Demetrios
Regular Member
- Messages
- 456
- Reaction score
- 118
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- 0
- Location
- Ἀθῆναι
- Ethnic group
- Ἕλλην
- Y-DNA haplogroup
- I2a-Y18331 > A2512*
I don't think this is a lot. In any case, Crete was under Arab rule for a period, in what became known as Emirate of Crete, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emirate_of_Crete, which lasted for some 150 years or so. It was also under Ottoman rule for some 200 years, and used to have a large Muslim population. In 1821, during the Greek revolution, as much as 45% of the population on the island may have been Muslim, but most of them were local Cretan converts. In any case, all of these Muslims left with the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. Here is some additional information about them, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretan_Turks.It's interesting how much Cretans are shifted toward modern Anatolians and Levantines in comparison to the other Greek samples. The same pattern is seen using ancient (BA) Anatolian and Levantine samples. That cannot be attributed to Minoan ancestry, because even including the Minoan_Lasithi sample the Cretans still require extra Levantine and especially BA Anatolian admixture. Was there something in the post-Minoan history of Crete that I don't know?
An ethnic map of Crete, around 1861. Turks and Muslim Greeks are in red, Orthodox Greeks in blue.