Phokas shortly before he became emperor. Perhaps to recapture the attention of readers beginning to tire of troop movements he also offers a scrap of information about a curiosity of the region to which the emperor was heading: its inhabitants were once called troglodytes, because ‘they went underground in holes, clefts and labyrinths, as it were in dens and burrows’, this brief note was probably not based on first-hand knowledge but it might have been prompted by an awareness of the vast number of rock-cut cavities in an area to the west and southwest of Kaisareia (Kayseri of modern Turkey). Had Leo been more inclined to garrulous digression (or perhaps just better informed), he might have supplied more details of the troglodyte region and the task of bringing scholarly order to the hundreds of rock-cut monuments and other cavities in the area might have been much similar. … At this time the region was still inhabited by a mixed population of Turkish-speaking Moslems and Greek-speaking Christians. The latter group left for Greece in the early 1920s, during an exchange of population of minorities that was part of the radical social re-ordering initiated by Kemal Ataturk; they were replaced by Turks from Greece, mostly from Thrace. In the two decades before this upheaval, however, members of the local Greek population acted as guides to Guillaume de Jerphanion, who made several visits to the volcanic valleys and wrote his meticulous descriptions of many painted Byzantine rock-cut churches. 
  42. ^ Bainbridge, James (2009). Turkey. Lonely Planet. p. 527. ISBN 978-1-74104-927-5. Several mummies are exhibited too, including the 11th-century mummy of a blonde nun discovered in the 1960s in the Ihlara Valley. 
  43. ^ Önder, Mehmet (1983). The museums of Turkey and examples of the masterpieces in the museums. Türkiye İş Bankasi. p. 162. OCLC 19230376. In this museum there is also a mummy which is believed to date from Byzantine times. 
  44. ^ Shwartz, Susan (2001). Shards of Empire. E-reads/E-rights. p. 380. ISBN 978-0-7592-1298-5. He also mentions the graves in the underground cities. He also mentions the discovery of a mummified body of a young girl in Ihlara Valley (Peristrema), one of the most remote of the Cappadocian monastic communities and cut by the Melendiz River to the depth of 150 meters, which is where I placed Father Meletios and his friends. 
  45. ^ a b Hovannisian, Richard G. (2004). The Armenian People From Ancient to Modern Times, Volume I: The Dynastic Periods: From Antiquity to the Fourteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 243. ISBN 978-1-4039-6421-2. From the late tenth century on the Byzantine Empire had followed a policy of removing prominent nakharars from their native lands, absorbing those lands in the structure of the empire, and giving the nakharars in exchange lands and titles elsewhere. The decision of many lords to leave was frequently the result of coercion, though throughout the tenth to eleventh centuries there were also pro-Byzantine factions within the Armenian kingdoms, supporting Byzantium’s aims. Already in 968 the southwestern district of Taron was annexed; in 1000, a large area embracing Tayk, Karin, and Manzikert (to the north of Lake Van) was annexed to the Byzantine Empire. In 1021 King Senekerim Artsruni of Vaspurakan ceded his kingdom to the empire and moved to Cappadocia, he was followed in 1045 by King Gagik II of Ani and King Gagik-Abas of Kars (1064). The Byzantine policy of removing important lords from their Armenian lands and settling them elsewhere (principally on imperial territory, in Cappadocia and northern Mesopotamia) proved shortsighted in two respects. First, it left eastern Asia Minor devoid of its native defenders. Second, it exacerbated Armeno-Greek ethnic tensions by the introduction of thousands of Armenian newcomers into Cappadocia, the empire compounded its error by disbanding a 50,000-man local Armenian army, ostensibly to save money. As a result, the land was left defenseless as well as leaderless. 
  46. ^ a b c Zlatar, Zdenko (2007). The Poetics of Slavdom: The Mythopoeic Foundations of Yugoslavia, Volume 2. Peter Lang. p. 540. ISBN 978-0-8204-8135-7. It was after the defeat of the Byzantine Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes (reigned 1068-1071) and his capture by the Seljuk sultan, Alp Aslan (reigned 1063-1072) at Manzikert in Armenia that the real Michael VII Dukas arose. The defeat at Manzikert led to the loss of most of Anatolia, from which the Byzantine Empire never truly recovered, and it inaugurated the process of islamization of the Greek population of Asia Minor. 
  47. ^ a b Richard C. Frucht (2005). Eastern Europe: An Intruduction to the People, Lands, and Culture. ABC-CLIO. p. 886. ISBN 978-1-57607-800-6. The Byzantine Empire suffers a major defeat at the Battle of Manzikert in Eastern Anatolia, opening the interior of Asia Minor to invasion by Sekjuk Turks. This strategic turn began the steady multicentury transformation of Asia Minor from an entirely Christian and Greek-populated centre to a predominantly Muslim and Turkish region 
  48. ^ a b c Suzek, Senem (2008). The decoration of cave churches in Cappadocia under Selçuk rule. Thesis (M.A.)--University of Notre Dame. pp. 9–11. OCLC 747992800. These events in themselves alienated the provinces, to such an extent that it has been claimed that the Armenian and Syrian Monophysite communities welcomed Turkish rule which was seen as relief from the oppression of Orthodox Christianity. Military losses in the tenth and eleventh centuries severely disrupted the population of Asia Minor. Two forced migrations of Armenians into Cappadocia have been documented, the first occurred in the tenth century following the Byzantine conquests of Melitene (934), Tarsus (965), and Antioch (969). The second followed the Battle of Malazgirt (Manzikert) in 1071, when many Armenians moved west, as documented by the chronicler Matthew of Edessa, after severe persecutions of the Armenian and Syrian Monophysite non-Calcedonian communities, the Armenian royal families, which included Adom and Abucahl of Vaspuracan and Gagik of Ani, used the opportunity provided by the Selçuk conquest to seek vengeance upon the local Greek Orthodox population. This included the pillage of wealthy estates and the torture and assassination of the Orthodox metropolitan of Kayseri. Kakig was eventually killed by the local Greek landowners. 
