1. History
     Pre-Modern Times    Turkiya (1821-1885)    Mahdiya (1885-1898)    Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1899-1955)    Republic of Sudan (1956-2011)    Republic of South Sudan (since 2011)  

2. References

The Greek diaspora in what became the Republic of South Sudan in 2011 is tiny in numbers - estimated at around 90 - but historically played an important role and has some prominent members, especially First Lady Mary Ayen Mayardit.^[1]

History

Pre-Modern Times

It is unclear when the first inter-human and cultural exchange between Hellenic and Southern Sudanese civilisations took place. However, since Greek contacts with the Nubian kingdoms of Northern Sudan have been established going back more than two and a half millennia,^[2] it may well be argued that through Southern Sudanese exchanges with Nubia there were at least indirect relations since ancient times. Scholars in Ancient Greece were evidently inspired with curiosity about the exotic lands further South and particularly about the sources of the River Nile. Most prominently, the pioneering historian Herodotus (c. 484-c. 425 BCE) made bizarre references to a savage land of the "burnt faces" (Aithiopia).^[3]

As Hellenic culture continued to inspire and influence the Nubian kingdoms of Nobadia, Makuria and Alwa in medieval times,^[4] it may likewise be argued that indirect contacts between Southern Sudanese societies and the Greek world may well have to continued through Nubia. Before migrating to their modern location the South Sudanese Dinka people lived in close proximity to Alwa, a relation confirmed by the considerable impact the Nubian language had on the Dinka vacabulary.^[5]

Turkiya (1821-1885)

When the Turkish-Egyptian forces of the Ottoman Khedive Mohamed Ali conquered the Funj kingdom in 1821, the invading army reportedly included Greek mercenaries of Arvanite origin - who helped pave the. way for the subsequent conquest of Southern Sudanese lands.^[1]

As more Greeks followed the invaders from Egypt into Northern Sudan, some of them guided expeditions further southward. Greek merchants, who ventured South, were mainly interest in dealing with ivory.^[6] Their number and commercial activity greatly increased after the monopoly of trade was abolished in 1849 and the White Nile was opened for navigation.^[7]

Some also became involved in the trade of slaves, which devastated large parts of Southern Sudan until the 1870s. The Greek historian Antonios Chaldeos, who has written his PhD thesis about the history of the Greek communities in Sudan, strongly suggests from the local histories of Omdurman residents that one of those slave-traders was George Averoff,^[6] who is still widely considered a "philanthropist" and "one of the great national benefactors of Greece". The Omdurman quarter of Abu Ruf is still today named after Averoff.^[6]

Other Greeks did not come to Southern Sudan for commercial reasons though. For instance, Giuseppina Tabraui, a Roman Catholic missionary sister from a Greek Catholic family in Tiberias, accompanied Bishop Daniele Comboni in 1871 and was the first mother superior of the mission to Central Africa. And Panayotis Potagos, a Greek traveller and physician, explored Bahr El Ghazal in 1876-77.^[3]

Mahdiya (1885-1898)

After the 1885 victory of the indigenous Northern Sudanese Mahdist movement over the Egyptian-Turkish rule, the Islamists also took control of most of what is now South Sudan, but held on to it rather loosely - which prompted imperialist Belgian and French missions into Southern Sudan. It may have been in this context that in 1895 a Greek merchant by the name of Grigoris Apostolidis became active in Sambi on the While Nile. He originated from Imvros and after a few years moved on to open a shop Yirol. He got married to a local woman and had two sons with her.^[1]

Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1899-1955)

Soon after the defeat of the Mahdist regime and the subsequent Fashoda incident in 1898, the British-dominated colonial regime started establishing control in Southern Sudan. At the same time, Greek merchants once again followed the invaders. The most important player in those early years was business-magnate Angelo Capato, who hailed from the Ionian island of Cephalonia and had been supplying the British Army and Navy in the Red Sea port town of Suakin since 1883.^[8] He held British nationality and was particularly close with Governor-General Reginald Wingate:^[1]

"around 1900, the government granted him, against a promise to supply the expeditionary force with necessary provisions, the monopoly (for two or three years?) of the ivory trade in Equatoria"^[8]

When Capato after a string of misfortunes - amongst them a fire that destroyed his storehouse in Gondokoro - had to declare bankruptcy in 1912,^[8] many of his agents continued the business on their own. The colonial government supported this immigration as it preferred giving licences to Greek, Jewish, and Syrian merchants, rather than to Northern Sudanese "Jellaba" traders.^[12]

In the region of Upper Nile, a few Greeks settled in Malakal, Bor - which was a center of ivory trade - and Taufikia. In Equatoria, some Greeks - mostly ivory traders, but also a few contractors, engineers and employees - settled in Maridi, Yambio, Tambura, Nzara, Li Yubu, Ezo, Yei, and Mongalla. The greatest number of Greeks, however, settled in Bahr El Ghazal, mainly in its commercial centre Wau,^[1] where in 1910 fifteen Greek merchants were reported to make large profits.^[13] The Comboni missionary priest Stefano Santandrea, who served in Wau from 1928 to 1948 and then until 1955 in Deim Zubeir, stressed though that "their competition prevented their [Northern] rivals from exploiting the natives."^[14] Others went to set up shops in more remote places of the region, like Aweil, Deim Zubeir, Kossinga, Meshra er Req, Raga, Rumbek and Tonj.^[1] Some soon went on to settle in the Belgian Congo, French Central Africa and other African lands.^[15]

