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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Pavlos, post: 4646357, member: 96635&quot;]I never denied they did not call themselves Romans and trying to make a distinction if they considered themselves &quot;Greek or Roman&quot; just does not make sense.</p><p>I try to say is that they were Romans i.e. Citizens of Rome, being part of the Roman Empire (eventhough after the 7--8th century it got a complete different character), but still ethnic Greeks and still they considered themselves descendant of the Hellenics. You should also not forget, Hellenics were pagans, those orthodox Greeks did not want themselves to be considered a pagan, and being a Hellenic was a dirty term as an Orthodox Christian.</p><p>During the Ottoman Empire, all Orthodox people in Greece and the Balkans (including Bulgarians, Albanians, Vlachs, Georgians and Serbians) were all called &quot;Rum&quot; i.e. Romans part of the &quot;Rum Millet&quot; i.e. Roman Nation. For that reason ethnic Greeks by default continued to call themselves Romans after 1453. There were so many different ethnics in that millet, yet the Ottomans consider them all birds of a feather.</p><p><br /></p><p>Regarding the Lemnos account. As [USER=111037]@Only a Poor Old Man[/USER] mentioned, the nationalistic awareness started in the 19th century, all around the beginning of the Hellenic state. Lemnos was not part of this &quot;Hellenic state&quot; until 1912. The locals were not fully consciousness raised and the the children fell back on the Byzantine and Ottoman default. They just did not know yet those &quot;Hellenics&quot; were actually the same people as them, the nationalist consciousness just took a while to propagate and did not reach Lemnos until 1912.</p><p>I have a unique family name from Epirus and a book is written about it by one of my family members (he is a writer) and there they called themselves a Roman as well all the way till the liberation from the Ottomans. It was not just Lemnos, but all parts that were still under Ottoman rule after 1821. The Ottoman empire still existed yet in 1827, the Greeks at the third national assembly at Troezen established the Hellenic State (Eλληνικὴ Πολιτεία). They were not any different then all the other people living in the Ottoman ruled Greek parts in that time.</p><p><br /></p><p>Just a side note, in my opinion Lemnos got liberated rather than &quot;captured&quot; from the Ottoman Empire.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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