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98-633: Turkish majorities: The Cretan Muslims or Cretan Turks ( Greek : Τουρκοκρητικοί or Τουρκοκρήτες , Tourkokritikí or Tourkokrítes ; Turkish : Giritli , Girit Türkleri , or Giritli Türkler ; Arabic : أتراك كريت ) were the Muslim inhabitants of the island of Crete . Their descendants settled principally in Turkey , the Dodecanese Islands under Italian administration (part of Greece since 1947), Syria (notably in

196-577: A basis for coinages: anthropology , photography , telephony , isomer , biomechanics , cinematography , etc. Together with Latin words , they form the foundation of international scientific and technical vocabulary ; for example, all words ending in -logy ('discourse'). There are many English words of Greek origin . Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European language family. The ancient language most closely related to it may be ancient Macedonian , which, by most accounts,

294-742: A disgrace. Their community was close-knit and entirely endogamous until the Lebanese Civil War , when many of them were forced to migrate and the community was dispersed. Cretan Muslims constitute 60% of Al Hamidiyah 's population. The community is very much concerned with maintaining its culture. The knowledge of the spoken Greek language is remarkably good and their contact with their historical homeland has been possible by means of satellite television and relatives. Greek language Greek ( Modern Greek : Ελληνικά , romanized :  Elliniká , [eliniˈka] ; Ancient Greek : Ἑλληνική , romanized :  Hellēnikḗ )

392-558: A fairly stable set of consonantal contrasts . The main phonological changes occurred during the Hellenistic and Roman period (see Koine Greek phonology for details): In all its stages, the morphology of Greek shows an extensive set of productive derivational affixes , a limited but productive system of compounding and a rich inflectional system. Although its morphological categories have been fairly stable over time, morphological changes are present throughout, particularly in

490-560: A faster, more convenient cursive writing style with the use of ink and quill . The Greek alphabet consists of 24 letters, each with an uppercase ( majuscule ) and lowercase ( minuscule ) form. The letter sigma has an additional lowercase form (ς) used in the final position of a word: In addition to the letters, the Greek alphabet features a number of diacritical signs : three different accent marks ( acute , grave , and circumflex ), originally denoting different shapes of pitch accent on

588-540: A foreign language. It is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, " Homeric Greek is probably closer to Demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English ". Greek is spoken today by at least 13 million people, principally in Greece and Cyprus along with a sizable Greek-speaking minority in Albania near

686-675: A further insurgency in 1889 and the collapse of the Pact of Halepa arrangements. The international powers allowed the Ottoman authorities to send troops to the island and restore order but the Sultan Abdulhamid II used the occasion for ruling the island by martial law. This action led to international sympathy for the Cretan Christians and to a loss of any remaining acquiescence among them for continued Ottoman rule. When

784-718: A small insurgency began in September 1895, it quickly spiralled out of control and by the summer of 1896, the Ottoman forces had lost military control over most of the island. A new insurrection that began in 1897 led to a war between Greece and the Ottoman Empire . The Great Powers dispatched a multinational naval force, the International Squadron , to Crete in February 1897, and by late March 1897 it brought Cretan insurgent and Greek Army operations against

882-704: A surprisingly wide array of herbs and other plant-based raw materials. While they have certainly not introduced olive oil and herbs to their compatriots, Cretan Muslims have greatly extended the knowledge and paved the way for a more varied use of these products. Their predilection for herbs, some of which could be considered as unusual ones, has also been the source of some jokes. The Giritli chain of restaurants in Istanbul , Ankara and Bodrum , and Ayşe Ün's "Girit Mutfağı" ( Cretan Cuisine ) eateries in İzmir are indicative references in this regard. Occasional although intrinsically inadequate care has also been demonstrated by

980-709: A synthesis between the Muslim landowners and the emergent Christian commercial classes. His rule was generally cautious, pro- British , and he tried harder to win the support of the Christians (having married the daughter of a priest and allowed her to remain Christian) than the Muslims. In 1834, however, a Cretan committee had already been founded in Athens to work for the union of the island with Greece . In 1840, Egypt

1078-485: A temporary arrangement before they were appointed to some appropriate position. It was a kind of appanage given to increasing number of members of the Ottoman elite for tax farming . Instead to resolving the Porte's problems, the institutions of arpalik introduced new, even bigger ones. The exact duties of the arpalik holders were never precisely defined by the Ottoman government, which caused frequent tensions between

