Most ancestors of Tsalka Greeks moved to the East of modern Georgia from the
Erzurum Province. Most Tsalka surnames are formed using a pattern that reflects the history of resettlement: Tsalka speakers add a Turkish suffix (usually
-gil) to the name of the male head of the family at the time of migration to the Caucasus. Other last names have a Russian suffix (
-ov or
-ev). The biggest wave of Pontic Greek migration to Georgia occurred in 1830. Greeks had cooperated with the Russian army that
entered Ottoman territories in 1828, and were afraid of Turkish retaliation after the signing of the
Treaty of Adrianople, which returned territories with significant Greek population to the Ottoman Empire. Over 42,000 Greeks living in
Akhaltsikhe Municipality,
Kars,
Bayazet and
Erzurum municipalities left the territory of modern Turkey, which constitutes at least 1/5 of the total population of the time. Tsalka Greeks moved to Georgia in 1830: from
Gümüşhane and
Maden in May, from Başköy village in
Erzurum vilayet in July; the third, biggest group arrived from various sancak of Erzurum vilayet over the course of the second half of the same year. By the end of 1831, the Greek population of Tsalka settled in 18 villages with a total population of 642 families. Most of them spoke Pontic Greek at home, but the subsequent generations switched to Turkish as it was the local
lingua franca. This is also reflected in the
toponyms: many Greek villages in Tsalka have Greek names, but their residents do not speak Greek. In 1979, Tsalka Greeks composed a third of all the Greek population of Georgia. In later decades, many of them moved to
Crimea,
Stavropol and
Krasnodar Krais. == Typology and dialects ==