Berbati and Prosymna

The Hellenization of the country’s toponyms was an organized national endeavor, which began during the reign of King Otto. From 1833 to 2011, a total of 4.986 settlement renamings were carried out in three distinct periods. Many settlements were renamed more than once.

From the beginning of its formation, the administration of the newly established Greek state, began to draw upon names from ancient and Byzantine geography and history to name regions, prefectures, provinces, municipalities and settlements, casting aside the names that had existed for centuries.

In doing so, the administration tried to refute the theory of Austrian traveler and historian Jakob P. Fallmerayer (1790-1861), who in the 1830s argued that the Modern Greeks were not descendants of the Ancient Greeks but were, in essence, a Slavic race mixed with Albanians and Greek-speaking Byzantine refugees from Asia Minor and Thrace – a theory that he based largely on the etymology of the existing toponymic map. Any doubt cast on the origin and the continuity of modern Greeks undermined the existence of the Greek state itself as well as its convergence course towards Europe.  

During the first period 1833-1909, a total of 192 settlements were renamed, 24% of which were located in the prefecture of Argolid and Corinthia, due to the proximity to the first capital of the Greek state, Nafplion, and the imperative need to connect this specific region with its ancient past.

However, the exact correspondence between ancient and modern geography was not always guaranteed.

The Eastern Question, the subsequent rise of Nationalism in the Balkans and the expansion of the borders of the Greek state reinforced the state’s policies on toponym replacement. However, a group of scholars persistently disagreed with the settlement renaming and advocated the preservation of the old toponyms. The geographer, academic and historian Antonis Milarakis (1841-1905) argued that nobody had the right to replace the geographical names that had been preserved for centuries and were associated with the medieval and modern history of the country, thus disrupting the relationship of people with the space, simply because the names were considered barbaric, Slavic, Venetian or Turkish.

The second period lasted from 1910 to 1940 and began with the establishment of the “Commission for the Study of the Toponyms of Greece and the verification of their historical Origin” (Government Gazette 125/1909), that would deliberate on the replacement of “foreign” or “cacophonous” names with no “historical value” and replace them with “Greek and euphonious” names in order to refute any insinuations regarding the ethnic composition of the population.

In 1912, the dissolution of the multi-settlement municipalities brought back to the fore the issue of “cacophonous” and “foreign-sounding” toponyms. At the same time, the annexation of Macedonia and Thrace rushed the Greek state to resolve the toponymic issue in a way that would ensure the hellenicity of the space and prevent any territorial disputes with the neighbouring Balkan states. Thus in the period 1910-1940, o total of 3.499 settlement renamings were undertaken, of which 2.579 in the three-year period 1926-1928 alone.

Finally, in the third period that lasted from 1940-2011, o total of 1.295 settlement renamings were implemented.