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The Greeks (Greek: Έλληνες—"Hellenes") are a nation and ethnic group, who have populated Greece from the 17th century BC until the present day. Today, they are primarily found in the Greek peninsula of southeastern Europe and Cyprus. more...

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Until the early 20th century, Greeks were uniformly distributed between the Greek peninsula, the western coast of Asia Minor, Pontus and Constantinople, regions which coincided to a very large extent with the borders of the Byzantine Empire of the late 11th century and the areas of Greek colonization in the ancient world. In the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) in 1923, a large-scale population exchange between Greece and Turkey transferred and confined ethnic Greeks almost entirely into the borders of the modern Greek state, that is, in areas where groups of Greek-speaking Indo-Europeans first established themselves about 1500 BC. Other ethnic Greek populations can be found from Southern Italy to the Caucasus and diaspora communities in a number of other countries. Today, the vast majority of Greeks are at least nominally adherents of Greek Orthodoxy.

Identity of the Greek people

The Greek language has been spoken in the Greek peninsula (i.e. the southern Balkans) for over 3,500 years (and in western Asia Minor for a little less), and has an unbroken literary history which makes it one of the oldest surviving branches of the Indo-European family of languages. From ancient Greece the Greeks have inherited a sophisticated culture and language documented over almost three millennia. Modern Greek is recognizably the same as the language of Athens under Pericles in the 5th century BC. Few languages can demonstrate such continuity.

The definition of Greekness has varied through history, but by modern standards, the term "Greeks" has traditionally referred to any native speakers of the Greek language (whether Mycenaean, Byzantine or modern Greeks). Byzantine Greeks valued the classical tradition and considered themselves the Orthodox heirs of ancient Greece and Rome. The use of the older self-descriptive ethnic term "Hellenes" revived during the era of the neo-platonic philosopher Gemistus Pletho and the work of Ciriaco Pizzecolli. It became fairly common with the emergence, in the late 18th century, of the nation-state and its gradual consolidation, but it was not until the early 20th century that its popular use was firmly re-established.

The Greeks today are a nation in the meaning an ethnos (έθνος in Greek), defined more by a sense of sharing a common Greek culture and having a Greek mother tongue, than by citizenship, religion or by being subjects to any particular country. The word 'Greek' also has a wider meaning – because, especially in the past, it referred to all Eastern Orthodox Christian inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire – the millet-i Rum – irrespective of their ethnicity (see also Names of the Greeks).

Read more at Wikipedia.org