Archive for the ‘greek & asia minor’ Category
The Armenian diaspora is global and has been for centuries: as long ago as the 17th and 18th centuries, Armenian populations were well-established not just in the ancestral homelands of Anatolia and the Caucasus, in the then Russian and Ottoman Empires, but also right around the Black Sea, in Persia, much of Europe and India, with outposts all the way east to China and the Far East. Cities as diverse as Constantinople and Smyrna (Istanbul and Izmir in modern Turkey), Lemberg (L’viv in Ukraine), Tiflis (Tbilisi in Georgia) and Baku (in today’s Azerbaijan) had significant Armenian populations. It might even be claimed with some truth that the cultural and social capital of stateless Armenia was Constantinople or Tiflis rather than Yerevan, which existed in something of a backwater at that time.
During the 19th century, the Armenian presence spread in Egypt and of course developed in North America as well as in England and France, but the pattern of the diaspora shifted during the traumas of the 20th century. Today, the Armenian populations in some of the longer-established diaspora settlements have shrunk and the revitalised centres are elsewhere: in Argentina, Australia, Canada, France and USA.
With such a history, researching Armenian family history research is rarely straightforward. Even if a family was unaffected by the persecutions in the Ottoman Empire, the often international branching and dispersal of families means that an Armenian family tree rarely confines itself to a single country. The archives in the Republic of Armenia itself have some excellent resources – civil registration for its territory dates back in some cases all the way to 1730 and Armenian Apostolic Church parish registers from 1828. One advantage is that the historical records – all those up to 1928 – are concentrated at the National Archives in Yerevan. However, there are no countrywide indexes to names in the birth/baptism, marriage and death/burial registers, so it is necessary to know, or to find out, exactly where a family came form.
Of course, many family historians with Armenian roots are more interested in genealogical records for communities in western Armenia, or what is today Turkish territory. The best news is that records for two provinces of the Russian Empire now in Turkey are held in Yerevan. These are for the oblasts of Igdir and Kars (which included the towns of Ardahan and Kaghzvan) which were Russian territory from 1878 to 1917. Unfortunately, there are no comprehensive records in Yerevan for the Armenian communities elsewhere within the borders of modern-day Turkey. What records of interest to Armenian family history there are in Turkish archives, and how accessible they are, is still uncertain. It is worth mentioning that, given the importance of Tiflis described above, there are also significant holdings of Armenian-interest records in the National Archives of Georgia.
If you are researching your Armenian family tree and would like assistance or advice, please feel free to contact Bluebird Research. We have reliable researchers in Armenia and Russia and would be happy to provide an assessment upon request. We expect to be able to offer professional research services in Turkey later this year, although we must caveat this by stressing that success may be doubtful given the prevailing circumstances on the ground.
Bluebird Research offers professional genealogical research services in Greece and would be delighted to assist you in investigating your family tree and obtaining vital documents from archives and record offices in Greece.
We can help whether your family left Greece for an English or Welsh sea port in the Victorian era, or settled in America before WW1, or emigrated to Canada in the 1920s, or arrived in Australia after World War Two.
We can help whatever the background of your ancestor – whether seaman or merchant or labourer from a village.
We can help whether your family came from the old Kingdom of Greece (regions such as Euboea, Livadia and Morea or Peloponnese); or from Thessaly and southern Epirus (acquired by Greece in 1881); or from central Epirus and Macedonia (acquired 1913) or from western Thrace (acquired 1919); or, for that matter, from one of the Ionian, or the Dodecanese or the Aegean Islands.
Comprehensive nationwide civil registration in Greece began in 1925 but in some areas local equivalents date back to 1831, just after independence. In addition, as well as Greek Orthodox church registers of baptism, marriage and burial, Greece benefits from more unusual record sources such as separate community-level male and female registers.
Our rates for paid research are reasonable and we would be glad to undertake family history research upon your behalf in Greece. We encourage all enquiries and are happy to respond to questions and provide assessments without charge or obligation.
On the third of the three legs of the Halkidiki in Greece is Mount Athos, which is the Autonomous Monastic State of the Holy Mountain (Agion Oros).
