Greek-Speaking Romans of Anatolia: The Many Worlds of Rûm

The Western Roman Empire fell in the 5th century. The Eastern Roman Empire — which we now call Byzantium — lasted until the 15th. A whole millennium between them.

So what happened to the Greek-speaking, Orthodox Christian descendants of the Romans? Where did they go? What did they call themselves? And why is the most famous “Roman” in the modern world a 13th-century Persian poet buried in central Turkey?

Before we go further: this is not the article you think it is

Most English-language pieces about “the Rum” treat the word as a synonym for “the Greek Orthodox minority of Istanbul” — a small, vanishing community in Fener, holding on against history.

That community is real, and we will spend a lot of this article with them. But that is only one branch of the Rum world. Once you open the word up properly, Rum turns out to be:

A word the Qur’an itself uses for an entire empire (Surat ar-Rûm).
The official name of a Muslim sultanate in central Anatolia, ruled by Turks, for over two centuries.
The reason Mevlana Jalāl al-Dīn, born in Balkh, is known to the world as “Rumi.”
The self-designation of millions of Arabic-speaking Greek Orthodox Christians in today’s Syria and Lebanon.
A category that, in early Ottoman usage, could mean Bulgarian, Serb, Albanian, Wallachian, Romanian, Arab — anyone Eastern Orthodox.
A 21st-century literary and culinary identity being lovingly rebuilt in Çukurcuma and Beyoğlu by novelists, pastry chefs and church cantors.

Rum, in other words, is not an ethnicity. It is what the Roman Empire became in the imagination of the Islamic world — a giant, plural, contradictory word that survived the fall of Rome, the fall of Constantinople, and the rise of nationalism, and is still alive today.

This is its biography.

A note on spelling. Rûm (with a circumflex) is the standard scholarly transliteration of Arabic الرُّومُ and Persian/Turkish Rum. We will use Rum throughout for readability, except in proper names like Kayser-i Rûm and Sultanate of Rûm. Rhomaioi (Ῥωμαῖοι) and Romioi (Ρωμιοί) are the underlying Greek self-designations — “Romans.”

Introduction: Constantinople's Roman Heritage

Long before anyone uttered “Istanbul,” the Rum simply called it i Póli — the City. To say páo stin Póli — “I’m going to the City” — needed no further explanation. There was only one City that mattered. In formal speech they called her Konstantinoupoli; in liturgy and learned circles she was Vasilevousa (“the Reigning City”) and Nea Romi (“New Rome”).

These layered names reveal something deeper than geography. For the Rum, this was not just a metropolis but the beating heart of their Roman, Greek-speaking, Orthodox world — the place where faith, language and memory fused into a single idea simply called “the City.” The Istanbul Rum writer Nektaria Anastasiadou, whose 2021 novel A Recipe for Daphne is the most loving recent portrait of the community, still calls it “the Polis” in the Istanbul Greek dialect, “as if there were only one city in the whole world.”

To walk through Istanbul’s Fener district is to feel the ghost of a civilization breathing down your neck. There, the Phanar Greek Orthodox College — the “Red School” — stands like a crimson fortress, its Byzantine–Ottoman architecture a silent testament to a people who defied categorization. They were not merely Greeks, nor simply Romans, nor entirely Ottoman. They were the Rum, and their story is the submerged history of Anatolia itself.

Today, those who still call themselves Rum in Istanbul number, depending on how you count, between two and three thousand souls — a startling collapse from the roughly 110,000 living in the city at the time of the 1923 Lausanne exchange. Yet even as a tiny minority, there endures a traditional, institution-anchored network — fortified by two millennia of experience — and a resilient ecclesiastical system anchored at the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

The Rum (Greek Orthodox) community in Turkey has all but disappeared. The number of those under 80 who have not assimilated has dwindled to roughly a thousand. Yet even as a tiny minority, there endures a traditional, institution-anchored network—fortified by two millennia of experience—and a resilient ecclesiastical system.

Preface: Who Gets to Be Rome?

The fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD didn’t end Rome. It kicked off a thousand-year identity war. The Eastern Roman Empire — Byzantium — held fast to the Roman title, language and imperial rituals. To them, they were simply Rhomaioi: Romans. But they weren’t alone in that claim.

Across medieval and early-modern Eurasia, rulers fought battles not just over land but over legitimacy. From the tsars of Bulgaria and Serbia to Charlemagne‘s heirs in the Holy Roman Empire, from the Crusader emperors in Latin-occupied Constantinople (1204–1261) to the Seljuks of Rûm in Konya and finally to the Ottoman sultans who seized the capital in 1453 — many crowned themselves successors to Rome. Some, like Mehmed, did it explicitly. Others did it through architecture, ritual, ceremonial dress.

Yet the most persistent and intimate custodians of Roman identity were not always the emperors. They were the ordinary Rum people of Anatolia who spoke Greek, practiced Orthodox Christianity, and called themselves Rum — Romans. In today’s Turkey, Rum refers specifically to these Greek-speaking Orthodox communities whose roots reach back to Byzantium and beyond. In Western literature, they’re often flattened into “Greeks.” But they are something far more layered: heirs not only to Hellenic culture, but to the Eastern Roman legacy and a deep Anatolian civilization that predates Greek colonization.

What "Rum" actually means

The word Rum comes from Arabic الرُّومُ (ar-Rūm) and Persian/Turkish Rum, both loaned directly from Byzantine Greek Ρωμιοί / Ρωμαῖοι — “Romans.” (The city of Rome itself, by contrast, is Arabic رُومَا Rūmā — a different word.)

The citizens of what we now call the Byzantine Empire called themselves Romans, not Byzantines. Their state was a continuation of the Roman polity; their official religion was Orthodox Christianity; their everyday language was Greek. The Arabs, encountering them from the 7th century onward, simply called them what they called themselves — ar-Rūm — and called their territory the land of the Rûm and the Mediterranean the Sea of the Rûm. Ancient Greece, by contrast, was Yūnān (from Ionia), and ancient Greeks were Yūnānī — a separate word entirely. Yunan and Rum are not synonyms; they are two different histories.

