Rumeis and Urums: The Crimean Greeks Who Settled in Mariupol

In Ukraine’s 2001 census, 91,500 people identified as Greek. Of these, 77,500 lived in Donetsk Oblast. Most are descendants of Christians who moved from Crimea to the northern shore of the Sea of Azov at the end of the 18th century. The port city of Mariupol took shape as a town when these people settled there.

Even among people who share the same “Greek” background, the languages they have spoken fall into two groups. Those who speak a language descended from Greek have called themselves “Rumeis,” and those who speak a Turkic language have called themselves “Urums.” According to the encyclopedias, “Urum” means “Byzantine” or “Christian,” a Turkic rendering of the name Greek-speakers used for themselves. This article traces the course of the migration, the two languages, the language policy of the 20th century, and the census figures, drawing on encyclopedias and materials from the statistics office.

1778: Crimea’s Christians Moved North

The Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine (ЕІУ), published by the Institute of History of Ukraine at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, covers this migration in an entry titled “The Migration of the Christians of the Crimean Khanate to the Northern Azov Region, 1778–1780” (written by N. Batsak). According to the encyclopedia, after the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, internal strife and hunger spread through the Crimean Khanate, where Russian troops were stationed. The government of the Russian Empire sought to weaken the khanate’s economy by moving its Christians en masse into Russian territory.

On March 9, 1778, Catherine II signed a decree ordering the resettlement of the Greeks, Georgians, Armenians, and Wallachians living in Crimea. One of those who led the migration was Ignatius, Metropolitan of Gothia and Kaffa, head of Crimea’s Christians. The first group departed on July 28, 1778, and the movement was largely complete by September 18. The encyclopedia gives an incomplete official count as of the end of that year: 31,386 Christians left Crimea, of whom 18,395 were Greek.

The people who moved were not given land to settle on right away. They spent the winter of 1778–79 on temporary land, and government decisions from autumn 1779 to spring 1780 allotted the Greeks, Georgians, and Wallachians land bounded by the Berda River to the west, the Kalmius River to the east, and the Vovcha River to the north (the Armenians were moved to the lower Don). ЕІУ writes that the town of Mariupol and 21 villages were founded here. According to IEU, the villages were given the names of the places in Crimea the people had come from, such as Manhush, Sartana, Staryi Krym, and Yalta.

“Migration” or “Forced Resettlement”: How the Encyclopedias Describe It

How this event is described differs between encyclopedias. The entry “Greeks” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (IEU), published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (a reprint of the 1989 print edition), states that “In 1774–83, 18,400 Greeks were forcibly resettled” from Crimea to Azov gubernia. Batsak’s entry in ЕІУ says that the recruitment of migrants involved direct and indirect coercion, including false information and threats, while also noting that many Christians chose of their own accord to become Russian subjects, both to escape political instability and to gain the privileges of foreign settlers. The years also differ: IEU counts 1774–83, while ЕІУ counts 1778–1780.

Timeline: From Crimea to Mariupol, and Into the 20th Century

Year	Event	Source
1771	Ignatius arrives in Kaffa, Crimea (present-day Feodosia), as Metropolitan of Gothia	ЕІУ (Ignatius)
March 9, 1778	Catherine II signs a decree ordering the resettlement of Crimea’s Christians	ЕІУ (Migration)
July 28–September 18, 1778	Groups of migrants leave Crimea. Records through the end of the year show 31,386 Christians, of whom 18,395 were Greek	ЕІУ (Migration)
May 25, 1779	An imperial charter granting the migrants self-government and other conditions is signed (delivered to the Metropolitan in November)	ЕІУ (Ignatius)
September 1779 / 1780	The town of Pavlovsk is given the name Mariupol (encyclopedias differ on the year; see the section below)	ЕІУ (Mariupol), IEU
August 15, 1780	Founding of the town of Mariupol (the date given in ЕІУ’s entry on the migration)	ЕІУ (Migration)
1781	14,483 Greeks in Mariupol county	ЕІУ (Migration)
1870s	The right to their own schools and self-government, granted in 1779, is lost	IEU
1897	69,400 Greeks in Katerynoslav gubernia, most around Mariupol	IEU
1926–1938	The “Hellenization” policy of switching schools and other institutions to Modern Greek (Demotic)	ЕІУ (Hellenization)
December 1937–early 1938	People involved in Greek cultural and educational institutions are arrested over an organization fabricated by the NKVD	ЕІУ
December 5, 2001	Census. 91,500 Greeks, of whom 77,500 in Donetsk Oblast	State Statistics Committee

Did Mariupol Begin in 1779 or 1780?