  49. ^ a b Herrin, Judith; Saint-Guillain, Guillaume (2011). Identities and Allegiances in the Eastern Mediterranean After 1204. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. p. 181. ISBN 978-1-4094-1098-0. The geographical distribution of the Greek population in Muslim Asia Minor in the first half of the thirteenth century is not clear. It is not impossible that the Greeks might have constituted and ethnic majority in some large urban centres throughout the Seljuk sultanate of Rum…Probably by the beginning of the thirteenth century most of northern Galatia, Phrygia, southern Paphlagonia, and some inland areas adjacent to the Byzantine Pontos, had been cleared of Greeks. Under the pressure of the Turkmen nomads they had emigrated to Western Anatolia, the Balkans, the Pontos, as well as to the central Anatolian plateau and coastal regions of Lycia and Pamphylia in all likelihood, the Greeks were rather numerous in city centers and rural areas in ancient Lycaonia, Cappadocia and Pamphylia. In north-eastern Anatolia the major cities of Sivas, Erzincan, Erzerum were mostly populated by Armenians and Greeks. 
  50. ^ Barve, Shashikant V. (1995). Introduction to classical Arabic: a contribution to Islamic and oriental studies. S.V. Barve. pp. 1–89. OCLC 33161571. The Seljuk state of Anatolia was thus born under the great-grandson of Saljooq and it was duly recognized as an independent sultanate by the ‘Abbasid caliph. This facilitated massive Turkish migration and settlement in Anatolia and the process of its islamisation and turkification began in full swing, the Greek Christian population began to diminish owing to mass conversions to Islam or slaughter or exile to Greek territories in Europe. 
  51. ^ a b Lapidus, Ira Marvin (2002). A History of Islamic Societies. Cambridge University Press. pp. 250–252. ISBN 978-0-521-77933-3. The absorption of the former Byzantine empire by Turkish-Muslim conquerors led to the eventual conversion of Anatolia and thus added new territories to the domain of Islam. Before the Turkish migrations, the vast majority of the Greek, Armenian, Georgian, and Syrian populations of Anatolia had been Christian. By the fifteenth century more than 90 percent of the population was Muslim, some of this change was due to the immigration of a large Muslim population, but in great part it was caused by the conversion of Christians to Islam. These conversions were basically due to the breakdown of Anatolian Christianity through the weakening of the Byzantine state and the Greek Orthodox Church, and the collapse of Anatolian society in the face of Turkish migrations; in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Turks excluded bishops and metropolitans from their sees. Church revenues and properties were confiscated. Hospitals, schools, orphanages, and monasteries were destroyed or abandoned, and the Anatolian Christian population was left without leadership and social services, the remaining Christian clerics had to turn to Turkish authorities to handle internal disputes on terms that only further weakened Christian institutions. …Byzantine princes, lords, and administrators were tempted to convert to Islam in order to join the Ottoman aristocracy. By the end of the fifteenth century Anatolia was largely Muslim, the Ottoman conquests in the Balkans also established Muslim hegemony over large Christian populations, but did not lead, as in Anatolia, to the substantial assimilation of the regional population to Islam. 
  52. ^ Pentzopoulos, Dimitri (2002). The Balkan exchange of minorities and its impact on Greece. C. Hurst & Co. Publishers. pp. 29–30. ISBN 978-1-85065-702-6. 
  53. ^ Çiğdem Balım-Harding; Meral Güçlü (1999). Turkey. Clio Press. p. xxvi. ISBN 978-1-85109-295-6. During these centuries, other peoples of Anatolia (Greeks, Kurds, Armenians and others) lived with the Turks and shared the land; many adopted the Turkish language, converted to Islam, and came to be known as Turks. The Mongol invasion changed the demography of the Middle East and even central Asia. Turkic tribesmen migrated in large numbers into the Middle East, turkicizing Anatolia, northern Iran and central Eurasia. 
  54. ^ a b Thierry, Nicole; Thierry, Jean Michel (1963). Nouvelles églises rupestres de Cappadoce. C. Klincksieck. p. viii. OCLC 22265623. This is the latest of the painted churches, for an inscription states that the donor of the frescoes was Thamar, wife of Basil Giagupes, a Greek feudatory serving the Seljuk Sultan of Konia, Masut II. He was probably the lord of the surrounding district which must have still been strongly Greek. 
  55. ^ Peacock, A.C.S.; De Nicola, Bruno (2016). Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia. [Routledge]: Routledge. pp. 216–221, 229, 231. ISBN 9781317112693. The Greek communities of Cappadocia under the Seljuqs had a profound spiritual attachment to Byzantium, which formed a significant part of their communal identity. … On the other hand, the story gives tangible information on the situation of indigenous Greek painters in Anatolia, even if not taken literally. Above all, the author states that the two Greek artists in question are considered among the best in the land of Rūm, while stressing that they were excellent in the field of human figures, which probably distinguished them from their Muslim counterparts. Second, the story of the painter Kaloioannes or, Kālūyāni Naqqāsh, his journey to Constantinople, and his one-year stay a monastery in the Byzantine capital during the lifetime of Mawlana should correspond to the second half of the thirteenth century, this suggests that Greek painters of Rūm were well acquainted with Byzantine art through direct contact with Constantinople from 1261 onwards. 
  56. ^ a b Panzac, Daniel (1995). Histoire économique et sociale de l'Empire ottoman et de la Turquie (1326-1960): actes du sixième congrès international tenu à Aix-en-Provence du 1er au 4 juillet 1992. Peeters Publishers. pp. 345–6. ISBN 978-90-6831-799-2. They were known as Karaman Greeks (Karamanlilar or Karamaniyari) and had latterly been turcificated during in culture and language during the reign of Murad III. A good number of them had been converted to Islam. 
