Ancient Greek Lives

A relict population of about five thousand Greek speaking Muslim converts in Northeast Turkey (on the Black Sea coast) speaks a dialect of ancient Greek (i.e. similar to the version of the language spoken until about two thousand years ago) that is found nowhere else in the world as a living language, and was widely believed to have gone extinct. This provides insights into how the ancient Greek dialect sounded and was used orally. Most Greek speakers in Anatolia were relocated to Greece, and most Turks in Greece were relocated to Turkey in 1923, but because these Greeks were Muslims, they were excluded from the swap.

This also reminds us that there were many Greek speaking communities in Anatolia until the 20th century, something often forgotten as a consequence of the nature tendency to assume that the political and cultural map of the world was always as it is today.