PC/AHC: Alt-Cypriots

archaeogeek

Banned
So I had a thought; initially Cyprus was sort of a colony of a colony of a colony; it was Assyrian, Phoenician, Greek, Egyptian (although this period mostly maintained the still extant divide between Phoenician and Greek cities). However by the time if became christian it was mostly greek.
During the crusades it ended up with a relatively large venetian and frankish population although most of them packed up and left when Catherine Cornaro gave up the throne.
So apart from turkish or greek, how hard would it be to have Cypriots of another ethnicity from the area; say remain phoenician, becoming a romance exclave with a language akin to sicilian, becoming armenian, being settled by anatolians, or, hell, by thracians, illyrians or whatever the early albanians were?
 
Easy. The Turks could've had easier luck assimilating the Greek Cypriot population via Islamification and pumping the island with settlers. At best, you would end up with a majority Turkish population though with one with a culture and dialect very distinct from mainland Turkey. It would be heavily Greek influenced.

Or unless you don't want the Greeks, just keep it Phoenician.
 

archaeogeek

Banned
Easy. The Turks could've had easier luck assimilating the Greek Cypriot population via Islamification and pumping the island with settlers. At best, you would end up with a majority Turkish population though with one with a culture and dialect very distinct from mainland Turkey. It would be heavily Greek influenced.

Or unless you don't want the Greeks, just keep it Phoenician.

Isn't modern Turkish already a very heavily greek influenced turkic language?

Also couldn't islamification be kind of a crapshoot in terms of whether they'd end up arabic or turkish by the 20th century?
 
Isn't modern Turkish already a very heavily greek influenced turkic language?

Also couldn't islamification be kind of a crapshoot in terms of whether they'd end up arabic or turkish by the 20th century?

No, not at all. It has very few Greek loanwords. Most of their loan words are from Arabic and Persian and this is modern Turkish. Ottoman Turkish obviously had a lot more Arab-Persian linguistic influence. Isn't that what you wanted? Not Greeks on the island but a different people and culture?
 
A possibility is a large immigration of Romans if the Eastern Empire is the one that falls, though I doubt its plausibility.
 
A possibility is a large immigration of Romans if the Eastern Empire is the one that falls, though I doubt its plausibility.

There's not much of a Latin presence in the East because there was already high prestige languages like Greek, Egyptian and Aramaic already. It never had much of a chance save for isolated military colonies in the East.
 
What about a Jewish territory? Maybe the Romans decide to expell them from Judea but concentrate them on the island or - for a more remote POD - the Jews become a seafaring nation like the Phoenicians and colonize Cyprus.
 
What about a Jewish territory? Maybe the Romans decide to expell them from Judea but concentrate them on the island or - for a more remote POD - the Jews become a seafaring nation like the Phoenicians and colonize Cyprus.

Then you have a Hellenophone Jewish-majority province like Salonika in Ottoman times,
 

archaeogeek

Banned
Theodor Herzl thought that Cyprus might be a good Israel

I completely forgot that, there was a marrano duke of Mytilene; the ottoman sultan of the time made Solomon something (google gives me Solomon Abenaes) duke of Mytilene with a rather considerable estate in Lesbos along with the title. Maybe if he's made duke of Salamis instead and he starts settling the island with spanish jews?

Which would probably result in a weird greco-hispano-judaic creole...
 
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Isn't modern Turkish already a very heavily greek influenced turkic language?

The Cypriot dialect of [Ottoman] Turkish in OTL is very heavily influenced by the local Greek dialect, and vice versa. You could theoretically have it continue in TTL as well.
 
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