page_title: Greeks in South Sudan
section_title: Republic of Sudan (1956–2011)
hierarchical_section_title: Greeks in South Sudan / History / Republic of Sudan (1956–2011)
caption_attribution_description: English: Grave of Emmanouel J. Lagoutaris (1.4.1935-13.3.2015) in the Greek section of the Christian Cemetery in Khartoum, Sudan
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: While the Greeks in Southern Sudan seem to have continued to prosper in the first few years after Sudan's independence, a sign of increasing instability occurred in 1960, when many of them gave refuge to Greeks who fled the Congo Crisis. Just a few years later they themselves came under pressure, as the Anyanya insurgency escalated across the Southern Sudanese region from 1963 on: after a rebel assault on Wau in early 1964, the military regime of Ibrahim Abboud reportedly "announced that foreign traders would only be allowed to reside in provincial or district capitals in the South, where they could be kept under surveillance, and not in villages. This restriction was aimed at Syrian and Greek traders, who were suspected of helping the rebels."
  Shortly afterwards, four Greek merchants were taken to court for charges of having collected donations for the insurgents, but were acquitted. At the end of 1964 two Greek traders in Bahr Al-Ghazal and Equatoria respectively were arrested on charges of acting as a link between rebels and the outside world. In fact, an internal Anyanya paper claimed that "Greek merchants of Tembura helped by providing supplies" to a rebel camp in the Central African Republic.
  In 1967, two grandsons of Dimitri Yaloris, a Greek formerly based in Gogrial, and his Dinka wife, were killed in Bahr El Ghazal after being accused of supporting the Anyanya rebels. According to Chaledos, they were targeted by the army in a special operation, since they had indeed supplied arms to the insurgents through their enterprise.
  Moreover, the Greeks of Southern Sudan, many of whom had married locals, came under pressure from both warring sides: while the accusations from Khartoum continued, Southern opposition forces accused Greek monopolists of keeping the prices of animals "as low as possible to their own advantage" for export to the Middle East. Thus, the Greek community in the South further diminished during the 1960s, after its numbers had already decreased in the years before 1956. In Bahr El Ghazal, many Greeks left from smaller towns and moved to the provincial capital Wau with its established community premises.
  
  On the other hand, the Greeks in Southern Sudan seemed to be more resilient than the Greeks in what was then Northern Sudan, where the big exodus started in 1969 with the regime of Gaafar Nimeiry and its nationalisation policies. Reportedly up to 90% of the Greeks in the South had married locals, whereas such relationships were rare in the North. Thus it may be argued that the descendants of bi-cultural couples were more rooted in Southern Sudan. A 2014 Durham University thesis quotes a Gogrial resident:
  "Among the traders I should mention ‘Gorgor’ he was a Greek trader who was famous. He  married  from Wau...his son was very white, but could speak Dinka and he used to sing Dinka songs."
  However, the Norwegian-Greek historian Alexandros Tsakos concludes that the relationship between the "class" of "pure" Greeks and those of "mixed blood", "who sarcastically call themselves bazramit – 'the half-castes'", has historically not just been "fruitful", but also "difficult". He illustrates this through a biographical portray of Photini Poulou-Maistrelli's life as a "paradigm" for the latter. Poulou was born in Aweil to a Greek father and a Kreish mother from Raja in 1923. She spent most of her life in Wau and married a Greek merchant, but feuded both with other Bazramit and the community in Khartoum: for her and the descendants of other intermarriages "the main issue is to be recognized as Greek."
  Little is known about how the Greek community recovered after the 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement and the establishment of the Southern Sudan Autonomous Region. Nicholas Ghines, who followed two uncles to settle in Equator in 1947 and set up a transport business, opened a safari hunting company in 1972.
  In 1994, the Hellenic Community of Khartoum took over the properties of the inactive communities in the South: the club and church in Juba were leased to the Catholic Archdiocese. "The same happened in Wau." However, whe
caption: Grave of Emmanouel J. Lagoutaris (1.4.1935 – 13.3.2015) in Khartoum
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