  57. ^ a b Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü (2010). A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire. Princeton University Press. p. 36. ISBN 978-0-691-14617-1. The Ottoman state never sought to impose Turkish on subject peoples…Some ethno-religious groups, when outnumbered by Turks, did accept Turkish vernacular through a gradual process of acculturation. While the Greeks of the Peloponnese, Thessaly, Epirus, Macedonia, Thrace, and west Anatolian littoral continued to speak and write in Greek, The Greeks of Cappadocia (Karaman) spoke Turkish and wrote Turkish in Greek script. Similarly, a large majority of Armenians in the empire adopted Turkish as their vernacular and wrote Turkish in Armenian characters, all efforts to the contrary by the Mkhitarist order notwithstanding, the first novels published in the Ottoman Empire in the mid-nineteenth century were by Armenians and Cappadocian Greeks; they wrote them in Turkish, using the Armenian and Greek alphabets. 
  58. ^ Day Otis Kellogg; Thomas Spencer Baynes; William Robertson Smith (1903). The Encyclopædia Britannica: A-ZYM. Werner. p. 82. OCLC 4704101. By the Greeks it is still called by its ancient name of Laranda. which was changed by the Turks for its present designation in honour of Karaman, the founder of the Karamanian kingdom. 
  59. ^ a b Augustinos, Gerasimos (1992). The Greeks of Asia Minor: confession, community, and ethnicity in the nineteenth century. Kent State University Press. p. 18. ISBN 978-0-87338-459-9. Most of all, the imperial capital drew Greeks from communities deep in the interior. Greek and Turkish-speaking men from the regions of Cappadocia and Karaman settled in the capital, forming enclaves of their native communities. 
  60. ^ a b c d e f Daly, Michael; Bodleian Library (1988). The Turkish legacy: an exhibition of books and manuscripts to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Bodleian Library. p. 40. ISBN 978-1-85124-016-6. …a large number of works were printed in Turkish using the Greek and Armenian alphabets. These were intended for those ethnic Greeks and Armenians who, while retaining their religious allegiance to their respective churches, had lost all knowledge of their own languages and had been assimilated linguistically by their Muslim Turkish neighbours. Turcophone Greeks were known as Karamanlides, after the province of Karaman where many of them lived, although there were also large communities in Istanbul and in the Black Sea region, and printed or manuscript works in Turkish using the Greek alphabet are known as Karamanlidika. 
  61. ^ Guppy, Henry; John Rylands Library (1956). Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Volume 38. Manchester University Press. p. 27. Third, the rapid conversion of the country to Islam and Turkish speech — except in the case of some remote villages of Cappadocia which remained Greek-speaking and Christian – can be explained if the former inhabitants had to return as suppliants to the new foundations 
  62. ^ a b Horrocks, Geoffrey C. (2010). Greek: A History of the Language and Its Speakers. John Wiley & Sons. p. 398. ISBN 978-1-4051-3415-6. Cappadocia fell immediately under Seljuk control and, with the growth of bilingualism and conversion to Islam, its dialects began to show signs of Turkish influence and later of convergence with the dominant language. After the Greek military disaster of 1922-3 and the deportation of the Christian population to settlements in central and northern Greece, the central and eastern Anatolian varieties fell into what till recently was believed to be terminal decline; in 2005, however, it was discovered that there were descendants of the Cappadocian refugees in central and northern Greece who still spoke their traditional language fluently. The position of Cappadocia remains precarious, but it is certainly not yet extinct. 
  63. ^ Rodley, Lyn (2010). Cave Monasteries of Byzantine Cappadocia. Cambridge University Press. p. 5. ISBN 978-0-521-15477-2. ..medieval place names in the region that can be established are known only from scant references: one Elpidios, Memorophylax of Prokopios, who attended the Council of Chalcedon (451), may have come from Hagios Prokopios (now Urgup, but still called ‘Prokopion’ by the local Greek population in the early years of this century); 
  64. ^ a b Nagel Publishers (1968). Turkey. Nagel. p. 615. OCLC 3060049. The Karaman region was for a long time inhabited by Turkish-speaking Orthodox Greeks who wrote Turkish in the Greek script. These Greeks are called Karamanians. 
  65. ^ a b Paul J J Sinclair; Gullög Nordquist; Frands Herschend; Christian Isendahl; Laura Wrang (2010). The Urban mind : cultural and environmental dynamics. Uppsala, Sweden : African and Comparative Archaeology, Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University. p. 425. ISBN 978-91-506-2175-4. The roles of various minorities will be dealt with below. The largest minorities developed their own written traditions, creating Graeco-Turkish, Armeno- Turkish, and Judeo-Turkish literatures; in the 16th century, Jewish poets wrote hymns in Hebrew after the model of Ottoman songs and wrote Turkish in Hebrew script. The first literary works in a modern European sense were based on a spoken variety of Turkish and written with Armenian characters, the Karamanlid literature, produced by orthodox Christians, was written in Greek characters. The Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) group cultivated a Romance variety brought to Istanbul and the Balkans by Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, the first descriptions and grammars of Ottoman were written by minority members and foreigners. Ottoman scholars were less interested in the cultivation of Turkish as such, but paid more attention to the Arabic and Persian components of written Ottoman, as described below, the so-called transcription texts produced by various mediators are of high value for reconstructing the development of Turkish spoken varieties. 
  66. ^ a b Gökalp, Ziya (1959). Turkish nationalism and Western civilization: selected essays. Columbia University Press. p. 131. OCLC 407546. In Turkey the Karaman Greeks and many Armenians revived their languages after they had been Turkified. 
