A country that is emptying out
When you're on vacation in Athens or on the islands in summer, Greece gives an impression of high density, accentuated by the presence of 20 million tourists every year. Yet the country is increasingly empty: its population is shrinking, its young people are leaving for Athens or Germany, and its countryside is becoming a desert.
Demographics at half-mast. Greece has a population of around 11 million. But this figure, long stable, is changing. Already, since the 1980s, Greece has had one of the lowest fertility rates in Europe: 1.30 children per woman on average for the past forty years. So, if the population has continued to grow slightly, it's mainly thanks to the influx of Albanian immigrants. The problem is that a new factor appeared in 2009: the economic and financial crisis. This led to an exodus of young Greeks (around 500,000 in ten years), notably to Germany, but also to a drop in the birth rate (there are now more deaths than births), while the population has aged (the median age was 25 in 1950, it is now 45). As a result, since 2015, the country has fallen back below the 11 million mark. In 2018, the Greeks numbered just 10,738,000. Since no sufficient measures are being taken, the phenomenon is set to worsen. Projections give estimates of less than 10 million inhabitants in 2030 and less than 8 million in 2080. It should be noted that the situation is similar in the rest of the Balkans (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania, Serbia...).
Uprooted populations. Greece at the beginning of the twentieth century had nothing like the population of today. Already, it was a mosaic of peoples: Greeks, Turks, Slavs, Albanians, Jews, Romanians... After the incorporation of Northern Greece into the Kingdom in 1912, the non-Hellenic and non-Orthodox components were assimilated or forced into exile. Then, during the "Great Catastrophe" of 1923, a million Greeks from Asia Minor and the Black Sea were expelled from Turkey, and the majority of them settled in present-day Greece. The Greek Civil War (1946-1949) also had an impact on demographics, with villages emptied and major population movements throughout the country. In the 1960s, while Greeks were emigrating en masse to Germany, new small Greek communities were also arriving, driven out of Istanbul and Alexandria. In parallel with all these migrations, the country was marked for a century by a strong rural exodus, which accelerated between the 1950s and 1980s. As a result of these successive uprootings, the country's population became homogeneous, officially 95% Greek and Orthodox. But most Greek families are not originally from where they live today. And the relative stability of the population over the last two or three generations is once again being called into question by the 2009 crisis, with new internal and external migrations.
The weight of cities. As a result of the shocks of war and poverty, the Greek population largely moved to the cities from the 1920s onwards. A century later, cities now account for 80% of the country's population. The problem is that the Athens conurbation alone absorbs 3.8 million inhabitants, or 35% of the population. And if we add Thessalonica (1 million inhabitants), the country's two largest cities account for 45% of the population. This creates an imbalance in land use, especially as Athens and Thessalonica are younger and account for most of the economic activity. With only three other cities in excess of 100,000 inhabitants, no other hub is in a position to compete: Patras (Peloponnese) with 210,000 inhabitants, Heraklion (Crete) with 170,000 inhabitants and Larissa (Thessaly) with 160,000 inhabitants. So, while the average density is 81 inhabitants per km2, outside these five cities, it's usually between 0 and 30 inhabitants/km2. In other words, the rest of the country is almost empty. And the 2009 crisis has exacerbated the problem, with more job-seeking rural youth moving to the cities, and villages populated by retirees or abandoned all over Greece.
The Greek "minorities
Officially, the country's population is 98% Greek Orthodox. This apparent homogeneity needs to be qualified. Without even mentioning immigrants (at least 10% of the population) or ethnic and religious minorities, it masks the very varied origins of the Greeks themselves.
