Caucasus Greeks

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The Caucasus Greeks (Greek: Έλληνες του Καυκάσου or more commonly Καυκάσιοι Έλληνες, Turkish: Kafkas Rum), also known as the Greeks of Transcaucasia and Russian Asia Minor, are the ethnic Greeks of the North Caucasus and Transcaucasia in what is now southwestern Russia, Georgia, and northeastern Turkey. These specifically include the Pontic Greeks, though they today span a much wider region including the Russian north Caucasus, and the former Russian Caucasus provinces of the Batum Oblast' and the Kars Oblast' (the so-called Russian Asia Minor), now in north-eastern Turkey and Adjara in Georgia.^[1]

Greek people migrated into these areas well before the Christian/Byzantine era. Traders, Christian Orthodox scholars/clerics, refugees, mercenaries, and those who had backed the wrong side in the many civil wars and periods of political in-fighting in the Classical/Hellenistic and Late Roman/Byzantine periods, were especially represented among those who migrated.^[2] One notable example is the 7th-century Greek Bishop Cyrus of Alexandria, originally from Phasis in present-day Georgia. Greek settlers in the Caucasus generally became assimilated into the indigenous population, particularly in Georgia, where Byzantine Greeks shared a common Christian Orthodox faith and heritage with the natives.^[3]

The vast majority of these Greek communities date from the late Ottoman era, and are usually defined in modern Greek academic circles as 'Eastern Pontic [Greeks]' (modern Greek - ανατολικοί Πόντιοι, modern Turkish 'doğu Pontos Rum'), as well as 'Caucasus Greeks', while outside academic discourse they are sometimes defined somewhat pejoratively and inaccurately as 'Russo-Pontic [Greeks]' (modern Greek - Ρωσο-Πόντιοι).^[4] Nevertheless, in general terms Caucasus Greeks can be described as Russianized and pro-Russian empire Pontic Greeks in politics and culture and as Mountain Greeks in terms of lifestyle, since wherever they settled, whether in their original homelands in the Pontic Alps or Eastern Anatolia, or Georgia and the Lesser Caucasus, they preferred and were most used to living in mountainous areas and especially highland plateaux.^[5] In broad terms, it can be said that the Caucasus Greeks' link with the South Caucasus is a direct consequence of the highland plateaux of the latter being seen and used by the Pontic Greeks as a natural refuge and rallying point whenever North-eastern Anatolia was overrun by Muslim Turks in the Seljuk and Ottoman periods.^[5]