  67. ^ a b c Klaus Roth; Robert Hayden (2011). Migration In, From, and to Southeastern Europe. LIT Verlag Münster. p. 65. ISBN 978-3-643-10895-1. Journalists describing conversion to Islam usually considered the renegade as someone who, by losing his or her religion, was also stepping out of the Greek national community. The act would be usually described as an “eksomosia” (Metarrythmisis 3/15.6.1892; Omonia 16/29.2.1904), an apostasy from the religious oath. It might also be characterized as an “aponenoimeno diavima” (Omonia 10/23.2.1903), a desperate, out of mind action, an expression usually reserved for people who commit suicide. In this understanding, choosing to adopt the Muslim religion was not just an individual choice concerning spiritual matters, but additionally signified giving away “tin thriskeian kai ton ethnismon”, both religion and “national essence” (Metarrythmisis 3/15.6.1892). People who took such a decision were the people who “tourkeuoun”, who “become Turks”, an expression applied even when referring to people shifting to Islam in Egypt (Metarrythmisis 30/12.5.1891; Alitheia 3/15.11.1895). The use of this expression is an example of what has been called “Ottoman thinking”, according to which Muslims and Turks are conflated, and was even popular many years after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (Hirschon 2001: 171). 
  68. ^ Masters, Bruce Alan (2004). Christians And Jews In The Ottoman Arab World: The Roots Of Sectarianism. Cambridge University Press. p. 11. ISBN 978-0-521-00582-1. Throughout most of the Ottoman period, European visitors to the sultans' realms used the label "Turk" indiscriminately to mean any Muslim, regardless of his or her mother tongue. To become Muslim was to "turn Turk. 
  69. ^ Rodley, Lyn (2010). Cave Monasteries of Byzantine Cappadocia. Cambridge University Press. p. 160. ISBN 978-0-521-15477-2. Many shifts of population in central Anatolia took place before the removal of the Cappadocian Greeks in the 1920s and it is quite possible that the Archangel Monastery was abandoned, perhaps for centuries, and then restored to parochial, rather than monastic, use. 
  70. ^ Petersen, Andrew (2002). Dictionary of Islamic Architecture. Routledge. p. 58. ISBN 978-0-203-20387-3. Cyprus (Turkish: Kibris; Arabic: Qubrus)…However, in many ways the Ottoman conquest had simply replaced one group of rulers with another, leaving the Greek Orthodox population largely intact. This situation was understood by the Ottoman emperor, Selim I, who after the conquest tried to improve the prosperity of the island by populating it with Greek families from the Kayseri region. Ottoman rule ended with the First World War and from 1918 the island was under British rule until it became independent in the 1950s. 
  71. ^ a b Goodwin, Godfrey (1971). A history of Ottoman architecture. Johns Hopkins Press. p. 199. ISBN 978-0-8018-1202-6. He came from the district of Karaman and the Greek lands, but he does not, it is true, specifically call himself a Greek, which, in effect, he no longer was from the moment that he admitted that there was no other God but Allah. Yet after the conquest of Cyprus in 1571, when Selim decided to repopulate the island by transferring Greek families from the Karaman beylik, Sinan intervened on behalf of his family and obtained two orders from the Sultan in council exempting them from deportation, it was Selim I who ordered the first devsirme levy in Anatolia in 1512 and sent Yaya- basis to Karamania and this is probably the year in which Sinan came to Istanbul. Since he was born about 1491, or at the latest in 1492, he was old for a devsirme… 
  72. ^ a b Rogers, J. M. (2006). Sinan. I.B.Tauris. p. backcover. ISBN 978-1-84511-096-3. (Sinan) He was born in Cappadocia, probably into a Greek Christian family. Drafted into the Janissaries during his adolescence, he rapidly gained promotion and distinction as a military engineer. 
  73. ^ a b c Oberheu, Susanne. Wadenpohl, Michael (2010). Cappadocia. BoD. pp. 270–1. ISBN 978-3-8391-5661-2. On May 1st, 1923, the agreement on the exchange of the Turkish and Greek minorities in both countries was published. A shock went through the ranks of the people affected – on both sides. Within a few months they had to pack their belongings and ship them or even sell them, they were to leave their homes, which had also been their great-grandfathers’ homes, they were to give up their holy places and leave the graves of their ancestors to an uncertain fate. In Cappadocia, the villages of Mustafapasa, Urgup, Guzelyurt and Nevsehir were the ones affected most by this rule. Often more than half the population of a village had to leave the country, so that those places were hardly able to survive…The Greeks form Cappadocia were taken to Mersin on the coast in order to be shipped to Greece from there, but they had to leave the remaining part of their belongings behind in the harbor. They were actually promised that everything would be sent after them later, but corrupt officials and numberless thieves looted the crammed storehouses, so that after a few months only a fraction of the goods or even nothing at all arrived at their new home….Today the old houses of the Greek people are the only testimony that reminds us of them in Cappadocia, but these silent witnesses are in danger, too. Only a few families can afford the maintenance of those buildings…. 
  74. ^ a b Güzelyurt becomes a touristic hub. AKSARAY - Anatolia News Agency. July 17, 2012. In the town of Güzelyurt in Aksaray Province in the Central Anatolian region of Turkey, 250-year-old arched stone mansions have been transformed into boutique hotels to serve tourists coming to discover the area’s cultural and historical treasures. The town is an important part of the historical Cappadocia region…Much of the previously large Greek population in Güzelyurt vanished with the population exchange of the 1920s. "With the population exchange in 1924, Greeks and Turks exchanged places. Before the population exchange, rich Greeks dealing with trade in Istanbul had historical mansions in Güzelyurt," Özeş said, some houses in the town date back 250 years and a few 100-year-old historical houses also exist, according to Özeş. "They have extremely thick walls. The height of the arches is nearly four to five meters, each of the houses is a work of art creating an authentic environment." 
