Greek communities had settled in parts of the north Caucasus, Transcaucasia, Eastern Anatolia since well before the Christian and into the Byzantine era, especially as traders, Christian Orthodox scholars/clerics, refugees, or mercenaries who had backed the wrong side in the many civil wars and periods of political in-fighting in the Classical/Hellenistic and Late Roman/Byzantine periods. One notable example of such pre-modern Caucasus Greeks is the 7th-century Greek Bishop Cyrus of Alexandria, originally from Phasis in present-day Georgia. However, these Greek settlers in the Caucasus generally became assimilated into the indigenous population, and in particular that of Georgia, with whom Byzantine Greeks shared a common Christian Orthodox faith and heritage.