The Making of Modern Greece (Centre for Hellenic Studies, King's College London Publications)

The Making of Modern Greece Nationalism, Romanticism, and the Uses of the Past (1797–1896)

Edited by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks

The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797–1896)

Centre For Hellenic Studies

King’s College London



Publications 11

Theodoros Vryzakis (1814–1878), Υπέρ πατρίδος το παν, oil on canvas, 1858. Known in English as ‘Grateful Greece’. National Gallery, Athens. Reproduced with permission.

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The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797–1896)

edited by

Roderick Beaton & David Ricks

Copyright

© 2009 Roderick Beaton & David Ricks



All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

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Ashgate Publishing Limited Wey Court East, Union Road Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT United Kingdom



Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401–4405 USA

The editors have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Ashgate website http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, and the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) – (Publications of the Centre for Hellenic Studies, King’s College London) 1. Nationalism – Greece – History – 19th century 2. Greece – History – 19th century 3. Greece – Intellectual life – 19th century 4. Greece – Historiography I. Beaton, Roderick II. Ricks, David III. King’s College (University of London). Centre for Hellenic Studies 949.5’072 US Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Beaton, Roderick. The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, and the Uses of the Past (1797-1896) / Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. p. cm. – (Publications of the Centre for Hellenic Studies, King’s College London) 1. Nationalism - Greece - History - 19th century. I. Ricks, David. II. Title. DF803.B43 2009 949.5’06-dc22 2008049050 09ANSHT ISBN: 978-0-7546-6498-7 (alk. paper) ISBN: 978-0-7546-9339-0 (ebook) This book is printed on acid-free paper. Typeset by W.M. Pank, King’s College London. Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

THE CENTRE FOR HELLENIC STUDIES, KING’S COLLEGE LONDON, PUBLICATIONS 11

Contents

Editors’ preface Contributors Introduction Roderick Beaton

ix xi 1

Part I Nationalisms compared: the view from the early twenty-first century 1. Paradigm nation: the study of nationalism and the ‘canonization’ of Greece Paschalis M. Kitromilides 21 2. What the Greek model can, and cannot, do for the modern state: the German perspective Suzanne Marchand 33 3. Modern nations and ancient models: Italy and Greece compared Henrik Mouritsen 43 Part II Towards a national history: Greek & Western perspectives 4. European historiographical influences upon the young Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos Ioannis Koubourlis 5. Europe, the classical polis, and the Greek nation: Philhellenism and Hellenism in nineteenth-century Britain Margarita Miliori

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Part III Defining identity (1): religion & the nation state 6. From resurrection to insurrection: ‘sacred’ myths, motifs, and symbols in the Greek War of Independence Marios Hatzopoulos 7. Revisiting religion and nationalism in nineteenth-century Greece Effi Gazi

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Part IV Defining identity (2): insiders vs outsiders 8. The notion of nation: the emergence of a national ideal in the narratives of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ Greeks in the nineteenth century Yanna Delivoria

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65

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109

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From privileged outcasts to power players: the ‘Romantic’ redefinition of the Hellenic nation in the mid-nineteenth century Socrates D. Petmezas 123 Model nation and caricature state: competing Greek perspectives on the Balkans and Hellas (1797–1896) Basil C. Gounaris 137

Part V The colonial experience: politics & society in the Ionian Islands 11. Radical nationalism in the British Protectorate of the Ionian Islands (1815–1864) Eleni Calligas 12. Class and national identities in the Ionian Islands under British rule Athanasios Gekas

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Part VI Language & national identity 13. A language in the image of the nation: Modern Greek and some parallel cases Peter Mackridge 14. The Language Question and the Diaspora Karen Van Dyck

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Part VII The nation in the literary imagination 15. The nation between utopia and art: canonizing Dionysios Solomos as the ‘national poet’ of Greece Vassiliki Dimoula 16. The novel and the crown: O Leandros and the politics of Romanticism Dimitris Tziovas 17. Literature as national cause: poetry and prose fiction in the national and commercial capitals of the Greek-speaking world Alexis Politis 18. Autobiography, fiction, and the nation: the writing subject in Greek during the later nineteenth century Michalis Chryssanthopoulos 19. In partibus infidelium: Alexandros Papadiamantis and Orthodox disenchantment with the Greek state David Ricks

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201 211

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Afterword Michael Llewellyn Smith

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Index

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Editors’ preface

Like many of its predecessors in the series, this volume began life as an international conference held under the auspices of the Centre for Hellenic Studies, King’s College London, in this case in September 2006, in collaboration with the Institute for Neohellenic Research, National Hellenic Research Centre, Athens. Again in common with many of the preceding volumes, the book has, during the course of preparation, taken on a life and identity of its own, in significant respects different from those of the original conference. It is important to emphasize this because, of thirty-five papers given at the conference, only half have found their way into these pages. In part, this is the result of a deliberate policy, for which the editors take responsibility, to ensure balance and coherence within the constraints of a manageable size (and commensurate price!) for the volume. But other factors have inevitably played a part. Papers that were carved out of larger projects in progress, for the benefit of the conference, have more appropriately found other outlets for publication. At least one contributor to the conference was prevented by external circumstances from offering a revised text for publication. At this point we must also record, with sadness, the death, in January 2007, of Irina Kovaleva, who from her wheelchair radiated a determination and cheerfulness that added an extra dimension to the conference. Only the contributions by the two editors, and the Afterword by Sir Michael Llewellyn Smith, have been written specially for the volume – and therefore also with a degree of hindsight not available to the other contributors. On the other hand, every chapter of the book has been substantially reworked by its author since the conference, in the light of discussions that took place there; and so far as possible the lists of references have been updated to include items published in 2007. The editors have also taken their task seriously, intervening to impose a degree of uniformity in style and presentation, and harassing their hard-working colleagues with questions designed to ensure maximum clarity throughout the book. It is appropriate here to record debts of gratitude carried over from the conference, as well as new ones. The conference was generously sponsored by the National Bank of Greece, with additional sponsorship from the A.G. Leventis Foundation and the Hellenic Foundation (London). In preparing for the conference we were assisted by our colleagues Karim Arafat, Philip Carabott, and Alexandra Georgakopoulou, as well as by Michael Broderick and Jane Gillespie on the administration side. From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. ix

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PREFACE

The eventual shape and contents of the book have benefited from the advice of Paschalis Kitromilides, Peter Mackridge, and particularly of Michael Llewellyn Smith, who in addition to contributing the Afterword read the entire book in draft and offered many helpful comments and suggestions. John Smedley, our editor at Ashgate, has been exemplary as always, combining a light touch with shrewd insights and interventions. As with all previous volumes published for the Centre for Hellenic Studies, the greatest debt of all goes to Wendy Pank, in the School of Humanities at King’s College London, who produced all the publicity for the conference, to the highest standard and often against demanding deadlines, and has now done the same for the book itself, in preparing cameraready copy ready for press. Roderick Beaton David Ricks March 2008

About the contributors

Roderick Beaton is Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature and Head of the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, King’s College London. His books include George Seferis: waiting for the angel. A biography (2003, also translated into Greek) and From Byzantium to Modern Greece: medieval literature and its modern reception (2008). Eleni Calligas is Lecturer in Modern Greek History at Arcadia Centre of Hellenic, Mediterranean and Balkan Studies (Athens). She is co-editor, with Michael Llewellyn Smith and Paschalis M. Kitromilides, of Scholars, travels, archives: Greek history and culture through the British School at Athens (2009) and has published on the history of nineteenth-century Greece and particularly the Ionian Islands under the British Protectorate. Michalis Chryssanthopoulos is Associate Professor of General and Comparative Literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Birmingham. He is working and has published on nineteenth-century Greek prose, surrealism, the role of literature in the construction of the nation, dream discourse in literature, and psychoanalytical literary theory. Yanna Delivoria is a post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Faculty of Letters, Department of Comparative Literature). She currently works in a research programme concerning the historical, ideological, and theoretical aspects of autobiographical discourse in nineteenth-century Greece. Vassiliki Dimoula recently completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at King’s College London, with a thesis on ancient Greek and Romantic lyric poetry: Pindar, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, and Solomos. She teaches at Athens College. Effi Gazi is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly. Her most recent publication is The afterlife of the Three Hierarchs. A genealogy of ‘Helleno-Christian civilization’ (2004, in Greek). She has also published on historiography, on Greek nationalism, and on the history of politics and religion. From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. xi

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CONTRIBUTORS

Athanasios (Sakis) Gekas currently teaches History of Globalization and Mediterranean History at the University of Manchester. Before that he was a post-doctoral Research Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. He is interested in the economic and social history of the Ionian Islands and in the history of port-cities and class formation in the eastern Mediterranean during the nineteenth century. Basil C. Gounaris is Associate Professor of Modern History in the Department of History and Archaeology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and Director of the Centre for Macedonian History and Documentation. He is the author of Steam over Macedonia (East European Monographs, 1993); Family, economy, and urban society in Bitola, 1897–1911 (2000, in Greek); Social and other aspects of anticommunism in Macedonia during the Greek Civil War (2002, in Greek). His most recent book is The Greek Balkans: from the Enlightenment to World War I (2007, in Greek). Marios Hatzopoulos is a Research Associate at the Institute for Neohellenic Research, National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens. He studied at the universities of Crete and Athens, received his doctorate from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and has taught modern European and Greek history at the University of the Peloponnese. He is currently researching a book on the political utopia of a ‘Greek Empire’ in Ottonian Greece. Paschalis M. Kitromilides completed his PhD at Harvard University and is now Professor of Political Science at the University of Athens and Director of the Institute for Neohellenic Research, National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens. His most recent books include the edited volume Eleftherios Venizelos: the trials of statesmanship (2006) and the monograph An Orthodox Commonwealth (2007). Ioannis Koubourlis studied at the Panteion University, Athens and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is a Research Associate at the Institute for Neohellenic Research, National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens. He is the author of La Formation de l’histoire nationale grecque. L’Apport de Spyridon Zambélios (1815–1881) (2005), and is currently finishing a book on the ways Greek and foreign historiographical production of the time influenced the work of Zambelios and Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos. Sir Michael Llewellyn Smith was educated at the University of Oxford, where he studied classical languages and literature and philosophy. His doctoral dissertation was later published as Ionian vision: Greece in Asia Minor 1919–1922 (2nd ed. 1998). From 1970 to 1999 he served in the British Diplomatic Service, in Moscow, Paris, Warsaw, and Athens, his last two posts being Ambassador to



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Poland and Ambassador to Greece (1996–99). He has written books about Crete, the 1896 Olympic Games, and Athens, and is currently working on the life and times of Eleftherios Venizelos. He is a Vice President of the British School at Athens. Peter Mackridge is Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek at the University of Oxford and a visiting professor in the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, King’s College London. His books include The modern Greek language (1985), Dionysios Solomos (1989), Language and national identity in Greece, 1766– 1976 (2009), and two co-authored grammars of Modern Greek. Suzanne Marchand is Associate Professor of European Intellectual History at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.  She is the author of Down from Olympus: archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (1996), and is currently completing a book entitled The German Orient: religion, empire and scholarship.  Margarita Miliori currently lives and works in Athens as an independent researcher and translator. She has published a number of articles in Greek and international journals on Philhellenism, nineteenth-century historiography, and the Eastern Question. Henrik Mouritsen is Professor of Ancient History in the Department of Classics, King’s College London. He works on Roman history, mostly social and political, but has also published on nineteenth-century historiography. His books include Elections, magistrates and municipal elite; Italian unification: a study in ancient and modern historiography; and Plebs and politics in the Late Roman Republic.   Socrates D. Petmezas is Associate Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Crete and a member of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies of the Foundation of Research and Technology (FORTH). He studied Economics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and History at the E.H.E.S.S., Paris. His most recent books, in Greek, are: The Greek rural economy in the nineteenth century (2003) and Gross national product (1830–1939). Sources for the economic history of Modern Greece (with G. Kostelenos et al., 2007). His main research interests include the proto-industrialization and agricultural development of the southern Balkans and western Anatolia, and the history of nationalism in Greece. Alexis Politis is Professor of Modern Greek Literature in the Department of Literature at the University of Crete. His main publications, in Greek, include: The discovery of Greek folk songs (2nd ed. 1999); a critical re-edition of Fauriel’s collection of Greek folk songs (1999); The Romantic years (2nd ed. 2003); The mythological vacuum (2000); Engravings of time (2006); and Handbook for scholars in Modern Greek studies (2nd ed. 2005).

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David Ricks teaches in the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies and the Comparative Literature Programme at King’s College London. He has recent or forthcoming essays on various Greek writers, among them Cavafy, Ritsos, Sinopoulos, and Lorenzatos. Dimitris Tziovas is Professor of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham and General Editor of a translation series of Modern Greek literature published by the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the same university. His books include The other self: selfhood and society in Modern Greek fiction (2003, also translated into Greek) and the edited volume, Greek Diaspora and migration since 1700 (2009). Karen Van Dyck is Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Modern Greek Literature and Director of the Program in Hellenic Studies in the Classics Department at Columbia University in New York. Her publications include Kassandra and the censors: Greek poetry since 1967 (1998, also translated into Greek); The rehearsal of misunderstanding: three collections by contemporary Greek women poets (1998, a bilingual edition); and most recently The scattered papers of Penelope: new and selected poetry by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (2008). She is currently co-editing the Norton Anthology of Greek Poetry and  working on a book-length project on multilingualism, translation, and the literature of Greek America.

Introduction Roderick Beaton Greece was the first of the newly formed nation states of Europe to win full sovereignty and international recognition in the nineteenth century. To that extent, the ‘London Protocol’, signed on 3 February 1830 by the ambassadors of Great Britain, France, and Russia, and containing an annexe in which the Ottoman government gave its prior consent to the terms about to be agreed, marks a watershed in the history of modern Europe. Article 1 of the Protocol states baldly and unambiguously: ‘La Grèce formera un Etat indépendant, et jouira de tous les droits politiques, administratifs, et commerciaux, attachés à une indépendance complète’ (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1999, 30). Another two years would pass before a further Protocol would ratify the final terms of independence (30 August 1832), and the fledgling state would have to wait for its formal inauguration until February of the following year and the arrival of the future king, Otto, aboard a British warship; but it is the text of 1830 that marks the defining moment when the efforts of the Greeks who had rebelled in 1821, and of their foreign supporters, the ‘Philhellenes’, were crowned with success.1 A few comparisons should suffice to illustrate the significance of this event. The Greeks had not been the first to rebel against Ottoman rule: the Serbs, having rebelled in 1804, and again in 1815, and having won their battles without the western intervention that would prove decisive in the case of Greece, were obliged to be content, in 1829, with a degree of autonomy that fell significantly short of full sovereignty (Jelavich 1977, 31–7, 55–8, cf. Glenny 1999, 1–21), a situation that would not be remedied until the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Romania and Montenegro would be recognized as independent states at the same time, while Bulgaria and what was then Eastern Rumelia would remain for even longer under nominal Ottoman suzerainty (Jelavich 1977, 156). In Western Europe, Germany and Italy, much the largest and subsequently the most influential of the new nation states, had to wait until the 1860s to win the recognition that had been accorded to Greece in that Protocol of 1830. Elsewhere, before 1860, only the Belgian revolt against Dutch rule in August 1830 and the Swiss inter-cantonal war of 1847 would result in the creation of new states, respectively Belgium (which was not however recognized by its former rulers until 1838) and the Swiss Confederation (Thomson 1

  For the relationship of the protocols of 1830 and 1832, see the editor’s comments in Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1999, 27–8, 35–6.

From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. 1

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1966, 168–70, 213). It should be noted that Belgium, the Conféderation Helvétique, and Italy all followed the precedent of ‘la Grèce’ (‘Hellas’ in Greek) in adopting for the new state a name borrowed from antiquity. Viewed from this comparative perspective, the Greek Revolution against Ottoman rule can be seen as the earliest of the national revolutions of Europe (not excluding even the French) to be fully successful in achieving its aims, in the sense of establishing a lasting new polity based on legal and diplomatic recognition. On these grounds alone one might have expected that the study of nations and nationalism, which has become a burgeoning branch of historiography and political science in the past fifty years, would have seized upon this historical moment when for the first time the principle of what we would today call national self-determination became the basis for the creation of a new kind of state – the first of many, in Europe and far beyond, as would be proved by events right up to the present day. This has not happened, however. Paschalis Kitromilides, in the chapter that follows, explores the ‘epistemological’ as well as institutional reasons for this, and suggests a number of remedies. In this introduction, by way of explaining the rationale for the present book, I examine what it is about the historiography of ‘modern’ Greece that has for so long obscured or distorted the wider significance of the Greek nationalist project, before going on to consider some of the developments in the theoretical and comparative study of nations and nationalism over the last twenty years that might be expected to promote Greek nationalism from a peripheral instance to the ‘paradigmatic’ status claimed for it by Kitromilides explicitly, and implicitly by this volume as a whole. Greek historiography and exceptionalism Almost every account of the Greek Revolution, ‘Liberation Struggle’, or War of Independence, ends by emphasizing not what was achieved by the treaties of 1830 and 1832 but rather the unsatisfactory, provisional nature of the settlement.2 From the Greek point of view, ever since the early 1830s, the Great Powers had effectively taken away with one hand what they had granted with the other. This was most evident in the decision, in 1832, to restrict the territory of the new Greek state within frontiers that excluded the majority of the nation, and in the notorious client status to which nominally independent Greece would often be reduced in practice, throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. But these are problems that have afflicted small or relatively weak states at all periods of history down to the present, and have unjustly deflected attention from the de jure status as a newly created independent polity that Greece was the first in postNapoleonic Europe to attain. 2   Dakin 1972, 61–5; Woodhouse 1991, 150–6; Clogg 1986, 66–9, cf. 2002, 44–6; Gallant 2001, 28; Brewer 2001, 345, 349–51. Woodhouse the most strongly, followed by Clogg, echoes the predominant evaluation in Greek historiography that the settlement of 1830/1832 was so much unfinished business.



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A more fundamental distortion derives paradoxically from the very success of the Greek national project. Even before the revolution of 1821, from perhaps as early as the 1790s, the proponents of Greek independence had established a powerful and pervasive rhetoric: the present-day inhabitants of the land that had once been known as Hellas were the children (paides) of the Greeks of old (Hellenes) (Beaton 2007, 83–90); to set them free would be an act not of radical innovation, as in fact it was, but rather the restoration of an ancient and universally beneficial status quo, the very one, indeed, that had bequeathed to post-Renaissance Europe everything that its educated élites now valued and enjoyed. This was the distinctive contribution of the Romantic movement, in the arts and in radical politics, both to the emerging ideology of nationalism and specifically to the cause of Greek emancipation. The argument was expressed in its most extreme form by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, in the preface to his verse drama Hellas, written in immediate response to the outbreak of the revolution in Greece: The apathy of the rulers of the civilised world to the astonishing circumstance of the descendants of that nation to which they owe their civilisation, rising as it were from the ashes of their ruin, is something perfectly inexplicable to a mere spectator [...] We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece. [...] The modern Greek is the descendant of those glorious beings whom the imagination almost refuses to figure to itself as belonging to our kind, and he inherits much of their sensibility, their rapidity of conception, their enthusiasm, and their courage (Shelley 1943, 447).

Shelley, of course, was writing from a political position as radical as it was possible to espouse at the time, and his acquaintance with Greeks or the politics of their revolution was slight; but even among conservatives, one should not, perhaps, underestimate the subliminal power of this type of appeal during the decades of ‘Restoration’, when political élites all over Europe were intent on reviving the semblance of a status quo, perceived as superior, that had been irrevocably upset by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. It is certainly noteworthy that the signatories to the 1830 Protocol were the conservative governments of the Duke of Wellington, Tsar Nicholas I, and Charles X of France; although two of these would have been swept away by the time of the later version in 1832, and replaced by more liberal administrations that might have been expected to favour the radical aspects of the Greek cause, the changes to the terms of the treaty between 1830 and 1832 do not reflect that shift.3 Modern Greece came into being, sanctioned, however grudgingly, by the Great Powers of a Europe still dominated by Metternich and allies of the stamp of Wellington. No wonder, therefore, that neither the Greeks themselves nor their reluctant European backers had any reason, after 1830, to advertise the radical nature of what had been achieved, still less to present it as a precedent that might be followed by other would-be nations. It would suit conservatives (of whom there were not a few in influential places 3   Compare e.g. Brewer 2001, 249–50 with the texts of the respective treaties (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1999, 29–44).

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in Greece by the mid-nineteenth century, as Socrates Petmezas demonstrates in chapter 9), as well as radicals, to pretend that Greece was a special case, uniquely ancient and therefore like no other.4 Within a year of the outbreak of the Revolution, in January 1822, at almost the same time as Shelley’s Hellas was published in England, the first Provisional Constitution for the embryo state would adopt for its citizens the ancient name of ‘Hellenes’;5 this is how they have been known officially in Greek ever since, while the terms of self-designation in common use up till then, Romios and Graikos, would be consigned over time, in the one case to a popular, unofficial register, and in the other to oblivion by the early twentieth century. As with the name of the citizens, so with the name of the new state. This is why Greece, from that time on, uniquely among the nations and states of the world, has in certain contexts had to be distinguished by the addition of the prefix ‘Modern’.6 The process that had brought the independent state into being was routinely referred to in Greek as palingenesia (‘rebirth’ or ‘regeneration’); other terms, such as ‘revival’, and even ‘resurrection’, were canvassed during the 1820s, as Marios Hatzopoulos documents in chapter 6. So pervasive, and so effective, did the strategy of invoking ancient history in the Greek cause prove that as early as 1830, the only means the Austrian historian Jacob Philipp Fallmerayer could light upon, in order to overturn the hegemony of what he saw as an excessive Philhellenism in his adopted country of Bavaria, was to expose the historical errors on which it was based.7 But Fallmerayer was already a prisoner of the rhetoric that he set out to debunk: it need not have mattered, in Munich in the 1830s, or in Athens in the 1850s, whether or not the racial and cultural line of ancient Hellas had been swept away successively by Romans, Slavs, and Albanians, as Fallermayer sought to prove. But the fact is that it did matter. Slowly 4   This ambivalence has now been documented, in the case of the German responses to the revolution of 1821, by Constanze Güthenke, who notes that ‘the new flaring-up of insurrection against Ottoman rule’, as viewed by Germans, gave ‘hope of finding in Greece a paradigm for a country liberating itself’, while at the same time, during the 1820s, ‘Greece is almost unanimously singled out as different in kind from other instances of revolution’ (Güthenke 2008, 98, 101). 5   Droulia 2004, 51; on the criteria for defining ‘Hellenic’ citizenship between 1821 and 1832, see in detail Vogli 2007, 37–157. One of the first thorough-going attempts to annex the term, at this time still normally reserved for the ancient Greeks, to a contemporary political context occurs in the anonymous republican manifesto, Hellenic Nomarchy, published in Italy in 1806 (Anonymous Hellene 1982; for the best account in English see Kitromilides 2006). Commentators, writing with the benefit of hindsight, have not always appreciated how revolutionary it was for a ‘Hellene’ to address his contemporaries as fellow ‘Hellenes’, as happens throughout this text. 6   Some influential British historians of Greece have deplored this usage, along with the reason for it, which they have seen as evidence for an unhealthy fixation with a past that is fundamentally irrelevant to the country’s real, modern history; see Toynbee 1981, 8; Clogg 2002, 1. Indeed, the latter even controversially dispenses with the adjective ‘modern’ in the title of a book that begins c. 1700. 7   At least, this is the persuasive thesis put forward by Skopetea 1997. Fallmerayer’s Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea was published in Munich in two volumes, in 1830 and 1836. It has never been translated into English; the Greek translation, made as late as 1872, was revised and re-published in 1982. On the reception of this work in Greece see Veloudis 1982.



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at first, but with devastating and long-lasting impact, Greek intellectuals fought back. No one seems to have thought, in the mid-nineteenth century, of abandoning a claim that could be said to have served its purpose in securing national statehood for Greece against all the odds, and might even have been deemed expendable, once its historical foundations had come under scrutiny and been shown to be vulnerable. On the contrary, the rise of historicism at the mid-century provided the impetus for a subtle shift of ground: the ruptures exposed by Fallmerayer would become precisely the ligatures holding together a construction as new and as daring as it purported to be ancient: the History of the Hellenic Nation. In the monumental work with this title, published by the historian Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos between 1860 and 1874, as well as in the writings of the antiquary from Corfu, Spyridon Zambelios, during the previous decade, the revivalist rhetoric of the 1820s and 1830s came to be replaced by a rhetoric of continuity, which still holds sway today, and indeed was vividly paraded before the world’s TV audiences in the opening ceremony for the 2004 Athens Olympic Games.8 Trumping Fallmerayer, Paparrigopoulos projected the term ‘Hellenic nation’, first formulated in the 1780s,9 back through almost three thousand years of continuous historical evolution. From the 1860s until at least the 1980s, few within Greece would challenge this basis for defining Greek identity,10 while those who did so abroad were liable to be branded, along with Fallmerayer, as ‘mis-Hellenes’, or ‘Greek-haters’. Greek historiography for over a hundred years was therefore trapped within the terms of a discourse that had evolved very rapidly from about 1790 to the 1860s and then stood still. Greek historians had no interest in reminding domestic or foreign readers that the nation state in which they took a justified pride had been the first to be recognized in Europe – in 1830. The stakes had been set infinitely higher by a national rhetoric that traced the continuous history of the Greek nation back to the first Olympiad in 776 BCE (and subsequently, with the discovery of the civilizations of the Greek Bronze Age, from the 1870s onwards, much further back still).11 8   See Kitromilides 1998, esp. 28 for the characterization of Paparrigopoulos’s History as ‘without serious risk of exaggeration [...] the most important intellectual achievement of nineteenth-century Greece’. On Zambelios, see Koubourlis 2005; cf. Beaton 1988. 9   Dimitrios Katartzis, in a series of texts written between 1783 and 1791, seems to have been the first to use the Greek term ethnos in the sense that writers of the Enlightenment, such as Rousseau, used nation in French. Particularly revealing for the emergence of Greek nationalist terminology is the following: ‘I admit that at the present time, we [Greeks] are not a nation such as to form a state, but are rather subject to another that is stronger. [...] [But] we do constitute a nation to the extent that we are bound together by our ecclesiastical authorities [...]’ (Katartzis 1970, 44; cf. 22, 24, 104 and Politis 1998, 7). For a recently discovered exception which proves the rule, in that an isolated occurrence as far back as 1675 is shown to be just that, see Apostolopoulos 2005. 10   A rare exception was the Secretary General of the Greek Communist Party, Nikos Zachariadis, on whose radical rejection of the ancient heritage, in 1945, see Xydis 1969, 245 and Hamilakis 2007, 195 n. 11   On this last, see the essays collected in Hamilakis and Momigliano 2006.

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‘Exceptionalism’ of this kind – the claim that a given nation’s history is built upon unique foundations – was the norm throughout much of Europe during the later nineteenth century (Lawrence 2005, 17–41). In the case of Greece, exceptionalism continued to dominate academic historiography until at least the 1980s. Its traces are still visible in the titles, and aspects of the coverage, of two standard works re-issued in revised form as recently as 2007 – Greece, The Modern Sequel by the respected historians of the modern period, John Koliopoulos and Thanos Veremis (2007), and the multi-author single-volume Greek History published in Greek by Ekdotiki Athinon (2007), which begins with prehistory and ends with the ‘repatriation’ of far-flung Greeks around the turn of the twenty-first century (while downplaying other forms of immigration). In the political life of the country, the grip of exceptionalism on the popular imagination was reasserted strongly in the protests that erupted in 1992 over the naming of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. It is only since the 1980s that Greek historiography has begun to emancipate itself from the legacy of Paparrigopoulos and to engage once more with international, comparative, and more theoretically grounded modes of thought (something that Paparrigopoulos himself had done in his formative years, as Ioannis Koubourlis demonstrates in chapter 4; cf. Svolopoulos 2006). Paschalis Kitromilides, in a series of studies of the growth of Greek nationalism out of the French and Greek Enlightenment, has brought an impressive armoury of modern political theory and comparative data to bear on a much-studied phenomenon.12 A point of reference for many of the contributors to the present volume has been the revisionist account of the nation-building process in nineteenth-century Greece by the late Elli Skopetea (1988), matched by the new, historically grounded account of Greek Romanticism by Alexis Politis (1993). New periodicals, such as Istor and Historein, founded respectively in 1990 and 1999, have provided a forum in which mainly younger scholars have distinguished themselves. Antonis Liakos, in a career that began in the 1980s with an exploration of the links between Greek irredentism and the Italian Risorgimento, has gone on to place the historiography of Greece itself under the microscope (respectively Liakos 1985; 2007). Often, these new perspectives have provoked resistance at home, while sadly the barrier of the Greek language has delayed their impact on the international scene. During the last twenty years, several studies have appeared in English, in which the dominance of nationalist discourse within Greece has been systematically challenged on theoretical grounds.13 The disciplinary base of the authors has been primarily in literary and cultural theory, rather than in historiography or political science, and this may be one reason why there has been little sign of 12   Kitromilides’s Harvard PhD dissertation, Tradition, Enlightenment and Revolution (1978), has been published only in Greek translation (1996). Among many publications in English, especially relevant to the subject of the present book is Kitromilides 1998. 13   See Lambropoulos 1988; Leontis 1995; Gourgouris 1996; Jusdanis 2001; Peckham 2001; Calotychos 2003; and most recently Güthenke 2008.



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convergence between their work and that of mainstream theorists of nationalism. Anthropologists have fared rather better (pace the negative comments of Paschalis Kitromilides below), perhaps because in anthropology, Greece-based studies have since the 1960s effected something of a ‘paradigm shift’ within the discipline, as has been argued, from contrasting viewpoints, by Herzfeld (1987) and Just (2009). In general, anthropological studies, being based on observation at the present day, have less to contribute to the historical understanding of the nineteenth century than the twentieth, but it is noticeable that Herzfeld’s classic study Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece (1982) – a book whose subtitle finds an echo in the title of the present volume – is cited in one recent study of nationalism in Europe as its principal source for information about Greece (Leerssen 2006, 268). Other initiatives from outside Greece have come from a variety of directions, but converge upon a theoretically aware and historically grounded approach to the phenomenon of nationalism. The volume of essays edited by Dimitris Tziovas, Greece and the Balkans (2003), goes a long way towards setting the agenda for future studies, more recently followed up by the wide-ranging study by Vasilis (Basil) Gounaris (2007). The quasi-colonial relationship between Great Britain and ‘the Hellenes’, from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, has been investigated by Robert Holland and Diana Markides (2006). This theme is also touched upon in the volume edited by Michael Llewellyn Smith, Paschalis Kitromilides, and Eleni Calligas (2009), together with the history of the discipline of archaeology in Greece, a topic that had been neglected until recently, but has now begun to converge in particularly interesting ways with the study of Greek nationalism.14 In an important new study, Yannis Hamilakis, a Greek scholar based at a British university and writing in English, accepts the constructed nature of the modern Greek sense of the past, as many in Greece do not; but Hamilakis is also at pains to tease out local and indigenous modes of thought, for which he adduces evidence going back beyond the time of national independence. Seen from these early twenty-first-century perspectives, the distinctiveness and importance of the Greek national project may be said to lie not in the content of the claim to an ancient origin, still less in unprovable arguments about its validity, but rather in the remarkable success of Greeks and their supporters, since the 1820s, in establishing the link with antiquity as first and foremost among the grounds for the legitimacy of the modern nation state. The question is no longer: ‘Is it true that the modern Greeks are descended from the ancients?’ but rather: ‘How, when, and above all, why did it become important to anyone to think that they might be?’ From that second question flow several others: ‘How was the claim to continuity established, restated, and consolidated over the years?’ ‘What effect did this claim have on Greek fortunes, particularly in the successful establishment of the nation state in 1830?’ And the crucial one: ‘What does this extreme, and in comparative 14   See Voutsaki 2003; the essays collected in Brown and Hamilakis 2003; and, in a fine study that links the history of archaeology with that of modern city planning, Bastéa 2000.

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terms even far-fetched, claim to a legitimacy derived from the remote past have to tell us about all modern nationalisms, not only in Europe but beyond?’ If these questions have not yet been properly formulated, let alone addressed, by scholarship, the fault does not lie only with Greek national historiography and its long-standing exceptionalism, but also with the comparative and theoretical study of nations and nationalism. Without trespassing too far into the territory of the chapter that follows, I must briefly outline something of the fortunes of Greek nationalism within that broader field of study, particularly in recent years, in order to situate the present book within that developing context. Political theory: from ‘ modernism’ to ‘ethno-symbolism’ and beyond So far as I am aware, there is not a single theoretical or comparative study of the emergence of modern nationalism that gives emphasis to the primacy of the Greek case, or discusses its importance in those terms. The exception, which may be said to prove the rule, is that by Paul Lawrence (2005), which features on its cover a close-up of marble columns in what is probably the Theseion in Athens; the picture is unattributed and no reason is given in the text for why it should have been chosen. In his Introduction, however, Lawrence states (2005, 5): ‘it was during this period [the nineteenth century] that a number of new “national” states were founded: most notably, Greece in 1830, Belgium in 1831, Italy in 1861, Germany in 1871 and Romania, Serbia and Montenegro in 1878.’ But apart from a brief quotation from Alexandros Ypsilantis that immediately follows, Greece earns only one further mention in the rest of Lawrence’s book. Otherwise, some of the most widely cited general studies include brief, and not always wholly accurate, summaries of the Greek contribution.15 Whether the Greek struggle was even truly a nationalist one at all has been doubted, on differing grounds, by such influential commentators as Eric Hobsbawm (1992, 76–7) and John Breuilly (1993, 139–43). These omissions and distortions can be better understood if we briefly relate them to the development of the theoretical field since the 1960s. The paradigm that has dominated the study of nationalism ever since the influential work of Elie Kedourie has become known within that branch of academic discourse as ‘modernism’. As late as 1983, Ernest Gellner, one of its main proponents, could reiterate the essence of the ‘modernist’ paradigm: ‘Nationalism is not the awakening of an old, latent, dormant force, though that is how it does indeed present itself. It is in reality the consequence of a new form of social organization [...]’ (Gellner 1983, 48). This in turn derives from the categorical assertion by Kedourie (1960, 1) that nationalism ‘was a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century’. It is only to be expected that a thoroughgoing ‘modernist’ approach to the theory and history of nationalism would have had little time for Greek national discourse of the kind that we have just been considering – although here an honourable exception must be made for Kedourie himself, who included an important text 15   See, for example, Anderson 1991, 72; Smith 2003, 199–204; Burleigh 2006, 118, 164–9; Leerssen 2006, 131–3, and the comments of Paschalis Kitromilides in chapter 1 below.



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by one of the founding fathers of Greek nationalism, Adamantios Korais, in his influential anthology of writings on nationalism (Kedourie 1971, 153–88). In terms of ‘modernist’ political theory, almost everything written by Greeks and their supporters can be dismissed as either ‘perennialism’ (nations have always existed) or ‘primordialism’ (nations reflect the ideal, ‘natural’ condition of human society). These ‘paradigms’, as viewed by sceptical ‘modernists’, may be endemic to the nationalist project under study, but are usually regarded as inexcusable in the detached, modern scholar who studies the phenomenon.16 But if new generations of Greek historians and intellectuals are today directing a rigorous revisionist gaze upon the ‘exceptionalism’ that too often left their elders isolated from the mainstream, the mainstream itself has undergone significant change since the 1980s. Explicitly taking issue with Kedourie and his successors, Michael Burleigh has written, in a wide-ranging and often provocative study, first published in 2005: Nationalisms do not have tidy starting points [...] Nationalisms were rarely invented out of thin air, as those who wish to transcend them routinely claim, but were constructed, from a selection of pre-existing components, such as institutions, landscapes, language, law and, not least, local experience[s ...] that compose peoples’ historical identities (Burleigh 2006, 157–8, original emphasis).

This, although Burleigh does not say so, is the position that has been progressively articulated since the mid-1980s by Anthony D. Smith and others who have emerged from within the dominant ‘modernist’ paradigm, but now challenge some of its most cherished premises. Known inelegantly as ‘ethno-symbolism’, this increasingly divergent approach to the history and theory of nationalism allows room for what Smith has termed the ‘ethnic origin of nations’, and some of his more recent work converges both with that of Burleigh, in placing a new importance on shared religious experience and institutions (Smith 2003), and also with that of a concerted band of medievalists who have sought to extend the prehistory of nations far back beyond the conventional start-date of the Enlightenment or the revolutions in America and France.17 Greek exceptionalism may still lie beyond the pale for ‘ethno-symbolists’ in the first decade of the twenty-first century, but Smith himself has suggested the ground for a possible rapprochement: 16   For summaries of these positions see Smith 2001, 49–57; Lawrence 2005, 181–6. Older studies of Greek nationalism, even those relatively immune to the charge of ‘perennialism’ or ‘primordialism’, have tended, for historical reasons, to focus on evidence for the precocious emergence of the phenomenon between the thirteenth century and the late eighteenth, a position incompatible with strict ‘modernism’. See Xydis 1969; Geanakoplos 1976; Zakythinos 1976 (whose English title foreshadows that of the present book, although in an entirely different context). Even today, the presence or absence of an identifiable ‘Modern Greek’ consciousness continues to be debated as a criterion for establishing the chronological start-date for ‘Modern Greek’ literature: see Vayenas 2007 and the sceptical comments of Lauxtermann 2007, 129. 17   See, for example, Armstrong 1982; Hastings 1997; Scales and Zimmer (eds) 2005. For a useful overview, see Lawrence 2005, 180–97.

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Nationalism and nations [...] are part of a wider ethno-cultural ‘family’ of collective identities and aspirations [... T]he process of nation-formation [is] not so much one of construction, let alone deliberate ‘invention’, as of reinterpretation of pre-existing cultural motifs and of reconstruction of earlier ethnic ties and sentiments. [... T]he Greeks afford a good example of this revival and reidentification through continuity of names, language and landscapes (Smith 2001, 58, 83, 84, original emphases).

In this case, Smith is, if anything, too trusting of the Greek evidence; as specialists well know, much of what he identifies here as ‘continuity’ is the result of ‘construction’, not excluding, on occasion, even ‘invention’ (as will often be evident in this volume, particularly in the chapters by Mackridge and Van Dyck). More recently, Joep Leerssen (2006) has proposed a culture-based approach to what he terms ‘national thought in Europe’, extending the thought-patterns that would later culminate in nationalism back to the stereotyping of more-or-less ‘ethnic’ groups, a phenomenon that has a continuous history from the mid-sixteenth century. Leerssen’s cultural approach is a welcome addition to the bibliography, as is his identification of ‘a specifically European network of nationalisms, spanning Iceland and Bulgaria, the Basque country and Finland’.18 He is surely right, too, to lay emphasis on the active re-use of forgotten elements from the past in the creation of national identities and aspirations: his locus classicus for this is the rediscovery of Tacitus’s Germania in the mid-fifteenth century. But if Tacitus could provide a touchstone for eighteenth-century speakers of German to think of themselves as belonging to a ‘German’ nation, and if Caesar’s De Bello Gallico could rekindle memories of forgotten ‘Belgae’ among the Burgundian subjects of northern Europe, the Greek appropriation of a past more antique still, and yet more prestigious, is treated by Leerssen as, literally, peripheral.19 This is the more surprising as he is willing to concede, at different points in his account, that ‘the most pronounced case of irredentism in Europe is probably the case of Greece’ (Leerssen 2006, 174), and that the Greek ‘language question’ represents ‘the first and most fundamental of such debates [in Europe]’ (Leerssen 2006, 201). Of the newer trends summarized by Lawrence (2005, 198–206) under the heading of ‘Recent theoretical innovation’, neither the feminist/gender-based nor the post-colonial approach appears yet to have taken notice of the Greek case in a comparative or theoretical context; conversely none of the studies listed in note 13, which in various ways fall within Lawrence’s loose definition of postmodernism, merits a mention in his overview. This is the more of a pity, since a number of specialist studies recently have begun to converge on an approach to what Douglas Dakin, writing within an older tradition of historiography, had termed the ‘unification’ of Greece, proposing instead an explicitly post-colonial perspective.20 18   Leerssen 2006, 165; cf. 169: ‘one of the outstanding features of nationalism is that it is a supremely international affair’. 19   Leerssen concludes his brief account of the Greek Revolution: ‘Nationalism in Europe affects, then, not only the centre (Germany), but also the periphery: in Ireland and the Balkans’ (2006, 133). 20   See, indicatively, Gallant 2002; Holland and Markides 2006; Hamilakis 2007, esp. 19–21, 48– 51, 123; and some of the essays collected in Llewellyn Smith et al. 2008.



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All of this, taken together, suggests that the specifics of Greek nationalism, and the ways in which the nation-building process operated in the case of Greece, ought to be of far more central importance to historians and theorists of nations and nationalism than they have been up till now. Greek exceptionalism on the one hand, and its too-easy dismissal by ‘modernist’ theorists on the other, have together, for too long, obscured the formative role of the Greek experience in the creation of today’s Europe of sovereign, nation states and of the worldwide phenomenon of nationalism. About this book These remarks are intended to establish both a rationale and a context for the nineteen chapters that follow. In them, the authors set out, from a variety of academic disciplines and subject areas, to explore the ideological concepts and developments that made the achievement of Greek statehood possible in 1830, and that throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century would consolidate a durable national identity at once ‘modern’ and ‘Greek’, the former often unconsciously, the latter always consciously. Individual chapters present original insights and the results of up-to-the-minute research into the processes governing the emergence, contestation, and consolidation of Greek identity during that period. Most of the contributors, within their respective disciplines, are specialists in the field of Modern Greek studies; all, in different ways, have been concerned to situate the Greek experience within the theoretical context of current debates about modern nations and nationalism, and particularly in relation to the three components of the book’s subtitle: nationalism, Romanticism, and the ‘uses of the past’. The chronological frame for the book begins with the constitution for an imaginary republic drawn up by Rigas Velestinlis, at the cost of his life, in 1797, and ends almost a century later, with the celebration of the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. As it happens, neither of these events has been singled out for special attention within the book itself; rather they function as convenient reference points. At the time when Rigas published his constitution for a future ‘Hellenic Republic’, no such state existed, and within a few years of his death the brand of nationalism it represented – ‘civic’, statist, modelled on Rousseau and the French revolutionary constitution of 1793 – had been displaced by the ‘ethnic’ concept that owes more to Herder and the German tradition, of which the defining properties would increasingly be shared religion, language, and to a lesser extent geographical provenance.21 Almost a century later, in 1896, the capital of 21   For the terms ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ in this sense, see Leerssen 2006, 101, 170. The shift, which took place during the decade 1797–1806, is well documented in Kitromilides 2003 and 2006 (for a brief summary of the argument see 2006, 58). The possibility that the Greek-language periodical Ermis o Logios, published in Vienna, may have functioned as the channel through which Herder’s ideas filtered through to Korais, in Paris, is proposed by Xydis (1969, 226), and so far as I know has yet to be followed up.

