Some history lesson on the orgins and ethnic belonging to most modern Greeks can be summerized below by various authors and sources such as Britannica.



(Source: Britannica)


"...One of the most vexing questions concerning the history of medieval Greece has been that of the extent to which the indigenous "Hellenic" population survived and brings with it the question whether this term can properly be used of anything other than a cultural (as opposed to ethnic or racial) identity. The archaeological data, certainly, can offer answers only in terms of cultural similarities and differences, so that the question, as it has been traditionally expressed, of a Hellenic ethnic survival, cannot be answered. The issue must be explored in the context of the influx of large numbers of Slavs during the later 6th-8th centuries as well as the migration across Greece of nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoral groups such as the Vlachs from the 10th or 11th century and the Albanians from the 13th century.

....Evidence of tribal names found in both the Peloponnesus and northern Greece suggests that there were probably extensive Slavic-speaking populations in many districts; and from the 10th century to the 15th century Slavic occupants of various parts of the Peloponnesus appear in the sources as brigands or as fiercely independent warriors."

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“…For reasons not yet fully understood, the Albanians began in the 14th century to advance into the western coastal plain, where they served both Byzantine and Serbian overlords as well as ruling independently under various warlords and chiefly families; they were also present in considerable numbers in Thessaly, Boeotia, Attica, and the Peloponnese, serving as soldiers and as farmers, colonizing deserted lands. Albanians arrived in large numbers in the Peloponnese during the reign of the despotes Manuel Kantakouzenos, who brought them there to serve as soldiers and to resettle depopulated regions”


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“…..In central and southern Thessaly, the Vlachs played an important role. They have generally been identified with the indigenous, pre-Slav populations of Dacian and Thracian origin, many of whom migrated into the less-accessible mountainous areas of Greece and the northern Balkan region because of the Germanic and Avar-Slav invasions and immigration of the 5th–7th centuries. The Vlachs maintained a transhumant, pastoral economy in those areas. Their language belongs to the so-called Macedo-Romanian group and is closely related to that known from the 13th century on as Romanian (Daco-Romanian); it is essentially rooted in the late Latin, heavily influenced by the Slavic dialects with which the Daco-Thracian populations were in regular contact. By the 11th century the Vlachs are described as communities of shepherds who moved with their flocks between their winter pastures in Thessaly and summer pastures of the Gramoz Mountain and Pindus range; they are found in Byzantine armies and are mentioned in many documents dealing with landholdings in northern Greece"

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Modern Greece A Short History
C.M. Woodhouse
Page 163

“...Greece included considerably fewer than half of those who regarded themselves as Greeks by virtue of their language,their religion, and (less plausibly) their race"


"....It is a striking fact that the leading defenders of Greek liberty at this time were largely Non-Greek. Koundouriotis was decended from the Albanian invadors of Greece in the 14th century...One of the few leaders who maintained resistance far to the north of the Gulf of Corinth was the Souliote,Marko Botsaris,whos followers were largely Albanian"


About C.M Woodhouse:

C.M. Woodhouse was a Conservative politician and MP for Oxford from 1959 to 1966 and again from 1970 to 1974. Woodhouse was an expert on Greek affairs. He served most of his time in the War in Greece where his love for this country grew strong. After the conclusion of World War II, Woodhouse served as Second Secretary at the British Embassy in Athens, Greece until 1946, whereupon he returned to Britain. He is the author of 6 books on Greece.

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Author Sir Charles Eliot
"Turkey in Europe" - PUBLISHED 1908

Page 267:

"...It would be amazing if the people who are now called Greeks are of the physical types as what are styled Ancient Greeks, which generally means the inhabitants of Athens and Sparta. The Greeks have spread around the Aegean and Black Seas, and come into contact with the inhabitants of the littoral. The Macedonian Empire must have had a large non-Hellenic substratum. Constantinople and all Continental Greece were for centuries ruled by Romans, and during many subsequent centuries invaded and colonized by Slavs. The Crusades and Latin conquests brought a large influx of western Europeans, commonly called Franks; and in later times, extensive Albanian settlements were made in Greek districts. Clearly the Modern Greek must be of very mixed blood."


