Il curriculum educativo nazionale della Turchia ha rimosso il termine “bizantino” e lo ha sostituito con “Impero Romano d’Oriente”

That is correct.

Turkey did sth right for a change.

Greece and the entire world should do the same .No more Western Anti-Roman propaganda .

Which is the correct term.

Entirely correctly so. Calling it “Byzantium” just undermines the reality that this was a full continuation of the Roman Empire in that part of the Mediterranean. 

The people there never knew themselves as anything except Romans and referred to their state as such. 

That’s what they called their empire right, Roman Empire? And the citizens were Romans. ”Rum” was used to describe the Greek Orthodox citizens of the Ottoman Empire during its entire existence too.

I thought the terms were synonymous. What’s the difference?

is that an attempt to make it cooler? still far away from the original one

Are the Turks doing this to hack off the Greeks? Maybe. Is this a more accurate term for the polity? You betcha.

I believe the reason for this is this: Lately there is a growing interest for Roman history in Turkey, a lot of historians who are well known and followed in Turkey (these historians frequently appeared on TV when the media wasn’t this bought out) started producing content on Rome. These historians were mostly known for their shows on the Ottoman Empire.

A lot of TV series depicting the Ottomans have also been produced by the government for usual counter-revolutionary anti-republican islamism purposes. In these narratives “Byzantium” is always the foreign enemy, so Turkish people are biased towards the term Byzantium. A lot of hardcore Erdogan supporters even use the term “Byzantium seed” to insult secular opposition.

However, history of Rome is relatively new for Turkish people. Even in the most prestigious Turkish history schools finding any academic research on anything other than the Ottoman empire is difficult, let alone the public perspective.

It is my belief, that by unifying the already vilified term “Byzantium” with Rome, the government is trying to further create anti-Western sentiment amongst the population.

Not for the reasons Romaboos approve of btw, it’s so Turkish teachers can say “We’ve beaten and usurped the Roman Empire”.

There were bunch of other name changes in the history. Many of them are either stuff already mentioned within the topic or softcore Turkish propaganda.

I find nothing wrong with this but I find myself incredibly confused by the byzantiboo tendency to see this as some greay victory or to decay the use of “byzantium” is some sort of nefarious propaganda today.

Historiographical names for states and societies often aren’t contemporary to the time. Our split of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire into two cleanly separate things is also mostly convention, as are ideas like the dominate or principate.

The “Holy Roman Empire” is also kind of an inaccurate convention in that it was not a term that was initially or even later consistently used to describe the entity, but we have decided to use the term to distinguish it from “the” Roman Empire. Some languages use German-Roman, etc.

The Inca and the Aztecs are also exonyms applied to these people. The Myceneans didn’t call themselves that either, nor did the Hittites call themselves Hittite. The Carolingian Empire is also a neologism for a realm that was historically called the Empire of the Romans.

All this seems to me to be based on a specific nationalist fixation either on Byzantium itself (which, please, you don’t have to be an actual unironic patriot for a state that hasn’t existed for centuries) or on Greece as a continuation for it, in which case it’s important for you to somehow “claim” the legacy of Rome for national identity and pride reasons. When they’re reality is this _doesn’t matter_ and has no consequence.

Do we know why or did they do it for Byzantine reasons?

Actually, based.

Ok

This is nothing new, under the rule of Ottomans, Greek Orthodox Anatolians were and still those few living here today are called, Rumi, meaning Roman.

There are even a few Rum Meyhanesi(taverns) in Istanbul.

Definitely an improvement, though to be pedantic it was not called Ανατολική Ρωμαίικη Αυτοκρατορία either. It was called Βασιλεία Ῥωμαίων literally “the State of the Romans”.

Should be Roman Empire, but at least it isn’t Byzantine anymore. After the western part was no longer under the control of the empire, there was no more East as well, there was just **the** Roman Empire and some pretender called Holy Roman Empire.