Life of Ukrainian Greeks
1993, 30 min
State Enterprise "Ukrainian Studio of Television Films "Ukrtelefilm", 1993.
A film from the series "Native Land" is dedicated to Ukrainian Greeks living in the territory of modern Ukraine.
On the video: a survey of Ukrainians, what they associate Greece and the Greeks with; a story about the Azov Greeks; landscapes of Crimea, a survey of the inhabitants of the peninsula about the Greek community; the history of the settlement of the territories of Ukraine by the Greeks; the village of Maksymivka (now Bugas, Donetsk region), traditions of a Greek wedding; a story about the culture of the Greeks.
Comments: Chairman of the Odessa Society of Greeks Aristotle Papunidis; former chairman of the village council M. Miglibei; academician of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine Gennady Matsuka; director of the Donetsk Regional Center of Culture Donat Patrich; head of the department of the Kyiv Society of Greeks N. Tsitsarina.
Reference: the Greeks of Ukraine are an autochthonous and migratory ethnic community formed as a result of the ancient colonization of the Northern Black Sea region and the mass forced resettlement of Crimean Greeks (Rumei and Urum) to the Sea of Azov in 1778–1779 within the framework of the imperial colonization policy of the Russian Empire. During the Soviet period, the Greek population suffered large-scale repressions, in particular during the so-called Greek operation of the NKVD in 1937–1938 and the deportations of Pontic Greeks, which led to demographic losses, linguistic assimilation and the destruction of the institutions of national life. After World War II and partial rehabilitation, the community did not fully restore its cultural and linguistic autonomy, and in the 1980s–1990s a significant part of the Greeks emigrated to Greece. In modern Ukraine, the Greeks remain one of the recognized national minorities, concentrated mainly in the Sea of Azov, where cultural societies and educational initiatives, however, their number and the level of preservation of their native languages have significantly decreased due to long-term assimilation and repressive processes.