Accounts of the founding year differ between entries. ЕІУ’s entry “Mariupol” (2009) states that the county town of Pavlovsk was established near the Kalmius fortress in 1778, and that it was given the name Mariupol on Potemkin’s instructions in September 1779. The same encyclopedia’s entry on the migration states that “the town of Mariupol was founded on August 15, 1780,” and IEU’s entry “Mariupol” states that “Pavlovsk was renamed Mariupol in 1780.” The year varies depending on which event is counted as the town’s founding.

The First Winters After the Move

According to ЕІУ, the official record for 1781 shows 14,483 Greeks in Mariupol county, 3,912 fewer than when they left Crimea. IEU states that 4,655 people died in the first two winters from cold, shortages of food and housing, and disease.

Rumeis and Urums: Two Languages

The Greek-descended people of the Azov coast have spoken different languages depending on the village they settled in. IEU states that of the Greek villages, 12 were villages of people who spoke Greek dialects and 10 were villages of people who spoke a language resembling Tatar.

• Rumeis (rumeï): people who speak a language descended from Greek. The entry “Greeks” in the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine (ЕСУ) (L. Shkliar, 2006) describes this language as “a modified form of Greek (Modern Greek).”
• Urums (urumy): people who speak a Turkic language. According to ЕІУ’s entry “Urums” (M. Aradzhioni, 2021), they call their own language “urumdili” (the Urum language), and the Urum speech around Mariupol has four dialects mixing Oghuz and Kipchak elements.

The same ЕІУ entry explains that the name “Urum” means “Byzantine” or “Christian” and is a Turkic rendering of “rumoi” or “romios,” the terms Greek-speakers use for themselves. The encyclopedia also states that the Urums consider themselves ethnically Greek. According to ЕІУ, the Urums founded the town of Mariupol and 10 villages, corresponding to today’s Starobesheve, Velyka Novosilka (together with the Rumeis), Staryi Krym, Manhush, and others.

Old Names, Current Names

In the early 20th century, the Urum language was called “Greek-Tatar” and its speakers were called “Greek-Tatars.” According to ЕІУ, the Urums themselves used this term when explaining themselves to outsiders in Russian or Ukrainian, and some researchers followed suit, giving rise both to theories that the Urums’ ancestors were Tatars and to Soviet-era attempts to establish “Greek-Tatars” as a separate ethnic group. This classification later fell out of use as an artificial one. ЕСУ likewise sets out the two groups side by side as the “so-called Greek-Tatars” and the “so-called Greek-Hellenes, or Rumeis.”

Group	Name used in 20th-century sources	Self-designation (current name)	Language
Greek-speaking	Greek-Hellenes (hreky-elliny; ЕСУ still gives this name alongside the current one)	Rumeis (rumeï)	A language descended from Greek (Rumeika)
Turkic-speaking	Greek-Tatars (hreko-tatary)	Urums (urumy)	The Urum language (urumdili). Four dialects

How Has the Origin of the Two Groups Been Explained?

On the origin of the Urums, ЕІУ writes that there has long been debate among competing theories tracing their ancestry to Alans, Goths, Christianized Turkic peoples, and others. It states that the best-supported explanation at present is that Christians in Byzantine-era Crimea came to use the language of the Crimean Tatars and Turks during the era of the Crimean Khanate. ЕСУ describes the Rumei group as having “emerged later” than the Urums. This is a point on which researchers’ explanations have differed, and this article does not decide between them.