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independent Greece, Athens, was chosen by an international committee as the first venue of the newly revived Olympic Games, an event that would establish one of the most spectacular, and enduring, celebrations of internationalism in modern times. As has been convincingly demonstrated by two recent studies of that ‘revival’ (Kitroeff 2004; Llewellyn Smith 2004), the achievement of nationhood over the intervening century had not only transformed Greece; it had also very radically changed ways of thinking, both among Greeks themselves and those who interacted with them. The book’s sections are arranged thematically, not chronologically, although within each section there is generally an element of progression from earlier to later. In the first, entitled ‘Nationalisms compared: the view from the early twentyfirst century’, the comparative, more or less speculative theme of this introduction is carried forward by specialists in their respective fields. Paschalis Kitromilides examines from an ‘epistemological’ perspective the reasons for the failure of Modern Greek studies so far to win canonical, or in his preferred term ‘canonized’, status in comparative and theoretical studies of nations and nationalism. In contributions that were specifically commissioned so as to be open-ended and ‘essayistic’, Suzanne Marchand, a specialist in German nationalism, and Henrik Mouritsen, a classicist who has written from that perspective on the Italian Risorgimento, explore the possibilities for comparisons with the Greek case. These two chapters also function as a counterbalance to the arguments advanced in this introduction and by Kitromilides in the first chapter, in that they sound sensible warnings about the limits to such comparability. The remainder of the book, while by no means eschewing the comparative perspective, turns the spotlight for the most part on the specifics of the Greek case. Under the heading ‘Towards a national history: Greek and Western perspectives’, Ioannis Koubourlis and Margarita Miliori examine historiography around the middle of the nineteenth century; for both, the precedents of histories written in English and German prove crucial in shaping, respectively, the way in which Paparrigopoulos would move towards his national history of the ‘Hellenic Nation’, and the development of historical perspectives in Britain during the second half of the century. Common to both chapters is the formative presence of the eye-witness historian of the Greek Revolution, George Finlay, as well as new conceptualizations of the Hellenic past by Johann Gustav Droysen, George Grote, and, later, E.A. Freeman. The two sections that follow explore different aspects of ‘defining identity’. The chapters by Marios Hatzopoulos and Effi Gazi deal with religion, a topic much discussed in relation to nationalism in recent comparative studies, but often taken for granted with respect to Greece; here broader concepts and insights associated with the work of Anthony D. Smith and Michael Burleigh are firmly anchored in the context of the Greek historical evidence, which can produce some surprising conclusions. For Hatzopoulos, the rhetoric of the Greek Revolution is less uniformly secular than might have been expected, with a strong admixture of terms derived



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from the Orthodox tradition; Gazi, reviewing the role of religion in the early decades of the independent Greek state, uncovers a multifaceted flexibility in the construction of a national religious tradition that was not always, by any means, in conflict with Protestantism. Another aspect of ‘defining identity’, in the Greek context, has always been the potential for conflict between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. The contested roles of ‘autochthons’, or ‘inside Greeks’, those born within the boundaries of the kingdom established in 1832, and ‘heterochthons’, those born outside, are examined by Yanna Delivoria through case studies in the memoirs of former fighters in the Revolution. Then Socrates Petmezas takes up the story, identifying the dominant ideology of the mid-century with an élite group whom he terms ‘Romantics’, and whose careers and ideas turn out to owe much to the shared status of the group as outsiders. Finally under this heading, Basil Gounaris contrasts the inclusivity with which Greek nationalists had hailed their Balkan brethren in the first half of the nineteenth century with the mutual hostility that developed after the ‘Bulgarian Schism’ of 1870 and the emergence of competing nationalisms in the Balkans. The colonial perspective makes an explicit appearance in two short papers devoted to the Ionian Islands under the British Protectorate, which lasted from 1815 to 1864. In the first, Eleni Calligas argues that the Radical Party in the islands was the first modern-style political party based on ideological principles to function in Greek lands; in the second, Athanasios Gekas asks pertinent economic and social questions in the attempt to bypass the dominant nationalist rhetoric of the publications of the period, to suggest that the ‘national’ question may have been subordinate, in the minds of many Ionians under British rule, to issues of debt and social status that would remain unresolved long after the absorption of the islands into the Greek state. One of the pillars of national identity, throughout Europe, since at least the early nineteenth century, has always been language. The notorious Greek ‘language question’ that divided intellectuals and sections of Greek society, particularly at the two ends of the period surveyed by the volume, is revisited in contrasting ways by Peter Mackridge and Karen Van Dyck. The former situates the Greek controversy in the context of other languages whose written form has been similarly constructed in modern times, including Norwegian, Hebrew, and Arabic; the latter connects language with the issue of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, arguing that the most thoroughgoing pursuit of a national language was carried on outside the Greek state, by individuals who in one way or another could be said to have been more at home among the Diaspora. If nations are to be considered as ‘imagined communities’, in the controversial formulation of Benedict Anderson that is a frequent point of reference in this book, then it may reasonably be expected that the literature of an emergent nation will be one of the prime sites where that process of ‘imagining’ can be detected in action. If theoretical justification be needed for the inclusion of no fewer than five chapters on literature, this must surely be part of it. Another is that while historians and

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political theorists have often fought shy of straying into the preserve of the literary scholar, studies of Modern Greek literature have, by contrast, tended to address historical issues, including the nature and development of national identity as these can be traced in specific texts. Vassiliki Dimoula tackles the problematic interaction between nationalist ideology and Romantic poetics in the case of the ‘national’ poet Solomos, drawing on twentieth-century literary theory and comparative material from German poetry of the early nineteenth century. Romanticism again figures prominently in the study by Dimitris Tziovas of the first novel to be published in independent Greece, whose unusual blend of strengths and weaknesses he argues would leave a lasting legacy in Greek fiction down to at least the mid-twentieth century. Alexis Politis, starting from a wryly evinced belief in the superiority of quantitative data, presents hitherto unknown statistical information on the literary output of urban centres outside Athens during the nineteenth century, to conclude that the pursuit of a national agenda in literature, or the self-conscious creation of a ‘national’ literature, was the exception, rather than the rule, away from the capital. Michalis Chryssanthopoulos examines the interplay of historiography and autobiography in the career of one of the most versatile of Greek littérateurs in the closing years of the nineteenth century, Dimitrios Vikelas, who among others things played a leading role in bringing the first modern Olympic Games to Athens in 1896. The end-point of the Athens Olympics is also signalled in the final chapter, by David Ricks, who contrasts the contributions to the Olympic celebrations by the poet Palamas and the short-story writer Alexandros Papadiamantis, and teases out the implications of the latter’s equivocal praise for the Greek national project and corresponding nostalgic allegiance to the rapidly disappearing world of the Orthodox oecumene. If the last chapter brings the subject matter of the book back close to its startingpoint, in revisiting the uneasy relationship between religion and nationalism from the point of view of the writer of literature, this fact serves to underscore the essential relatedness of all the topics examined here. It is in the nature of nationalism, as a cultural phenomenon, to reach into many otherwise separate discourses and forms of human activity. Nationalism is a phenomenon that, despite repeated prophecies of its imminent demise, retains great power in the world around us in the early twenty-first century. In this respect, the words of Ernest Renan, written in 1882, may be taken as all too prescient: Nations are not something eternal. They began, so they will come to an end. A European confederation will probably replace them. Such, however, is not the law of the century we are living in. At the present time, the existence of nations is good, even necessary. Their existence is a guarantee of freedom, which would be lost if the world had only one law and one master (Renan 1995, 59).

This book is neither for nor against nationalism; it sets out neither to uphold nor to debunk the particular claims put forward, between one and two centuries ago, for Greek nationalism, with which it deals. There is much more to be said, both about the specific Greek case and about the wider phenomenon of which it forms



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a part. But on behalf of all who have worked to bring this volume to fruition, I would like to express the hope that we have played our part in ending the surprising isolation of Greece and Greek studies among historians and theorists of nationalism in the modern world.

References Anderson, B. (1991 [11983]), Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, revd ed., London: Verso. Anonymous Hellene (1982 [11806]), Ελληνική Νομαρχία, ήτοι λόγος περί ελευθερίας, 4th ed., ed. G. Valetas, Athens: Aposperitis. Apostolopoulos, D.G. (2005), ‘«Νέοι Έλληνες»: ο νεολογισμός και τα συνδηλούμενά του στα 1675’, O Eranistis 25, 87–99. Armstrong, J. (1982), Nations before nationalism, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Bastéa, E. (2000), The creation of modern Athens: planning the myth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beaton, R. (1988), ‘Romanticism in Greece’, in R. Porter and M. Teich (eds), Romanticism in National Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 92–108. Beaton, R. (2007), ‘Antique nation? “Hellenes” on the eve of Greek independence and in twelfth-century Byzantium’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 31/1: 79–98. Breuilly, J. (1993), Nationalism and the state, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Brewer, D. (2001), The flame of freedom: the Greek war of independence, 1821–1833, London: John Murray. Brown, K.S. and Hamilakis, Y. (eds) (2003), The usable past: Greek metahistories, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Burleigh, M. (2006 [12005]), Earthly powers: religion and politics in Europe from the Enlightenment to the Great War, London: Harper Perennial. Calotychos, V. (2003), Modern Greece: a cultural poetics, Oxford: Berg. Clogg, R. (1986 [11979]), A short history of modern Greece, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clogg, R. (2002 [11992]), A concise history of Greece, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dakin, D. (1972), The unification of Greece, 1770–1923, London: Benn. Droulia, L. (2004), ‘Towards Modern Greek consciousness’, The Historical Review/ La Revue Historique (Institute for Neohellenic Research, INR/NHRF, Athens) 1, 51–67. Ekdotiki Athinon (2007 [11992]), Ελληνική ιστορία, ανανεωμένη έκδοση, Athens: Ekdotiki Athinon. Gallant, T.W. (2001), Modern Greece, London: Arnold; New York: Oxford University Press. Gallant, T.W. (2002), Experiencing dominion: culture, identity, and power in the British Mediterranean, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Geanakoplos, D.J. (1976), ‘The Diaspora Greeks: the genesis of Modern Greek national consciousness’, in N.P. Diamandouros et al. (eds), Hellenism and the First Greek War

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of Liberation (1821–1830): Continuity and Change, Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 59–77. Gellner, E. (1983), Nations and nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell. Glenny, M. (1999), The Balkans, 1804–1999: nationalism, war and the great powers, London: Granta. Gounaris, V. (2007), Τα Βαλκάνια των Ελλήνων. Από το Διαφωτισμό έως τον Α΄ Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο, Thessaloniki: Epikentro. Gourgouris, S. (1996), Dream nation: Enlightenment, colonization, and the institution of Modern Greece, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Güthenke, C. (2008), Placing Modern Greece: the dynamics of Romantic Hellenism, 1770– 1840, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hamilakis, Y. (2007), The nation and its ruins: antiquity, archaeology, and national imagination in Greece, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hamilakis, Y. and Momigliano, N. (eds) (2006), Archaeology and European modernity: producing and consuming the ‘Minoans’, Creta Antica 7, Padua: Bottega D’Erasmo. Hastings, A. (1997), The construction of nationhood: ethnicity, religion and nationalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herzfeld, M. (1982), Ours once more: folklore, ideology, and the making of modern Greece, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press (2nd ed. New York: Pella, 1986). Herzfeld, M. (1987), Anthropology through the looking-glass: critical ethnography in the margins of Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1992), Nations and nationalism since 1780: programme, myth, reality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holland, R. and Markides, D. (2006), The British and the Hellenes: struggles for mastery in the eastern Mediterranean 1850–1960, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jelavich, C. and Jelavich, B. (1977), The establishment of the Balkan national states, 1804– 1920, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Jusdanis, G. (2001), The necessary nation, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Just, R. (2009), ‘The archaeology of Greek ethnography’, in Llewellyn Smith et al. (eds) 2009. Katartzis, D. (1970), Τα ευρισκόμενα, ed. K.Th. Dimaras, Athens: Ermis. Kedourie, E. (1960), Nationalism, London: Hutchinson. Kedourie, E. (ed.) (1971), Nationalism in Asia and Africa, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Kitroeff, A. (2004), Wrestling with the ancients: modern Greek identity and the Olympics, New York: Greekworks.com. Kitromilides, P.M. (1996), Νεοελληνικός Διαφωτισμός: οι πολιτικές και κοινωνικές ιδέες, Athens: MIET [Cultural Foundation of the National Bank]. Kitromilides, P.M. (1998), ‘On the intellectual content of Greek nationalism: Paparrigopoulos, Byzantium and the Great Idea’, in D. Ricks and P. Magdalino (eds), Byzantium and the Modern Greek Identity, Aldershot: Variorum, 25–33. Kitromilides, P.M. (2003), ‘An Enlightenment perspective on Balkan cultural pluralism: the republican vision of Rhigas Velestinlis’, History of Political Thought 24/3, 465–79. Kitromilides, P.M. (2006), ‘From republican patriotism to national sentiment: a reading of Hellenic Nomarchy’, European Journal of Political Theory 5/1, 50–60. Koliopoulos, J.S. and Veremis, Th.D. (2007 [12002]), Greece, the modern sequel: from 1831 to the present, new ed., London: Hurst.



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Koubourlis, I. (2005), La Formation de l’histoire nationale grecque. L’Apport de Spyridon Zambélios (1815–1881), Athens: Institut de Recherches Néohelléniques, Fondation Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique [Institute for Neohellenic Research, INR/ NHRF]. Lambropoulos, V. (1988), Literature as national institution: studies in the politics of modern Greek criticism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lauxtermann, M. (2007), ‘Two surveys of Modern Greek literature: Stephanos Kanelos (1822) and Iakovakis Rizos Neroulos (1826)’, Kampos: Cambridge Papers in Modern Greek 15, 125–48. Lawrence, P. (2005), Nationalism: history and theory, Harlow: Pearson. Leerssen, J. (2006), National thought in Europe: a cultural history, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Leontis, A. (1995), Topographies of Hellenism:  mapping the homeland, London: Cornell University Press. Liakos, A. (1985), Η ιταλική ενοποίηση και η Mεγάλη Iδέα, 1859–1862, Athens: Themelio. Liakos, A. (2007), Πώς το παρόν γίνεται ιστορία, Athens: Polis. Llewellyn Smith, M. (2004), Olympics in Athens 1896: the invention of the modern Olympic Games, London: Profile. Llewellyn Smith, M., Kitromilides P., and Calligas, E. (eds) (2009), Scholars, travels, archives: Greek history and culture through the British School at Athens, Athens: British School at Athens. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Greece, Service of Historical Archives (1999), The foundation of the modern Greek state: major treaties and conventions (1830–1947), ed. Ph. Constantopoulou, Athens: Kastaniotis. Peckham, R.S. (2001), National histories, natural states: nationalism and the politics of place in Greece, London: Tauris. Politis, A. (1993), Ρομαντικά χρόνια. Ιδεολογίες και νοοτροπίες στην Ελλάδα του 1830– 1880, Athens: Mnimon. Politis, A. (1998), ‘From Christian Roman emperors to the glorious Greek ancestors’, in D. Ricks and P. Magdalino (eds), Byzantium and the Modern Greek Identity, Aldershot: Variorum, 1–14. Renan, E. (1995 [11882, in French]), ‘What is a nation?’ in S. Woolf (ed.), Nationalism in Europe, 1815 to the Present: A Reader, London: Routledge, 48–60. Scales, L. and Zimmer, O. (eds) (2005), Power and the nation in European history, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shelley, P.B. (1943), Poems of Shelley, London: Oxford University Press. Skopetea, E. (1988), Το «Πρότυπο Βασίλειο» και η Μεγάλη Ιδέα. Όψεις του εθνικού προβλήματος στην Ελλάδα (1830–1880), Athens: Polytypo. Skopetea, E. (1997), Φαλμεράϋερ: το τέχνασμα του αντιπάλου δέους, Athens: Themelio. Smith, A. (2001), Nationalism: theory, ideology, history, Cambridge: Polity. Smith, A. (2003), Chosen peoples: sacred sources of national identity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Svolopoulos, K. (2006), Η γένεση της ιστορίας του νέου ελληνισμού, Athens: Estia. Thomson, D. (1966 [11957]), Europe since Napoleon, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Toynbee, A.J. (1981), The Greeks and their heritages, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Tziovas, D. (ed.) (2003), Greece and the Balkans: identities, perceptions and cultural encounters since the Enlightenment, Aldershot: Ashgate. Vayenas, N. (2007), ‘Για τις αρχές της νεοελληνικής λογοτεχνίας’, Nea Estia 1797: 296–313. Veloudis, G. (1982), Ο Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer και η γένεση του ελληνικού ιστορισμού, Athens: Mnimon. Vogli, E.K. (2007), «Έλληνες το γένος»: Η ιθαγένεια και η ταυτότητα στο εθνικό κράτος των Ελλήνων (1821–1844), Heraklion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis [Crete University Press]. Voutsaki, S. (2003), ‘Archaeology and the construction of the past in nineteenth century Greece’, in H. Hokwerda (ed.), Constructions of Greek Past: Identity and Historical Consciousness from Antiquity to the Present, Groningen: Forsten, 231–55. Woodhouse, C.M. (1991), Modern Greece: a short history, London: Faber (first published as The Story of Modern Greece, London: Faber, 1968). Xydis, S. (1969), ‘Modern Greek nationalism’, in P. Sugar and I. Lederer (eds), Nationalism in Eastern Europe, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 207–58. Zakythinos, D.A. (1976), The making of Modern Greece. From Byzantium to Independence, Oxford: Blackwell.

Part I Nationalisms Compared: The View From The Early twenty-first Century

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1 Paradigm nation: the study of nationalism and the ‘canonization’ of Greece Paschalis M. Kitromilides Challenges The broader epistemological problem motivating the analysis that follows could be considered to be the difficulty facing the academic study of Modern Greece in establishing itself as a recognizable and legitimate subject in contemporary scholarship. To appreciate the problem and to recognize it as such one needs to take, I believe, two logical steps: first to illustrate what is meant by the claim concerning this alleged failure; and secondly to define with some precision the meaning of the term ‘canonization’, borrowed for the purposes of the present analysis from the field of hagiology. To illustrate what I consider as the difficulty of Modern Greek studies in developing into a well-established academic field, I might follow the standard method of the human sciences, the comparative approach. The most obvious comparison is of course that between the study of modern and classical Greece. The contrast in this case could not be starker and more overwhelming. It should be pointed out that, in order to make real sense, the comparison between Modern and Classical Greek studies should be attempted as one between two independent fields of research, and their respective structures and standards, and should in no case be allowed to turn into a substantive evaluative exercise focusing on the intrinsic interest, significance, or value of each field. The comparison over structure and standards, however, could well be enlightening – as it would be between Modern Greek studies and any other professionally constituted field of area-based historical study. On this level of analysis, all indicators of professionalization, such as the range and quality of research resources and instrumenta studiorum in general, the number and scholarly standards of specialist journals, the significance, quality, and authority of monograph series, and the level and specialization of scholarly debate and academic judgement in the broad field of classics (history, literature, philosophy, art), make the field of Modern Greek studies outside contemporary Greece appear at best atrophied and essentially From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. 21

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dependent on the quality of the individual work of a few isolated scholars, mostly in Britain, Germany, North America, and sporadically elsewhere. Let me clarify two things. My discussion of Modern Greek studies refers to the state of the field outside Greece. Within Greece, and especially in the period since 1974, the field has significant achievements to its credit; and, if anything, the comparison with Classical Greek studies, archaeology excepted, could be reversed. The concern here, however, is with the academic study of Modern Greek history, society and culture as an international discipline, one of the most vexing problems of which is a serious asymmetry in communication and synchronization between developments within and outside Greece.1 Why then are Modern Greek studies marked by the lag we have identified in comparison with other epistemologically cognate and comparable fields – Turkish studies, for instance? There are no easy or obvious answers to the question, and of course it would not be acceptable to trace the problem to any presumed intrinsic epistemological weaknesses of the subject itself. Such an argument would be futile, naïve, and misinformed, even bigoted, and it is not really voiced with conviction or seriousness by anyone. On the contrary, the quality of several outstanding individual achievements of scholarship in the broad field of Modern Greek studies, spanning the whole spectrum of the human sciences (history, literature, and the social sciences) makes abundantly clear the great intellectual potential, the intrinsic interest, and the broader relevance of the field for understanding important questions of theory and method.2 Still, the field remains marginal and ‘uncanonized’. This is reflected especially in its susceptibility to the vagaries of the market and in its failure to establish a secure institutional presence in universities outside Greece. If the reasons for this cannot be academic or epistemological, then they will have to be sought in the sociology of knowledge, in the domain of extra-academic or non-cognitive factors that determine the course and fate of scholarship. In this interplay between thought and society the study of Modern Greece has fared miserably. It would be a long story to analyse the multifarious expressions of the problem in the intellectual history of Greece itself. What could be seen in this case would be the serious impediments to the growth of knowledge connected especially with the endemic phenomenon of factionalism, clientelism, or more simply power relations in the academic and intellectual spheres, something that the total hegemony of the socalled ‘progressives’ in the cultural life of the country since 1974 has paradoxically intensified instead of overcoming. But our concern here is with the international aspect of the problem, to which I must turn. On this level it would be hypocritical to ascribe the problems of the canonization of Modern Greek studies to funding, availability of positions, or institutionalization. This is particularly true of North America as opposed to Europe. In the USA and Canada there are chairs and richly endowed programmes of Modern Greek or 1

  For a parallel case study see Shubert 2004.   A mirror of relevant work is provided in the useful survey by Constantinides 2000.

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Hellenic studies, as the case may be, in several major universities, along with an active professional association and several journals; but the record of canonization has been negative rather than positive. The problem has to do with the management of such resources as there are, with the motivations and the inadequacies of persons who have found themselves in strategic institutional positions, and with a general failure of leadership in charting trajectories and developing visions for the field. This is broadly the history of Modern Greek studies in America in the last four decades or so. The problems in continental Europe are of a different order and need to be addressed on their own terms. In order to clarify the terms of the argument, we must now turn and reflect on the idea of canonization itself and on the requirements that need to be met in order to approximate it. As mentioned above, the term is borrowed from hagiology. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ‘canonization’ means the official ecclesiastical acknowledgement and proclamation of sanctity and among its prerequisites are popular veneration, evidence of miracles, and the creation of an iconic and hagiographic tradition. To use this term to discuss the methodological and epistemological problems arising from the cultivation of a modern secular subject of research may sound perverse or, at the very least, idiosyncratic. If one thinks seriously about the subject, the idea and the term, however, it will be appreciated that it provides a useful and concise way to articulate a complex problem. Canonization means first of all the attainment of authority in the consciousness of an interested public – in the case under consideration here, authority in the academic consciousness of a professional community. And authority as far as this particular public is concerned depends on seriousness, on the recognition of genuine worth and intrinsic significance, on a general consensus about an intellectual pursuit as being valuable for its own sake on account of its contribution in substantive and substantial ways to the growth of knowledge and to the enhancement of understanding. A second aspect of canonization is the connection between the attainment of authoritative status in the domain of the cultivation of knowledge and an evolving intellectual tradition, not iconic and hagiographical of course, yet certainly critical and capable of self-reflection and self-criticism; a tradition with its normative standards, its evolving debates and its canon of sources and frames of reference. Without these features there is no tradition and no canonization. One of the factors working against canonization in Greek studies is the inequitable international division of academic labour. This is another expression of the interplay of power with scholarship. It is reflected in the prerogative reserved to themselves by all those who enjoy power in the academic and scholarly world – that is all those occupying positions in powerful institutions in core countries, receiving consequently the lion’s share of research funding and controlling the media of academic communication (journals, conferences, lectures) – a prerogative of pronouncing on general subjects and engaging in theoretical elaboration, thus defining what is academically mainstream, while leaving what is considered ‘ethnic

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scholarship’ to the rest of the academic community. This last includes all those working in the smaller countries and writing in languages other than English – and maybe French – but whose judgement and views, regardless of the quality of their work, leave indifferent the power-wielders of the mainstream. They are only expected to produce ethnic scholarship, which at best may prove of some interest or relevance to mainstream scholarship for illustrative purposes. This attitude of domination amounts to a powerful pressure towards marginalization felt by fields like Modern Greek studies – and the only way to resist it is canonization and all that it involves. Otherwise the field is bound to be reduced to resignation, introversion, and eventually extinction. Possibilities The problems on the way to the canonization of the study of Modern Greece we have identified so far should be viewed as challenges, not as pointers to despair. In any case, as we know from the history of social theory, a sense of impasse or crisis may prove a source of striving and eventually of creativity, and it does not have of necessity to lead to resignation. So if we turn to observe and reflect upon the contemporary scene of scholarly production, we shall easily discern the promising reception of the Greek paradigm in one important and dynamic area of research, the study of nationalism. This I think is Greece’s opportunity. I sincerely hope it will not turn out to be a missed opportunity. Since the momentous years 1989–1990 and the changes they brought about to the political map of Europe and to power relations in the world, nationalism has been a growing and dynamic field of scholarship, plagued of course by many problems. This is not the place to discuss those problems, but we should reflect seriously on the place of the Greek experience in this field. Let us begin with a few caveats. Although the younger generation of scholars who gravitate with great eagerness to the study of nationalism very often appear to believe that the field has begun with their own supervisors, in fact the field is much older and so is the place of Greece within it. When Friedrich Meinecke published his epoch-making work in 1907, the study of nationalism was already on its way to becoming a fledgling field of critical scholarship.3 It has therefore at least a century-long history. Within this field the serious study of the Greek experience is also much older than what might be believed by readers of articles in Nations and Nationalism and in other journals in the forefront of the field today. On that score we should at least recall the contribution of Arnold Toynbee, first holder of the Koraes Chair at King’s College London. Toynbee wrote extensively on Greek nationalism in specialized studies (Toynbee 1922, 1931) but he also used the Greek paradigm as an illustration of broader tendencies in the unfolding of historical change, 3   The seminal work for the understanding of the transformations of German nationalism, by Friedrich Meinecke (1970), first appeared in 1907, was reissued in an expanded version in 1911, and went through five subsequent editions until 1928. On the early history of the critical study of nationalism from J.S. Mill to Acton, see Lawrence 2005, 31–50.



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which he tried to systematize in A Study of History (Toynbee 1954, 150–98). Epistemologically speaking, this might be considered as an instance of canonization. It would be prudent, therefore, to look at earlier literature on Greek nationalism, for methodological reasons at least, remembering furthermore that Toynbee was not alone, but belonged to a whole generation of Western scholars with a very serious interest in the Balkans, including R.W. Seton-Watson and W.M. Gewehr, who can be credited with some of the most serious early attempts at understanding nationalism in the region (Seton-Watson 1917; Gewehr 1931). I hope I will be forgiven for issuing these reminders, but I am obliged to do so to be consistent with my earlier argument concerning the necessary connection of canonization with an evolving tradition of research and methodological reflection – an engagement with substantive problems, bibliography, and sources. To make this reference substantive rather than allusive, I should perhaps point to the significance of the contributions of the generation of scholars who could be considered the successors of Toynbee and Seton-Watson in the study of Balkan nationalism. These include Peter Sugar, editor with Ivo Lederer of a classic collective work on the subject (Sugar and Lederer 1969), and in addition Charles and Barbara Jelavich, L.S. Stavrianos, J.F. Clarke, and, slightly later, Robert Lee Wolff, Gale Stokes, Stavro Skendi, and Keith Hitchins – to name just a few of the great scholars without whose work Balkan nationalism would have remained a field of amateur observation, depending largely on perceptive observers of the early part of the twentieth century like Rebecca West (1942). I cannot stress enough that it is essential to identify, reconstruct, and reflect upon these intellectual genealogies in order to have a sense of the growth of knowledge in a field and to avoid the arrogance of ignorance. Building and respecting intellectual genealogies is, therefore, an integral component of the intellectual process of canonization itself. Among recent major theorists of nationalism, Elie Kedourie was the first to recognize and argue for the paradigmatic character of the emergence of Greek liberal nationalist thought, primarily articulated by Korais, as the first case in the worldwide transmission of Western political thought to non-Western contexts (Kedourie 1970, 42–8; 152–88). The Greek example is present as a reference in all major works on nationalism from Hans Kohn to Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson. But in all these cases, and in many others, in contrast to Kedourie, the example is marginalized, the details are ignored, the conversation with sources that would lend substance to the discussion remains non-existent. In other words, the subject remains uncanonized. This may appear rather surprising, but even some scholars of Greek origin, writing for the most part in America, contribute very little to canonization, largely because of their unwillingness or inability to converse seriously with the sources. By contrast, interesting and original work has been produced in Greece, although on a limited quantitative scale (Kitromilides 2004), but there the problems arising from extreme factionalism in the scholarly world impede canonization in other ways, which lead us back to the sociology of knowledge.

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Before turning once more to the question of canonization, we should pause and reflect for a moment on what is substantively significant about the Greek experience of nationalism that might render it a subject of broader concern. In this regard Kedourie supplies the point of departure. In his 1970 anthology he pointed out, as mentioned above, the precocity of the phenomenon and its significance for understanding the whole process of transmission, adaptation, and reception that has universalized Western culture in the last quarter of the second millennium of the Christian era. I might add that, from this point of view, of equal significance and interest might be considered the Greek literature of the Enlightenment, which supplies precise textual evidence for this whole process of transmission and reception of modern secular ideas, a process of intellectual change in which nationalism originated. It is incumbent upon Neohellenists, therefore, to make this literature known, to bring it back, as it were, into the republic of letters from which it sprang, through modern critical editions, translations and in-depth studies of its comparative importance.4 The story of Greek nationalism, therefore, both before and after the 1820s (that is, the period of its decisive mutation in the crucible of revolutionary action from an intellectual campaign to a mass popular movement that forged a modern nation), possesses paradigmatic comparative significance: it represents, in fact, a veritable historical laboratory for observing the intricate processes of nation-building and, concomitantly, for appraising and controlling pertinent claims put forward by current theories of nationalism.5 Beyond this, the story of Greek nationalism in the nineteenth century possesses unique interest for intellectual history in its preoccupation with the reinvention of the past. Here we have the reconceptualization and reappropriation of a very ancient intellectual tradition that had been received in European history as a shared legacy of Western culture as a whole and, in its Christian guise, as the dominant intellectual tradition of a universal Christian empire, only to be reinterpreted and claimed as its distinct ethnic heritage by a particular nation in the nineteenth century. A further aspect of the reinvention of the classical past in Modern Greece has to do with the marked differences in attitudes toward antiquity in pre-independence Greek culture, which tended to adopt the democratic classicism of the Enlightenment and the approach of radical civic humanism, and the official rhetoric of the Greek state with its archaism and ancestor-worship, devoid both of critical temper and of the quest for a substantive acquaintance with antiquity as embodied in the humanist tradition. This aspect of the history of the classical tradition represents, I would say, the most intellectually significant dimension of the project of Greek nationalism. Finally, it should not escape our attention that the subject possesses a normative dimension reflected in the dilemmas with which Greek political thought in the 4

  Two attempts in this direction are Kitromilides 2006 and Tabaki 2003.   A pointer to how the Greek case might be integrated within broader forms of discourse on nationbuilding is to be found in Michael Burleigh’s over-ambitious Earthly Powers (2006, see esp. pp. 164–9), which, however, should also serve as an example of flaws to be avoided in similar attempts, namely: marginal documentation, uncritical reliance on secondary sources, and inaccuracy in historical detail – the endemic weaknesses of this type of generalizing scholarly discourse. 5



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nineteenth century had to grapple in charting the course of national politics. This aspect of the question is also of considerable relevance for the possibilities it possesses in articulating political criticism and for grounding a realistic criticism of nationalism itself, as the political culture of modernity, upon an appraisal of actual political decisions and their practical consequences in historical action. Dialogues In view of these substantive dimensions of the subject it is not, I would submit, an illegitimate quest to reflect seriously on how the obstacles to canonization might be overcome. The problem might be approached in terms of two dialogues: one with theory, the other with research. Theoretical agnosticism is really not an option for work in the human sciences. We must converse with theory, always having in mind the need for economy, circumspection, and contextualization. Theory will supply pointers and insights for gauging and appreciating the broader significance of empirical information. Case studies in turn will provide checks upon (and suggest limits to) theoretical claims and generalizing statements. If this interplay can be carried through meaningfully, mature work of some significance cannot but emerge. In the field of the study of nationalism, there are plenty of theoretical approaches capable of providing such insights, and pointers that might enhance the meaningfulness of specific studies. The challenge to the study of nationalism in the Greek context has precisely to do with the meaningful use of theory to fertilize historical research. In this connection, it must be said plainly that it would be absurd to be dogmatic about the use of theory or to espouse one position versus others, as occasionally happens with the debate between so-called ‘modernists’ and ‘primordialists’.6 Theoretical approaches have contributions of varying usefulness to make, but it would be unthinkable to try to apply them wholesale to the conduct of inquiry. In the case of such an attempt, theories are bound to prove obstacles rather than agents of understanding. Ernest Gellner, for example, produced a theory of nationalism that is replete with suggestions for a critical understanding of pertinent phenomena; but try to imagine what might emerge if one were to attempt to apply wholesale the theory of industrialization and social entropy to most historical contexts of nationalism.7 Benedict Anderson in turn has proposed an analytical category that has proved of extraordinary heuristic power and interpretative effectiveness, which means that its use has contributed significantly to understanding nationalism. But can interpretation and judgement be considered complete in just showing how the vast community of the nation might be imagined by its members? I do not believe that many scholars would be prepared to claim as much.8 6

  For an explanation of these terms, see Introduction, pp. 8–11.   Much more ‘operational’ as a theoretical framework for research on nationalism is Gellner’s article (1965, 147–78), which stresses the critical role of educational institutions in the nationalist transformation of societies. 8   For a sober appraisal of Anderson’s contribution, see Clark 2006, who points out, very reasonably, 7

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A kind of critical eclecticism may therefore be the answer to the question of how to combine theory with historical research in the study of nationalism. That is why it is, I think, sobering and often salutary to bear in mind Kedourie’s delightfully understated but firm critical perspective. His pointers to the role of intellectuals and of modern politics in shaping nationalist movements and the national identity of cultural communities, with often entirely unexpected consequences, supplies a convincing reading of the historical record that has proved quite enlightening for understanding the experience both of Europe and of the Third World.9 All of these approaches can be very usefully applied to the interpretation of nationalism in Greek society. The purpose of theory is to clarify and to enhance understanding. If it nurtures confusions and misconceptions it is useless. We must therefore be clear about concepts and terms, and the ways we apply them, to make sense of evidence. Nationalism as a historical category cannot be applied to all periods of history. Such a usage extends the scope of the term so much that it makes it useless. If we are to be able to communicate amongst ourselves, we must surely agree that nationalism is a phenomenon of modern politics and should be interpreted as such. The key to modern politics is the state, the nation state in particular. Nationalism is meaningless if set apart from the state. If we truly wish to understand nationalism, then, we should never lose sight of this connection. Objections pointing to ‘nationalism’ in pre-modern contexts (in medieval empires in the Balkans for instance) in fact confirm the argument concerning the critical role of the state in shaping ideology and normative discourse in ways that serve the cause of nationalism; that is, in ways that consolidate state power and can be mistaken in those earlier contexts for expressions of nationalism. As for the phenomenon of nationalist movements, articulated and led by intellectuals, in historical contexts preceding the nation state, it must be remembered that these were invariably state-oriented movements – from Enlightenment nationalism in the Greek and broader Balkan context in the eighteenth century, to Zionism, to Third World liberation movements in the twentieth century. The state is always there, as a context, as a vision, as an object of contestation; and pre-state nationalism’s main striving is to construct the population base upon which to build the state, in the sense of the modern national state. That is why the ‘modernist’–‘primordialist’ debate is so meaningless. Is anybody really arguing that nationalism emerges in a historical vacuum? Of course there are population groups, with their languages, cultural traditions, collective memories, and forms of ethnic consciousness which at some point in time along the modernization continuum are claimed by nationalist movements. If these movements achieve their objective to establish a sovereign national state, the populations that are incorporated into the state cross the great divide in history: that the idea of ‘imagined communities’ ‘gives us the beginning of a way to think about just such matters’. 9   This comes across quite characteristically in Kedourie’s study of the exposure of religious minorities in the Middle East to nationalism (Kedourie 1984, 286–316).



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the state transforms them and the culture they bring with them, and makes them quite different entities in radical ways. Think of languages, how they are changed, standardized, and ‘purified’ once connected with national states.10 Or think about religions, or more precisely religious institutions, how they are transformed and manipulated by the state – as a rule, after an initial period of resistance, with the full consent or collusion, as the case may be, of their hierarchies. So what sense does it make to talk of ‘ethnic origins’ as a decisive component of nationalism? Nationalism as an expression of the state and an agency for the consolidation of its power destroys pre-modern forms of culture; it transforms and recreates them. The destructive agenda of nationalism toward pre-modern forms of culture was noted by an important critical thinker, now almost totally forgotten by students of nationalism, Rudolf Rocker, as early as 1937.11 So it could turn out to be misleading, unless the term is used with great precision, to talk of ‘ethnic origins’ as legacies that survive, linger on from the past, and shape the content of nationalism. This is a complex problem which cannot be sidestepped: it has to be recognized and clearly affirmed that, in the context of the nation state, ethnic legacies are transformed and reinvented in ways that bear very little relation to the historical ontology of the pre-modern pasts of societies, which are usually marked by forms of syncretism that are totally intolerable to nationalism. And nationalism is the agency of such transformations and reinventions, which are components of the making of modernity and are ‘embedded in homogenous, empty time, created amnesias and estrangement’, in the words of Benedict Anderson (1998, 57). To integrate research on Greek nationalism into the contemporary debate on the subject, such issues – and of course others – will need to be addressed in substantive ways in discussing historical evidence and in attempting to recover from the sources, very often forgotten ones, the process of historical, intellectual, and political change connected with nationalism. The question of evidence and sources brings us to our second proposed dialogue, with empirical research. In this task, I can be much more concise, indeed epigrammatic by comparison with my comments on the role of theory. The following paradox is observable in the study of Greek nationalism. Whereas in writing on nationalism within Greece we can very often observe a serious divorce from theory, writing on Greek nationalism outside Greece is marked by an even more serious divorce from research. Although many scholars are keen to pronounce on nationalism, they show no similar eagerness to read the sources and pertinent literature, especially that produced in Greek. This pathology is reflected especially in the peculiar alacrity, indeed ardour, with which anthropologists like to make pronouncements on Greek nationalism. Generalizing from the limited evidence of ethnographic research, very often on a small island or a remote village or region, as a rule innocent of the whole learned 10

  On this, see further chapter 13 by Peter Mackridge in the present volume.   It is high time for students of nationalism to revisit the work of this forgotten but very perceptive thinker, who on account of his anarchism remained on the margins of scholarship as well as of politics, a fact that well illustrates the connection between the two (Rocker 1937). 11

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tradition that has been the main mediator of the articulation of nationalism, and consequently oblivious to the historicity of the phenomenon, anthropologists seem to derive a special pleasure from drawing conclusions – as a rule ignoring the work of non-anthropologists who have looked at these subjects – about the totalizing ‘triumph’ of the ethnos, the viciousness of the pervasiveness of nationalist values in Greek life, the identification of Orthodoxy with nationalist values, and so on. In so doing, anthropologists seem to forget that the demonization of nationalism does not really supply the most credible foundation for a critical understanding, and that such phenomena as they attempt to describe are usually the outcomes of complex historical processes, even at the micro-level of local communities. Therefore they should not be described in a language that makes them appear as intrinsic and defining long-term features of Greek society, a special trait of ‘Greek human nature’, as it were. Unless this unwillingness to engage in primary source research is reversed, no convincing work will be produced. I have the impression that this is a recent pathology, which is tending to become endemic in Greek studies: it is recent, because when Stephen Xydis wrote his classic account of Greek nationalism forty years ago, he made extensive use of source material in Greek and set a serious standard for the generation that followed him (Xydis 1969). This appears to be a peculiar disease of Greek studies, by comparison to Turkish studies for instance, where foreign scholars writing on Turkey use Turkish sources extensively. To a considerable degree this is also a question of professional ethics and standards, and the relevant failures are only symptoms of the deeper problem arising from what we have described as the failure of canonization. Unless this pathology in the dialogue with research can be cured, there can be very little hope for the progression of Greek studies outside Greece towards canonization. Epilogue To conclude. For Greece to become established as a serious paradigmatic case and not just as an incidental reference in the field of studies on nationalism, two requirements of scholarship need to be met: the circumspect, indeed ‘economical’, reflective and critical use of theory in pertinent case studies, and the grounding of such work upon a serious dialogue with the whole range of source material pertaining to each particular subject. Only thus can the general standard of the field rise to the professionally desirable level, happily represented by the contributors to the present volume, that will allow work on Greece to be sought after and read by scholars in other disciplines and specialisms, not just as another instance of ‘ethnic scholarship’, but because it is interesting and important in itself. If we reach that stage, we might be able to say that we have with some success resisted the inequitable international division of academic labour and the pressures toward marginalization it entails. We will then have accomplished a few important steps towards the canonization of Greece – and most especially of modern Greece’s ‘making’ – as an academic field of study.



