In this article I will again stand next to the Cappadocians, these great acrites of Hellenism in Anatolia.

Coded the main features of Cappadocian Hellenism, can be summarised in the following features: The Mycenaeans discovered Cappadocia between 1400 and 1200 BC, followed by the Greeks of Ionia, Caria, Pontus and other regions of Anatolia (Asia Minor) who settled in Cappadocia at various periods of history. Cappadocia received the beneficial influence of the Greek world in various phases of the presence of Hellenism there.

For example, I note that generals, soldiers and descendants of Alexander the Great colonized and founded villages and settlements in Cappadocia, transferring the characteristics of a multicultural world from the depths of Asia. The Cappadocians were heirs of the civilization shaped by the campaign of the greatest general of antiquity, Alexander the Great and historically emerged as a province of his Successors and later, as a living laboratory of Christianity.

The term “Cappadocia” etymologically belongs to the Persians. In the Inscription Behistun Monument (c. 520 B.C.), where the territories of Persia under Darius I were mentioned, in row 21, was inscribed Iyam Katpatuka, (this is Katpatuka). The name phonologically evolved from Greek speakers to Katpadukia> Kapadikia and later morphophonologically to Kappadokia. Before the Greek settlement [< 1400-1300 BC] the area was inhabited by Indo-European tribes – Simites, Canates-Hittites (1600-1200 BC). The Greeks increased their numbers during the Hellenistic period with settlements in mountainous Cappadocia (4th – 2nd century BC).

During this period, the dominant language of all the peoples living in the wider area was the Attic dialect, which gradually evolved into Koine or Hellenistic and then Cappadocian dialect for the next 2000 years. The successor of Alexander the Great Eumenes took over as satrap of the region and established dozens of Greek settlements, and distributed villages and towns to his officials. Then the Seleucids founded dozens of settlements and preferred the Cappadocians as capable and brave soldiers.

Cohabitation with other foreign-speaking nations in the region encouraged the development of small settlements, isolated from each other, in the form of types of border militias. Its main kings were the Ariarathean dynasty (Ariarathes Philadelphus, Pious Philopator), the Macedonian king Archelaus, Antiochus III, Tigranes the Great (Armenian rule), who deported thousands of Cappadocia Greeks to Mesopotamia.

With Tiberius, the Romans conquered Cappadocia and displaced its last Greek king, the Macedonian Archelaus. During the Roman conquest, the Cappadocians distinguished themselves in letters and arts with the neo-Pythagorean philosopher Apollonius of Tyana (1st century AD) and Aretaeus (81-138 AD), who distinguished himself as the greatest surgeon of antiquity,  who differentiated diabetes mellitus from diabetes insipidus, and first described the symptoms of asthma attack.

At the end of the 1st century the Cappadocians converted to Christianity. In the next 100 years until the beginning of 200 AD, the area was transformed into a bastion of monastic life, with the establishment and operation of dozens of monasteries. As a result of the devotion of the Cappadocians to Christianity, the greatest figures of the fathers of our Church emerged there, the three hierarchs of the Christian tradition: Basil the Great (c. 330-79) Bishop of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus (c.330-c.389 AD), as well as Gregory of Nyssa (c. 318-394). The fathers with their Greek education, through their work, were the ones who reconciled ancient Greek thought and culture with Christianity, from Homer and Hesiod to Neoplatonism.

From the 5th century all the languages of Anatolia fell into linguistic death and Greek dominated as Lingua Franca. The Cappadocian Byzantine Emperor Flavius Maurice Tiberius (582-602) expanded the borders of the empire, defeating the Sasanian Persians, while a few years later the Cappadocian Emperor Heraclius (610-641) established in 615 the Greek language as the official language of Byzantium.

With the spread of Islam at the end of the 7th century, Cappadocia became a stronghold military border of Hellenism and Byzantium, after the Islamization of Syria, and here the epics of Digenis Akritas were cultivated, as a product of the Byzantine-Arab wars.

From the 9th century, Cappadocia became a military zone of Byzantium and gave birth to the greatest military men of the empire, Phocas, Karpeas and others. Cappadocia also gave birth to the Christian sect of the Paulicians, whose deportation to the Balkans, transferred the epics of Digenis to the rest of Greece. The volcanic terrain of Cappadocia encouraged the creation of entire underground cities of refuge,  where they fled in times of danger from their enemies, initially the Arabs, in the 15th century the Mongols, but also in the 20th century the Turks. The inhabitants were called troglodytes, while their larger underground cities, which were more than 80 meters deep, operated in the settlements of Anakou and Malakopi.

