Remains of a Turkish mosque, Metsovon, Epirus
Courtesy Sam and Sarah Stulberg

When Constantinople fell in 1453, the Ottoman conquest of the Orthodox Balkans was assured. By that time, most of peninsular Greece was already in Ottoman hands. The other remaining bastions of Hellenism held out for a short time longer. The kingdom of Trabzon (Trebizond), at the southeast corner of the Black Sea, fell in 1461. During the sixteenth century, the Ottomans took Rhodes and Chios (Khios) in the Dodecanese Islands (Dodekanisos), Naxos in the Cyclades, and Cyprus. In 1669 the island of Crete capitulated after a lengthy siege. Only the Ionian Islands west of the Greek Peninsula remained outside the Ottoman sultan's grip; instead, they were part of Venice's expanding empire. The Greek world would remain an integral part of the Ottoman Empire until 1821, when one small portion broke away and formed an independent state. But a significant part of the Greek population would remain Ottoman until 1922.

Data as of December 1994