Useless-Knowledge.com
Feb 1, 2005
A Citizen Of The World
By Alexander Antonarakis
Feb. 1, 2005
A recent article was written agreeing with the toughts of an Austrian
Ethnologist in the 19th Century that modern greeks are not greeks, or
as the ethnologist put it “not a drop of blood of the ancient greeks
runs in the modern greek nation”. I thought it wold be more
appropriate to provide a response to Thomas Keyes.
Greek History is very large (4700 years), and it is impossible for
there not to have been mixing of populations. If you spoke to any
greek nowadays, they have the knowledge that they are not 100% pure
descendants of the ancients. They have the acceptance of the
procession of events throughout history. Yet it is quite naive to
think that all the nations in which greeks prevailed contributed
largely to the bloodline. The largest change in greek bloodline was
the Dorian Invasion which provided new ideas and architechture to the
Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations, creating a new hellenic heritage
which sread all over the agean initially. There were different city
states or kingdoms such as
Athens/Sparta/Thebes/Macedonia/Ionia/Crete/Byzanti um/Pontus, etc.
Later, after the colonization periods of the east and west
Mediterranean, Alexander spread the hellenic heritage until the
Indus. Yes, here there was large mixing of populations of Sogdians,
Bactrians, Persians, etc…but how many of these made their way back
to the Aegean? These greeks have become the bloodlines of modern
Iran, Pakistan, Afganistan, etc. In Egypt also there was some mixing,
but at the time of Mark Anthony, and later during the Golden Age of
Monastisism in Egypt, the copts and greeks lived comfotably with each
other, YET retained a heritage during the arab and ottoman invasions.
Over 100,000 and more greeks were expelled by Naser in 1955 from
Alexandria.
Now for the Slavic invasions into the Pindud mountains, yes we all
know that happened, but we do not know how much. Also, the greek
speaking Byzantium was definately not centered around modern day
greece. All of asia minor was crawling with hellenes. 2 million of
these finally made their way back to the Agaean in 1922. We all know
that we have some slavic blood, as the slavs know that they have
greek blood. The fact always remains that on the whole, tha greek
population was largely always greek with small additions here and
there.
As for Turks and Jews, we know that the Jews do not mix well with any
race. For the turks, it is also known that a convert to islam could
not turn back to christianity…the penalty was death. Many
christians such as greeks, slavs, and armenians retained their
religion as their genetic heritage. There is a huge amount of
christian blood in modern day turks, yet not nearly as significant in
the balkans and armenia/georgia.
Italians affected our bloodline slighlty in the cycladic islands,
corfu, and crete. But if you think, much of italy, especially the
south was part of byzantium until the 10th century, so much of their
bloodline is also hellenic or byzantine roman. Germans during the
world war definately did not affect our bloodline in anyway! And
black africans such as ethiopians did come to the Aegean in small
numbers.
The conclusion of this article is that the modern day Hellenes have
the most genetic heritahge than any other peoples in Europe and the
middle east (except maybe the jews in israel). We do not have direct
100% heritage of course from Homer and Socrates to Justinian and the
Comnenus family, but we do carry a large part of their body, be it
physical or mental. We are the closest peoples to the ancient and
byzantine hellens. Yet as Socrates said, “I am not an athenian, not a
greek, but a citizen of the world”…we should not fight on who
represents who, we should be proud of what we are, and of what we can
achieve in the future for our race, and for Europe in the World.