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References Anderson, B. (1998), The spectre of comparisons: nationalism, Southeast Asia and the world, London: Verso. Burleigh, M. (2006 [12005]), Earthly powers: religion and politics in Europe from the Enlightenment to the Great War, London: Harper Perennial. Clark, T.J. (2006), ‘In a pomegranate chandelier’, London Review of Books 28. Constantinides, S.E. (ed.) (2000), Greece in modern times, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. Gellner, E. (1964), Thought and change, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Gewehr, W.M. (1931), The rise of nationalism in the Balkans 1800–1930, New York: Holt. Kedourie, E. (1984), The Chatham House version and other Middle-Eastern studies, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Kedourie, E. (ed.) (1970) Nationalism in Asia and Africa, New York: Meridian Books. Kitromilides, P.M. (2004), ‘Η ιδέα του έθνους και της εθνικής κοινότητας’, in P.M. Kitromilides and T. Sklavenitis (eds), Historiography of Modern and Contemporary Greece, Athens: Institute for Neohellenic Research (INR/NHRF), vol. I, 37–52. Kitromilides, P.M. (2006), ‘From republican patriotism to national sentiment: A reading of Hellenic Nomarchy’, European Journal of Political Theory 5: 50–60. Lawrence, P. (2005), Nationalism: history and theory, Harlow: Pearson Longman. Meinecke, F. (1970), Cosmopolitanism and the national state, trans. Robert B. Kimber, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rocker, R. (1937), Nationalism and culture, New York: Rocker Publications Committee. Seton-Watson, R.W. (1917), The rise of nationality in the Balkans, London: Constable. Shubert, A. (2004), ‘Spanish historians and English-speaking scholarship’, Social History 29: 358–63. Stavrianos, L.S. (1958), The Balkans since 1453, New York: Holt. Sugar, P. and Lederer, I. (eds) (1969), Nationalism in eastern Europe, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Tabaki, A. (2003), ‘Du théâtre philosophique au drame nationale: Étude du lexique politique à travers l’ère des Révolutions. Le cas grec’, in P.M. Kitromilides (ed.), From Republican Polity to National Community: Reconsiderations of Enlightenment Political Thought, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 62–85. Toynbee, A.J. (1922), The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: a study in the contact of civilisations, London: Constable. Toynbee, A.J. (1931), ‘Cyprus, the British Empire and Greece’, Survey of International Affairs 1931, London: Oxford University Press, 354–94. Toynbee, A.J. (1954), A study of history, vol. 8, London: Oxford University Press. West, R. (1942), Black lamb and grey falcon: a journey through Yugoslavia, London: Macmillan. Wolff, R.L. (1974), The Balkans in our time, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Xydis, S. (1969), ‘Modern Greek nationalism’, in Sugar and Lederer (eds) 1969, 207–58.

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2 What the Greek model can, and cannot, do for the modern state: the German perspective Suzanne Marchand This chapter seeks to investigate two fundamental questions about German Philhellenism: exactly what sort of model did the (ancient) Greeks provide, and what were the limits of the model? Despite the mention of ‘the modern state’ in my title, I plan to speak mostly about cultural politics – for that is the realm in which Philhellenism, for the Germans at least, mattered the most. Finally, in this chapter I will largely ignore events taking place in Greece proper for, to be blunt, the Hellas that most German intellectuals cared about, in the 1820s and in the 1890s, was the ancient one, the imaginarily unified one of Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Phidias, and Pericles. That is the ‘Greece’ that generated ‘Greek’ norms, applicable in poetry, oratory, drama, art, philosophy, and politics – though it was of some importance that the Greek struggle for independence coincided with the birth of German political and economic liberalism. What I hope to clarify here is what that version of Greece offered Germans during the high tide of philhellenic sentiment, roughly between about 1795 and 1850; and why that model gradually lost its usefulness thereafter. I start by not taking for granted the presumption that the high tide of German Philhellenism must necessarily have coincided with the Greeks’ struggle for independence in the 1810s and 1820s, and must necessarily have waned once the complexities and disappointments of that political project came to light. Some welleducated liberals were indeed moved by the course of actual events in Hellas; but many of these young men were also moved by events in Belgium, Italy, or Poland – or, like the young Ludwig Ross, who would later spend thirteen years working to build up the Greek Antiquities Service, they involved themselves in spreading enlightened ideas in the provinces. A patriotic citizen of Schleswig-Holstein who knew far more about Aristophanes than about Ypsilantis, Ross went to Greece in 1832, less to aid the cause of Greek freedom than to seek adventure – or to seize the opportunity to study and collect unknown ancient artefacts and monuments (Minner 2006, 56–9; 74–5). Nor was the Greek national saga so inspiring later in the century – despite the fact that by this time, it should be noted, many more German From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. 33

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boys had been subjected to Greek lessons, and many more books, engravings, and poems celebrating the glories of Greece had appeared. Greece’s attempts to incorporate Crete, Macedonia, and Constantinople could have been relevant to fin de siècle nationalists and populists – but the Greek model had already come to stand for certain things, and these things were no longer particularly important in the nation-building process, in large part because they had already been achieved. The historical accident that lay behind German, and European, Philhellenism – that the Greek struggle for independence coincided with early liberal struggles directed against Restoration regimes in the West – defined the values that were associated with Greekness, and set limits to that model’s relevance for the making of the modern world. When seen in the context of the social world of the immediate post-Napoleonic era, these values – connected with Greekness by this generation’s rhetorical gestures – are indeed modernizing. But they could not support the diversification and democratization of cultural institutions demanded by new groups of culture producers by the fin de siècle. The contours of high liberal German Philhellenism are well known. It should be noted here, however, that even before Koraes’s famous lecture of 1803 on the ‘present state of civilization in Greece’ (Koraes 1971), even before Canto II of Byron’s Childe Harold appeared in 1812, and before Napoleon’s armies took the Holy Roman intellectual world by storm, German Graecophilia was already widespread amongst members of a particular set of culture producers – a group we can characterize, if perhaps caricature, as free-thinking Protestant, middle- or upper-middle-class, well-educated men. For them, the Greeks represented the following values: beauty, friendship, secularism, simplicity, rational discourse, seriousness, individual liberty, meritocracy, unity, idealism, nostalgia, and purity. I have taken the first three of these key values directly from Goethe’s 1805 tribute to Winckelmann, substituting secularism for what Goethe courageously called paganism (Goethe 1994). To dwell on this term, just briefly, let me note that like many of the others in the early nineteenth century, it was a value invoked by the opposition, not by the status quo; for Goethe and his generation of enlightened, anti-clerical readers, the ancient Greeks’ sceptical or aestheticized attitude towards organized religion was admirable. ‘Paganism’ represented their most cherished values: dependence on one’s self, the wonders of the here and now, the universe as a work of art, the close relationship between nature and spirit, and the need for knowable, rational gods. As for the other values, they were also largely oppositional ones: cultural unity as against the fragmented world of the German principalities; meritocracy, simplicity, and seriousness as against the baroque frivolity of German courtly culture; rational discourse in a world of feudal decision-makers with no need to justify their commands. One might also note that friendship, a concept with its real roots in the eighteenth century, once Hellenized, and filtered through that greatest of Greece’s promoters, Winckelmann, had at the very least homosocial or nepotistic implications, which already begins to suggest the limits to its modern applicability.



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It should be noted that Winckelmannian Graecophilia had never really been a political platform, but was, rather, a movement devoted to cultural reform. For followers of this tradition, ancient Greece functioned, as Anthony La Vopa pointed out some time ago, to resolve tensions between liberal optimism and cultural pessimism characteristic of their class, the Bildungsbürgertum, or non-commercial middle class, tensions that were already in evidence in neoclassical critiques of Enlightenment utilitarianism and the division of labour such as Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters of 1793 (La Vopa 1990, 41). As early as the 1790s, Schiller and his colleagues were trying to make some sort of a nation from Greek models; although I continue to think that Thomas Nipperdey’s quip about German political history, which opens his three-volume magnum opus, applies to its cultural history too: ‘In the beginning there was Napoleon’ (Nipperdey 1998, 11). The collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, followed by French defeat, opened the space for new millenarian dreams, and for new men to seize culture’s reins. Then the Greeks began to speak – or at least so the Germans thought – a liberal language they could understand; and for a brief time, the aims of Greek regeneration after Ottoman rule and German cultural revolution after Napoleon coincided. Both projects seemed destined to succeed, which indeed proved to be right, though of course, neither so quickly, nor so completely, as their idealistic proponents had hoped. Like other European supporters of the Greek cause, German Philhellenes were radical with respect to regime change, and perhaps even with respect to governance, in Greece; but the movement was only briefly (if at all) revolutionary with respect to politics at home. There was a highly interesting utopian moment, in which Friedrich Thiersch and Ludwig I of Bavaria thought Greece could be ‘a cornerstone of European freedom and the protectress of Christianity in the Orient’, and believed that military victory would be inevitably and immediately followed by a Greek cultural renaissance so powerful that it would spread Enlightenment throughout Asia (cited in Mitsou 2005, 41). But note that Thiersch’s revolution was scheduled to take place on somebody’s else’s soil – and by the autumn of 1821, after Metternich expressed his disapproval, these proxy-colonial hopes dwindled. They lasted longer, however, than those of Marx and Engels in early 1848, or of George Bush’s backers in 2001–2; as Christoph Hauser has shown, recruitment and donations continued, especially in the west German states, throughout the 1820s.1 Another estimate of volunteers willing to go to Greece and act as peace-keepers (or Otto-enforcers) lists 3,541 Bavarians and 487 Württembergers; volunteers from the areas where Metternichian repression was more effective, such as Prussia and Austria, reached only 186 and 135 respectively (Barth and Kehrig-Korn 1960, 59). Hauser argues that philhellenic propaganda and organization offered an opportunity for liberals to express natural law principles of resistance, to think 1   See also Irmscher 1966, who argues that though the directly political part of German Philhellenism ended in late 1821, even afterwards the use of the Ottomans as a metaphor for despotism proved politically effective.

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through the process of transition from a Kulturnation to a Staatsnation, and, as it were, to begin to practise proto-parliamentary politics – and perhaps this is true for the southwestern territories on which he focuses (Hauser 1990, 199–205). But more centrally, especially in places like Prussia, Austria, and Saxony, strict censorship ensured that many of those who wrote about the Greeks after the crackdown tempered their endorsements of modern Greek liberty (though not their denunciations of Turkish barbarity), in favour of expressing their admiration for ancient Greek perfections.2 Indeed, it was perhaps as a result of this censorship that romanticizing poets and politics-shy academics seized control of the Graecophile discourse. It was well known amongst those who actually went to Greece that the new nation looked very little like the romanticized portrayals of it as ‘antiquity reborn’; the war itself was hardly a heroic battle, as French and German volunteers squabbled amongst themselves, food was scarce, and uniforms and medical supplies scantier still. The members of the German clubs founded in the Greek cities – mostly lowranking officers and a few tradesmen – often kept to themselves, and to their own language and customs (such as duelling), creating bad feeling between the Greek and German populations. Such Germans lived humdrum lives and, it seems, often resented the romanticized impressions of their conditions prevalent at home. Early archaeologists and some travellers also echoed this jaded, ‘Balkan’, or ‘Oriental’ view of modern Greece. As one of Olympia’s early excavators wrote:

He who has never eaten pilaf with tallow, He who had never in shivering need to wallow And never went to bed, his umbrella overspann’t He does not know you, my divine Levant.3

For the average German intellectual it was, of course, far more attractive to pay tribute to an ancient world of poets and thinkers, of athletes and architects, than to contemplate such board and lodging. Nor did many liberals – not to speak of conservatives – have much desire to devote themselves to the less heroic tasks of post-revolutionary state-building, such as the modernization of the Greek economy or the annexing of more territory. The German liberals had their own nation-building to tend to, their own inefficiencies and social inequalities to worry about. Thus, even though by mid-century there were plenty of Germans who had 2   It may also be that Hegel’s departures from the potentially much more radically democratic aesthetic state proposed by Friedrich Hölderlin – including Hegel’s underscoring of the fatal flaw in Athenian democracy (its acceptance of slavery) – already signal the collapse of ancient Greece as a political model for German liberals (and this flaw would also make it impossible for radicals like Marx to resurrect it). See Chytry 1989, 148–98. 3   Quoted in Barth 1936, 14. The German original (for which mine is a very poor translation!) reads: Wer nie Pilaf mit Unschlitt ass, Wer nie am Mangal [sic] fröstelnd sass Und nie im Bett den Schirm aufspannte, Der kennt dich nicht, der göttliche Levante.



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visited or served in Greece, the modern Greeks had become politically irrelevant, merely disappointing reminders that the achievement of ‘nationhood’ and ‘liberty’ did not necessarily solve all of one’s problems. Let me now issue a proviso to my claim above that German Philhellenism was not radical. It was not politically radical, I maintain; but in cultural terms, one can still, in the early nineteenth century, call it so, and in two ways. The first relates to my discussion of the ‘pagan’ above: Graecophiles were generally critics of the organized churches, and especially of the Catholic Church; most were not, in fact, atheists or pagans, but anti-clerical Protestants or Jews. The men of the later eighteenth century were often more radical here than their later descendants; many were avid readers of Spinoza, freemasons, and inclined to libertinism; we should not forget how suspicious authorities were about the religious convictions of such great and Graecophile minds as Winckelmann, Lessing, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Goethe. And, if one were an orthodox Christian, or Jewish, cleric, these men were dangerous; they harboured hardly concealed ambitions to drive the clergy out of the business of education; and by the 1830s, at least at the secondary and university level, they had largely succeeded. Moreover, bolstered by Enlightenment ethnography, they managed to turn a neat trick, transforming Greek folk poetry into natural revelation, while, on the other hand, turning the Old Testament into Volkspoesie. This deistic broadening of the realm of the spiritual made possible new forms of tolerance, and destroyed the theology faculty’s hold on the study of Geist. This success, the equating of the ‘spiritual’ contributions of the Greeks with those of the ancient Israelites, made possible a post-1830 reconciliation of classicists and Christians, upon which the modern understanding of Western cultural history was built. I could cite Hegel here, but it would be more appropriate to invoke the great mid-century Greek specialist, and royal tutor, Ernst Curtius. In a public lecture presented in 1853, Curtius insisted that it was the mission of the Germans to reconcile the apparent differences between Christianity and Hellenentum; by this time, both had become disembodied spiritual factors, whose ultimate purpose was not to defeat one another, but to create a secular patrimony Curtius called Culturgeschichte, and we would probably call Western Civilization.4 It is worth pointing out that though this secular patrimony technically should have given all Europeans equal cultural standing, Protestant, educated men claimed proprietary rights; although a (Catholic) Bavarian king sat on the Greek throne between 1833 and 1862, it was chiefly Protestant intellectuals who generated and perpetuated German Philhellenism at home. Another way in which early nineteenth-century German Philhellenes were radical was in their prescription for who should steer the process of nationmaking. Again, clerics here were a target, but not the only one: the other was 4   ‘Do [Greek and German culture] not have in common the ability and the mission, to detach themselves from the peoples to whom they originally belonged, and with their vital energy undiminished, to pass from one nation to another?’ (Curtius 1877 [1853], 70–1).

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the aristocracy. Putting yourself in the position of a member of the social, clerical, or political élite of the Holy Roman Empire, consider the audacity of Friedrich Schiller’s 1784 proclamation: If we are able to have a national theatre, then we will be a nation. What held Greece together? […] Nothing but the plays, which were infused with the Greek spirit, the great interests of the state and of a better humanity (cited in Sheehan 1989, 173).

The theatre, well-known den of loose women and illusions – so much so that Rousseau, along with many another Calvinist, and a number of avid republicans, denounced it – the carrier of Geist? Of course the other, ultimately more successful contender was the university philosophical faculties – claimants to provide both Geist and Wissenschaft. In a remarkably short period of time, hastened by Napoleon’s conquests, the Germanies left behind the era in which speaking German was thought barbarous, and German princes thought secular culture-production frivolous; when, after 1805, cultural unity was the only unity Germandom had, a new set of heroes emerged – Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Jacob Grimm, Karl Schinkel, and Alexander von Humboldt – who held values in almost all ways opposed to those of the older nobility. They made the case that ‘spirit’, as opposed to history, blood, or religious confession – could hold a state together, or at least hold an imaginary state together; it remains unclear in Europe today if a real state based only on Geist could endure, but it seems to me now, as it seemed to the early German liberals then, that the game might be worth the candle. Beauty is not a revolutionary or a wholly democratic value – it presumes a hierarchy of taste and tastemakers, and it is on the whole a value opposed to utilitarian concerns. But it is a secular, and in its application to human achievements, at least a semi-meritocratic, virtue. The idea implicit in Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1954, first published 1793), that every individual should be brought up so as to be able to work on the world freely, as did the ancient Greek sculptors, is not something we should sneer at. Nor should we sneer at the presumption of Graecophiles like Wilhelm von Humboldt or August Boeckh that educated persons should serve the state, but also expect it to respect cultural freedoms – if in a still élitist way, they did believe in education for citizenship, and in freedom of thought and expression. They also believed that the ‘greatness’ of a state ought to be judged less by its military conquests or its material wealth than by its cultural deeds. These things were not necessarily accepted by the Old Regime, and had to be won from them, which they were, though, once again, never were their successes total or universally applied. Surely we can blame them for not pushing for more universality – such as equally enriching education for women, Jews, Poles, the poor, and peasants – and for their strong preference for cultural rather than political reform. But perhaps the Greek model was precisely the goslow model they wanted; it helped to build support for universal secular secondary education and for state-supported universities which favoured classics over the natural sciences, and even over theology, law, and medicine; they got libraries



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and museums, which bought classical books and artefacts in large numbers. By dint of their work, access to cultural goods did expand – though in point of fact, probably a smaller percentage of non-middle-class men received professorships in the nineteenth than in the eighteenth century, and the goods offered were of a limited sort. The national model generated by the Graecophiles of the century’s first half, then, was a relatively modern and progressive one for the pre-1848 era; but in the century’s second half, the model did not evolve to face new challenges, or to stake out new cultural territory. Perhaps rather than treat this as the inevitable decline of ancient models in the face of industrial modernization, we should consider Greece’s waning as the result of the successes of the high liberal Graecophiles, who now had no interest in backing new movements or oppositional values. They got comfortable jobs, in secondary schools and universities, and they stopped caring so much about educating ‘the people’ – a category that was becoming, in any event, all too capacious for many early liberals to continue to countenance. In fact, already in 1852, Wilhelm Herbst, a Greece-loving Gymnasium teacher, complained that the seriousness and specialization of German Graecophilia had made the wider use of the Greek model, especially among politicians and businessmen, almost impossible; he preferred English Graecophilia, which allowed for the broader use of the Greek model, rather than its monopolization by philological pedants (Herbst 1852, e.g. 171–2). But Herbst was fighting a losing battle against the increasing identification of Graecophilia with the narrow interests of the educated upper middle classes, and especially the classical scholars, something that was happening in America as well. As Caroline Winterer argues, Greece-lovers in late nineteenth-century America increasingly emphasized the remoteness of Greece, and its function as modernity’s antidote rather than mirror (Winterer 2002, 68); the hopes for rapid regeneration, either of Greece itself or of European politics as a whole, were gone; in La Vopa’s terms invoked above, cultural pessimism was getting the better of liberal optimism. Teaching or studying the classics was now identified with anti-modernism, and with opposition to the broadening of Germany’s cultural palate and the reform of its cultural institutions. Before concluding, I must draw attention briefly to some of the lesser-known critiques of German Philhellenism launched in the later nineteenth century.5 These came from writers, organizers, and scholars keenly aware of ways in which the Greek model did not offer the only alternative, either for German politics 5   There were also some writers, especially committed Christians, who criticized the Reich’s lack of support for the Greeks (and Armenians) during the twenty years of Balkan turmoil that preceded the Great War. One of these was August Heisenberg, father of the famous physicist and professor of Byzantine studies at the University of Munich. In 1912, as the Greeks were suffering large casualties in the battles of the first Balkan War, Heisenberg delivered a blistering lecture, arguing: ‘We need Turkey for political reasons, we need it, it seems, for our power position. Thus we do not raise a hand, we prefer that the people of the Balkans remain, instead, in serfdom and misery’ (Heisenberg 1913, 37). Rather in the tradition of Thiersch, the Munich professor suggested that a greater-Greek, Christian state in southeastern Europe (and Asia Minor) might be a better bet than alliance with the tyrannical Turks.

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or, especially, for German cultural modernism. I will not dwell on the feminists, socialists or Christian populists who were clearly left out by the Greek model, or even on the better-known Germanophiles, who complained long and loudly about the privileging of foreign, dead cultures over their own. The scholars I refer to are the orientalists, who had been around at least as long as the classicists, and had a long history of underlining weaknesses in Greek culture, or Greece’s debts to the older cultures of the Orient. Lack of racial purity was one of these supposed weaknesses, something that Jacob Fallmerayer famously pointed out in the century’s first half, but which the influential racist propagandist Houston Stewart Chamberlain reiterated in a 1905 book entitled Arische Weltanschauung [The Aryan World-View]. Here, Chamberlain argued explicitly for the need to replace the old (classical) humanism with one grounded instead in Indo-Aryan civilization, in order to give Kultur religio-racist rather than secular-aesthetic roots. The advantages of India as a foundation for cultural revival are, for Chamberlain, first of all, its great antiquity and thus its supposed autonomy from Semitic influences, something the Greeks (who had adopted Judaized Christianity) could not boast. But more common was the critique of Greece’s lack of profound spirituality, what Indologist Paul Deussen described as Greek genius’s Richtung auf das Aeusserliche [focus on the exterior] which makes for great art but prevents deep study of inner essences and their abysses (Deussen 1911, 3). Both Chamberlain and Deussen loved the Greeks, but they were eager to adopt an older, wiser ancestor culture, India, as the new model. India offered values that were, in a way, a return to the pre-liberal value system: mystery, ancestry, hierarchy, submissiveness, piety. But these seemed new, and compelling, precisely because they were anti-Greek values;6 and in a way, the association of the Orient with anti-liberal ideas has been as fateful, and more disastrous, for the countries of that region as has the association of Greece with the high liberalism that failed. In the fin de siècle critique of what one writer called ‘plaster-cast antiquity’ and the search for older, ‘oriental’ ancestors, one can see represented many of the modern culture’s needs and interests that could not be addressed by liberal models: the need to understand unconscious drives, the recognition that rationalization could not drive out human attraction to the mysterious, the anxieties unleashed by mass migration, popular sovereignty, and cultural mixing. It was possible for some artists, writers, and scholars to incorporate some of these newer themes and longings into their treatments of Greek antiquity;7 but even this only satisfied a minority of avant garde connoisseurs and neo-Romantic scholars. Perhaps the anti-colonial movements in the Orient could have been used, as were the Greeks, as a launching pad for a new sort of cultural optimism and reform; but the fin de siècle generation did not have the optimism to do so, and the values derived from 6

  For the appeal of the Orient at the fin de siècle, see Marchand 2004a.   An example, here, was the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin, who enjoyed a brief period of fame and fortune in the 1890s. By about 1905, however, his paintings of satyrs and Greek rituals began to seem bourgeois and even trite (cf. Marchand 2004b). 7



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the East were not the right ones to sustain a new progressive movement. Even more anti-materialist than the Greek model, the Oriental models had nothing to do with social justice, economic opportunity, or ethnic and religious diversity.8 And even these failed to attract more than a minority of intellectuals, and the story of German cultural history down to 1933 is one of the continual battle of models, from the American to the Japanese, the Gothic to the Russian. One might perhaps call that diversity of paradigms truly modern; though with it came titanic battles for cultural control which lasted through the Nazi era, and may even have diverted intellectuals from working to build a modern political culture. Speculating on the future, one might argue that the Greek model could still be used (by local inhabitants) in places where a small liberal, male élite is trying to create a semi-meritocratic, semi-secularized, semi-progressive national culture over and against an old authoritarian power. (Perhaps Saudi Arabia, or, understanding secularism differently, China?) Obviously, however, without total overhaul, the model cannot really inspire the progressive innovation in the genderequal, religiously diverse democracies that most liberals now endorse. It served a real purpose; and we should not sneer at the role it played in liberating all of us from court- and clerical-dominated cultural institutions. But, in so far as Europeans tried to impose it on the nineteenth-century Greeks, as many of the chapters in this volume demonstrate, it also had its limitations, and generated long-lasting misunderstandings of modern Greece’s history, circumstances and desires, some of which had already taken deep root by the date with which this volume ends. Now that we understand the historical consequences of the Greek model better than ever before, we should also know better than to try to resurrect it.

References Barth, W. (1936), Geschichte der deutschen Gesellschaft Philadelphia in Athen, Athens. Barth, W. and Kehrig-Korn, M. (1960), Die Philhellenenzeit, Munich: Hüber. Chytry, J. (1989), The aesthetic state: a quest in modern German thought, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Curtius, E. (1877), ‘Der Weltgang der griechischen Cultur’, [1853] in E. Curtius, Alterthum und Gegenwart, vol. 1, Berlin: Hertz, 59–77. Deussen, P. (1911), Die Philosophie der Griechen, Leipzig: Brockhaus. Goethe, J.W. (1994), Skizze zu einer Schilderung Winckelmanns, ed. J. Golz, Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag. Hauser, C. (1990), Anfänge bürgerlicher Organisation: Philhellenismus und Frühliberalismus in Südwestdeutschland, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Heisenberg, A. (1913), Der Philhellenismus einst und jetzt, Munich: Beck. 8   See, for example, T. Jackson Lears’ discussion of the Japanophilia of the Boston Brahmins (Lears 1981).

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Herbst, W. (1852), Das Classische Alterthum in der Gegenwart: Eine geschichtliche Betrachtung, Leipzig: Teubner. Irmscher, J. (1966), ‘Der Philhellenismus in Preussen als Forschungsanliegen’, in Sitzungsberichte der deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Klasse für Sprache, Literatur und Kunst) 2: 17–30. Koraes, A. (1971 [11803, in French]), ‘Report on the present state of civilization in Greece’, in E. Kedourie (ed.), Nationalism in Asia and Africa, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 153–88. La Vopa, A. (1990), ‘Specialists against specialization: Hellenism as professional ideology in German classical studies’, in G. Cocks and K.H. Jarausch (eds), German Professions, 1800–1950, New York: Oxford University Press, 27–45. Lears, T.J. (1981), No place of grace: antimodernism and the transformation of modern American culture, 1880–1920, New York: Pantheon. Marchand, S. (2004a), ‘Philhellenism and the Furor Orientalis’, Modern Intellectual History 1/3: 331–58. Marchand, S. (2004b), ‘Arnold Böcklin and the problem of German Modernism’, in S. Marchand and D. Lindenfeld (eds), Germany at the Fin de Siècle: Culture, Politics and Ideas, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 129–66. Minner, I.E. (2006), Ewig ein Fremder im fremden Lande: Ludwig Ross (1806–1859) und Griechenland, Mannheim: Bibliopolis. Mitsou, M.-L. (2005), ‘Le Philhellénisme bavarois et la “Grand Idée”’, in Philhellénismes et transferts culturels dans l’Europe du XIXe siècle (Revue Germanique Internationale, 1–2), 35–44. Nipperdey, T. (1998), Deutsche Geschichte, 1800–1866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat, vol. 1, Munich: C.H. Beck. Schiller, F. (1954 [11793]), On the aesthetic education of man, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sheehan, J.J. (1989), German history, 1770–1866, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Winterer, C. (2002), The culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American intellectual life 1780–1910, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

3 Modern nations and ancient models: Italy and Greece compared Henrik Mouritsen In this brief chapter I explore some aspects of the relationship between the creation of nation states in the nineteenth century and the use of the distant past to define these new states. The points I shall be making draw on my previous work on nineteenth-century historiography and nationalism.1 A prominent theme throughout this volume is the centrality of classical Greece to the formation of the modern Greek state during the nineteenth century. Many areas of public and cultural life were dominated by ancient models and precedents, which became a ubiquitous point of reference. Modern scholars often seem to perceive the extensive use made of the classical past as a distinctively Greek phenomenon, which has therefore emerged as something of an anomaly. In contrast, I shall argue that the historical dimension was integral to the large majority of new nation states established in this period. In Greece the temporal distance may seem striking, but it was far from unique. What was perhaps unusual about the Greek experience was the wide popular resonance that the classical model found, as well as its durability as a component of the new national identity. Overall, it is the long-term success of the Greek ‘national project’ that strikes the modern observer the most, rather than the many obstacles it faced during its formative stages. Its success could not be taken for granted, and the classical model may have been an important factor contributing to the creation of a new collective identity. This particular point is brought out most vividly when we compare Greece to Italy, another new nation state formed in the nineteenth century, which could look back upon a glorious ancient past. However, before turning to Italy I would like to make a few observations about the historicity of the modern concept of the nation, its utopian nature, and the many difficulties involved in turning a nation into a nation state. In this context the role of the past in the creation of new nation states will also be touched upon. 1   See Mouritsen 1998 (especially ch. 2, on ‘Theodor Mommsen and the “Italian question”’); 2006; 2007.

From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. 43

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There is now a broad consensus among scholars that the modern concept of the nation can be traced back to eighteenth-century Germany, when early Romantic thinkers such as Herder redefined the relationship between land, people, and collective identity. His notion of the people, das Volk, as an organic, living entity was as influential as it was revolutionary. In place of the more localized or classbased sources of identity which had previously dictated people’s allegiances, Herder envisaged a nation that encompassed both princes and paupers, an ‘imagined community’, in the later formulation of Benedict Anderson, which crossed social barriers of class and education and bound together people who lived too far apart ever to be able to meet. Moreover, the Romantic nation was more than the sum of its members: it was endowed with a soul and spirit of its own, even a destiny. The spirit of a nation expressed itself in its language, customs, and mentality. Each nation thus represented a unique, closed world which could achieve its own form of perfection distinct from that of other nations. From its first inception, the idea of the nation had a strong historical dimension. It was inextricably linked to the early development of historicism, which was the reinvention of the past as a continuous, ever-changing process of creation. Time was redefined as an active, transforming force, and the central agent in the course of history was identified as the nation, which had its own distinct existence and followed its own unique life course. While history meant constant change and evolution, the nations themselves played an a priori, transcendental role within the historical process, which might affect their articulation but not their essence. The intimate connection between nation and history meant that the Romantic nation automatically found itself at the centre of a grand narrative that traced the stages of its development and – ideally – its steady progress towards perfection. A nation was defined by the history which had shaped its customs and language, and it was widely accepted that certain periods could express the true nature of a nation more clearly than others. For example, Herder himself wished he had lived in the Middle Ages, a period when the German nation and its language were supposedly at their purest. Partly under the influence of the Napoleonic occupation of Europe, the Romantic idea of the nation gained a stronger political aspect, giving rise to the new ideal of the nation state in which the nation realized its true potential and destiny. Thus, the natural aim of a nation was defined as political autonomy and self-governance. Only under those conditions could it fulfil its historical role and achieve perfection and freedom. The two latter were combined in Hegelian thinking, which endowed the formation of nation states with a deeper historical meaning as the fulfilment of history’s hidden plan and purpose. The nation state represented a giant step forward for humankind towards the realization of God’s will on earth. The creation of states was not random but, in the words of the leading German historian Leopold von Ranke, die Gedanken Gottes, the thoughts of God. In this teleological construction the nation state was the necessary, indeed inevitable, outcome of a nation’s struggle for self-fulfilment.



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The reality, as we all know, was often very different from the theory. The fundamental problem was that the nation state was an attempt to give concrete political shape to what was essentially an abstract ideal, namely the imaginary community of the nation. The Romantic nation was in essence a utopian dream, deeply rooted in German idealism, while the nation state was the practical realization of that idea. Translating the ideal into hard political realities automatically raised fundamental questions. Above all, clear definitions of the new nation state had to be formulated, unambiguously setting out who were its members and what was its territory. In many parts of Europe the criteria used to define the Romantic nation – language, custom, religion, descent, and territory – were poorly suited to form the basis for a practical political structure for the simple reason that they did not all provide the same answer to the question posed. There were often deep religious divides splitting a nation, notably in Germany, and language might also be a problematic unifier, either because of bilingualism or multilingualism, or because regional dialects hampered mutual understanding between speakers of the same language. Likewise, the claim to ancestral soil and common descent were frequently the cause of bitter territorial disputes in border zones and in areas with mixed populations. In light of these difficulties, it is not surprising that the past remained one of the most fundamental – and indeed most solid – pillars on which a nation state could be built. The common past was a constitutive element of the modern nation, and in political terms new state formations were almost invariably presented as the restoration of an earlier state structure from which it sought legitimacy. The use of the past to constitute a new nation state was therefore far from unique to nineteenthcentury Greece. The temporal span covered may have been unusual, but again it was not unparalleled. Neither was the selective nature of the national narrative in any way unusual. Indeed it was very common to privilege some periods at the expense of others, which were deemed less noble or instructive. As we saw, Herder had already stressed the primacy of some periods in expressing the essence of a nation. In many parts of Europe, distant, even prehistoric pasts were rediscovered by the new nations which had emerged from long periods of foreign domination (or were striving to do so), had been united or otherwise politically redefined. Celtic origins were (re)discovered in Scotland and Ireland (especially after 1829) along with the medieval roots of their nations. Also in Norway, recently emerged from what was called the ‘four-hundred-years’ night’ under Danish rule (which ended in 1814), we find a strong focus on the medieval period, when the country had last been politically independent. In Denmark, on the other hand, the nation state was created involuntarily by the stripping off of non-Danish territories from the multi-ethnic, dynastic kingdom (Norway in 1814 and Schleswig-Holstein in 1864). While the viability of the new, much-reduced nation state was a cause for concern, it also led to a redefinition of what it meant to be Danish. There was a renewed interest in the national history, with a strong emphasis on a distinctly

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Nordic identity, supposedly most strongly manifested in the medieval and Viking periods; even prehistory made its contribution to the identity of the new state. In Germany, the Middle Ages also became central to the new nation, providing a vision of a purer and more genuine Germany under the Holy Roman emperors – before Kleinstaaterei and internal divisions led to political decline. However, there were also attempts to provide the new state with more ancient examples of German strength and unity. The leader of the Germanic tribe of the Cherusci, Arminius/ Hermann, who had famously defeated the Romans at the Teutoburgerwald, was celebrated as a national hero and subject to extensive public commemoration, most strikingly at the gigantic Hermann monument near Detmold (1839–1875), which carries the telling inscription: Deutschlands Einigkeit meine Stärke – meine Stärke Deutschlands Macht (‘Germany’s unity is my strength – my strength is Germany’s might’). Moving on from Germany to Italy, we find a rather more complex situation, despite the similarities between their parallel movements of unification. While Italy shared Germany’s traditional fragmentation, it was characterized by a stronger regionalism culturally as well as politically. The Italian national movement of unification in the nineteenth century was therefore faced with much more entrenched local identities, which had to be overcome for the ‘national project’ to succeed. In order to bind the disparate regions together, the new state needed a strong historical model that could inspire a common Italian identity. The only period in which the whole of Italy had ever been fully united was during the period of Roman rule from the first century BCE to the Visigothic invasions (albeit never including Sicily). However, ancient Rome also turned out to be an ambiguous national model, since it was the story of a small city-state that conquered its neighbours by force and imposed a uniform Roman administration and culture upon a diverse pattern of existing cultures and languages. The message drawn from antiquity was therefore a mixed one. Ancient Italy presented an image of pluralism being replaced by uniformity, which meant that ancient models were available both for a unitary and a regional vision of the peninsula. By prioritizing earlier periods it was possible to point to an original pre-Roman diversity that seemed to correspond to – and thereby reinforced – a contemporary diversity. In this context we may observe an interesting historiographical phenomenon: a national narrative created by foreigners. The narrative of ancient Italian unity was largely formulated by ancient historians from Germany, the academic ‘powerhouse’ of nineteenth-century Europe. As I have argued in my book on the unification of Italy, it was German historians, above all Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), who created a version of the classical past that could serve as a suitable model for contemporary efforts to unite Italy (Mommsen 1854–6). Deeply inspired by the national movement in Germany, Mommsen conceived a grand narrative of Italian unification, which embodied the contemporary idea of national unity as a metahistorical telos and universal measure of human progress.



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Mommsen saw the creation of a single Roman state in Italy as the result of a natural ‘coming together’ of all the Italian nations under Roman leadership – Rome acting as the direct equivalent to Prussia. Realizing that their destiny was to join Rome and share her world-historical mission, the Italians readily gave up their parochial local identities and merged with Rome. Mommsen even speculated that they might have fallen from a distant pre-historical unity that was now to be restored. Contemporary Italian historians were often more sceptical, probably under the influence of strong local allegiances. The new Italian state nevertheless presented itself as the re-creation of ancient Italy unified under Rome. This point was expressed most unequivocally in the designation of the Papal city of Rome as the new capital. Since the unification of Italy was largely a North Italian project, led by Piedmont and the House of Savoy, the most logical seat of government would have been Turin. However, as early as 1861, nine years before the final capture of the Eternal City, Rome was declared capital. In Italy the distant ancient model served mostly as a political template for the new state, to which it presented the only direct predecessor. But the symbolic use made of ancient Rome was relatively modest and rarely pressed very hard, despite notable exceptions such as Rome’s Vittorio Emanuele Monument or Altare della Patria (1895–1911), which has few parallels in the rest of Italy, presumably because of limited popular appeal. Most emphasis was placed on the present glory of Italy reborn, as illustrated, for example, by the custom of naming all major streets and squares after the contemporary heroes of the unification rather than distant historical figures. Only with the dictatorship of Mussolini did the use of ancient Rome take off on a larger scale, although the main aim seems to have been to justify his imperial ambitions rather than to reinforce internal national unity. In any case, his failure eventually doomed the classical past as a viable model for the modern Italian state. We may speculate whether the failure of ancient Rome to provide a suitable identity for the new state might be a contributing factor behind some of the difficulties currently experienced by the modern Italian state. It meant there was no national ‘narrative’ strong enough to supplant long-established regionalism and suppress resurgent separatism. Ancient Rome was not able to inspire a shared sense of the past that encompassed all the different parts of the country. In Tuscany, for example, a historical identity based on the ancient Etruscans often seems to be stronger than the Roman alternative, which is perhaps not surprising since it had been actively promoted by local antiquarians over several centuries prior to the rise of the Risorgimento. Likewise, in central Italy the Samnites, the bitter foes of the expanding Roman republic, can still be seen as the local ancestors rather than Rome itself. Thus, in the Teatro di Savoia at Campobasso, the capital of the province of Molise, the ceiling fresco depicts the triumph of the Samnites over their Roman enemies. Examples such as this illustrate how the distant past can be used

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to reinforce a regional rather than national identity, thereby subverting the utopian dream on which the unitary nation state was originally founded. The case of Italy has two important lessons. First, it reminds us that the outcome of a ‘national project’ is not a given, and secondly it underscores the point that an ancient historical model may not necessarily work in the modern project’s favour. From that perspective the contrast with Greece could hardly be more pronounced, for what emerges from such a comparison is the striking success of the Greek ‘national project’, as well as the importance of a viable historical model. In modern Greece the classical past came to provide a highly effective point of national identification, which is in itself a remarkable achievement; after all, it is not selfevident that people identify themselves with a civilization that existed more than two thousand years ago. This may in many respects have been an intellectual project, conceived and implemented from the top down. It also took shape under the influence of the Western powers, whose projections of classical models onto the new state played an important part in the process. Here the contribution of the leading German historian of ancient Greece, Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–1884), must be stressed, since it was he who composed the unitary narrative that gave Macedonia an integral place in the story of the Greek nation (Droysen 1833; 1836–43; cf. chapter 4 by Ioannis Koubourlis below). The parallel to Mommsen’s Italian history is striking, since both operated with a strong unifying agent who overcame petty particularism in order to realize the national mission. The inspiration clearly came from contemporary Prussia, but while in Italy this role was given to Rome, in Greece it fell to Macedonia. In contrast to Italy, the classical model appears to have been relatively uncontested in Greece, despite the existence of alternative ‘narratives’, including conservative attempts to establish Byzantium and the Greek Orthodox tradition as a model for the new nation. The identity offered by the classical model seems to have enjoyed broad popular appeal, perhaps because the local identities and power structures were relatively weak compared to Italy. The ancient Greek model has also shown itself to be remarkably durable compared to that of other European countries, whose historically based identities generally have faded since their peak in the nineteenth century. Part of the strength of the ancient Greek model may be explained by a clever choice of emphasis, since it was essential to focus on those aspects of antiquity that were most constructive as components of modern nation-building. Thus, in the creation of modern Greece the classical past was used primarily as a cultural unifier rather than a direct political blueprint, which would not have been viable. The new Greek state was no re-creation of the past – inevitably, since there was no ancient state to emulate. Instead it was presented as a rebirth of the ancient Greek civilization in a new and stronger political form. In short, when assessing the ‘Making of Modern Greece’, we should bear in mind that the transformation of the nation as an abstract idea into a political and



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cultural reality inevitably was a process fraught with immense difficulties. Viewed in that perspective, the creation of the modern Greek state during the nineteenth century, invoking a distant classical past as a common source of identity, stands out as a remarkable success.

References Droysen, J.G. (1833), Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen, Hamburg: Perthes. Droysen, J.G. (1836–43), Geschichte des Hellenismus, 2 vols, Hamburg: Perthes. Mommsen, Th. (1854–6), Römische Geschichte, vols 1–3, Berlin: Wiedmann. Mouritsen, H. (1998), Italian unification. A study in ancient and modern historiography (Bulletin, Suppl. 70), London: Institute of Classical Studies. Mouritsen, H. (2006), ‘Hindsight and historiography: writing the history of Pre-Roman Italy’, in M. Jehne and R. Pfeilschifter (eds), Herrschaft ohne Integration: Rom und Italien in republikanischer Zeit, Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Antike, 23–37. Mouritsen, H. (2007), ‘The civitas sine suffragio: ancient concepts and modern ideology’, Historia 56: 141–58.