The Micrasiates. Every second Greek has at least one ancestor from Asia Minor(Mikra Asia in Greek), a vast region covering present-day Turkey and the shores of the Black Sea, which was part of Greek civilization in antiquity. Around 1.2 million Greeks were expelled from Turkey in the "Great Catastrophe" of 1923. Arriving with an entire oriental culture, they have strongly influenced present-day Greece, whether through their music (rebetiko), their cuisine or their political demands, which have often weighed heavily in relations between Athens and Ankara. Now fully integrated into Greek society, the Micrasiates (or Greeks from Asia Minor) are Orthodox and have given the country many leading personalities. But there are also several sub-communities, such as the Greeks of Smyrna (now Izmir) or Constantinople (Istanbul), each with its own traditions, such as the spicier Smyrnian cuisine, or soccer, with the great clubs AEK (Athens) and PAOK (Thessalonica) founded by refugees from Constantinople. The Pontics, meanwhile, are almost a minority of their own among the Micrasiates. Originally from the Black Sea (formerly known as the Pont-Euxin), they are estimated to number between 400,000 and 1 million in Greece today. For most of them, their families arrived here from Turkey in 1923. They were joined by other Pontics from Georgia, Russia and Ukraine after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. These latest arrivals are sometimes less well integrated, referred to as "Russians" and the butt of many jokes (like the Belgians about the French and vice versa). And, still among the Micrasiates, we must mention a community originally from Cappadocia (eastern Turkey): the Karamanlides, some 200,000 Turkish-speaking Orthodox who were assimilated into the Greeks during the 1923 population exchange. Some Pontic and Karamanlid families continue to speak Turkish at home, but use Greek outside the home. These populations were used to repopulate towns and villages emptied of their Turkish, Slavic or Jewish inhabitants in the 1920s, mainly in Crete, Macedonia and Eastern Thrace. Micrasiates make up a large part of the population of Athens and around half of the Greek diaspora worldwide.
Greek Catholics. In the land of Orthodoxy, there are 200,000 Catholics, of whom only 70,000 are Greek. This small community is found mainly in Athens and in former Venetian and Italian possessions such as the Cyclades, Crete, Corfu and the Dodecanese. They even make up half the population in Syros and Tinos (Cyclades). Well integrated but still often referred to as Frangi ("the Franks"), they mostly follow the Latin rite of the Roman Catholic Church. However, 6,000 of them belong to the little-known Hellenic Greek Catholic Church. Although placed under the authority of the Pope, this church follows the same Byzantine rites as the Orthodox, including the authorization of marriage for priests.
Saracatsanes. Originally settled in the Pindus massif, but also in the Peloponnese, Macedonia, Eastern Thrace, Thessaly and Evia, they number around 80,000 in Greece and a few thousand in Albania and Bulgaria. They are an ancient tribe of shepherds and bandits speaking a dialect close to ancient Greek. A nomadic and rebellious people, the Saracatsanes were forcibly settled under the Metaxas dictatorship in 1938. They call themselves Greeks, but ethnologists and historians disagree on their origins: perhaps they are Hellenized Aromanians or Bulgarians, descendants of the Pelasges (the inhabitants of Greece during the Achaean period), or the result of a melting pot of different peoples. Opposed to the government in Athens during the civil war (1946-1949), the Saracatsanes rallied en masse to neighboring communist countries before being driven out. Now settled in the major cities, they are renowned for their folklore and are often praised for their bravery.
The Maniotes. The inhabitants of Magne (the central "finger" of the Peloponnese) number around 20,000, living in one of the country's most deprived regions. While there is no doubt that they belong to the Greek ethnic group, they occupy a special place in the collective imagination. Their ancient dialect links them directly to the Laconian Greek spoken by the Spartans in antiquity, and their remote peninsula was a refuge for the Greeks when the Avars and Slavs arrived in the 6th century. At once shepherds, bandits and pirates, they remained attached to the Byzantine heritage, inflicting a heavy defeat on the Moraean prince William II of Villehardouin in 1259 and forcing the Ottomans to guarantee them political autonomy. But clan conflicts and family vendettas drove some of the inhabitants into exile, notably in Corsica in the 17th century. Spearheading the War of Independence from 1821 onwards, the Maniotes were also long opposed to the Greek state. Poverty has since forced a majority of them into exodus, particularly to Athens.
The Souliotes. In Epirus, the Souli valley was home to as many as 12,000 inhabitants in the 19th century. Today, only 700 remain. Ethnically Albanian but Greek-speaking and Orthodox, the Souliotes were feared warriors, opposing the powerful Ali Pasha of Ioannina before joining Napoleon's troops in the Albanian Regiment. From the War of Independence to the resistance against the Nazis, they were part of every battle. Driven out of their valley by poverty in the 1950s, they nonetheless remain, like the Maniotes, one of the models of modern Greek identity.
Ethnic minorities
At the crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa, Greece has been a mosaic of peoples since ancient times. But from 1830 to 1977, the Greek state pursued a policy of forced Hellenization (or "ethnic cleansing") that virtually wiped out non-Greek minorities, either by driving them out or assimilating them.
