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Direct Link To This Post Topic: A question on Greeks
    Posted: 09-Apr-2005 at 13:37
Can Greeks have blue eyes and blonde hair?I met someone like that but I used to think that they were a mediterrainean race
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 09-Apr-2005 at 13:42
Sure. Greekness isn't determined by hair or eye colour. It is statiscitly less common there than elsewhere, but light hair and eyes are found all over Europe and the middle east, and in parts of Central Asia AFAIK. That it is more common in Scandinavia does not make it an exclusivly Scandinavian trait, much to the dismay of the Nordicist wierdos.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 09-Apr-2005 at 14:16

Originally posted by Cywr

That it is more common in Scandinavia does not make it an exclusivly Scandinavian trait, much to the dismay of the Nordicist wierdos.

And Hitler

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 09-Apr-2005 at 14:46
Who was a shortassed swarthy Austrian, or would they say, Alpine?
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 12-Apr-2005 at 09:37
Gazi, why can't Greeks have such features? We belong to the Indo-European family after all and it is not strange for a Mediterranean to be like that. The question is if original Turks can be like that since they should have mongoloid anthropological characteristics. However, there are blonde people in Turkey...
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 12-Apr-2005 at 09:43

Originally posted by Molossos

it is not strange for a Mediterranean to be like that.

Actually it's strange, it's just not impossible.

 

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 12-Apr-2005 at 09:49
Molossos, if a Greek happens to have blonde hair and blue eyes, it has nothing to do with language. The term Indo-European isn't related to this question and shouldn't even be mentioned. We're talking about genes, not linguistics.

Edited by Kuu-ukko
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 12-Apr-2005 at 12:45
Original Turks have Mongoloid features, high cheel bones, yellowish skin...... but you can find blonde, blue eyed Turks.
Yet instead of that, you find it interesting that the european characteristics can be found on a european people
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13-Apr-2005 at 03:24
Isn't there a lot of slavic blood in today's Greeks?

When the Roman Danube frontier collapsed after the 602 mutiny, the Slavs migrated en masse all the way down the Balkan peninsula, and only coastal districts (except for eastern Thrace) remained in Roman hands. 

It was in the early 800s before peninsular Greece was again under imperial rule, and even though there was a re-settlement campaign (from Anatolia) the ethnic composition of the Greek mainland had changed forever.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13-Apr-2005 at 04:13

That's Falmerayer's theory that has been rejected by the bulk of scientific community. "Sklaviniae", did not have a lasting or major effect (but they surelly had some). For more info try google...

 

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13-Apr-2005 at 04:23
Interesting....then I stand corrected, though I have read it in different sources.  Either way there is some Slavic impact.

Anyways, then did anything happen during the time the mainland slipped from imperial control?  And what about about the effects of the re-settlement campaign in the 9th century?


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13-Apr-2005 at 05:33

In short (I'm short in time, but it's indeed an interesting topic). Slavs could not take any fortified cities. They limited themselves in the countryside of Northern Greece and made incursions all the way to the Peloponnese. Most of them were pushed out later on, but other have stayed and mixed with the local population. In the course of time they were totally Hellenized. What reminds this period even to this day are some pleacenames all over the Greek mainland countryside.

It has to be made clear, that genetically there's no pure population anywhere in the world. Even more for the Balkans, which is a crossroad of civilizations and a melting pot of people.

 

 

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13-Apr-2005 at 16:26
Originally posted by Kuu-ukko

Molossos, if a Greek happens to have blonde hair and blue eyes, it has nothing to do with language. The term Indo-European isn't related to this question and shouldn't even be mentioned. We're talking about genes, not linguistics.


Indo European speaking people were white and many had blonde hair and blue eyes. The whole Indo European concept is very theoretical and nobody really has proven the original homeland of these tribes.

My Papoo had blondish hair and blue eyes, he was from Thrace. I had blonde hair when I was younger but I could have gotten that from my German side.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13-Apr-2005 at 17:32

Indo European speaking people were white and many had blonde hair and blue eyes.


