Most modern Greeks may know little or no knowledge of the ancient Greek language, but not an isolated community in northeastern Turkey.
There is a tribe in northeastern Turkey that speaks ancient Greek
On the shores of the Black Sea about 5.000 people seem to speak a dialect that is surprisingly close to the ancient Greek language.
As linguists point out, through this dialect they can draw very important conclusions about the language of Socrates and Plato, as well as how it evolved.
The community lives in a cluster of villages near the Turkish city of Trabzon, which was once the ancient region of Pontus.
Linguists have found that the dialect, Romeyka, a variety of Pontic Greek, has structural similarities to ancient Greek that are not found in other forms of the language spoken today. Romeyka also has many similarities with the ancient vocabulary.
According to Ioanna Sitaridou, a lecturer in Philology at the University of Cambridge, "the use of the incomprehensible has been lost in modern Greek. But in Romeyka it has been preserved. "
One possibility is that the speakers of this dialect are the direct descendants of the ancient Greeks who lived along the shores of the Black Sea before the 6th or 7th century BC, when the area was first colonized.
But it is also possible that they were descendants of indigenous peoples or an immigrant tribe who were forced to speak the language of the ancient Greek colonialists.
The inhabitants of this area are devout Muslims, which is why they had the right to remain in Turkey after the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.
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