For generations, seagoing Greeks told stories to their families of faraway places where their ships had docked. These stories invariably included meeting patriots (fellow countrymen) in restaurants and at card tables in exotic places. Years ago these chance encounters seemed wondrous. A Greek could travel halfway around the world and find a fellow Greek speaking the mother tongue and sharing common friends and relatives from a village or town in Greece. These transplanted Greeks comprised the Greek Diaspora still thriving throughout the world. According to a Greek government ministry, "More than five million Greeks (or more than half of Greece's domestic population) live outside of Greece's borders."

Accurate statistics about the various Diaspora populations and the definition of who belongs in them are difficult to obtain, but the Greek national government published the following numbers in 1997:

According to Richard Clogg in The Greek Diaspora in the Twentieth Century, the countries with the largest Greek Diaspora populations, in descending order, are the United States, Australia, the republics of the former Soviet Union, Canada, South Africa, Germany, Argentina, and Brazil. Greek communities exist in other parts of the world also, including Egypt, England, Morocco, the countries surrounding the Persian Gulf, and Zaire.

The word, Diaspora, is one of various Greek terms commonly used when referring to Greeks living outside Greece. Diaspora comes from the Greek word, diaspora, which means "scattering." Another word, omogenia, translates as "same birth." The Greek government uses the term Apodimos Ellinismos (Greeks Abroad) for the General Secretariat for Greeks Abroad, a department of the Foreign Affairs Ministry created to interface with Hellenes in other parts of the world. In this text the term Diaspora is used according to the Oxford English Dictionary definition: "a dispersion, as of people of a common national origin or of common beliefs."

A Long History of Greeks Abroad

Distant settlements date back to the times of the ancient Greeks who were not organized into a single nation but by city-states, leagues, and colonies throughout the Mediterranean, Asia Minor, and beyond. Herodotus, the Father of History, writes in the fifth century BC in The Histories about Greek colonies stretching from Olbia (near Odessa) on the Black Sea in the East to Thuria, Italy, in the West.' The Greek language and culture were not confined to the present-day boundaries of the Greek state, and were expanded further when Alexander the Great established Hellenistic communities from the great city of Alexandria, Egypt, to India, in the fourth century BC. Greeks, along with their language and thought, were prominent in the vast Byzantine Empire, which lasted one thousand years from 324 to 1453 A.D. Throughout the centuries, countless small migrations occurred from the motherland and surrounding communities. A Greek presence was recorded in such distant places as the state of Florida in 1768; in Russia, in part due to the invitation of Catherine the Great, in 1779; and in Calcutta with the completion of a Greek Orthodox church in 1780. During the 1800s, migration from Greece accelerated primarily to the nearby areas of Russia, Romania, Turkey, and Egypt. However, migrations to further locations also occurred, such as the exodus to England of people from the island of Chios after the massacre during the Greek war of independence in 1822. In the late 1800s Greece, still recovering from the transition from the Ottoman Empire to a republic, was hit with an economic crisis in the 1890s. This economic crisis, plus the unequal distribution of land and the demands of the dowry system, propelled the mass migrations of the early 1900s worldwide.

Richard Clogg in The Greek Diaspora in the Twentieth Century states that the largest migrations "occurred during the fifteen years or so before the Balkan Wars of 1912-13; in the aftermath of the Asia Minor `catastrophe' of 1922; and during the 1950s and 1960s [as a result of devastation from World War II, the Civil War and an opening of immigration quotas abroad]. Together these great migrations laid the foundations of the present Greek communities in America, Canada, Australia, Germany and elsewhere." Unavailable as yet are accurate numbers reflecting the effect of the collapse of communism in 1989 in the former Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries.

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