Italian colonists in the Dodecanese especially in Rhodes and Leros. The Kingdom of Italy occupied the Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean sea during the Italian-Turkish war of 1911. In the 1919 Venizelos-Tittoni Agreement, Italy promised to cede the overwhelmingly Greek-inhabited islands, except Rhodes, to Greece, but this treaty was never implemented due to the Greek catastrophe in Asia Minor. With the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, the Dodecanese was formally annexed by Italy, as the "Possedimenti Italiani dell'Egeo". In the 1930s, Mussolini embarked on a program of Italianization, hoping to make the island of Rhodes a modern transportation hub that would serve as a focal
Greek Cypriots all major towns and countless villages. The everyday language of Greek Cypriots is Cypriot Greek, a dialect of Modern Greek. It shares certain characteristics with varieties of the Dodecanese and Chios, as well as those of Asia Minor. Greek Cypriots are generally educated in Standard Modern Greek, though they tend to speak it with an accent and preserve some Cypriot Greek grammar. Greek Cypriots Greek Cypriots (, ) are the ethnic Greek population of Cyprus, forming the island's largest ethnolinguistic community. According to the 2011 Cypriot census, 659,115 citizens in the area controlled by the Republic of Cyprus, which excluding