The Europe perhaps started when the Phoenician traders moved north bringing with them the know-how of agriculture. Specifically people underestimate how much of the Greek civilization was historically centered in the Levant and Anatolia. The tremendous influence of the Greek Levant and Anatolia on both the Christian ethos and the late Judaic state (the story of Chanukah). In fact one can argue that it’s the southern shores of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean where the Greek ideas developed and flourished. A far larger story than just the obvious Buzantium. Lars Brownworth explains – When did Turkey become Turkish?
“It’s hard to emphasize just how deeply Hellenic roots run in Anatolia. Ionian settlers reached the western coast of Turkey as early as the 9th Century BC and made up a sort of Magna Graecia in Asia. Some of the most famous names in Greek history and mythology are associated with this area in what is now Turkey. Homer was supposedly born in Smyrna (Izmir), Herodotus was born in Halicarnassus (Bodrum), and Jason’s pursuit of the Golden Fleece took place on the Turkish coast of the Black Sea. These Ionian cities were instrumental in sparking the Persian Wars which ultimately resulted in Alexander the Great wielding everything between the Balkans and India into a massive Hellenistic state. In 133 BC king Attalus of Pergamum (one of the last splinter kingdoms of Alexander’s empire) willed his territory to Rome and Anatolia entered the Roman Empire. It stayed in imperial hands from the 2nd century BC till the 11th AD without a serious break. In 1071, when the Byzantine army suffered a catastrophic defeat at Manzikert, parts of Asia Minor had been Greek for nearly two thousand years.
The most Hellenized regions were the coasts, and Byzantium recovered enough to retain control of them but the interior was officially abandoned. Once it was clear that the Crusades wouldn’t change the situation, the emperor Alexius Comnenus agreed to a treaty with the Seljuks allowing Christians to peacefully emigrate to imperial territory. This ensured the effective end of the Greek presence in the interior and its ultimate Turkification and Islamification.
The change, however, was relatively gradual – a slow eroding over the centuries. The Muslim authorities in Asia Minor referred to the Greek population as ‘the emperor’s church’ and as late as the fifteenth century were afraid that it would act as a fifth column in a Byzantine counterattack. Thriving Greek communities with their own schools, churches, and customs dating back to when Xenophon was marching ‘up country’ remained in place throughout the Ottoman Empire. What finally extinguished them was the great population exchange of 1923. Half a million Turks who had settled in Greece during Ottoman times were relocated to Turkey, and in exchange 1.5 million Greeks from Asia were transplanted in Greece. (Many of the homes they inhabited are still ghost towns today as the Turks refuse to live in them). We are in the very end stages of the complete disappearance of Greek traces from one of its ancient heartlands.”
Only recently people started to recall the transfer of the Jews for the Arabic countries to Israel at the same time the Palestinian refugees fled Israel but this larger symbolic Greek transfer seems forgotten in the same context.