The Qur’an itself includes Surat ar-Rûm, “the Romans” — Sura 30 — concerning a defeat and prophesied victory of the Byzantines. From its very founding, the Islamic textual tradition has a word for, and a relationship with, Rome’s surviving eastern half.

What makes Rum unique among ethnonyms is its breathtaking ambiguity. Even in the medieval period it could mean, depending on context:

The Byzantine Empire as a state;
The peoples of Asia Minor (Anatolia), whether Muslim or Christian;
Specifically Eastern Orthodox Christians;
Specifically Anatolian Muslims, living in a place once called Roman;
Or, sweepingly, anyone on the northern shore of the Mediterranean.

This was not loose talk. As the historian Rustam Shukurov has shown, in the 12th–14th centuries individuals genuinely slipped across these categories — a Turkmen warlord could be Rûmî; so could a Greek monk on Mount Athos. The historian Cemal Kafadar, in his now-classic essay “A Rome of One’s Own” (Muqarnas 24, 2007), argues that the Ottomans inherited and amplified this fluidity: their empire was, in their own mid-15th-century texts, Rûm — a Rome of one’s own.

The strict modern equation Anatolia = Turkey is a much later invention, promoted by Turkish nationalist academics from the early 20th century onward as part of nation-building.

Hold on to that fluidity. It is the key to everything that follows.

Rumi was a Rumi

The most famous person in world literature carrying a “Rum” name is the 13th-century Persian poet Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī — known in the English-speaking world simply as Rumi, and in Turkish as Mevlana. He was not Greek, not Christian, not Byzantine. He was born in Balkh (in today’s Afghanistan), wrote in Persian, and died in Konya in 1273.

So why “Rumi”?

Because he lived and died in the Sultanate of Rûm — the Seljuk-Turkish state whose capital was Konya, whose territory had been Byzantine until a generation or two before, and which therefore inherited the name Rûm. A Persian-speaking Sufi mystic from Central Asia, settled in a Turkish-ruled sultanate on land the Arabs still thought of as Roman, became “the Roman” — al-Rūmī — because of where he lived.

It is one of the most beautiful linguistic accidents in world history. The same word that today marks an embattled Christian minority in Fener also marks the most popular poet on the American bestseller lists.

Other famous “al-Rūmīs”:
Suhayb ar-Rumi, a companion of the Prophet Muhammad, born in Byzantine territory.
Qāḍī Zāda al-Rūmī, the 14th–15th-century mathematician working at Ulugh Beg’s observatory in Samarkand.
Tāj al-Mulūk Ayrumlu, mother of the last Shah of Iran — even modern Iranian onomastics carries a Rum trace.

The Sultanate of Rûm: when “Rum” was a Muslim state

The story most Western histories skip is this: for the better part of two and a half centuries, the central and eastern Anatolian plateau was ruled by a Muslim Turkish state that called itself the Sultanate of Rûm — Saljūqiyān-i Rūm. Founded after the Seljuk victory at Manzikert (1071), with its capital eventually at Konya (Iconium), it lasted from roughly 1077 until the Mongols broke its independence in the mid-13th century and reduced it to a tributary, with its final rump dissolving by 1308.

It was Rûm because its territory was the former Roman heartland of Anatolia. Its sultans built caravanserais, madrasas and great mosques — many still standing along the old Silk Road routes. They patronized Persian poets (Rumi above all), employed Greek and Armenian Christian scribes and craftsmen, and ruled a population that was still majority Christian for most of their tenure.

This is the period the dissertation by historian F. M. Sümertaş (2021) and the scholarship of Rustam Shukurov and Dimitri Korobeinikov examine so carefully: a period in which Rum was not a minority identity at all but a shared geographical and political space, where Seljuk sultans could be styled Sultān al-Rûm wa-l-Sham wa-l-Arman — “Sultan of Rûm, Syria and Armenia” — and where the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople was just one Roman claimant among several.

When Mehmed II took Constantinople in 1453 and styled himself Kayser-i Rûm — Caesar of the Romans — he was reaching back through the Seljuks, through the Sultanate of Rûm, to claim a title that, in his world, already carried 400 years of Muslim use. He was not inventing a Roman claim. He was completing one.

Worth noting, against the romanticized version of the story: later Ottoman sultans largely abandoned the Kayser-i Rûm title. It was Mehmed’s personal project. His successors had other claims to make — Caliph, Padişah, Sultān al-Barreyn wa Khāqān al-Bahreyn. The Roman flame, in the Ottoman dynasty’s own self-presentation, flickered only briefly.

The Name That Tells a Story — and the Yunan / Rum distinction

Today’s Anatolian Greeks carry several names depending on who is speaking and when. In Turkish, the Orthodox Christian minority is called Rum — “Roman” — directly from Byzantine Greek Rhomaios. In modern Greek they are Έλληνες (Ellines, “Hellenes”), reviving the ancient ethnonym, while the older Byzantine self-designation Rhomaioi fell out of fashionable use in the 19th century. In Ottoman Turkish, however, a sharper distinction was preserved that modern English usage erases:

Yunan / Yunanlı — Greeks of Greece proper, the country, the kingdom. From Ionia.
Rum — Eastern Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire, regardless of whether they spoke Greek, Bulgarian, Arabic or Turkish.

A Rum from Fener and a Yunanlı from Athens were, in 19th-century Istanbul, two different things. The Rum thought of themselves as the people of Romanía — the land of the Romans — not as expatriate Hellenes. This is why one of the more historically literate commenters on the Greek-Asia diaspora press wrote, correctly: “Rum concerns Orthodox, not Greeks. Yunan are the Greeks, and their country is Ionia.”

