The Greek state has systematically pursued a policy of Hellenisation following its independence from the Ottoman Empire in the early 1830s. This ideology included replacing all geographical and topographic names with revived names rooted in Classical Greece – that is, any name deemed foreign, divisive against Greek unity, or considered to be "bad Greek" was hidden or assimilated. The names that were considered foreign were usually of Albanian, Slavic or Turkish origin. accordingly those places were also renamed.

According to Katerina Zacharia, the aim of the name changes was to cover the memory of the "dark past", meaning Roman, Frankish, Venetian and especially Turkish rule. Kyramargiou and colleagues, writing on the nineteenth century, describe the beginnings of the programme in 1833 as a restoration of ancient and Byzantine place names, intended to distance the newly established kingdom from its Ottoman past and associate it with ancient and Byzantine Greece. The name changes followed the territorial expansion of Greece and continued into the Greek Republic.

Wherever possible, places were renamed after the learned names in Classical Greece, mainly by consulting Description of Greece by Pausanias. The process of renaming was undertaken from two directions: "bottom-up" and "top-down". Central and southern Greece followed the "bottom-up" approach with different towns competing for the name of a nearby archaeological site. In this regard, even the Arvanites of Attica demanded that their place names be Hellenised. In contrast, the changes in the north were made "top-down" with a team of historians, folklorists, and archaeologists and archaising names foreign to the inhabitants were introduced. Railway companies also gave their stations ancient names so that European visitors could easily recognise them.

By covering the "dark past" and recalling classical Greece the new names were selected to align historical consciousness with the national narrative. To this day, the use of the old Albanian, Slavic, or Turkish place names by authorities, organisations, and individuals is penalised under Greek law. The result of these policies was a successful restoration of a distant past through nationalism to show that modern Greece was "really the same country as classical Greece".

History The area that is today's Greece was inhabited by various peoples throughout history, and the country's toponyms reflect their diversity of origins. The Hellenisation of toponyms in Greece started soon after Greek independence. Many place names in Greece of non-Greek origin were replaced by ancient names that were supposed to have some connection to the area. For example, the ancient name of Piraeus was revived in the 19th century, after it had been called in Greek, in Venetian, and in Turkish for centuries, after the Piraeus Lion which stood there.Peter Mackridge, Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976, Oxford, 2009, p. 21.

In 1909, the existence of large numbers of non-Greek place names were a nuisance to the government. In 1909 the government-appointed commission on toponyms report that every one village in three in Greece (30% of the total) should have its name changed (of the 5,069 Greek villages, 1,500 were considered as "speaking a barbaric language".

During the Balkan Wars, Greece doubled its territory and population, but it brought various large non-Greek populations into its border, notably including Slavic-speaking Orthodox, mostly Turkish-speaking Muslims from Macedonia, Muslim Albanians, Orthodox Arvanites and Aromanians in Epirus. After the Second Balkan War against Bulgaria in 1913, the majority of Slavic speaking Christians were transferred to Bulgaria as part of a population exchange agreement (Treaty of Neuilly) between the two countries. Moreover, after the end of Graeco-Turkish War and the subsequent Treaty of Lausanne and population exchange between Greece and Turkey, all Muslims except Western Thrace, were exchanged for all Orthodox in Turkey except for those in Istanbul. The villages of the exchanged populations (Bulgarians and Muslims) in Greece were resettled with Greeks from Asia Minor, and the Balkans (mainly from Bulgaria and Yugoslavia). By 1928, Greece's demography had drastically changed from the position in 1830: the country had turned into a nation-state, non-Greeks and most of the population spoke Greek. The Arvanites and Aromanians today mostly proclaim themselves as Greeks. After World War II the remaining Muslim Albanians were expelled due to collaboration activity and war crimes.

After the departure of Slav and Muslim populations in 1912-1926Elisabeth Kontogiorgi, Population Exchange in Greek Macedonia: The Forced Settlement of Refugees, Oxford University Press, 2006, "The influx of Greek refugees coupled, with the departure of Muslims and pro-Bulgarian Slav Macedonians, produced a radical ethnological impact: whereas Macedonia was 42 per cent Greek in 1912, it was 89 per cent in 1926." the Greek government renamed many places with revived ancient names, local Greek-language names, or translations of the non-Greek names and non-Greek names were officially removed.Todor Hristov Simovski, The Inhabited Places of the Aegean Macedonia (Skopje 1998), , pp. XXXVIII-XLII.Bintliff, "The Ethnoarchaeology of a 'Passive' Ethnicity", in K.S. Brown and Yannis Hamilakis, The Usable Past: Greek Metahistories, Lexington Books, 2003, p. 138 "This denial of the multiethnic composition of the rural landscape has been helped by state-imposed systematic place-name changes throughout this century, many as late as the 1960s, through which a wonderful scatter of traditional Greek, Slav, Albanian, and sometimes Italian village names has been suppressed—wherever conceivable—in favor of the name of any ancient Greek toponym remotely connected to the neighborhood. Although the bulk of the population was GreekAnastasia Karakasidou's paper on "Politicizing Culture: Negating Ethnic Identity in Greek Macedonia", Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 11 (1993), 22-23 notes 2-3. "the bulk of the population in Greek Macedonia is nothing less than Greek"Elisabeth Kontogiorgi, Population Exchange in Greek Macedonia: The Forced Settlement of Refugees, Oxford University Press, 2006, "The influx of Greek refugees, coupled with the departure of Muslims and pro-Bulgarian Slavs, produced a radical ethnological impact: whereas Macedonia was 42 per cent Greek in 1912, it was 89 per cent in 1926." the renaming was considered a way to establish a collective ethnic consciousness.Elisabeth Kontogiorgi, Population Exchange in Greek Macedonia: The Forced Settlement of Refugees, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 292-294. "The policy of Hellenizing toponyms was fundamental to the more comprehensive process of establishing a collective ethnic consciousness and a sense of national identity rooted deeply in the profundity of time and history." Several historical Greek names from Asia Minor were also introduced in the region mainly by the resettled refugees. Many Demotic Greek names were also replaced by a Katharevousa Greek form, usually different only morphologically. This process started in 1926 and continued in the 1960s.

