Posted by gertrude on May 27, 2002 at 03:45:09:
In Reply to: Re: what about the influence of the franks/venetians on the islands? posted by kosta on May 27, 2002 at 00:38:23:
And just before anything else here is an extract from Coon's book I just found online:
"The title of this section is The Greeks, and not Greece, since from the mythical days of the Argonauts to the present, neither the peninsula of Hellas nor Ionia and the Aegean Islands have been large enough to hold the far-wandering Hellenes. Greek is a language and a civilization, the Greeks a people; the Greeks are the descendants of all the peoples who have adopted and retained that language and that civilization from classical times to the present. Some of these converts to Hellenicism were inhabitants of Asia Minor, others of Thrace and Byzantium, others of the lands bordering the Black Sea, especially the Crimea.
Into the peninsula of Greece itself, many thousands of Slavs wandered as immigrants during the maximum South Slavic expansion; the Turks brought colonists, including many Albanians, and whole districts of Boeotia and Attica and of other parts of Greece are today Albanian speaking. Romance-speaking shepherds, the Vlachs, have also made the slopes of the Pindus their seasonal pastures"