  75. ^ Saffron, Inga (2002). Caviar: the strange history and uncertain future of the world's most coveted delicacy. Broadway Books. p. 66. ISBN 978-0-7679-0623-4. Middlemen from Greece, Italy, and the Levant haggled over barrels of the newly popular delicacy. Young, ethnic Greek boys came down from hills of Cappadocia to work in the Istanbul caviar trade. 
  76. ^ C[harles] W[illiam] Wilson (1887). The Greeks in Asia. The Asiatic Quarterly Review, Volume III, January–April, pp. 32-56. Swan Sonnenshein & Company. pp. 50–51. OCLC 457113541. The Cappadocian Greeks have a reputation throughout Asia Minor for energy and commercial activity; there are few towns in which a merchant from Kaisariyeh is not to be found ; and the rocky nature of the country drives even the poorer classes to seek their living elsewhere. Perhaps the most interesting trait in the character of these Greeks is their intense love of their native country; the great ambition of every man is to earn sufficient money to enable him to build a house and settle down in his beloved Cappadocia. The young men go off to Constantinople for a few years, and then return to marry and build a house; a couple of years of married life sees the end of their savings, and they have to revisit the capital, sometimes remaining there ten or fifteen years, to earn sufficient to support themselves and their wives for the remainder of their lives. Each village is connected with some particular guild in Constantinople; one supplies bakals or small storekeepers, another sellers of wine and spirits, another dryers of fish, another makers of caviare, another porters, and so forth…The people have no marked political aspirations such as those which prevail amongst the Greeks of the west coast; they dream, it is true, of a new Byzantine Empire, but any sympathies they can spare from an all-absorbing love of money and gain are devoted to the Russian. The south Cappadocian district, in which St. Gregory of Nazianzus once ministered, shows many signs of growing prosperity ; building is going on, and the people are vacating, for houses above ground, the subterranean villages, to which they owe the preservation of their faith and language. These villages are known by Greek as well as by Turkish names ; in some Greek is spoken by Moslem and Christian, in others a Graeco-Turk jargon, and in others Turkish only; and this mixture is found even in the churches, where the descriptive remarks on the holy pictures are often in Turkish written in Greek characters. 
  77. ^ a b Hirschon, Renée (1998). Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus. Berghahn Books. p. 18. ISBN 978-1-57181-730-3. Before the expulsion, Greek settlements were both numerous and widespread throughout Asia Minor, indeed throughout most of today’s Turkey. The greatest concentration was in the province of Pontus, on the Black Sea, where the Greek presence goes back for millennia, the western coastal regions and north-western area of Asia Minor were also densly settled with numerous Greek communities in coastal and inland cities and in the countryside. Generally, fewer Greek communities existed in central and southern Asia Minor, but the provinces of Kappadokia and Lykaonia had large numbers of Greek settlements and substantial populations in urban centers such as Kaisaria, Nigde, and Ikonion. 
  78. ^ a b c Jones, Adam (2010). Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction. Taylor & Francis. pp. 150–151. ISBN 978-0-415-48618-7. By the beginning of the First World War, a majority of the region’s ethnic Greeks still lived in present-day Turkey, mostly in Thrace (the only remaining Ottoman territory in Europe, abutting the Greek border), and along the Aegean and Black Sea coasts. They would be targeted both prior to and alongside the Armenians of Anatolia and Assyrians of Anatolia and Mesopotamia…The major populations of “Anatolian Greeks” include those along the Aegean coast and in Cappadocia (central Anatolia), but not the Greeks of the Thrace region west of the Bosphorus…A “Christian genocide” framing acknowledges the historic claims of Assyrian and Greek peoples, and the movements now stirring for recognition and restitution among Greek and Assyrian diasporas. It also brings to light the quite staggering cumulative death toll among the various Christian groups targeted…of the 1.5 million Greeks of Asia minor – Ionians, Pontians, and Cappadocians – approximately 750,000 were massacred and 750,000 exiled. Pontian deaths alone totaled 353,000. 
  79. ^ Vermeule, C. C. (2001). ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY OF ANTIQUITY, Volumes 2-3. Pindar Press. p. 243. ISBN 978-1-899828-11-1. The Cappadocian Greeks of the twentieth century were known not only for their preservation of the ancient tongue but also for the richness of their folktales, legends of saints, kings, heroes, and common folk that often went back through the Byzantine era to Graeco-Roman times. R. M. Dawkins observed that the children whom he met in the villages of Cappadocia preserved among themselves the last traces and broken fragments of the art, each child telling his own special story to the others. 
  80. ^ Schiffer, Reinhold (1999). Oriental Panorama: British Travellers in 19th Century Turkey. Rodopi. p. 269. ISBN 978-90-420-0796-3. …in 1838 Ainsworth spoke of the regained ease, freedom and prosperity of Cappadocian Greek settlements such as Nevsehir and Incesu and arrived as a verdict which is possibly less remote from the truth than that of British castigators: "The Cappadocian Greeks are, generally speaking, pleasing and unreserved in their manners, and their conversation indicated a very high degree of intelligence and civilization, where there are so few books, and so little education, and consequently, little learning." 