Page 299:

"..It must be confessed that, though the Greeks showed more energy than any other Christian race, those who now remain in Turkey (except the islanders) are not remarkable for physical vigour or military capacity. This, is no doubt, partly due to the fact that the people who revolted against Mahmud WERE largely Hellenized Vlachs and Albanians, who, under the modern system would not be regarded as Greeks. Nowadays the robust agricultural population is rarely Hellenic in its sympathies, for, as already mentioned, there are comparatively FEW parts where it is really Greek."

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Lucy M. J. Garnett
"Greece of the Hellenes" - PUBLISHED 1914

Page 31:

"....The height standard for the Greek army is nominally 5 feet 1 inch the average Hellene by no means being a tall man. Nor is this standard rigidly adhered to, for a recruit is not rejected on the score of height, if certified physically fit in other respects. Some of the hardiest soldiers are recruits among the Albanians and pastoral Koutso-Vlachs of Thessaly who form an important contingent."

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Page 33:

[Speaking about the dress of the Greek Royal Guard]

"...His feet are shod with Albanian red leather shoes the upturned, pointed toes of which are finished with woolen turfs"

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Page 33 and 34:

"...All Greek soldiers are required to be able to read and write, and if a conscript on joining has not already acquired those rudiments of education, he is put to school. Not-withstanding the educational efforts of the Government as many as 30 percent proved fifteen years ago or so to be completely illiterate, which not more than 25 percent had advanced beyond the ´three R´s´. This may be partly accounted for by the fact that these conscripts include both Albanians from the settlements in Attica and other parts of the Kingdom and pastoral Koutso-Vlachs, all of whom habitually speak their own dialects, and learn Greek only as a foreign tongue."

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Professor Richard Clogg
"A concise history Of Greece"

Page 79:

“...The Academy was built with bequest from Simon Sinas, the hugely wealthy son of Georgios Sinas, a Hellenized Vlach whose family came from Moschopolis in Southern Albania, who made his fortune in the Habsburg Empire and was himself the donor of Theophilos Hansen's observatory (1843-6)”.


About Professor Richard Clogg:

Richard Clogg is an Emeritus Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford. A graduate of the University of Edinburgh, he previously taught at the Universities of Edinburgh and London, where latterly he was Professor of Modern Balkan History.

He has written widely on Greek history and politics. His publications include 'A Concise History of Greece', published by Cambridge University Press. This has been translated into a dozen languages, including Chinese and Japanese and all the languages of South-East Europe. He is currently working on an academic memoir and on a history of the Special Operations Executive in Greece.

Richard Clogg and C.M Woodhouse co-authored the book "The Struggle For Greece".


VAZHDIMI
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William ST. Clair
“That Greece Might Still Be Free”
Oxford University Press – 1972

Page 228:

“..The rich Hydriote ship-owner, Conduriottis, held the title of President of Greece. He was an Albanian, unable to speak Greek. And so the leaders of both armies in the war came, as did many of the fighting men, from that violent illiterate race who had not yet learned to prefer nationalism to other loyalties”

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Passage “The Return of The Ancient Hellenes”

Page 10:

“..To the average Peloponnesian Greek of 1821, even had he been able to read, the manifesto would have been incomprehensible. He would probably not have recognized the appellation of “Hellene” as applying to himself and he would certainly have had no appreciation of the conception of “Hellas” as a nation-state. The direct tradition of knowledge of Ancient Greece had largely died out centuries before. The inhabitants of Olympia, Delphi, and Sparta knew little or nothing of the interesting history of the towns they occupied. Other famous ancient place names survived only in distorted Turkish..”

