Talk:Greeks

Article review

It has been a while since this article has been reviewed, so I took a look and noticed the following:

• There are lots of uncited statements, including entire paragraphs.
• The "History" section stops in the 1800s. Is there any additional information to add from the article from the 1900s or 2000s? Any information that should be added about post-WWII migration?
• The "Demographics" section doesn't have post-2008 information, so this section probably needs to be updated.

Should this article go to WP:GAR? Z1720 (talk) 17:30, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

GA Reassessment

Greeks

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • GAN review not found

Result: There have been no improvements forthcoming since the nomination over a month ago. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 21:40, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

There are lots of uncited statements, including entire paragraphs. The "History" section stops in the 1800s. Is there any additional information to add from the article from the 1900s or 2000s? Any information that should be added about post-WWII migration? The "Demographics" section doesn't have post-2008 information, so this section probably needs to be updated. Z1720 (talk) 01:16, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Doric invasion

Is mentioned under ‘Histor’ > ‘Origins’ as something that unquestionably occurred, and then a couple of paragraphs later dismissed as a former archaeological fad. I do not know the current consensus to fix it myself. ~2026-86312-1 (talk) 13:50, 8 February 2026 (UTC)

Related Ethnic Groups

Why is there no “related ethnic groups” for Greeks like there is on the pages of other ethnic groups? Greeks are closely related to Albanians, Southern Italians, Romaniote Jews, and Ashkenazi Jews (and Turkish Cypriots, for Greek Cypriots; and Bulgarians, for Northern Greeks [e.g. Thrace, Macedonia]). ~2026-44917-69 (talk) 06:57, 16 August 2026 (UTC)

That's been discussed repeatedly. It was removed because people were forever edit-warring about it, adding and removing entries based on their personal whims. And that edit-warring was inevitable, because there isn't any sourceable academic consensus about what "relatedness" even means. Ethnic "relatedness" isn't a meaningful concept, so the question "what are the ethnic groups most closely related to X" has no coherent answer Wikipedians could possibly come to a reasoned consensus about. Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:48, 16 August 2026 (UTC)

Homeland

The description In the introduction of this article states that:

“Greeks or Hellenes (/ˈhɛliːnz/; Greek: Έλληνες, Éllines [ˈelines]) are an ethnic group and nation native to Greece, Cyprus, southern Albania, Turkey, southern Italy, parts of Egypt, and to a lesser extent, other countries surrounding the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea. They also form a significant diaspora (omogenia) around the world.”

However, Greeks are certainly not an indigenous population of the Nile Valley or North Africa— nor are they native (even to a “lesser extent”) to the other countries surrounding the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea (e.g. Syria, Lebanon, Palestine-Israel, Georgia, Ukraine etc.) that weren’t explicitly named in this paragraph.

• The Greeks of Crimea, Ukraine, the Russian Federation, Georgia, the North Caucasus etc. are native to the Pontus(/Karadeniz/Lazona/Western Armenia/Northeastern Anatolia), not the Caucasus or Eastern Europe (and of course the small Greek minority of the Black Sea coast of Moldova and Romania are not native either and came from Balkan Greece or Anatolia during the early modern or modern era, mostly Phanariots).

• The Greek minority of the Levant came from Cyprus/Greece/Anatolia (especially the ones that still live in the Levant today [which *entirely* consists of 1. Cretan Muslim descendant communities, 2. the descendants of Anatolian Greeks that fled Ottoman Anatolia and early republican Turkey in the early 20th century 3. the descendants of some late 18th/19th/early 20th century Ottoman Greek merchants 4. the descendants of a very small amount of WW2 Greek refugees that fled the axis occupation of Greece and ended up remaining in Syria instead of being repatriated, and 5. some priests and religious hierarchs from Cyprus and Greece connected to the Jerusalem patriarchate. All of the older/ancient Greek communities of “the Decapolis” and the broader Levant were gradually Arabized after the Islamic conquests and absorbed into the much larger Arab Rūm/Melkite population throughout the centuries. Thus, the Greek-speaking, ethnic Greek-identifying minority of the Levant today largely has modern origins, not ancient ones.]).