The Albanians. They number around one million in Greece, or almost 10% of the population. Most of them settled in the 1990s, after the two shocks experienced by the neighboring country: the fall of the communist regime in Tirana (1991) and the "pyramid crisis" (1997). Their arrival was massive, and for a long time provoked strong anti-Albanian feeling among the Greek population. Today, things have calmed down: Albanian immigrants have contributed to the country's economic boom and helped to repopulate many villages and small towns that had been in decline. Integration, initially held back by the authorities, has been relatively easy, thanks to the cultural proximity between the two peoples. Although 60% of Albanians are Muslims, they are not very religious and remain marked by Orthodox traditions inherited from the Byzantines. Their language is different, but Greek is spoken or understood in most parts of southern Albania. Greeks and Albanians are the two oldest peoples in the Balkans. They have forged close links throughout history: the Greeks colonizing Illyria (Albania) in Antiquity, and the Albanians settling in Greece in the Middle Ages. Known as the Arvanites (Orthodox) and Tsamides or Chams (Muslim), the former Albanian populations made up the majority of the inhabitants of cities such as Athens and Ioannina at the time of independence in 1829. Nowadays, it's hard to notice the presence of Albanians in Greece, so much have they blended into the local population. And integration is now officially accepted. After two major waves of regularizations (in 2003 and 2010), in 2015 the state finally granted Greek nationality to Albanian children born and living in Greece. A measure that also helps combat demographic decline.
The "Turkish" minority. This is the only ethnic minority recognized by the state, and a unique case in the European Union. Under the Lausanne Agreement of 1923, Greece is obliged to maintain on its territory a minority of Muslims officially designated as "Turks". These are confined to a part of Eastern Thrace, near Bulgaria, where certain aspects of Islamic and former Ottoman law apply. Around 150,000 people live around the town of Xhanti. Two-thirds of them are Turks, but there are also Pomaks, Roma and Africans. Under pressure from Ankara, the "Turks" of Eastern Thrace still enjoy certain advantages, such as reduced taxation and bilingual schools. But the fact that the judiciary is locally entrusted to muftis (appointed by the state) is considered discriminatory by the Council of Europe. And outside Thrace, this minority of Greek citizens faces integration problems compounded by various vexations, such as administrative refusals to provide Muslim prayer halls and burial grounds.
Turks in the Dodecanese. Apart from Eastern Thrace, where they number around 100,000, Turks are still present on Rhodes (around 3,500) and Kos (2,000), two islands close to Turkey. They are often descendants of families from Crete, where Turks made up half the population before being expelled from the island in 1923. The Dodecanese archipelago provided a refuge, remaining under Italian rule until 1947.
The Slavs. Arriving from the 6th century onwards, they were well-established, even in the majority, in Macedonia, Thrace and the Peloponnese. But after 1912, the Slavs of Greece were driven out in large numbers or assimilated. Today, they number between 50,000 and 250,000, mainly in the northern regions. Among them are the Pomaks (Islamized Slavs), estimated at between 15,000 and 50,000, and the Orthodox Bulgarians, most of whom call themselves "Macedonian Slavs" or "Macedonians" and maintain close links with northern Macedonia. The use of South Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Slavo-Macedonian and local variants) is tending to be lost through lack of education and social pressure. As for Slavic place names, almost all have been Hellenized. The most striking example is in the Peloponnese: the village of Tsimova was renamed Areopoli in homage to the Greek god of war, Ares. It was here that the Greek War of Independence began on March 17, 1821.
The Roma. Present in the Balkans since the 11th century, they number between 110,000 and 300,000 in Greece, most of them Orthodox. Speaking Romani and Greek, they are mostly settled around major urban centers, and the municipality of Agia Varvara (near Athens) is their most flourishing stronghold. Renowned for their musicians, such as the great singer Manolis Angelopoulos (1957-1989), the majority of them nevertheless live in very difficult conditions. Within the EU, it is in Greece that the Roma suffer the most severe discrimination: unemployment, lack of access to public services, arbitrary arrests, etc.
The Aroumains. Also known as the Vlachs (a more pejorative term), this Latin-speaking people are scattered across the southern Balkans. In Greece, they number between 50,000 and 200,000, mainly in the northern regions, of whom only 2,000 still speak Aromanian. The most likely hypothesis is that they are the descendants of Roman settlers or of local populations romanized during Antiquity. But they are considered Romanian by the Bucharest authorities (even if they don't speak Romanian). Often descended from families of merchants and shepherds who made their fortune on the great sheep transhumances across the Balkans, the Aroumains of Greece consider themselves Greek and are predominantly Orthodox. The community includes prominent figures such as the Boutaris family (wines from Macedonia) and the 19th-century philanthropists Zappas and Averoff. There are also some 2,000 Meglenites, Muslim Aromanians often regarded as Turks.