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1176-399: A verdict from a local judge in accordance to imperial law. Their duties were to protect peasants and persons in their territory and to join the imperial army during campaigns. The sultan gave Sipahis vineyards and a meadow for the needs of their families, retainers and horses. One of the main conditions imposed by the state was that a Timar holder did not own the land, as ownership was held by

1274-804: Is also found in Bulgaria near the Greek-Bulgarian border. Greek is also spoken worldwide by the sizable Greek diaspora which has notable communities in the United States , Australia , Canada , South Africa , Chile , Brazil , Argentina , Russia , Ukraine , the United Kingdom , and throughout the European Union , especially in Germany . Historically, significant Greek-speaking communities and regions were found throughout

1372-773: Is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic branch within the Indo-European language family. It is native to Greece , Cyprus , Italy (in Calabria and Salento ), southern Albania , and other regions of the Balkans , Caucasus , the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor , and the Eastern Mediterranean . It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system

1470-479: Is an Indo-European language, but also includes a number of borrowings from the languages of the populations that inhabited Greece before the arrival of Proto-Greeks, some documented in Mycenaean texts ; they include a large number of Greek toponyms . The form and meaning of many words have changed. Loanwords (words of foreign origin) have entered the language, mainly from Latin, Venetian , and Turkish . During

1568-405: Is difficult to estimate the proportion which became Muslim, as Ottoman cizye tax records count only Christians: estimates range from 30 to 40% By the late 18th century, as many as 30% of the islanders may have been Muslim. The Muslim population declined through the 19th century, and by the last Ottoman census, in 1881, Muslims were only 26% of the population, concentrated in the three large towns on

1666-501: Is perhaps the immediate predecessor of the Timar system. However, it was not until the re-emergence of the empire under Mehmed I in 1413 that a tenure system that was distinctly Timar was developed. Before the collapse of the empire by Timur in 1402, Bayezid had granted quasi-Timar holdings to his own servants. With the reunification of the Ottoman lands under a Sultan , these men would once again have legal title to their holdings. Over

1764-519: Is protected and promoted officially as a regional and minority language in Armenia, Hungary , Romania, and Ukraine. It is recognized as a minority language and protected in Turkey by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne . The phonology , morphology , syntax , and vocabulary of the language show both conservative and innovative tendencies across the entire attestation of the language from the ancient to

1862-821: Is sometimes called aljamiado , as when Romance languages are written in the Arabic alphabet. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Greek: Transcription of the example text into Latin alphabet : Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English: Proto-Greek Mycenaean Ancient Koine Medieval Modern Timar In the Ottoman Empire,

1960-526: Is spoken by at least 13.5 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey , and the many other countries of the Greek diaspora . Greek roots have been widely used for centuries and continue to be widely used to coin new words in other languages; Greek and Latin are the predominant sources of international scientific vocabulary . Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around

2058-763: Is still used internationally for the writing of Ancient Greek . In Greek, the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point (•), known as the ano teleia ( άνω τελεία ). In Greek the comma also functions as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό,τι ( ó,ti , 'whatever') from ότι ( óti , 'that'). Ancient Greek texts often used scriptio continua ('continuous writing'), which means that ancient authors and scribes would write word after word with no spaces or punctuation between words to differentiate or mark boundaries. Boustrophedon , or bi-directional text,

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2156-650: Is the Greek alphabet , which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary . The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin , Cyrillic , Coptic , Gothic , and many other writing systems. The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world. Beginning with

2254-477: Is written down and codified in a narrative called ( Kanunname ) that mediated and resolved contradictions especially between those two non-Islamic legal traditions – local and imperial – upon which the Ottomans based their dominion 3) officials consult with local grandees and proceeded from village to village to inspect and evaluate land and other holdings 4) draw up results of the survey in a register prefaced by

2352-785: The Cretan Greek dialect, but the language of administration and the prestige language for the Muslim urban upper classes was Ottoman Turkish . In the folk tradition, however, Cretan Greek was used to express Muslims' "Islamic—often Bektashi —sensibility". Today, the highest number of the Turkocretan descendants can be found in Ayvalık . Those who left Crete in the late 19th and early 20th centuries settled largely along Turkey's Aegean and Mediterranean coast. Alongside Ayvalık and Cunda Island , they settled in İzmir , Çukurova , Bodrum , Side , Mudanya , Adana and Mersin . Starting in 1645,

2450-495: The Eastern Mediterranean , in what are today Southern Italy , Turkey , Cyprus , Syria , Lebanon , Israel , Palestine , Egypt , and Libya ; in the area of the Black Sea , in what are today Turkey, Bulgaria , Romania , Ukraine , Russia , Georgia , Armenia , and Azerbaijan ; and, to a lesser extent, in the Western Mediterranean in and around colonies such as Massalia , Monoikos , and Mainake . It