  81. ^ C[harles] W[illiam] Wilson (1887). The Greeks in Asia. The Asiatic Quarterly Review, Volume III, January–April, pages 50,51. The Cappadocian Greeks have a reputation throughout Asia Minor for energy and commercial activity; there are few towns in which a merchant from Kaisariyeh is not to be found ; and the rocky nature of the country drives even the poorer classes to seek their living elsewhere. Perhaps the most interesting trait in the character of these Greeks is their intense love of their native country; the great ambition of every man is to earn sufficient money to enable him to build a house and settle down in his beloved Cappadocia. The young men go off to Constantinople for a few years, and then return to marry and build a house; a couple of years of married life sees the end of their savings, and they have to revisit the capital, sometimes remaining there ten or fifteen years, to earn sufficient to support themselves and their wives for the remainder of their lives. Each village is connected with some particular guild in Constantinople; one supplies bakals or small storekeepers, another sellers of wine and spirits, another dryers of fish, another makers of caviare, another porters, and so forth…The people have no marked political aspirations such as those which prevail amongst the Greeks of the west coast; they dream, it is true, of a new Byzantine Empire, but any sympathies they can spare from an all-absorbing love of money and gain are devoted to the Russian. The south Cappadocian district, in which St. Gregory of Nazianzus once ministered, shows many signs of growing prosperity ; building is going on, and the people are vacating, for houses above ground, the subterranean villages, to which they owe the preservation of their faith and language. These villages are known by Greek as well as by Turkish names ; in some Greek is spoken by Moslem and Christian, in others a Graeco-Turk jargon, and in others Turkish only; and this mixture is found even in the churches, where the descriptive remarks on the holy pictures are often in Turkish written in Greek characters. 
  82. ^ a b Taylor, Frederick (2012). Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany. Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 59–60. ISBN 978-1-4088-2212-8. The other large Christian minority in the Turkish sphere of rule was that of the Ottoman Greeks, again totaling around 1.5 million, mostly living near to the west coast of Anatolia, where they had been settled since a millennium before the birth of Christ. Numerous Greeks were to be found also in Istanbul (once, as Constantinople, the capital of the Greek Byzantine Empire), on the Black Sea coast and in the eastern province of Cappadocia, where the long-established but isolated Greek population now spoke a kind of Turkish dialect… The resulting war between the Greeks and Turks, the latter led by their great national hero, General Mustafa Kemal (later honored with the name Kemal Ataturk) ended in a definite and tragically bloody Turkish victory. Many thousands of Greeks were massacred or fled 
  83. ^ a b Moseley, Christopher (2007). Encyclopedia Of The World's Endangered Languages. Psychology Press. pp. 239–40. ISBN 978-0-7007-1197-0. Cappadocian Greek [100] an outlying dialect of Greek spoken in a few isolated communities in the interior of Cappadocia in central Turkey, notably in Sille (Silli) near Konya, villages near Kayseri, and Faras (Pharasa) and adjacent villages, before the genocide of 1915 and the subsequent population exchanges, after which most survivors settled in Greece. 
  84. ^ a b c Midlarsky, Manus I. (2005). The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press. pp. 342–343. ISBN 978-0-521-81545-1. Many, (Greeks) however, were massacred by the Turks, especially at Smyrna (today’s İzmir) as the Greek army withdrew at the end of their headlong retreat from central Anatolia at the end of the Greco-Turkish War. Especially poorly treated were the Pontic Greeks in eastern Anatolia on the Black Sea; in 1920, as the Greek army advanced, many were deported to the Mesopotamian desert as had been the Armenians before them. Nevertheless, approximately 1,200,000 Ottoman Greek refugees arrived in Greece at the end of the war. When one adds to the total the Greeks of Constantinople who, by agreement, were not forced to flee, then the total number comes closer to the 1,500,000 Greeks in Anatolia and Thrace. Here, a strong distinction between intention and action is found. According to the Austrian consul at Amisos, Kwiatkowski, in his November 30, 1916, report to foreign minister Baron Burian: “on 26 November Rafet Bey told me: ‘we must finish off the Greeks as we did with the Armenians…’ on 28 November Rafet Bey told me : ‘today I sent squads to the interior to kill every Greek on sight.’ I fear for the elimination of the entire Greek population and a repeat of what occurred last year, Or according to a January 31, 1917, report by Chancellor Hollweg of Austria: The indications are that the Turks plan to eliminate the Greek element as enemies of the state, as they did earlier with the Armenians. The strategy implemented by the Turks is of displacing people to the interior without taking measures for their survival by exposing them to death, hunger, and illness, the abandoned homes are then looted and burnt or destroyed. Whatever was done to the Armenians is being repeated with the Greeks. Massacres most likely did take place at Amisos and other villages in Pontus. Yet given the large number of surviving Greeks, especially relative to the small number of Armenian survivors, the massacres apparently were restricted to Pontus, Smyrna, and selected other ‘sensitive’ regions. 
  85. ^ Magnarella, Paul J. (1998). Anatolia's loom: studies in Turkish culture, society, politics and law. Isis Press. p. 199. ISBN 978-975-428-113-2. …Greece and Turkey agreed to exchange their “Turkish” and Greek populations. As a consequence, most Christian Greeks living in rural Turkey were exported to Greece. However, the descendants of Anatolian Greeks who had converted to Islam remained, and the cult of Christian saints remained with them. 
  86. ^ Darke, Diana (2011). Eastern Turkey. Bradt Travel Guides. pp. 164–5. ISBN 978-1-84162-339-9. Less visited than most parts of Cappadocia, Guzelyurt (‘Beautiful Place’ in Turkish)…The next thing to visit is the Byzantine Church of St Gregory, built in AD385, restored in 1835, and then converted into a mosque when the Greeks left in the exchange of populations in the 1920s. Known today as Buyuk Kilise Camii (Big Church Mosque), the whitewash on the walls is being removed to reveal the original frescoes. A little further into the valley look out for the Sivisli Kilise (Anargyros Church) with square pillars and a dome with fine frescoes, then the Koc (Ram) Church and the Cafarlar (Rivulets) Church. Monastery Valley, as it is known, continues for 4.5 km (2.8 mi) with fine scenery and panoramas and yet more rock-cut churches, some with interesting architectural features. 
