On 12 November 2025, the General Assembly of UNESCO convened in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, unanimously ratified the proposal of its Executive Committee, which in April of the same year proposed to establish a World Day of Celebration to honour, annually, the Greek language. It is a historic decision
according to which a language is universally recognized for its value and cultural contribution to humanity. This long life of the Greek language and its globalization, as has often been noted by the most eminent scholars, leads us to connect it directly with the concept of the Diaspora. A Diaspora not only of the people who had the good fortune to acquire it as a mother tongue but also a Diaspora as a language operating in geographical places and times in different parts of the world. It is worth noting that Greek became the official language of the Eastern Roman Empire with Justinian’s Nearae [Novellae Leges] 7.1 (482-565) and, thus, Byzantium was Hellenized and Constantinople became the centre of the Greek language. Ιt is noteworthy that the Gospels were written in Greek in different parts of the world, such as the Gospel of John in Ephesus of Asia Minor while the Gospel of Mark probably in Rome.
Diaspora can therefore be considered as an intrinsic nature of the Greek language itself, which is spoken and has been spoken in every corner of the world.
Hellenic Diaspora – Studies in honour of Michael Damanakis
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Hellenic Diaspora – Studies in honour of Michael Damanakis
Anastasios Myrodis Tamis
978-960-468-459-5
This collective volume describes themes related to Hellenic (Greek and Cypriot) Diaspora and is dedicated to the university teacher and researcher, Professor Michael Damanakis, who introduced intercultural education to Hellenic Diaspora as a subject of teaching, learning, and research. The Hellenic Diaspora, it is scientifically assented, is, historically and experientially, the oldest, systemic expatriation among the nations that lived on our planet. For about 3000 years, a large part of Hellenes (many estimate that it constitutes 40% of the total population of seventeen million Greeks) lived and developed an Outer Greece. For the Greeks of the Diaspora, Hellas is not just a nation-state, but constitutes an ideological entity, a sensation, a set of values and a way of life. This ideological and diachronic dimensions of the multiple variations of Hellenicity and its principles, have resulted in the preservation of ethnic and cultural identity and the development and cultivation of an interactive Hellenicity by expatriates and non-Greek-background Philhellenes in all neighbourhoods of the world, through all aspects of education and Greek culture, mainly the Greek language, literature, philosophy, history, music, performing and interpretive arts. Expatriated Hellenism possesses capabilities, hands out priorities and visions, displays courageous morale, however, is also characterised by its limitations. It often faces a crisis in its communication with the Greek and Cypriot institutions and regularly discerns the disparaging symptoms of the endemic pathogenesis of this crisis. However, it resists and advances. Expatriate Hellenism and its institutions in the Diaspora are recipients of very serious socio-economic and political influences, dangerous mutations, provocative differentiations and pressures, which put to constant test the cultural physiognomy and ethnolinguistic identity of millions of people, who trace their origin back to Hellas and to the Greeks. In recent years, the forms and structures of the Hellenic community organisations in the Diaspora, the way they survive and the method of networking their human resources have been profoundly affected. The methods of resistance against their ethnolinguistic assimilation are being modified, the strategies of reaction against their cultural leveling are being revised, new ways are being
formed. The modern effects of globalized economics and politics, globalized television, the telecommunication revolution and the attempted globalization of cultures, the onslaught of artificial intelligence, profoundly, negatively and positively, affect the behaviour, form and structure of Greek and Cypriot communities in their countries of settlement.
