Caucasus Greeks
[6] However, the numbers of these early Pontic Greek refugees to Georgia were in any case probably fairly small, and so although some of the refugees managed to retain their Pontic Greek language and identity, others assimilated through intermarriage into the other Christian communities of the South Caucasus region, particularly their fellow Christian Orthodox Georgians but also those Armenians or Ossetians who were Orthodox.
[9] Many of their descendants survive in Georgia’s Marneuli district and Armenia's Akhtala region, although most immigrated to Greece, and particularly Thessaloniki (Salonika) in Greek Macedonia in the mid-1990s.
This movement was reinforced in the early 1600s by the growing power along the coastal valleys districts of the derebeys ('valley lords'), which further encouraged Pontic Greeks to retreat away from the coast deeper into the highlands and up onto the eastern Anatolian plateau, before some moved further east into the neighbouring Lesser Caucasus around Kars and southern Georgia.
As a result, many Pontic Greeks felt pressured into following their cousins who had left Pontus as refugees in previous generations, and so they too decided to migrate to southern Russia or neighbouring Georgia and the South Caucasus.
A smaller number of such Pontic Greeks had of course settled in Georgia and the Russian Caucasus well before the Russo-Turkish wars, most notably those belonging to noble and landowning families from the pre-Ottoman Empire of Trebizond.
[19] Several Ottoman-era sources tell us, however, that even among Pontic Greeks belonging to local noble families - such as those of Gavras, Doukas and the Komnenoi - who had turned Turk, many remained Crypto-Christian (in north-eastern Anatolia often referred to as Stavriotes), openly renouncing Islam and taking up arms against Ottoman troops based around Gümüşhane and Erzinjan during the Russo-Turkish wars, before following the Russian army back into Georgia and southern Russia.
[20] It was some of these Pontic Greek community leaders that claimed noble lineages extending back to the Empire of Trebizond who subsequently became officers in the Russian Imperial army, as many Armenian and Georgian princes such as Ivane Andronikashvili had previously done.
[24] Selim I had been based in the Trebizond region before he became Sultan in 1512, since he was himself of partly Pontic Greek origin on the side of his mother Gülbahar Hatun.
[31] The main reason Caucasus Greeks preferred to identify themselves exclusively with the later, particularly 19th century waves of Pontic Greek refugees to the South Caucssus rather than also with ancestors who had already settled in the region in the late Byzantine or early Ottoman period is probably because this helped in the presentation of their history as being linked for a longer period to the territories ruled by the Empire of Trebizond, that is Pontus proper, and also helped minimize the historically inconvenient evidence of both substantial non-Greek influences on their culture and extensive intermarriage with the indigenous, non-Hellenic races of the South Caucasus region.
Another well known, although more recent Caucasus Greek with roots in these areas but born in Tbilisi was Yanis Kanidis, a Russian PE instructor and hero of the Beslan school hostage crisis in North Ossetia.
[40] The Caucasus Greeks of the Kars Oblast were generally reasonably well educated, every village having its own school, although most were involved in farming, horse breeding, or mining for their livelihoods.
[42] Although their native language was Greek, generally only the most highly educated - such as scholars, lawyers, members of the Orthodox clergy educated in Russian universities, and other community leaders claiming noble or royal lineage extending back to the Empire of Trebizond - had more than an intermediate-level knowledge of formal Demotic Greek and the more classicizing Katharevousa of the late Byzantine period.
[47] Since many of the Turkish, Kurdish, and Indigenous Laz-speaking Muslims from the Kars region had fled westwards into Ottoman territory during and after the 1877-78 war, many other non-Orthodox Christian communities were also resettled there by the Russian administration.
[citation needed] Most Caucasus Greeks left Kars Oblast following the cession of the area back to the Ottoman Empire in 1917, but before the official population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1922-23.
[50] They mainly settled in villages in Greek Macedonia previously inhabited by Ottoman Muslims, and again generally preferred those situated on grassy plateaux or mountain districts, since these most closely resembled their former home in the South Caucasus.
[51] According to the terms of the population exchange protocol (which was essentially an appendage to the Treaty of Lausanne) the categories 'Greek' and 'Turk' were defined by religious affiliation rather than ethnicity, resulting in large numbers of Greek Muslims from Macedonia and Crete being categorized as 'Turkish in soul' and so resettled in the Turkish Aegean and parts of Anatolia.
These Greeks were based mainly in Stavropol Krai, in the foothills of the North Caucasus, where they still make up a significant element of the population (often up to 10%) in both urban and rural areas.
[54] Most of the Caucasus Greeks of Kars Oblast who had not sided with the Bolsheviks subsequently left for Greece in 1919, before the province was officially re-incorporated into the territory of the new Turkish Republic and the large-scale Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1922-23.
[citation needed] The communist affiliations of most Caucasus Greeks has also been cited to account for why they often play down or even conceal any previous involvement their ancestors may have had in the Tsarist army or administration during the Russian occupation of the Transcaucasus region.
One example of a high ranking Caucasus Greek from Kars Oblast who spent much of his life fighting and propagandizing against Soviet communism, after having fought against the Bolsheviks with the forces of the White movement, was Constantine Kromiadi.