  87. ^ a b Ammon, Ulrich (2012). Morphologies in Contact. Akademie Verlag. p. 180. ISBN 978-3-05-005701-9. Even among men, very few people were fully bilingual, as opposed to speakers of Cappadocian, another Asia Minor dialect of Greek origin, where bilingualism was spread among men and women. Cappadocian was spoken in about 32 Greek-speaking settlements in central Asia Minor before 1923, when the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey took place. Today, there are few remaining native speakers, in certain parts of Northern Greece (in the areas of Karditsa, Volos, Kilkis, Larisa, Thessaloniki, Chalkidiki, Kavala, and Alexadroupoli), all of them descendants from Cappadocian refugees. 
  88. ^ Oberheu, Susanne. Wadenpohl, Michael (2010). Cappadocia. BoD. p. 8. ISBN 978-3-8391-5661-2. Right up until the last century, Greeks settled down in Cappadocia and helped shape many villages with their beautifully decorated houses… Cappadocia is not only a World Natural Heritage, but also a World Cultural Heritage, and an unusual openness to the world can be perceived here to the present day. 
  89. ^ Dawkins, R.M. 1916. Modern Greek in Asia Minor. A study of dialect of Silly, Cappadocia and Pharasa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  90. ^ a b Dawkins, R.M. 1916. Modern Greek in Asia Minor. A study of dialect of Silly, Cappadocia and Pharasa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  91. ^ Armenian General Benevolent Union (1988). Ararat, Volume 29. Armenian General Benevolent Union of America. p. 43. OCLC 643827160. Unlike the Karamanlides – Elia Kazan’s people, the Greeks of Kaisaria in the Anatolian interior who, over the centuries became Turkish-speaking – the Kouvoukliotes were always Grecophones who spoke Turkish with a strong Greek accent. As was natural, their dialect included Turkish words like rahat, bahcheh, dondourmas…., and it differed greatly from the Greek spoken in other villages of the province. 
  92. ^ Sterrett, John Robert Sitlington ; American School of Classical Studies at Athens (1885). Preliminary report of an archæological journey made in Asia Minor during the summer of 1884. Cupples, Upham, and Co. p. 17. OCLC 10889843. Melegobi is a large and flourishing village, inhabited almost exclusively by Greek-speaking Greeks. The Greeks are numerous all through the western part of Cappadocia, and generally cling to their language with great tenacity, a fact worthy of notice, inasmuch as the Greeks in other parts of Asia Minor speak only Turkish. Instances of Greek-speaking towns are Nigde, Gelvere, Melegobi (Μελοκοπια), and Ortakieui in Soghanli Deressi. 
  93. ^ a b Stephen K. Batalden; Kathleen Cann; John Dean (2004). Sowing the word: the cultural impact of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1804-2004. Sheffield Phoenix Press. p. 246. ISBN 978-1-905048-08-3. Pinkerton had been assured by a number of “worthy” Greeks that “the cruel persecutions of their Mahomedan masters have been the cause of their present state of ignorance, even in regard to their native tongue”. Pinkerton’s interlocutors claimed that there had been a time “when their Turkish masters strictly prohibited the Greeks in Asia Minor even from speaking the Greek language among themselves", those who disobeyed "this their barbarous command" had had their tongues cut out or had been punished with death. The cutting out of tongues was a commonly held, popular explanation for the abandonment of Greek in favor of Turkish, although there is no evidence that such a practice had ever occurred. “It is”, Pinkerton wrote, “an indisputable fact, that the language of their oppressors has long since almost universally prevailed, and that in a great part of Anatolia even the public worship of the Greeks is now performed in the Turkish tongue”. He appended a list of publications in karamanlidika, five of which he had been able to purchase, he concluded that, in his “humble opinion,” 
  94. ^ Δέδες, Δ. 1993. Ποιήματα του Μαυλανά Ρουμή. Τα Ιστορικά 10.18–19: 3–22.
  95. ^ Meyer, G. 1895. Die griechischen Verse in Rabâbnâma. Byzantinische Zeitschrift 4: 401–411.
  96. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2012-08-05. Retrieved 2014-10-24. 
  97. ^ http://www.khamush.com/greek/gr.htm
  98. ^ Andrew Dalby, Siren Feasts, p. 109, 201
  99. ^ Ash, John (2006). A Byzantine journey (2nd ed.). London: Tauris Parke Paperbacks. ISBN 9781845113070. Having inherited pastirma from the Byzantines, the Turks took it with them when they conquered Hungary and Romania, 
  100. ^ Davidson, Alan (2014). The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford University Press. p. 123. Retrieved 21 October 2014. This is certainly true of Byzantine cuisine. Dried meat, a forerunner of the pastirma of modern Turkey, became a delicacy. 
  101. ^ Underwood, Irina Petrosian ; David (2006). Armenian food : fact, fiction & folklore (2nd ed.). Bloomington, Ind.: Yerkir Pub. ISBN 9781411698659. In Byzantine times, the city was called Caesarea Mazaca. There and throughout Byzantium, the technique called paston was an accepted salt-curing tradition. Turks reintroduced paston as pastirma. 
  102. ^ Smith, Bruce; Kraig, Andrew (2013). The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. Oxford University Press. ed. Retrieved 21 October 2014. When the Ottomans settled in Istanbul they also adopted a number of Byzantine dishes, one of which was a form of cured beef called paston and which the Turks called pastirma…It became and remains a specialty of Kayseri in Cappadocia in west central Turkey. 
  103. ^ Anagnostakis, Ilias (2013). Flavours and Delights. Tastes and Pleasures of Ancient and Byzantine Cuisine. Armos. p. 81. paston or tarichon…Cured meats were either eaten raw or cooked in pasto-mageireia with bulgur and greens, mainly cabbage. 
