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Originally Posted by ElKarlo
Ahem, I believe they are actually decendent from the Bactreo Greeks who settled the area after Alexander came through. They are one of the few tribes in Pakistan that is Polythesist, they are a throwback to the ancient world it seems,
But I think I read that genetically they are unrelated to the Greeks or Balkan people.
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There were Greeks in Bactria before Alexander, he just set up the precedent for the first Bactrian kingdom. The Greek world was much bigger than what we normally see as Greece today. Greek mercenaries and artisans worked with the Persian empire before Alexander came along, and Greek sculptors were some of the first to depict the Buddha (and also the animorphic Siva figures and images as well).
These guys could be descendants of Greeks, but Bactria was already chalk full of various Iranian and Indian groups as well (notably Sakas/Scythians), not to mention the Dravidian peoples that had also crept that far North prior to the Indo-Aryan spread, and then of course the waves of Persians and Arabs that came though later (and then the Mongols, Turks, and other nomads that swept through in the first Millenium AD). Basically we shouldn't take their claims too seriously; displaced or marginalized people often come up with these kind of tales. Some Irish thought they were Scythians, the Gypsies that came out of Romania by way of this very area actually came to believe that they really were from Egypt, and there were people in France who actually thought they were descendants of Jesus. Not to say any of that is impossible, we just have almost no way of knowing for sure.
If you've ever tried to research the migrations and kingdoms of Central Asia, you would know how confusing and messy this shit is.