#romaniotes

Sephardi & Romaniote Jewish Women's Clothing in the Byzantine and Ottoman Periods, illustrated by Nikos Stavroulakis

The Romaniotes are the oldest Jewish community in Europe, speaking a distinct language known as Yevanic, a Greek dialect infused with Hebrew, Aramaic and Turkish words. They derived their name from the endonym Rhomania (Ῥωμανία), which refers to the Eastern Roman Empire. Thriving Romaniote communities were located all over the Balkans and Anatolia, as well as parts of modern-day Italy, Hungary, Armenia, Romania and Ukraine. Almost completely exterminated during World War II, the Romaniotes still have functioning synagogues in some Greek cities.

Listening to this video and this video Romaniote Greek sounded like standard Greek as far as I can tell. But another Greek Romaniote in this video read the Shema in Yevanic and it sounded really different. 

Romaniote Jewish sisters from the Epirus region, Greece, ca. 1920s

In the past, Thessaloniki was nicknamed Evraioupolis, which means City of Hebrews in Greek. Its Jewish history dates back more than two thousand years, when Yevanic-speaking Romaniotes first settled in Thessaloniki. They were followed in the 14th century by Askenazim from Hungary, France and Bavaria, and finally in 1492 by Sephardim from the Iberian Peninsula, who altered the face of and enriched the then-Ottoman city forever. Their unique language, called “Ladino” — originally a mixture of Spanish and Hebrew, which later grew to include Arabic, Turkish, Italian and Greek — would become synonymous with Thessaloniki. Thus, the city became known as a center of the European Jews, maintaining a Jewish majority for centuries. The year 1943 marks the beginning of the end of the community, when around 50,000 Thessaloniki Jews were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. This came about despite strong opposition by Greek and Bulgarian Christians and an outcry from the city's ’s leading citizens and clergy, such as Archbishop Damaskinos. Some Jews survived as partisans hiding in the mountains. Less than 2,000 Jews returned after the war, having lost everything.

Members of the Romaniote Jewish community of Ioannina, Greece, dressed up to celebrate Purim in the 1930s.

Costume of a Romaniote Jewish man from Ioannina, Greece. Watercolor by Nikos Stavroulakis, 1986.

in the years that led up to World War II, the new government led by Ioannis Metaxas instilled into the Jews a sense of self-identification as Greeks. 13,000 Greek Jews served in the Greek army against the Italians in the Greco-Italian campaign. In fact, one battalion was called the “Cohen Brigade,” comprised of Jews from Salonica who fought in front line action. Many were killed or wounded alongside their Christian brethren. One such soldier was Colonel Mordecai Frizis, the first high-ranking Greek officer to die in World War II. While leading his troops on horseback in Epirus, he was mortally wounded, yet, he refused to dismount. With full knowledge that he would not survive, he gave orders to his loyal followers to press the attack, giving the Greeks and the Allies their first victory.