Lay persons reside almost entirely at Karyés and Dafni; elsewhere on the peninsula only Eastern Orthodox monks live. Although all monks in residence become Greek citizens, and nowadays most of the 2,000 residents are of course ethnically Greek, the monasteries of Mount Athos have always had an international flavour, being one of the great centres of learning in the Orthodox world. Zografou Monastery is Bulgarian; Iviron Monastery is Georgian; Agiou Panteleimonos (or Rossikon) is a Russian monastery and Hilandariou Monastery is Serbian.
Mount Athos is self-governing and a special visa called a diamonētērion is required to visit. Women visitors are generally forbidden, although various of the monasteries have sheltered female refugees in times of crisis, including Jewish families during the Nazi occupation of Greece in WW2.
Athos is also one of the seats of Old Calendarism in Greece. The Greek state abandoned the old style Julian Calendar for the new style Gregorian Calendar in February 1923 and the Church of Greece followed suit, not without some controversy, in March 1924, so that 10th March became 23rd March that year (the old style calendar having slipped 13 days behind by the 20th Century). However, elements of the Greek Orthodox church refused to accept this change and continued to live by the old style calendar. They became known as Palaioimerologitai, or Old Calendarists, sometimes calling themselves, somewhat provocatively, the True Orthodox Christians. The number of Old Calendarists in Greece is not known but is thought to be up to one million, with concentrations in Athens and Attica, with Mount Athos supplying spiritual leadership. The Old Calendarists have endured some discrimination over the years; for instance, the Greek state did not recognise Old Calendarist marriages until as recently as 1969.
Across much of Central and Eastern Europe in the 18th and 19th Centuries, the middle class was small. The landed and ruling elite was separated from the peasantry and the labouring classes in the towns by a great gulf, rather than there being a sizeable middle class in to which both upper and lower echelons gradually shaded by imperceptible degrees. Of course, during the course of the long 19th Century, this traditional feudal structure changed with industrialisation and increased social mobility, and a recognisable and increasingly influential bourgeoisie began to emerge. What is striking about the traditional Eastern European society, however, was that the middle class was composed disproportionately of people regarded by both the landowners and the peasantry as non-indigenous, even if their families had lived in the vicinity for generations.
Karl Marx described how these people in the middle – the lawyers, bankers, moneylenders, tax collectors, merchants, traders, innkeepers, shopkeepers and so on – occupying the Lücken-Positionen, the gap in between, were overwhelmingly “non-indigenous” (Ivan T Berend, Decades of Crisis, University of California Press, 2001). Depending upon region, these roles might be filled by Armenians, Germans, Greeks or Jews. They were vulnerable for many reasons. They were regarded with distaste by the landowners and with resentment by the peasantry, although or because they were needed by both alike. Their religion usually marked them out as different and foreign. In the countryside they might live in isolation and even in the towns their communities were often small and occupied distinct quarters. This vulnerability became more pronounced at a time of national awakening (or re-awakening, as the case might be) and whenever assertive nationalism required an adversary it was likely to be turned against the perceived alien in the midst. Similarly, class consciousness was also likely to be directed against the moneyed middleman to whom both the upper and lower class turned in times of need.
These communities are one of the fascinating features of Eastern Europe up to the First World War. This is why the family historian may find Greek ancestors in Romania or Ukraine, and German and Jewish ancestors across the entire eastern half of the European continent and European Russia. Many towns, or quarters of towns, became German or Jewish settlements apart, islands in a sea of native peasantry. In such places, German often became the lingua franca of the town (certainly so in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Baltic gubernia of Imperial Russian) and would be learnt and spoken by all other elements in civic society, such as the Poles or Latvians in their respective lands.
Some of the people in the middle, such as the Armenian community in Poland, assimilated and only relicts remain. Elsewhere, for the reasons indicated above, the German and Jewish middle classes were subject to distrust, victimisation, deportation and worse over the course of the 20th Century and this distinctive element of Eastern European society has all but disappeared.
Over the course of the late 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century, the Ottoman Empire gradually shrank out of Europe and the Middle East into the region of Asia Minor currently occupied by modern Turkey, leaving in its wake territories which were contested and claimed by the emerging nation states.