Under the Ottomans after the fall of Constantinople, Rum was not just an ethnic label for Greeks. It was above all a religious–political category: all Eastern Orthodox Christians under the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople were counted as part of the Rum millet (millet-i Rûm). This umbrella included not only Greek-speakers of Anatolia and the Aegean, but Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians/Wallachians, Vlachs/Aromanians, many Orthodox Albanians, and large Arab Orthodox communities attached to the patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem. Only in the 19th and 20th centuries, as new national churches emerged, did this broad Rum world begin to fragment.

A historiographical note: recent scholarship (Konortas, Braude, Greene) treats the formal “millet system” as largely a 19th-century legal construction projected back onto earlier centuries. What Mehmed II actually did in 1454 was install Gennadios Scholarios as Ecumenical Patriarch with broad communal authority — the institutional richness of the system grew up over the following four centuries, not in a single founding act.

The Constantinopolitan Rum and what they called themselves

During the Ottoman period, Greek-Orthodox communities often called themselves Ρωμιοί (Romioi) or Ανατολίτες (Anatoliotes, “Anatolians”). For Greeks of Constantinople specifically, you would hear:

Κωνσταντινουπολίτες — Konstantinoupolites (Constantinopolitans) — but in everyday speech simply Πολίτες — Polites, “people of the City.” A Rum of Istanbul is, before anything else, a Polites.
Μικρασιάτες — Mikrasiates (Asia Minor Greeks).
Ανατολίτες — Anatolites (Anatolians).

From the cosmopolitan neighbourhoods of Istanbul to the remote villages of the Pontic Mountains, the Rum were the keepers of a unique cultural mosaic. They were the descendants of Anatolia’s pre-Turkic inhabitants: the Greeks of Constantinople, the Pontians of the Black Sea, the Cappadocians of the central plateau, and the Karamanlides of the central Anatolian highlands — Orthodox Christians who, by the 18th century, spoke only Turkish but wrote it in the Greek alphabet (Karamanlidika).

They are a living bridge to the Byzantine world, and their dramatic decline in the 20th century has left a void in Anatolia’s soul, visible only to those who know where to look.

Rum in Western literature: a translation problem

Western scholarship rarely uses “Rum” as a standalone identity. It usually translates the word into more familiar labels:

“Greeks” / “Ottoman Greeks” / “Anatolian Greeks” / “Asia Minor Greeks” — depending on geography.
“Greek Orthodox” — in religious or administrative contexts. The Rum millet becomes the “Greek Orthodox community.”
“Greek Cypriots” vs “Turkish Cypriots” — in the Cyprus context, where Rum is used mainly in Turkish-language sources (Kıbrıslı Rumlar).

The term Rum itself surfaces only in specialist literatures: Byzantine studies (where Rhomaioi is treated reverentially), Ottoman legal history (Rum millet), modern minority-rights discourse, and linguistics — particularly the work on the Romeyka dialect of the Pontic Mountains. The result is that the average English-language reader encounters the Rum only as a footnote, with no sense of the word’s millennium-long Mediterranean breadth. The continuity the word actually carries — Roman–Ottoman–Mediterranean — gets erased in translation.

The Greek Patriarchate in Fener Istanbul - The Other Tour

The same erasure affects publishing. Nektaria Anastasiadou, asked by US and UK agents to add “bombs to the story, because that’s how we think of Istanbul in the US,” was told her novel A Recipe for Daphne would be difficult to publish because the world of the Rum was unknown and therefore “of no marketing value.” One editor wrote that she was “not moved by the Rum community and its existential crisis.” Anastasiadou kept looking, and was eventually published by Hoopoe in 2021.

The history of Romaika — and how it differs from Romeyka

Few linguistic stories in the Eastern Mediterranean are more fascinating, or more misunderstood. Romaika was not a dialect of Greek — it was Greek, the living continuation of Koine, spoken by the people who called themselves Romans.

Origins: from Koine to Romaika

Romaika (Ρωμαίικα) literally means “Roman [language]” — the language of the Romans of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire. It evolved directly from Koine Greek (ἡ κοινὴ διάλεκτος), the common dialect that spread after Alexander the Great in the 4th century BCE. By the 1st century CE, Koine was the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean — used in administration, trade, and the early Christian church. The New Testament was written in Koine. Over the centuries the spoken language evolved: sound changes, simplification of grammar, vocabulary borrowed from Latin and local languages. By around the 9th–10th centuries CE the spoken language had become distinct enough from the classical written form to merit a new name: Medieval Greek, or Romaika.

The Byzantine Period: the Roman language of the Romans

In the Byzantine Empire, people did not call themselves Greeks (Hellenes) — that word still carried pagan connotations. They were Romans (Ῥωμαῖοι), and their language was the Roman tongue. The official state language shifted gradually from Latin to Greek between the 6th and 8th centuries. The spoken language of the empire’s people was the evolving Romaic, distinct from the highly stylized Atticizing Greek used by scholars and clergy. Texts like the Chronicle of Morea (14th c.) or Digenis Akritas show vernacular Romaika in early form — simpler grammar, dialectal forms, an almost modern rhythm.

Ottoman Era: Romaika across the Rum Millet

After 1453, Romaika continued as the vernacular of the Rum millet across the empire. But regional variation exploded:

Region	Language situation
Constantinople & Smyrna	Romaika remained vibrant — used in trade, church, and literature.
Aegean & Pontus	Local dialects of Romaika persisted, rich in archaisms (Pontic Greek retains ancient features like infinitives).
Cappadocia & Central Anatolia	Shift toward Turkish-speaking Orthodox (Karamanlides), though they still identified as Rum. Turkish written in Greek script (Karamanlidika).
Cyprus & Crete	Romaika blended with local idioms and Western influences (Venetian, Italian).
Syria & the Levant	Spoken Greek largely lost by the 16th century, but Koine retained as liturgical language by the Greek-Orthodox and Greek-Catholic (Melkite) communities.

