Griko

The Griko are Greek speakers of southern Italy, in Apulia's Salento peninsula, southern Calabria and parts of Sicily. They inherit Magna Graecia's Greek presence, founded by eighth-century BC colonists and reinforced by returning Byzantine rule in the early Middle Ages and refugee settlement.

Even after the eleventh-century Norman conquest, much of Calabria and Salento remained Greek-speaking: late in the thirteenth century Roger Bacon noted clergy and people living in Greek, and Calabrian Greeks such as Barlaam of Seminara and Leontius Pilatus taught Greek to Petrarch and Boccaccio, helping kindle the Renaissance. In 1337 they thus formed Greek-speaking enclaves in the Angevin and Aragonese kingdoms, their Italiot dialects blending Doric and Koine with Romance words.

From the fifteenth century the Latin Church pressed the Byzantine rite and Greek liturgy toward Latin and Italian; sixteenth-century refugees from the Ottoman Peloponnese only briefly strengthened the shrinking enclaves.