Folk dances, such as the Serra (also known as Pyrrhichios), and traditional musical instruments, like the Pontic lyra, remain important to Pontian diaspora communities.

A genetic study of male Georgians, including Pontic Greeks in Georgia, revealed that the latter had high incidence of haplogroup L, which is also prevalent among Laz people.

Anton Popov writes, "Anthony Bryer states that 'at the beginning of the nineteenth century a Pontic Christian might describe himself in the old way as a Douberites, Phytanos or Tsitenos first, and then as a "Roman" (Rum) Orthodox subject of the sultan; by the end of the century he was calling himself a Greek, and after he had finally left the Pontos in 1923, a Pontic Greek.'"

Again, Acherson writes, "The teachers and the school curricula came from Athens, bringing with them a new concept of Greekness which linked the Greek-Orthodox communities of the Black Sea and the 'nation' of Greece."

Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi give three theories on why most Pontic Greeks distanced themselves from nationalism and separatism: poorly developed political consciousness, tradition of submissiveness to Islamic hegemony, or fears of massacres and economic harm.

[29] More generally, Greek nationalism in Asia Minor mostly appealed to "the most enlightened and liberal", to the medical, legal and literary professionals and to the rising middle class.

After the Greek-Turkish population exchange in 1923, even though the state never considered them a "national threat", many of these Pontians saw their language as a "cultural flaw" and desired to get rid of it.

[citation needed] The first recorded Greek colony, established on the northern shores of ancient Anatolia, was Sinope on the Black Sea, circa 800 BC.

In time, as the numbers of Greeks settling in the region grew significantly, more colonies were established along the whole Black Sea coastline of what is now Turkey, Bulgaria, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, and Romania.

[49] This region was organized circa 281 BC as a kingdom by Mithridates I of Pontus, whose ancestry line dated back to Ariobarzanes I, a Persian ruler of the Greek town of Cius.

Mithridates VI the Great, as he was left in memory, claiming to be the protector of the Greek world against the barbarian Romans, expanded his kingdom to Bithynia, Crimea and Propontis (in present-day Ukraine and Turkey) before his downfall after the Third Mithridatic War.

During this long period of resistance many Pontic Greeks nobles and aristocrats married foreign emperors and dynasties, most notably of Medieval Russia, Medieval Georgia, or the Safavid Persian dynasty, and to a lesser extent the Kara Koyunlu rulers, in order to gain their protection and aid against the Ottoman threat.

[51] In the 1600s and 1700s, as Turkish lords called derebeys gained more control of land along the Black Sea coast, many coastal Pontians moved to the Pontic Mountains.

This could be willingly, for example so to avoid paying the higher rate of taxation imposed on Orthodox Christians or in order to make themselves more eligible for higher level government and regular military employment opportunities within the empire (at least in the later period following the abolition of the infamous Greek and Balkan Christian child levy or 'devshirme', on which the elite Janissary corps had in the early Ottoman period depended for its recruits).

But conversion could also occur in response to pressures from central government and local Muslim militia (e.g.) following any one of the Russo-Turkish wars in which ethnic Greeks from the Ottoman Empire's northern border regions were known to have collaborated, fought alongside, and sometimes even led invading Russian forces, such as was the case in the Greek governed, semi-autonomous Romanian Principalities, Trebizond, and the area that was briefly to become part of the Russian Caucasus in the far northeast.

Many were executed, for example during the Amasya trials;[58] others were subject to massacres; many Pontic men were forced to work in labor camps until they died; still others were deported to the interior on death marches.

[83] After Christianity spread to the Pontus region in Roman times, Pontic Greeks began constructing a number of churches, monasteries, and other religious buildings.

A scholar named Sevastos Kyminitis founded the Phrontisterion of Trapezous, a Greek school operating in Trabzon from the late 1600s to the early 1900s.

[135] These Greeks pre-date the refugees and migrants who left their homelands in the Pontic Alps and moved onto the Eastern Anatolian plateau after the fall of the Empire of Trebizond in 1461.

They were mainly the descendants of Greek farmers, soldiers, state officials and traders, who settled in Erzurum province in the late Roman and Byzantine Empire period.

Unlike the thoroughly Hellenized areas of the western and central Black Sea coast and the Pontic Alps, the Erzinjan and Erzerum regions were primarily Turkish- and Armenian-speaking, with Greeks forming only a small minority of the population.

In commercial cities like Trebizond, Sampsounta, Kerasounta, and Sinope upper-level education and arts flourished under the protection of a cosmopolitan middle class.

During the 19th century hundreds of schools were constructed by Pontic Greek communities in the Trebizond Vilayet, giving the region one of the highest literacy rates in the Ottoman Empire.

Teachers from the Of-valley provided education for thousands of Anatolian Sunni and Sufi students in home schools and small madrassas.

[142][143] The effects of this educational heritage continue to this day, with many prominent religious figures, scientists and politicians coming from the areas influenced by the Naqshbandi Sufi orders of Pontic Greek extraction in Of, Caykara and Rize, among them president Erdogan, whose family originates from the village of Potamia.

Popular singers of Pontic music include Stelios Kazantzidis, Chrysanthos Theodoridis, Stathis Nikolaidis, Theodoros Pavlidis, Giannis Tsitiridis, and Pela Nikolaidou.

A unique aspect of Pontian dance is the tremoulo (Greek: Τρέμουλο), which is a fast shaking of the upper torso by a turning of the back on its axis.

The students would establish athletics clubs providing the Pontic Greek youth with an opportunity to participate in organised sporting competition.

The Hellenic Athletic Club, Pontus Merzifounta, founded in 1903 was one such example formed by students attending Anatolia College in Merzifon near Amasya.

Champion individuals of Pontic Greek origin have also emerged in World Championship and Olympic levels of competition for athletics (Katerina Stefanidi, Voula Patoulidou), gymnastics (Ioannis Melissanidis), diving (Nikolaos Siranidis), taekwondo (Alexandros Nikolaidis) and kick-boxing (Mike Zambidis, Stan Longinidis).