By the 18th–19th centuries, Romaika referred broadly to the spoken vernaculars of the Orthodox world — from Istanbul to the Black Sea — in contrast to Katharevousa, the later “purified” Greek of the nationalist period.

Romaika vs. Katharevousa: the Great Language Split

When the modern Greek state was founded after the London Protocol of 1830 and formalized by the London Conference of 1832, a fierce debate broke out: should the national language be the spoken Romaika of the people, or a “purified” form closer to classical Greek (Katharevousa)? The state chose Katharevousa for administration, treating Romaika as “vulgar.” Ordinary people kept speaking Romaika, producing a diglossia that lasted more than a century. Only in 1976, under the post-junta government, did Demotic Greek — the direct descendant of Romaika — become the official language of Greece (Law 309/1976).

Romaika vs. Romeyka — two related words, two different things

A small but important clarification, because the post that this piece replaces ran them together: Romaika and Romeyka are not synonyms in current scholarship.

Romaika (Ρωμαίικα) is the broad historical self-designation for vernacular Greek by people who called themselves Romans — the whole continuum from Byzantine speech to Modern Greek.
Romeyka (Ρωμέικα), in the work of Prof. Ioanna Sitaridou and her Cambridge team, refers specifically to the endangered Pontic Greek variety still spoken in scattered Muslim villages near Trabzon. These speakers are descendants of Rum who converted to Islam after the Ottoman conquest of Trebizond in 1461 and stayed put — exempt, as Muslims, from the 1923 exchange. Their language preserves features lost everywhere else in Greek: infinitives, ancient phonology, lexical archaisms. It is sometimes described, fairly, as a “living fossil.”

Romaika today: living echoes

In Istanbul, the remaining Rum community still refers to their language as Romaika — not “Greek.” Estimates suggest fewer than 1,000 active speakers under the age of 80 in the city, with the total Rum population numbering only a few thousand. In Pontus (Black Sea region), Pontic Romeyka preserves remarkable archaisms. In Cyprus, the local dialect retains medieval features — a living echo of Romaika spoken in Byzantium. Today, the writer Nektaria Anastasiadou is composing new novels in Istanbul Greek, deliberately, to insist that the dialect “is being reborn, just like the Rum community of Istanbul.”

In short, Romaika never died. It became Modern Greek, though the name changed when the people stopped calling themselves Romans.

A linguistic continuum, not a rupture

Period	Self-identification	Linguistic stage	Notes
Hellenistic (300 BCE – 300 CE)	Koine	Common Greek	Language of the New Testament
Byzantine (300 – 1453 CE)	Romaika / Glossa Romaion	Medieval Greek	Living speech of the “Romans”
Ottoman (1453 – 1800s)	Romaika / Romeyka / Karamanlidika	Vernacular Greek of the Rum millet	Diverse dialects, often bilingual with Turkish
Modern (1800s – today)	Demotic Greek / “Modern Greek” / Istanbul Greek	Continuation of Romaika	Officialized in Greece in 1976

The Deep Anatolian Layer: Beyond Greek Colonists

To understand the Rum, one must look beyond the Aegean coast and into the Bronze Age. Long before the Ottomans or Seljuks, and indeed before Greek colonists built their famed cities at Ephesus and Miletus, Anatolia was home to sophisticated indigenous civilizations. Among them were the Luwians, a people whose history is etched into the rocky landscapes of Lycia and Lydia. Mycenaean Greek contact reached even further east — pottery and place-names suggest Greek presence in Ugarit on the Syrian coast as early as ~1550 BCE.

When early Hellenes arrived, they did not find an empty land. They encountered the Luwians, Hittites, and other ancient peoples who had thrived there for millennia. The process of Hellenization, supercharged by Alexander the Great’s conquests in the 4th century BCE, was not a simple case of Greek culture being imposed. It was a profound cultural fusion. Native Anatolian populations — Lycians, Lydians, Carians — gradually adopted Greek and integrated into the Hellenistic world, bringing their own ancient traditions with them.

The Rum, therefore, are not purely the descendants of Greek colonists. They are also the heirs of the countless Anatolian tribes and civilizations who, over centuries, became Hellenic. Their lineage is a blended one, a palimpsest where Luwian stones lie beneath Byzantine churches. By the early Byzantine era, this fusion was complete; Anatolia was a predominantly Greek-speaking, Christian land, and its people called themselves Rhomaioi.

The Ottoman Chapter: The Rum Millet

The Ottoman conquest did not erase the Rum; it codified them. The Rum Millet system granted the Orthodox community a degree of autonomy under the leadership of the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople. This religiously defined identity allowed the Rum to persist as a distinct entity within the empire.

The heart of this community beat strongest in Istanbul’s Fener district. The Patriarchal Academy was refounded in 1454 under Gennadios Scholarios, just a year after the conquest. Over the following four centuries it evolved into the Great School of the Nation (Μεγάλη τοῦ Γένους Σχολή — Megalē tou Genous Scholē) — the intellectual nucleus of Ottoman-Greek life, producing generations of physicians, diplomats, scholars, dragomans and hospodars.

The famous red-brick castle on the Fener skyline that visitors photograph today — the so-called “Red School” — is much later. It was built between 1881 and 1883 by the Ottoman-Greek architect Konstantinos Dimadis. The institution still operates as Özel Fener Rum Lisesi, although the student body has dwindled to a few dozen.

The Patriarchate’s long migration through the city

Before the Patriarchate settled in Fener, its seat moved through Constantinople in a long arc:

Hagia Sophia — until 1453, when Mehmed II converted the cathedral into a mosque.
Church of the Holy Apostles — granted by Mehmed II to Gennadios Scholarios but already in disrepair.
Pammakaristos Monastery (today’s Fethiye Camii in Çarşamba) — from 1456 until 1587, when Sultan Murad III converted it into a mosque after his Caucasian victories.
A brief stop at Vlach Saray, then at St. Demetrios Kanavou.
Church of St. George at Fener — from around 1600 to the present day. The church was enlarged in 1614 under Patriarch Timothy of Cyzicus, and rebuilt by the Greek community in 1720 under Patriarch Jeremiah III.