2548-516: The Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ), but little definitive evidence has been found. In addition, Albanian has also been considered somewhat related to Greek and Armenian, and it has been proposed that they all form a higher-order subgroup along with other extinct languages of the ancient Balkans; this higher-order subgroup is usually termed Palaeo-Balkan , and Greek has a central position in it. Linear B , attested as early as

2646-511: The Kanunname that listed the names of all the towns, villages and populations, what they produced and expected revenues. Based on these fiscal projections, the Sultan would distribute the land and villages to the soldiers who had participated in the conquest. Initially the candidates for Timar were recommended individually to the Sultan. Upon receiving this recommendation, the Sultan commanded

2744-573: The Ottoman Empire gradually took Crete from the Republic of Venice , which had ruled it since 1204. In the final major defeat , Candia (modern Iraklion) fell to the Ottomans in 1669 (though some offshore islands remained Venetian until 1715 ). Crete remained part of the Ottoman Empire until 1897. The fall of Crete was not accompanied by an influx of Muslims. At the same time, many Cretans converted to Islam – more than in any other part of

2842-648: The Sultan for these grants in reward for participating in the growing number of campaigns. Furthermore, Timars were being offered to volunteers and members of the pre-Ottoman military class for their loyalty and service to the Sultan. In order to meet this new demand, existing Timars were turned into jointly held unites, or divided into shares. This growing demand also forced the Ottoman Sultan’s to engage in further wars of conquest in neighbouring countries thus creating Timars through new surveys. This however, also increased

2940-492: The nominal and verbal systems. The major change in the nominal morphology since the classical stage was the disuse of the dative case (its functions being largely taken over by the genitive ). The verbal system has lost the infinitive , the synthetically -formed future, and perfect tenses and the optative mood . Many have been replaced by periphrastic ( analytical ) forms. Pronouns show distinctions in person (1st, 2nd, and 3rd), number (singular, dual , and plural in

3038-618: The "fatherland" did not always take place without pain, including that of being subjected to slurs as in other cases involving immigration of people. According to Peter Loizos, they were often relegated to the poorest land: They were briefly feted on arrival, as 'Turks' 'returning' to the Turkish heartland... like the Asia Minor Christians seeking to settle on land in northern Greece, the Muslim refugees found that local people, sometimes government officials, had already occupied

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3136-421: The 18th century. Personal, mystical, fantastic themes abound in the works of these men of letters, reflecting the dynamism of the cultural life in the island. A taste and echo of this tradition can be perceived in the verses below by Giritli Sırrı Pasha (1844–1895); Fidânsın nev-nihâl-i hüsn ü ânsın âfet-i cânsın Gül âşık bülbül âşıkdır sana, bir özge cânânsın which were certainly addressed to his wife,

3234-789: The 19th century caused many Muslims to leave Crete, especially during the Cretan Revolt (1897–1898) , and after Crete's unilateral declaration of union with Greece in 1908. Finally, after the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922 and the Turkish War of Independence , the remaining Muslims of Crete were compulsorily exchanged for the Greek Christians of Anatolia under the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). At all periods, most Cretan Muslims were Greek-speaking, using

3332-470: The 3rd millennium BC, or possibly earlier. The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language . Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now-extinct Anatolian languages . The Greek language is conventionally divided into

3430-521: The Cretan Christians to Turkey with them: One of the significant aspects of Giritli culture is that this Islamic—often Bektashi—sensibility is expressed through the Greek language. [There has been] some confusion about their cultural identity, and an assumption is often made that their music was somehow more "Turkish" than "Cretan". In my view this assumption is quite wrong.... But certain instruments were more often used by Christians: there are few cases of Muslim Cretan lyra -players compared to Christians:

3528-547: The Cretan Muslim writer Mustafa Olpak , whose biographies in retrospect from the shores of Istanbul, Crete and Kenya follow his grandfathers who were initially brought to the Ottoman Empire as slaves to Crete. ( see below: Further reading ). A study by one Greek researcher counts six Cretan Muslims who engaged themselves into music in Cretan Greek dialect. The Cretans brought the musical tradition they shared with

3626-486: The Greek alphabet since approximately the 9th century BC. It was created by modifying the Phoenician alphabet , with the innovation of adopting certain letters to represent the vowels. The variant of the alphabet in use today is essentially the late Ionic variant, introduced for writing classical Attic in 403 BC. In classical Greek, as in classical Latin, only upper-case letters existed. The lower-case Greek letters were developed much later by medieval scribes to permit