For a family historian with roots in the parts of South-East Europe which were formerly Ottoman, the three main administrative divisions to understand for the period from 1864 up to the First World War are, in diminishing order of size, the vilayet, the sanjak (also sandjak) and the kaza.
The vilayet was the largest of these divisions and is approximately equivalent to a province. With some exceptions, these tend to be smaller than, and do not correspond in location with, the successor nation states which have replaced Turkey-in-Europe. For instance, the vilayets of Shkoder, Janina, Monastir, Salonica and Edirne cover the territory which extends today from Albania, Macedonia and Greece to the Black Sea.
Each vilayet was subdivided into a number of sanjaks, which in turn were divided up into the kazas. For instance, before the Great War, one of the western, Aegean coast vilayets in Anatolia was called Aidin and comprised the five sanjaks of Smyrna, Magnisia, Aidin itself, Denisli and Mentese. Smyrna contained 12 kazas (Smyrna & Nymphaeon, Krini, Pergamos, Vourla, Odemission etc), Magnisia 11 kazas, Aidin five, and Denisli and Mentese six each.
Across Anatolia or Asia Minor, the majority population was usually Turkish (or Kurdish in the east) but many towns and villages were mixed, with the different communities (e.g. Turkish, Greek, Armenian and Jewish) residing in their own relatively self-contained quarters. However, in some places the Turks did not form a majority: for instance, Greeks dominated Smyrna sanjak.
The 20th century erased the ethnic diversity of the former Ottoman Empire. Turkey itself became an overwhelmingly homogeneous nation state, an historical process which is still a matter of serious dispute for Greece and Armenia. The traces of Armenian and Greek civilization remain throughout Asia Minor and often feature as Turkish tourist attractions – see for example the website of the Turkish Culture & Tourism Office in UK here.
What remains unclear is the extent to which the Ottoman era Asia Minor records of interest to family historians, such as those in the Armenian and Greek diasporas, survive. Are Greek Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic church registers of baptism, marriage and burial to be found in Turkish state archives? Are there any congregation list or even individual-level census returns? With a few exceptions (such as Armenian research in Constantinople), there is a sense at present that Greek and Armenian genealogical research within Turkey is, if not impossible, then doomed to disappointment. However, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the next decade will see an opening up of Turkish archives: Turkey remains an applicant to join the European Union, is promoting tourism, and has a potentially large international constituency of family historians who would be extremely interested in the contents of state archives. It will be interesting to see what happens.
In common with most countries in Europe, Greek birth, marriage and death records are not just created locally, but also held locally rather than being centralised and made available in a single nationwide record centre.
Civil registration – the recording of vital events of birth, marriage and death by the state rather than the church – did not commence in Greece until 1925, in which year the Lixiarheion registration system was established and began to be rolled out nationally. Cities and towns have their own dedicated register offices (likewise called Lixiarheion), while in smaller settlements civil registration is carried out at the dimos (the mayor’s office) or koinotis (the community office).
Between 1912 and 1925, registration of birth/baptism, marriage and death/burial by the Church was mandatory. However, even prior to 1912, parish registers were maintained by most Greek Orthodox parish churches, with copies (usually known in English as “bishop’s transcripts”) sent to the diocese office.
Traditionally in Greek society, a child was not named at birth. Rather, the child was referred to simply as “bebá” or similar until baptism. Churching took place at 40 days after the birth, with the naming of the child taking place at the baptism (it is useful to know this when searching baptism registers for populous locations, as you can skip ahead 40 days from the date of birth, if known, with some confidence).
Forenames were not selected randomly but followed either a pattern of naming within the family (i.e. first son named after its paternal grandfather, the second after the maternal grandfather etc) or after saints in the Orthodox calendar – and, obviously, these could be one and the same, as the earlier generations were quite likely named after saints. Children were not named after their parents unless the parent of the same sex died between conception and baptism. The naming convention may also mean that some core family forenames recur in alternate generations, but that within a generation they may occur two, three or more times. For example, if grandfather was named Konstantinos and had three sons named Athanasios, Nikolaos and Spyridon, each of the three sons may well have named their first-born son Konstantinos (with the accompanying patronymic distinguishing them).