  104. ^ Hazel, John (2001). Who's Who in the Roman World. Routledge. p. 19. ISBN 978-0-415-22410-9. Archelaus 1. (Cl BC) was a Greek general from Cappadocia who served MITHRIDATES (3) VI, king of Pontus. 
  105. ^ Fried, Johannes (2015). The Middle Ages. Harvard University Press. p. 10. ISBN 9780674055629. One of their own number, Bishop Ulfilas, a Goth who originally came from a Greek-Cappadocian family, translated the Holy Gospel into the Gothic vernacular – an enormous undertaking and a work of true genius. 
  106. ^ Berndt, Dr Guido M (2014). Arianism: Roman Heresy and Barbarian Creed. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. p. 57. ISBN 9781409446590. Though ulfila may have spoken some Greek in his own family circle, since they were of Greek origin, he is likely to have been able to draw on formal education in both latin and Greek in creating Gothic as a literary language. 
  107. ^ "Gök Medrese". The Gok Medrese (Blue Koran school). The Seljuk building was designed for vizier Fahr ed-Din Ali ben Hussein around 1271 by the Greek architect Kalojan. 
  108. ^ Speros Vryonis (1981). Studies on Byzantium, Seljuks, and Ottomans. p. 282. Perhaps the best known of these architects was the Greek from Konya, Kaloyan, who worked on the Ilgin Han in 1267-8 and three years later built the Gök Medrese of Sivas. 
  109. ^ ΚΥΡΙΑΚΑΝΤΩΝΑΚΗΣ, ΙΩΑΝΝΗΣ. "Η ελληνική λογιοσύνη της Κωνσταντινούπολης" (PDF). Κέντρο Μικρασιατικών Σπουδών. ΒΑΠΟΡΙΔΗΣ, ΑΒΡΑΑΜ Νίγδη (Φερτέκι, Καππαδοκία), 1855-Κωνσταντινούπολη, 1911 Κρατικός αξιωματούχος, μέλος του Ελεγκτικού Συνεδρίου του Αυτοκρ. Υπουργείου Παιδείας: «επιθεωρητής των τυπογραφείων και ελεγκτής των ελληνικών βιβλίων». Συνέγραψε οθωμανική ιστορία: Επίτομος βιογραφική ιστορία των Σουλτάνων της Οθωμανικής αυτοκρατορίας προς χρήσιν των σχολών δύο τομίδια (πρώτη έκδ.: ΚΠ., Βουτυράς: 1885) 
  110. ^ Güneş, İhsan (1997). Türk parlamento tarihi: Meşrutiyete geçiş süreci I. ve II. Meşrutiyet, Volume 2. Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi Vakfı. p. 441. ISBN 9789757291152. YORGAKI EFENDI Yorgaki Efendi, 1856'da Niğde'de dünyaya gelmiştir. Kurtoğlu'nun oğludur. Rum mektebini bitirmiştir. Liva idare meclisi üyesi iken, 25 Kasım 1908'de 38 oy alarak Niğde'den mebus seçilmiştir 
  111. ^ Ένωσις Σμυρναίων. "Καθαίρεσαν από τις οδοσημάνσεις το όνομα του εθνομάρτυρα Νικολάου Τσουρουκτσόγλου και δεν το αποκατέστησαν μέχρι σήμερα" (PDF). The Organization of the Association of Smyrneans. Retrieved Sep 12, 2015. 
  112. ^ Henōsis Smyrnaiōn., Henōsis Smyrnaiōn (1964). Mikrasiatika chronika, Volumes 11-12. Tmematos Mikrasiatikon Meleton tēs Henōseos Smyrnaiōn. p. 94. OCLC 6939449. Χουδαβερδόγλους - Θεόδοτος Σοφοκλής ( 1872 · 1956 ). Γεννήθηκε στή Χαλκηδόνα Κωνσταντινουπόλεως άπό γονείς καταγόμενους άπό τά Τύανα της Καππαδοκίας. " Εγραψε: Βιβλία και άρθρα και μελέτες αναφερόμενες σέ θέματα στενογραφίας, Ιστορικών ερευνών, εκδόσεως Βίων Αγίων κ.λ.π. 
  113. ^ Werkgroep Coupure, Werkgroep Coupure (2009). De Coupure in Gent. Scheiding en verbinding. Academia Press. p. 304. ISBN 9789038213231. Leonidas-Kestekidès (°1882 Nikede, met Griekse nationaliteit…(Translated: Leonidas Kestekides (° 1882 Nigde of Greek nationality 
  114. ^ Boinodiris, Stavros (2010). Andros Odyssey: Liberation: (1900-1940). iUniverse. p. 22. ISBN 9781440193859. Prodromos Athanasiades-Bodosakis was born in Bohr, Cappadocia. After the exchange ofpopulations he became a Greek industrialist who in 1934 took over Pyrkal, an armament company and one of the oldest defense industries. 
  115. ^ Rōmanou, Kaitē (2009). Serbian and Greek Art Music: A Patch to Western Music History. Intellect Books. p. 152. ISBN 9781841502786. Petros Petrides was born in Nigde, Kappadokia, in 1892 and died in Kifissia (Attica) in 1977. A man of vast knowledge on various fields of science and art, who is rightfully placed among the most cultivated and educated Greek composers of the first half of the 20th century; 
  116. ^ Young, Jeff (2001). Kazan: the master director discusses his films : interviews with Elia Kazan. Newmarket Press. p. 9. ISBN 978-1-55704-446-4. He was born on September 7, 1909 to Greek parents living in Istanbul. His father was Yiorgos Kazanjioglou, had fled Kayseri, a small village in Anatolia where for five hundred years the Turks had oppressed and brutalized the Armenian and Greek minorities who had lived there even longer. 

External links[edit]

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