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Around 1300 BC, groups of Mycenaean Greeks settled in Miletus and its surroundings. [1] . It was the beginning of a story, that of the Greek presence in Asia Minor , which would last for 3,200 years. The fact is really striking and takes on maximum expression when we compare it with the presence of other peoples in their national territories today. So, for example, the Anglo-Saxons have only been in England for a little over 1,500 years; the Hungarians, for their part, 1100 years in their homeland; and the Turks have only been in present-day Turkey for just over 900 years. That is to say, the Greeks had already been inhabiting the lands of Asia Minor for 2,400 years when the first Turks arrived in Anatolia and for approximately 1,800 years when the first Angles and Saxons settled in what is now England.
The Greek footprint in Asia Minor was and is very deep. Their language and culture soaked the Anatolian lands , seeding them with cities and monuments, with history and traditions that still today, under the thick mantle of Turkish nationalism and oblivion, appear everywhere in the toponymy, in the gastronomy, in the architecture and in a BTC Users Number Data hundred other areas. The origins of the Greco-Turkish War Turkish domination over Anatolia began to be announced in the second half of the 11th century and did not become effective until after the Battle of Manzikert (1071). From that year on, Turkish war bands subjugated the entirety of Asia Minor . But the rapid Byzantine reconquest of more than half of the territory, the western third and the northern and southern maritime regions, and, above all, the demographic weakness of this first Turkish domination, prevented Turkish consolidation. Where it remained, central and eastern Anatolia, was nothing more than the domination of a warrior caste over a mass of Greek and Armenian population.
The demographic situation really changed from the second half of the 13th century, when Byzantine weakness gave new possibilities to Turkish expansion, especially when the large masses of Turkish refugees fleeing the Genghiskanid conquests arrived in Anatolia. It is at this moment when military domination transforms into true colonization and when the demographic change and the true “Turkishization” of Asia Minor begins. By the 16th century, the ethnic Turks and the native populations assimilated by them already constituted the dominant element, demographically speaking, in the entire Anatolian peninsula. However, in the west of the peninsula, on the coasts of the Black Sea, in Cilicia and in numerous isolated cantons in the center and east, the Greek and Armenian population continued to be the majority throughout the 14th-19th centuries . At the end of this last century, the non-Turkish population of Asia Minor was estimated at more than a third of the total.
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發表於 2024-3-9 15:03:44