One city has been in the news of late - with very different perspectives.
The Guardian last week reported on people being 'deported' from the city:
Ukraine crisis: claims Mariupol women and children forcibly sent to Russia | Ukraine | The Guardian
On the other hand, Russia Today reports on how an academic has been 'silenced' in the UK:
Professor faces government crackdown for questioning Ukraine narrative — RT World News
Russia Today prefers to tell us about another city:
As Russia Today admits, "the region has a distinct identity and doesn’t fit neatly into either Russia or Ukraine":
Historic roots of the Donbass problem explained — RT Russia & Former Soviet Union
And that includes a Greek-speaking population:
Ethnic Greeks (including Urums) in Donetsk Oblast
History of the Greeks in Ukraine: Staying Silent We Betray Our Heritage
From the New European:
Greek roots of a seized city
PETER TRUDGILL explains how Catherine the Great’s ‘Greek Project’ led to the naming of Khersón
The Ukrainian city of Khersón (Hersón, Chersón) ... was founded by the Russian Empress Catherine the Great in 1778, and was one of a number of cities established at around that time in “New Russia”, which was the term used by the Russians to refer to the area along the north shore of the Black Sea, which they annexed from the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the 18th century.
Other towns in that region dating from the same period include Mariúpol, Sevastópol (English Sebastopol), Simferópol, Melitópol, Tiráspil (Romanian Tiraspol), and Odésa (English Odessa)...
It is not a coincidence that all these names, like Khersón, are of Greek origin. The -pol ending is derived from the Ancient Greek pólis, Modern Greek póli “city”...
Ancient Greek-speaking peoples settled all round the Black Sea, and many large communities of Pontic Greeks – the Ancient Greek name for the Black Sea was Pontos – were still living all around the Black Sea in the 20th century on the coasts of Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia and northern Turkey.
For example, large communities of Greeks, with their own distinctive dialect of Greek, still remain in Mariúpol and the surrounding villages.
On February 26 the Athens newspapers reported that 10 ethnic Greeks in Mariúpol and nearby Sartana had been killed by the Russian bombardment of civilians.
The Greek newspaper Kathimerini released the text of a social media message written by the French President Emmanuel Macron, in Greek, condemning the attack.
Translated, his message read: “It is not just the people of Ukraine who are in mourning today because of the war caused by Russia, but all the people of Europe. Tonight, with grief we think of Greece, which unjustly lost 10 members of its community who lived in the Ukrainian city of Mariúpol”.
No comments:
Post a Comment