The godparents of the baptised child are named in the baptism register and they play an important role in Greek culture. The godparents and the parents form a new and mutual kinship called koumbároi, which does not have an exact equivalent in the Catholic or Protestant churches in Western Europe. The godparents are often siblings of the parents (i.e. uncles or aunts of the child), or they may be influential members of the community (who will then be able to mentor and sponsor the child in later life), or they may be close neighbours or friends.
Beyond the borders of modern Greece, throughout Eastern and South-eastern Europe, and especially in Romania, there are families with Greek ancestry. They may no longer bear distinctively Greek names, or be able to speak or read Greek, although some communities are still very much identifiably and consciously Greek. There are two related sources of these family histories, both dating back to the centuries of Ottoman rule.
Firstly, there are the Black Sea or Pontic Greeks, who spread from Constantinople around the Anatolian seaboard and to all ports around the coast of what are today Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Abkhazia, Georgia and, of course, Turkey. These Greeks were bankers, merchants, ship owners and the like, and often formed (along with Armenians and Jews) the core of the middle class in the towns in which they settled. Naturally, there was also a Greek working class, often making a living as sailors and fishermen. In Romania, there are still coherent albeit dwindling Greek communities in the capital Bucharest and in the ports and towns of the Danube delta such as Constanţa, Galaţi and Sulina.
Secondly, there are the so-called Phanariotes, Greeks from the historic Phanar district of Constantinople (today Fener in Istanbul) who rose to influential positions in the administration of the Ottoman Empire and especially in its Danubian Principalities, the precursor of modern Romania. Here, the Greeks were not only financiers, traders and innkeepers but also often the local rulers and landowners. They married into and purchased estates from the native Romanian ruling class (the boyars). Many assimilated over time, so that the Phanariotes became more of a caste than an ethnic group, including families with clearly Albanian, Italian and Romanian as well as Greek roots. While some family surnames such as Mavrocordatos and Ypsilantis still bespeak Greek origins, others do not and, of course, this is doubly true of female lines of descent.
Bluebird Research is pleased to offer family history research services in all parts of Romania and would welcome the opportunity to assist you in investigating your family tree.
“I was talking to a wealthy peasant who came in from a neighbouring village to Monastir market. He spoke Greek well, but hardly like a native. “Is your village Greek”, I asked him, “or Bulgarian?” “Well”, he replied, “it is Bulgarian now, but four years ago it was Greek”. The answer seemed to him entirely natural and commonplace. “How”, I asked in some bewilderment, “did that miracle come about?” Why”, said he, “we are all poor men, but we want to have our own school and a priest who will look after us properly. We used to have a Greek teacher… but we had no priest of our own. We shared a priest with several other villages, but he was very unpunctual and remiss. We went to the Greek Bishop to complain, but he refused to do anything for us. The Bulgarians heard of this and they came and made us an offer. They said they would give us a priest who would live in the village and a teacher to whom we need pay nothing. Well, sir, ours is a poor village, and so of course we became Bulgarian”.”
from HN Brailsford, Macedonia: Its Races and their Future, Methuen & Co, 1906
Monastir, or Manastir, is today known as Bitola and is the second city of the Republic of Macedonia. It is situated in the far south of the country; Albania is not far off and Greece closer still.
When Brailsford was writing, in 1905, Macedonia was not a state but an ill-defined region of ailing Turkey-in-Europe increasingly contested by different national movements. It is true that some of its peoples, such as the Albanians in the west and the Greeks in parts of the south, possessed clear national affiliations but for many others personal identity was properly a matter of religion, to which all else was secondary. The people had been accustomed to being defined by faith community (millet) by the Ottomans for as long as the collective memory could recall. Since the Bulgarians, the Greeks and the Serbs, all of whom had an eye on at least part of Macedonia, were all Orthodox, this meant that the majority population of Macedonia found itself on a kind of three-way spectrum along which they could slide, or be slid, as the case may be, as illustrated by Brailsford’s anecdote. The longer-term result of this was that the emerging separate Macedonian identity developed in contradistinction to those surrounding nation states.
