Inside villages along Turkey's Black Sea coast, communities still speak a form of Greek, calling it "Romeika," as their ...

Inside villages along Turkey's Black Sea coast, communities still speak a form of Greek, calling it "Romeika," as their mother tongue. A 2007 article published in the major Turkish centrist newspaper Radikal brought this largely hidden reality into public view, written by Vahit Tursun, a Greek-speaking Muslim from the Ofe district of Trabzon. He described growing up in the mountain village of Otsena, where children were beaten at school for speaking their native language. Tursun wrote that Pontian Greek was the language of daily life in his village, used for flirting, solidarity, humor, and love. When teachers were assigned to the school, the first thing they did was ban it. Students were intimidated and physically punished for speaking it, and some were pressured to report classmates who did. Historian Vlassis Agtzidis told the Greek newspaper Kathimerini that there are currently four Greek-speaking groups surviving inside Turkey: Cretan, Pontian, Macedonian, and Cypriot. Each traces back to communities that converted to Islam during the Ottoman period but retained their Greek language for generations. Official Turkey has historically classified these populations as Turks who speak an unusual dialect, refusing to acknowledge their Greek origin. Tursun dedicated years to compiling a Pontian Greek dictionary, work that made him unwelcome among nationalist circles in Turkey. The broader pattern, as Agtzidis explained, reveals how the modern Turkish state was built over the suppression of multi-ethnic realities that still persist today, quietly, in villages few outsiders have ever heard of. Erdogan himself traces his family roots to Rize in the Pontic region, an area where Greek-speaking Muslim communities were common for centuries after forced or coerced conversions under Ottoman rule. #Pontus #GreekHistory #Turkey