3724-425: The Greek language are often emphasized. Although Greek has undergone morphological and phonological changes comparable to those seen in other languages, never since classical antiquity has its cultural, literary, and orthographic tradition been interrupted to the extent that one can speak of a new language emerging. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than

3822-495: The Greek language was the Cypriot syllabary (also a descendant of Linear A via the intermediate Cypro-Minoan syllabary ), which is closely related to Linear B but uses somewhat different syllabic conventions to represent phoneme sequences. The Cypriot syllabary is attested in Cyprus from the 11th century BC until its gradual abandonment in the late Classical period, in favor of the standard Greek alphabet. Greek has been written in

3920-629: The Greek verb have likewise remained largely the same over the course of the language's history but with significant changes in the number of distinctions within each category and their morphological expression. Greek verbs have synthetic inflectional forms for: Many aspects of the syntax of Greek have remained constant: verbs agree with their subject only, the use of the surviving cases is largely intact (nominative for subjects and predicates, accusative for objects of most verbs and many prepositions, genitive for possessors), articles precede nouns, adpositions are largely prepositional, relative clauses follow

4018-502: The Greek world. Various explanations have been given for this, including the disruption of war, the possibility of receiving a timar (for those who went over to the Ottomans during the war), Latin - Orthodox dissension, avoidance of the head-tax ( cizye ) on non-Muslims , the increased social mobility of Muslims, and the opportunity that Muslims had of joining the paid militia (which the Cretans also aspired to under Venetian rule). It

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4116-566: The Greek-Albanian border. A significant percentage of Albania's population has knowledge of the Greek language due in part to the Albanian wave of immigration to Greece in the 1980s and '90s and the Greek community in the country. Prior to the Greco-Turkish War and the resulting population exchange in 1923 a very large population of Greek-speakers also existed in Turkey , though very few remain today. A small Greek-speaking community

4214-462: The Julian calendar) arrival of Prince George of Greece and Denmark as the first High commissioner of an autonomous Cretan State , although still under the suzerainty of the Sultan, effectively detached Crete from the Ottoman Empire. The island's Muslim population dropped dramatically because of these changes, with many emigrating to other parts of the Ottoman Empire. From the summer of 1896 until

4312-422: The Muslim community of the island a proper status, many others left. The Greco-Turkish War (1919–22) and the ensuing population exchange is the final chapter among the root causes that shaped these nuances. Among contributions made by Cretan Muslims to the Turkish culture in general, the first to be mentioned should be their particular culinary traditions based on consumption at high-levels of olive oil and of

4410-490: The Organic Law into a constitutional settlement known as the Pact of Halepa . Crete became a semi-independent parliamentary state within the Ottoman Empire under a Greek Orthodox Governor. A number of the senior "Christian Pashas" including Photiades Pasha and Adossides Pasha ruled the island in the 1880s, presiding over a parliament in which liberals and conservatives contended for power. Disputes between these led to

4508-570: The Ottoman Empire. After a violent riot by Cretan Muslims against Cretan Christians and British occupation forces on 6 September 1898 (25 August according to the Julian calendar then in use on Crete, which was 12 days behind the modern Gregorian calendar during the 19th century), the Admirals Council ordered all Ottoman forces to leave Crete, and the last of them were evacuated on 6 November 1898. The 21 December 1898 (9 December according to

4606-467: The Ottoman state. Another essential condition was that Timars could not be inherited but it was not uncommon for a Timar to be reassigned to a son provided they performed military service. Holding a Timar was contingent on active military service and if a Sipahi failed to participate in military service for seven years he lost his authority over the land grant. Nevertheless, a Sipahi retained his title and could be eligible for another Timar if he remained in

4704-707: The Ottomans in Crete to a halt by forcing the Greek Army to abandon the island, bombarding insurgent forces, placing sailors and marines ashore, and instituting a blockade of Crete and key ports in Greece. Meanwhile, the International Squadron's senior admirals formed an "Admirals Council" that temporarily governed Crete pending a resolution of the Cretan uprising, and the Admirals Council eventually decided that Crete should become an autonomous state within

4802-509: The Porte and the provinces. This tensions probably additionally contributed to the decay of the traditional timar system because it left sipahis out of the clear chain of command . By the end of the sixteenth century the Timar system of land tenure had begun its unrecoverable decline. In 1528, the Timariot constituted the largest single division in the Ottoman army. Sipahis were responsible for their own expenses, including provision during