The Jews. Although there are only 5,000 Jews in Greece today, they formed large communities until the early 20th century, as in Thessalonica, once known as the "Jerusalem of the Balkans". The majority were descendants of Sephardim expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492 and welcomed by the Ottomans. But there were also older communities, such as the Romaniotes who arrived in northern Greece during the Roman period, or the Jews of Thebes who were moved to Corfu by King Roger of Sicily in 1150. Around half of all Jews fled the country from 1912 onwards. And the Shoah was particularly deadly here: 60,000 Greek Jews were massacred by the Nazis in 1943-1944 (86.7% of the community), including 50,000 in Thessalonica alone. Those who had left earlier settled mainly in Palestine, where they built the port of Haifa, and in France, with illustrious descendants such as Edgar Morin, Marcel Dassault, Nicolas Sarkozy and Patrick Modiano, originally from Thessalonica, and Georges Moustaki, of Corfu parents.
The Dönme family. In the 17th century, a number of Jewish families from Thessalonica converted to Islam and founded a Messianic sect. Retaining certain Jewish rites, they are known as the Dönme ("the returners" in Turkish) and today number around a thousand in Greece. Assimilated to Turks, they are spread between Ioannina, Thessalonica and Alexandroupolis.
Armenians. Between 20,000 and 35,000 mainly Orthodox, settled in Athens, Thessalonica and Thrace. Fleeing the genocide of 1915, some 100,000 Armenians found refuge in the Greek enclaves of Asia Minor, before sharing the fate of the Micrasiates in 1923. Welcomed in Greece, they then emigrated en masse to France, like Charles Aznavour's family, and the United States of America. This epic story is recounted in Elia Kazan's film America America (1963).
The African Greeks. The smallest and least known of the country's minorities. No one knows exactly why or since when, but a thousand black Muslims live in the village of Avato (24 km north-east of Xhanti). Some researchers believe that their ancestors were slaves of the Ottomans in the 18th century, while others see them as descendants of Sudanese auxiliaries to the British army in the 19th century. Well integrated with the Pomaks and Roma, they practice Islam, speak Greek and Turkish and are assimilated by the state into the so-called "Turkish" minority.
Foreigners in Greece
Although Greece is traditionally a country of emigration, it has also become a land of welcome. New populations arrived during the economic boom of the 1980s. But, apart from the massive arrival of a million Albanians in the 1990s, immigration remained very low for a long time. However, it suddenly exploded (+1,000%) with the "migrant crisis" in 2015.
Refugees. In 2015, 846,000 refugees, mainly Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis fleeing their war-torn countries, arrived in Greece in the space of a few months. On the scale of France, this would represent 6.5 million people suddenly disembarking. This unprecedented crisis led to the most expensive humanitarian mission in UN history. Yet Greece was merely an "airlock" to the richer countries of Europe, since only 8% of refugees applied for asylum to stay here. Some 300,000 refugees are still living in Greece, mostly in army-run camps around Athens, Thessalonica and Patras. And, despite constant departures to Northern Europe, this figure remains stable, if not rising. In fact, around 10,000 refugees continue to arrive in Greece every month. These are still Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis, but also Bengalis, Pakistanis and Somalis. When they have the opportunity to leave their camps, these immigrants rarely integrate with the local population. But even though they are in the minority, those who have chosen to stay in Greece have become a source of cheap labor for companies. It is estimated that foreigners represent 25% of the working population, often in jobs that Greeks themselves do not want. With unemployment hovering around 20% since 2009, the neo-Nazi party Aube Dorée has won up to 10% of the vote by campaigning on the theme of immigration. But the majority of Greeks are conciliatory, ready to help, if not tolerate, refugees. For they themselves are often scarred by memories of exile.
Foreign sailors and workers. In Greek ports, you'll notice that most of the big fishing boats have foreign crews. Most of them are Egyptians. In 2010, Cairo and Athens signed an agreement on the development of fishing and aquaculture in Greece. Under this agreement, several thousand Egyptian fishermen stay in Greece on a seasonal or permanent basis. However, most do not have residence permits, and are frequently targeted by the extreme right. In all, there are some 10,000 Egyptians in Greece. Foreigners now account for 90% of salaried jobs in the sector, with shepherds from Bulgaria and farm workers from Asia (including 35,000 Pakistanis) and Albania. Albanians are also the main workforce for building and construction companies. Most of these immigrants are illegal, but they have become indispensable to the Greek economy.
