San

Caregiver. History enthusiast!!

[San @sanfranx47]

My dad passed away just a few hours before the festive day of St. Irini, the patron saint of our island. It is one month today, and I am feeling lost and alone without him. I can't accept it...

Μακάρι να αναπαυθεί εν ειρήνη.

[San @sanfranx47]

Historical accuracy goes both ways.

The transatlantic slave trade was supplied primarily by African kingdoms and traders who sold other Africans to European buyers that part is well documented.
White Europeans were also enslaved in large numbers ,notably the Barbary slave trade, which took over a million Europeans.
Using only one side of this history as a political weapon while ignoring the rest is not accuracy ,it’s selective storytelling.

And I don’t appreciate my heritage being twisted for anyone’s ideological games.

[San @sanfranx47]

@riste224 @jesuistouareg One darker looking individual doesn’t redefine the average.
Using him to claim otherwise is not accurate,it is incorrect and misleading.

[San @sanfranx47]

Claiming that classical mythology and history belong to 'the West' and not to modern Greeks is a bizarre form of cultural appropriation.
These stories, philosophies, and epics were natively conceived, written, and lived by the ancestors of the people who still inhabit the Greece today.

The fact that the rest of the Western world later adopted and admired Greek culture does not erase the ownership of the people who created it.

The deep connection between modern Greeks and their ancestors is proven by the language itself.

An average modern Greek speaker can look at the original ancient text of the Odyssey or classical inscriptions and recognize the vocabulary, grammar, and roots of their own native tongue.

By contrast, YOU an average English speaker today cannot read or understand Old English from the medieval era (like Beowulf) without specialized academic training, and even struggle heavily with Early Modern English from just a few centuries ago.

The Greek language has maintained an unbroken, continuity for over 3,000 years. The Odyssey is not a generic 'Western' story, it is a foundational piece of Greek heritage that modern Greeks can still read, speak, and claim as their own.

[San @sanfranx47]

@Dimchios @EvrenSAuthor Indeed!! You are entirely right. There is absolutely no point...

[San @sanfranx47]

@EvrenSAuthor @Dimchios Who do you think you are to demand that I prove my existence to you?

[San @sanfranx47]

I am not going to submit a bibliography to justify my existence to you.

We both know this isn't an academic seminar. You are trying to use pedantic, ultra rigid definitions of 19th century 'nation-states' to intellectualize a very simple, biased goal: trying to argue that the people living on this land today have no connection to their ancestors.

The historical and legal facts don't change just because you demand peer reviewed validation.
The Greek language is spoken here today, the same geography is inhabited, and the legal traditions of Byzantium survived through the Ottoman era to form the bedrock of the modern state.

Indigenous cultures do not need permission, academic approval, or validation from their neighbors to exist.

Your refusal to accept an organic, 3,000 year cultural evolution is your issue, not mine. The conversation is indeed over.

[San @sanfranx47]

You are being completely insufferable.

Calling historical facts 'nonsense' and throwing a tantrum about how you think i write ,(what are you 5 year old?) , because you simply cannot refute the evidence.

You demanded proof of an uninterrupted state, legal, and institutional identity. I gave you the exact, documented "chain of custody" from antiquity to 1821 .

[San @sanfranx47]

You are manufacturing a definition of "continuity" that requires a civilization to remain frozen in a static vacuum for 3,000 years.
If a nation must maintain the exact same political regime, state name, and religious system to claim continuity, then no nation on Earth possesses it.

History is a process of organic evolution, not a series of disconnected boxes. When the Roman Republic became a Christian Empire, or when Anglo-Saxon England became Norman England, their historical continuity was not wiped out it mutated. The transition from ancient to modern Greece is an organically documented chain of custody preserved by massive institutional pillars.

When Rome conquered the Greek world, it did not erase Greek political identity, it absorbed it. The Roman elite was completely Hellenized culturally.

The Eastern Roman Empire was the continuation of Roman statehood, but its administrative, military, and legal reality became exclusively Greek. By the 7th century, Emperor Heraclius changed the official language of the Roman Empire from Latin to Greek, and replaced the Roman title emperor with the Greek Basileus. The political institution itself transformed organically into a Greek state.

When Constantinople fell in 1453, the political identity did not vanish into a vacuum. The Ottoman Empire legally codified the Greeks as a distinct political and administrative entity called the Rum Millet (the Roman/Greek Nation).
They were not just a "gene pool" , they were a legally recognized class governed by their own ethnarch, the Ecumenical Patriarch, who applied Byzantine Roman civil law over them. This is an uninterrupted legal and political identity spanning from antiquity to the 1821 revolution.

The concepts of Democracy (demokratia), Politics (politika), Tyranny (tyrannia), Monarchy (monarchia), and Law (nomos) are the foundational building blocks of Greek political thought.
The modern Greeks did not adopt these words from a textbook in 1821 like the French or Americans did.