4900-526: The Sultan’s military campaigns who would be eligible for a Timar grant. This made it so competing groups formed and were motivated to fight for the Sultan’s favouritism and patronage. By the time Mehmed II (r. 1451–1481) reigned over the Ottoman Empire the number of candidates eligible for Timar grants had fallen substantially. There was a growing expectation among the Janissary soldiers and other Kuls of

4998-729: The Timar system and other apparatuses of provincial administration. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the surveying and distribution of conquered territory among the Sipahi class had become a very complicated and highly bureaucratic process. In the survey, known as the Tapu-tahrirs , all the fiscal information about the territory would be collected and divided into Timar. The process went as follows: 1) appoint administrator ( emin – accompanied by clerk ( katip ) and regional judge kadı ) collected available documentation about land and building ownership and local taxes 2) information

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5096-404: The acute during the late 20th century, and it has only been retained in typography . After the writing reform of 1982, most diacritics are no longer used. Since then, Greek has been written mostly in the simplified monotonic orthography (or monotonic system), which employs only the acute accent and the diaeresis. The traditional system, now called the polytonic orthography (or polytonic system),

5194-402: The ancient language; singular and plural alone in later stages), and gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and decline for case (from six cases in the earliest forms attested to four in the modern language). Nouns, articles, and adjectives show all the distinctions except for a person. Both attributive and predicative adjectives agree with the noun. The inflectional categories of

5292-535: The authorities in the first years of the Turkish Republic for settling Cretan Muslims in localities where vineyards left by the departed Greeks were found, since this capital was bound to be lost in the hands of cultivators with no prior knowledge of viniculture . In the field of maritime industries , the pioneer of gulet boats construction that became a vast industry in Bodrum in our day, Ziya Güvendiren

5390-581: The best land and housing. The same author depicts a picture where they did not share the "Ottoman perceptions of certain crafts and trades as being of low status", so more entrepreneurial opportunities were open to them. Like others who did not speak Turkish, they suffered during the " Citizens Speak Turkish! " campaign which started in 1928. "Arabs, Circassians, Cretan Muslims, and Kurds in the country were being targeted for not speaking Turkish. In Mersin, for instance, 'Kurds, Cretans, Arabs and Syrians' were being fined for speaking languages other than Turkish.". In

5488-613: The campaigns, their equipment, providing auxiliary men ( cebelu ) and valets ( gulam ). With the onset of new military technologies, particularly the gun, the Sipahis, who had once made up the backbone of the Ottoman army, were becoming obsolete. The long and costly wars which the Ottoman Sultans waged against the Habsburgs and Iranians had demanded the formation of a modern standing and professional army. Therefore, cash

5586-557: The community left Crete between 1866 and 1897, on the outbreak of the last Cretan uprising against the Ottoman Empire, which ended the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 . Sultan Abdul Hamid II provided Cretan Muslim families who fled the island with refuge on the Levantine coast. The new settlement was named Hamidiye after the sultan. Many Cretan Muslims of Lebanon somewhat managed to preserve their identity and language. Unlike neighboring communities, they are monogamous and consider divorce

5684-569: The delegated powers. They had the right to collect certain parts of the tax revenue from arable lands in certain localities in return for service to the state. They were responsible for supervising their Timar territory and the way it was cultivated and possessed by peasants. The Sipahi was rewarded if he procured the settlement of vacant land, but punished if he caused the abandonment of cultivated land. Timar holders had police authority to pursue and arrest wrongdoers within their territories. However, they could not enforce penalties until they received

5782-404: The early 19th century that was used for literary and official purposes in the newly formed Greek state. In 1976, Dimotiki was declared the official language of Greece, after having incorporated features of Katharevousa and thus giving birth to Standard Modern Greek , used today for all official purposes and in education . The historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of

5880-550: The end of hostilities in 1898, Cretan Muslims remained under siege in the four coastal cities, where massacres against them took place. Subsequent waves of emigration followed as the island was united by stages with Greece . In 1908, the Cretan deputies declared union with Greece , which was internationally recognized after the Balkan Wars in 1913. Under the Treaty of London , Sultan Mehmed V relinquished his formal rights to

5978-618: The epics of Homer , ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting importance in the European canon . Greek is also the language in which many of the foundational texts in science and philosophy were originally composed. The New Testament of the Christian Bible was also originally written in Greek. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world , the Greek texts and Greek societies of antiquity constitute

