The Greeks of Ukraine: From Yesterday to Today

Kostiantyn Balabanov, former rector of Mariupol State University and Honorary Consul General of the Republic of Cyprus in Mariupol, traces the history of the Greek communities in Ukraine from antiquity to the present. The lecture is given in Russian with consecutive interpretation into Greek by Marina Georgiou, following a welcome by Tasos Christofides, Rector of the University of Cyprus.

Balabanov begins with the ancient Greek colonies along the northern Black Sea and Sea of Azov coasts (Olbia, Tyras, Chersonesos) and Byzantine ecclesiastical influence on Kyivan Rus'. He then surveys the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Greek communities in Nizhyn, Kyiv, and Odesa, where the Filiki Eteria was founded in 1814. Turning to the Sea of Azov, he describes the forced relocation of over 18,000 Greeks from Crimea in 1778 under Count Suvorov, and the persecutions under the Soviet regime, including collectivisation, the 1932–1933 famine, and the execution of over 4,000 Greeks in the Donbas during the late 1930s.

The second half covers the revival of Greek education after Ukrainian independence, the Federation of Greek Societies of Ukraine, and the founding of Mariupol State University in 1991. Balabanov details the support given to the university by the Republic of Cyprus, the A. G. Leventis Foundation (naming Anastasios P. Leventis, Vassos Karageorghis, and Charalambos Bakirtzis), and the University of Cyprus, including student fieldwork in Donetsk Greek villages led by Euphrosyne Rizopoulou-Egoumenidou in 2006. He concludes with the 2022 destruction of Mariupol, its university buildings, and the Cypriot consulate, and the university's relocation to Kyiv. Afterwards, Bakirtzis recalls visiting Mariupol and its Greek villages with Karageorghis.