Filipinos. Since the 1990s, it has become "fashionable" for wealthy Athenian families to have a domestic worker from the Philippines. This trend has spread to the rest of the country, with the result that there are now an estimated 40,000 Filipinos (90% of them women) in Greece. The government downplays the figure to 5,000. Just as it downplays the working conditions of these "handymen", often verging on slavery.
E.U. nationals There are around 150,000 non-Greek citizens of the European Union living in Greece. They include mainly Cypriots (Greek-speaking), Germans (mostly of Greek origin) and Bulgarians. The French number 18,000, half of whom live in the Athens area.
The Greek Diaspora
In ancient times, Greek settlement was not confined to Greece alone, but covered almost the entire Mediterranean. Today, it's the same, but on a global scale, with some 10 million Greeks and Greek speakers from Montreal to Melbourne and from Alexandria to Ajaccio.
Older communities in Southern Europe and the Near East. Throughout the Mediterranean, the descendants of the ancient Greek colonies have, for the most part, been assimilated into the local population over the centuries. But thanks to the influx of new migrants, some communities have managed to hold on. This is the case in Italy, where there has been a continuous Hellenic presence since the 8th century B.C., with today around 30,000 people whose mother tongue is modern Greek. The regions of Calabria and Puglia are home to the Grikos, a minority of 60,000 people who speak a mixture of ancient and Byzantine Greek. Opposite this, in Albania, there are 215,000 speakers, mainly in the south of the country, officially recognized as an ethnic minority. By contrast, Greeks have all but disappeared from the rest of the Balkans, with the exception of Romania, where there are an estimated 6,000. Further afield, beyond the Caucasus, Pontics continue to speak Greek in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (around 10,000 each), where they were deported by Stalin in the 1950s. There are 2,500 Greeks in Istanbul, massed around the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and a thousand or so in the rest of Turkey. The country also boasts some 300,000 Islamized Greeks who are not considered part of the diaspora. Small communities remain in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. The Hebrew state is home to 60,000 Jews of Greek origin. Cyprus is a special case, since it is the only other country where Greek is the national language, with around one million speakers. There are 5,000 in Egypt, mainly in Alexandria, a city founded by Alexander the Great and still home to an Orthodox patriarchate. The most recent Greek "colony" is in Corsica, with around 1,000 people living in Cargèse and Ajaccio. It was founded by Maniotes in the 17th century (see above). Although their descendants have lost the use of their Greek dialect, some continue to attend the church of Saint-Spyridon, where Catholic masses are said by a pope in the Byzantine rite. The rest of France is home to around 35,000 recently arrived Greek Orthodox, as well as some 30,000 descendants of Jews from Thessaloniki.
Recent communities from the New World and Northern Europe. Following in the footsteps of shipowners Stavros Niarchos and Aristotle Onassis, Greeks emigrated en masse to the United States and Argentina to escape the crises of the Great Catastrophe (1923) and the Civil War (1946-1949). Today, the countries of the New World account for the lion's share of the diaspora. These communities are generally well-integrated, and include both Greek and Greek-Cypriot citizens and descendants of Greeks and Greek-Cypriots. The largest is in North America, with 3 million in the United States and almost 300,000 in Canada, including 80,000 in Quebec. There are some 300,000 Greeks in South America, notably in São Paulo (Brazil) and Buenos Aires (Argentina). On the other side of the Atlantic, South Africa is home to 140,000. And in Australia, where the community numbers 425,000, Melbourne is considered the third largest Greek city in the world, after Athens and Thessaloniki, with 150,000 Greek inhabitants (47% of the population). In the Old World, Greeks may have left the Mediterranean behind, but from the 19th century onwards, they began to make inroads into northern Europe. A former colonizing power (officially) in Cyprus and (unofficially) in Greece, the United Kingdom is home to 400,000 Greek speakers, including 300,000 in the London area alone. There are also communities of around 20,000 in Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands, 10,000 in Switzerland, and around 5,000 in Austria, Hungary and the Czech Republic. But the country that most attracts Greeks today is Germany. Until recently, the community there numbered 360,000. However, since the crisis of 2009, it is estimated that almost 300,000 new Greeks have emigrated more or less temporarily to Germany.