So when you stand in the courtyard of the Patriarchate in Fener, you are not standing where the institution always was. You are standing at the end of a 150-year search for a permanent home — and at the beginning of a 400-year chapter in which that home, for all its modest exterior, became the spiritual capital of more than 250 million Orthodox Christians worldwide.

The Patriarchate as a mini-government

The Rum millet (all Orthodox under the Ecumenical Patriarch, not just Greeks) was the largest and most politically influential non-Muslim community in the empire. The Patriarchate in Fener acted almost like a mini-government: it ran its own courts for family and inheritance law, collected and redistributed taxes, supervised schools, hospitals and churches, certified marriages, and represented the community before the Sublime Porte.

Ottoman millet period

The Rum millet (all Orthodox under the Ecumenical Patriarch, not just Greeks) was the largest and most politically influential non-Muslim community. The Patriarchate in Fener acted almost like a mini-government: it ran its own courts for family law, collected and redistributed taxes, and supervised schools, hospitals, and churches.

15th Century — Post-Conquest Repopulation

Following the 1453 conquest, the Ottomans worked to restore the city’s population and infrastructure by drawing diverse communities into the capital. According to Halil İnalcık’s reading of the 1477 cadastral register, roughly:

Muslim households ~58–60% (mainly resettled from Anatolia and the Balkans)
Greek-Orthodox (Rum) ~22–25% (relocated to maintain Byzantine know-how and commercial continuity)
Armenians ~4–6% (brought in for crafts, finance and stonework)
Jews ~9–11%
Latins, Romani and others ~4%

Ethnic groups settled in distinct quarters: Greeks in Fener, Armenians in Kumkapı and Samatya, Jews in Galata and Balat. The millet structure allowed each group autonomy under its own religious leadership.

16th Century — Imperial Capital and Urban Boom

As the empire reached its height, Istanbul became one of the largest and most diverse cities in the world. Population surpassed 400,000. Muslims remained the majority (~55–60%). Greeks continued to be the most prominent minority, concentrated in Fener. The arrival of Sephardic Jews after 1492 swelled the Jewish community and reshaped Jewish culture in Istanbul. Armenians grew in numbers and established a strong presence in construction, goldsmithing and trade. Each community deepened its institutional presence — schools, churches, synagogues, hospitals.

17th Century — Maturing Pluralism

Istanbul’s population stabilized around 500,000+, with non-Muslims making up roughly 40–45%. Greeks remained influential in commerce and state affairs. Phanariot families — the higher echelons of the Greek-Orthodox community of Constantinople, named for the Phanar (Fener) neighborhood on the Golden Horn — began their long rise into Ottoman administration. The Patriarchate moved permanently into the St. George complex around 1600. The Patriarchal Church was rebuilt in 1614 by Patriarch Timothy of Cyzicus.

18th Century — Stability and Phanariot Ascendancy

The 18th century is the Phanariot century. From the 1660s onward, members of leading Rum families — Mavrocordatos, Ypsilantis, Mourouzis, Soutzos, Karatzas — supplied the Ottoman state with its Grand Dragomans (chief interpreters of the Porte, effectively foreign-policy lieutenants) and, from 1711, with the hospodars (princes) of the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. The historian Christine Philliou’s Biography of an Empire (2010) is the now-standard portrait of this world. The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774) expanded Russia’s right to protect the Sultan’s Orthodox subjects, accelerating Phanariot influence and Russian leverage in the Balkans. Greek-Orthodox merchants from Chios, Hydra and Smyrna built shipping fortunes in the Aegean and Mediterranean. Karamanlidika print culture flourished in central Anatolia.

1821 — the wound behind the gate

Then came the catastrophe nobody talks about.

In April 1821, in reprisal for the outbreak of the Greek Revolution in the Peloponnese, Ottoman authorities seized the Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory V and hanged him from the central gate of the Patriarchate in Fener — on Easter Sunday, still in his liturgical vestments. Several other senior Rum clerics and lay leaders were executed in the days that followed. The Phanariot establishment, accused of collective disloyalty, never fully recovered; the office of Grand Dragoman was henceforth closed to Greeks.

That gate of the Patriarchate has been kept welded shut ever since, as a memorial. It is still closed today. Visitors enter the courtyard through a side gate a few meters away. If you walk past it on our tour without knowing what it is, you might mistake it for ordinary disused metalwork. It is, in fact, one of the most quietly devastating monuments in the city.

19th Century — Cosmopolitan Peak (and the scholars who tried to catalogue it before it vanished)

The Tanzimat reforms (1839 Hatt-ı Şerif of Gülhane → 1856 Hatt-ı Hümayun → 1876 Constitution) and economic modernization spurred rapid growth. Istanbul’s population rose from ~426,000 in 1794 to nearly 1.2 million by 1900. Muslims accounted for ~55–60%, while Greeks (Rum people) (~25%), Armenians (~15%) and Jews (~5%) formed a strong minority bloc. Greeks led in shipping, commerce and education; Armenians in finance, publishing and architecture; Jews expanded into medicine, printing and commerce, especially in cosmopolitan districts like Pera.