Name changes by region The older name forms of the renamed settlements were mainly of Greek, Slavic, Turkish, Aromanian or Albanian origin. Other names that were considered foreign were also of Frankishhttps://www.protothema.gr/stories/article/1087679/ta-toponumia-tis-elladas-kai-i-proeleusi-tous/ "Frankish toponyms in Greece The Frankish toponyms in Greece are remnants of the Frankish rule (1204-1566), during which Frankish rulers had settled in island or continental parts. Their research, although started satisfactorily at the beginning of the 20th century, by A. Adamantiou, S. Lambros and S. Dragoumis, has not progressed significantly since then. The Franks either completely changed the place names (eg Nafpaktos, it was called Lepanto) or sometimes translated them into their language e.g. Monemvasia was called Malevesie etc." and Italian origins.Charalambos Symeonidis, "The Frankish and Venetian influence", in: History of the Greek Language (edited by MZ Kopidakis), published by M.I.ET., Athens, 2010, p. 174.http://pandektis.ekt.gr/dspace/handle/10442/4968/simple-search?query=%CE%A0%CF%84%CF%85%CF%87%CE%AF%CE%B1 https://greece.redblueguide.com/en/the-small-island-vido-in-corfu-do-you-know-it http://pandektis.ekt.gr/dspace/handle/10442/4968/simple-search?query=%CF%80%CF%8C%CF%81%CF%84%CE%BF+%CE%B3%CE%B5%CF%81%CE%BC%CE%B5%CE%BD%CF%8Chttps://www.protothema.gr/stories/article/1087679/ta-toponumia-tis-elladas-kai-i-proeleusi-tous/ Venetian / "Italian toponyms These are place names that also appeared after 1204 and are due not only to the conquest of Greek territories by the Venetians, but also to the trade-political relations East-West, at this time." According to ongoing research being carried out at the Institute of Neohellenic Research in Athens, between 1913 and 1996, the names of 4,413 settlements were legally changed in Greece. In each case, the renamings were recorded in the official Government Gazette. The regional breakdown in renamings is: Macedonia: 1,805 renamings; Peloponnese: 827 renamings; Central Greece: 519 renamings; Thessaly: 487 renamings; Epirus: 454 renamings; Thrace: 98 renamings; Crete: 97 renamings; Aegean Islands: 79 renamings; Ionian Islands: 47 renamings. List compiled by the Institute for Neohellenic Research . Click on [ + ] to reveal general information about the site.

Central Greece

Eastern Central Greece was home to the Arvanites, an Albanian speaking people who migrated to the area in the 14th century. Until the 19th century some parts of Attica and Boeotia were populated by Arvanites, many of the place names were also Arvanite. After the establishment of Greece in 1830, most of the names have been changed, especially to names unused since antiquity, from Classical Greece.

Old name New name Notes Liopesi Paiania Old name was Arvanitic. Liopesi: 'Place of cows' or 'of the cow'. From the Albanian word lopë or cow and the suffix ës indicating belonging to a place, object or quantity of something. Menidi Acharnes Old name was Arvanitic Kriekouki Erythres Old name was Arvanitic. Kriekouki: 'Red Head'. From the Albanian word Krye/Krie (in some dialects) meaning 'head' and Kuq or red. Dervenosalesi Pyli, Boeotia Old name was Arvanite. Dervenosalesi: 'The thigh mountain pass'. From the word Derven meaning 'mountain pass' (itself a local borrowing of the Persian word 'Dervend' meaning the same thing) and Shalës or 'thigh', due to the narrowness of the area resembling the length or shape of a thigh.

Epirus Epirus had a Greek majority population before annexation to Greece (1913), with minorities of Aromanians and Albanians. A part of the Albanian minority, known as Cham Albanians, resided in the coastal area and were expelled from the area after World War II by the group EDES. An unknown number of Aromanians and Orthodox Albanians, the latter called Arvanites in some sources, still live in the area, who today identify mostly as Greek. Particularly in the early 20th-century Albanian place names of Epirus have been systematically changed to Greek, thereby erasing the former Albanian presence in the landscape.