How do we know this?
We don't even know where they came from, how the hell can we speculate on what they looked like?
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13-Apr-2005 at 17:56
As Yannis said Falmerayer's theory that has been rejected.
Of course the "modern Hellines aren't a pure "race" but he available data does demonstrate that any potential introgression into the Hellinic gene pool were minor and did not replace the indigenous people. Hence, Fallmerayer's thesis has been disproved.
I do not focus on the suggestion that we are not the righful heirs as Falmerayer suggests, but on his suggestion that the ancient Hellines underwent a natural extermination by consecutive waves of nomadic peoples and that what has come to be present-day Hellas is totally inhabited by Slavs, Albanians, and Hellinic-speaking Byzantine populations that have moved here from Anatolia.

Now as for the Slavs, I think there is some kind of mix up here.

The population wrongly considered to be Slavs are the Arvanites (also considered by some alleged historians to be Albanians), and the Vlachs also considered to be some kind of non-Hellinic people. All this, even though all historic records prove the opposite .

The Arvanites

Were a Hellinic race of people from the area of Epirus, their very name comes from the ancient Hellinic district of Arvonos.
Without getting into the details of 16th-18th cent. I'll only mention the letter of Jacomo Barbarrigo towards the Germans in 1479 where he mentions:

"The Arvanites and the Hellines are nothing more than the same people that hate every foreigner"
and the Venetian Senate in 1471 that declared :

"The major part of our mercenary troops are Hellines and Arvanites Hellines"


The Vlachs:

The theory of their origins to be somewhere in C.Europe, mention that this "migration" allegedly took place in (depends on the source) either during the 7th, 9th, 10th,12th, I've even seen a tzech source mention 17th cent.
But unfortunately for all that attempt to claim the Vlachs as their own people that "migrated" towards Hellas, the first written evidence of the Vlah' s language we have, is that of the Byzantine collumnists, Theophanis is and Theophylactus (579 A.D.) while the word Vlahs (Armani) was mentioned for the first time in 976 A.D. from Kedrinos.

You see Vlahs were not known with this name but with the word "Armani or Aromanoi". This word derives from the "Romanus lives" and it is related to the decree of Karakala (Edictum Antonianium), 212 A.D. According to this decree, the right of the Roman citizen was passed on to all the residents of the whole Roman province.

If we were to accept that they were a foreign (non-Hellinic) people, why is there no mention of them in various Turkish or European sources, as we find the Slavs, Bulgarians and Albanians clearly being destinguished from the Hellines of Byzantium?
See: Pouqueville (Voyage en Grece) Leak (Travels in Northern Greece), Heuzey (1858) Kouzinery (Voyages en Macedoine) Berard (Turkish domination and Hellenism), Wace- Thomson (Nomads of Balkans)

Slavs (Sklavines)

Anyway, most sources agree on the Slavic enclaves "Sklavinies" and we do find Byzantine sources mentioning them especially in west Macedonia and Thessaly. But these sources also mention the integration of the Slav into the Byzantine system (not the Hellinic society), by hellenising them. Many Byzantine sources mention military expeditions against the Slavs in the Hellinic area, which started from the mid-7th c and resulted in the gradual reestablishment of Byzantine authority.

But there are also many souces :

Maria Nystazopoulou - Pelekidou, "Les Slaves dans l' Empire Byzantin", The 17th International Byzantine Congress. Major Papers (Washington D.C., August 3-8, 1986) New York 1986, pp. 345-367, with the bibliography and the quotation of the sources; for the policy of Byzantium, see p. 355.

Mention that, not only did Byzantium attempt to subjugate the new settlers but also forcibly transfered Slavic populations to Anatolia in order to achieve 2 things. 1) Slavic element in the Hellenic area was arithmetically weakened, and 2) assimilation was facilitated, since Slavs who were transferred to Anatolia found themselves among a flourishing and numerous Hellinic population.