They spoke them, wrote them, and preserved them in an unbroken, linear evolution for 3,500 years. The fact that a modern Greek can look at an ancient inscription or a Byzantine manuscript and recognize the roots of their own civic vocabulary is the ultimate proof of conscious political continuity

[San @sanfranx47]

If there was no meaningful continuity, then the Mycenaean and Classical populations of Greece and the Aegean simply vanished, and at some later point a completely different population appeared out of nowhere, started speaking Greek, preserved Classical literature, lived in the same places, and somehow ended up genetically closest to the Mycenaeans among tested ancient groups.
That is the actual implication of the position you keep defending.

That scenario is far more extraordinary than the straightforward one supported by the data: the same regional populations continued, absorbed some later admixture kept speaking Greek, and remained the demographic core of the Eastern Roman state in its Greek speaking territories.

The existing evidence Lazaridis 2017 showing modern Greeks closest to Mycenaeans, the 2026 Deep Maniot study showing pre Medieval southern Greek lineages surviving, continuous language, continuous settlement, continuous literary tradition already supports continuity with admixture. That is the normal finding for this region.
You are the one treating that body of evidence as insufficient while offering no positive evidence of replacement or discontinuity in the Greek heartlands. The burden is not on the side that has the data. It is on the side claiming the data somehow fail to show what they show.
I am not required to prove anything to you .
I am pointing out that the claim of no real continuity requires explaining how a new population magically acquired both the language and the genetic affinity. You have not done that.

[San @sanfranx47]

You’re shifting the burden of proof and selectively quoting the papers.

I never wrote a perfect, unbroken, zero admixture genetic chain with a genome from every single century. That standard is impossible for almost any population on earth.

What I wrote is the far more modest and well supported position: the Greek-speaking populations of the Eastern Roman Empire carried substantial ancestry from the earlier Aegean (Mycenaean and post-Mycenaean) populations of the same regions, and this ancestry continues into modern Greeks.Lazaridis et al. 2017 shows modern Greeks are genetically closest to the Mycenaeans among tested ancient groups, with continuity plus later admixture. That is the paper’s finding.

The 2026 Communications Biology study on Deep Maniots does contain the sentence you quote about Roman and medieval ancestry being “largely unknown” before their own work.
But the actual results of that paper contradict the way you’re using it. The authors conclude that Deep Maniot paternal lineages predominantly derive from Bronze Age, Iron Age and Roman period Greek speaking populations, that these lineages are almost absent elsewhere, and that Deep Mani preserves “southern Greece’s pre Medieval genetic landscape.”
They call the population a genetic snapshot of pre Medieval southern Greece. That is positive evidence of continuity through the Roman and early medieval periods in at least one well studied Greek region, not evidence of discontinuity.
You cannot take the authors acknowledgement of remaining gaps, ignore their positive findings of continuity, and then declare that continuity has not been shown. That is manipulating the evidence.
On identity: yes, the Eastern Roman state and its people called themselves Romans (Rhomaioi). That political self-identification is not in dispute. It does not erase the demographic and genetic reality of the Greek speaking population that lived under that state. Language, continuous settlement, and genetic data are separate from the political label they https://t.co/KGVMcFZAZr are the one asserting that the continuity claim is false or unproven to the point of being illegitimate.
Therefore the burden is on you to show positive evidence of major discontinuity or replacement between the Mycenaean/Classical populations and the Greek speaking populations of the Eastern Roman Empire. Pointing to incomplete sampling and then treating that incompleteness as proof of discontinuity is not evidence. It is an argument from silence.If you have autosomal aDNA from Roman or medieval Greek sites that demonstrates wholesale population replacement rather than continuity with admixture, present it.

Until then, the data we actually have support persistence of earlier Aegean ancestry, not its erasure

[San @sanfranx47]

You’re asking for a peer-reviewed article showing that the Eastern Romans (Byzantines) descended from the Mycenaeans both historically and genetically.

That’s a fair request, so here it is:
Genetic evidence
Lazaridis et al., Nature 2017: “Genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans”
(https://t.co/9byPJqMpKJ)

The study sequenced Mycenaean genomes and compared them to modern populations. The conclusion is clear ,modern Greeks (and therefore the Greek speaking populations of the medieval Eastern Roman Empire) show substantial genetic continuity with the Mycenaeans.
Later admixture exists, but the core ancestry is continuous.

The people who lived in mainland Greece, the Aegean islands and western Anatolia under the Eastern Roman Empire were the direct demographic and cultural successors of the Classical and Hellenistic Greek populations, who themselves descended from the Mycenaean world.
They spoke Greek, used Greek literature, and maintained continuous settlement in the same regions. “Eastern Roman” was a political and legal identity.
The population itself was Greek.

Asking for a paper that says the exact phrase “Eastern Romans = Mycenaeans” is Gaslight.

The genetic and historical continuity is already established by the data above.
If you have peer reviewed genetic or historical studies that contradict Lazaridis et al. and show a complete population replacement between the Mycenaean period and the Byzantine period in Greece, feel free to share them.