This is also the century in which an extraordinary network of Rum scholars quietly catalogued the city they were watching change. They are nearly always missing from English-language accounts of the Rum, and they deserve their own paragraph:

Patriarch Kōnstantios I (1770–1859) wrote the Kōnstantinias — Ancient and Modern Constantinople — the first comprehensive Rum guide to the city, published in Greek and subsequently translated into Karamanlidika (1863), Ottoman Turkish, French and English. A patriarch and a topographer at the same time.
Skarlatos Byzantios (1797–1878) produced the monumental three-volume Konstantinoupolis — a walk through the city neighborhood by neighborhood, layer by layer, building by building. He had studied at the Great School of the Nation when it was temporarily relocated to Kuruçeşme on the Bosphorus.
Alexander G. Paspatēs (1814–1891), in Byzantinai Meletai (Byzantine Studies, 1877), walked the city identifying which Ottoman mosques had once been Byzantine churches: the Pammakaristos (Fethiye Camii), Manuel Monastery (Kefeli Mescidi), St. John the Forerunner (Ahmed Paşa Mescidi) and dozens more. His book essentially invented urban Byzantine archaeology in Istanbul.
The Greek Literary Society of Constantinople (Ὁ ἐν Κωνσταντινουπόλει Ἑλληνικὸς Φιλολογικὸς Σύλλογος — the Syllogos), active 1861–1923, became the civil-society spine of late-Ottoman Rum life: libraries, schools, an Archaeological Commission, an annual journal, philanthropic and educational programs across the empire. Its Zografeios Agon literary prize, founded in the 19th century, still exists — Nektaria Anastasiadou won it in 2019.

These are the people who made it possible for anyone today to know what was lost.

Early 20th Century — Collapse of Diversity

Wars, nationalism and population transfers shattered centuries of coexistence. In 1919, the city’s population was ~1.17 million: 38% Muslim Turks, 31% Greeks (Rum), 17% Armenians, 4% Jews. Then:

The Armenian Genocide (1915) and the deportations from Anatolia devastated the Armenian presence empire-wide; Istanbul’s Armenian community shrank.
The Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) ended in the destruction of Greek Smyrna in September 1922.
The Lausanne Convention (1923) enforced a compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey — over a million people were forcibly relocated. The Rum of Istanbul and the Muslims of Western Thrace were the only exempted populations.
1923: the archive of the Syllogos was confiscated by the new Turkish Republic and subsequently lost. Much of the intellectual infrastructure of the Constantinopolitan Rum vanished with it.

By the late 1920s, Muslims made up over 80% of the city’s population, marking the end of its multicultural Ottoman character.

The Unraveling: Exodus and the Echoes of Romeyka

The 20th century was a catastrophe for the Rum, in stages. Rather than a single collapse, it is best read as a staircase:

Year	Istanbul Rum population	Trigger
1900	~300,000+	Cosmopolitan peak
1923	~110,000	Lausanne exchange (Istanbul exempted)
1942	stable but ruined financially	Varlık Vergisi — the Wealth Tax, discriminately applied to non-Muslims
1955	~80,000–90,000	Septemvriana — the 6–7 September pogrom, triggered by fake news of an attack on Atatürk’s birthplace in Thessaloniki
1964–65	~48,000	Expulsion of ~12,000 Greek citizens; many Turkish-citizen Rum left in the same wave
Today	~2,000–3,000	Sustained out-migration

Each step has a name. The Lausanne exchange of 1923 saw over a million people forcibly relocated. The Wealth Tax of 1942, ostensibly a war-finance measure, was assessed at punitive rates against non-Muslims, ruining many Rum, Armenian and Jewish businesses overnight; those who could not pay were sent to labor camps in Aşkale. The 1955 pogrom destroyed thousands of Rum, Armenian and Jewish shops and homes across Istanbul in a single night of organized violence. The 1964 expulsions targeted Greek nationals living in Istanbul, but in practice swept up entire mixed families.

A Greek family is seen on a bridge at the Evros River in northern Greece after being expelled from Istanbul in 1964.

A Greek family photographed on a bridge over the Evros river in northern Greece in 1964, expelled from the only city they had ever known, became one of the iconic images of the era.

Eleni was shocked to see the first page of the newspaper that morning, exactly 57 years ago today: “Some of the rights of the Greeks in Turkey have been canceled.” She looked around and only saw concerned faces. Tatavla, the then almost exclusively Rum Polites neighborhood, was shaking with the possibility of their worst fears coming true: being forced to leave Istanbul, their City.

Yet, in the most unexpected of places, the Rum world endures.

The Pontic echo: Romeyka in the mountains above Trabzon

In the mountains near Trabzon, a linguistic miracle persists. A dialect of Greek known as Romeyka is still spoken by Muslim villagers — descendants of Rum who converted to Islam after the Ottoman conquest of Trebizond (1461) and stayed put, exempt from the 1923 exchange as Muslims. Their language is not written, not taught in schools, and survives mostly in the speech of the elderly. Prof. Ioanna Sitaridou (Cambridge) and her team have documented its remarkable features — surviving infinitives, archaic phonology, lexical fossils — and built a living archive that turned a vanishing tongue into a globally visible heritage project.

It is a final, fading echo of the Rum’s Anatolian journey, and it is being spoken by Muslims who think of themselves as Turks.

The forgotten Rum of the Levant: Syria, Lebanon and the Melkites

Now we leave Anatolia for the south, because if you stop the story at Trabzon you have only told half of it.

The Greeks of the Eastern Mediterranean were among the most adventurous peoples of antiquity. From the 8th century BCE, settlers from Euboea founded Al-Mina on the Syrian coast — one of the earliest Greek footholds in the Levant. Mass migration followed Alexander’s conquest of the Persian Empire, when Syria and the Levant became core territory of the Seleucid Kingdom. Greek settlers arrived in waves; indigenous populations were widely Hellenized; by the time of the Roman conquest, Greek was the lingua franca and Greek culture was dominant. Syria was one of the earliest regions to be Christianized, and was a core region of Christianity well before the rise of Islam.

When the Ottomans later inherited these territories, the same word Rum applied — and unlike in mainland Greece, where the older self-designation faded in favor of Hellene, in the Levant the word stuck. To this day, the Greek Orthodox and Greek-Catholic Melkite Christians of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine call themselves Rûm in Arabic — Rûm Orthodox (روم أرثوذكس) and Rûm Kathūlik (روم كاثوليك).

The Greek Orthodox are the older community, in continuous communion with the Patriarchate of Antioch (today seated in Damascus) and through it with Constantinople.
The Greek-Catholic Melkite Church separated from the Greek Orthodox in 1724, entering into union with Rome while retaining the Byzantine liturgical rite and Koine Greek as its liturgical language.

