Le Retour Des Grecs de Russie: Identites, Memoires, Trajectoires - Paperback

by K. Kaurinkoski (Author)

This book explores the reasons which pushed individuals and entire communities residing in Ukraine and in other former Soviet republics for centuries to claim their Greek origin after the end of the Cold War and endeavour "return" migration to Greece. The book provides a historic background, tracing Greek migrations to the Russian Empire where the Greeks, mainly from the Ottoman Empire, settled in large numbers in the 18th and 19th centuries. It then analyses diasporic return migrations and transnational economic migrations from Ukraine and other former Soviet republics to Greece and Cyprus since the late 1980s. The book focuses on the history of one diaspora group in particular, namely, the Mariupol Greeks, and discusses the reasons why there has been no community "return" migration in the case of these Greeks to the "imagined motherland".