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6076-452: The following periods: In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia : the coexistence of vernacular and archaizing written forms of the language. What came to be known as the Greek language question was a polarization between two competing varieties of Modern Greek: Dimotiki , the vernacular form of Modern Greek proper, and Katharevousa , meaning 'purified', a compromise between Dimotiki and Ancient Greek developed in

6174-439: The infinitive entirely (employing a raft of new periphrastic constructions instead) and uses participles more restrictively. The loss of the dative led to a rise of prepositional indirect objects (and the use of the genitive to directly mark these as well). Ancient Greek tended to be verb-final, but neutral word order in the modern language is VSO or SVO. Modern Greek inherits most of its vocabulary from Ancient Greek, which in turn

6272-415: The island followed by the erection of blockhouses or local fortresses across the whole of it. More importantly, he designed an Organic Law which gave the Cretan Christians equal (in practice, because of their superior numbers, majority) control of local administration. At the time of the Congress of Berlin in the summer of 1878, there was a further uprising, which was speedily halted through the adaptation of

6370-462: The island suffered severe losses, due to conflicts, plague or famine. In the 1830s, Crete was an impoverished and backward island. Since the Ottoman sultan, Mahmud II , had no army of his own available, he was forced to seek the aid of his rebellious vassal and rival, Kavalalı Mehmed Ali Pasha of Egypt , who sent troops to the island. Starting in 1832, the island was administered for two decades by Mustafa Naili Pasha , whose rule attempted to create

6468-491: The island. The Cretan Muslims still remaining were forced to leave Crete under the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. In Turkey , some descendants of this population continued to speak a form of Cretan Greek dialect until recently. Turks in Crete produced a varied literary output, leading one researcher to define a "Cretan School" which counts twenty-one poets who evolved within Ottoman Divan poetry or Turkish folk literature traditions, especially in

6566-414: The late 15th century BC, was the first script used to write Greek. It is basically a syllabary , which was finally deciphered by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in the 1950s (its precursor, Linear A , has not been deciphered and most likely encodes a non-Greek language). The language of the Linear B texts, Mycenaean Greek , is the earliest known form of Greek. Another similar system used to write

6664-458: The membership of Greece and Cyprus in the European Union, Greek is one of the organization's 24 official languages . Greek is recognized as a minority language in Albania, and used co-officially in some of its municipalities, in the districts of Gjirokastër and Sarandë . It is also an official minority language in the regions of Apulia and Calabria in Italy. In the framework of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages , Greek

6762-416: The military class and participated in military campaigns. Due to the nature of the documentation of the early history of the Ottomans it is very difficult to assign the Timar system a concrete date. Elements of the Timar system however can be seen to have their origins in Pre-Islamic antiquity (Ancient Middle Eastern Empires, Rome , Byzantium , and pre-Islamic Iran ). Pronoia of the late Byzantine era

6860-441: The modern period. The division into conventional periods is, as with all such periodizations, relatively arbitrary, especially because, in all periods, Ancient Greek has enjoyed high prestige, and the literate borrowed heavily from it. Across its history, the syllabic structure of Greek has varied little: Greek shows a mixed syllable structure, permitting complex syllabic onsets but very restricted codas. It has only oral vowels and

6958-437: The next fifty years this system of land tenure was largely expanded and standardized. After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottomans turned once more to the familiar policy of expansion through conquest. With the period of consolidation that followed there was a move towards total annexation and assimilation of the provinces into the Ottoman system. This meant the elimination of local dynasties and replacing them with

7056-577: The north coast and the southern town of Ierapetra remained in Ottoman hands. The Ottoman approach to the "Cretan question" was that, if Crete was lost, the next line of defense would have to be the Dardanelles , as indeed it was the case later. The Ottoman Grand Vizier, Mehmed Emin Aali Pasha arrived in the island in October 1867 and set in progress a low profile district-by-district reconquest of

7154-514: The north coast, and in Monofatsi . People who claim descent from Cretan Muslims are still found in several Muslim countries today, and principally in Turkey . Between 1821 and 1828, during the Greek War of Independence , the island was the scene of repeated hostilities. Most Muslims were driven into the large fortified towns on the north coast and both the Muslim and Christian populations of

7252-399: The noun they modify and relative pronouns are clause-initial. However, the morphological changes also have their counterparts in the syntax, and there are also significant differences between the syntax of the ancient and that of the modern form of the language . Ancient Greek made great use of participial constructions and of constructions involving the infinitive, and the modern variety lacks