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Part II Towards A National History: Greek & Western Perspectives

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4 European historiographical influences upon the young Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos Ioannis Koubourlis All national historiographies comprise texts that constitute turning points in their respective courses towards formation. In general, the main aim of the authors of such texts is to note the advances towards the writing of an all-encompassing history of the relevant national past; but, equally importantly, it is to point out persisting lacunae in such a history. These lacunae may concern certain ‘missing links’ in a given national narrative; and this is precisely the case of Greek national historiography before 1853, which had not as yet fully integrated Byzantium or the ancient Macedonians into the Greek national past. But these lacunae may also concern the very formation of the relevant national conception of history. For in order to reach maturity a national historiography must be based on a particular philosophy of history that establishes the ‘nation’ as the prime agent of historical action within a linear and, most importantly, homogenous historical time.1 For French national historiography, for example, one such text is the Letters on the History of France by Augustin Thierry (1795–1856), published in 1827. The subtitle of the work is revealing of the author’s programmatic concerns: To Serve as an Introduction to the Study of this History. A comparable text for the Greek case is the article ‘Introduction to the History of the Regeneration of the Greek People’ by Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos (1815–1891), more commonly known as the ‘1846 lecture’. This was the title that K.Th. Dimaras (1986, 143–5) gave it because it was based on Paparrigopoulos’s courses of that year at the Athens High School (Gymnasium). The text was published in three different versions – the first and the last in French – and provides useful information regarding not only Paparrigopoulos’s intellectual biography, but also the development of his ideas on the formation of a national conception of Greek history (Paparrigopoulos 1846a; 1850; 1855). For instance, one might have considered the second version of this article as the Greek translation of the first, were it not for a number of small, but quite significant, 1

  See, among others, Anderson 1991, 24; Bhabha 1990; Lekas 2001.

From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. 53

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changes. The most important of these is that the Greek version includes a definition of the concept of ‘nation’ absent from the French version: ‘Nations […] [are] moral beings which form gradually, and develop over time needs, interests, emotions, habits, and ideas’ (Paparrigopoulos 1850, 203). In my opinion, this addition attests to Paparrigopoulos’s gradual advance towards a better command of the theoretical principles of German historicism.2 Indeed his whole intellectual journey can be represented as a course towards full adherence to these principles. Paparrigopoulos before 1846 By 1846, Paparrigopoulos had already published three books. The first, On the Settlement of Certain Slavic Tribes in the Peloponnese (1843) was an essay about the Slavic presence in Greece during the Middle Ages, but essentially a critique of the ideas of Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer (1790–1861).3 In fact, this work is very enlightening as to the differences between the young and the mature Paparrigopoulos – the author of the five-volume History of the Hellenic Nation (1860–1874) which was to establish the ancient Macedonians and the Byzantines as important elements of the Greek national past.4 Influenced to a large extent by the ‘marvellous writings’ of Gibbon (Paparrigopoulos 1843, 8), Paparrigopoulos’s first essay was marked by a particularly pronounced negative attitude towards the Byzantine state. The author could not understand ‘how it could have survived for so long’ and described the Byzantine period in general as the ‘darkest and most ignorant era’ (Paparrigopoulos 1843, 30, 80). Paparrigopoulos’s second book, The Last Year of Hellenic Freedom (1844), was an attempt to prove that the destruction of Corinth by the Romans took place in 145, and not in 146 BCE. As we know, his assumptions never convinced the historical community. That notwithstanding, this work is equally revealing of the contrast between the young essayist and the future national historiographer: in this text, Paparrigopoulos (1844, 8–11) spoke of the ancient Macedonians, in a similar vein to the Romans, as a foreign power against which the Greeks failed to unite so as to avoid being conquered. The year 1845 was a turning point in Paparrigopoulos’s perception of Greek history. In his Textbook of General History, which was based on Lévi Alvarès’s New Elements of General History,5 Paparrigopoulos (1845, ix–x) spoke openly of his ambition to write the complete history of the Greek nation from ancient times to the present. He also complained about the fact that the modern Greeks tended to refer only to their ‘grandfathers’, the ancient Greeks, while neglecting 2

  For a general discussion of these principles, see Iggers 1973; 1983, 29–89.   On the reaction of Greek intellectuals against Fallmerayer’s theory of the ‘slavicization’ of the Greek people, see Veloudis 1970. 4   See Kitromilides 1998; Kitromilides and Sklavenitis 2004, 1.37–101 and 1.149–69. 5   David Lévi Alvarès (1794–1870) was an important French pedagogue of the nineteenth century. He published several textbooks for the use of primary and secondary schools, which went through numerous editions. 3



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their ‘fathers’, the medieval Greeks, who managed to ‘expel the Romans from the throne of Constantinople’, becoming the sovereigns of a new, ‘Byzantine’ empire (Paparrigopoulos 1845, x and 520). Still, he did not explicitly identify the ‘medieval Greeks’ with the ‘Byzantines’ because, as he was to write some months later, the history of the decadent Byzantine empire could not simply be considered coterminous with the medieval history of the Greek people (Paparrigopoulos 1846b, 17–18). The ‘1846 lecture’ The ‘1846 lecture’ was above all an account of what had already been accomplished and what still needed to be done with regard to the writing of a full Greek national history. Paparrigopoulos had realized that any attempt to compose a complete history of the Greek nation had to address convincingly two different, though interconnected, problems: the documentation of the precise events of this history and their interpretation from a philosophical point of view, so as to produce a largescale explanatory scheme that could put in perspective the general course of events and reveal their inner meaning. Paparrigopoulos was convinced, however, that it would be difficult to solve both problems simultaneously. He therefore concluded that Greek historians had to address the former problem as the more important and urgent. In his opinion, Greece needed her national historiographer more than she needed a philosopher of history (Paparrigopoulos 1846a, no 71, 3). According to Paparrigopoulos, to achieve the task of writing a full Greek national history, Greek historians had to make use of every source or argument at their disposal. The problem was that the great majority of works on Greek national history consisted of secondary contributions – in most cases by Philhellenes like Pouqueville, Villemain, and Maurer. Paparrigopoulos acknowledged, however, that he and his fellow Greek historians did not lack a starting point: they had the works of three European authors who had already made considerable advances towards the writing of a general history of Greece: James Emerson, Johann Wilhelm Zinkeisen, and George Finlay. These three had published histories of Greece that, despite the common practice up to that time amongst ‘Hellenists’, were not limited either to antiquity or to the uprising of 1821. All three would become the object of Paparrigopoulos’s critique on the grounds that none of them had been able convincingly to combine the philosopher’s larger view with the work of the historian proper. Emerson, Zinkeisen, Finlay James Emerson (1804–1869) was the first to publish a History of Modern Greece, from its Conquest by the Romans B.C. 146 to the Present Time, in 1830. This was essentially a history of Greece’s regeneration. Indeed, Emerson described his task as follows:

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I have […] pointed out those causes, which, even in the depths of [the] slavery [of Greece], tended to preserve her people distinct from their conquerors, – her language, her religion, her church, her merchants, her independent warriors, and her diplomatic aristocracy (Emerson 1830, 2.281).

However, Emerson’s focus was primarily on the more richly documented centuries. As a result, according to Paparrigopoulos (1846a, no 71, 2; cf. Zinkeisen 1832, xv), his History was useful only for the period after the thirteenth century. Indeed, as the previous quotation shows, Emerson’s emphasis was on the Ottoman period. And, of course, those ‘independent warriors’ were the klefts, and that ‘diplomatic aristocracy’ the Phanariots. But what was now truly essential for the formation of an all-encompassing Greek national history was the earlier centuries. So, from this point of view, Emerson did not fulfil one of the most challenging demands upon such a history: what was the factor that brought about the so-called Hellenization of the Eastern Roman Empire? Paparrigopoulos (1846a, no 71, 2) stated that, if Emerson had been the first to publish a large-scale History of Greece, Zinkeisen (1803–1863) had nonetheless been ‘the best’ historian of Greece to date. And this was so because, in his History of Greece (1832), Zinkeisen had proved his deep knowledge of the relevant historical sources. Zinkeisen was also, as Finlay (1844, 33) put it, ‘the first who conceived the [very] idea of writing a complete history of Greece’, although he never managed to finish his work.6 Yet he too failed to give a satisfactory answer to the most crucial questions faced by any aspiring author of a truly national history of the Greeks, especially, as Paparrigopoulos (1846a, no 71, 2–3) noted, on the topic of the Hellenization of the Eastern empire and the role of the schism between the Catholic and the Orthodox churches in the formation of the modern Greeks’ national identity. Ironically, whatever Paparrigopoulos’s opinion might have been, Zinkeisen’s greatest advantage was not, strictly speaking, historiographical but philosophical.7 His idealistic historicism had led him to insist repeatedly that the only way to understand Greek history was by representing it as a structured whole whose parts could not be detached one from another without losing the overall meaning. Consequently, Zinkeisen claimed of all earlier historians of Greece: instead of joining [Byzantine history] with the history of Ancient Greece, [they] rather searched for the most striking contrasts between the two; they thereby lost, quite inevitably, the opportunity for an appreciation of the Byzantine imperial era in purely historical terms (Zinkeisen 1832, 7).

What constituted Greek history as a whole, according to Zinkeisen, was the Hegelian Geist (spirit or genius) of the Greek people: 6   Zinkeisen never published the second volume of his History, while its third and fourth volumes are a translation of Thomas Gordon’s History of the Greek Revolution. 7   It is interesting to note that the other most important Greek national historian, Spyridon Zambelios (1815–1881), drew attention to this particular fact: ‘Zinkeisen [was] more a philosopher than a medievalist’ (Zambelios 1852, 27).



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It is not enough to focus our attention […] solely on the official expression of the activities of the people; what we need rather to comprehend is the spirit which created the form that survived, and illustrated its power (Zinkeisen 1832, 12).

Zinkeisen defined Geist as the power by which a people emerges by itself as a distinct entity and […] develops to a higher degree its inherent qualities which in turn enable it to sustain its uniqueness […]; [this power is] the natural consequence of the descent and original destiny [of the people] but […], with the passing of time, brings about changes which may be regarded as active causes of the characteristic modifications of the spirit of the times (ibid.).

These principles, together with his meticulousness in the study of historical sources, explain why Zinkeisen was destined to become the most cherished point of reference for Greek national historians, even after the turn of the twentieth century. However, perhaps because of his strict adherence to the evidence of historical sources, Zinkeisen essentially remained, like Emerson, a historian of Greece, and not of the Greek nation. Both writers, for instance, had devoted many pages to historical events (such as the conflict between Venetians and Ottomans for control of ‘Greek territories’ or the Norman raids on Greece) that did not directly involve or refer to the local population. Yet, quite understandably, such topics now represented for Greek national historians only secondary details. In order to bring to the fore the primary historical actor – the Greek nation itself – Greek national historians had frequently to skim over details, even to ignore certain historical facts, and ‘possibly resort to conjecture and speculation’, as Zambelios (1852, 209) was to put it in the famous Introduction to his Folk Songs of Greece. However uncongenial this may have been to the young Paparrigopoulos, it was nonetheless instrumentally necessary: before trying to compose a complete history of the Greek nation, someone had to provide the general explanatory scheme in which the real historical facts could later fit. In 1846, however, Paparrigopoulos was not fully aware of this necessity. In his eyes, Greek national history represented something of a jigsaw puzzle: he had the general image in mind, or rather this image seemed to him already given; and thus his job was to put down the pieces, decide what to do with the missing parts, and think of the exact connections between them. Zambelios, on the other hand, as a less inhibited philosopher of history, would later realize that Greek national historians had to proceed in a rather different way: they had to start from the connections and, when needed, change the general image. In fact, this change of perspective would be Zambelios’s distinct contribution to the writing of an all-encompassing Greek national history (as is argued in detail in Koubourlis 2005). In 1846, however, the author who seemed to give the best answers to the problem of writing Greek national history was George Finlay (1799–1875), whose Greece under the Romans had been published in 1844. Perhaps what had permitted him to do so was the fact that ‘he had lived among the Greeks for a

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long time’ (Paparrigopoulos 1846a, no 71, 3). But, as was mentioned above, what held primary importance for the young Paparrigopoulos was the verification of facts. So he compared Finlay to a traveller who attempts to gain the view of a place by climbing the highest mountain, thereby losing the view of the mountain foot (ibid.). It is not, therefore, coincidental that Paparrigopoulos was unable fully to utilize Finlay’s contribution. This was later to be accomplished by Zambelios, who emphasized what Finlay had insisted upon, that is the ability of the Greeks to ‘absorb’ their conquerors and incorporate them into their national body: The moral and social causes which enabled the Greeks […] to absorb [the Macedonian race] as a component element of their own nation, were the same which afterwards enabled them to destroy the Roman influence in the East. […] A combination of causes […] enabled [the Greeks] to preserve their national institutions, […] even after the annihilation of their political existence. […] [These] institutions ultimately modified the Roman administration itself, and long before the Roman empire ceased to exist, its political authority in the East was guided by the feelings of the Greeks (Finlay 1844, 5 and 26–7).

There was one more perspective that Finlay cultivated more than any other Western historian of Greece. It was he alone who explicitly referred, in the subtitle of his book, not to a ‘history of Greece’, as Emerson and Zinkeisen had done, but to a history of the ‘Greek nation’. Finlay (1844, xi–xii) actually believed that it was this point that distinguished his own work from that of all those, and particularly Gibbon, who were essentially not ‘historians of the Greek people’, but ‘historians of the Roman empire’ and who thus inevitably tended to consider the very same historical facts ‘under [a] very different aspect’. Finlay’s book, on the contrary, which dealt with ‘the condition of the Greek nation until the extinction of the Roman empire in the East in 717 A.D.’, that is until ‘the Roman empire gradually changed into the Greek, or Byzantine’ one (Finlay 1844, 440), laid special emphasis on the ‘national existence’ and the ‘national institutions’ of the Greek people after the Roman conquest: [The Greeks] have maintained possession of their country, their language, and their social organization […] [T]he preservation of their national existence is to be partly attributed to the institutions which they have received from their ancestors. […] [T]his nationality was again called into activity when the Roman government [of the East], from increasing weakness, gradually began to neglect the duties of administration (Finlay 1844, x–xi).

Furthermore, in keeping with the Göttingen historical school (of which Zinkeisen was also a disciple), Finlay insisted on the historical importance of the ‘national character’ of the Greeks. The roots of this ‘character’ went back, he believed, to the ‘social and political organization’ of their ancestors. And taking this a further step forward, Finlay estimated that the advantages of the social organization of the ancient Greeks had enabled Alexander the Great to introduce ‘Greek civilization as an important element in his civil government’, ‘thus facilitating the infusion of



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some portion of the Hellenic character into the hearts of his conquered subjects’ (Finlay 1844, 3–4).8 The common problem, however, of all the ‘foreign’ historians of Greece – at which Paparrigopoulos only hinted, but which Zambelios (1852, 468) would later clearly state – was the fact that they had not written ‘from a [genuinely] Greek point of view’. In the eyes of both Greek historians, even Finlay, the most ‘Greek’ of all ‘foreign’ historians, was trying to be objective in the wrong way, with many arrière-pensées. Take, for instance, Finlay’s view of Byzantium: Gibbon remarks, ‘that Tiberius, by the Arabs, and Maurice, by the Italians, are distinguished as the first of the Greek Caesars, as the founders of a new […] empire’. But if manners, language, and religion are to decide concerning the commencement of the Byzantine empire, […] its origin must be carried back to an earlier period; while, if the peculiarities of the form of government be taken as the ground of decision, the Roman empire may be considered as indefinitely prolonged with the existence of the title of Roman emperor, which the sovereign of Constantinople continued to retain. […] Yet, as [the empire of Constantinople] was by no means identified with the native inhabitants of Hellas, but existed among the Greeks of Constantinople and Asia, it ought correctly to be termed Byzantine (Finlay 1844, 440–2).

As mentioned above, at that period Paparrigopoulos also had many arrière-pensées regarding the Byzantine empire, but the issue in this case was who exactly happened to lay particular emphasis on the matter: a ‘Greek’ or a ‘foreigner’? Accordingly, Paparrigopoulos criticized Finlay for being primarily interested not in ‘Greek history’ per se, but in ‘the history of the Byzantine empire’ (Paparrigopoulos 1846a, no 71, 3) – a stricture that would be difficult to understand outside its particular intellectual context. From precocious essayist to national historiographer The context of the ‘1846 Lecture’ can help us to understand the problems regarding the writing of an all-encompassing Greek national history that Paparrigopoulos would not overcome until at least 1853, the year of the publication of his first, onevolume, History of the Hellenic Nation. For in his earlier works, Paparrigopoulos had essentially distinguished between the history of the Byzantine state and the history of medieval Greece; he had then considered ancient Macedonians as a more or less distinct nation – because as he wrote in his Textbook of General History in 1849, ‘the Macedonian nation accomplished, in the general history [of civilization], a different mission from that of the Hellenic nation’ (Paparrigopoulos 1849–53, 1.193); and, inevitably, he had tended to focus on the history of the ancient and modern Greeks. So, a somewhat ‘teleological’, yet quite understandable, question here would be: what was still needed for the formation of the general explanatory scheme that holds together the edifice of Paparrigopoulos’s all-encompassing five-volume History of 8   Such a view could not be further from that of George Grote: see chapter 5 by Margarita Miliori in the present volume.

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the Hellenic Nation? In my opinion, the answer is: two main sources of inspiration, Droysen and Zambelios, as well as a more refined understanding and use of the theoretical principles of German historicism by Paparrigopoulos himself. Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–1884), to whom Paparrigopoulos (1849–53, 1.206) referred for the first time in his Textbook of 1849, but without being able to take advantage of the contribution of the great German historicist, offered him weighty arguments regarding the Greek identity of the ancient Macedonians and the spread of Hellenic civilization eastwards. He also offered him one of the key concepts of the newly born Greek national historical school: the concept of ‘Hellenism’. Although Droysen himself restricted its use to the Hellenistic world, he and his disciples, such as Otto Abel (1824–1854), understood ‘Hellenism’ in the sense of a ‘Hellenic genius’, which had a historical trajectory of its own. In fact, what Paparrigopoulos and other Greek national historians such as Zambelios had to do after having read Droysen was to generalize the use of the concept so as to apply it to the whole of Greek history and, at another level, to identify it with the concept of ‘Greek nation’. The final result of this double intellectual process was the production of a series of terms and concepts well known to all contemporary Hellenists: ‘Ancient Hellenism’, ‘Macedonian Hellenism’, ‘Byzantine Hellenism’, ‘Modern Hellenism’, and so forth.9 Zambelios, on the other hand, with his Folk Songs of Greece, inserted the ideas of the German historicists into a general explanatory scheme for the entire Greek national history. It was a scheme that provided, among other things, the most convincing theory so far to account for the Hellenization of the Eastern empire. Zambelios understood that the most important issue was to explain the ‘passages’ from antiquity to the Middle Ages, and from the fall of Constantinople to the national uprising of 1821. This is why he believed that Greek historians had to focus on the Middle Ages; to his mind, Byzantium was the ‘missing link’ in the continuous chain of Greek national history. Zambelios also tried to read and interpret Greek history backwards, starting from 1821. For him, each historical event was the key to explain all earlier events, and of course 1821 was the masterkey to everything. In other words, he understood the whole of Greek history as the inevitable course towards the national uprising of 1821 and the formation of a Greek national state. Such a change of perspective had a major impact on the way that Greek historians would in future understand Greek national history. Hitherto, this history had been represented as a series of national disasters and conquests – most importantly, by the Romans, Franks, and Ottomans – which were finally ended by ‘the glorious War of Independence’. This was the view on Greek history of Adamantios Korais (1748– 9   For the uses of the concept of ‘Hellenism’ in the works of Droysen, Abel, and Paparrigopoulos, see Momigliano 1970; Sigalas 2000; Koubourlis 2005, 97–100. It is interesting to note that, before Droysen and Abel, Zinkeisen had used the concept of ‘Hellenism’ in a variety of contexts (for example, ‘late Hellenism’, ‘religious Hellenism’, ‘Byzantine Hellenism’, etc.), but without assigning it special emphasis; see Zinkeisen 1832, 598, 624, 777, and passim.



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1833); it was also the view of the young Paparrigopoulos. But due to Zambelios’s new perspective, these disasters were now taken to represent the necessary steps towards the formation of the national identity and national state of the modern Greeks. Of course, this explanatory scheme was based on Zambelios’s ideas about the role of Providence in the history of the Greek nation; for him, this nation was a martyr – the ‘chosen people’ – in the service of God. In a book review written immediately after the publication of Zambelios’s Folk Songs of Greece, Paparrigopoulos confessed that his colleague ‘understood what very few had understood’ (1852, 402). But although Paparrigopoulos admitted that Zambelios had made more advances than anyone else towards the formation of a national conception of Greek history, he had two criticisms: that Zambelios had overemphasized the role of religion in the history of the modern Greek nation, and that, even though he revealed historical details about the Hellenization of the Byzantine empire, Zambelios persisted in viewing the Byzantine monarchy as an initially ‘foreign (Roman) element’ which had remained for too long hostile to the ‘Greek national element’, that is the Byzantine people and the Orthodox Church. The conclusion is that, just a few days after reading Zambelios, Paparrigopoulos was ready to go further in his conception of Greek national history: further than Zambelios, further even than himself, if we take into consideration what he was very shortly to publish, that is his first, one-volume, History of the Hellenic Nation, a text that does not really emphasize the Hellenization of the Byzantine empire. Besides, as he stated in the same book review, writing the history of the Greek nation could never be done by just one person, but needed a whole generation of Greek historians (Paparrigopoulos 1852, 401–2). Influenced therefore by Droysen and Zambelios, Paparrigopoulos started from the mid-1850s to think of Greek history not merely as a complex of facts, as he had done early in his life, but as the history of a Geist: ‘Hellenism’. In his fivevolume History of the Hellenic Nation, Paparrigopoulos was to present this Geist transforming itself into something else, every time that it moves to a different geographical terrain or historical era, and this in order to accomplish each time a different historical mission, without, nevertheless, losing its one and only identity. In fact, this particular conception of history, with all its idealistic anthropomorphism, constitutes the theoretical basis of Paparrigopoulos’s final argument in support of the Greek identity of the ancient Macedonians and the national role of the Byzantine monarchy: That [Macedonian Hellenism] is not Ancient Hellenism, we have [already] conceded; that it is not Hellenic at all, we deny with all our powers […] What really is a pure Hellenism […]? Nations can accomplish different missions at different periods and try to achieve different ends by different means […] So when we see the same language and the same […] quality of moral and spiritual force, it is not permissible to doubt the existence and the action of the same nationality, even if its action has been modified by time and circumstances (Paparrigopoulos 1860–74, 2.175).

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In reality, Paparrigopoulos was to conclude this intellectual journey much later, at the very end of his career. His last great work, the famous Conclusion or Epilogue to the History of the Hellenic Nation of 1877 – also published in French under the misleading title Histoire de la civilisation hellénique – was something more than an abridged version of his five-volume History. It was a history of ‘Hellenism’, that is of the Hellenic Geist, extracted from a multitude of historical data, the very same data that Paparrigopoulos had spent all his life seeking.

References Abel, O. (1847), Makedonien vor König Philipp, Leipzig: Weidmann. Anderson, B. (1991 [11983]), Imagined communities. Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, 2nd rev. ed., London: Verso. Bhabha, H.K. (ed.) (1990), Nation and narration, London: Routledge. Dimaras, K.Th. (1986), Κωνσταντίνος Παπαρρηγόπουλος. Η εποχή του – Η ζωή του – Το έργο του, Athens: MIET [Cultural Foundation of the National Bank]. Droysen, J.G. (1833), Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen, Hamburg: Perthes. Droysen, J.G. (1836-43), Geschichte des Hellenismus (2 vols), Hamburg: Perthes. Emerson, J. (1830), The history of Modern Greece, from its conquest by the Romans B.C. 146, to the present time (2 vols), London: Colburn and Bentley. Finlay, G. (1844), Greece under the Romans: A historical view of the condition of the Greek nation, from the time of its conquest by the Romans until the extinction of the Roman empire in the East, B.C. 146–717 A.D., Edinburgh: Blackwood. Gordon, T. (1832), History of the Greek Revolution (2 vols), Edinburgh: Blackwood. Iggers, G.G. (1973), ‘Historicism’, in P.P. Wiener (ed.), Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas (2 vols), New York: Scribner’s, 2.456–64. Iggers, G.G. (1983), The German conception of history: the national tradition of historical thought from Herder to the present, 2nd rev. ed., Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Kitromilides, P.M. (1998), ‘On the intellectual content of Greek nationalism: Paparrigopoulos, Byzantium and the Great Idea’, in D. Ricks and P. Magdalino (eds), Byzantium and the Modern Greek Identity, Aldershot: Ashgate, 25–33. Kitromilides, P.M. and Sklavenitis T.E. (eds) (2004), IV international congress of history: historiography of modern and contemporary Greece 1833–2002. Proceedings (2 vols), Athens: Institute for Neohellenic Research (INR/NHRF). Koubourlis, I. (2005), La Formation de l’histoire nationale grecque. L’Apport de Spyridon Zambélios (1815–1881), Athens: Institut de Recherches Néohelléniques, Fondation Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique [Institute for Neohellenic Research (INR/ NHRF)]. Lekas, P.E. (2001), Το παιχνίδι με τον χρόνο. Εθνικισμός και νεοτερικότητα, Athens: Ellinika Grammata. Lévi Alvarès, D. (1842 [11829]), Nouveaux éléments d’histoire générale, 20th ed., Paris: privately printed.



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Momigliano, A. (1970), ‘J. G. Droysen between Greeks and Jews’, History and Theory 9: 139–53. Paparrigopoulos, K. (1843), Περί της εποικίσεως σλαβικών τινων φυλών εις την Πελοπόννησον, Athens: Antoniadis. Paparrigopoulos, K. (1844), Το τελευταίον έτος της ελληνικής ελευθερίας, Athens: Antoniadis. Paparrigopoulos, K. (1845), Στοιχεία της Γενικής Ιστορίας κατά το σύστημα του Γάλλου Λευΐ, Athens: Koromilas. Paparrigopoulos, K. (1846a), ‘Histoire de la régénération du peuple grec. Introduction’, Le Moniteur grec 3/70: 1–4; 3/71: 1–3. Paparrigopoulos, K. (1846b), Ολίγα αντί πολλών προς τον Γ. Γ. Παπαδόπουλον, Athens: Koromilas. Paparrigopoulos, K. (1849–53), Εγχειρίδιον της Γενικής Ιστορίας, 2 vols, Athens: Koromilas. Paparrigopoulos, K. (1850), ‘Εισαγωγή εις την ιστορίαν της αναγεννήσεως του ελληνικού έθνους’, Pandora 1/9: 199–203; 1/10: 230–3. [Paparrigopoulos, K.] (1852), ‘Βιβλιογραφία. Άσματα δημοτικά της Ελλάδος, εκδοθέντα μετά Μελέτης ιστορικής περί Μεσαιωνικού Ελληνισμού, υπό Σπυρίδωνος Ζαμπελίου…’, Pandora 3/65: 397–403. Paparrigopoulos, K. (1853), Ιστορία του ελληνικού έθνους από των αρχαιοτάτων χρόνων μέχρι της σήμερον, προς διδασκαλίαν των παίδων, Athens: Koromilas. Paparrigopoulos, K. (1855), ‘L’Opinion grecque sur le système de Fallmerayer’, Spectateur d’Orient 3/32: 252–64. Paparrigopoulos, K. (1860–74), Ιστορία του ελληνικού έθνους, από των αρχαιοτάτων χρόνων μέχρι των νεωτέρων, χάριν των πολλών εξεργασθείσα (5 vols), Athens: various publishers. Paparrigopoulos, K. (1877), Επίλογος της Ιστορίας του Ελληνικού Έθνους: μετά πίνακος

αλφαβητικού των κυρίων ονομάτων των περιεχομένων εις τους πέντε τόμους της ιστορίας ταύτης, Athens: Vlastos.

Paparrigopoulos, K. (1878), Histoire de la civilisation hellénique (depuis ses origines jusqu’à nos jours), Paris: Hachette. Sigalas, N. (2000), ‘Hellénistes, hellénisme et idéologie nationale. De la formation du concept d’“hellénisme” en grec moderne’, in Ch. Avlami (ed.), L’Antiquité grecque au XIXème siècle. Un exemplum contesté ?, Paris: L’Harmattan, 239–91. Thierry, A. (1827), Lettres sur l’histoire de France, pour servir d’introduction à l’étude de cette histoire, Paris: Sautelet. Veloudis, G. (1970), ‘Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer und die Entstehung des neugriechischen Historismus’, Südostforschungen 29: 43–90. Zambelios, S. (1852), Άσματα δημοτικά της Ελλάδος. Εκδοθέντα μετά μελέτης ιστορικής περί μεσαιωνικού ελληνισμού, Corfu: Ermis. Zinkeisen, J.W. (1832), Geschichte Griechenlands vom Anfange geschichtlicher Kunde bis auf unsere Tage. Erster Theil: Das Alterthum und die mittleren Zeiten bis zu dem Heerzuge König Rogers von Sicilien nach Griechenland, Leipzig: Barth. Zinkeisen, J.W. (1840), Geschichte der griechischen Revolution, nach dem Englischen des Thomas Gordon bearbeitet und von der Ankunft des Präsidenten I.A. Kapodistrias bis zur Thronbesteigung des Königs Otto im Jahre 1835 (2 vols), Leipzig: Barth.

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5 Europe, the classical polis, and the Greek nation: Philhellenism and Hellenism in nineteenthcentury Britain Margarita Miliori In dealing with the history of Philhellenism as an ideological and intellectual current that did not exhaust its momentum during the Greek War of Independence, but survived and evolved, in a variety of ways, in the wider context of the European history of ideas, it is important to keep in mind that Philhellenism represented from the start (that is, from the 1820s) both a ‘national cause’ applied to a European end and a ‘European cause’ applied to a Greek national end. This initial oscillation of Philhellenic ideology between national specificity and European comprehensiveness appears to be a resilient, fundamental characteristic of Philhellenic discourse throughout the nineteenth century, cutting through its various scholarly and political manifestations in later times. In this chapter I shall attempt a reading of the interrelated histories of Hellenism and Philhellenism in nineteenth-century Britain that will take seriously into account this oscillation of British perceptions of Greece between ‘Europe’ and ‘the nation’. I will start with a few remarks on the 1820s and then concentrate on longterm developments up to the turn of the century. By the third decade of the nineteenth century, it has been argued, ancient Greece had already established its artistic and literary pre-eminence over Rome within Western European perceptions of classical antiquity.1 Consequently, its symbolic appeal as the common origin of European civilization was both widespread and strong. Yet, under the impact of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, a fundamental restructuring of the relationship between European modernity and the classical past had also been set in motion. In effect, at the very moment that Hellenism for the first time acquired a concrete modern political significance, through the Philhellenic movement, the relevance of ancient politics to modern European experience was vigorously challenged, not only in Britain, but also in 1   On Hellenism and European identity during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Iakovaki 2006.

From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. 65

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France, where liberal intellectuals were struggling to come to terms with recent revolutionary legacies.2 In Britain, it was an accident of history that brought the Philhellenic movement and scholarly Hellenism together. In the 1820s, British nationalist rhetoric against the ‘democratic imperialism’ of Napoleonic France still weighed heavily upon British perceptions of Greek antiquity. It is characteristic in this respect that in the Philhellenic literature of this period ancient Greek democracy still appears in dark hues, rehearsing, in the main, William Mitford’s History of Greece, a work published during the Napoleonic Wars with an overt polemical purpose.3 The demand for a revision of classical historiography along more liberal and, for that matter, more scholarly lines was also voiced, during the same decade, in liberal intellectual circles. Yet no reference was made, in this scholarly context, to the contemporary national struggle of the Greeks. For, at this stage, the liberal appeal for a more comprehensive historical approach to the exceptional intellectual and artistic achievement of ancient Greece was closely linked with the establishment of a distinct conceptual barrier between ancient and modern national politics. Two path-breaking critical essays on Mitford were published in the British periodical press at the height of the Philhellenic movement, in 1824 and 1826 respectively (Macaulay 1898a; Grote 1826). Neither contained even a passing reference to revolutionary Greece, although both Grote and Macaulay belonged to Philhellenic political circles. Macaulay, in particular, both in his article of 1824 and in later writings, emphatically argued that modern political allusions to ancient Greek virtue were misleading (cf. Macaulay 1898b, 189). Thus, although Hellenism played a very important role in the overall ideological framework that sustained Philhellenic activism, mainly by introducing the Greeks, as it were, a priori, into the European ‘family of nations’, it had distinct limitations as a means of determining the most crucial dimension of Greek nationality in British eyes: the political and moral status of modern Greek nationhood.4 During the 1820s, liberal Philhellenism approached such issues almost exclusively on the basis of modern political considerations (see, further, Rosen 1992). Even the tentative analogy, drawn by a number of British Philhellenes, between the ancient Greek city-republics and the ostensibly ‘local’ character of modern Greek patriotism, as exhibited during the War of Independence, should be primarily understood, in this chronological context, as a by-product of a ‘modern’ Philhellenic debate concerning the political prospects for the Greeks: ‘local patriotism’ could be interpreted either as an ‘insufficient’ or as an ‘immature’ version of Greek political virtue; in the 2

  On Britain, see Turner 1981. On France, Vidal-Naquet 1990; Hartog 1991.   Mitford 1784–1818. For Philhellenic rehearsals of Mitford’s arguments see Napier 1821, 5–6; Sheridan 1822, 101, note 31; Gordon 1832, 1.2. 4   ‘Political morality’ and ‘national morality’ should be considered more or less synonymous notions in the British context, both in the 1820s and in later times. The abiding centrality of the political within British conceptualizations of the nation is too large an issue to be discussed here. Yet it remains a fundamental conceptual parameter that in many ways underlies the ‘particularity’ of British Philhellenism in relation to other ‘national’ versions of the phenomenon. 3



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second case, it could be seen as the authentic basis upon which Greek national patriotism, in the modern, canonical sense of the word, would in time evolve.5 The subsequent evolution of the relationship between Philhellenism and British liberalism also needs to be placed against a wider European background. At first sight, Philhellenism appears to lose its central relevance to British liberalism between the 1830s and the 1850s, and then, from the late 1850s onwards, gradually to acquire an enhanced, paradigmatic significance within a more clearly delineated ‘Ottoman’ or ‘Balkan’ European region. These developments, however, do not correspond to any fundamental changes during these decades as regards British perceptions of the modern Greek national character. It would be even less plausible to attribute them to a diminution of the appeal of ancient Greece as a mirror-image of European modernity in liberal eyes; for as we shall see, liberal Hellenism reached its apex in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Ultimately, then, both the qualitative changes that took place over the long term in British Hellenism and British Philhellenism, and in the relationship between them, as well as the eventual liberal relocation of modern Greek ‘nationality’ to a more restricted regional context, should be understood as interrelated facets of a wider mid-nineteenth-century liberal rearrangement of the notional map of Europe, propelled primarily by liberal ‘Russophobia’ on the one hand, and by ideological allegiance towards a host of Continental liberal-nationalist movements on the other. Keeping in mind this wider ideological background, we may now concentrate on our specific topic and inquire, first, what kinds of relationship among ‘Ancient Greece’, ‘Modern Europe’, and ‘the nation’ were postulated by mid-nineteenthcentury British Hellenism? Secondly, in what particular ways did this historically specific version of Hellenism influence the evolution of British Philhellenic discourse? In Connop Thirlwall’s History of Greece (1835–44), and even more in George Grote’s monumental work, which was published a decade later and quickly acquired canonical status,6 we may identify a number of significant historiographical rearrangements that determined the character of British Hellenism in the midnineteenth century and beyond. Thirlwall organized his History according to a cyclical schema of national rise and fall, based upon a theory that maintained that all nations passed through a series of analogous developmental stages.7 This national schema allowed him to rearrange the various historical and symbolic loci of Greek antiquity in a hierarchical fashion, pushing the classical period, strictly defined, towards the centre of the ancient Greek historical experience. Indeed, his History went a long way towards the positive reevaluation of ‘liberal’ Athens from the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE, while ‘heroic’ Sparta was accommodated in the background as the representative of an 5   Gordon (1832, 1.313) presents ‘local patriotism’ as a ‘Greek vice’, Finlay (1836, 33–4) as a Greek virtue. 6   References here will be to the edition of 1884, when the complete work was republished in twelve volumes (Grote 1884). 7   This theory had been first introduced into British classical historiography by Thirlwall’s contemporary Thomas Arnold (see Arnold 1847 [1835], 1.503–24; Forbes 1952).

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earlier, ‘frozen’ stage of Greek national development (Thirlwall 1835–44, 1.335– 40). Finally, monarchical Macedonia was excluded altogether from the ‘national’ space of Greece: Thirlwall presented the ascendancy of Philip over the classical city-states as a ‘conquest’ of Greece by a foreign power.8 With Grote, this double process by which the ancient Greek historical paradigm becomes both ‘nationalized’ and ‘classicized’ in mid-nineteenth-century Britain reaches its final consequences. Grote imposed a strict starting point upon Greek historiography – the date of the first recorded Olympiad in the eighth century BCE – and emphatically denied that Alexander had ever ‘Hellenized’ Asia (Grote 1884, 1.ix–x). His exclusive identification of ‘Hellenism’ with ‘the aggregate of habits, sentiments, energies and intelligence manifested by the Greeks during their epoch of autonomy’ (Grote 1884, 12.91–2), provided the appropriate ‘national’ background against which Grote erected the modern, liberal paradigm of Periclean Athens as an ideal commonwealth, embodying in its collective life the highest degree of public virtue (both civic and martial), while cultivating amongst its citizens an unprecedented excellence in the individualized spheres of commerce and culture. The construction of Grote’s ideal rested upon important interpretative innovations concerning the internal evolution of the Athenian polity,9 combined with a radical revision of the role that Athens had played in the overall development of Greek history. Crucially, Grote exculpated Athens from the traditional charge that it had brought upon Greece the Peloponnesian Wars, the event that precipitated the ‘fall’ of the Ancient Greek ‘nation’ (Grote 1884, 5.122–58 and 357). On the whole, by presenting Athens not only as the embodiment of cultural ‘Hellenism’ at its peak, but also as the champion of wider ‘Pan-Hellenic’ interests, Grote enhanced his ideal with further ‘patriotic’ connotations, which, on the symbolic level at least, could surpass the limitations of the polis, and become relevant to modern national politics. Thus the ancient Greek historical paradigm, in its mid-nineteenth-century classicized and highly politicized form, encouraged rather than inhibited the figurative interplay between ancient and modern politics. Yet, as we have seen, this was achieved through a concomitant internalization of the fundamental conceptual barrier erected earlier between antiquity and modernity within Greek history itself. The ‘nationalization’ of ancient Greek history imposed a determinate chronological limit as well as an ideological closure upon Greek historical experience. It did not, however, transform classical historiography into a ‘national’ historiography of the ancient Greeks, for it did not, after all, involve the projection of any ostensible national particularity upon the Greeks that would render them fundamentally 8   Note, for example, Thirlwall’s presentation of the revolt of the Spartan Agis against Macedonian power in 330 BCE, as a struggle against foreign dominion (Thirlwall 1835–44, 6.257). 9   See Grote’s defence of ostracism (1884, 3.147; 4.82–9), his rehabilitation of Cleon (6.26; 7.258– 65), and his substitution of Kleisthenes for Solon as the originator of the Athenian political system (4.54–91).



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distinct from other European nations. On the contrary, the more amenable ancient Greek history became to multiple, modern and national, figurative comparisons, the less profitable it became as a historical ground upon which to root modern Greek national specificity. Viewed from the vantage point of Philhellenism, the canonization of such a classicized version of Hellenism was fundamentally inhibiting. In effect, most midnineteenth-century British Philhellenes, in their efforts to investigate the origins of modern Greek nationhood, followed a very different path of historiographical mediation between classical antiquity and modern nationality. This alternative path is best exemplified in George Finlay’s History.10 Finlay has frequently been appreciated, in the past, as a historian of Byzantium. Yet his historical perspective was neither ‘Greek nationalist’ nor ‘medievalist’, but typically Philhellenic, in the early political and moral sense of the term. His main interest lay in the unresolved relationship between ancient and modern Greek virtue, in the interplay of continuity and change within the moral constitution of the Greek national body. Starting from a distinctly Philhellenic premise, namely that the ‘local patriotism’ that the modern Greeks had exhibited during the War of Independence was an authentic fragment of their ‘nationality’ manifesting itself under multiple layers of political and moral corruption, Finlay attempted to follow through the Greek patriotic ideal from the ‘end’ of Greek antiquity to the ‘beginning’ of Greek modernity, using its ‘resilience’ and its ‘distortions’ in between as interpretative tools by which to explore the wider historical contexts of the intervening periods. His ideological perspective was not inimical to Grote’s Hellenism, and his own Greek patriotic ideal was infused with many of the liberal connotations of Grote’s polis. Nevertheless, the successive transplantation of this ideal into conspicuously non-classical environments required conceptual adaptations and ideological diffusions that run contrary to the essentially figurative functions of classicized Hellenism in his times (cf. Potter 2009). A good example in this respect is Finlay’s transplantation of the Greek ideal from the urban setting of the polis to the predominantly rural and dispersed social environment of the Eastern Roman Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries CE (Finlay 1877 [1844], 1.xxi–xxiii). At this point in Finlay’s narrative the democratic legacy of the polis manifests itself as a loose tradition of local self-government and defensive ‘patriotism’ – a highly arbitrary definition of Greek virtue in classicist– Hellenist terms. Yet in Finlay’s context, this conceptual adaptation was crucial for rendering the survival of the Eastern Roman Empire, at the time of the barbarian incursions, as a Greek ‘national achievement’. By the same token, the resilience and vitality of the Eastern part of the ancient world, as opposed to the Western part, were identified with the resilience and vitality of the Greek political tradition. 10   Finlay’s History was initially published in seven volumes between 1844 and 1861. The posthumous edition of 1877, cited here, included some previously unpublished chapters on the period 1844–64.

