Geographical name changes in Greece
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".