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What Happened To The Greeks...


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Some old populations survived in the balkans.

Latin populations known as vlachs/aromanians are still preserved in an area from Istria in Croatia to Epir and Bulgaria.

They are mentioned repeteadly in byzantine sources and are related with the romanians.

Some latin population was placed along the Adriatic coast where they took refuge in the thema of Dalmatia where most became assimilated with the venatians. Their language died in the XX century.

Other vlachs from the Balkan mountains rebeled against the Anghelos dinasty and created the second Bulgarian empire and eventually got assimilated with slavic bulgarians.

Strong vlach communities existed in ottoman Macedonia and Epir, but later ethnic conflicts led to assimilation or emigration. Some emigrated in Romania and settled in the sea area, Dobrogea.

Gheorghe Hagi, former captain of the football national team of Romania is aromanian. His name cames froma aghios=holy in greek and was a name given to people that visited the Holy Land by christians and turks alike.

The albanians are illiric with thracian influences.

This is all about language because genetics in this contact area might give us a serious surprise.

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The original Greeks themselves were a mix of various tribes and races who settled in those lands and many of them originally came from Central Asia or Europe. Subsequently, after the Romans dominated Greece, many of them were taken as slaves to various parts of the Roman Empire and I guess that over time, they would have not only mixed with other races but lost their very identities as they got absorbed into the various communities they settled in.

 

I think therefore that it is nearly impossible to correlate people today who are settled in Greece with the ancient world and maybe DNA matching may provide clues to migration paths. I understand that there is a company which performs this testing and you have to send them a swab of your DNA and they can trace the migration paths from Africa [ everything originated in Africa ] to other parts of the world. I remember seeing a program on TV the other day where a woman from the Phillipines started in Africa, migrated to Europe, to Asia and some of them in fact, migrated all the way to South America. This could explain why some people from that region bear a strong physical resemblance to native Indians settled in South America [not those who came to the New World from Spain].

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performs this testing and you have to send them a swab of your DNA and they can trace the migration paths from Africa [ everything originated in Africa ] to other parts of the world.

 

I don't think everything originated in Africa. I guess, (I hope I don't offend anyone,) you can go back to Noah'a arc to trace origin. He had three sons one went to Asia, one to Africa, and one to Europe. I think the misconception of this is everyone traces back their origin to Egypt. At the same time however Mesopatamia Asia, Greece Europe (however speculation has traced many Greeks from Asia), and Egypt in Africa arised at the same time. Egypt although beeing in Africa were not black Africans. The Africans were deeper into Africa. Remember it has been said a little before the Egyptians, the Mesopatamians arised from the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers.

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performs this testing and you have to send them a swab of your DNA and they can trace the migration paths from Africa [ everything originated in Africa ] to other parts of the world.

 

I don't think everything originated in Africa. I guess, (I hope I don't offend anyone,) you can go back to Noah'a arc to trace origin.

 

Noah's ark... you must be kidding, right ?

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The word 'Greek' is not so much a term of birth as of mentality, and is applied to a common culture rather than a common descent....

 

 

As I've always understood it, "Greek" is an ethnic or at least geographical designation.

 

"Hellenic," on the other hand, is a purely cultural term to which anyone of the right mentality can claim allegiance.

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After Constantin the word "hellenic" was not used anymore meaning pagan. The byzantines refered at themselves as "romans" regardless of ethnicity.

The greeks chenged their name from "romanoi" to "hellenes" only during the War of Independance when other christians did not join the plan for the rebirth of the byzantine emire, but the West was philohellen.

A fascinating case of inventing a nation.

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