page_title: Greeks in South Sudan
section_title: Turkiya (1821–1885)
hierarchical_section_title: Greeks in South Sudan / History / Turkiya (1821–1885)
caption_attribution_description: English: The Abu Ruf quarter of Omdurman, named after the Greek merchant George Averoff, who is still widely considered a "philantropist", but was involved in slave trade in Sudan. The quarter is still today named after him. Cropped from 1914 Baedeker Egypt &amp; Sudan map of Khartoum and Omdurman.
context_page_description: The Greek diaspora in what became the Republic of South Sudan in 2011 is tiny in numbers – estimated at around 90 – but historically played an important role and has some prominent members, especially First Lady Mary Ayen Mayardit.
context_section_description: When the Turkish-Egyptian forces of the Ottoman Khedive Mohamed Ali conquered the Funj kingdom in 1821, the invading army reportedly included Greek mercenaries of Arvanite origin – who helped pave the. way for the subsequent conquest of Southern Sudanese lands.
  As more Greeks followed the invaders from Egypt into Northern Sudan, some of them guided expeditions further southward. Greek merchants, who ventured South, were mainly interest in dealing with ivory. Their number and commercial activity greatly increased after the monopoly of trade was abolished in 1849 and the White Nile was opened for navigation.
  Some also became involved in the trade of slaves, which devastated large parts of Southern Sudan until the 1870s. The Greek historian Antonios Chaldeos, who has written his PhD thesis about the history of the Greek communities in Sudan, strongly suggests from the local histories of Omdurman residents that one of those slave-traders was George Averoff, who is still widely considered a "philanthropist" and "one of the great national benefactors of Greece". The Omdurman quarter of Abu Ruf is still today named after Averoff.
  Other Greeks did not come to Southern Sudan for commercial reasons though. For instance, Giuseppina Tabraui, a Roman Catholic missionary sister from a Greek Catholic family in Tiberias, accompanied Bishop Daniele Comboni in 1871 and was the first mother superior of the mission to Central Africa. And Panayotis Potagos, a Greek traveller and physician, explored Bahr El Ghazal in 1876–77.
caption: The Abu Ruf quarter on a 1914 map
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