Greek Diaspora

The Greek diaspora or Hellenic diaspora, also known as Omogenia (Greek: Ομογένεια), refers to the communities of Greek people living outside the traditional Greek homelands, but more commonly in other parts of the Balkans, in southern Russia and Ukraine, Asia Minor, the region of Pontus (Pontic Greeks), as well as Eastern Anatolia and neighbouring Georgia and the South Caucasus (see Caucasus Greeks, Greeks in Russia, and Greeks in Georgia). Members of the diaspora can be identified as those who themselves, or whose ancestors, migrated from the Greek homelands.

The Greek diaspora is one of the oldest and historically most significant in the world, with an almost unbroken presence from Homeric times to present. Examples of its influence range from the instrumental role played by Greek expatriates in the emergence of the Renaissance, various liberational and nationalist movements implicated in the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, to commercial developments like the commissioning of the world's first supertankers by shipping magnates Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos.

In ancient times, the trading and colonising activities of the Greek tribes from the Balkans and Asia Minor spread people of Greek culture, religion and language around the Mediterranean and Black Sea basins, establishing Greek city states in Sicily, southern Italy, northern Libya, eastern Spain, the south of France, and the Black Sea coasts. Greeks founded more than 400 colonies.Alexander the Great's conquest of the Achaemenid Empire marked the beginning of the Hellenistic period, which was characterized by a new wave of Greek colonization in Asia and Africa, with Greek ruling classes established in Egypt, southwest Asia and northwest India.

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