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To cut a long story short, Finlay’s perspective produced a historical narrative that may be read as an exploration of the contrasting impact upon modern Greek national consciousness of the imperial and ‘conservative’ legacies of Rome on the one hand, and of the ‘patriotic’ and ‘progressive’ legacies of Greece on the other. Linguistic or ethnological considerations were effectively submerged under this dialectic, while the Orthodox Church retained a pivotal but subordinate role. Finlay treated the Early Church as a ‘Greek’ national institution (1877, 1.119– 38), and acknowledged its crucial role in the transformation of the Eastern Roman Empire into a Greco-Roman one (1877, 1.352–3). Yet later on in his narrative, and especially in his treatment of the period 1204–1453, he interpreted the Orthodox faith of the Byzantine Greeks as a distorted manifestation of their national consciousness, morally binding them to an imperial legacy essentially foreign to their own national traditions. Finlay’s great value for the evolution of nineteenth-century British Philhellenism lay precisely in the fact that his History could be read simultaneously as a ‘national’ extension of ancient Greek historiography and as the ‘history of the Greco-Roman and Christian Empire’ before, during, and after its transformation into Byzantium. Indeed, between the 1850s and the 1870s, this double reading of Finlay’s work, as a national and, simultaneously, as a supra-national history, had been instrumental in the gradual emergence of a new type of Philhellenism, which reaffirmed the European relevance of modern Greek nationality while situating it in a more restricted regional context. A pivotal role in this process of mediation was played by the Philhellene historian E.A. Freeman. Freeman publicly defended the Greeks during the difficult years of the 1850s and 1860s, and also became the main medium through which Finlay’s work reached the British public.11 Yet his untiring popularization of Finlay’s History entailed a subtle reinterpretation of Finlay’s views according to his own historical and theoretical perspective. For Freeman, the imperial legacy of Hellenized and Christianized Rome represented the long-term gravitational pole of European history – a comprehensive civilizational matrix that had historically absorbed the ‘Germans’ in the West and the ‘Slavs’ in the East, gradually creating out of them a host of modern nations.12 Furthermore, Freeman’s conceptualization of nationality was more elaborate than Finlay’s, allowing for a series of linguistic, religious, and ethnological factors to play an autonomous role in the ‘objective’ definition of the modern Greek nation, irrespective of the moral and political continuities and discontinuities between ancient Greek virtue and modern Greek patriotism that Finlay had brought to the fore. From such a point of view, the self-identification of the Byzantine Greeks as ‘Roman’ and ‘Orthodox’ no longer appeared as a distortion of their essential ‘Greekness’, but rather as a historically specific configuration of their national identity. On the whole, Freeman’s creative reading of Finlay’s History 11

  See, indicatively, Freeman 1855; 1856; 1862; 1863b; 1864.   See Freeman 1886, for a relatively concise version of his general theory. On Byzantium and the Slavs, see Freeman 1876. 12



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opened the way for the paradigmatic appropriation of the Greek case within a wider theory concerning the historical emergence of multiple modern ‘nationalities’ in post-Byzantine Eastern Europe (see, further, Miliori 1998, 229–44 and 305–14). At the same time, in his articles on classical historiography, Freeman emphatically renounced the classicist’s closure of ancient Greek history along the lines of Grote (Freeman 1854; 1857). Very much like Finlay, he fully subscribed to the idealization of the Greek political legacy and its patriotic connotations. Yet he strongly objected to what he saw as the extraction of classical Greece from the unbroken continuities of universal history that, in his view, the classicized version of Hellenism implied. His own scholarly contribution to Hellenism, the first volume of his unfinished project on the history of federal government, was an attempt to ‘de-classicize’ the Greek political ideal. The volume was dedicated to the Achaean League, which, according to Freeman, was more relevant to modernity than the classical polis, since it represented a genuine application of the Greek democratic principle beyond the closed boundaries of the Greek city-state (Freeman 1863a, 1.5–6, 236–70). Despite Freeman’s active ideological engagement in favour of the Greeks, the conceptual framework upon which this engagement was based inevitably begs a further, methodological question: are we ultimately entitled to describe his perspective on ancient and modern history, which also eventually led him to acknowledge multiple ‘national causes’ in the Balkans, as distinctly ‘Philhellenic’? Posing this question brings us to the difficult problem of deciding what counts as ‘Philhellenic’ in mid-, and even more in late, nineteenth-century Britain. Should we restrict Philhellenism to an exclusive discourse, centred upon the relationship of the modern ‘Hellenes’ with their classical forefathers, or should we enlarge our definitions so as to accommodate other strands of discourse that encouraged proGreek attitudes, but were either ‘external’ to Hellenism as such, or represented non-canonical, and to a large extent anti-classical, versions of it? I think that the unbroken thread of continuity that exists between early Philhellenism, Finlay’s historiographical approach, and Freeman’s creative reinterpretation of Finlay’s work seriously undermines the hypothesis of a radical break between early and late nineteenth-century British Philhellenism. On the contrary, the study of the gradual conceptual and ideological adaptations that were carried out in the context of Philhellenic historiography suggests that early Philhellenism contributed much more than a ‘rhetoric’ to late nineteenth-century ‘multinational’ Philhellenic visions. Moreover, the inherent incompatibility between the classical-Hellenist and the Philhellenic paths of mediation between Greek antiquity and European modernity renders the relatively anti-classical and religiously inflected version of late nineteenth-century British Philhellenism a much more canonical development than it appears at first sight. Finally, viewed from a comparative European perspective, the eventual opening of British Philhellenic discourse towards the Slav ‘nationalities’ of the Balkans appears to be a specifically British – rather belated, but hardly unique – appropriation of the Philhellenic

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legacy by nineteenth-century liberal-nationalist discourse on the South Slavs. French or Italian liberal intellectuals in the mid-nineteenth century, starting from an essentially ‘Greco-Latin’ and often also a Roman Catholic perspective on European history, seem to have found it easier to place the classical associations of Greece at the centre of their multinational, Balkan visions. Mazzini’s Philhellenic perspective on the civilizing mission of Greece in the Balkans – eventually leading to the formulation of his well-known vision of a Greco-Slav federation in 1857 – dates from the 1830s (Mazzini 1939 [1857]; see also Liakos 1985, 51–3). A less well-known, but instructive mid-nineteenth-century example emerges from the work of the French scholar Cyprien Robert. While mainly preoccupied with the historic ‘mission’ of Slavdom in Europe, Robert managed to merge in his works a Hellenist and Philhellenic perspective on the patriotic legacies of the polis, with a Slavophile, liberal discourse on the ‘ancient’ liberties of the Slavs.13 Furthermore, much of Robert’s wider argument, which was at once anti-Russian and antiGerman, relied upon a tenuous effort to prove that the Slavs, like the Greeks, had an ancient ethnological presence in Europe, prior to the German incursions (Robert 1852, 2.3–105). The anti-German animus that motivated Robert’s ‘alternative’ ethnology was virtually absent in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. On the contrary, British national historiography around the middle of the century was positively reoriented towards an exploration of the Germanic roots of the British nation (see Anderson 1994, 129–62; Burrow 1981, 119–25). Combined with other contemporary ideological factors, this development coloured mid-nineteenth-century British conceptualizations of ‘Europeanness’ with a distinctly Germanic hue. On the other hand, while the shared ‘Orthodox’ identity of the Greeks and the Southern Slavs was not a particularly appealing argument in the eyes of mid-nineteenthcentury liberals with a Roman Catholic background, in Britain traditional High Anglican sympathies for the non-papal catholic traditions of the Orthodox Church were gradually rekindled and popularized in liberal-conservative circles from the mid-1850s onwards. This positive attitude significantly facilitated the eventual interpretation of the common Orthodox faith of ‘Eastern European’ peoples – as well as their allegiance to their national church establishments – as a plausible byword for ‘patriotic’ commitment to their respective ‘nations’.14 In short, I propose that the rather belated transition from a strictly pro-Greek frame of reference to an enlarged, multinational version of Philhellenism in the context of British liberalism – as well as the crucial role that Orthodoxy eventually 13   See Robert 1844; 1852. Robert produced a rather unexpected continuum between the Greek polis, the self-governing communities of the ancient Slavs, the Polish tradition of national independence, and the modern constitutions of the Greeks, the Serbs, and the ‘Slavo-Hungarians’ (Robert 1852, 1.229–84). 14   The publication of Stanley’s lectures (1861) signals an important turning point in this longterm intellectual process, which involved various facets of British theological, historical, and political discourse, as well as focusing Philhellenic discussion on the national Church of Greece (Miliori 1998, 276–314).



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played in this transition in the British context – should be primarily attributed to the particular strength of the liberal-classicist version of Hellenism in mid-nineteenthcentury Britain, combined with a series of other intellectual factors, that ultimately have to do with the way British intellectuals positioned British national identity within the wider context of European history. Indeed, when we take into account the particular character and status of Hellenism in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, it is hard to imagine that any hypothetical attempt to place upon an equal basis ancient Greek liberty and the traditional liberties of the Slavs, as Robert had done, would have stood much chance of success. Ultimately, the religious dimensions of ‘nationality’, the imperial legacies of Rome, and ‘Philhellenic’ historiography were the most plausible – if not the only available – avenues for the meeting of the Greeks and the Slavs in nineteenth-century British discourse on Europe. The importance of the debate on the ‘Eastern Question’, as an underlying factor that propelled the intellectual developments described above, does not require further elaboration here. What still needs to be discussed, however, is the extent to which strictly pro-Greek Philhellenic attitudes in the later part of the century can be directly attributed to late nineteenth-century developments in the realm of Hellenism. In 1879, a year after the Treaty of Berlin, and while diplomatic negotiations concerning the border between Greece and Turkey in Thessaly and Epiros were still pending, two separate ‘Philhellenic’ associations were established in London within the span of three months. A Greek Committee was established in April with an overt political and diplomatic pro-Greek agenda.15 The scholarly Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies was established in June, with the avowed aim ‘to advance the study of the Greek language, literature and art, and to illustrate the history of the Greek race in the ancient, Byzantine and Neo-Hellenic periods’.16 By virtue of its extended chronological scope, the latter scholarly Society may be legitimately described as ‘Philhellenic’. Yet as the inaugural address of its president, Charles Newton, clearly indicates, the term ‘Philhellenic’ (or even ‘Neo-Hellenic’) scholarship, if used in this context, must be understood as a mere afterthought of Hellenism. In particular, Newton makes it quite clear that the primary concern of the Society would be to promote systematic archaeological research as opposed to merely ‘textual’ Hellenism. Furthermore, he defines scholarly interest in the Byzantine and the Neo-Hellenic periods as predominantly linguistic and strictly oriented towards discovering ‘traces’ of antiquity in later phases of Greek civilization, preferably material traces, and ideally through the study of inscriptions 15   This Committee published a series of pro-Greek papers until 1882 and was reactivated during the Greco-Turkish War of 1897. Amongst its leading members were the Oxford jurist and historian James Bryce, the journalist Lewis Sergeant, and prominent Gladstonian politicians, such as Lord Rosebery and Charles Dilke. 16   The Society was modelled upon the contemporary French Association pour l’Encouragement des Etudes Grecques and contributed to the establishment of the British School at Athens in 1886 (Macmillan 1904; Stray 1998, 137–9). Its rules and membership list were published in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 1 (1880), p. ix cited.

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(Newton 1880, 1–6). He concludes with an illuminating terminological distinction between scholarly ‘Hellenists’ and partisan ‘Phil-Hellenes’: I see no reason why this Society should not include not only Hellenists who are avowed Phil-Hellenes, but also those Englishmen who, though they decline to call themselves Phil-Hellenes, have a just claim to be considered Hellenists, and have in that capacity an earnest wish to promote the objects which this Society has in view (Newton 1880, 6).

Newton’s terminology suggests that the almost simultaneous establishment of two distinct ‘Philhellenic’ associations in 1879 was hardly coincidental. Indeed, if the archaeological turn of British Hellenism in the late decades of the nineteenth century signalled a more rigid organization of research and a further institutionalization of classical studies, it also reflected, and entailed, a decisive widening of the notional gap between the partisan Philhellene and the classical scholar. In the mid-nineteenth century, to present oneself as a ‘Philhellene’ could become a means of expressing dissent from the Anglocentric establishment of classical education, and to propose an alternative course of Greek studies, in this way enhancing the academic status of a ‘peripheral’ institution within the national academic establishment. Such was the case, for example, of the Scottish classicist John Stuart Blackie, Professor of Greek in the University of Edinburgh, who recommended the study of modern Greek language and literature as a prophylactic against the ‘pedantry’ of classical education ‘besouth the Tweed’ (see Blackie 1852; 1853). Towards the turn of the century, however, Philhellenic activism could signal a much more radical break with academia and function as a ‘rite of passage’ towards an entirely different professional path. Noel Brailsford left academia to ‘fight for the Greeks’ in 1897, and then built upon this experience a long journalistic career as a Balkan expert and radical philanthropist (see Leventhal 1985, 25–42). In view of such considerations, it would be an exaggeration to claim that the adoption of a strictly pro-Greek political stance in the late nineteenth century depended exclusively, or even primarily, upon classical recollections. The most persuasive ‘defences of Hellenism’ around the turn of the twentieth century were written by journalists and literary men who cannot be described as academic classicists. Moreover, in the historical arguments brought forward by such authors in order to prove the superiority of the Greeks over their Slav competitors, we find an equal, if not greater, emphasis on medieval and modern history rather than direct appeals to the Greeks’ classical heritage.17 On the contrary, the Philhellenic declarations of late nineteenth-century classicists were frequently of a stereotypical, redundant nature.18 Despite these qualifications, however, it cannot 17   See, for example, Sergeant 1897, passim; Upward 1908, 1–49. Classical allusions as a means of Philhellenic polemic are more pronounced in the translated essays contained in Abbott 1909. 18   For example, the Irish classicist J.H. Mahaffy (1876, vi–vii) declared that although he was ‘no enthusiast about the modern, any more than about the ancient Greeks’, the Greeks were ‘vastly more intelligent, more peaceable, more civilized’ than the Bulgarians and the ‘turbulent and mischievous Serbians’.



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be denied that the less polemical – and ostensibly apolitical – institutional context of late nineteenth-century British Hellenism encouraged, almost by definition, exclusively pro-Greek versions of Philhellenism. The ideological significance of this apparently neutral, antiquity-oriented kind of Philhellenism for the subsequent history of Anglo-Greek relations should not be underestimated. Yet it would be wrong to interpret it as a survival of an ostensibly ‘authentic’ version of Philhellenism dating from the 1820s, for it bears the imprint of a series of wider ideological transformations and discursive rearrangements that had taken place in the highly politicized British intellectual environment in the intervening period. Indeed, the relationship between Hellenism and Philhellenism is a complex and open-ended story, which deserves detailed historical and theoretical examination in a comparative light. Changing perceptions of European history, evolving theoretical understandings of ‘nationality’, and successive realignments of the discursive boundary between ‘scholarship’ and ‘politics’ have left a significant imprint upon British and European perceptions of Greece. This is why the study of Philhellenism can still mediate between the ‘internal’ and the ‘external’ dimensions of Modern Greek studies, and consequently contribute, in an indirect, but still productive manner, to the study of the ‘making of modern Greece’.

References Abbott, G.F. (ed.) (1909), Greece in evolution: studies prepared under the auspices of the ‘French League For the Defence of the Rights of Hellenism’, translated from the French and prefaced by Charles W. Dilke, London: Fisher and Unwin. Anderson, O. (1994 [11967]), A liberal state at war: English politics and economics during the Crimean War, Aldershot: Gregg Revivals. Arnold, T. (ed.) (1847 [11835]), ΘΟΥΚΥΔΙΔΗΣ, The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, illustrated by maps, taken entirely from actual surveys, with notes, chiefly historical and geographical by Thomas Arnold, 3rd ed. (3 vols), Oxford: Henry and Parker. Blackie, J.S. (1852), Classical literature in its relation to the nineteenth century and Scottish university education, Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knox. Blackie, J.S. (1853), On the living language of the Greeks and its utility to the classical scholar, Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knox. Burrow, J.W. (1981), A Liberal descent: Victorian historians and the English past, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Finlay, G. (1836), The Hellenic kingdom and the Greek nation, London. Finlay, G. (1877 [11844 –61]), A history of Greece from its conquest by the Romans to the present time, B.C. 146 to A.D. 1864 (ed. H.F. Tozer, 7 vols), Oxford: Clarendon Press. Forbes, D. (1952), The Liberal Anglican idea of history, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freeman, E.A. (1854), ‘Greece during the Macedonian period’, North British Review 21: 425–50.

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Freeman, E.A. (1855), ‘Finlay on the Byzantine Empire’, North British Review 22: 343– 75. Freeman, E.A. (1856), ‘The Greek people and the Greek kingdom’, Edinburgh Review 103: 386–422. Freeman, E.A. (1857), ‘Alexander the Great’, Edinburgh Review 105: 305–41. Freeman, E.A. (1862), ‘Finlay’s History of the Greek Revolution’, Saturday Review 13: 242–4. Freeman, E.A. (1863a), History of federal government from the foundation of the Achaian League to the disruption of the United States: General introduction – History of the Greek federations, London: Macmillan. Freeman, E.A. (1863b), ‘Greece and its insurrections’, Saturday Review 15: 245–6. Freeman, E.A. (1864), ‘Medieval and Modern Greece’, The National Review 18: 78–114. Freeman, E.A. (1876), The Eastern Question in its historical bearings: an address delivered in Manchester, November 15, 1876, revised by the author, Manchester: National Reform Union. Freeman, E.A. (1886), The chief periods of European history: six lectures read in the University of Oxford in Trinity Term, 1885; with an essay on Greek cities under Roman rule, London: Macmillan. Gordon, T. (1832), History of the Greek Revolution (2 vols), Edinburgh: Blackwood. Grote, G. (1826), ‘Institutions of Ancient Greece’, Westminster Review 5: 269–331. Grote, G. (1884 [11846–56]), A history of Greece from the earliest period to the close of the generation contemporary with Alexander the Great (12 vols), London: John Murray. Hartog, F. (1991), ‘Liberté des anciens, liberté des modernes: La Révolution Française et l’antiquité’ in R.-P. Droit (ed.), Les Grecs, les Romains et nous; L’antiquité est-elle moderne? Paris: Le Monde, 119–41. Iakovaki, N. (2006), Ευρώπη μέσω Ελλάδας: μια καμπή στην ευρωπαϊκή αυτοσυνείδηση 17ος-18ος αιώνας, Athens: Estia. Leventhal, F.M. (1985), The last dissenter: H.N. Brailsford and his world, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Liakos, A. (1985), Η ιταλική ενοποίηση και η Μεγάλη Ιδέα 1859–1862, Athens: Themelio. Macaulay, T.B. (1898a), ‘On Mitford’s History’ [from Knight’s Quarterly Magazine 1824] in The Complete Works of T.B. Macaulay, Albany edition (12 vols), London: Longman and Green, 11: 365–93. Macaulay, T.B. (1898b), ‘History’ [from Edinburgh Review 1828], The Complete Works of T.B. Macaulay, Albany edition (12 vols), London: Longman and Green, 7: 188–91. Macmillan, G.A. (1904), An outline of the history of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1879-1904, London. Mahaffy, J.P. (1876), Rambles and studies in Greece, London: Macmillan. Mazzini G. (1939 [11857]), Lettere slave; Con prefazione di Fabrizio Canfora, Bari: Laterza. Miliori, M. (1998), ‘The Greek nation in British eyes 1821–1864: aspects of a British discourse on nationality, politics, history and Europe’, unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford. Mitford, W. (1784–1818), History of Greece (5 vols), London: Cadell and Davis. Napier, C. (1821), War in Greece, London: Ridgway. Newton, C.T. (1880), ‘Hellenic studies; an introductory address’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 1: 1–6.



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Potter, E. (2009), ‘George Finlay and the History of Greece’, in M. Llewellyn Smith, P. Kitromilides, and E. Calligas (eds), Scholars, Travels, Archives: Greek History and Culture through the British School at Athens, Athens: British School at Athens. Robert, C. (1844), Les Slaves de Turquie; Serbes, Monténégrins, Bosniques, Albanais et Bulgares; leurs resources, leurs tendances et leurs progrès politiques (2 vols), Paris: Passard, Labitte. Robert, C. (1852), Le Monde slave; son passée, son état present et son avenir, 2 vols, Paris: Passard. Rosen, F. (1992), Bentham, Byron and Greece: constitutionalism, nationalism and early Liberal political thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sergeant, L. (1897), Greece in the nineteenth century: a record of Hellenic emancipation and progress: 1821–1897, London: Fisher and Unwin. Sheridan, C.B. (1822), Thoughts on the Greek Revolution, London: John Murray. Stanley, A.P. (1861), Lectures on the history of the Eastern Church: with an introduction on the study of ecclesiastical history, London: John Murray. Stray, C. (1998), Classics transformed: schools, universities and society in England, 1830– 1960, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Thirlwall, C. (1835–44), A history of Greece (8 vols), Cabinet Cyclopaedia series, London: Longman. Turner, F. (1981), The Greek heritage in Victorian Britain, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Upward, A. (1908), The East End of Europe; the report of an unofficial mission to the European provinces of Turkey on the eve of the revolution, London: John Murray. Vidal-Naquet, P. (1990), La democratie grecque vue d’ailleurs, Paris: Flammarion.

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Part III defining identity (1): religion & the nation state

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6 From resurrection to insurrection: ‘sacred’ myths, motifs, and symbols in the Greek War of Independence Marios Hatzopoulos On a cold winter day in late February 1821, at a time when all eyes were on the Sultan’s struggle to crush his defiant vassal Ali Pasha, a high-ranking officer of the Russian army with an eminent Phanariot background crossed the waters of the river Pruth from Bessarabia into Ottoman territory at the head of a few thousand men, a few cavalry, and four cannons. His name was Alexandros Ypsilantis. In order to join his motley troops, hundreds of Greek students had burned their books in Bucharest and other Balkan cities. A month later, far to the South, in the Peloponnese, Christian peasants burned the properties of their Muslim neighbours. Before long, Ottoman troops had suppressed the insurrection in the North, but that in the South evolved into a fully-fledged war. The outbreak of the war was finally the time for the Philiki Etaireia [Friendly Society] to see its labours bear fruit. This ‘Friendly Society’ was a secret patriotic organization, one of a multitude of secret political organizations that had flooded Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It had been founded in Odessa by members of an aspirant Greek-speaking Diaspora, merchants who had become attracted to Jacobin-style politics advancing radical and liberal agendas. It was more or less the same sort of people who had become involved in sustaining an extended network of Greek schools that disseminated political classicism and revolutionary nationalism within the traditional Orthodox world under Ottoman rule. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries these ideas had triggered a certain conception in the imagination of the Westernizing Greek-speaking élites: that of the ‘Greek people’ as a distinctive community with a common culture. Imaginary though it was, this conception had real political consequences. Laying a claim of ancestry to what was at the time Europe’s dearest ideal, the classical Greek past, national identity led the Greeks to break away from the pan-Balkan Orthodox world. Soon, ideas on collective autonomy came to fit in with the novel beliefs on identity. An upsurge in schooling, extension of Greek literacy, an From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. 81

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increase of interest in matters purely secular, and, finally, a pervasive economic crisis in Ottoman trade after 1815, which hurt the petit-bourgeois commercial intermediaries and merchants who championed nationalistic ideas, resulted in an armed insurrection against Ottoman rule in early 1821. In these terms, it has been widely accepted that the advance of nationalist ideas and the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence marked a complete break with the pre-existing social reality, the world of tradition. In this chapter I shall attempt to qualify this view by putting forth a threefold argument (see, further, Hatzopoulos 2005). I shall argue first that, for all its inherent modernity, the cause of the Greek nationalists drew upon a legacy of traditional ideas and predispositions; secondly, that an idea deep rooted in Orthodox belief, that of resurrection, allowed nationalists to make the most of that legacy; and thirdly, that this development came to be one of considerable importance for the collective identity of the traditional strata of Greek society themselves. The theoretical underpinning of my argument is Anthony Smith’s view of nationalism as a secular ideology and movement drawing, nonetheless, on the ‘sacred’ motifs, symbols, and rituals of the culturally designated population. Nationalists, Smith suggests (2000; cf. 2003, 19–43), only rarely attempt to destroy entirely an older, religious identity, since they realize that, if their message is to be communicated widely and effectively, it needs to be couched in the language and imagery of those they wish to mobilize and liberate. Therefore, nationalists tend rather to appropriate elements of the old cults for their own secular and political ends. In any event, the idea of an armed insurrection against Ottoman rule epitomized the ideological and political developments of the age of the Enlightenment within the Orthodox community. There is little doubt that the Philiki Etaireia was the principal organizational structure through which the call to arms was disseminated. Yet we tend to forget that the nationalist call for insurrection was an agenda conceived by intellectuals, financed and propagated by merchants, but left to be executed by peasants. The ethics of deliverance In the last years before the outbreak of war the Philiki Etaireia had boosted its membership to such a degree that, according to a reliable witness, ‘it came to indoctrinate even the swineherds’ (Frantzis 1839, 79–80). The process of indoctrination had the purpose of enthusing members with the new ideas and values of nationalism. Research has highlighted the fact, for instance, that the word ‘homeland’ (πατρίς) was deliberately used with its modern politicized meaning, even more so as the recruit became a formal member, at the expense of the traditional regional sense of the word that signified one’s birthplace or native village (Frangos 1973, 96–8). In a conscious effort to promote its own revolutionary agenda, the Philiki Etaireia did challenge traditional allegiances, but also took advantage of older ideas and predispositions. It is well known that its founders, Nikolaos Skoufas, Athanasios Tsakaloff, and Emmanuel Xanthos, created the impression that their struggle had



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the unconditional backing of Russia in order to instil among Society members the psychological reassurance of having a strong foreign ally. In doing this, however, the Society was also striking deeper chords. A brief note in Xanthos’s memoirs gives us a hint: the chief members of the Philiki Etaireia aimed at capitalizing on the ‘age-old superstition of the enslaved Greeks that co-religionist Russia would liberate them from Turkish tyranny’ (Xanthos 1845, 12; emphasis mine). What Xanthos referred to as ‘superstition’ was actually an age-old tradition of prophecy and myth which included, but was not necessarily limited to, the prospect of military intervention by an external power on behalf of the subject Christians of the East. The tradition was largely based on a literature of extra-canonical prophetic and apocalyptic writings that had aimed, since Byzantine times, to provide hope to the Orthodox community during critical periods of threat, anxiety, and change. Writings of this sort mirrored the fears and agonies of their time, all the while serving an important communal function: in case of defeat and devastation, they could be called upon to offer ‘divine’ affirmation that the state of affairs which humiliated the community would not last. The main underlying myth was that tribulation would cease and glory would be restored to the community of the faithful through divine intervention predicated on the agency of a messianic deliverer at a more or less foreseeable, and sometimes specifically calculable, point in the future. It is for this reason that we may call these prophetic writings ‘messianic’ and the beliefs they substantiated ‘messianism’. Greek sources refer to these texts as ‘oracles’ (χρησμοί), to their compilations as ‘books of oracles’ (χρησμολόγια) and to the whole literary genre as ‘oracular literature’ (χρησμολογία). The term chresmos (oracle) had been used in medieval Greek, with the pagan undertones it inevitably bore, to signify any sort of obscure prognostication, by contrast with the term propheteia (prophecy), which bore more orthodox theological connotations (Kyriakou 1995, 13–14). Oracular literature was a special literature. Though employing apocalyptic themes, it was regularly disowned by various exegetes of apocalyptic prophecy for lacking a ‘pure eschatological’ perspective (Argyriou 1982, 93–113; cf. Argyriou 1988). Despite its millenarian flavour, it lacked the capacity to produce the waves of violent action known from the study of millenarian movements. Those responsible for its dissemination were not peasant leaders who wanted to flee the present world but for the most part literate, articulate, and politically aware people who wanted to see their community restored to its former glory. Oracular texts were capable of evolving their meanings according to the course of events through convenient interpretations and interpolations. The groundwork of this literature was a work traceable to the frustrations and anxieties of late antiquity, the Tiburtine Sibyl; yet as Muslim expansion started menacing Byzantium towards the end of the seventh century, a new composition, the Revelation of Methodios (also known as Pseudo-Methodios), came to establish the definite outlines of the genre by casting Muslims in the role of the oppressor and a mysterious messianic figure, an earthly ruler, in the role of deliverer of the Christians (Abrahamse 1985,

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1–9; Alexander 1985, 151–84). The late Byzantine collection of the Oracles of Leo the Wise expanded and elaborated on the same themes at a time when the Byzantine state had irreversibly embarked on the course of disintegration (Mango 1984), while the fall of Constantinople in 1453 inspired updates of old prophetic material as well as the creation of brand new oracles. In this context, the late fifteenth-century Interpretation of Gennadios came to dominate the oracular genre, promising the restitution of Constantinople to its ‘original owners’ through the messianic agency of a blond deliverer who would come in time to be identified, among other candidates, with the Russians (Turner 1968; Sklavenitis 1978). Finally, in the eighteenth century, as Ottoman power declined, there appeared the Vision of Agathangelos, a prophetic text offering a calculable date for the termination of Ottoman rule (A. Politis 1969). Prophetic language, however, goes beyond written texts. Alongside its written form, the oracular tradition employed various alternative forms of reproduction that encouraged its use by different social groups. For one thing, the systematic use of visual material in manuscript or published oracles permitted broader access to their otherwise arcane prophetic meanings. For another, the regular use of rhyme encouraged oral reproduction of the prophecy. It should be noted, moreover, that celestial phenomena such as comets, solar or lunar eclipses, strange cloud formations and the like acquired a symbolic status in the eyes of the faithful, regardless of social or educational background. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the oracular tradition and its underlying messianic myths became socially shared cultural features within the Orthodox community. Messianic myths served the socio-psychological needs of the subjugated Christians harbouring hope in hard times but did little to topple the enemy they were designed to combat. Messianism spanned the period of Ottoman rule, but the best it could have hoped to instigate was a quasi-crusading initiative from abroad, possibly combined with a more or less localized uprising from within. That was because messianism adhered to a conception of ‘history’ entirely controlled and prearranged by Providence, according to which past, present, and future were the unfolding of a great divine plan. The promise of deliverance from Muslim rule was articulated within these confines: deliverance would be an act of compensation for sufferings endured. Were it ever to come, it could come only through God’s instruments, not through the community’s own efforts and resources. What messianism longed for was outside intervention, both divine and human. What this set of beliefs promised to the subjugated community was not what we would call liberation, but rather redemption, from Ottoman rule. Messianism was also obsessed with the idea of collective regeneration. It held that Ottoman rule would meet a divinely ordained, but intra-historical, end, and that the fallen Eastern Roman Empire would be restored or, more precisely, ‘resurrected’. For messianists the idea that a dead entity could be revived by the will of God defined a mode of thought and a corresponding use of language. The reaction of the monk and poet Kaisarios Dapontes, after the Russo-Ottoman War



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of 1768–1774 fell short of messianic expectations, is quite characteristic.1 ‘The empire of the Romans will never be resurrected’, he had painfully to admit, since it has turned out that the time for resurrection appointed by the oracles was not the true one and [thus] the empire was not resurrected. The time appointed by the oracles for resurrection was 320 years after the Conquest (Sathas 1872, 119).

Dapontes’s contemporary, the chronicler Athanasios Komninos-Ypsilantis, used similar terms: If, therefore, in the time appointed by the prophecies […] the Romans have not been liberated, then it will be very difficult for the resurrection of the Roman empire to take place (Komninos-Ypsilantis 1870, 534).

Resurrection, in messianic thinking, was not a rhetorical device but rather a necessary and fundamental element.2 The prospect of the restoration of the Byzantine Empire and the reconquest of Constantinople strongly echoed the overtones of communal regeneration, as the hope of resurrection or deliverance applied not only to the empire and its capital but, in effect, to the community of the subject Orthodox as a whole. In the words of the metropolitan of Gaza Paisios Ligaridis (1610–1678), the first to make a comprehensive compilation out of the mass of Greek oracular literature after the fall of Constantinople: ‘it is a great comfort to us thrice-miserable Romans to hear that there shall come a resurrection, a deliverance of our Genos’ (cited in Kariotoglou 1982, 104). What is interesting here is that the traditional approach viewing the fall of the empire as a divine judgement upon Christian sins was reversed in equally traditional terms. Instead of the rise and fall, messianism spoke of the fall and rise of the Eastern Roman Empire. Crucially, this reversal was not illegitimate from a theological point of view: the Bible talked extensively about the pedagogy of a chosen people and its exile and return and, at the same time, taught that Passion is to be followed by Resurrection. The ethos of liberation At first glance, messianism should not have been something with which a dedicated nationalist could easily come to terms. Nationalists preached a message of practical salvation according to which the community ought to assume its 1   Dapontes was a keen reader of oracular literature (Sathas 1872, μεʹ-μςʹ). His reference to the daughter and successor of Peter the Great as ‘Elizabeth, the great Queen of the fair-haired ones’, reflects oracular symbolism (Hasluck 1929, 472 n.4). 2   It seems possible that the celebration of Orthodox Easter had come to acquire messianic undertones over the period of Ottoman rule. N.G. Politis (1904, 687) considered likely the existence of a post-Byzantine belief holding that every Easter the angels secretly celebrate Christ’s resurrection within the cathedral-turned-mosque of Agia Sophia. Interestingly, the Sfakiot chieftain Daskalogiannis chose Easter day to mount his first attack on the Muslims of Crete, thus initiating the Christian uprising of 1770 on the island (Psilakis 1909, 283).

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destiny through rationally planned and executed acts in the interest of collective self-determination. Deliverance for them had no other meaning than liberation. On this level messianism was undoubtedly problematic and had to be confronted. It belonged to the dark universe of ‘headless ideas’ which the educator–intellectuals of the Neo-Hellenic enlightenment had set out to eradicate (Kitromilides 1996, 239); it was a token of cowardice, according to the Hellenic Nomarchy, the anonymous nationalist polemic of 1806 (Anonymous Hellene 1982, 203). Yet from the late 1800s to the early 1820s, when nationalist activism took the shape of participatory organizational structures with increasing membership demands, the need to communicate the agenda of armed revolt in a swift and effective manner became a priority (Panagiotopoulos 2003). The more inclusive these structures, the more pressing became the need for ideological elements capable of activating and mobilizing the masses. I should like to suggest that messianic prophecy was very important in this respect, in so far as it encapsulated shared beliefs in the reversal of the collective status of Christians, acting as ‘validating charter’ for actions that would otherwise have appeared unacceptably revolutionary. As a result, messianism came to be seen not as a mere ideological current but, more specifically, as a reservoir of myths and symbols capable of galvanizing anti-Ottoman sentiments which, after reinterpretation in nationalistic terms and conjunction with modern ideals, could be made capable of mobilizing the masses towards a common political goal: armed revolt against Ottoman rule. It was in this spirit that nationalists turned to messianic myths. Unsurprisingly, the propaganda of the Philiki Etaireia did include elements of oracular literature, as its former member Nikolaos Kasomoulis recorded in his memoirs (1939, 425). Another document signed by the Society’s leader, Alexandros Ypsilantis, proves that its leading members had no qualms about blending together old values and new aspirations, oracular literature and insurrection, Orthodoxy and Hellas, even more so when it came to arguing that the outbreak of war was at hand and there could be no turning back: If we are true sons of venerable Greece, as we boast that we are […] what are we waiting for? What excuse, however reasonable, could make us postpone this golden time which, as it appears, Providence has brilliantly ordained so that all the predictions, all the oracles about the liberation of the Genos, about the resurgence of Orthodoxy, may come true? (Xanthos 1845, 238).3

Existing evidence substantiates the claim that, at least to a certain extent, the Philiki Etaireia made progress within the deeply traditional communities of Greek lands thanks to the popularity of messianic beliefs. Fotakos (1971, 35), a dedicated member of the Society and later aide to Kolokotronis, writing in his memoirs about 3   The undated document has the title Report on the foundation of an artistic [φιλόμουσος] and charitable Greek commercial society (Xanthos 1845, 220–35), while the excerpt under consideration belongs to an appendix with the title Secret paragraphs about the main aim of the artistic and charitable Greek commercial society (Xanthos 1845, 236–9).



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the pre-independence Orthodox communities, admitted that messianic myths did advance the popular resonance of revolutionary nationalism.4 Moreover, the first historical account of the Philiki Etaireia, the essay by Ioannis Philemon, maintained that oracular literature was a long-term factor that, having already moulded a firm popular belief in the eventual reversal of the status of collective subjection, decisively conditioned the popular reception of the call to arms (Philemon 1834, 217–18; cf. 67–8). Yet what allowed nationalists to make the most of the messianic repertoire of myths and symbols was its regenerative discourse. Nationalists were quick to appropriate and reinterpret the old messianic discourse of resurrection in secular terms, in terms of the homeland and its people. When the war broke out in the Danubian lands, Ypsilantis addressed the former members of the Society, and now comrades-in-arms, with the proclamation of 24 February 1821: Brothers of the Friendly Society! At last has arrived that splendid moment so much desired! […] You, beloved associates, have shown what pure and fervent patriotism can do. From you, Greece expects even greater things now, in the hour of her resurrection! (Walsh 1829, 434).5

On the outbreak of the war in Greece, Petros Mavromichalis (Petrobey), having declared the region of Mani and the whole of the southern Peloponnese in revolt, issued an appeal to the European courts. Resurrection, in this case, applied to the people: With one word we have decided to set ourselves free or perish. We therefore invoke the aid of all the civilized nations of Europe, that we may the more promptly attain to the goal of a just and sacred enterprise, reconquer our rights and resurrect our unfortunate people (Trikoupis 1853, 369).6

Roughly at the same time, some distance to the North, in the village of Milies on Mount Pelion, the nationalist leaders of the region raised glasses in a characteristic toast: ‘Christ is risen, long live the resurrection of the homeland, long live liberty’ (Kamilaris 1897, 29–30). Quite characteristically, an Austrian intelligence report dated 12 March 1821 recognized the representation of the Resurrection among the decorative motifs on the Greek revolutionary flags flown at Jassy (Laios 1958, 51). Robert Walsh, chaplain to the British embassy in Istanbul at the time, did not fail to observe that the theme of resurrection was taken as ‘typifying the rising hopes of the country’ (Walsh 1836, 179). 4   Also known as Fotios or Fotakos Chryssanthopoulos, on whom see, further, chapter 8 by Yanna Delivoria in the present volume. 5   Walsh cites the Greek text (1829, 434) and the English translation (Walsh 1829, 435), which I follow here with some revision. The Greek text is also to be found in Daskalakis (1966, 119). 6   Mavromichalis’s proclamation was translated into English by Gordon (cited in Dakin 1973, 59), whom I follow for the most part. Gordon’s translation is not always very accurate. For instance, Gordon’s text reads ‘and regenerate our unfortunate people’ while the original uses the precise term αναστήσωμεν (‘resurrect’) instead of αναγεννήσωμεν (‘regenerate’).

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Resurrection and collective identity The reinterpretation of the concept of resurrection in secular terms, in terms of the Greek homeland and its people, provided Greek nationalism with a powerful symbolic discourse that survived long into the post-independence era.7 But as far as the pre-independence period is concerned, a development at the popular level merits further attention. The appropriation and reinterpretation of resurrection by Greek patriots couched the ideals and values of Greek nationalism in the vocabulary and imagery of faith. In this way, the priesthood and peasantry who clung to the prospect of revolt found a platform of understanding and, ultimately, a cognitive map of familiarization with what was a modern and secular cause. It is instructive to recall in this context the chant, ‘Christ has risen to elevate the cross and trample on the crescent in our beloved Greece’, with which in 1823 Lord Byron and his company were received in a monastery in Ithaca (Trelawny 1941, 138). The familiarization of the Orthodox strata with nationalistic ideals through the vocabulary and imagery of faith had, in turn, an effect on their sense of collective identity. The reinterpreted discourse of resurrection provided the traditional sections of society with a comforting matrix for coming to terms not only with the idea of insurrection but also with one of its prerequisites that underpinned the agenda of the revolutionaries: the myth of Hellenic descent. Even if the programme of the nationalists had essentially been formalized along secular and neoclassical lines, those provincial primates, military chieftains, village clergymen, monks, and peasants who had a vague idea about – or even reasons to detest – the line of revolutionary Hellenism found a frame of reference that did not compel them to relinquish their religious identity in favour of a secular one. For these people, instead, the reinterpreted discourse of resurrection furnished an ideological basis which facilitated an acculturation between the myth of Hellenic descent that nationalists upheld and the sense of belonging to a religious collectivity. From this point of view, in the nascent Greek nation state the pre-modern imagined community based on common faith had never been closer to the emerging community of common ancestry, in the terms used by Kitromilides (1990). Within the popular mind, the belief in a God-revived moral community of the faithful could now be transmuted, after conceptual adjustment to conform with the teaching of intellectuals, into the conviction that a moral community of Hellenic ancestry was to be regenerated by the grace of God. This view is a recurrent theme in the writings of General Makriyannis (on whom see chapter 8 by Yanna Delivoria in the present volume). An interesting elaboration is to be found at the end of the second book of Makriyannis’s memoirs where the author recounts an imaginary fable. Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I meet in Hades. After the two monarchs regret their lives and realize how ephemeral is earthly power, Alexander says: 7   See Pamboukis 1843, 22; Saripolos 1890, 96; Koumanoudis 1990, 99; Valaoritis 1907, 188, 190; Christovasilis 1881; Kyriakidis 1892, 6; Palamas n.d., 435.



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Come, Napoleon, let us go and see the ancient Greeks in the [underworld] place where they dwell and find old Master Socrates and Plato and Themistocles and the gallant Leonidas, and tell them the thrilling news that their descendants, who had been lost and wiped out from the list of mankind, have been raised from the dead. Those good and righteous men, the beacons of truth, the noble protectors of freedom, enrich mankind with patriotism, with pure courage, with virtue, not with treachery and deceit: and though they are poor in the vain riches of a day, they are very rich in the world’s history: for that their deeds are a tourney of virtue. For this reason it was the will of the just God to resurrect their descendants, whose homeland had been lost for so many centuries. And it was that they might remember their faith that the true God resurrected them: unshod, unclothed, unfed, with their muskets bound up with string, they had their goods seized by the Turks every season: most of them fought with sticks and stones and without the wherewithal: the Turks were in force and fully trained; the poor Greeks, few and untrained, have beaten the Grand Signior [sic] (Makriyannis 1966, 147).