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Page 232:

“..It was probably at this time that the Albanian dress made its decisive step towards being regarded as the national dress of Greece. The Government party, being largely Albanians themselves, favoured the dress and a version of it was common among the Greek “klephts” and “armatoli”. Now it seemed that anyone who donned an Albanian dress could claim to be a soldier and share in the bonanza”

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Page 231:

“..European friends of Greece, in their moments of disenchantment with Colocotrones, Mavrocordato, and the rest, had always been able to console themselves with the belief that the Greek fleet at least was sound. Here at least, despite the unfortunate fact that they were undeniably Albanians, were the worthy descendants of Themistocles and Artemisia”

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Page 24:

“..As the news became more detailed there was a search for heros. The Mainotes were of course the Modern Spartans but Marco Botsaris, the Albanian Suliote leader, was usually taken as the Modern Leonidas. When stories appeared of a woman of Hydra, Boubolina, leading the Greeks in battle, she was dubbed the Modern Artemisia or the Greek Joan of Arc.
It seemed impossible to represent any event in the Modern Greece as an event in its own right without overwhelming it with misleading allusions”

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"...The first Christian Albanian migrations to what is today Greek territory took place as early as the 10th-12th century (Trudgill, 1975:5; Banfi, 1994:19), although the main ones most often mentioned in the bibliography happened in the 16th-17th centuries, when Albanians were invited to settle in depopulated areas by their Byzantine, Catalan or Florentine rulers (Tsitsipis, 1994:1; Trudgill, 1975:5; Nakratzas, 1992:20-24 & 78-90; Banfi, 1994:19).

...So, some have estimated that, when the Ottomans conquered the whole Greek territory in the 14-15th century, some 45% of it was populated by Albanians (Trudgill, 1975:6). Another wave of Muslim Albanian migrations took place during the Ottoman period, mainly in the 18th century (Trudgill, 1975:6; Banfi, 1994:19). All these Albanians are the ancestors of modern-day Arvanites in Central and Southern Greece"

(SOURCE: Greek Helsinki - http://www.greekhelsinki.gr/english/reports/arvanites.html)

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Edward Blaquiere Esq.
“The Greek Revolution; Its Origin and Progress”

Page 21

“...Among the numerous islands of the Aegean, arise several barren rocks, some of which are however gifted by nature with small and commodious heavens. Of this number are Hydra Spezzia and Ipsara, the two first close to the Eastern shore of the Peloponnesus, and the later not far from Scio, on the Asiatic coast. Tyranny and Want had driven some families, whose origin like that of nearly all the peasants, who inhabited proper Greece, WAS Albanian, to take refuge on the desolate crags, where they built villages, and sought a precarious existence by fishing.”

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T. J. Winnifrith
“The Vlachs: The History of a Balkan People”

Page 139:

“...One of Greece’s first and best Prime Ministers was John Kolettis, a Vlach who dressed like a Turk and had been court physician to Ali Pasha.”

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“Science Monthly” - edited by J. McKeen Cattell,
Published in 1915

Pages 41 and 42

“Most of the old Greek race has been swept away, and the country is now inhabited by persons of Slavonic descent. Indeed there is a strong ground for the statement that there was more of the heroic blood of Hellas in the Turkish army of Edhem Pasha than in the soldiers of King George.”

Page 42

“The Modern Greek has been called a ‘Byzantine Slav.’ King George himself and Constantine his son are only aliens placed on the Grecian throne to suit the convenience of outer powers, being in fact descendants of tribes which to the ancient Greeks were merely Barbarians.”

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Encyclopedia Britannica
Published in 1910

Page 465 - History of Greece

“...In 1715 the Ottomans with a large disciplined army set themselves to recover the Morea [later renamed the Peloponnesus], the Venetians were left without support from the Greeks. The peninsula was rapidly recaptured and by the Peace of Passarowitz (1718) again became a Turkish dependency. The gaps left about this time in the Greek population were largely made up by an immigration from Albania


E.K.