7350-403: The number of candidates for Timar grants. The solution to this crisis took two forms: more than one Sipahi holding a single Timar and instead of receiving an entire village, Sipahis were given shares in many villages in order to make up their Timar. These solutions likely had further implications than just meeting the demands of a growing demographic. The Ottoman government had a policy of keeping

7448-600: The objects of study of the discipline of Classics . During antiquity , Greek was by far the most widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world . It eventually became the official language of the Byzantine Empire and developed into Medieval Greek . In its modern form , Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union . It

7546-706: The older periods of Greek, loanwords into Greek acquired Greek inflections, thus leaving only a foreign root word. Modern borrowings (from the 20th century on), especially from French and English, are typically not inflected; other modern borrowings are derived from Albanian , South Slavic ( Macedonian / Bulgarian ) and Eastern Romance languages ( Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian ). Greek words have been widely borrowed into other languages, including English. Example words include: mathematics , physics , astronomy , democracy , philosophy , athletics , theatre, rhetoric , baptism , evangelist , etc. Moreover, Greek words and word elements continue to be productive as

7644-461: The poet-composer Leyla Saz , herself a notable figure of Turkish literature and Turkish Classical Music . Recently, a number of books written by descendants of Cretan Muslims in the form of novelized family souvenirs with scenes set in Crete and Anatolia have seen the day in Turkey's book market. Saba Altınsay 's "Kritimu" and Ahmet Yorulmaz 's trilogy were the first to set the example in this move. There has even been family souvenirs written by

7742-424: The provincial governor to award the candidate with Timar in the province. The candidate then, “with the Sultan’s order” ( eli-emirlu ), would go out and find a vacant Timar suitable for him. It has been suggested that there was a regular rotation system so that Timar holders were dismissed after serving a defined period of tenure. This length would vary case to case. As long as the candidate participated regularly in

7840-453: The registered Timars intact even while the number of Sipahis grew. Furthermore, it prevented Sipahis from gaining complete and independent control over the peasants and land within a territory. The institution of arpalik was introduced to make burden of government officials easier by compensating losses of its high officials. An arpalik was a large estate (i.e. sanjak ) entrusted to some holder of senior position, or to some margrave , as

7938-486: The sixteenth century. The goals of the system were necessitated by financial, state and expansionist purposes. The financial aims of the system were to relieve pressure from the Ottoman state of paying the army as well as to gain a new source of revenue for the central treasury. The expansionist aims were to increase the number of cavalry soldiers and to gradually assimilate and bring conquered countries under direct Ottoman control. The Ottoman state also desired to centralize

8036-437: The stressed vowel; the so-called breathing marks ( rough and smooth breathing ), originally used to signal presence or absence of word-initial /h/; and the diaeresis , used to mark the full syllabic value of a vowel that would otherwise be read as part of a diphthong. These marks were introduced during the course of the Hellenistic period. Actual usage of the grave in handwriting saw a rapid decline in favor of uniform usage of

8134-461: The sultan’s authority by removing the feudal system and aristocratic elements from dominating the empire. Within the Timar system the state gave Timar holders, including the Sipahis, the authority to control of arable lands, vacant lands or land possessed by peasants, wastelands, fruit trees, forests or waters within the Timar territory. The Sipahis employed agents or surrogates called Kethüda , Vekil , or voyvoda to collect revenues and exercise

8232-533: The summary translation of a book on Bodrum made by Loizos, it is stated that, even as late as 1967, the Cretans and the 'local Turks' did not mix in some towns; they continued to speak Greek and mostly married other Cretans. As of 2006 there were about 7,000 Greek speakers living in Tripoli, Lebanon and about 3,000 in Al Hamidiyah , Syria , the majority of them Muslims of Cretan origin. Records suggest that

8330-506: The timar system was one in which the projected revenue of a conquered territory was distributed in the form of temporary land grants among the Sipahis (cavalrymen) and other members of the military class including Janissaries and other servants of the sultan . These prebends were given as compensation for annual military service, for which they received no pay. In rare circumstances women could become timar holders. However, this privilege

8428-541: The very name for that instrument in Turkish language being Rum kemençesi – Greek kemenche . Nuances may be observed among the waves of immigrations from Crete and the respective behavioral patterns. At the end of the 19th century Muslims fled reprisal to take refuge in the present-day territory of Turkey or beyond (see Al Hamidiyah ). During the 1910s, with the termination of the Cretan State which had recognized

