Greek

The Rum, or Romioi, are the last of the Greek Orthodox Christians who lived in Constantinople since Byzantine times and were spared the 1923 population exchange along with the islanders of Imbros and Tenedos. Over a hundred thousand in the 1920s, they were driven out by the 1942 wealth tax, the 1955 pogrom and the 1964 expulsions, and fewer than 2,500 remain in Istanbul today, most of them elderly, with about a thousand younger newcomers from Greece who came for work after the Greek debt crisis. They cluster around the Ecumenical Patriarchate in the Phanar, the spiritual centre of the world's Orthodox Christians, and keep three Greek schools, dozens of churches and two Greek-language newspapers. On Imbros, emptied in the 1960s and 1970s, a reopened Greek school has drawn several hundred people back, and every 15 August the island's villages fill for the feast of the Virgin, led by Patriarch Bartholomew, who was born there.

About 4,000 Greeks still live in Egypt, the remnant of a community that numbered well over 100,000 in the early 20th century and shaped Alexandria's cotton trade, banking, food industry and literature, from the poet Constantine Cavafy to the singer Demis Roussos. Most left in the 1950s and 1960s after the Suez war and Nasser's nationalisations; those who stayed are mainly Egyptiote families born in Egypt over several generations, who mostly hold Greek citizenship, joined by a few business people, teachers and clergy from Greece. Community life centres on the Greek Communities of Cairo and Alexandria, with their schools, homes for the elderly and the Greek hospital in Cairo, and on the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria, one of the ancient patriarchates of Christianity, which now leads a church across Africa. The community is ageing, its schools teach a few hundred pupils, and many younger members marry Egyptians or emigrate.

Lebanon's Christian Greeks descend mainly from families who fled Smyrna and Asia Minor in 1922 and Antioch and Alexandretta when those areas passed to Turkey in 1939, and who settled and prospered in Beirut as merchants, shipowners and professionals. Most hold Lebanese citizenship, many without Greek papers, and speak Arabic and French alongside Greek. The Hellenic Community of Beirut runs a Greek language school for about 140 children and the Hellenic Club near the port, whose festivals drew thousands until the 2020 port explosion wrecked it. The community has shrunk with every crisis, after the 2006 war and again after the 2019 collapse, and Greece evacuated some of its citizens in the wars of 2024 and 2026. They are distinct from Lebanon's Arab Greek Orthodox (Rum) and from the Greek-speaking Muslims of Tripoli.

Syria's Christian Greeks descend mostly from families who fled Smyrna, Cesme and Cappadocia in the early 20th century, joined by older merchant families in Aleppo. By now they are third- and fourth-generation Syrians who speak Arabic in daily life and worship in the Greek Orthodox churches of the Patriarchate of Antioch, whose seat is in Damascus. The Greek Community of Damascus, organised since 1913, holds them together, and Greek-language schools in Damascus and Aleppo once drew Christian pupils of every background. War and emigration have thinned them to a few hundred families, and after the fall of the Assad government in December 2024 some left for Greece while community leaders chose to stay.