When Juba - next to Gondokoro - was developed in the 1920s as the new capital of Mongalla province, "Greeks and Cypriots played a significant role, which is especially evident in brick architecture that are found around Juba's urban center."^[16] In 1935, when there were about forty Greeks living in Juba, they founded the Hellenic Community Juba with the intention to set up a Greek-Orthodox church and a school. Gerasimos Contomichalos, a nephew of Capato's and the most eminent business magnate in Sudan, made a substantial donation to the association. Fund-raising for the church building took until 1951 though, when Stelios Roussos made a large donation. In honour of the benefactor the church was named after St. Stylianos and opened in 1954.^[1] The Hai Jalaba area of Juba became known as the Greek quarter of town. There were two social clubs by that time.^[17]

In Wau, where about fifty Greeks were living in the late 1930s, the Greek Community of Bahr El Ghazal was founded in 1939. It got granted by the authorities a plot of land, where the community started to construct building that were rented out in order to create a sustainable revenue source for the association. Accordingly, the construction of other buildings was postponed and the Church of Prophet Elias - named after the benefactor Elias Papoutsidis - only opened in 1955. At that time, the community had about 65 members.^[1]

Republic of Sudan (1956-2011)

While the Greeks in Southern Sudan seem to have continued to prosper in the first few years after Sudan's independence, a sign of increasing instability occurred in 1960, when many of them gave refuge to Greeks who fled the Congo Crisis.^[1] Just a few years later they themselves came under pressure, as the Anyanya-insurgency escalated across the Southern Sudanese region from 1963 on: after a rebel assault on Wau in early 1964, the military regime of Ibrahim Abboud reportedly “announced that foreign traders would only be allowed to reside in provincial or district capitals in the South, where they could be kept under surveillance, and not in villages. This restriction was aimed at Syrian and Greek traders, who were suspected of helping the rebels.^[18]

Shortly afterwards, four Greek merchants were taken to court for charges of having collected donations for the insurgents, but got acquitted.^[19] At the end of 1964 two Greek traders in Bahr Al-Ghazal and Equatoria respectively were arrested on charges of acting as a link between rebels and the outside world.^[20] In fact, an internal Anyanya paper claimed that "Greek merchants of Tembura helped by providing supplies” to a rebel camp in the Central African Republic.^[21]

In 1967, two grandsons of Dimitri Yaloris, a Greek formerly based in Gogrial, and his Dinka wife, were killed in Bahr El Ghazal after being accused of supporting the Anyanya rebels.^[22] According to Chaledos, they were targeted by the army in a special operation, since they had indeed supplied arms to the insurgents through their enterprise.^[1]

Moreover, the Greeks of Southern Sudan, many of whom had married locals, came under pressure from both warring sides: while the accusations from Khartoum continued,^[23] Southern opposition forces accused Greek monopolists of keeping the prices of animals “as low as possible to their own advantage" for export to the Middle East.^[24] Thus, the Greek community in the South further diminished during the 1960s,^[1] after its numbers had already decreased in the years before 1956.^[14] In Bahr El Ghazal, many Greeks left from smaller towns and moved to the provincial capital Wau with its established community premises.^[25]

On the other hand, the Greeks in Southern Sudan seemed to be more resilient than the Greeks in what was then Northern Sudan, where the big exodus started in 1969 with the regime of Gaafar Nimeiry and its nationalisation policies. Reportedly up to 90% of the Greeks in the South had married locals, whereas such relationships used to be very rare in the North.^[26] Thus it may be argued that the descendants of bi-cultural couples were more rooted in Southern Sudan.

However, the Norwegian-Greek historian Alexandros Tsakos concludes that the relationship between the "class" of "pure" Greeks and those of "mixed blood", "who sarcastically call themselves bazramit – 'the half-castes' ", has historically not just been "fruitful", but also "difficult". He illustrates this through a biographical portray of Photini Poulou-Maistrelli's life as a "paradigm" for the latter. Poulou was born in Aweil to a Greek father and a Kreish mother from Raja in 1923. She spent most of her life in Wau and married a Greek merchant, but got into ever-growing feuds both with other Bazramit and the community in Khartoum: for her and the descendants of other intermarriages "the main issue is to be recognized as Greek."^[25]

Little is known about how the Greek community recovered after the 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement and the establishment of the Southern Sudan Autonomous Region. Nicholas Ghines, who followed two uncles to settle in Equator in 1947 and set up a transport business, opened a safari hunting company in 1972.^[17]

In 1994, the Hellenic Community of Khartoum took over the properties of the inactive communities in the South: the club and church in Juba were leased to the Catholic Archdiocese. "The same happened in Wau." However, when some Greeks returned to Wau in 1995, they managed to regain the community's estates.^[1]

After the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the Greek Community of Juba registered officially again.^[1]

Republic of South Sudan (since 2011)

In 2015, "the Divine Liturgy was celebrated for the first time after 38 years in St. Stylianos church in downtown Juba, by Metropolitan Narkissos of Nubia." Narkissos also laid the foundation stone for a new missionary center in Mongalla.^[27] The Greek Orthodox Church (Patriarchate Alexandria) is a member of the South Sudan Council of Churches.^[28]

References

• Louisiana State Highway 15
• Louisiana State Highway 159
• Louisiana State Highway 16
• Louisiana State Highway 17
• Louisiana State Highway 18
• Louisiana State Highway 182
• Louisiana State Highway 19
• Louisiana State Highway 20
• Louisiana State Highway 21
• Louisiana State Highway 22
• Louisiana State Highway 23
• Louisiana State Highway 24
• Louisiana State Highway 25
• Louisiana State Highway 26
• Louisiana State Highway 27
• Louisiana State Highway 28
• Louisiana State Highway 29
• Louisiana State Highway 3
• Louisiana State Highway 30
• Louisiana State Highway 300
• Louisiana State Highway 301
• Louisiana State Highway 302
• Louisiana State Highway 310
• Louisiana State Highway 339
• Louisiana State Highway 34