Both communities lost spoken Greek as a daily language around the 16th century. Both, however, preserve Greek as a liturgical language, Byzantine-rite worship, Greek baptismal names, and a sense of belonging to the broader Rum-Orthodox world. They are emphatically distinct from the Maronites (Roman Catholic, Aramaic liturgy), the Syriac churches (Aramaic/Syriac), and the Armenian Apostolic Church.

The Syrian writer Rana Haddad, who grew up in Latakia and read A Recipe for Daphne in manuscript, recalled that “Rum” was the word on her Syrian identity card — and that it was only after reading Nektaria Anastasiadou’s novel that she finally understood what it meant. “That we were once members of the Eastern Roman Empire, otherwise known as Byzantium.” This is the kind of thing that happens to a word that is everywhere and nowhere in the modern Mediterranean.

Estimates, drawn from advocacy and church sources (and which should be treated as rough figures rather than census-level data), suggest something like 4–5 million Rum-Orthodox and Rum-Catholic Christians worldwide, with concentrations of roughly 1.3 million in Syria and 0.8 million in Lebanon before the Syrian civil war began in 2011. That war has hit them brutally hard. Christians in Syria have dropped from approximately 22% of the population to around 1% over the last fifteen years, according to community leaders such as Father Antonios Malouf, who in a 2019 speech in Greece — delivered in fluent Greek — invoked the deliberate echo of the 1922 Smyrna catastrophe: “In the beginning of the war they were told that ships were waiting for them at the port to save them, as was said in the destruction of Smyrna…” The valley known as Wadi al-Nasara — the Valley of the Christians, in the Homs governorate — remains one of the principal refuges.

These are people whose churches are Byzantine, whose icons are Greek, whose baptismal names include Konstantinos and Theodora and Antonios and Maria, whose liturgy is in Koine Greek — and whose passports say “Arab.” They are Rum. The Rum world is much larger than the room we usually give it.

The Last Romans, today: the Rum of Istanbul in 2026

Back in the Polis, the community is small but not finished. In an interview with The Markaz Review, the novelist Nektaria Anastasiadou described what she calls the Istanbul Rum rhythm — ρυθμός — the texture of family meals, afternoon coffees, church services, social gatherings that keeps a community alive when its institutions are gone. She tells the story of an afternoon tea in the hall of Saints Constantine and Helen Church in Tarlabaşı during a city-center lockdown — the streets outside filling with tear gas, and the hostess saying without missing a beat: “Oh, well. Time for coffee, then.” Out came the Bunsen burner; out came the Turkish coffee. It is hard to imagine a more concentrated portrait of the community’s stubborn survival.

The institutions are mostly small now:

The Ecumenical Patriarchate at Fener — still the spiritual center of world Orthodoxy, with a Patriarch (Bartholomew I since 1991) who speaks fluent Turkish and lives a few hundred meters from where Gregory V was hanged.
The Phanar Greek Orthodox College — institutionally alive, demographically minuscule.
The Zographeion and Zappeion Lycées on or near İstiklal — still operating, still keeping Greek alive in formal education.
Aya Triada (Holy Trinity) on Taksim Square (1880) — the largest Greek-Orthodox church in Istanbul, an architectural statement of Rum self-confidence at the height of the Tanzimat era.
Apoyevmatini (Απογευματινή, “afternoon paper”) — the Greek-language newspaper founded in 1925 and still appearing, with a circulation in the low hundreds, run for years by a single family.
The Balıklı Hospital and Foundation in Zeytinburnu — a Rum charitable institution that has cared for the community since 1753.
The Patriarchal Library, the Ayia Yorgi (St. George) Church complex, and a sprinkling of still-active parish churches across Beyoğlu, Kurtuluş, Kadıköy and the Princes’ Islands.

And there is the writing. Anastasiadou is composing her current novel in Istanbul Greek, the local dialect, deliberately, as a refusal of extinction — invoking Isaac Bashevis Singer, who chose to write in Yiddish after the Holocaust because “all languages are constantly in the throes of death and in the terrible effort of being reborn.” There is the new generation of Rum-Polites researchers, photographers, archivists, restaurateurs in Çukurcuma and Galata. There is the slow reopening of long-disused churches in Dolapdere and elsewhere, attended by congregations of a few dozen but attended nonetheless.

The Rum world of Istanbul is small. It is not over.

Guided Istanbul Tour about The Rum

This full-day itinerary expands beyond Fener to explore the profound legacy of the Rum people across the Bosphorus, from the historic peninsula to the vibrant Asian side. We’ll trace their journey from the Orthodox heartland to cosmopolitan centers of trade and culture where Rum people thrived in the 20th century until 1964! Maybe even 74!

Theme: A journey through the spiritual, commercial, and modern layers of Rum heritage.
Pace: A full, walking-intensive day. Comfortable shoes are essential.
Transport: We will use the tram, funicular, and ferry to connect the neighborhoods.

The itinerary

This is a full-day private tour itinerary curated by The Other Tour team.

Morning (Fener & Balat):

9:00 AM: Start at the Ecumenical Patriarchate and Church of St. George in Fener.
10:00 AM: See the iconic Fener Greek Orthodox College (The Red School).
10:45 AM: Visit the historic Church of St. Mary of the Mongols.
11:30 AM: Explore the colorful streets of Balat.

Midday (Transit & Lunch):

1:00 PM: Lunch in Balat or Karaköy.
2:00 PM: Take the Tünel (the world’s second oldest metro) funicular from Karaköy up to Beyoğlu.

Afternoon (Beyoğlu & Karaköy):

3:00 PM: Walk down İstiklal Avenue, noting old Greek schools and institutions.
3:45 PM: Visit the grand Aya Triada Church.
4:30 PM: Descend to Karaköy to see the port area.

