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Greeks in the Czech Republic

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There is a small community of Greeks in the Czech Republic. Roughly 12,000 Greek citizens who fled from the 1946-1949 Greek Civil War were admitted to Czechoslovakia; they consisted of people of both Greek and Macedonian ethnicity, as well as other ethnic groups.[1]

Migration history

The admission of Greeks to Czechoslovakia was facilitated by members of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) living in exile in Bucharest, Romania. Though they initially expected that they would soon return to Greece, due to the development of the political situation they could predict no definite end to their stay in Czechoslovakia. As a result, many eventually naturalised as Czechoslovak citizens.[2] In many cases, they were resettled into houses which had formerly been owned by Sudeten Germans and were left empty after their occupants were expelled from the country.[3] About 5,200 of the migrants consisted of unaccompanied children.[4] The migrants were ethnically heterogeneous, consisting not just of Greeks and Macedonians, but Aromanians, Sephardi Jews, and a few Turks.[5]

Beginning in 1975, shortly after political liberalisation in Greece led to the legalisation of the KKE, several thousand young Greeks, including those born in Czechoslovakia, emigrated to Greece.[6] Older Greeks followed them some years later, after an arrangement was made between the Greek and Czechoslovak governments for them to receive their pensions in Greece.[7] By 1991, there were just 3,443 people in Czechoslovakia who declared Greek ethnicity; almost all of those were in the Czech portion of the country, with just 65 in the Slovak portion.[8]

Language

In the early days of their lives in the CR, ethnic Greek and ethnic Macedonian migrants used Greek as their lingua franca; however in orphanages which housed unaccompanied child migrants, it was not uncommon for ethnic Greek children to become receptively bilingual in the Macedonian language spoken by their playmates.[9] In later years, locally-born members of the community showed increasing language shift towards Czech, and tended to have weaker command of Greek. This is especially true for the grandchildren of immigrants, born in the 1980s and later.[10]

Notable people

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Sloboda 2003, p. 6
  2. ^ Králová 2009, p. 337
  3. ^ Zissaki-Healy 2004, p. 27
  4. ^ Sloboda 2003, p. 8
  5. ^ Sloboda 2003, p. 10
  6. ^ Sloboda 2003, p. 15
  7. ^ Sloboda 2003, p. 16
  8. ^ Sloboda 2003, p. 17
  9. ^ Sloboda 2003, p. 26
  10. ^ Sloboda 2003, p. 20

References

  • Sloboda, Marián (2003), "Language maintenance and shifts in a Greek community in a heterolinguistic environment: the Greeks in the Czech Republic" (PDF), Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, 29 (1): 5–33, ISSN 0364-2976
  • Zissaki-Healy, Tassula (2004), "The World We Live In: Children of the storm", The New Presence (3): 27–28, ISSN 1211-8303
  • Králová, Kateřina (2009), "Otázka loajality řecké emigrace v Československu v letech 1948 až 1968/Loyalty of the Greek Emigrants in Czechoslovakia between 1948 and 1968", Slavonic Review, 95 (3): 337–350, ISSN 0037-6922

Further reading

  • Hradečný, Pavel (2000), Řecká komunita v Československu, její vznik a počáteční vývoj (1948-1954)/The Greek community in Czechoslovakia: its emergence and initial development (1948-1954), Prague: Institute of Contemporary History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic
  • Botu, Antula; Konečný, Milan (2005), Řečtí uprchlíci : kronika řeckého lidu v Čechách, na Moravě a ve Slezsku 1948-1989/Greek community: chronicle of the Greeks in the Czech Republic, Moravia, and Silesia, 1948-1989, Prague: Řecká obec Praha, ISBN 9788023954623
  • Hlavatý, Ivan (2009), "Kuchyně a strava řecké menšiny v České republice jako faktor etnické identity/Cuisine and Food of the Greek Minority in the Czech Republic as a Factor of Ethnic Identity", Národopisná revue, 19 (3): 168–176, ISSN 0862-8351
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