8526-518: The village of Al-Hamidiyah ), Lebanon , Palestine , Libya , and Egypt , as well as in the larger Turkish diaspora . Cretan Muslims were descendants of ethnic Greeks who had converted to Islam after the Ottoman conquest of Crete in the seventeenth century . They identified as Greek Muslims , and were referred to as " Turks " by some Christian Greeks due to their religion; not their ethnic background. Many Cretan Greeks had converted to Islam in

8624-564: The wake of the Ottoman conquest of Crete . This high rate of local conversions to Islam was similar to that in Bosnia-Herzegovina , Albania , parts of western North Macedonia , and Bulgaria ; perhaps even a uniquely high rate of conversions rather than immigrants. The Greek Muslims of Crete continued to speak Cretan Greek . European travellers' accounts note that the "Turks" of Crete were mostly not of Turkic origin, but were Cretan converts from Orthodoxy. Sectarian violence during

8722-408: Was a Cretan Muslim, as are many of his former apprentices who themselves have become master shipbuilders and who are based in Bodrum or Güllük today. An overall pattern of investing in expertise and success remains remarkable among Cretan Muslims, as attested by the notable names below. However, with sex roles and social change starting out from different grounds for Cretan Muslims, the adaptation to

8820-574: Was a distinct dialect of Greek itself. Aside from the Macedonian question, current consensus regards Phrygian as the closest relative of Greek, since they share a number of phonological, morphological and lexical isoglosses , with some being exclusive between them. Scholars have proposed a Graeco-Phrygian subgroup out of which Greek and Phrygian originated. Among living languages, some Indo-Europeanists suggest that Greek may be most closely related to Armenian (see Graeco-Armenian ) or

8918-568: Was also used as the official language of government and religion in the Christian Nubian kingdoms , for most of their history. Greek, in its modern form, is the official language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population. It is also the official language of Cyprus (nominally alongside Turkish ) and the British Overseas Territory of Akrotiri and Dhekelia (alongside English ). Because of

9016-557: Was also used in Ancient Greek. Greek has occasionally been written in the Latin script , especially in areas under Venetian rule or by Greek Catholics . The term Frankolevantinika / Φραγκολεβαντίνικα applies when the Latin script is used to write Greek in the cultural ambit of Catholicism (because Frankos / Φράγκος is an older Greek term for West-European dating to when most of (Roman Catholic Christian) West Europe

9114-447: Was forced by Palmerston to return Crete to direct Ottoman rule. Mustafa Naili Pasha angled unsuccessfully to become a semi-independent prince but the Cretans rose up against him, once more driving the Muslims temporarily into siege in the towns. An Anglo-Ottoman naval operation restored control in the island and Mustafa Naili Pasha was confirmed as its governor, though under command from Istanbul . He remained in Crete until 1851 when he

9212-432: Was needed to maintain them. Essentially, the gun was cheaper than a horse. By the early decades of the seventeenth century, much of the Timar revenue was brought into the central treasury as substitute money ( bedel ) for exemption from military service. Since they were no longer needed, when the Timar holders died off, their holdings would not be reassigned, but were brought under imperial domain. Once under direct control

9310-405: Was restricted to women who were prominent within the imperial family, or high-ranking members of the Ottoman elite. Timars could be small, when they would be granted by governors, or large, which then required a certificate from the Sultan, but generally the fief had an annual tax revenue value of less than 20,000 akçes . This system of land tenure lasted roughly from the fourteenth century through

9408-469: Was summoned to the capital, where at a relatively advanced age he pursued a successful career. Religious tensions erupted on the island between Muslims and Christians and the Christian populations of Crete revolted twice against Ottoman rule (in 1866 and in 1897). In the uprising of 1866 , the rebels initially managed to gain control of most of the hinterland although as always the four fortified towns of

9506-580: Was under the control of the Frankish Empire ). Frankochiotika / Φραγκοχιώτικα (meaning 'Catholic Chiot') alludes to the significant presence of Catholic missionaries based on the island of Chios . Additionally, the term Greeklish is often used when the Greek language is written in a Latin script in online communications. The Latin script is nowadays used by the Greek-speaking communities of Southern Italy . The Yevanic dialect

9604-673: Was written by Romaniote and Constantinopolitan Karaite Jews using the Hebrew Alphabet . In a tradition, that in modern time, has come to be known as Greek Aljamiado , some Greek Muslims from Crete wrote their Cretan Greek in the Arabic alphabet . The same happened among Epirote Muslims in Ioannina . This also happened among Arabic-speaking Byzantine rite Christians in the Levant ( Lebanon , Palestine, and Syria ). This usage

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