The scene concludes with some words from the lips of Makriyannis, words wavering between reflection and prayer: Thou, O Lord, shalt raise the dead Greeks, the descendants of those famous men, who gave mankind the fair raiment of virtue. And by Thy power and Thy righteousness Thou shalt bring the dead back to life, and it is Thy just will that the name of Hellas shall be spoken once more, that she shall shine forth, and the worship of Christ too, and that the honest and the good, those who are the defenders of justice, shall live on (Makriyannis 1966, 148).8

Illiterate as he was in his early life, Makriyannis wrote his memoirs as soon as he had acquired some writing skills, driven by the desire to produce an account of his life. Yet these lines, possibly written during 1832–3 (cf. Makriyannis n.d., xx–xxi), were not the personal thoughts of a semi-literate war veteran. Take, for example, the monk Kyrillos Lavriotis, a man whom Makriyannis never met or knew, so far as is known. Kyrillos was not a man of arms but a man of prayer who became involved in what Argyriou (1982) has termed the Greek exegetic movement. Carrying on an old tradition in the age of transition, he set out to study the Book of Revelation from 1792 to the 1820s, with a view to extrapolating clues relevant to his turbulent epoch. His thoughts, recorded during the War of Independence, suggest an approach to current events pretty similar to that of Makriyannis: A few thousand Orthodox Christians, descendants of the Hellenes, unarmed, unwashed, in utmost poverty, weakened by hunger, overwhelmed by slavery, untrained in warfare, unclothed, unshod, utterly illiterate, completely vulgar, with no 8   The English translation of the memoirs of General Makriyannis (1966) by H.A. Lidderdale, which I follow here for the most part, though generally accurate, fails to grasp the specificity of meaning of the original text (Makriyannis n.d.). For instance, the Greek verb ‘ανασταίνω, -ομαι’ [resurrect / rise / raise somebody from the dead] has been freely rendered as ‘set / stand on one’s feet’. Lidderdale’s translation reads, respectively: ‘tell them the thrilling news that their descendants […] stand on their feet once more’ (Makriyannis 1966, 147), and ‘Thou, oh Lord, shalt set upon their feet these long dead Greeks’ (Makriyannis 1966, 148).

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support and help to rely on, rose from their long dead corpse and, with God’s help, shall finally be resurrected, and, after they crush their enemies by land and sea, shall place their noble feet upon the neck of their vanquished tyrants (cited in Argyriou 1999, 176–7).9

For all their differences in life and occupation, the monk Kyrillos and the military leader Makriyannis had more in common than a first glance would suggest.10 Research has shown that Kyrillos, no less than Makriyannis, deemed freedom an achievement based on God’s help and man’s own effort and heroism (Argyriou 1999, 176). On the other hand, it has also shown that Makriyannis, perhaps no less than Kyrillos, was a keen reader of oracular and apocalyptic literature (Metallinos 1985; Sphyroeras 1984). Both men viewed insurrection against Ottoman rule as reflecting the will of God. Both imagined their community as a collectivity of common faith, descent, and morality. Both expected God’s will to be fulfilled through and within this community, which was in effect the Greek nation. Their thought was no longer part of the traditional ethics of deliverance; it was part of the ethos of liberation. These two cases provide this chapter with its conclusion. When the messianic discourse of ‘resurrection’, exposed as it was to the forces of modernity in the early nineteenth century, was reinterpreted in nationalist terms and combined with patriotic values, it essentially gave way to a new approach, one that would oscillate between the old and the new ideas as much as did those who adhered to it. According to this approach, resurrection meant liberation and liberation would come about through insurrection. Insurrection was approved by God but realized by man. Liberation, therefore, was presumed through the agency of the nation which, in turn, was elevated to a messianic pedestal and charged with a providential mission. It was in these terms that the Greek nation had, first, to liberate itself. In view of such lofty standards, however, the achievement of independence was anything but a conclusion to the annals of the Greek nation’s vicissitudes. In fact, it was just the beginning.

9   The labour of Kyrillos Lavriotis, the voluminous ‘Commentary on Revelation’, is unpublished. Asterios Argyriou has thoroughly studied the manuscript, now kept in the library of the School of Theology at the University of Athens. The manuscript is the eleventh draft of the ‘Commentary’ and the only one to have survived. The draft was mainly written from 11 June 1817 to 30 May 1821, but the text may have been re-edited between 1825 and 1826 (Argyriou 1999, 174). 10   Historians have portrayed Kyrillos Lavriotis as a counter-revolutionary (cf. Bees 1937, 244 λδʹ–244 λεʹ; Kitromilides 1996, 429) but this view flies in the face of Argyriou’s research (1999, 174– 8). In fact, Kyrillos combined a millenarian version of messianism with modern notions of freedom, subscribing fully to the right of man to take up arms against oppression. He was thus happy to see the subjugated Christians take their destiny into their own hands. In this sense it is important that Kyrillos characterized his Orthodox brethren as ‘descendants of the Hellenes’.



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References Abrahamse, D. de F. (1985), ‘Introduction’, in P. J. Alexander, The Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1–9. Alexander, P.J. (1985), The Byzantine Apocalyptic tradition, ed. D. de F. Abrahamse, Berkeley: University of California Press. Anonymous Hellene (1982 [11806]), Ελληνική νομαρχία, ήτοι λόγος περί ελευθερίας, Athens: Aposperitis. Argyriou, A. (1982), Les Exégèses grecques de l’Apocalypse à l’époque Turque (1453–1821): Esquisse d’une histoire des courants idéologiques au sein du peuple grec asservi, Thessaloniki: Etaireia Makedonikon Spoudon [Society for Macedonian Studies]. Argyriou, A. (1988), ‘Εσχατολογική γραμματεία και σκέψη κατά τους χρόνους της Τουρκοκρατίας’, Theologia 59: 308–22. Argyriou, A. (1999), ‘Το ιδεολογικό περιεχόμενο των ερμηνειών στην Αποκάλυψη κατά την περίοδο του νεοελληνικού Διαφωτισμού’, in S. Agouridis et al. (eds), 1900 Ετηρίς της Αποκαλύψεως του Ιωάννου: Πρακτικά Διεθνούς Διεπιστημονικού Συμποσίου (Αθήνα-Πάτμος, 17–26 Σεπτεμβρίου 1995), Athens: Iera Patriarchiki Moni Ag. Ioannou Tou Theologou Patmou [Monastery of St John the Theologian, Patmos], 163–81. Bees, N.A. (Βέης) (1937), ‘Περί του ιστορημένου χρησμολογίου της Κρατικής Βιβλιοθήκης του Βερολίνου και του θρύλου του «Μαρμαρωμένου Βασιλιά»’, Byzantinisch-Neugriechische Jahrbücher 13: 203–44. Christovasilis, Ch. (1881), Στʹ αδέρφια μας, Trikkala. Dakin, D. (1973), The Greek struggle for independence, London: Batsford. Daskalakis, A.B. (1966), Κείμενα-πηγαί της ιστορίας της Ελληνικής Επαναστάσεως, vol. I, Athens. Fotakos [Photios Chryssanthopoulos] (1971), Απομνημονεύματα περί της Ελληνικής Επαναστάσεως, vol. 1, Athens: Greca. Frangos, G.D. (1973), ‘The Philiki Etaireia: a premature national coalition’, in R. Clogg (ed.), The Struggle for Greek Independence: Essays to Mark the 150th Anniversary of the Greek War of Independence, London: Macmillan, 87–103. Frantzis, A. (1839), Επιτομή της ιστορίας της αναγεννηθείσης Ελλάδος αρχομένη από του έτους 1715 και λήγουσα το 1835, vol. 1, Athens: Kastorchis. Hasluck, F.W. (1929), Christianity and Islam under the Sultans, vol. 2, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hatzopoulos, M. (2005), ‘“Ancient prophecies, modern predictions”: myths and symbols of Greek nationalism’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London. Kamilaris, R.N. (1897), Γρηγορίου Κωνσταντά: Βιογραφία – Λόγοι – Επιστολαί, μετά περιγραφής των Μιλέων και της Σχολής αυτών, Athens: Konstantinidis. Kariotoglou, A. (1982), ‘Η περί του Ισλάμ και της πτώσεως αυτού «Ελληνική Χρησμολογική Γραμματεία»: από των αρχών του 16ου μέχρι και του τέλους του 18ου αιώνα’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Athens. Kasomoulis, N. (1939), Ενθυμήματα στρατιωτικά της Επαναστάσεως των Ελλήνων, 1821–1833, vol. 1, Athens. Kitromilides, P.M. (1990), ‘“Imagined communities” and the origins of the National Question in the Balkans’, in M. Blinkhorn and T. Veremis (eds), Modern Greece: Nationalism and Nationality, Athens: ELIAMEP. Kitromilides, P.M. (1996), Νεοελληνικός Διαφωτισμός: οι πολιτικές και κοινωνικές

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ιδέες, Athens: MIET [Cultural Foundation of the National Bank]. Komninos-Ypsilantis, A. (1870), Τα μετά την Άλωσιν (1453–1787), Constantinople: Vretos. Koumanoudis, S.A. (1990), Ημερολόγιον 1845–1867, ed. A.P. Matthaiou, Athens: Ikaros. Kyriakidis, E. (1892), Ιστορία του σύγχρονου ελληνισμού από της ιδρύσεως του Βασιλείου της Ελλάδος μέχρι των ημερών μας, vol. 2, Athens: Inglessis. Kyriakou, K. (1995), Οι ιστορημένοι χρησμοί του Λέοντος ΣΤ ́ , του Σοφού: χειρόγραφη παράδοση και εκδόσεις κατά τους 15–19 αιώνες, Athens: Syllogos pros Diadosin Ofelimon Vivlion. Laios, G. (1958), Ανέκδοτες επιστολές και έγγραφα του 1821, ιστορικά δοκουμέντα από τα αυστριακά αρχεία, Athens: Difros. Makriyannis (1966), The memoirs of General Makriyannis 1797–1864, [abridged] trans. H.A. Lidderdale, London: Oxford University Press. Makriyannis (n.d. [11907]), Μακρυγιάννη απομνημονεύματα, Athens: Karavias. Mango, C. (1984), ‘The legend of Leo the Wise’, no. XVI, in C. Mango, Byzantium and its Image, London: Variorum. Metallinos, G. (1985), ‘Χρησμολογικές απηχήσεις στα Οράματα και θάματα του Στρατηγού Μακρυγιάννη’, Theodromos 4: 169–221. Palamas, K. (n.d.), Άπαντα, vol. 1, Athens: Biris-Govostis. Pamboukis, Ch. (1843), Λόγος επιτάφιος εις το Μνημόσυνον του αειμνήστου Δημητρίου του Υψηλάντου, Nauplion: Tombras and Ioannidis. Panagiotopoulos, V. (2003), ‘Η Φιλική Εταιρεία: οργανωτικές προϋποθέσεις της Εθνικής Επανάστασης’, in V. Panagiotopoulos (ed.), Ιστορία του Νέου Ελληνισμού 1770-2000, vol. 3, Athens: Ellinika Grammata, 9–32. Philemon, I. (1834), Δοκίμιον ιστορικόν περί της Φιλικής Εταιρείας, Nauplion: Kondaxis and Loulakis. Politis, A. (1969), ‘Η προσγραφόμενη στον Ρήγα πρώτη έκδοση του Αγαθάγγελου: το μόνο γνωστό αντίτυπο’, O Eranistis 42: 173–92. Politis, N.G. (1904), Μελέται περί του βίου και της γλώσσης του ελληνικού λαού: Παραδόσεις, vol. 2, Athens: Sakellariou. Psilakis, V. (1909), Ιστορία των επαναστάσεων της Κρήτης, Chania: Nea Erevna. Saripolos, N.I. (1890), Τα μετά θάνατον δημοσιευμένα, Athens: Papageorgiou. Sathas, C.N. (ed.) (1872), Μεσαιωνική βιβλιοθήκη, vol. 3, Venice: Chronos. Sklavenitis, T.E. (1978), ‘Χρησμολογικό εικονογραφημένο μονόφυλλο των αρχών του 18ου αιώνα’, Mnimon 7: 46–59. Smith, A.D. (2000), ‘The “sacred” dimension of nationalism’, Millennium 29: 791–814. Smith, A.D. (2003), Chosen peoples: sacred sources of national identity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sphyroeras, V. (1984), ‘Σημειώσεις από την ανάγνωση των Οραμάτων του Μακρυγιάννη’, Diavazo 101: 74–7. Trelawny, E.J. (1941 [11858]), Recollections of the last days of Shelley and Byron, London: Milford. Trikoupis, S. (1853), Ιστορία της Ελληνικής Επαναστάσεως, vol. 1, London: Taylor and Francis. Turner, C.J.G. (1968), ‘An oracular interpretation attributed to Gennadius Scholarius’, Ellinika 21: 40–7.



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7 Revisiting religion and nationalism in nineteenth-century Greece Effi Gazi In the early twenty-first century, Orthodoxy is still considered to be the keystone of Greek national identity. This is the outcome of a long and complex process in which national and religious components have been linked. The emergence of Greek nationalism and the formation of Greek national identity have been much discussed. Yet the linkage between nationalism and religion and the ways in which a particular religion becomes associated with a particular nationality have not yet been resolved by scholarly debate. A major reason for this has been the lack of a general theoretical framework or systematic discussion focusing specifically on the relation of nationalism to religion in the modern Greek context (cf. Mavrogordatos 2003, 117). Clearly, new analytical perspectives are needed. In general, nationalism has tended to be defined in the social sciences as a modern, secular ideology that replaced the religious systems found in pre-modern, traditional societies. In this context, the terms ‘religion’ and ‘nationalism’ figure in a conventional distinction between tradition and modernity: inevitably, the one is replaced by the other in an evolutionary process. Assumptions of this kind are currently being reconsidered. In his recent work Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity, Anthony Smith critically discusses the three main positions that have undermined the relation of religion to nationalism: the ‘secular replacement’ theory according to which a secular, revolutionary nationalism progressively replaced religion in the modern epoch; the ‘neo-traditional’ theory according to which religion persisted as a traditional phenomenon in modernity and was instrumentalized by nationalism; and the ‘political religion’ theory that finds in nationalism many of the features of traditional religions, such as symbols, liturgies, rituals, and messianic fervour (Smith 2003, 13). Moreover, Smith draws attention to Benedict Anderson’s argument according to which nationalism emerged from, and in opposition to, older civilizations based on religious scriptures that it subsequently displaced. Smith points out that the concept of displacement is not the same as a straightforward ‘religious replacement’ thesis (Smith 2003, 14). On the contrary, From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. 95

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it accepts the crucial and long-standing influence of religion on nations and nationalism. No matter how secular – or rather, secularizing – nationalisms may be, they retain a number of religious features in a variety of combinations. They have their own sacred texts and prophets, their own faith and sacrifice, rituals and ceremonies, their own particular perceptions of community, history, and destiny (Smith 2003, 14, 31). This analytical perspective is not a retreat to the pre-modern: on the contrary, it is an effort to bring together and to bind the multiple elements that contribute to the making of the modern national state and of the modern national subject. In this chapter, I build upon these approaches, focusing on recent historical scholarship on religion and nationalism in Greece, in order to discuss its particular themes and topics, evaluate its central interpretive schemas, and note its desiderata for future study. I refer mostly to postwar and post-dictatorship historical scholarship, which is based on extensive research on nationalism, and much less on religion. I have opted to discuss themes and topics rather than particular authors and works, mainly because I wish to focus on the issues I consider to be still unresolved and worthy of debate. My main purpose is to engage critically with the perspectives of a growing and rich field of historical scholarship on Greek nationalism and religion as a phenomenon throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Broadly, I identify three main issues: the Enlightenment, the impact of Protestantism, and the multifaceted nature of Orthodoxy. The ‘Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment’: a secular phenomenon? The study of Enlightenment ideas in Greek-speaking contexts is strongly linked to the name of K.Th. Dimaras (1917–1990), the leading figure in a related project and the initiator of a research field that has become known, since 1945, as the ‘Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment’ (Dimaras 1977; Tambaki 2001, 210). The core of this research primarily involved works of socio-cultural and intellectual history that focused on the diffusion of secular ideas in the Greek-speaking world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and connected this diffusion, correctly, with the rise of modern Greek nationalism. The Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment is generally considered to have played an important role in the revival of interest in ancient Greece and in the gradual detachment of educated individuals and groups from religious values and practices. A commitment to ancient Hellenism, a desire to emulate the ancients, a turn to democratic ideals, and a strong anticlericalism constitute its primary features. The strong resistance of the Patriarchate of Constantinople to these initiatives is viewed in relevant historiography as further evidence of the clash between religious and secular ideas that provided the ground for the development of nationalism. At first sight, modern Greek nationalism indeed owes much to the revival of ancient Hellenism. For many Greek intellectuals at the time, ancient Greece held more by way of inspiration and example than the Orthodox tradition in both political and intellectual terms (Dimaras 1977, 53–5, 58–60).



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Hence, the entire process is more complex than a binary opposition between religious and secular values suggests. In fact, this is only a partial reading of the roots of Greek nationalism. To my mind, this reading derives from the central scope of this particular historical research. In its early stages, the postwar study of the Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment adopted a very critical stance towards established nationalistic perspectives which saw Orthodoxy and the Church as the guardians of the Greek nation and which perpetuated perceptions of an ideal link between religious and national identity. In an attempt to distance itself from the official version of national history, as well as from institutionalized post-civilwar interpretations of ‘Helleno-Christian Civilization’, this approach focused on the history of the secular, not of the religious, phenomenon. As a consequence, it prioritized secular phenomena while at the same time successfully challenging nationalistic views on the politics of the Church (Iliou 1994, 31–9; Noutsos 2005, 319–20). Gradually, a different angle provided access to a different view. Firstly, the reappropriation and relocation of Enlightenment ideas in religious and ecclesiastical contexts cannot be excluded. As Homi Bhabha has argued, modernity itself and its problematic boundaries are enacted in the ambivalent temporalities of the nationspace. The latter is not constructed through polarities and pluralities but mainly through the jarring of meanings, through the articulation of cultural formations determined by constant processes of negotiation, reinscription, and reinterpretation of concepts, ideas, and symbolic systems that circulate in various settings (Bhabha 1995, 25, 31–9, 139–46, 162–4). The process of ‘translating’ the Enlightenment into the social and cultural context of the Ottoman Empire necessarily involved the Church and clerical intellectuals. In fact, a close reading of Dimaras reveals his own interest in what he identifies as the Church’s ‘religious humanism’, before the diffusion of new ideas came to threaten its authority (Dimaras 1977, 145–70). Dimaras’s ‘religious humanism’ is most probably an analytical category reflecting his own early religious commitment (Apostolopoulos 1994, 71–7). It is, however, important to stress that the interweaving of religious and secular ideas surfaced in Dimaras’s interpretive scheme. Along these lines, other scholars primarily interested in the history of secularization have discussed the complexity of the rivalries that surrounded the Enlightenment and have revealed overlapping communities of interpretation that were not exclusively limited to the Church (Iliou 1986). Clergymen such as Evgenios Voulgaris, Iosipos Moisiodax, and Daniel Philippidis represented an Orthodox perspective on the Enlightenment that redeployed ecclesiastical tradition (Gazi 2004, 122–3) and developed an eclectic interest in new intellectual and political conceptualizations.1 The late eighteenth century, in particular, saw the emergence of new forms of political thinking. In this context, the prospect of Russian intervention to liberate the Orthodox subjects of the Ottomans enabled the reinterpretation of religiously 1   See Dimaras 1977, 31, 147; Kitromilides 1985, 46–60; Makrides 2001; Wolff 2001; Kalaitzidis 2007, esp. 82–106.

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based eschatological prophecies and their re-conceptualization within the secular setting. Prophecies such as Agathangelos, which foresaw the removal of the Ottoman yoke, became linked to the political thinking that promoted ‘Enlightened despotism’ (Kitromilides 1996, 169–222; Rotzokos 2007, 27–38, 219–86). The analytical trend that aims to re-examine the features of the Neohellenic Enlightenment is not blind to the clash that ensued between scholars seeking new perspectives and the Church. There were many examples of confrontation, censorship, control, and persecution throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that are revealing of the church authorities’ efforts to control the circulation of ‘new ideas’. Any analysis should be sensitive to the varieties of such conflicts and aware of the multifaceted complexity of the Enlightenment in the particular context of late Ottoman society. Nor indeed can the Enlightenment itself be viewed as being completely immune to religion. The complex relation of the Enlightenment to religious perceptions and its multidimensional engagement with Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, the pagan tradition, and indeed Orthodoxy merits attention (Wolff 2001, 211–12). ‘Religion’ was not necessarily rejected but in many cases seen as ripe for reform and modernization. This tendency allowed for a rapprochement defined primarily by eclecticism (Kondylis 2000, 89–94). A considerable amount of intellectual effort was put into ‘finding ways to reconcile reason and faith, innovation with tradition, and individual freedom of thought with authority’ (Israel 2005, 99). Indeed, we should not underestimate the impact of Deism, as well as of Protestant perspectives promoting the ideal of a reformed and self-conscious Christianity, on the works, for instance, of Korais (Frazee 1969, 102–3; Iliou 1976, 40–5; Kitromilides 1996, 423; Clogg 1996, 65–84). Along these lines, the study of the Enlightenment as a monolithic secular phenomenon that represented the cornerstone of Greek nationalism is open to challenge. Beneath the benign image of the ‘Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment’ lies a complex intellectual and cultural process of adaptation, reappropriation, negotiation, and coexistence deserving of further exploration. The impact of Protestantism Greek historiography on nationalism has to date shown a strong interest in the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas and has predominantly linked those ideas to the formation of national ideology. Vital aspects of Greek nationalism are indeed connected to the Enlightenment. Yet contact with the West was not confined to the Enlightenment. The flow of Enlightenment ideas was followed in the nineteenth century by an important flow of Protestant values and practices through missionary channels. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, and the London Missionary Society were the dominant missionary organizations active in the region. Their history offers a valuable opportunity to explore the trends of a transnational and global history that stands at the heart of the American conception of ‘world mission’. There is a plethora of studies focusing on the rivalry between the missionaries on



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the one hand, and the Patriarchate or the autocephalous Greek Church on the other (such as Karmiris 1937 and Mamoni 1980–1). This analysis however, underestimates the fact that, at least in the early stages of Protestant missionary work up to the 1830s, the Patriarchate remained rather flexible towards missionaries, thanks to their shared hostility towards Catholics. The doctrine ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ prevailed in Patriarchal circles. Moreover, as Richard Clogg has convincingly argued, initial tolerance also resulted from the fact that the Patriarchate was alarmed over the diffusion of revolutionary literature, largely of French inspiration, among the Orthodox flock and sought ways to reduce its influence (Clogg 1968, 158). Hilarion of Mount Sinai, the overseer of the Patriarchal Press, allowed Protestant tracts to be printed there during the years 1818–1820 while at the same time keeping up a bitter controversy with Greek intellectuals who favoured secular ideas and fought against church authoritarianism (Clogg 1968, esp. 153–5, 163; Iliou 1988). After the formation of the independent Greek state, Protestant initiatives were seen as an opportunity to develop education (Thanailaki 2005, 48–100). Up to the 1830s, the missionaries’ educational activities, particularly those concentrated on the education of girls, were if anything welcome.2 This initial tolerance allowed for the diffusion of Protestant practices among the Orthodox flock. In recent studies on missionaries in the eastern Mediterranean, the relationship between Protestant practices and the rise of nationalism is well portrayed. Missionaries focused on the translation of the Gospel into the vernacular, education (including female education), and the circulation of printed material. Their contribution to the gradual reinforcement of a more ‘secular’ version of religious beliefs, strongly related to the image of a reformed and ‘enlightened’ individual, left room for the diffusion of nationalism and middle-class values and practices (Augustinos 1986, 133, 140; Nasioutzik 2002, 184–90). Furthermore, the establishment of a state and a national autocephalous church in Greece in 1833 is not irrelevant to Protestant affiliations. Part of the scholarship on ecclesiastical issues in Greece insists that the autocephalous church was the product of the politics of Georg Ludwig von Maurer, a Protestant and Regent for the young King Otto (for example, Papadopoulos 1920). The situation of both the Catholic and Protestant churches in Bavaria, which were dominated by the secular power, was his model (Papadopoulos 1920, 104–7; Frazee 1969, 106, 115). Yet the foundations of the autocephalous church had been laid during the years of the Revolution when the Church had made moves to separate itself from the Patriarchate (Frazee 1969, 123; Troianos-Dimakopoulou 1999, 11–15). This process crystallized in the first years of the independent state with the initiatives of clerics with Protestant tendencies such as Theoklitos Farmakidis and Misail Apostolidis (Frazee 1969, 103). This process has led certain commentators, in particular those of the Neo-Orthodox perspective, to denounce the gradual 2   See Ziogou-Karastergiou 1986, 58–65; Fournaraki 1987, 17–20; Polemis 1972–3, 16, 21; Metallinos 1977, 74–80, 293–6.

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Protestantization of the Greek version of formal (national) Orthodoxy. According to them, the autocephalous church is the direct product of Protestant influences, as is demonstrated by its dependence on the state or by its relation to secular ideologies such as nationalism (Metallinos 1983, 16). For the Neo-Orthodox, the return to an authentic Orthodoxy, beyond the structures of the national church or its religious organizations, is necessary (Yannaras 1999, 262–302). This interpretive trend is reductive to the extent that it presupposes there is such a thing as a homogeneous and intact Orthodoxy, which in turn presupposes a complete exit from history. As a state church, however, the Orthodox Church of Greece has much in common with Protestant state churches. Arising from a rejection of the supranational authority of the Pope, Protestantism was not merely compatible with, but actually inseparable from, incipient nationalism in many cases, England being a prime example. It served as the ‘midwife’ of nationalism and promoted the conception of a state church, imposed by secular authority (Mavrogordatos 2003a, 119). Furthermore, as a powerful agent of socialization, the state church in Greece came to play an essential role in national education (Papadaki 1997). This argument does not imply in any way that Protestantism imposed itself on Orthodoxy; it merely shows how adaptable the latter could be, especially in the nineteenth century. There is definitely a long history of rivalry and controversy, which did not cease with the coming of nationalism (Hering 1995). During the 1830s and 1850s in Greece, secular and Enlightenment ideas were eclipsed in a climate of Orthodox fervour (Dimaras 1985, 391–410; Kitromilides 1991, 64–5). Besides, the Church developed an increasingly hostile attitude towards the so-called loutherokalvinoi [Lutheran–Calvinists] (Metallinos 1977, 292–3). It established anti-heresy and anti-proselytism departments to neutralize Protestant influence, while the Holy Synod circulated encyclicals condemning the missionaries’ publications (Karmiris 1937, 287–8). Civil laws were passed outlawing proselytism, the violation of which was punishable by fines, imprisonment, or both. Significantly, the law punished only those turning against the ‘prevailing religion’. One might be punished, for instance, if one encouraged an Orthodox to convert to Protestantism but not vice versa. As a result, missionary schools closed down (Hillia 1842) and the American missionary Jonas King was put on trial for proselytism (1845–1852) (Thanailaki 2005, 142–60, 100–10). Such tensions were the result of various factors, including the perceived need for a stricter definition of Orthodoxy, as well as Russian pressure and the priorities of Greek domestic and foreign policy. Moreover, this process reflected initiatives taken by the Patriarchate of Constantinople at the same time. Indeed, the Spiritual Central Committee of the Church (Ekklisiastiki Pnevmatiki Kentriki Epitropi), founded in 1836, had as its primary aim the control of missionary activities (Mamoni 1980–1, 182). These policies against the missionaries provide further evidence of the gradual distancing of the Patriarchal and the Greek Church authorities from the missionaries. Although this fact definitely rules out the possibility that there was a process of Protestantization, it does not necessarily mean that Protestant



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morals and practices failed to penetrate and to be creatively adapted to Orthodox contexts. Ironically, by the time the missionaries departed the country, sections of Greek Orthodoxy had absorbed and relocated certain Protestant particularities. For instance, piety, moral individualism, or the use of the vernacular for the improvement of faith had penetrated into certain Orthodox contexts. In this context, it seems that the missionaries were sincere when they insisted that conversion was not their primary aim. In fact, proselytism had a particular meaning in their discourse as it was not intended to result in individuals turning to Protestantism, but rather in a reforming tendency within Orthodoxy itself. In some cases, they viewed Orthodoxy as a form of paganism, but more often as a ‘petrified Christian mummy’ in need of modernization and reform. Instead of a deliberate programme to convert Christians to Christianity, they aimed to cultivate an inner momentum that would transform ‘nominal’ into ‘enlightened’ Christians. In some cases, they made a significant contribution to the development of bourgeois culture, primarily among Anatolian Greeks (Augustinos 1986, 140) and they promoted strong ties with the USA, the ‘land of newborn Christians’ (Iatrides 2002, 51). Long after the departure of the missionaries, religious organizations such as Anaplasis and the Zoë Brotherhood of Theologians were safeguarding an Orthodoxy that had developed through creative dialogue with Protestantism. The Church, on the other hand, was deeply ambivalent about such groups, distancing itself without entirely cutting itself off from them. The turbulence in their relations was enriched by wider forms of political and cultural critique within mainstream Orthodoxy. Facets of Orthodoxy Greek national historiography throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century has contributed strongly to the creation of an image of Orthodoxy as a homogeneous entity standing at the centre of national identity. Many studies on theology, on the other hand, view tradition as the cornerstone of Orthodoxy. Yet, just as national identity itself is constantly in process, Orthodoxy and its meanings have changed over time, while a variety of practices are the product of changing socio-cultural and political moments. ‘Culture wars’ within Orthodoxy call for a reconsideration of its borderlands. Moreover, the impression of immutable traditionalism usually associated with Orthodoxy risks obscuring two important phenomena: first, a Western perception of Orthodoxy as ‘Eastern’ and ‘stagnant’, informed by Orientalist assumptions (Wolff 2001, 131–6), and secondly, the doctrinal flexibility of ‘official’ Orthodoxy in practice. The fact is that, since the foundation of the independent state almost two centuries ago, the Church has been prepared to compromise with the state on a whole range of issues, except on the issue of the separation of church and state (Mavrogordatos 2003a, 125). In a recent study, Paraskevas Matalas discusses what he calls the ‘two Orthodoxies of modern Greece’ (Matalas 2003, 45–84). In that context, he analyses how the establishment of the autocephalous church provoked a strong dispute between two

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groups, each defending what it saw as its own Orthodox tradition. On the one hand, Theoklitos Farmakidis insisted on the formation of a state church that would be independent of the Patriarchate. In his view of Orthodox tradition, the Church had been constantly bound to the state, and independence from the Patriarchate of Constantinople would contribute to the crystallization of the Greek state’s Orthodoxy (Frazee 1969, 188). Konstantinos Oikonomos, on the other hand, believed Orthodoxy was an ecumenical entity in Greek hands. As a consequence, any disengagement from the Patriarchate was not only unnecessary but endangered national identity itself. In the course of the nineteenth century, these two versions of Orthodoxy were transformed and redeployed in various ways depending upon a variety of factors (such as Patriarchal recognition of the autocephalous Greek Church in 1850, the Crimean War, the Bulgarian Exarchate), yet variants and varieties also surfaced. Several popular uprisings took place primarily in the Peloponnese (including Mani, Pylos, Argos) during the first half of the nineteenth century. Central to all was protest against the formation of an autocephalous church and against state initiatives to close down a number of monasteries. Economic difficulties due to bad harvests, as well as the resistance of local communities to state bureaucracy, evidently played an important role in provoking these uprisings. However, popular protest was articulated primarily in religious terms. Under the influence of Russian interests and the policies of the Philorthodox Society (1839), popular protest focused on threats against Orthodoxy coming from the state and the official church (Aroni-Tsichli 1989, 51–179). The events that surrounded the preaching of the monk Christophoros Papoulakos in the late 1840s and early 1850s are particularly revealing of the impact of ‘religious critique’. Papoulakos started visiting several regions in the Peloponnese in 1847. Before he was arrested by state military forces in 1852, he exercised a tremendous influence on agrarian populations. His preaching constituted an attempt to grasp the genuine and authentic meaning of Orthodoxy but also a form of cultural and political critique. He turned against ‘immorality’, the inadequacy of the official Church and the ‘dangerous’ activities of Papists and Protestants. His prophecies of future catastrophes became linked to the coming 400th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople. His preaching not only functioned as an Orthodox critique against the Orthodox Church of Greece itself, attacking its ‘subordination to a Catholic king’; it also appealed to a popular nationalism that was based on the sense of superiority of Orthodox Greeks over Muslim Ottomans and Catholic ‘Franks’ (Aroni-Tsichli 1989, 284–310). In a similar manner, the teaching of Apostolos Makrakis gained a large number of followers in the 1860s. Makrakis (1831–1905) and his followers sought a new meaning of Orthodoxy, outside the jurisdiction of official state and church authorities. Combined with elements of social critique and protest, along with visions of the Great Idea, Makrakis’s teaching soon evolved in a variety of directions, ranging from straightforward religious nationalism to Christian socialism articulated in the newspaper Armageddon. It became influential mainly in the Peloponnese under the



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impact of the stafidiko (crisis in currant production) (Kalafatis 1993). Makrakis’s teaching and activities provided the matrix for most religious organizations offering alternative versions of Orthodox collectivities, including Anaplasis at the end of the nineteenth century and Zoë in the early twentieth (Brang 1997, esp. 313–27). The prompt reaction of the Church against these individuals and groups was not only related to its attempts to safeguard its position as the official guardian of a national religion. It also emphasized that varieties of Orthodoxy did not go unnoticed; in fact, they attracted committed adherents. Moreover, the ambivalence of the Church underlies the political instrumentalization of religion throughout the nineteenth century. By the end of that century, Orthodoxy was to be redeployed in the service of conservative and, later, anti-communist ideas. Indeed, religion stood at the centre of conservative politics and provided central elements in the ideological and symbolic order of the Greek Right (Makrides 2003; Bournazos 2003, esp. 55–6). It is also necessary to point out that debates about Orthodoxy and its national relevance were not limited to Orthodox Christian Greeks. Throughout the nineteenth century, the question of the ‘national religion’ also involved nonChristians, such as Jews and (to a lesser extent in that period) Muslims. While Jewish communities could be found in several locations in the early national state, religious anti-Semitism played its own subsidiary role in the segmentation of Greek national identity and politics. The Greek War of Independence (1821–1828) was based on both secular perspectives and religious rivalries. Religion was the only fixed line of demarcation, in full conformity with the pre-existing Ottoman system of religiously defined millets. It was a war of Christians against Muslims, while the Jews of the Peloponnese, regarded as the tacit allies of the Muslims, experienced the violence of the war (Pierron 2004, 28–32; Margaritis 2005, 30–3). The issue exploded after the incorporation into the Greek state of the Ionian Islands (1864). The islands, having been successively under Ottoman, Venetian, French, Russian, and British dominion over a period of centuries, had a population with a distinct cultural identity that did not entirely correspond to the developments in nation-building that had taken place in mainland Greece. The inclusion of the islands in the national state recast social and political relations among the local populations. The ‘blood libel’ events against the Jews of Corfu, Zakynthos, and Lefkada started when a young girl, initially considered to be Christian (and later proved to be Jewish), was found murdered in 1891. Her death was attributed to the Jews. Popular agitation resulted in riots that involved deaths, injury, and destruction of property among the Jewish population. These events not only revealed the power of religious and economic anti-Semitism (Gekas 2004, esp. 185–91); they challenged the assumed unity of all Greeks as they gave rise to a tense debate about the very nature of Greekness. In an attempt to placate foreign opinion, the Greek ambassador in London, John Gennadius, published an article in the English newspaper Daily News. He blamed the Ionians for their anti-Semitism, which he attributed to Venetian influence, while also claiming that ‘proper’ Orthodox Greeks

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(that is, the Greeks of the mainland) were free of such prejudice. The result was a fierce response from the Corfiot politician and intellectual, Iakovos Polylas. He not only passionately supported the Ionians’ patriotism and religious commitment, but also claimed that the rivalries between Christians and Jews in the islands had emerged after their incorporation into the national state and were a result of party politics. Moreover, Polylas proudly asserted that even mainland Greek Orthodoxy was not free of anti-Jewish sentiment (Liata 2006, 66–70). The multifaceted nature of Orthodoxy underlines the location of religion in changing socio-political contexts and how this affects its functions as well its own changing nature. It also provides evidence for the existence of a network of relations encompassing dominant and non-dominant versions of Orthodoxy, as well as other religions in the territory of the Greek state. At the beginning of this chapter, I raised the question of the theoretical implications of a study of nationalism concerned with religious factors. I also proposed the use of the concept of displacement rather than replacement in the study of the complex relation of nationalism to religion. My analysis of Greek nationalism has attempted to show the advantages of such an approach. This analysis draws upon the perspectives developed by important historical research in recent decades on the different aspects of Greek nationalism. Such perspectives have contributed to a better understanding of the convoluted relationships among religion, national ideology, and national identity. By treating religious symbolism as the key building block of emerging national identities and state-building processes (cf. Skopetea 1988, 120, 122), the study of religion is relocated in history. References Apostolopoulos, D. (1994), ‘Οι πηγές της έμπνευσης ενός ερμηνευτικού σχήματος: ο «θρησκευτικός ουμανισμός»’, in Επιστημονική συνάντηση στη μνήμη του Κ.Θ. Δημαρά, Athens: Institute for Neohellenic Research (INR/NHRF), 71–7. Aroni-Tsichli, K. (1989), Αγροτικές εξεγέρσεις στην Παλιά Ελλάδα (1833–1881), Athens: Papazissis. Augustinos, G. (1986), ‘“Enlightened” Christians and the “oriental” Churches: Protestant missions to the Greeks in Asia Minor, 1820–1860’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 4/2: 129–42. Bhabha, H. (1995), The location of culture, London: Routledge. Bournazos, S. (2003), ‘Το ελληνικό αντικομμουνιστικό έντυπο (1925–1967): μια πρώτη προσέγγιση’, Archeiotaxio 5: 52–63. Brang, L. (1997), Το μέλλον του ελληνισμού στον ιδεολογικό κόσμο του Απόστολου Μακράκη, Athens: Armos. Burleigh, M. (2006 [12005]), Earthly powers: religion and politics in Europe from the Enlightenment to the Great War, London: Harper Perennial. Clogg, R. (1968), ‘Some Protestant tracts printed at the Press of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople: 1818–1820’, Eastern Churches Review 2/2: 152–64.



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Clogg, R. (1996), ‘The correspondence of Adhamantios Korais with the British and Foreign Bible Society (1808)’, in R. Clogg, Anatolica. Studies in the Greek East in the 18th and 19th Century, Aldershot: Variorum, 65–84. Dimaras, K.Th. (1977), Νεοελληνικός Διαφωτισμός, Athens: Ermis. Fournaraki, E. (1987), Εκπαίδευση και αγωγή των κοριτσιών. Ελληνικοί προβληματισμοί (1830–1910). Ένα ανθολόγιο, Athens: Istoriko Archeio Ellinikis Neolaias [Historical Archive of Greek Youth]. Frazee, C.M. (1996), The Orthodox Church and independent Greece, 1821–1852, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Gazi, E. (2004), O δεύτερος βίος των Τριών Ιεραρχών. Μια γενεαλογία του «ελληνοχριστιανικού πολιτισμού», Athens: Nefeli. Gekas, S. (2004), ‘The Port Jews of Corfu and the “Blood Libel” of 1891: a tale of many centuries and of one event’, Jewish Culture and History 7/1–2: 172–96. Hering, G. (1995), ‘Orthodoxie und Protestantismus’, in Gesammelte Schriften zur südosteuropäischen Geschichte, ed. M.A. Stassinopoulou, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 73– 130. Iliou, P. (ed.) (1976), Σταμάτης Πέτρου. Γράμματα από το Άμστερνταμ, Athens: Ermis. Iliou, P. (1986), Κοινωνικοί αγώνες και Διαφωτισμός. Η περίπτωση της Σμύρνης (1819), Athens: Mnimon. Iliou, P. (1988), Τύφλωσον Κύριε τον Λαόν Σου. Οι προεπαναστατικές κρίσεις και ο Νικόλαος Πίκκολος, Athens: Poreia. Iliou, P. (1994), ‘Οι ασέβειες του ιστορικού’, in Επιστημονική συνάντηση στη μνήμη του Κ.Θ. Δημαρά, Athens: Institute for Neohellenic Research (INR/NHRF), 31–9. Israel, J. (2005), Europe and the radical Enlightenment. A typology of modernity’s intellectual and cultural roots. C.Th. Dimaras Annual Lecture, 2004, Athens: Institute for Neohellenic Research (INR/NHRF). Kalafatis, T. (1993), ‘Θρησκευτικότητα και κοινωνική διαμαρτυρία’, Istorika 18–19: 113–42. Kalaitzidis, P. (2007), ‘Ορθοδοξία και Διαφωτισμός – Το ζήτημα της ανεξιθρησκίας’, in P. Kalaitzidis and N. Dodos (eds), Ορθοδοξία και νεωτερικότητα, Athens: Indiktos, 79–165. Karmiris, I. (1937), Ορθοδοξία και Προτεσταντισμός, Athens. Kitromilides, P.M. (1985), Ιώσηπος Μοισιόδαξ. Οι συντεταγμένες της βαλκανικής σκέψης τον 18ο αιώνα, Athens: MIET [Cultural Foundation of the National Bank]. Kitromilides, P.M. (1991), ‘Ιδεολογικά ρεύματα και πολιτικά αιτήματα’, in G.B. Dertilis and K. Kostis (eds), Θέματα νεοελληνικής ιστορίας (18ος-20ος αιώνας), Athens: Sakkoulas, 59–70. Kitromilides, P.M. (1996), Nεοελληνικός Διαφωτισμός, Athens: MIET [Cultural Foundation of the National Bank]. Kondylis, P. (2000), Ο Νεοελληνικός Διαφωτισμός. Οι φιλοσοφικές ιδέες, Athens: Themelio. Liata, E. (2006), Η Κέρκυρα και η Ζάκυνθος στον κυκλώνα του αντισημιτισμού. Η «συκοφαντία για το αίμα» του 1891, Athens: Institute for Neohellenic Research (INR/ NHRF). Makrides, V. (2001), ‘Ορθόδοξη Εκκλησία και Διαφωτισμός στη Νεότερη Ελλάδα’, Istor 12: 157–88.