[San @sanfranx47]

Are you being deliberately obtuse??

Herodotus was born in Halicarnassus, a Dorian Greek colony in Asia Minor part of the wider Greek world, not some foreign land.
Ancient Greeks never restricted “Greece” to the modern mainland borders.
The exact passage is Histories 8.144.2: the Athenians declare that τὸ Ἑλληνικόν rests on “same blood and same language, common temples of the gods and sacrifices, and similar customs.”
That’s the classic statement of Greek ethnic identity.
Your attempt to dismiss him as “not from Greece” is pure modern geographic projection and shows you haven’t actually read the text.

[San @sanfranx47]

Greek myths are not "work of fiction."

They contain substantial historical and cultural heritage rooted in real events, places, and societies that were embellished over centuries of oral tradition.

Greek myths are foundational to Western literature, identity, philosophy, art, and ethics.
They explain real geography, origins of cities and rituals, and moral lessons.
They are sacred stories and cultural memory, not invented fantasy .

The myths are not historically accurate in every detail but they are far from made up or equivalent to pure fiction.
Archaeology and linguistic evidence show they contain real heritage and embellished memories of actual Bronze Age events and societies.

[San @sanfranx47]

You are exposing your own historical illiteracy.
Yes, modern Greeks share massive genetic ancestry with ancient Anatolia.
However, that ancestry comes from Neolithic and Bronze Age populations (like the Minoans and Trojans) who lived there 4,000 to 8,000 years ago. They were Indo European and Aegean peoples, not Central Asian Turks.

The Turkic migration into Anatolia did not happen until the 11th century CE thousands of years after the Bronze and Classical Greek periods.
Equating ancient Anatolians with modern Turks is like claiming ancient Native Americans were British because they lived on the same land.

You accuse people of identity politics, yet you are the one using anachronistic, unscientific insults because you cannot handle peer reviewed DNA data.
Greeks aren't Turks, rather, modern Turkish people carry a massive amount of assimilated indigenous Greek and Anatolian DNA.
Pick up a history book will you!!

[San @sanfranx47]

You are making bold claims about the ethnic makeup of Bronze Age Greeks, but you haven't provided a single peer reviewed study, archaeological report, or piece of genetic data to back it up.

Unless you have actual scientific facts or lived through the era yourself, your personal opinions cannot override the published DNA data from actual Mycenaean skeletons.

Show us the scientific studies that prove your claims, or admit you are just making things up.

[San @sanfranx47]

You are conflating / confusing two different things trade interactions and demographics.

While it is true that ancient Greeks interacted and traded with Asia and Africa, and had no modern 19th century concept of 'race,' this does not mean ancient Greece was a modern multi racial melting pot.

Greeks had a very strict concept of Hellênikon (shared blood, shared language, and shared religion, as Herodotus famously defined it).
Anyone who did not possess these traits was classified as a barbaros (foreigner).

Ancient Greece was a collection of independent city states populated by an indigenous Mediterranean people.
Modern peer reviewed DNA studies on Bronze Age Mycenaean and Minoan skeletons show massive genetic continuity with modern Greeks, proving they were a distinct, indigenous population, not a multi ethnic global hub.
Trading with three continents is a historical fact

Pretending the actual population of Bronze Age Mycenae or Sparta looked like modern London or New York is an anachronistic fiction

[San @sanfranx47]

Hermaphroditus is a mythological figure from Greek legend the son of Hermes and Aphrodite who, according to Ovid, merged with the nymph Salmacis into a single dual sexed being.

The statues are artistic/symbolic depictions of androgyny, not evidence of real people or ancient “gender identity” as understood today.
This is a real medical condition.

Hermaphroditus or intersex/DSDs are extremely rare medical disorders of sexual development not a spectrum and not the same as today’s gender identity claims.
Ancient myths noting anomalies don’t validate modern ideology.

[San @sanfranx47]

Hermaphroditus is a mythological figure from Greek legend the son of Hermes and Aphrodite who, according to Ovid, merged with the nymph Salmacis into a single dual sexed being.

The statues are artistic/symbolic depictions of androgyny, not evidence of real people or ancient “gender identity” as understood today.
This is a real medical condition.

Hermaphroditus or intersex/DSDs are extremely rare medical disorders of sexual development not a spectrum and not the same as today’s gender identity claims.
Ancient myths noting anomalies don’t validate modern ideology.

[San @sanfranx47]

Modern classicists agree that Herodotus was a tourist who viewed Egypt through a deeply Greek lens, often misunderstanding what Egyptian priests told him.

Furthermore, ancient Egyptians were an indigenous North African population distinct from Sub Saharan populations, meaning that even if Greeks borrowed heavily from Egypt, it still would not make them Sub Saharan African or "that originated in Africa".

When Plato or Pythagoras traveled to 'Africa,' they traveled exclusively to the Nile Delta in the extreme north. Borrowing architectural or geometric ideas from Egypt does not mean Greek culture came from Sub Saharan Africa.