I was sat in a restaurant on the shores of Lake Garda, Italy (just place name dropping!), when a bunch of Germans walked in. Nothing strange about this as Germans are everywhere, and its not far from the the Austrian (Germans who can't make up their minds) border.
After a bit, it became apparent that they were all 'Berliners', and as I was idly looking at them, I was struck by the appearance one of the girls, who had an 'oriental' cast to her face. I don't mean she was a first generation daughter of a Chinese and European couple, I mean from a certain angle you could see that she was not wholly 'German' in descent.
This caused me to think about how the history of a location is often written in the DNA and appearance of its local population. In the case of Berlin, Stalin infamously allowed his "Mongolian" divisions three days to
mass rape the population of Berlin as a punishment for Nazi atrocities in Russia. This was part of a
systematic system of rape, murder and looting across all of Eastern Germany, and has left its mark in the DNA and appearance of the population of that region. A bit of a Slavic or Mongolian slant to
East Germans and Berliners is maybe therefore not surprising, even if for obvious reasons it is not a subject that is openly discussed.
However as an illustration that most places can exhibit this - I give you
Constantinople (modern
Istanbul) and the population of western Turkey. The original
Turkic invaders were a small dark haired and dark complexioned people (and remain so across the globe), and yet a 'surprising' number of 'Istanbul Turks' are tall, blond and blue eyed ..... well surprising that is, until you realise that up until the Turkish Ottoman conquest in 1453, the city and surrounding provinces had been host for centuries to thousands of tall, blond / red headed and blue eyed Gauls, Vikings, Saxons and others from Northern Europe (or the old Roman world) who fought in Roman or Byzantine armies, and the descendants of these men are still the inhabitants of the city, despite becoming 'Turks' by conversion afterwards.
This still causes some Turkish nationalist hackles to be raised when you mention it in Istanbul (I know of what I speak LOL), but its true. The Turks are taught surprisingly little about pre-Islamic Asia minor, and I suspect would rather pretend the land was not Greek before becoming theirs by conquest. Still in the East of Turkey its true to say that the population is largely 'Turkic' looking, but this area was depopulated in the centuries of fighting between the Byzantines and Arabs, and then Byzantines and Turks, but in the 'European west' its different.
Its patently obvious that, a total of about 40,000 or so invading Turks couldn't kill and replace several million Byzantines, and like the supposed "Anglo-Saxon" or "Norman" invasions of England, it was mostly a replacement at the top rather than an invasion and population replacement.
History is full of these visual reflections of the movements of peoples if only we have the local knowledge to notice them, and travelling along the crossroads of invasions and conflict often shows us these faces from the long forgotten past.
An Istanbul crowds showing its diversity