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Makrides, V. (2003), ‘Orthodoxy in the service of anticommunism: the religious organization Zoë during the Greek Civil War’, in P. Carabott and T. Sfikas (eds), The Greek Civil War. Essays on a Conflict of Exceptionalism and Silences, Aldershot: Ashgate, 159–73. Mamoni, K. (1980-1), ‘Αγώνες του Οικουμενικού Πατριαρχείου κατά των Μισιονάριων’, Mnimosyni 8: 179–212. Margaritis, G. (2005), Ανεπιθύμητοι συμπατριώτες. Στοιχεία για την καταστροφή των μειονοτήτων της Ελλάδας, Athens: Vivliorama. Matalas, P. (2003), Έθνος και Ορθοδοξία. Οι περιπέτειες μιας σχέσης. Από το «ελλαδικό» στο «βουλγαρικό» σχίσμα, Heraklion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis [Crete University Press]. Mavrogordatos, G. (2003), ‘Orthodoxy and nationalism in the Greek case’, West European Politics 26/1: 117–36. Metallinos, G. (1977), Το ζήτημα της μεταφράσεως της Αγίας Γραφής εις την Νεοελληνικήν κατά τον 19ο αιώνα, Athens. Metallinos, G. (1983), Ελλαδικού Αυτοκεφάλου παραλειπόμενα. Μελέτη ιστορικοφιλολογική, Athens. Nasioutzik, P. (2002), Αμερικάνικα οράματα στη Σμύρνη τον 19ο αιώνα. Η συνάντηση της αγγλοσαξωνικής σκέψης με την ελληνική, Athens: Estia. Noutsos, P. (2005), Νεοελληνικός Διαφωτισμός. Τα όρια της διακινδύνευσης, Athens: Ellinika Grammata. Papadaki, L. (1997), ‘Η γερμανική προτεσταντική προπαγάνδα στην καθ᾽ ημάς Ανατολή: μία «μυστική εγκύκλιος» της ιεραποστολικής Εταιρείας του Ρήνου και οι κοινοτικές έριδες στις Σέρρες (1870–1874)’, Istor 10: 35–87. Papadopoulos, C. (1920), Ιστορία της Εκκλησίας της Ελλάδος. Ίδρυσις και οργάνωσις της Αυτοκεφάλου Εκκλησίας της Ελλάδος, vol. 1, Athens: Petrakos. Pierron, B. (2004), Εβραίοι και χριστιανοί στη Νεότερη Ελλάδα. Ιστορία των διακοινοτικών σχέσεων από το 1821 έως το 1945, Athens: Polis. Polemis, D. (1972-3), ‘Άγνωστα μονόφυλλα των εν Σύρω Μισσιοναρίων και Ειδήσεις περί του Φιλελληνικού Παιδαγωγείου’, O Eranistis 10: 14–22. Rotzokos, N. (2007), Εθναφύπνιση και εθνογένεση. Ορλωφικά και ελληνική ιστοριογραφία, Athens: Vivliorama. Skopetea, E. (1988), Το «Πρότυπο Βασίλειο» και η Μεγάλη Ιδέα. Όψεις του εθνικού προβλήματος στην Ελλάδα (1830–1880), Athens: Polytypo.

Smith, A.D. (2003), Chosen peoples. Sacred sources of national identity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tambaki, A. (2001), ‘Περί Νεοελληνικού Διαφωτισμού’, Istor 12: 207–14. Thanailaki, P. (2005), Αμερική και Προτεσταντισμός. Η «Ευαγγελική Αυτοκρατορία» και οι οραματισμοί των Αμερικανών μισιονάριων για την Ελλάδα το 19ο αιώνα, Athens: Kastaniotis. Troianos, S. and Dimakopoulou, C. (1999), Εκκλησία και Πολιτεία. Οι σχέσεις τους κατά τον 19ο αιώνα, Athens: Sakkoulas. Wolff, L. (2001), The Enlightenment and the Orthodox world, Athens: Institute for Neohellenic Research (INR/NHRF). Yannaras, Ch. (1999), Ορθοδοξία και Δύση στη Νεώτερη Ελλάδα, Athens: Domos. Ziogou-Karastergiou, S. (1986), Η Μέση Eκπαίδευση των κοριτσιών στην Ελλάδα (1830– 1893), Athens: Istoriko Archeio Ellinikis Neolaias [Historical Archive of Greek Youth].

Part IV defining identity (2): insiders vs outsiders

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8 The notion of nation: the emergence of a national ideal in the narratives of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ Greeks in the nineteenth century Yanna Delivoria It is a commonplace to say that in the nineteenth century the Greek national ideal of restoring the Greek nation as a political entity is by definition multifaceted. This is due to the existence of competing institutional, financial, or intellectual tendencies: military leaders, local authorities, newcomers from Europe or the Ottoman Empire, clergy, intellectuals.1 However, in this case, we shall not examine the concept of the nation in its historical and theoretical parameters, but in the national rhetoric of four individuals who witnessed the major event of modern Greek history, that is the Revolution of 1821, either from the standpoint of an ‘inside Greek’ (autochthon), as in the cases of Makriyannis and Chryssanthopoulos, better known as ‘Fotakos’, or from that of an ‘outside Greek’ (heterochthon), as in the cases of Kasomoulis and Tertsetis; ‘outside Greek’ is used here as a term for those whose land of origin was not included in the Greek state of 1832. The notion of nation as seen in these texts written in the mid-nineteenth century – that is, after the establishment of the Greek state – is a starting point for evaluating the disparity between the heroic past of the national struggle and the present state of frustrated expectations. During the second half of the nineteenth century, there can be detected a general feeling of transition from the ‘heroic we’ of the struggle for independence to the ‘petty we’ (ψωροημείς) of the minuscule Greek state. On the one hand, the national rhetoric of the Great Idea becomes dominant, with the expansion of national frontiers, the liberation of Christian populations in the Ottoman empire, the making of Greece as a ‘model kingdom’ in the East; on the other, the success of the national struggle is strongly questioned, as the new political entity of the state has failed to solve crucial social conflicts. Thus, one can see that the national ideal in the texts of Makriyannis, Fotakos, Kasomoulis, and Tertsetis is closely related to certain well-known issues of the era, such as: national coherence in time and space, meaning in practice the unbroken continuity 1

  See the ‘Introduction’ to Svoronos 2004, 16, by S. Asdrachas.

From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. 109

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from ancient to modern Greeks; the thorny relation of ‘inside’ Greeks to ‘outside’ Greeks and Europeans; the role of the state in the dispensing of justice for the veterans of the Revolution, often characterized as a conflict between ‘patriots’ and ‘anti-patriots’; and the ‘glorious destiny’ of the Greek nation, which is expected to rise from its ashes like a phoenix and fulfil its cultural and political role as a ‘model kingdom’ in the East and, eventually, in the whole world.2 Meanwhile, as three of the texts in question are autobiographical, we have to keep in mind the peculiarities of the genre, which is a hybrid between history and fiction.3 I refer to the memoirs of Makriyannis, Fotakos (Chryssanthopoulos), and Kasomoulis. On the one hand, autobiography is a record of a ‘lived reality’, as it refers to a real person, who lived in a specific and verifiable time and place; indeed the presentation of evidence is something quite commonly found in these autobiographical texts. On the other hand, the autobiographical ‘I’ is quite different from the objectivity of the third person used in historiography. The autobiographer is at the same moment observer and observed. The fact that he has to produce a written version of his life, highlighting certain events while understating or omitting others, thus creating a plot, is already the first step along the path that leads to fiction. In the case of the memoirs written by those who fought in the War of Independence, the autobiographical venture is clearly historically oriented, and does not always follow the author’s curriculum vitae. The writers of memoirs are motivated either by the urge to justify publicly their actions or ideas, something that is often linked with self-praise or vindication, or by their sense of moral obligation to leave a testimony for later generations, in order to enhance the national consciousness – an enterprise which may seem more objective than that of apologia, but has nevertheless strong subjective nuances.4 As we shall see, the rhetoric of the texts to be discussed rests equally on their pretensions to history and on the tropes of fiction. Makriyannis Yannis Makriyannis (1798–1864) is perhaps the most famous writer of Memoirs of the Revolution; this fame, of course, as has been argued by Giannoulopoulos (2003), is partly due to the literary qualities of the text itself and partly to the ‘mythology’ ascribed to the figure of Makriyannis by critics such as Vlachoyannis, the first editor of the manuscript, and the poet George Seferis, who saw in the ‘rough-hewn’ writing of Makriyannis the authentic ‘Greek soul’. The memoirs cover a period of approximately fifty years, from 1798 to 1851, involving the author’s youth as an orphan in Roumeli, where he managed to become a successful tradesman, and his manhood, as a leading member in the army 2   These issues are discussed in detail by Skopetea 1988, as well as by Tsaousis 1983a, Veremis 1983, Politis 1998, Petropoulos 1982. 3   See also chapter 18 by Michalis Chryssanthopoulos in the present volume. 4   For the motives of autobiographical writing, see May 1979, 40–8.



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of the Revolution and an active political agent in the Greek state. One thing that can be said with certainty is that Makriyannis’s writing is impassioned: as K.Th. Dimaras (2000, 334) succinctly remarked, ‘Makriyannis does not narrate, does not describe – he fights.’ Due to this ‘high emotional temperature’ of the text, the memoirs of Makriyannis can hardly be used as a reliable source of historiography; their literary qualities, however, are indisputable, for the author’s narrative includes an astonishing variety of expressive means: dramatization, embedded secondary narratives, frequent alternations of direct and indirect speech, as well as interpolation of dreams, proverbs, songs, and anecdotes from the folklore tradition. Meanwhile, being a polemicist, Makriyannis applies several rhetorical means to his narrative as well. One of these is the illusion of oral speech, which brings the author to the same ontological level with the reader: the narrator often uses the second person either to address his readers or to accuse his enemies, or even to invoke the ultimate judge, God Almighty. Another is the captatio benevolentiae: the narrator in the prologue acknowledges his difficulties in writing, and apologizes to his readers for his shortcomings. Then again, the narrator presents his own ‘ethos’, distinguished by bravery, honesty, fairness, and distinguishes sharply between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters. As a result, the reader feels compelled to identify with the good ones, including the hero himself. Finally, the narrator frequently has recourse to the use of evidence, such as letters, official records, and extracts from the press, to support his own claims. There are two main ideas, closely linked together, in the memoirs of Makriyannis: salvation of the homeland (πατρίδα) and the imperative of justice. The first refers to the constant dangers that threaten the nation: at first it was the Turks, then the warring parties in the civil war, among them in particular Kolokotronis, now the incompetent or venal politicians of the Greek state, most of them ‘outside’ Greeks who are seen as ‘foreigners’, such as Mavrokordatos, Kolettis, and Metaxas. It is worth mentioning at this point that Makriyannis uses the same vocabulary to characterize the Turks and his personal opponents, thus equating the national enemy with the ‘internal’ one.5 The second main idea in Makriyannis’s narrative refers to the situation of those who, like Makriyannis himself, had given everything they had for the national cause of the Revolution, and received nothing in return from the governments of the Greek state. This persistent demand for justice indicates the awkward situation of the former combatants at this period: after the establishment of the Greek state, the new political formations did not allow the veterans of the Revolution to play a leading role upon the public stage. Moreover, the dissolution of the National Army and its replacement by Bavarian mercenary troops left most of them unemployed, with no official recognition for their services to the nation, and in some cases literally starving (Fenerli-Panayiotopoulou 1977, 31). In this context, we often come across the stereotype of the ‘hateful foreigner’. On the one hand, the narrator praises the ‘true patriots’, the fighters of the Revolution 5

  For the strongly antagonistic political worldview of Makriyannis, see also Kitromilides 1984, 47.

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who stand for the triptych ‘homeland–religion–virtue’ and to whom the nation ‘owes great favours’, and, on the other hand, he accuses the ‘outside’ Greeks, who were mainly either Phanariots or from the Ionian Islands, and the foreigners of the Bavarian Regency or embassies of other countries, of being pernicious to the nation. These groups stand accused of importing such ‘outlandish’ habits as discord, selfinterest, and foreign intervention not only into politics, but even into the social realm, with their preferred forms of theatre, music, and liberal manners. In this way the purity of Greek society has become ‘infected’, and held back from its ‘normal development’ (Makriyannis 2003, 338–43, 380–1, 388–90). No wonder, then, that Makriyannis was in favour of the resolution of 1843 for excluding ‘outside’ Greeks from public service.6 As for the narrator’s attitude towards Europe, we can detect signs of ambivalence: Europe is the gaze of the Other, the enlightened West, observing and evaluating the ‘coming of age’ of the Greek nation; the Greeks must ‘behave themselves’ in order to gain the respect of the civilized European nations and prove their difference from the ‘barbarian’ Turks (Makriyannis 2003, 202, 212, 262–3). Meanwhile, the Greeks are seen as historically superior to the Europeans, as lenders of a cultural treasure: hence the notion of ‘ungrateful Europe’, who borrowed from ancient Greece the Enlightenment and the values indispensable for its development, and now not only refuses to repay its debts, but also gives ill service to the newly born Greek state.7 Another interesting element in Makriyannis’s rhetoric is the distinction between the nation and the state.8 Patrida (homeland) is perhaps the commonest word in his text, and, of course, it does not refer only to a piece of land, but rather to an ideal. This homeland is presented as feminine and motherly in nature, fragile and vulnerable, the receiver of absolute devotion and unquestionable love: she nurtures her children with moral values such as virtue, honesty, faith in God, and when she is in danger, as she often is, she expects her children to save her in return. The state, on the other hand, is – or should be – fatherly, the guarantor of justice: it should impose fair laws on its citizens, reward those who do good, and punish those who do evil. However, in Makriyannis’s narrative, the Greek state seems to fail in its fatherly role and becomes a Saturn, a father unable to recognize his own flesh and blood, for the state persecutes the fighters of the Revolution and rewards the enemies of the nation who seek its division in order to serve foreign masters. There is a pattern of expectation and frustration in the way the narrator describes his relation to 6   For the details of the resolution of 1843 and Makriyannis’s stance at the national assemblies, see Dimakis 1991, 33, 43, 80, 82, and chapter 9 by Socrates Petmezas in the present volume. 7   ‘The Europeans, who are their pupils [that is, pupils of the Ancient Greeks] reward us, their descendants, with lessons of meanness and decadence – such is their virtue, such is the wisdom they give us’ (Makriyannis 2003, 339; see also 414). For the ambivalent attitude of the Greeks towards Europe, see Tsaousis 1983a, 21–3. 8   For a detailed study on Makriyannis’s concept of patriotism and the semantics of patrida, see Holton 1984–5, esp. pp. 149–60.



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successive heads of state: Kapodistrias and King Otto. Both of them were expected to be ‘Fathers of the Nation’, guaranteeing its order and prosperity, and both of them turned out to be ‘tyrants’, in Makriyannis’s words, for they failed to dispense justice to their subjects.9 We could say, in conclusion, that Makriyannis’s declared motive is to tell a story that will teach the next generations the true meaning of patriotism; the latent motive, however, is vindication: by narrating the story of his life through the prism of national history, Makriyannis sets up an imaginary court, in order to defend himself and attack his opponents, before a jury that consists of contemporary and – most importantly – of future readers. Thus he awaits the ultimate praise from history itself, to atone for the pettiness of his era. Fotakos (Fotios Chryssanthopoulos) Fotakos, as he was usually known in his lifetime (1798–1878), was a Peloponnesian fighter in the Revolution and is chiefly remembered as Kolokotronis’s adjutant. What makes his narrative particularly interesting is the fact that the author wishes to present himself more as historian than autobiographer. In fact, the author’s prologue may be seen as a brief essay on historiography: history, he says, is by definition a mosaic that consists of heterogeneous pieces of information; thus no historian can ever claim to have a concrete and clear image of the past.10 Beyond his lack of immediate experience of the facts, according to Fotakos, a further difficulty faced by the historian is that he may be taken in by the testimony of witnesses, as these are not always reliable for reasons of self-justification or selfindulgence. Moreover, educated historians do not really ‘listen’ to the witnesses, because they are already biased by their own readings: ‘their heads are full of ideas, speeches and acts of the great and educated ancient men, such as Themistocles, Epaminondas, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, and others’.11 As Fotakos points out, the same impossibility of ‘truth’ applies to autobiographical ventures: no man can ever claim that he remembers everything he has experienced in the past, for his memory deceives him – and we could add here, not only his weak memory, but 9   As Petropoulos points out (1982, 20–1), in that first period of political organization of the Greek state, there was a strong tendency to political absolutism among the lower classes, for they always expected the ideal of justice to come in the form of a god-sent leader, such as Ypsilantis, Kolokotronis, or Kapodistrias. 10   Chryssanthopoulos 1974, 1.ιθʹ–λαʹ, and in particular κγʹ–λαʹ. The first edition of Fotakos’s memoirs in 1858 contains the events of the Revolution from 1821 to 1822, whereas the posthumous edition of 1899 covers a longer period from 1821 to 1828. 11   In the same context, the narrator gives us a vivid metaphor to describe the way the biased intellectuals misuse the narratives of former fighters as a ‘source of lived history’: they throw a bucket full of water into a well, and when they draw it back to the surface it is difficult to say what kind of water the bucket contains, the water it had before or the water of the well (Chryssanthopoulos 1974, 1.κηʹ). Of course, these insinuations against duped intellectuals have a very specific target, Spyridon Trikoupis and his History of the Greek Revolution (1853–7), which Fotakos attempts to correct at several points in his own narrative.

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also his strong desire to remember the past in a certain way (Chryssanthopoulos 1974, 1.vii). Fotakos nevertheless makes a conscientious effort to write history in a ‘scientific’ way: he consistently uses evidence to support his version of ‘true’ history, with reference to letters, official documents, decrees, even folk songs related to the battles he mentions in his narrative. He emphasizes, however, that this evidence may be useless or incomprehensible to historians who cannot perceive their situational context: for example, a letter written on the battlefield might contain false information because the writer wanted to deceive the enemy; a certificate of honour does not always prove the bravery of the recipient, but the government’s attempt to buy this person’s devotion. Speaking in J.L. Austin’s terms, we could argue that the historian must be able to see the perlocutionary act in such documents, not only the locutionary. As for Fotakos’s concepts of national consciousness, we again find the familiar distinction between ‘patriots’ and ‘anti-patriots’. Despite the fact that the author tries to give an impartial account of the Revolution, evaluating the contribution of all the social groups involved, including the military, priests, local authorities, and tradesmen, he shows, on the other hand, an evident hostility towards prokritoi (local magnates) and Phanariots. The first group is accused of having been reluctant to join the national struggle for independence for fear of losing the privileges they held under Ottoman rule. The second group consists of ‘outside’ Greeks, depicted as deceitful interlopers.12 Initially, the ‘inside’ Greeks, the Peloponnesians in Fotakos’s view, in their innocence and good faith welcomed everybody into the national entity, as long as they shared the same religion. However, the presence of Phanariots on the political scene had fatal results, for these people introduced a system of intrigues and manipulations, undermining the rightful leaders of the nation, such as Kolokotronis (Chryssanthopoulos 1974, 1.205–6, 461–4). For example, the narrator uses the image of a hedgehog to describe the way Mavrokordatos, an eminent Phanariot, established himself in the headquarters of the Revolution: He came to Trikorfa, in order to observe things closely; and, to sneak in, he imitated the ruse of the hedgehog, who, as they say, lowers the needles of his skin and becomes very thin in order to enter his nest; and as soon as he is in, he swells and becomes a tangle of needles, and leaves no room for anything else in his nest (Chryssanthopoulos 1974, 1.205).

Closely connected with this dichotomy of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ Greeks is the contrast between the heroism of the national struggle and the corrupt entity of the state, which in Fotakos’s narrative becomes a distinction between an idyllic past and an unsatisfactory present. Back then – that is, before and during the Revolution – people were primitive, naive, and superstitious, as is illustrated in the incident where the troop of Maniats believe that someone has cast a spell on them, or the 12   According to Rotzokos (1997, 31), the stereotype of the ‘Phanariot intriguer’, who introduces new political manners, is common in the writings of this period and has been readily reproduced in the discourse of later historiography.



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lengthy description of divination practices; but at the same time they were pure, disinterested, and unselfish (Chryssanthopoulos 1974, 1.122, 161–4). Now, in the narrator’s time, people are no longer superstitious, but as a result they have lost their faith in God, as well as a sense of honour in their political and social relations. Society has become permissive; young people adopt foreign fashions deleterious to the future of the nation.13 The Greeks have lost their national consciousness (εθνισμός) and their faith, he concludes, because they adopted the social manners and the political scheming of the ‘outside’ Greeks. Thus the national ideal is identified with simple people, the fighters of the Revolution, who sacrificed themselves in the name of freedom and the Christian religion. To prove the ‘mythical’ quality of these men, the narrator mentions several incidents where soldiers literally died of ‘shame’ when their leader, Kolokotronis, scolded them (Chryssanthopoulos 1974, 1.285). These people respected, admired, or even worshipped the leaders of the army, such as Ypsilantis and Kolokotronis, the ‘pure national heart’, often described as a messiah (Chryssanthopoulos 1974, 1.324, 330). In view of all this, we could argue that Fotakos’s point of view is quite different from that of Makriyannis, since his narrative is organized as an objective historical argument, with no intention of personal vindication. On the level of narrative, of course, there is a typical autobiographical split, as the writing subject is both the narrator and the hero of the story; but here the narrator, aspiring to historiography, rarely adopts the first person in narrative, and Fotakos the hero rarely appears on stage. The action is centred on the character of Kolokotronis, whom the narrator unreservedly admires; thus the genre of the text often tends towards biography, if not hagiography, rather than autobiography. So in Fotakos’s ‘legal case’, Kolokotronis occupies the same place that Makriyannis had in his own narrative, being the benevolent hero of the Revolution; the patriot par excellence; the strategic genius; the fluent orator, often using parables, like Christ, so as to make himself understood by simple-minded people; the caring father to his soldiers; the protector of civilians; the impartial judge. The difference between the two texts is that Makriyannis was both the narrator and the hero, the defence and the defendant, whereas Fotakos assumes only the role of narrator and counsel for the defence, in order to correct the errors of written history, here represented by Spyridon Trikoupis and his History of the Greek Revolution, and restore his protagonist, Kolokotronis, to his rightful place in the pantheon of national heroes.14 13   As Tsoukalas points out (1983, 38–9), the invocation of the ‘purity’ of the simple folk, in contrast with ‘corrupt’ urban manners, reveals the fear caused by the rapid transformation of a traditionally rural society into a modern capitalist state (see also Politis 1998, 95–100). 14   It is worth mentioning that the national rhetoric of these texts can actually infect the critics themselves: Vlachoyannis criticized the work of Fotakos for being strongly biased in favour of Kolokotronis; Gritsopoulos, on the other hand, almost seventy years later, defended the value of Fotakos’s memoirs using the same discourse of ‘purity’, ‘honesty’, ‘truthfulness’, and ‘folk spirit’ that Vlachoyannis had used in his own ‘Introduction’ to the Memoirs of Makriyannis (see Gritsopoulos, ‘Introduction’ in Chryssanthopoulos 1974, 1.59–79).

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Nikolaos Kasomoulis The son of a wealthy tradesman of Kozani, a town in western Macedonia, Kasomoulis (1795–1872) was an ‘outside’ Greek, in the sense that he did not come from the centre of the Revolution: the Peloponnese, Roumeli, or the Western Aegean islands. However, he was a leading member of the revolutionary movement in the region of Olympus, and after this movement failed, he became the secretary and confidant of Nikolaos Stornaris, a local leader in Thessaly. Kasomoulis was a fighter, although not a prominent one, a writer, and a man of politics. Thanks to his secretarial position, he participated in several meetings and associated with important figures such Karaiskakis, Mavrokordatos, and Kolettis. His motive in writing his three-volume memoirs is not that of an apologist but rather of an eye-witness. He never praises himself: in fact at some points he depreciates himself as an anti-hero in a heroic context. He confesses, for example, to feeling fear on the battlefield of Missolonghi; he complains of sore feet after a long day’s march. Here too the narrative tends towards historiography: the protagonist often leaves the stage and the narrator uses the first person sparingly. Moreover, Kasomoulis does not address his readers, as Makriyannis often does; for he does not, at least openly, wish to manipulate them into the ‘correct’ interpretation of events. However, the author alternates narration and dramatization, or ‘telling’ and ‘showing’, and tries to embellish his narration by interpolating various figures of speech, proverbs, anecdotes, especially those concerning the siege of Missolonghi – that is, he seeks to make his text pleasant reading, not merely a didactic piece of history. As an ‘outsider’, Kasomoulis sees the Revolution in a somewhat disillusioned light. This becomes evident in his account of the first major victory of the Greek revolutionary army over the Turks, the destruction of Tripolitsa, where he visits the headquarters of the Revolution to ask for support for the movement of Olympus (Kasomoulis 1972, 1.151–3).15 Uninvolved, himself, in the military enterprise, he describes the looting, killing, and humiliation of the Turks in an even-handed way, expressing his pity for the weaker party and his repugnance at the cruelty of the victors. Fotakos, on the other hand, mentioning the same event in his memoirs, justifies the mass killings as ‘fair revenge’ for the long tyranny of the Turks over the Greeks, and the looting as a legal act of self-preservation according to ‘revolutionary law’. This justification, of course, is addressed not only to the reader but to contemporary historians and particularly to those Europeans who had criticized this particular incident of the Greek Revolution (Chryssanthopoulos 1974, 1.250–6). As for the inside–outside distinction, Kasomoulis shares the notion of the disastrous influence of Europeans on local manners, but does not hold them responsible for all evils (Kasomoulis 1972, 1.170). He denounces them, as might 15   It is interesting to notice the disappointment of the young hero when he realizes his ‘outside’ position in the struggle, as the headquarters in Tripolitsa seems unaware of the existence of the Olympus movement, or even of Olympus itself (Kasomoulis 1972, 1.154).



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be expected, for their policy of intervention, but he does so in terms of political ethics. Even in extreme cases, such as the massacre of the unarmed population by French troops in Argos in November 1832, the cruelty is stigmatized, but is not seen as an opportunity for generalized condemnation. Kasomoulis is a pragmatist. Unlike Makriyannis and Fotakos, he does not expect a godlike leader to save the nation; neither does he see his homeland in feminine, motherly terms. In fact, being a ‘conservative’, as Vlachoyannis calls him in the introduction to his Memoirs, the only mother Kasomoulis acknowledges is the central government (Kasomoulis 1972, 1.xviii; 301). When the narrator describes the public reception accorded, respectively, to Kapodistrias and King Otto, we can see that he does not share the messianic expectations of the Greek people, for he underlines the extravagance of these manifestations. Moreover, he refers to the projects of the Philiki Etaireia as a well-meaning but deceptive utopia, which excited the people, but did not have the means to realize its promises. No wonder then that the figure of speech most used by the narrator is irony, to express his disillusionment, bitterness, or frustrated idealism. In these terms, the organization of Kasomoulis’s narrative invites comparison with that of a Bildungsroman: the hero is a young idealist who begins his journey in life by organizing a revolutionary movement; indeed, a significant part of the first volume is reminiscent of a travel journal. Then, when this venture has failed, he discovers little by little the workings of war and politics from the inside, coming to understand the competitive attitudes of politicians and military commanders, and to recognize the sordid backstage of the heroic enterprise. In the end, the hero becomes integrated into society: Kasomoulis became a member of the national army, as many of the fighters of the Revolution did not. This is only implied in the narrative, however: in the historically oriented memoirs of Kasomoulis, the leading role does not belong to the writing subject, but to the nation itself. The closing event of the memoirs is the arrival of King Otto, which marks a new beginning in national history. Georgios Tertsetis Poet, jurist, and scholar, Tertsetis (1800–1874) is best known as the judge who refused to sign Kolokotronis’s death sentence in 1833. He was born in Zante and studied law in Italy, where he was greatly influenced by the ideas of European liberalism; bilingual in Italian and Greek, he also wrote under the name of Giorgio Terzetti. Tertsetis never wrote his own memoirs, but as a scholar he persistently urged the former fighters of the Revolution, such as Kolokotronis, Nikitaras, and Fotakos, to write theirs, or if they were illiterate, to dictate them. Tertsetis was fascinated by the heroic spirit of the Revolution, as he experienced the fervour of the national struggle through the fighters who often sought refuge in the Ionian Islands (see Konomos 1959, 5–7; Bouchard 1970, 22–6). A characteristic example of his eagerness to adopt the ‘heroic spirit’ of the Revolution is his brief involvement in the national army, among the troops of Ypsilantis in Roumeli in

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1828, as described vividly by Valetas, who draws this piece of information from the Historical Recollections of Nikolaos Dragoumis (1993, 1.129–30): In Mytikas and in Dragamesto he takes up arms and wears a foustanella, he shaves his head, and he assimilates himself, both physically and mentally, to the battlehardened fighters. He feels in him the pride of the warrior, the ευδόκιμον αλκήν [renowned vigour] mentioned by Aeschylus. He did not want to show that he was an intellectual, and when they discovered his identity, [General] Church employed him as his secretary and as ‘counsel of the military court’ to defend the fighters who misbehaved (Valetas in Tertsetis 1954, 1.17).

This fascination with the heroic spirit led Tertsetis gradually to a parallelism between ancient and modern Greeks, and to a historical concept of the nation. He sees the fighters of the Revolution in legendary dimensions and describes their deeds as the logical continuation of the ancient glory of Marathon and Thermopylae. In his patriotic speeches and political articles, he seems to believe firmly in the superiority of the Greek nation compared to others, and therefore in its historical role as ‘model kingdom’, destined by Divine Providence to fulfil a unique destiny.16 The term ‘Greek’, though, does not bear a racial but a moral meaning for Tertsetis: ‘Greekness’ is synonymous with ‘virtue’. That is, the modern Greeks can call themselves descendants of the ancient Greeks not because they share the same blood, but because they share the same bravery and passion for freedom: O Greeks! We are blessed to have such a name! For it has been proven […] that Freedom is the mother and father of Greek people and magnanimity is their tireless companion; […] one does not have to be born Greek to bear the glory of a Greek mantle; one becomes Greek by his own virtue. 17 These allusions to the classical spirit, however, do not stop him from attacking the purists who tend to underestimate the folk culture, insisting on the cult of antiquity: for Tertsetis, a devoted admirer of Solomos, national identity is inextricably linked to the folk spirit and the demotic language spoken by the people of his time (Tertsetis 1954, 2.367–8; Konomos 1959, 81–7). Seeking the ‘root of evil’ that hinders the nation from fulfilling its destiny, Tertsetis blames the politicians, in particular Mavrokordatos and Kolettis, for the lamentable condition of the Greek state. He accuses them of lacking patriotism, which, according to Tertsetis, is a quality inherent in the ‘Greek Man’. Aristotle, Socrates, Alexander the Great, Demosthenes, are all considered to have had the special qualities of the ‘Greek Man’; even Napoleon is considered Greek in that sense, but ‘Europe has infected him’, as Tertsetis argues, probably referring to the influence of European absolutism on the former democratic credentials of the 16   Tertsetis 1954, 2.141, 280, 376. As is argued by Bouchard (1970, 79–81, 118–20), Tertsetis found the theoretical basis for these arguments in the teachings of Giambattista Vico and his follower Pellegrino Rossi, whose classes he attended at the University of Paris between 1838 and 1840. 17   ‘Λόγος στο στρατόπεδο του Μύτικα’ (1828) in Konomos 1959, 25; ‘Ομιλία περί του αοιδίμου Γρηγορίου’ (1853) in Tertsetis 1954, 3.370; see also Bouchard 1970, 59.



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French emperor (Tertsetis 1954, 2.356). Europe, however, is seen not as a threat, but as the trustee of the ancient legacy; therefore the author incites the youth of Greece to compete with the civilized European nations, for, in Tertsetis’s words, Europe is willing to help the young nation take its legitimate place in history: Young people of Greece, you have to compete in virtue with the civilized nations of Europe. Europe has received you, has embraced you nowadays, like a man of sensitivity who welcomes the children, the orphaned grandchildren of a great old benefactor. […] Think of the glory that this prong of Greek land can attain, and along with it all the neighbouring Christian nations, as long as you do not lose the place destined for you by fate, or to be more precise, by the hand of God Himself (Tertsetis 1954, 2.375–6). Devoted to romantic idealism, Tertsetis is obviously a peculiar case of an ‘outside’ Greek. Despite the fact that he was not directly involved in the events of the Revolution, he identifies himself with the heroic ideals of the former fighters: virtue, purity, bravery, self-sacrifice. It is exactly this identification with the folk spirit of the Revolution that explains Tertsetis’s stance towards the resolution of 1843, which excluded ‘outside’ Greeks from public service: although he is himself an ‘outsider’ (a Catholic from the Ionian Islands), he considers himself a patriot beyond any doubt, and therefore declares in favour of the exclusion. He has then to make a transposition to justify his choice: he argues that the ‘outside’ Greeks represent the linguistic ‘purism’ of the establishment (λογιωτατοκρατία), thus identifying the ‘national’ enemy with his own ideological enemy (Tertsetis 1954, 2.388). Therefore, in Tertsetis’s writings the term ‘autochthonism’ (αυτοχθονισμός) has neither political nor geographical but cultural implications, for he understands the term to mean love for one’s nation, tradition, and living language, and proposes ‘autochthonism’ as a cure for the plague of the purist tendency manifest in the Language Question (Tertsetis 1954, 2.366). Considering Tertsetis’s national rhetoric as a value system, one could argue that at several points it parallels that of the veteran fighters, such as Makriyannis. There is, however, a significant difference, as Tertsetis’s rhetoric does not aspire to vindication, but to compensation: conceiving history in terms of rise and fall, he can see the national ideal only in terms of climactic development, and therefore counterbalances the sense of decay of the present state with the hope of a glorious national future.18

Conclusion The narratives of these four writers of the nineteenth century are strongly connected with national history and, as they bear the ideological weight of promoting the

18   This pattern, as Tertsetis conceives of it, is as follows: Greek antiquity (peak), Byzantium– Turkish domination (decline), Revolution and Independence (peak), Absolute Monarchy (decline), Constitutional Monarchy (hope for a new peak) (Tertsetis 1954, 2.342–78).

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‘correct’ version of history to be shared with the reader, they apply various tropes to entice him, thus uniting history with literature and rhetoric. The ‘inside’/‘outside’ distinction is crucial in all these writings. This is especially true of ‘inside’ Greeks like Makriyannis and Fotakos, who see ‘foreigners’ as usurpers of power, for it relates to an important social and political question of this period: who is to blame for the present state of affairs? Of course, the author’s stance in each case is affected by the degree of his personal involvement in events. Makriyannis writes a polemic, for he speaks in ‘the name of the nation’, considering himself to a significant degree responsible for the achievement of national independence. By contrast, Kasomoulis writes a more or less dispassionate testimony, assigning to himself a peripheral position in the national struggle. Fotakos cannot escape the fact that he has lived the events of the Revolution through the eyes of Kolokotronis, while Tertsetis, a scholar, echoes the arguments of the former fighters for reasons of romantic idealism. What is intriguing in these texts is the function of writing itself, which equalizes, smoothes out, and organizes the contradictions of memory into a meaningful narrative.19 Standing at the crossroads of history, that is, between ‘not any more’ (the fading heroic past) and ‘not yet’ (the fulfilment of national aspirations), these writers turn to the past to give their version of events, and at the same time transform this already fading and amorphous past into a coherent plot, in the hope that, once the ‘truth’ is told and all debts are settled, the future can only bring their national ideal closer to realization.

References Abbott, P. (1988), ‘Autobiography, autography, fiction: groundwork for a taxonomy of textual categories’, New Literary History 19/3: 597–615. Bouchard, J. (1970), Γεώργιος Τερτσέτης. Βιογραφική και φιλολογική μελέτη (1800– 1843), Athens. Chryssanthopoulos, F. (‘Fotakos’) (1974 [11858, 1899]), Απομνημονεύματα περί της Ελληνικής Επαναστάσεως 1821–1828 (2 vols), introduction by T. Gritsopoulos, Athens: Etaireia Peloponnisiakon Spoudon. Chryssanthopoulos, M. (1998), ‘Ρευστή ταυτότητα και εσωτερική ετερότητα: έξω και μέσα Έλληνες στον ύστερο δέκατο ένατο αιώνα’, Gramma 6: 31–60. Dimakis, I. (1991), Η πολιτειακή μεταβολή του 1843 και το ζήτημα των αυτοχθόνων και των ετεροχθόνων, Athens: Themelio. Dimaras, K.Th. (2000 [11948]), ‘Απομνημονεύματα’, in K. Dimaras, Ιστορία της νεοελληνικής λογοτεχνίας. Από τις πρώτες ρίζες ως την εποχή μας, 9th ed., Athens: Gnosi, 325–48. Dragoumis, N. (1993 [11874]), Ιστορικαί αναμνήσεις (2 vols), introduction by A. Angelou, Athens: Ermis. 19   For the ratification of one’s past through the act of writing, see Mandel 1980, 63–6, and Eakin 1992, chapters 1–2.



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Eakin, P.J. (1992), Touching the world. Reference in autobiography, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fenerli-Panayiotopoulou, A. (1977), ‘Οι αγωνιστές και τα απομνημονεύματά τους’, O Politis 10: 31–40. Giannoulopoulos, G. (2003), Διαβάζοντας τον Μακρυγιάννη. Η κατασκευή ενός μύθου από τον Βλαχογιάννη, τον Θεοτοκά, τον Σεφέρη και τον Λορεντζάτο, Athens: Polis. Gusdorf, G. (1980), ‘Conditions and limits of autobiography’, in J. Olney (ed.), Autobiography. Essays theoretical and critical, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 28–48. Holton, D. (1984-5), ‘Ethnic identity and patriotic idealism in the writings of General Makriyannis’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 9: 133–60. Kasomoulis, N. (1972 [11939–41]), Ενθυμήματα στρατιωτικά της Επαναστάσεως των Ελλήνων 1821–1833 (3 vols), introduction by I. Vlachoyannis, Athens: Kosmadakis. Kitromilides, P.M. (1984), ‘Η πολιτική στάση του Μακρυγιάννη. Η σημασία της μαρτυρίας του έργου Οράματα και Θάματα’, Diavazo 101: 46–9. Konomos, D. (1959), Γεώργιος Τερτσέτης, ανέκδοτα κείμενα, Athens: Syllogos Ofelimon Vivlion. Kournoutos, G.P. (1959), Introduction, in Απομνημόνευμα (1453–1953), Vasiki Vivliothiki, vol. 44, Athens: Zacharopoulos, 11–47. Makriyannis, [G.] (2003 [11907]), Απομνημονεύματα, introduction by I. Vlachoyannis, Athens: Gnosi. Mandel, J.B. (1980), ‘Full of life now’, in J. Olney (ed.), Autobiography. Essays theoretical and critical, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 49–72. Marcus, L. (1994), Auto/biographical discourses. Theory, criticism, practice, Manchester: Manchester University Press. May, G. (1979), L’Autobiographie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Petropoulos, I.A. and Koumarianou, A. (1982), Η θεμελίωση του ελληνικού κράτους. Οθωνική περίοδος 1833–1843, Athens: Papazisis. Politis, A. (1998 [11993]), Ρομαντικά χρόνια. Ιδεολογίες και νοοτροπίες στην Ελλάδα του 1830–1880, 2nd ed., Athens: Mnimon. Porter, R. (ed.) (1997), Rewriting the self: histories from the Renaissance to the present, London: Routledge. Rotzokos, N. (1997), Επανάσταση και εμφύλιος στο Εικοσιένα, Athens: Plethron/ Dokimes. Skopetea, E. (1988), Το «Πρότυπο Βασίλειο» και η Μεγάλη Ιδέα: όψεις του εθνικού προβλήματος στην Ελλάδα (1830–1880), Athens: Polytypo. Svoronos, N. (2004), Το ελληνικό έθνος. Γένεση και διαμόρφωση του Νέου Ελληνισμού, introduction by S. Asdrachas, Athens: Polis. Tertsetis, G. (1954), Άπαντα (3 vols), introduction by G. Valetas, Athens: Pigi. Tsaousis, D.G. (1983a), ‘Ελληνισμός και ελληνικότητα. Το πρόβλημα της νεοελληνικής ταυτότητας’, in Tsaousis 1983b, 15–25. Tsaousis, D.G. (ed.) (1983b), Ελληνισμός-ελληνικότητα. Ιδεολογικοί και βιωματικοί άξονες της νεοελληνικής κοινωνίας, Athens: Estia. Tsoukalas, K. (1983), ‘Παράδοση και εκσυγχρονισμός. Μερικά γενικά ερωτήματα’, in Tsaousis 1983b, 37–48. Veremis, T. (1983), ‘Κράτος και έθνος στην Ελλάδα: 1821–1912’, in Tsaousis 1983b, 59–67.

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9 From privileged outcasts to power players: the ‘Romantic’ redefinition of the Hellenic nation in the mid-nineteenth century Socrates D. Petmezas How and why is a new and distinct national historical ‘narration’, structurally different from a previously dominant one, produced, diffused, and consecrated, in such a way as to mobilize adherence and support against competing historical narratives? This is the question addressed in the following pages. I will not analyse in depth the competing political ideologies fighting to impose their authority in the native symbolic system.1 I think that when we observe the multiple converging discourses and historical narrations in nineteenth-century Greece, we can usually classify them under three major ideological matrices. The first was produced by the republican intellectuals of the so-called Greek Enlightenment (1780–1830);2 the second by the group of privileged outcasts I call for convenience ‘Romantics’ (1840–1860); and the third around the turn of the century, by the radical integral nationalists who proposed an exclusivist, organicist, communalist, and languagecentred narration.3 My concern here is to present the first cohesive exposition of this second ideological matrix, as it was mainly set out in a series of books and articles published in reviews and newspapers between the 1830s and the early 1860s, written by a rather small group of writers who shared certain characteristics. The best known of them were Alexandros Rizos Rangavis (Rangabé) (1809–1896), Nikolaos Dragoumis (1809–1875), Markos Renieris (1815–1897), Konstantinos (1815– 1891) and Petros Paparrigopoulos (1817–1891), Georgios Vasiliou (d.1889), 1   The symbolic system is here defined as a system of values, social norms, mental representations, and incorporated non-reflexive predispositions and practices. Ideology is understood as a worldview together with a set of theories related to this worldview. These theories have a normative (moralizing) component that explicitly intends to orient human (individual or collective) activity. 2   For a presentation of the basic elements of the first such ideological matrix, see Petmezas 1999 and, for a summary of some key themes, chapter 7 by Effi Gazi in the present volume. 3   On the integral nationalists, many of them linked to the demoticist movement, see Augustinos 1977; Tziovas 1986, esp. 58–85. See also Petmezas 2007, 228–30.

