[LINK] The Greeks of Bengal

[rfmcdonald]

Here is another link to Paul Byron Norris' Banglapedia essay on the Greeks of Kolkata (Calcutta), the city that at one point was the metropolis of all of Bengal. Kolkata's Greeks seem to have constituted only one of several diaspora communities recognized readily by Westerners, with Jews, Armenians, and Tibetans also present from early times in significant numbers. The first paragraphs of Norris' essay are below.

The Ottoman conquest of the Byzantine Empire and the subsequent Turkish occupation of Greece and the Balkans in the late 15th and early 16th centuries forced upon the Greeks a harsh servitude under an alien imperialism which threatened their culture. Fortunately for them their Turkish masters despised commercial occupations and this enabled many Greeks to achieve relative prosperity under the banner of trade. In fact, almost the entire commercial activity of the Ottoman Empire was in the hands of Greeks and Armenians in the 18th and 19th centuries. Greek merchants dominated the trade of the Mediterranean and the Levant and thrust tentacles into Central Europe and Russia. Eventually the most daring of them found their way to India in the 18th Century.

The earliest record of a 'Modern', commercial Greek presence in India is to be found in the Latin Memorial tablets of two Greek merchants in the Catholic Cathedral of Calcutta- the dates of their deaths in this city are given as 1713 and 1728. Some Greeks arrived overland through Persia and Afghanistan but many more chose the sea route via the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. They came from the Greek Diaspora- from Asia Minor, from the Aegean and Ionian Islands, from mainland Greece but especially from the Thracian city of Philippopolis (now called Plovdiv and lying within Bulgaria). They settled chiefly in Dhaka and in Calcutta. It is difficult to be precise about their numbers but between 1770 and 1800 there were probably about two hundred or more Greeks in Dhaka and Narayanganj and somewhat less in Calcutta.