Pontic

The Pontic Greeks are the Greek-speaking people of Pontus, the mountainous Black Sea coast of northeastern Anatolia. Greeks founded their first colonies there around 700 BC, and the Hellenistic Kingdom of Pontus was annexed by Rome in 63 BC. Seljuk conquests in the eleventh century cut the region off from the rest of the Greek world and let the Pontic dialect develop in isolation.

After the Fourth Crusade seized Constantinople in 1204, a branch of the Komnenos family, backed by Georgia, founded the Empire of Trebizond. In 1337 it still ruled the Pontic shore as a Byzantine successor state, enriched by Silk Road trade.

The empire fell to Sultan Mehmed II in 1461. Under Ottoman rule Pontic Greeks remained Orthodox merchants, miners and peasants along the coast, though communities in the remoter highlands gradually converted to Islam and adopted Turkish.