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The geographical name change in Greece was an initiative by the Greek government to replace non-Greek geographical and topographic names within the Greek Republic with Greek names as part of a policy and ideology of Hellenisation.The main proponent of the initiative has been a Greek homogenization social-engineering campaign which aimed to assimilate or obliterate geographical or topographical names that were deemed foreign and divisive against Greek unity or considered to be "bad Greek". The names that were considered foreign were usually of Ottoman, Albanian, Slavic and Turkish origin. Most of the name changes ocurred in the ethnically heterogenous northern Greece and the Arvanite settlements in central Greece. Place names of Greek origin were also renamed after names in Classical Greece.
The policy commenced after the independence of Greece from the Ottoman Empire in the early 1830s, after the territorial expanses of Greece and continued into the Greek Republic. To this day use of the old Turkish, Albanian or Slavic placenames by authorities, organisations and individuals is penalized under Greek law.
Map of current Greece
Notable geographical name changes
Central Greece
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Central Greece is home to the Arvanites, an Albanian speaking people who migrated to the area in the 14th century. Till the 19th century most of Attica and Boeotia was populated by Arvanites, many of the placenames were also Arvanite, after the establishment of Greece in 1830 most of the names have been changed, especially to unused names since antiquity, from Classical Greece.
Old name was Arvanitic. Liopesi: 'Place of cows' or 'of the cow'. From the Albanian word lopë or cow and the suffix ës indicating belonging to a place, or quantity of something.
Old name was Arvanite . Dervenosalesi: 'The thigh mountain pass'. From the word Derven meaning 'mountain pass'(itself a local borrowing of the Turkish word 'Dervend' meaning the same thing) and Shalës or 'thigh', due to the narrowness of the area resembling the length or shape of a thigh.
Epirus
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Epirus had a Greek majority population prior to annexation to Greece (1913), with minorities of Aromanians and Albanians, while the majority of the toponyms in the region are ancient Greek. A part of the Albanian minority, known as Cham Albanians, resided in the coastal area and were expelled from the area after World War II by the EDES resistance group. An unknown number of Aromanians and Orthodox Albanians still live in the area, who today identify mostly as Greek. Since the early 20th-century Albanian place names of Epirus have been systematically changed to Greek, thereby erasing the former Albanian presence in the landscape.
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Till 1912, the area had a very heterogenous population consisting of Slavic, Turkish, Greek, Jews and Wallachian people. Most of the geographical names were of non Greek origin, the Greek government planned to change this.
Between 1913 and 1928 the Slavic names of hundreds of villages and towns were Hellenized by a Committee for the Changing of Names, which was charged by the Greek government with "the elimination of all the names which pollute and disfigure the beautiful appearance of our fatherland"
Between 1912 (Balkan Wars) and 1928 (after the Population exchange between Greece and Turkey), the non Greek inhabitants were largely gone and instead of them Greek refugees from the Ottoman Empire settled in the area thereby changing its demography.
Western Thrace
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Since 1977 all Turkish village names of Western Thrace have been changed to Greek names. Western Thrace is home to a large Turkish minority.
During the Ottoman era, population was mostly Turkish, the old name was Sari-Saban in Turkish, it was renamed from 1913 till 1929 as Sapaioi, later renamed again.
See also
For a comprehensive list and database of Place Name changes in Greece(by settlement, date and year of change), see:
Cohen, Getzel M. (2006). Breaking ground : pioneering women archaeologists (1st pbk. ed. ed.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. p. 202. ISBN9780472031740. Macedonia and Epirus on the mainland, and Crete, where the population was predominantly Greek, deeply resented Turkish rule, and the desire for union with Greece was strong.{{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); |edition= has extra text (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
Geoffrey Lemprière Hammond, Nicholas (1973). Studies in Greek history. Clarendon Press. p. 32. Retrieved 28 June 2013. The toponyms of Epirus are predominantly Greek — for instance the river-names
