From the early days of history, the Greeks have asserted themselves as one of the most adventurous peoples. Even from before the first millenium BCE, they set off from their homeland in modern day Greece, to explore and settle across all of the known world. Over the next centuries, they would leave their cultural impact throughout the world, from the coast of Spain up until India. Many of those Greeks that settled foreign lands were lost to history- however, there still exist many communities outside of the modern Greek world that still maintain their roots and their Greek identity. One such case is that of the Rum, the Greek inhabitants of present-day Lebanon and Syria. These distinctly Greek people have been forgotten by the Western world, and their plight throughout history, and especially during the Syrian civil war, has gone unnoticed.
A Brief Historical Overview
The history of the Greeks in the Levant begins very early, from the 8th century BCE, when settlers from Euobeia founded present- day Al-Mina. However, large scale migration of Greeks into the region did not start until Alexander’s conquest of the Persian empire, at which point Syria and the Levant became parts of the Greek Kingdom of the Seleucids. Throughout the next centuries, many settlers from mainland Greece arrived in this region, and many of the indigenous inhabitants were quickly Hellenized and adopted the Greek culture. By the time of the Roman conquests, Greek had become the lingua franca of the region, and Greek was the dominant culture. This was also one of the first regions to be christianized, with most of the inhabitants adopting Christianity, and Syria was one of the core regions of Christianity before the spread of Islam.
Culture and Demographics
It is important to note here the origin of the name Rum. It comes from the days when all of the Greek world was conquered by the Romans. When the Roman Empire was split into a Latin West and Greek East, the Greeks of the Eastern Roman Empire, subsequently termed Byzantine Empire by historians, continued to call themselves Romioi (Ρωμιοί, i.e. Romans).When the Ottomans conquered the Eastern Roman Empire, they adopted the word Rum, meaning Roman, to refer to all their Christian subjects. In mainland Greece, this characterization gradually fell out of use to the characterization Greek, however in the Levant and Syria the term persisted and continues to be used by the Christian Greeks in the area. Most Rum belong to the Greek Orthodox denomination, though in 1724 a part of them formed the Greek Catholic Melkite denomination. These Christian denominations have only minor differences, and they both use Koine Greek as their liturgical language, and are baptized with Greek names. This contrasts them to the other Christian people of Syria and the Levant, that is the Roman Catholic Maronites, the Oriental Orthodox Armenians, and the
Syriac Christian Assyrians. The adherence of the Rum to the Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic church has preserved their Greek heritage throughout centuries of foreign rule .There is little information on the numbers of the Rum, but an estimation based on statistical data from 2011 gives about 4.3 million Greek Orthodox and 1.5 million Greek Catholic Rum. Of those, 1.3 million live in Syria, 0.8 million live in Lebanon, while the rest have scattered all over the world.
Present Situation
Ever since the start of the Syrian civil war, the Rum, along with the rest of the Christians of Syria, have been persecuted relentlessly. Operation Antioch, an independent group of activists who aim to raise awareness on the plight of the Rum, states in an interview on Al Masdar News that the Rum “have undergone a genocide in the hands of islamist terrorists ,funded and supported by Turkey and Saudi Arabia, as well as Western allies.” In their words, “The continuing war in Syria has destroyed our people. Ever since the conflict started, we have been characterized as friendly to the regime and infidels by the islamists, and we have been targeted for extermination by terrorist organizations such as FSA, Al-Nusra, and Daesh. Many Rum villages in Syria have been abandoned by our brothers who are forced to flee, afraid for their lives.
Our religious leaders have been abducted and murdered, our churches desecrated and destroyed. Even the cultural sites of our ancestors, dated to the time of the Greeks, have been targeted for destruction. Those of us with the courage to stay are forced to live in constant fear. Forced to live under inhuman conditions, without food or water, our people are forced to rely on humanitarian support from the government of Syria and International Organizations. Our only refuge is the region of Wadi al-Nasara, as our people are becoming the victim of a coordinated persecution against all Syrian Rums, Assyrians, Aramaians, and Armenians. For us, our own existence is at stake.”
According to TheGreek Observer, when these events started, thousands of Greek Christians hurried to the Greek Consulate authorities and applied for the Greek citizenship- however, those applications remained unanswered as the Greek embassy in Damascus had to cease operations in 2012 due to security concerns. The Rum priest, Father Antonios Malouf, in an event for Syria in Greece in 2019, stated in perfectly fluent Greek: “The Christians in Syria lived without discrimination, equal among equals…Unfortunately this spiritual and social development stopped abruptly, because of the war…the Christian population decreased from 22% to just 1%. Christians are refugees in the whole world…Rockets keep falling on the houses of those that stayed and on the schools of their children…They don’t want to leave their homeland. In the beginning of the war they were told that ships were waiting for them at the port to save them, as was said in the destruction of Smyrna. The jihadists attack cities and towns, destroy monuments and cultural sites…An entire village on the border with Lebanon was massacred and the dead bodies were thrown into a well until it was filled. Those that stayed and were beheaded constitute the new martyrs of the Church, those that didn’t betray their faith.
Everyone talks about refugees, but who talks of the Christians of Syria?”Those same people that are persecuted are not very different from modern-day Greeks. Even though they lost their Greek language in the 16th century, the Rum continue to adhere to Greek Orthodoxy and Greek Catholicism, and use Greek as their liturgical language. Their churches and monasteries are Greek, built during the Byzantine times. They are baptized with Greek names. They uphold Greek traditions. And most importantly, they feel Greek. It is important that the rest of the Greeks and the world realize who they are and what they are going through and raise awareness of the crisis they are facing, so these ancient people, that have withstood so many wars and conquests, will not perish.
SOURCE Ilias MeletopoulosStudent, National Technical University of Athens, Anthony Kriezis, Student, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