In Cappadocia, more than 700 churches and 180 monasteries operated in the period 6th-13th century, which preserved the Greek language and functioned as the universities and ecclesiastical academies of the time. In the monasteries the bodies of the nobles were buried and embalmed. After the 10th century, Armenian refugees settled in Cappadocia and were transported by the Byzantines, resulting in serious ethnic conflicts between Armenians and Greeks.

On August 26, 1071, the Byzantines were defeated by the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Manzikert in Armenia, resulting in the invasion of Anatolia by the Turks and the transformation of its hitherto pure Greek-Christian population with Muslim and Turkish populations. This was followed by 300 years of conflict between the Greeks not only with the Turkish invaders but also with the Armenians, Syrian Monophysites and Kurds who often colluded with the Ottomans against the Orthodox Greeks out of religious revenge.

With the invasion of the Turkmen tribes, the Greek population of Anatolia was weakened, as a result of the mass Islamization of the Orthodox. By the early 15th century, 90% of Anatolia had been Islamized, while many Cappadocian Orthodox leaders gained large positions in the army of the Seltz Sultanate of the Rums, such as the amiras-general Vasilios Yagoupis.

Those who converted to Islam were considered “Turks» and were considered outcasts of Greek national self-consciousness. However, the Greeks remained demographically dominant in provincial Cappadocia for the next five hundred years. In the late 16th century parts of Cappadocia, and especially the ancient Greek region of Laranda (Karaman), became Turkish-speaking largely due to cultural mixing and assimilation, using Greek script. The same happened with Armenian and Jewish Turkish speakers. It is noted that in a population of 120,000 Cappadocians, 80% remained Greek-speaking, while there was a linguistic revival of Greek among the Karamanlides.

The isolation of the Greek settlements, the existence of monasteries and the socio-economic self-sufficiency preserved the Cappadocian dialect and the Greekness of the place names (Agios Prokopios>Prokopion (Urgup) until 1924.

With the conquest of Cyprus (1571) many Cappadocians were deported to the island. In the 17th century there were large migratory flows of Cappadocians to Constantinople, Smyrna and Kydonies, where they flourished socio-economically and transferred there traditional values of the East. The cities of Caesarea (Keyseri), Konya, Nigde were transformed into hotbeds for the cultivation of Greek letters, local literature, fairy tales and preservation of the Ancient Ionian Greek.

With the beginning of World War I, the Young Turks besieged the settlements and villages of Cappadocia. American and European literature estimates that 750,000 Anatolian Greeks were massacred and another 700,000 were exiled or deported. According to American and Japanese records, the total number of victims in Cappadocia and Ionia alone amounts to 397,000 and of the Pontic Greeks to 353,000.

In November 1916, Young Turk General Rafet Bey declared: “As in the case of the Armenians, we must also finish with the Greeks…” In September 1924, those who survived the persecution and genocide, 50,000 Cappadocian refugees, trek to Mersin and boarded ships to Patras, Piraeus and Thessaloniki, most of which have been looted en route by corrupt officials. In their villages and settlements, after the exchange, Turks, Islamized Greeks (Valaades), mainly from Macedonia, Islamized Balkan Slavs and Roma settled.

The Cappadocian dialect is a conservative dialect that preserves the characteristics of ancient Ionic, as well as the Pontic, mainly because they were not affected by the Venetian-Frankish influence, as the cities of Ionia and Greece were. Its special characteristics as a result of contact with Turkish are: loss of grammatical gender, quotation of the verb at the end of the sentence, phonetic harmony and  transferred Turkish words. The bilingual Cappadocians, for example the Kouvoukliotes, even spoke Turkish with heavy Greek phonemic rendering.

Every year thousands of descendants and children of Cappadocian refugees from all over Greece meet in Thessaloniki or Athens, followed by a two-day event with dances, songs and the remembrance of the customs and traditions brought with them by the parents-refugees from their martyred homelands. It is worth noting that thousands of Greek descendants of mixed marriages, daughters and sons, sisters and brothers of Cappadocians, who, according to the rules of exchange, remained behind in Anatolia, since they were not deemed exchangeable, either perished in the depth of four and five generations, or some of them still maintain contact and kinship events to perpetuate the tragedy of uprooting. 

*Professor Anastasios M. Tamis taught at Universities in Australia and abroad, was the creator and founding director of the Dardalis Archives of the Hellenic Diaspora and is currently the President of the Australian Institute of Macedonian Studies (AIMS)