The Arvanites and the Arbëresh: The Diaspora That Predates the Nations

Some communities are older than the categories used to sort them. Long before there was a Greek state or an Albanian one, Albanian-speaking populations were settled across the southern Balkans and had begun to scatter beyond it — into the Peloponnese, onto the Aegean islands, across the sea into southern Italy. These were the Arvanites of Greece and the Arbëresh of Italy, and their existence is awkward for any national map drawn afterwards, because they do not sit neatly inside one nation or another. They are a diaspora that predates the nations. What is new is that three independent bodies of evidence — ancient DNA, Edwardian travel testimony, and the documentary history of the Greek Revolution — have begun to describe this scattered population in the same terms, and to reconnect its branches to a single ethnogenesis.

What the genetics links together

The most recent evidence comes from the 2026 genomic study of Albanian origins, which was able to trace the Italian branch of the diaspora back to its source. The Arbëresh of southern Italy are historically documented as settling from the sixteenth century onward; the genetics identifies where they came from and, more tellingly, when their admixture occurred. Davranoglou and colleagues report the linkage directly:

“the Albanian-speaking diaspora in Southern Italy, known as the Arberesh, who settled from the sixteenth century onwards and originated primarily from Peloponnesian Arvanites”

— Davranoglou et al., Ancient DNA Evidence for the History of the Albanians, p. 15

The Arbëresh, in other words, descend chiefly from the Arvanites of the Peloponnese — the Albanian-speakers of southern Greece — who crossed to Italy carrying their language and their ancestry with them. And the study found in the Arbëresh the same East European-derived Y-chromosome lineages that mark the wider Albanian population, which carries an important chronological implication: the admixture that produced those lineages had already occurred before the sixteenth-century migration. The genetic profile the Arbëresh took to Italy was one they shared with the Albanian homeland, formed before they left. This places the Arvanites of Greece not as a separate, mysterious ancient stock but as part of the same Albanian ethnogenesis — one limb of a single population, later divided by borders that did not yet exist when it formed.

What a traveller still saw in 1910

If the genetics reconstructs the diaspora from the bones, an Edwardian traveller documented it while it was still audibly alive. Z. Duckett Ferriman’s Home Life in Hellas (1910) is a sympathetic account of Greece, which makes its testimony on this point the more striking: even a friendly observer could not overlook the non-Hellenic populations embedded in the countryside. Ferriman names them plainly:

“But there are two non-Hellenic peoples in Greece of whose presence there can be no doubt, since they have in part preserved their language, the Albanians and the Vlachs.”

— Z. Duckett Ferriman, Home Life in Hellas, Greece and the Greeks, p. 205

The proof, for Ferriman, was linguistic survival: these communities had kept their own speech, and their presence therefore admitted no doubt. He records that the Albanians had been scattered all over the Morea — the Peloponnese — by the fifteenth century, the same region the genetics later fingered as the Arbëresh homeland, and he notes their reach into the islands with a detail that has become almost emblematic: “The northern half of Andros is Albanian” (p. 74), and resisting assimilation. Ferriman’s map of Albanian settlement, drawn from observation in 1910, and the geneticists’ map, drawn from genomes in 2026, describe the same scattered people.

What the revolution’s own record shows

The third body of evidence is the documentary history of the Greek Revolution itself, and it places these same Albanian-speakers not at the margin of the Greek national story but at its centre. The naval islands that supplied the revolutionary fleet — Hydra and Spetses above all — were Albanian-speaking communities, and their seamen were constitutive of the war effort. This is not a revisionist claim smuggled in from outside; it is what the standard histories record. The Albanian-speaking populations of southern Greece, far from standing apart from the Greek project, were among its indispensable pillars, their sailors and fighters woven into the struggle that founded the modern Greek state. The diaspora that the later ethnic narrative would render invisible was, at the founding moment, doing much of the founding.

The convergence

What makes this case unusually solid is that the three lines of evidence were gathered independently and by different disciplines, yet they meet. The genetics shows Albanians as a deeply rooted palaeo-Balkan population with only modest later admixture, and it ties the Peloponnesian Arvanites and the Italian Arbëresh to that same ancestry. The history shows those same Albanian-speakers as constitutive of the Greek Revolution and present in Greek villages down through the countryside that Ferriman surveyed. And Byzantine studies, standing behind both, shows that the medieval “Greek” ancestor claimed by the national myth called itself Roman and used “Hellene” as a word for pagan — so that the ethnic-continuity story fails on every side at once. The convergence is what matters:

“we detect continuity of West Balkan Late Bronze and Iron Age ancestry in Early Medieval Albania, to a greater degree than in neighbouring Balkan regions”

— Davranoglou et al., Ancient DNA Evidence for the History of the Albanians, p. 1

Read together, these findings describe a population older and more widely dispersed than the borders later drawn through it. The Arvanites of the Peloponnese and the islands, the Arbëresh who carried their speech to Italy, and the Albanian-speaking seamen of Hydra and Spetses were branches of one people, whose scattering began before the nations existed and whose contribution the nations then forgot. To recover them is not to redraw a border but to remember that the diaspora came first, and the map came after.