For the family historian with antecedents from Macedonia, the advice is to tread with great care and to be prepared for a difficult way ahead. It is vital to know the exact place of origin of the family in order to conduct any meaningful genealogical research. Knowing the family religion is important, too, nationality or ethnicity perhaps less so. Many villages would have just the one church, and/or just the one mosque, and in that respect it might matter little whether the villagers thought of themselves as Bulgarian, Greek, Macedonian, Serb or Vlach (Aromanian or Wallachian) on the one hand, or as Albanian, Bosnian, Pomack or Turkish on the other. Note also that some Albanians in Macedonia were Roman Catholic and, indeed, Orthodox; and that the Gypsies, who tended to live in discrete communities on the outskirts of towns and villages, were usually Muslim but occasionally Orthodox.
Macedonia was contested politically and militarily for too long, with significant and bloody revolts at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th, long before the two Balkan Wars of 1912/13 and the destruction of the Great War. Brailsford worked in the vilâyet of Manastir on behalf of an NGO called the British Relief Fund during the winter of 1903/04, following the 1903 uprising and its savage Turkish suppression and reprisals. In that vilâyet alone, he calculated that 119 villages were wholly or partly burned and over 8,400 homes destroyed, displacing at least 60,000 civilian non-combatants. Some families went back to re-build their villages once peace returned but others re-settled elsewhere or went abroad; the subsequent upheavals and conflicts after 1903 created a pattern of repeated displacement and migration and the impact of this, too, must not be under-estimated when attempting family history research in Macedonia.
Novorossiya, New Russia, was the name given to the southern steppe region of the Russian Empire which comprised the gubernia of Kherson, Taurida and Ekaterinoslav and, where colonists were invited to settle and develop the land in the 18th and 19th centuries. Settlers came from across Russia and Ukraine, of course, but there were also significant numbers of Germans, Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians, Moldavians and Swiss, among others.
The Greeks of New Russia were concentrated on the western side of the Sea of Azov, in a cluster of 24 large villages in the Mariupol district, and were granted citizenship in 1779. Here they grew tobacco and cabbages, raised livestock, kept taverns and ran shops. As traders in a multi-ethnic environment, many Greeks spoke one or more of Russian, Turkish and Tatar as well as Greek. Marriages were contracted young (grooms were typically 17 or 18, brides often 14 or even younger) and families large.
In other towns on the northern Black Sea coast such as Anapa, and around the Crimea, they were also successful merchants, builders and ship-owners. The numbers of Greeks in the Russian Empire increased steadily throughout the 19th century, partly because of the creeping territorial expansion of the Empire and especially due to the conflicts between Russia and Turkey in 1828/29, 1853-56 and 1877/78: many Pontic Greeks living in the Ottoman Empire withdrew with the Russian forces to avoid reprisals at the hands of Turkish forces.
However, under the Soviet Union, the multi-national character of New Russia, which now fell largely within the Ukrainian SSR, was systematically destroyed by Stalin. The Greeks came to be regarded as counter-revolutionary: they were capitalists, they were too attached to their own culture, and many were suspect as they held Greek identity papers which the Greek government had made available to Greeks living in the diaspora after WW1. From 1936, and again after WW2, deportations led to virtually the entire Greek community of the former New Russia region, up to 240,000, eventually being forcibly removed to Siberia and Central Asia.
There was some movement back after the death of Stalin in 1953 but the process did not gather momentum until the late 1980s and early 1990s, when many of the Greek villages formed by the deportees were abandoned. There are still sizeable Greek communities in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and in towns such as Anapa in Russia and the now Ukrainian Mariupol (which recorded 21,923 in 2002), but most of those able to leave the former USSR headed to mainland Greece.
Pontic Greek family history research in Russia and Ukraine is inevitably complicated by this history, as it is also by the often parlous state of some regional state archives and the difficulty of accessing such records as survive. However, if you would like an opinion on the prospects of success, please write to Bluebird Research with an outline of the information you have and we will respond as soon as we can.
Today, in the era of identity politics, it is expected of everyone that they possess a clear and unequivocal identity and in particular that they identify with a particular nation state, commonly the one in which they were born and/or live.