It’d be more precise to say that:

1. The Greeks are an ethnic group and nation native to Greece, Cyprus, Thrace and Asia Minor, Southern Albania, and the Mezzogiorno.

1. Greeks have had a historic diasporic presence in Egypt (particularly Alexandria/the Egyptian coast and the Sinai), the Levant, and other regions surrounding the Mediterranean and Black Seas for millennia. Lalaloopsypoopsy (talk) 22:22, 16 September 2026 (UTC)

"The Greek minority of the Levant came from Cyprus" Cyprus is part of the Levant anyway. See the main article:

• "In its narrowest sense, used in archaeology and other contexts, the Levant refers to Cyprus and land bordering the Levantine Sea (Mediterranean) in West Asia that includes Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, and south Cilicia (Turkey). In its widest historical sense, the Levant included all the Eastern Mediterranean; extending from Greece to Egypt and Cyrenaica (Eastern Libya)."

References

Dimadick (talk) 08:43, 18 September 2026 (UTC)

Cyprus being included within some definitions of the Levant does not address my point. I am distinguishing the Greek homeland (that is, the core regions where Greek ethnogenesis took place) from regions with historically significant Greek diaspora or colonial communities. The fact that Cyprus, itself a historic Greek homeland, may or may not be classified geographically as part of the Levant does not make Greeks indigenous to Syria, Lebanon, or Historic Palestine. Longstanding diaspora settlement shouldn't be conflated with ethnic nativity.

The description/introduction says "and to a lesser extent, other countries surrounding the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea." However, Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey are all listed explicitly earlier in the paragraph ("…are an ethnic group and nation native to Greece, Cyprus, southern Albania, Turkey…"). The only countries left in the "Eastern Mediterranean" are Syria, Lebanon, Palestine-Israel, and Egypt— none of which Greeks are native to. Since Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey are already listed in the sentence, there's no need for "Eastern Mediterranean" to be mentioned as well; it's either just redundant (since all three of the Eastern Mediterranean countries that Greeks are indigenous to are already listed, "Eastern Mediterranean" is unnecessary), or it's implying that Greeks are native to other Eastern Mediterranean countries that weren't named in the description (which is incorrect).

This also didn't address my comment about the Black Sea. Nor about Egypt.

(Also, "Levant" has been used in many ways throughout history, not just in the broader archaeological or ancient history definition that includes Cyprus.

For example, in the time of the Ottoman Empire, "Levantine" was used as a descriptor for Catholic Europeans/Franks from the Western Mediterranean [like Venetians, Genoese, Maltese, French etc.] that lived in port cities in Anatolia, Rumelia, Syria, Egypt etc., not to Eastern Mediterranean people.

And today, in geopolitics, academic journals, etc. "Levant" is generally used to refer to the Arab countries of the Eastern Mediterranean [Syria, Lebanon, Palestine/Israel, and Jordan].

I think it was fairly obviously that I was using the term in its more modern sense, in the way it's commonly understood today [as essentially synonymous to "Bilad al-Sham"].) Lalaloopsypoopsy (talk) 04:37, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

What areas an ethnic group is "native" to is not a well-defined concept for which we should expect consistent reliable sourcing to exist, so we probably shouldn't invoke that concept here at all. "Native to" can mean all sorts of different things (any area where members of X have been living for more than a few generations before now; any area where they form a majority; the main settlement area where the bulk of them lives; the area where their ethnicity was historically first attested, and so on), and there is no principled way we could choose one meaning of the term over another. Let's please re-word this and avoid the term "native" (or "homeland", for that matter). Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:18, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

Couldn't we simply replace "native to" with "present in"? – Demetrios1993 (talk) 13:38, 27 September 2026 (UTC)