Evening (Kadıköy):

5:30 PM: Take a ferry from Karaköy to Kadıköy.
6:00 PM: Explore the vibrant market streets.
7:00 PM: Dinner at a traditional meyhane or modern restaurant.
8:00 PM: Return ferry to European side.

The Detailed Itinerary

Morning (9:00 AM – 1:00 PM): The Spiritual & Scholarly Heart – Fener & Balat

Our journey begins in the historic districts along the Golden Horn, the ancient nucleus of the Rum community.

9:00 AM – Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople: Start your day at the spiritual center of the Orthodox world. Enter the courtyard of the Patriarchate in Fener and visit the Church of St. George. Inside, you will find sacred relics, including the Column of Flagellation, and a profound sense of history. This site has been the seat of the Patriarch since the 17th century and represents the enduring religious authority of the Rum.
10:00 AM – Phanar Greek Orthodox College (The Red School): A short walk uphill brings you face-to-face with the magnificent red-brick castle that dominates the Fener skyline. Gaze up at the Phanar Greek Orthodox College, an iconic symbol of Rum intellectual and cultural life. While it is an active school and public access is limited, its imposing exterior speaks volumes about the community’s prestige and resilience during the Ottoman era.
10:45 AM – Church of St. Mary of the Mongols: Continue to this unique and resilient church. It holds the distinction of being the only Byzantine church in Istanbul that was never converted into a mosque. Its continuous operation offers a powerful, tangible link to the city’s Byzantine past.
11:30 AM – Balat District Walk: Stroll through the colorful, winding streets of Balat. While this area was historically a mosaic of Jews, Armenians, and Rum, the atmosphere still evokes the old, multi-ethnic Constantinople. Observe the beautifully restored Ottoman houses and perhaps stop for a Turkish coffee at a local café before heading to our next destination.

Midday (1:00 PM – 3:00 PM): Lunch & Transit to Beyoğlu

1:00 PM – Lunch in Balat or Karaköy: Enjoy lunch at a traditional restaurant in Balat. Alternatively, take a short taxi or bus to the Karaköy port area, where you can find a wider variety of eateries, from fresh fish sandwiches at the docks to modern cafés.
2:00 PM – Transit to Beyoğlu: From Karaköy, take the historic Tünel funicular up to the start of İstiklal Avenue in Beyoğlu. This short ride replicates a journey made for centuries between the commercial port and the modern district above.

Afternoon (3:00 PM – 5:30 PM): Cosmopolitan Centers & Hidden Treasures – Beyoğlu & Karaköy

Beyoğlu (formerly Pera) was the vibrant, cosmopolitan heart of 19th and early 20th-century Constantinople, home to a wealthy and influential Rum community.

3:00 PM – İstiklal Avenue and the Greek Schools: Walk down the bustling İstiklal Avenue. Look for the impressive buildings of historic Rum institutions, such as the Zographeion Lyceum and the building that housed the influential newspaper Apoyevmatini. These structures are silent witnesses to the once-thriving Rum professional and intellectual class.
3:45 PM – Aya Triada Church (Holy Trinity): Located just off İstiklal Avenue, the Aya Triada Church is one of the largest Greek Orthodox churches in Istanbul. Its grand dome and neo-classical architecture reflect the prominence and confidence of the Rum community in the late Ottoman period. Step inside to appreciate its serene and spacious interior.
4:30 PM – Karaköy Port and Church of St. Gregory the Illuminator: Descend back to Karaköy on the historic Nostalgic Tram or by walking down the steep, charming streets. Near the bustling port, you can find the Armenian Church of St. Gregory the Illuminator, which serves as a reminder of the interconnectedness of the various Christian communities that thrived in this trading hub. The port area itself was a key point of arrival and departure for the Rum community throughout history.

Late Afternoon & Evening (5:30 PM – 8:00 PM): The Anatolian Shore – Kadıköy

To complete our journey, we cross the Bosphorus to Kadıköy, ancient Chalcedon, a center of Greek life for millennia.

5:30 PM – Ferry to Kadıköy: Take a public ferry from Karaköy to Kadıköy. This short trip offers stunning views of the Istanbul skyline and is a quintessential local experience. The ferry decks were once filled with Rum, Armenian, and Turkish commuters, and the route remains a vital link between the continents.
6:00 PM – Kadıköy Market and Surp Takavor Church: Disembark and immerse yourself in the lively, open-air market of Kadıköy. The streets here buzz with energy. While exploring, look for the Surp Takavor Armenian Church, a testament to the area’s continuous Christian presence. The market itself embodies the Anatolian spirit of trade and community that the Rum were an integral part of.
7:00 PM – Dinner in Kadıköy: Kadıköy is a culinary hotspot. Choose from a multitude of options, from traditional meyhanes (taverns) where you can imagine Rum merchants and intellectuals debating, to modern restaurants offering contemporary Turkish cuisine. It’s the perfect place to reflect on your day-long journey.
8:00 PM – Return Ferry: Take an evening ferry back to Karaköy or Eminönü, watching the city lights shimmer on the water—a beautiful end to a day exploring the deep, layered heritage of the Rum people.

Get in touch for a guided tour

The Rum are not a footnote. They are an entire Mediterranean civilization compressed, hidden in plain sight, in the word a 21st-century Turkish news anchor uses for “the Greek Orthodox minority,” in the surname of a 13th-century Persian poet, in the religion line on a Syrian identity card, in a welded gate in Fener that nobody is allowed to open. Every time we walk this tour with a guest, somebody asks why they have never heard of any of this. The honest answer is that the world has spent two centuries flattening these layered identities into nation-state-shaped boxes — and that telling the story properly requires you to hold many things at once: a Sufi poet and a Damascene priest and an Istanbul pastry chef and a 19th-century antiquarian and a Pontic grandmother and a gate that does not open.

We hope this article makes the holding a little easier.

If you would like to walk any of it with us, get in touch. We will answer all your questions ASAP.

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