In some regions of Europe (and of course elsewhere), this is very much a modern phenomenon and a consequence of the nation-building projects of the 19th and 20th centuries. Particularly in the large and sprawling multi-ethnic empires that crumbled during WW1, less focused identities formerly existed.
For instance, in the Ottoman Empire and not just in its Anatolian heartland but also in so-called “Turkey in Europe”, religion rather than nationality or ethnicity was the defining feature. The Empire recognised its component regions, of course, but thought of the constituent populations as Muslim, Christian and Jewish, with Christian perhaps subdivided into Greek Orthodox, Armenian and so on. These religious communities were known as millets. As late as the 1920s, both the Greek and the Turkish states found that they had to impose national identities upon particular populations where they were lacking. For instance, Cappadocia was home to up to 100,000 Orthodox Christians. They were known as Karamanlides, but this did not denote ethnicity or race: it simply meant that they were Turkish-speaking and wrote in Turkish but using the Greek alphabet. Although loyal to Turkey, enjoying good relations with their Muslim neighbours, and not thinking of themselves as Greek, they were caught up in the great Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923/24 following the Treaty of Lausanne. Removed from their centuries-old heartland in Anatolia, they became unwilling refugees in Greece, where they had to forge a new, national rather than religious, identity and learn a new language.
In what is today Belarus, too, national identities were far from fully formed even between the World Wars. In the years 1918-1924, when a massive repatriation programme was under way to return refugees and other displaced persons from Soviet Russia to their former places of origin in newly independent Eastern European successor states, many effectively Belarusian refugees entered their religion (Orthodox) in the box marked “nationality” on the registration forms: even Belarusian nationalists recognised that the people had little or no national consciousness.
Poland acquired extensive eastern marches following the collapse of Tsarist Russia and a war with the Bolsheviks. One of these new provinces, województwo Poleskie, was ethnically very mixed and had a particularly small Polish Roman Catholic minority population (14.5% according to the 1931 Polish census). As well as approximately 6.7% in Polesie who declared themselves explicitly to be Belarusian, no less than 62.4% (about 800,000 people) identified themselves as “locals” (tutejszy or tutejsi) and their language as “local”. This was a peasant people, speaking a mix of Belarusian and Russian with some Polish and Lithuanian elements; many were illiterate. Some became polonised before WW2 and the end of the Second Polish Republic, but most came to be regarded as Belarusians and found themselves living in the Belarusian SSR from the 1940s.
Australia’s population changed radically after WW2: not only was the rate of population increase unprecedented in Australian history, but there were new waves of continental European immigrants in the immediate post-War period 1947 to 1952 and continuing throughout the 1950s and ‘60s.
While the British Isles still contributed the greatest number by far, the 1961 federal census showed, for example, 228,296 enumerated individuals born in Italy, 109,315 born in Germany, 102,083 born in the Netherlands, 77,333 born in Greece and 60,049 in Poland, with smaller numbers from other countries across Europe.
Assisted passage schemes were agreed not just with UK government (the widely-known “ten-pound pom” scheme) but also with countries such as Greece and Malta, and proved very popular. These meant that immigrants over the age of 19 years paid a nominal sum (Aus $25) towards their passage, with the balance being picked up by the Australian state. For the two assisted passage schemes just mentioned, 91,927 Greeks and 71,660 Maltese entered Australia between 1947 and 1969. There was some return migration after two or three years, but the majority settled, naturalised and became Australian citizens.
Today, people of Greek birth or descent make up the 7th largest ethnic community in Australia: in the 2006 census, 365,147 claimed wholly or partly Greek ancestry, of whom 235,140 stated that both their parents were born outside Australia. These figures include significant numbers of Greeks from Cyprus, Egypt and Turkey.
The Greek community in Melbourne is reckoned to be the single biggest outside Greece, larger even that those in New York and Chicago. Melbourne districts such as Coburg, Doncaster, Oakleigh, Port Melbourne and Preston have particular concentrations.
Bluebird Research is able to assist with Greek genealogical research and will be pleased to provide a free assessment upon request.