This demographic measure was even applied vice-versa, that is, Hellinic populations from Anatolia were transplanted into Slavic populations ("epi tas Sklabinias") in order to reinforce the Hellinic element in these areas. Thus we learn, for example, that emperor Nicephorus (802-811) established in the northern Hellinic area populations which he transferred from all administrative districts ("ek pantos thematos") of Anatolia.

Beside the measures taken by the Byzantines, it is intering enough to note that during the time of Stefan Dusan (1331-1354), the Serbs expanded their domination into Makedonia but there is not one source to mention that the conquered population was Slavic. The Serbian expansion is mentioned in contemporary sources, as a conquest of Hellinic regions.

It is also remarkable that a few years later, during the first siege of Thessaloniki by the Turks (1383-1387), King Manuel Palaeologus, in his speech "Admonition to the people of Thessaloniki", urges the inhabitants to fight to death, fot this is what their historical tradition decrees: "because we are Romioi (= Byzantine Hellines) and our country is the one of Philip and Alexander".
This means that he, as well as the inhabitants, were conscious of the historical continuity of Hellenism and of their Hellinic origin which had its roots in ancient times.

See B. Laourdas, Ο "Συμβουλευτ ;ικός πρός τούς Θεσσαλονικ είς" τού Μανουήλ Κο_ 6;νηνού [= Manuel Komnenos' speech "Admonition to the people of Thessaloniki"], Makedonika 3 (1953-55), p. 297, 21-22; Cf. also p. 291, 1.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13-Apr-2005 at 22:14
Consider that if both blonde hair and blue eyes are multiple-alle traits and recessive for the most part they are not especially common traits. I've never seen a Greek with those features. And with contact lenses and hair colorings factored in I just give up.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-Apr-2005 at 07:50
eaglecap, there is no gene for languages. Besides, how the heck aren't Persians or Indians blonde if Indo-Europeans? The people who originally spoke proto-Indo-European MAY have resembled southern Russians (the alleged homeland proto-IE), but don't know that for sure. In my opinion, proto-IE-speaking people can't have been blonde, since it isn't common to have blonde even today.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-Apr-2005 at 09:04
I've never seen a Greek with those features.


I have. Not common, but present none-the-less.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-Apr-2005 at 11:03

Originally posted by Kuu-ukko

eaglecap, there is no gene for languages. Besides, how the heck aren't Persians or Indians blonde if Indo-Europeans? The people who originally spoke proto-Indo-European MAY have resembled southern Russians (the alleged homeland proto-IE), but don't know that for sure. In my opinion, proto-IE-speaking people can't have been blonde, since it isn't common to have blonde even today.

Not languages.Most have the common ancestry

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-Apr-2005 at 23:49
Originally posted by Kuu-ukko

eaglecap, there is no gene for languages. Besides, how the heck aren't Persians or Indians blonde if Indo-Europeans? The people who originally spoke proto-Indo-European MAY have resembled southern Russians (the alleged homeland proto-IE), but don't know that for sure. In my opinion, proto-IE-speaking people can't have been blonde, since it isn't common to have blonde even today.


I did not say that but all the archaeological evidence I have seen points to the fact that these Indo European tribes were white, we are only talking about 5-6,000 years ago. This whole concept is based on theory so it has not been proven. Look at the Tarim Basin mummies, they had blonde and red hair. The indo European tribes who migrated into India and Persia have intermixed with other ethnic groups since then. But, if you look at the cast system in India the Brahma caste tend to have fairer skin.
The Indo European tribes (Greek speaking) migrated into the southern Balkans also intermixed with pre Greek people we call; Helladic, Cycladic and Minoan. Of course, we know that the Balkans have been invaded many times since then.
My papoo had blondish hair and blue eyes. Funny, no body on my Anglo side had blue eyes, that I know of.
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