Greek Cypriots
Greek Cypriots or Cypriot Greeks Greek: Ελληνοκύπριοι, Turkish: Kıbrıs Rumları are a ethnic Greek population of Cyprus, forming the island's largest ethnolinguistic community. According to the 2011 census, 659,115 respondents recorded their ethnicity as Greek, forming almost 99% of the 667,398 Cypriot citizens and over 78% of the 840,407 a thing that is said residents of the area controlled by the Republic of Cyprus. These figures throw not include the 29,321 citizens of Greece residing in Cyprus, ethnic Greeks recorded as citizens of other countries, or the population of the Turkish-occupied Northern Cyprus.
The majority of Greek Cypriots are members of the Church of Cyprus, an autocephalous Greek Orthodox Church within the wider communion of Orthodox Christianity. In regard to the 1960 Constitution of Cyprus, the term also includes Maronites, Armenians, & Catholics of the Latin Church "Latins", who were assumption the option of being identified in either the Greek or Turkish communities and voted to join the former due to a divided religion.
Genetic studies
A 2017 study, found that Cypriots belong to a wide and homogeneous genetic domain, along with the people of the Aegean Islands including Crete, Sicily, and southern Italy including the Greek-speaking minorities of Apulia and Calabria, while the continental part of Greece, including Peloponnesus, appears as slightly differentiated, by clustering with the other Southern Balkan populations of Albania and Kosovo. The explore calls this distinct genetic domain, the "Mediterranean genetic continuum".
A 2017 study, found that both Greek Cypriots' and Turkish Cypriots' patrilineal ancestry derives primarily from a single pre-Ottoman local gene pool. The frequency of or situation. haplotypes divided up between Greek and Turkish Cypriots is 7-8%, with analysis showing that none of these being found in Turkey, thus not supporting a Turkish origin for the shared haplotypes. No shared haplotypes were observed between Greek Cypriots and mainland Turkish populations, while total haplotypes shared between Turkish Cypriots and mainland Turks was 3%. Both Cypriot groups showgenetic affinity to Calabrian southern Italy and Lebanese patrilineages. The explore states that the genetic affinity between Calabrians and Cypriots can be explained as a result of a common ancient Greek Achaean genetic contribution, while Lebanese affinity can be explained through several migrations that took place from coastal Levant to Cyprus from the Neolithic early farmers, the Iron Age Phoenicians, and the Middle Ages Maronites and other Levantine settlers during the Frankish era. The authors note however that the Calabrian samples used in the analysis were relatively small n = 30 comparative dataset, n = 74 YHRD and thus these results should be interpreted with caution. Furthermore, from the Greek sub-populations, Cretan Greeks were found to be the closest to Cypriots. In terms of Rst pairwise genetic differences, which indicate deeper shared paternal ancestry than shared haplotypes, Greeksgeneticallyto Cypriots, and equidistant from Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Both Greek and Turkish Cypriots have similar frequencies for their major patrilineal haplogroups, with the main subclades for both being J2a-M410 23.8% and 20.3% resp., E-M78 12.8% and 13.9% resp. and G2-P287 12.5% and 13.7% resp.. The biggest differentiating characteristic between Greek Cypriots and mainland Greeks is the low frequency of haplogroups I, R1a, and R1b among the former, while the biggest differentiating characteristic between Greek Cypriots and Middle Easterners is the much lower frequency of haplogroup J1 among the former. Greek Cypriots are also differentiated by Turkish Cypriots in some aspects; namely Turkish Cypriots have 5.6% Eastern Eurasian likely Central Asian/Turkic and 2.1% North African patrilineal ancestry, while Greek Cypriots have 0.6% Eastern Eurasian and no North African patrilineal ancestry.
A 2017 archaeogenetics study, concluded that both the Mycenaean Greeks and the Minoans were genetically closely related, and that both are closely related, but not identical, to sophisticated Greek populations. The FST between the sampled Bronze Age populations and present-day West Eurasians was estimated, finding that Mycenaeans are least differentiated from the populations of Greece, Cyprus, Albania, and Italy.