User:Gilgamesh~enwiki/Greek place names

This is a list of traditional Greek place names. That is, a list of the names of places as they exist in the Greek language. This list includes:


 * Places involved in the history of Greek culture&mdash;including Ancient Greece, the Hellenistic world, the Roman Empire, the New Testament, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire and modern Greece and Cyprus, as well as places with important Greek-speaking minorities&mdash;and the Greek language names given to them.
 * Places whose official names include a Greek form.
 * Places whose names originate from the Greek language, even if they were never involved in Greek history or culture.

Though this list includes toponyms from Roman times, this list does not include later wholly Latin-derived names that have no Greek linguistic involvement nor significant Greek-speaking communities. A notable exception may be places such as Australia, which has one of the largest modern Greek-speaking communities outside Greece and Cyprus.

Both koine and modern forms and transliterations (including polytonic spellings) are listed if available. This list is incomplete, and some items in the list lack academic detail.

As a historical linguistics article, this list is an academic lexicon for the history of Greek place names, and is not a formal dictionary nor gazetteer and should not be relied upon as such.

Indeed, many toponyms in Modern Greek now have different names than were used in by Greek-speaking communities in the past. An example is Malta, which was called Μελίτη (Melítē) and was once home to a Greek-speaking community. However, this community is gone or assimilated, and the common Modern Greek name is Μάλτα (Málta, from Maltese).

However, in other cases, Modern Greek has retained archaic names (sometimes with grammatical modifications).

Distinctly Greek names are also largely retained for places without significant modern Greek populations that had a larger Greek-speaking presence until relatively recent times in history, including many areas in what are now Turkey, Cyprus, Egypt, Russia, Ukraine and Crimea.

Format
The names presented are in presented in a variety of standard formats, including Classical Greek spelling, scientific transliteration of the Classical Greek, standard Modern Greek, and with its two influential standards&mdash;the United Nations transliteration standard and the United States Board on Geographic Names transcription standard. The U.N. standard is more often used in maps and diplomatic purposes, while the U.S. B.G.N. standard is used in U.S. government maps of Greece and Cyprus, and often by Greek immigrants in English-speaking countries, and is also widely used for English-speaking tourists in Greek-speaking countries.