“Hellenization” and the Choice of Language in the 1920s–30s

In Soviet Ukraine, a policy of creating schools and newspapers in the languages of national minorities was pursued in the 1920s. According to ЕІУ’s entry “Hellenization” (L. Yakubova, 2005), for the Greek-descended population, a policy of switching schools and other institutions to the spoken form of Modern Greek (Demotic) was pursued from 1926 to 1938. Yet S. Yali, head of the government’s Greek section, who himself set out this policy, had written that the Greek dialect of Mariupol and Modern Greek were not the same.

According to the encyclopedia, the policy began in the 1926/27 school year with 15 trial classes in primary schools, and from 1929 a teacher-training school in Mariupol trained teachers. In 1930 the newspaper Kolektyvistis was launched, and surveys of the Greek dialects of Mariupol were also conducted. At the same time, the encyclopedia notes, textbooks were always in short supply and the population was not prepared for the language switch. The encyclopedia also notes that in 1933, Ukraine’s People’s Commissar for Education, Zatonsky, acknowledged that the policy had had an assimilationist tendency.

The Arrests of 1937–1938

According to ЕІУ’s entry (L. Yakubova, 2004), from December 1937 to early 1938, the NKVD used a fabricated case involving a “Greek anti-Soviet organization” as grounds to arrest nearly everyone involved in the Hellenization policy and in Greek schools and cultural institutions in Mariupol, Stalino (present-day Donetsk), Kharkiv, Odesa, and Kyiv.

Census Figures

The number of Greek-descended people varies greatly depending on the census and the scope counted. The figures from the encyclopedias and the statistics office are set out below.

Census	Number of Greeks	Scope and source
1897	69,400	Katerynoslav gubernia. IEU
1926	105,000 / approx. 124,000	Soviet Ukraine. The former is from IEU, the latter from ЕСУ (both centered on the area around Mariupol)
1959	104,400	Soviet Ukraine. Of which 93,000 in Donetsk Oblast. IEU
1979	104,100	Soviet Ukraine. IEU
1989	99,000	Soviet Ukraine. ЕСУ
2001	91,500	Ukraine. Of which 77,500 in Donetsk Oblast (1.6% of the oblast’s population). State Statistics Committee

Why Are There Two Figures for 1926?

For 1926, IEU gives 105,000 (of which 64,200 in the Mariupol region), while ЕСУ gives approximately 124,000 (of which 97,000 in the Mariupol region). IEU presents its figure as covering “Soviet Ukraine” and ЕСУ as covering “Ukraine,” but neither explains the reason for the difference, so the sources do not reveal where the gap comes from.

The figures for native language have also changed. According to IEU, 81% named Greek as their native language in 1926, but only 8% did in 1959. In the 2001 census, among Greeks, 6.4% named their own ethnic language as their native language, 4.8% named Ukrainian, and 88.5% named Russian (State Statistics Committee). The statistics office’s table groups “own ethnic language” into a single category and does not distinguish between the Rumei language, the Urum language, and Modern Greek.

Mariupol and the Greek-Descended Population

The town’s name went from Pavlovsk (1778–1779) to Mariupol, was called Zhdanov after the Soviet politician Zhdanov from 1948 to 1989, and reverted to Mariupol in January 1989 (ЕІУ). According to IEU, Greeks made up 4.3% of the town’s residents in 2001.

Since independence, the connection with Greece has also shown up in the town’s institutions. According to ЕІУ, a humanities college that opened in 1991 became Mariupol State University of Humanities in 2005 and grew into a center of Greek culture. Greece’s consulate general opened there in 1997. The landscape painter Arkhip Kuindzhi (1842–1910) was born in Mariupol, and IEU describes him as “a landscape painter of Greek descent.” On food, our article on Ukrainian cuisine, as the sources describe it, notes that the Crimean Tatar fried pastry chebureki is called “chir-chir” among Mariupol’s Greek-descended population. The Bulgarian-descended people who moved to the Azov coast in the 19th century are covered in our article on the Bulgarians and Gagauz of Bessarabia.

Mariupol Since 2022

During Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Mariupol, according to IEU, remained under the control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine until May 16, 2022, and according to the Ukrainian government’s list has been under Russia’s temporary occupation since May 21 of that year (as of September 2026).