From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. 123

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Spyridon Zambelios (1815–1881), Panagiotis (1806–1868) and Alexandros Soutsos (1803–1863). I call them ‘Romantics’, not because they held something of a monopoly on Romantic Weltanschauung (or on Romantic literary taste) in Greece, but because they were Romantic both in their literary taste and self-image and in the theoretical conceptualization of their nationalism. At this point a working definition of the ‘Romantic’ variant of nationalism is necessary:

• • • • • •

It conceives of the nation as a collective entity, endowed with inalienable, inimitable, and above all with natural moral attributes. Its very ‘essence’ is unalterable (and thus a-historical) and is endowed with a collective ‘genius’ and with ‘merits’ that are not dependent on the individual achievements of its members. Membership of the nation is a quasi-biological event and is never an option open to the individual. Voluntary dissociation from one’s nation is perceived as high treason even (indeed especially) when no institutional bonds (notably citizenship) unite the particular individual to the nation. Nations as a-historical entities are considered to be the eternal creations of Divine Providence and are usually seen as endowed with a specific historical (and even salvationist) mission. Language or culture is, in most cases, seen as the single most objective evidence of a person’s national identity, irrespective of his formal education or personal consciousness. Language and popular literature are usually transformed into criteria for comparison between individual nations.

The group of individuals that would become the ‘Romantic nationalists’ consisted of young, highly trained, and sophisticated intellectuals and professionals, ‘heterochthons’ – that is to say, born outside the Greek state – who had arrived in independent Greece in the early 1830s. Newcomers and without native political support, their main (and sometimes their only) assets were their formal education, which could be regarded as their distinctive cultural capital; their social position, or accumulated social capital; and their self-image as the rightful élite in sociopolitical or intellectual terms, that is to say, their symbolic capital. However, very few local notables or military chieftains were ready to accept the aristocratic credentials of the group at face value and accord them social precedence because of their university degrees or their distinguished lineage (many were of Phanariot descent). They were thus dependent on their patrons and powerful older relatives in order to secure political support and find lucrative and authoritative positions in the civil service. The contours of their careers had evolved under the patronage of older relatives and patrons close to the pre-1843 centre of power: the monarchical state and its authorities (the regency, high political élite, or the king). A common feature is the fact that their patrons were themselves heterochthons who had fought in the War



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of Independence, supported by the French or the Russian party, and were – with the notable exception of Ioannis Kolettis – in one way or another closely connected either to the pro-monarchical Fusion of Parties [Synchonefsis] movement of 1837 or the notorious Philorthodox Society of 1839 (see Table 1; cf. Petropoulos 1968, 307–9; 329–43; 519–33 and Hering 2004, 1.237–42). Up till 1844, then, the members of this group had been well integrated into Greek intellectual life and had participated in the same publishing activities as the older generation of Enlightenment intellectuals. Their Romanticism at this time perhaps amounted to nothing more than a literary pose.4 Their aptitude and knowledge (that is, their symbolic and cultural capital) made them valuable to the ruling political groups at this key moment of state-building, when the public administration and the institutions of the new society were being formed and power structures remodelled. This entailed a rapid transformation of the way resources of material and symbolic power were distributed among the various competing groups. The central state (the monarchy and the high political élite) aimed to build a European-style ‘modern’ centralized state and an administrative structure penetrating deep into the social body. This entailed the concentration and gradual monopolization of the main instruments of material and symbolic violence, and the expansion and standardization/unification of the financial, juridical, and educational institutions under the aegis and the close scrutiny of the state. This modernizing/Westernizing priority of the new state was fully endorsed by the young heterochthon intellectuals and the political élite, the prime beneficiaries of this process of concentration and redistribution of resources and authority, and grudgingly accepted as unavoidable by the local native power holders (notables, military chieftains, and the higher clergy), whose autonomous political capital, inherited or newly accumulated during the revolutionary war, was gradually being devalued. Grassroots anti-Phanariot and more generally anti-heterochthon feelings were widespread and grew extremely violent, the natives denouncing the incomers as intriguing opportunists, who unduly monopolized income and resources (a topic also explored in chapter 8 above by Yanna Delivoria). During the revolt of September 1843, such feelings were exploited by political leaders and notables heading a powerful coalition of local politicians in the Constitutional Assembly, which disenfranchized the heterochthons by a special Act (Dimakis 1991). Their self-proclaimed ‘autochthon’ competitors (defined as having been born in independent Greece) were certainly unable to match their cultural capital, but could now impose draconian institutional barriers to access to the civil service, positions of authority, and the salaries that went with them. Young and ambitious heterochthon intellectuals were overnight transformed into a numerically small, but important, group of privileged outcasts. These disenchanted clerks could only 4   On Renieris’s early attack on the rationalism and artificiality of the French school of law, an attack inspired by the German historical school of law and its political implications in 1837, see Petmezas 2007, 217–22.

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find employment either in the education system or in the still very narrow private business sector and the liberal professions. As a result, by 1844 the ‘Romantics’, as heterochthons, found themselves harshly excluded both from the status and material benefits of the civil administration and from the emerging political field of representative politics. After the death of Kolettis, in 1847, they and their patrons moved closer to the monarch and his interests, and distanced themselves as far as possible from the official ecclesiastical policy of the state, given the state priority of Westernizing modernization.5 Table 1. Patrons of the ‘Romantics’ Ioannis Kolettis (1773–1847)

Head of government (1844–7), Minister (1833–7) and the leader of the National or ‘French’ party Georgios Glarakis (1789–1855) Minister (1837–9, 1847–9), Senator Iakovos Rizos Neroulos (1778–1842) Minister (1833–7, 1841–3) Georgios Stavros (1785–1869) Governor of the National Bank of Greece (1842–69) Michael Soutsos (1784–1854) Counsellor of State Georgios A. Rallis (1804–1883) University Professor, Minister (1841–3, 1847–49, 1857–60) Nikolaos Renieris (d.1848) Counsellor of State (1836–), Senator (1844–) Konstantinos Schinas (1801–1857) University Professor, Minister (1833–4, 1837–9), Ambassador to Vienna (1854–7) Michael Potlis (1810–1863) University Professor, Minister (1855–6)

These were not the only highly educated heterochthons to be dismissed from the civil service, or to be patronized by powerful politicians who were close to the throne. Their heterochthon liberal adversaries faced the same frustration at being excluded from the civil administration. Some of them (Stefanos Koumanoudis and Nikolaos Saripolos) even shared Kolettis’s patronage or (later) a close relationship to the new monarch, George I. Yet this last group and their older friends and protectors were uncompromising constitutionalists, most of them close to the ‘English’ party and its top politicians, who were very critical towards the main policy principles of the Napist party.6 That is to say, they were fearful of Russia’s Mediterranean policy and, later, its hazy pan-Slavism, and totally immune to the demands of the Orthodox zealots; in spite of their Romantic literary tastes, they 5   On the formation of two variations of national ideology among church hierarchs, cf. Matalas 2002, 39 ff. 6   The ‘Napist’ or pro-Russian party followed a conservative and populist policy, aiming at the installation of a strong centralized Orthodox monarchy. Its followers believed that the interests of Greece and tsarist Russia in the Middle East were converging. The party leadership supported the demand for a constitutional monarchy in 1843, not because of their constitutional beliefs but because they wanted to curb the absolute power of a Catholic monarch, Otto, who was reluctant to share power with them (cf. Hering 2004, 1.220–43).



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remained in general inside the perimeter of the given national narrative of what may be termed the generation influenced by Korais (see Table 2). Table 2. Patrons of the opponents of the ‘Romantics’ Alexander Mavrokordatos (1791– 1865)

Head of government (1844, 1854–5), Minister (1833) and the leader of the liberal Constitutional or ‘English’ party Spyridon Trikoupis (1788–1883) Minister (1833, 1844) and prominent member of the liberal Constitutional or ‘English’ party Theoklitos Pharmakidis (1784– University Professor, Royal Commissioner to the 1860) Holy Synod (1833–40, 1844–50) Stephanos Pillikas (1805–1861) University Professor, Minister (1853–4) Pericles Argyropoulos (1809–1860) University Professor, Minister (1854–5)

Ioannis Kolettis, himself a heterochthon politician, as head of the government and Minister of Educational and Religious Affairs (1845–7), offered employment to some of the unemployed heterochthons and Phanariot scions in the only source of high public authority (and salaries) that was left open to them: the newly founded University of Athens. Others, such as the young and politically ambitious Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, became journalists and published newspapers and pamphlets that intransigently supported Kolettis.7 Pavlos Kalligas and other members of the opposing liberal side also wrote extensively for liberal newspapers such as Athina, Anamorfosi (1843–46) and Karteria (1845–48).8 Later on, in the late 1850s and early 1860s, newspapers were published by both conservatives such as Rangavis (Eunomia, 1862–65) and liberals such as Kalligas (the editor of Elpis from 1862). This was a first round of ferocious symbolic and institutional strife in the University and what we may call the informational space (newspapers, reviews, even literary works, and belles lettres). In the 1844 parliamentary elections, the majority of the thirty university professors voted for Mavrokordatos; Kolettis, his liberal opponent, wanted to change that at any price. The nomination and replacement of university professors were absolutely within the prerogatives of the Minister of Education (until 1887) and Kolettis made extensive and reckless use of this arbitrary power. He dismissed seven professors by ministerial decree and replaced them with others friendly to the government. In total, Kolettis managed to nominate ten new professors of his choice, thus replacing one third of the academic body.9 7   Cf. Dimaras 1986, 125–7. Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, Ioannis Soutsos, and Alexandros Rizos Rangavis wrote for the conservative Aion of Athens, and for Ora and Imera of Trieste. 8   Cf. Masson-Vincourt 1997, 18; Bochotis 2003, 67. Papasliotis also wrote extensively for the liberal Athina, and Saripolos for Kleio, published in Trieste. 9   Tables 3 and 4 have been compiled using the following publications: Dimitriadis 1916; Pentazou 1995; Kimourtzis 2001; Lappas 2005.

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Table 3. The Athens Law School Key to the table: Phanariots in bold, their liberal opponents in italics. Symbols: | succession, ≥ replacement, / nomination as temporary or full professor Giorgos A. Rallis (1837–) Ioannis Soutsos (1837–) Stephanos Pillikas (1837–52) | Pavlos Kalligas (1854–) Gottfried Feder (1837–43) ≥ Petros Stroumbos (1843–47) ≥ Konstantinos Phrearitis (1847–55, 1855–81, 1882–) Vasilis Oikonomidis (1847–) Georgios A. Mavrokordatos (1837/39–57) | Markos Renieris (1857–64) Emil Herzog (1837/39–43) ≥ Pavlos Kalligas (1843–45) ≥ Petros Paparrigopoulos (1845–) Pericles Argyropoulos (1837/1844–60) Stephanos Galatis (1843–44) Nikolaos Saripolos (asst.1846–52) ≥ Diomidis Kyriakou (1852/–62) Michael Potlis (1855–62) Emmanuel Kokkinos (1861–62, 1864–) Nikolaos Saripolos (1862–75)

When Kolettis died, other ministers, such as Glarakis and Rallis, who were closer to the Court, became more influential in the academic world and in Greek politics. They were also much closer to the more hardline members of the clergy and cooperated with the Philorthodox zealots. Some isolated beneficiaries of Kolettis’s patronage were expelled from the University, while Philorthodox student protest movements, loudly promoted by the Napist newspaper Aion, were again used in order to oust liberals like Pylarinos and Manousis (Pentazou 1995). This last effort failed only in extremis, causing Paparrigopoulos considerable frustration (Dimaras 1986, 137). Table 4. Faculties of Letters and Science: Phanariots and their liberal opponents (for symbols, see Table 3) Faculty of Letters Konstantinos Schinas (1837–50) | Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos (1850/1857–) Theodoros Manousis (1837–58) | Georgios Papasliotis (1858/–77) Neophytos Vamvas (1837–54) | Georgios Gennadios (1837–42) | Konstantinos Asopios (1842–) Ludwig Ross (1837–43) ≥ Alexandros Rizos Rangavis (1844–66) Heinrich Ulrich (1837–43) ≥ Stephanos Koumanoudis (1846/1854–) Theoklitos Pharmakidis (1839–43) Ioannis Venthylos (1839–54) | Athanassios Roussopoulos (1855/1860–) Philippos Ioannou (1839–62)



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Eduard Masson (1841–43) ≥ Frangiskos Pylarinos (1843–46) ≥ Nikolaos Kotzias (1846/1856–) Frangiskos Pylarinos (1850/1852–65) Anastasios Gennadios (1862–) Euthymios Kastorchis (1852/–) Dimitrios Mavrophrydis (1861/–66) Dimitrios Vernardakis (1861/–69) Faculty of Sciences Konstantinos Negris (1837–45) Georgios Vouris (1837–55) | Vasilios Lakon (1862/1868–) Xavier Landerer (1837–43) ≥ Alexandros Venizelos (1843–62) Xavier Landerer (1844–69) Kyriakos Domnados (1837–45) ≥ Iraklis Mitsopoulos (1845/1847–) Karl Fraas (1837–42) Dimitrios Stroumbos (1844/1855–) Theodoros Orphanidis (1849/1854– Ioannis Papadakis (1850/1854–)

The Law School was now dominated by the so-called Phanariots (Table 3) and only the Faculty of Letters was still in its majority liberal, thanks to its older professors (Table 4). Other heterochthons, such as Georgios Vasiliou and, later, Markos Renieris, had gradually become integrated into the newly founded (and in spirit truly national) National Bank. After 1850, with the country under strong British pressure, a new political equilibrium was found and prospects for our privileged outcasts, who were still excluded from politics and the highest ranks of the civil administration, looked grim. It is in this context that the leading figures of this small outcast group established two new journals: Pandora from 1850,10 and the Spectateur d’Orient in 1853.11 These were to become the vehicles through which the formulation of a radically new conceptualization of the history of the Greek nation would be promoted. The new crisis of the Eastern Question, related to the Crimean War, gave them an attentive national audience, both among the top echelons of the state and the wider literary public. Thus the disenchanted clerks grasped the opportunity to promote a new political discourse that would gradually come to be accepted as authoritative. Furthermore, this discourse enhanced the 10   Pandora was initially edited by Dragoumis, Rangavis, and Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos. Later, in April 1855, Dragoumis became the sole editor. He passed the editorship to his son, Stephanos, in April 1862, when he was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs. The latter remained as editor throughout the three difficult years following the dethronement of the Wittelsbach dynasty. Finally, Nikolaos Dragoumis took over once again in March 1865. On this, see also Sachinis 1964, 36–40. 11   This review was in French and was edited by Dragoumis, Rangavis, Konstantinos and Petros Paparrigopoulos, Vasiliou, and Ioannis Soutsos. The introductory notices by Paparrigopoulos (1853) and Rangavis (1853) are very important for understanding the political and diplomatic objectives of the publication.

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privileged and dominant position of the monarchy and the Church (the latter less as a hierarchical power structure than as a symbolic marker). Furthermore, the new ideological message propagated by the Romantic group completely altered the way Greek identity and history were conceptualized. Markos Renieris – jurist, philosopher, and historian, and later governor of the National Bank (1869–1890) – was the most prolific and outspoken. He presented the basic structural elements of their (as I believe, shared) philosophical conception. Rangavis and Paparrigopoulos wrote extensively on international developments, and also presented in translation their work on the history of literature and the history of the nation. Ioannis Soutsos, economist and jurist, wrote on economic matters and Petros Paparrigopoulos on the judicial system. Georgios Vasiliou and Nikolaos Dragoumis presented a panorama of the Greek unredeemed populations – and thus promoted a geography of national territorial aspirations – and, as a consequence, produced a new conceptualization of the formation of the Greek nation, fully in accordance with Paparrigopoulos’s culturalist critique of Fallmerayer.12 Finally they began to translate the famous long introduction by Spyridon Zambelios to his 1852 book, Folk Songs of Greece. It is worth noticing that Zambelios, a source of inspiration for both Renieris and Dragoumis, was not a part of this close group. He was a possibly reluctant fellow traveller, who did not share their political beliefs and ambitions.13 In his articles, Renieris (1853, 1853–4) used the same Romantic metaphors, concepts, and arguments that he had used extensively in his earlier book and articles in 1841 and 1842. But now ‘Hellas’ is no longer an integral part of the West in its eternal dialectical confrontation with the Ottoman East. Hellas is now the dialectical synthesis of contending European ideologies (Russia now absorbing the oriental part of the metaphor).14 From this stems the idiosyncratic historical character of Hellenism and its particular providential mission: the creation of a new Christian civilization and a resolution to the Eastern Question.15 The Hellenic nation is seen as having quintessential attributes expressed in various characteristics, such as its legislation (Roman law), its customs, and mores. A clear dissociation between, on the one hand, natural, spontaneous, popular, collective, and distinctive institutions and, on the other hand, foreign, imported, voluntarist, artificial, and individualistic institutions, pretending to a false and treacherous universality of application, is clear in the way Renieris and 12

  On Paparrigopoulos’s early thought, see chapter 4 by Ioannis Koubourlis in the present volume.   Renieris, in introducing Zambelios’s article, clearly states that the latter was not a member of the group (see Zambelios 1854, 356). 14   Cf. Renieris 1853, 48: ‘C’est que la partie orientale et la partie occidentale sont immortelles en Grèce; c’est que Dieu même a écrit sur le front de la race grecque: tu seras le cœur du monde, tu seras le lien éternel entre l’Orient et l’Occident.’ 15   Cf. Renieris (1841, ιγʹ): ‘behind the political Eastern Question, there lies the philosophical Eastern Question, and Greece is destined to solve both questions [όπισθεν του πολιτικού ζητήματος της 13

Ανατολής υπάρχει το φιλοσοφικόν της Ανατολής ζήτημα· και η Ελλάς ειναι προωρισμένη να λύση και το έν και το άλλο]’ (my emphasis).



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his fellow Romantics, such as Dragoumis and Vasiliou, approach the institutions of contemporary Greece. This ideologically conservative and politically reactionary shift is clearly illustrated in the use of Hellenic particularity in order to criticize and indict ‘imported’ representative institutions and the perceived extremism of ‘universal suffrage’ (Vasiliou 1853, 77–8). The mediating position of Hellas (already in search of a stable position in the West, in spite of self-valorization in a mediating role) underlines the constant problem of identity in Hellenic nationalism. In the early 1840s, no pressing political agenda had forced Renieris or any other Greek to confront real problems, such as the assimilation of non-Greek-speaking Ottoman Christians into the Greek nation, or subsequently to address the ‘language question’ in a meaningful way (on which see chapters 13 and 14 by Peter Mackridge and Karen Van Dyck in the present volume). Very few scholars felt the need to turn their attention to the spoken vernacular or to celebrate the Greek demotic language as a product of the national genius that clearly differentiated Greeks from other Balkan Christians. Our Romantics continued to use the purist katharevousa and even to campaign for a more archaic form of it. As far as I can see, language was used as a measure of value, but only in the sense that a more pure and classical form could better reveal the unaltered Greek genius. The ideological coherence of the discourse of the Romantics, as a group, was vitiated by their conservative approach to the Language Question. Language in its vernacular form could thus never be elevated to become the nucleus of national attributes, because this would have been to endanger the conscious project of nation-formation through the incorporation of other Orthodox Christian groups in the Hellenic nation (Paparrigopoulos 1853, 3–7; Vasiliou 1853, 74–8). Hellenism was associated with a common religious and cultural tradition, open to all Orthodox Christians of the Balkans. Paparrigopoulos (1855, 255) provided an eloquent definition: La question n’est donc pas de prouver que la nation hellénique moderne descend directement de la lignée de Periclès et de Philopoemen; le combat, comme vous voyez, aurait été non seulement impossible mais également vain. Ce que nous allons, ce que nous devons prouver historiquement, c’est que du mélange qui a été opéré, et qui est encore opéré entre diverses tribus, ne résulte pas, comme ils disent, une populace brutale, inerte, sotte, mais une nation contenant en elle-même les éléments d’un grand être politique, et plus particulièrement que l’esprit de l’hellénisme […] vivifie perpétuellement ce nouveau produit de la succession des siècles (cited in Koubourlis, 2005, 95).

It is not a coincidence that Rangavis and others were already active, as early as the late 1830s, in revolutionary societies targeting unredeemed Christians in the southern Balkans (Souloyiannis 1977). History was used as testimony to the Hellenic national character. Reflecting the first synthesis by Zambelios, Renieris insisted that the intrinsic national attributes of social equality and (in some sense) representative self-government

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had been realized in the legislation, mores, and customs of the Greek Church and communities under Ottoman rule. National unity was prefigured in the unified organization of the Greek Orthodox Church, which had also secured the preservation and predominance of Greek language and culture. The Church and community organizations were represented as the sole Hellenic institutions that had survived the fall of Constantinople, and both were conceived as shrines of the distinctive Hellenic principles of representation that incidentally had been fulfilled only under strong (imperial) authority.16 The metaphor establishing a direct and symbolically primordial link between the essence of the Hellenic nation and the monarchy completed the long conservative turn of the Romantic nationalists. They would all soon find their place in the ministries and embassies of the last years of the rule of King Otto. In the mid-1850s, through the Spectateur d’Orient and other periodicals, the Romantics were able convincingly to form a powerful new identity, forged around the axiomatic particularity of Hellenism: no longer either Western or Eastern, but both Western and Eastern, and eternally distinctive. This was presented with the credentials of a scientifically observed historical reality. It is no accident that Paparrigopoulos and Zambelios were among the contributors to this periodical. Finally, in September 1855, once the detested ‘Occupation’ government of Mavrokordatos had been replaced, the whole group shared in the positive effects of their political realignment with the throne. All were rewarded with high posts in the civil administration and some even became ministers, thus sharing the spoils of ideological victory. Georgios Rallis, the doyen of the conservatives in the Law School, had been president of the Supreme Court since 1850 and served as minister from 1857 to 1860. Ioannis Soutsos was named director of the Department of Statistics and Public Finances in the Interior Ministry in 1859. The active engagement of the editors of the Spectateur d’Orient in the public sphere paved the way for first Alexandros Rizos Rangavis and then Nikolaos Dragoumis to become Foreign Minister, respectively from 1856 to 1859 and in 1862, while Markos  Renieris became Minister Plenipotentiary in Constantinople (1861–2) and would negotiate an agreement of mutual assistance against the Ottomans with the Serbian minister Ilija Garašanin, author of the celebrated naçertanije memorandum (Hehn 1975). Petros Paparrigopoulos was named Chief Public Prosecutor in 1857. Others, while remaining engaged in active nationalist politics, were closely associated, from the early 1850s, with the National Bank of Greece, the first banking institution in the eastern Mediterranean, founded in 1843. In 1860, Vasiliou and 16   Dragoumis (1854, 199): ‘un peuple (les grecs) qui, malgré le joug qui pèse sur lui depuis 400 ans, a su se perpétuer en corps de la nation qui a conservé ses moeurs nationales et sa religion, qui sous l’oppression la plus sanglante et le gouvernement le plus desservant, se fait administrer par ses communes et ses propres institutions, et dont le patriarche en sa qualité de chef de nation, étant un pouvoir aimé, respecté et obéi dans trois parties du monde, jusqu’aux extrémités les plus reculées de l’empire des Osmanlis, que ce peuple ne peut manquer ni d’aptitude ni de volonté de gouverner et d’être gouverné.’



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Renieris, both under the patronage of its first governor, Georgios Stavros, became vice governors of the Bank. Renieris succeeded Stavros in 1869 and would hold the position of Governor for twenty-one years, from 1869 to 1890, during which time he continued to align himself with nationalist activism and political conservatism. Of the ‘Romantic’ group of former outcasts, Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, after struggling to find a temporary (ektaktos) position in the University in 1850, replaced his patron and predecessor Konstantinos Schinas, becoming Professor of Greek History in 1856, although under heavy criticism from his liberal opponents (Dimaras 1986, 185). Paparrigopoulos’s last publishing venture, the editorship of Hellen to support King Otto in 1858–9, did not provide him with the political career he craved (Dimaras 1986, 126). By contrast, Spyridon Zambelios, a politically ambitious historian who had begun his career as a journalist and served in the Ionian Parliament in 1850–1 with the moderate Reformist Party, did not try to profit from his minor engagement. Less conservative than his ideological confrères, he maintained a safe distance from Greek political and symbolic rivalries, and by so doing condemned himself to the margins of mainstream Greek historiography. The members of this group rose to political, economic, and diplomatic prominence in the last years of Ottonian rule (1856–1862) and then faced a temporary eclipse during the political revolution that ousted the Wittelsbach dynasty. They reintegrated themselves into the highest echelons of Greek society in the last years of the 1860s. The radical turn of the 1862 ‘October’ Revolution and, subsequently, the bitter outcome of the Cretan revolt of 1866–8 forced many of their former opponents, such as Kalligas and Saripolos, to come to an understanding about priorities. Both the Romantics and the majority of their former opponents equally opposed the full enforcement of the representative parliamentary principle of government and the perpetuation of universal suffrage. Both groups shared the priority given to actions assuring the moral ‘regeneration’ of the masses and the revitalization of their ideological framework. The new historical narration did the job perfectly. It would not be long, however, before the ideological view of the ‘Romantics’ analysed here would receive a decisive blow. From 1870 onwards, the Bulgarian schism would render their conception of Hellenism quite inadequate to deal with the realities of the age of bitterly contending nationalisms in the Balkan peninsula.

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Renieris, M. (1842), ‘Τι είναι η Ελλάς’, Eranistis 1/2: 189–215. R[enieris, M.] (1853), ‘Le dualisme grec’, Spectateur d’Orient 2 (10/22 September 1853) 33–49. R[enieris, M.] (1853–4), ‘De la Société grecque’, Spectateur d’Orient 5 (25 October/7 November 1853), 159–68; 6  (10/22 November 1853), 175–85; 8 (10/22 December 1853), 263–81; 11 (25 February/7 March 1854), 367–80. Sachinis, A. (1964), Συμβολή στην ιστορία της Πανδώρας και των παλιών περιοδικών, Athens: Papadoyianis. Souloyiannis, E.T. (1977), ‘Μυστική εταιρεία για την απελευθέρωση του αλύτρωτου Ελληνισμού (1839)’, Parnassos 19/3: 407–20. Tziovas, D. (1986), The nationism of the demoticists and its impact upon their literary theory, Amsterdam: Hakkert. V[asiliou, G.A.] (1853), ‘L’élément orthodoxe en Turquie’, Spectateur d’Orient 3 (25 September/7 October 1853): 73–80. Z[ambelios, S.] (1854), ‘Apologie des chrétiens d’Orient’, Spectateur d’Orient, 22 (10/22 July 1854): 355–72.

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10 Model nation and caricature state: competing Greek perspectives on the Balkans and Hellas (1797–1896)* Basil C. Gounaris Barba-Yannis o kanatas, uncle John the pottery-dealer, is the handsome hero of a very well-known Athenian song, usually accompanied by guitars and mandolins. According to the lyrics, he was famous for his smart Sunday outfit, polished shoes, and top-hat. Barba-Yannis is also mentioned by Penelope Delta in her most popular novel, Trelandonis, published in 1932 (Delta 1967). According to the novel and to her memoirs, in the early 1880s Barba-Yannis and his song were very famous – known even to King George I himself. He was a kind of a ‘trademark’ for Athens. Delta and others described him as a middle-aged man, tall, impressive in stature, with thick blond moustache and blue eyes, witty and outspoken. Around that time, at the peak of his fame, Barba-Yannis disappeared. A newspaper discovered him in the summer of 1883 in Tatar-Pazardjik in Eastern Rumelia, where, rumours said, he was making a second career as a notary. For the newspaper, the surprising conclusion was that the ‘trademark’ of the Greek capital had turned out to be an under-cover Bulgarian (kryptovoulgaros), who had rushed back to his liberated homeland (Delta 1967, 184; Zannas 1981, 63–4; Efimeris, 30 August 1883).1 In 1883, about the time the ‘true identity’ of Barba-Yannis was revealed, Prince Alexander Battenberg, the first ruler of Bulgaria, paid a short visit to Athens, which to the Greeks caused more embarrassment than satisfaction. In which capacity, they wondered, had the prince come: as a traveller, as an ally, or, perchance, as a friend? Greeks were well aware that none of these options seemed compatible *  This paper is based on research sponsored and supported in many ways by the Greek Literary and Historical Archive (ELIA), Athens. I am also grateful to my friend and colleague Dr Dimitris Livanios for his valuable comments. For a fuller treatment of the themes addressed here, see, in Greek, Gounaris 2007. 1   The best account of Barba-Yannis is by Theodoros Vellianitis (n.d.), written around 1925. Vellianitis claims that in Bulgaria Barba-Yannis gave up trading pots but that he did not become a notary.

From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. 137

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with Bulgarian policies in Eastern Rumelia and Macedonia (Mi Hanesai, 14 April 1883).2 The prince met Trikoupis in his office, at the Ministry of Defence. There he had the chance to admire the portrait of General Chatzichristos, also known as ‘Voulgaris’, a native of Belgrade whose father, it was said, had been close to Black George Petrovič of Serbia. Originally in the service of Hursit Pasha, he had joined the Greek side, participated actively in the Greek War of Independence, and then, being a political client of Prime Minister Ioannis Kolettis, had risen to become adjutant to King Otto. Battenberg gazed at the painting speechless (Aion, 20 May 1883).3 Indeed, any comment by the Prince would have been inappropriate. General Chatzichristos had served the cause of Balkan brotherhood, together with his Montenegrin comrade Vassos Mavrovouniotis, more than anyone else (Chrysologis 1876). Both had grown easily into handy symbols of the Great Idea, the vision of a resurrected Christian empire to be run by the Greeks from Constantinople. In fact the General had attended the 1843–1844 National Assembly, officially representing ‘Thracians, Serbs and Bulgarians’, on the day that Kolettis delivered his famous speech. In that very speech Kolettis made an explicit reference to Chatzichristos and to his heroic Bulgarian cavalry, to argue that the true meaning of the call by Rigas Ferraios (Velestinlis) to ‘free the Balkans’, which had inspired the revolution, should be revived (Aion, 19 January 1844). This slogan was to be repeated many times in the following years, but what Rigas and Kolettis had in mind was by no means the same thing.4 In any case, Chatzichristos died in Athens in 1853, honoured, respected, and pleased, a true incarnation of the Great Idea. Thirty years later, his choices seemed inconceivable to Prince Battenberg. BarbaYannis simply preferred to return to Bulgaria. Apparently he did not feel quite at home in Athens – despite his reputation as a ladies’ man. Most Greeks would have agreed with him that the Greek capital was no longer a proper home for a Bulgarian, no matter how fluent in Greek. This story gives the impression that a major change had occurred between the early 1840s and the early 1880s. In 1873 a newspaper lamented: ‘the days of Chatzichristos have gone’. It explained that Balkan cooperation and fraternity were no longer feasible (Aion, 3 Septmber 1873). But had they ever really been taken for granted? Frankly, they had not; and the reason went deeper than the diplomatic complications of the Eastern Question, which themselves were enough to make a joint revolution or a Balkan coalition almost impossible. At least since the time of the Enlightenment, if not well before, Christian unity and a common Balkan mentality had coexisted with a sense of distinctiveness. This sense was based on linguistic and geographical criteria – place of origin – and was seasoned 2   Eastern Rumelia was to be annexed in September 1885 and Macedonia to become the focal point of Bulgarian irredentism thereafter. In 1883 the Bulgarization of Rumelia was in progress; the best account on this in English is Ploumides 2004. 3   The only available biography is Sporidis 1855; see also Naxidou 1988. 4   Rigas’s vision was of a Hellenic Republic made up of many nations (γένη). For Kolettis, all Orthodox Christians were included in the Greek nation by virtue of their religion.



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by vague medieval memories, reproduced by early modern historiography, and many stereotypes, varying from region to region, and not necessarily flattering. The growth of Greek nationalism enhanced the importance of such characteristics, in relation to language first of all (on which see chapter 13 by Peter Mackridge in the present volume). In this context the use of the Greek language was expected to secure the cultural unity of the Sultan’s Christian subjects or, according to Rigas, to develop into a common civic characteristic (Apologia 1815, 85–92; Kitromilides 2000, 46, 56). In any case, a generation before the Revolution it was clear that securing the predominance of the Greek language in the Balkans would be by no means an easy task. Linguistic uniformity was already out of the question, and cleavages had already appeared in many communities, especially in the multilingual environment of the Habsburg Balkan provinces, even within the Orthodox community of Vienna, almost a century before the Greek uprising.5 The study of geography and history contributed additional evidence for past controversies and was bringing to the surface pejorative comments introduced by medieval writers (Stageiritis 1819, 360–3). This ‘refashioning’ of the past did not imply a full-scale standardization of the Balkan peoples’ national characteristics, not even in the case of the Romanians, who in the early nineteenth century already possessed a history of their own, written by a Greek emigrant (Stanescu 1969). The exact relation between the ‘simple and industrious’ Bulgarians and the ‘thrice-barbarian invaders’ (trisvarvaroi) of the Middle Ages, or between the ‘filthy’ Albanians and the heroic Skenderbey (Scanderbeg), was hard to determine (Giochalas 1975). Rigas himself, in the very same poem that begins ‘What are you waiting for, friends and brothers?’, had praised Albanians as freedom-loving, only to identify them just a few verses later with the Turkish oppressor (Kitromilides 2000, 153, 163). Apparently current views weighed more heavily than history. In fact, the concern of liberal Greeks of that time was for their own place and rank among the European nations. Other Balkan peoples, whatever their rank by modern cultural and political standards, were bound to be judged by the Greeks as underdeveloped, though with the exception of the Serbs, who were saved from obscurity by their early struggle for freedom (Anonymous Hellene 1982 [1806], 215–16, 220–1). It was only natural that political and cultural deficiencies, stereotypes mixed with rumours, and evidence from travellers, all together projected on peoples with distinctive languages and homelands, created the impression that nations were in the making. The Orthodox Christian entity formed one body and one nation, that is, the Greeks or Romans, according to the author of Apologia 1815. On the other hand, he also noted that Hellenes, Bulgarians, Wallachians, Serbs, and Albanians in his day were forming separate nations, each with its own language and its own 5

  See Papastathis 1983, 581–7. For later evidence, see the newspaper published by the Poulios brothers, Εfimeris, vol. 1 (31 January; 4, 18, and 28 February; 23 May 1791), 50, 52, 77, 81–2, 187; vol. 2 (9 March 1792), 167 and vol. 6 (10 March 1797), 226.

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name (Apologia 1815, 108–9). In other words, religious unity was only one aspect of the Balkan world, certainly the most promising in terms of Greek political aspirations, but neither unique nor realistic, given the variety of cleavages already present and indeed felt by local societies or communities (Kitromilides 1989). Wallachians and Moldavians were soon forgotten. The memory of their brief mobilization on behalf of the Greek cause was anything but happy for both sides (Ion 1995; Oikonomidis 1982–4). However, the contribution of Bulgarians, Montenegrins, and, most of all, of Albanians to the Greek cause in 1821 was regarded as a permanent abdication by those peoples of their own right to national emancipation (cf. Skopetea 1988, 331–2). It was a very convenient thought – or rather wishful thinking – consistent with the view that Orthodoxy was the only important characteristic of Greek high culture; and even this characteristic, in the case of Muslim Albanians, was not indispensable since – it was argued – they were not really pious adherents of Islam. In fact the contribution of non-Greek-speakers to the 1821 Revolution had been overestimated. The prospect of a strategic military cooperation with the Albanians, Muslim and Christian alike, had been considered, but at the same time hatred for the Albanian oppressors also ran high (Gounaris 2006). The contribution of the various Slav-speakers – not more than several dozen – had in reality been marginal. They had made their presence felt especially in civil warfare, on the side of government units, and this had not gone unnoticed (Naxidou 1988). According to the 1822 electoral law, all these fighters, as nonlocals, were ineligible for election to the higher posts of the state, but this view came to be challenged later and eventually collapsed (Athina, 26 November 1824; Vogli 2007, 121–47).6 It was a clear sign that the state was in doubt: it was badly in need of Christian fighters, and familiar with multilingualism. But after the outbreak of the War of Independence, things had changed. The Hellenic language had been held up as the most precious national tradition and effective political argument. Therefore Slav-, Turkish-, and Albanian-speakers were most often received with open arms; but occasionally they could be seen as redundant or even unwelcome. In any case, the retrospective federalization of the Greek struggle for independence was false, but by no means meaningless. In the context of Kolettis’s Great Idea, participation in the war effort against the Turks was the most important argument for belonging to the Greek nation. The other argument was the common historical origin and affinity of all the Balkan peoples. Various testimonies were employed to prove that Romanians, Bulgarians, Albanians, even Montenegrins were somehow related to the Greeks, usually through the beneficial mediation of the Pelasgians or various ancestral Thracian tribes. The former were the common ancestors of Greeks and Albanians; the latter had all been assimilated by Greek colonists in ancient times. According to the same theories, the colonization of the Balkan hinterland in the early modern period had completed this process of mutation. Serbs, who had 6   Many of the 1821 Christian ‘outsiders’ (‘heterochthons’) who settled in Greece were fugitives from Greece proper who had been scattered throughout the empire. Even if some generations had elapsed since then, they were indeed returning rather than immigrating into liberated Greece.



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gained their semi-independent hegemony before the Greeks, were identified not simply as friends but as Christian Orthodox brothers (Gounaris 2005, 195–209). This theory of intensive Hellenization had the extra benefit of neutralizing the Slav threat and putting the blame on those who had cultivated Slavophobia, rather than on the Slavs themselves. Russophiles were of course the chief supporters of such views but there is no indication, to the best of my knowledge, of any scientific counter-argument on the part of Russophobes. How could any Greek, after all, challenge the mighty power of colonization and Hellenization? If Greek was not the spoken language of modern Thracians, Dacians, Macedonians, and Illyrians, they could be taught Greek anew. But without a common historical descent, any relationship with them would be unstable. What Greeks could not even conceive of – namely to demarcate the past which they had been so conveniently monopolizing – was accomplished quite easily by the young Balkan states, which speedily constructed their own counter-myths. Not only did they achieve various degrees of independence; they also strengthened their states in territorial, economical, and social terms. Above all, they challenged Greece’s Great Idea both in theory and in practice. Greeks had to respond and to deconstruct these competing nationalisms and demolish the idea of a common Balkan past, without at the same time weakening the Greek national ideal. Deconstruction proved to be the easier part, given all the shortcomings that had been kept in reserve until then. Preserving the immunity of the Hellenic ideal, however, would prove a difficult task. From the Greek point of view, the most threatening element of Balkan national emancipation was irredentism. Through the back door, the question of ethnological and linguistic boundaries was being reintroduced, amounting to a renegotiation of historical rights, and including a reassessment of the revolutionary tradition. Therefore Greek criteria for nationhood had to be strict over this issue. Bitterness made them even more so. Newly formed nations can be divided into those that are reinstated on their own and those that are established through mediation, wrote Emmanuel Lykoudis (1900–1), legal counsellor of state. Indeed, until the Eastern Crisis of 1876–78, the Greek example was revolutionary par excellence. Therefore Montenegrins could not be judged inferior to the Souliots or the Cretans. They had won their independence by themselves (Aion, 13 December 1852; 26 May 1858; 22 March 1861). But this was not the case with the Romanians, who did not dare to fight and spent their time in manoeuvring for mediation (Aion, 25 September 1872). Nor was it the case with the Serbs any longer, since they had dared to fight but not to risk their lives in open encounters, as the Greeks had done so many times in the past. The heroic impulse was an exclusive privilege of the Greek nation (Aion, 1 July 1876). Bulgarians were not comparable either. Their geographically restricted rising could not stand next to the large-scale massacres that had followed the Greek insurrections of 1774 and 1821 (Palingenesia, 5 January 1877); nor could it stand next to the Cretan rising of 1896, because Crete had always been ‘free by itself’.

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Not surprisingly, when Balkan nations became more aggressive, the Greek paradigm was reversed. Serbs were lectured by the Greek press that nations without modern technology, administration, communications, wealth, and sciences could not declare wars but only fight with the blind, bold bravery of the uncivilized; they could burn their huts and wait until the civilized world sympathized with their cause. Greece had made the same mistakes, but knew she was a student in the ‘school of civilization’ (Efimeris, 17 June 1876). Bulgarians were also bound to make such mistakes because ‘their passion was blind and the inflated patriotic chauvinism of a barbarous people could not be retained by reason’ (Sfaira, 25 August 1900). By the time of the Balkan Wars, Greece had been reinstated as the heroic example, but what is important here is that the other Balkan nations could not keep up with the shifting Greek paradigm, no matter what they did. If Greek history was to be judge and Greeks the jury, other arguments for Balkan national emancipation did not stand any chance either. Their languages were no more than dialects (idiomata). Most had no literature. Their freedom had been given to them, not won by force of arms. Their blood had been shed in skirmishes, not proper battles. They expected to win territories through speculation rather than warfare. Their states had no firm social structure, no middle class. Their irredentist aspirations were manipulated by others: Catholics, Protestants, the Powers, chiefly Russia. They were ‘bastard’ nations in terms of geography and anthropology, born out of the medieval orgies of the nations, by-products of lewdness, scourges of God, destined to disappear (Akropolis, 6 February 1906). This critique was an ideological regression, considering that the distinctiveness of the Balkan peoples had been a given fact in the early nineteenth century. Although in theory Greece still supported the right to self-determination, especially if independence was claimed from Turkey, in reality the Greek attitude could hardly be described as liberal and ingenuous, not even vis-à-vis the Serbs or Montenegrins. If these peoples had betrayed Greek expectations, then they could not be classified as true nations; they were ethnaria (petty nations). History, however, was not the only judge in this trial of nationhood. Modernity was the other, no less significant for the Greek self-image (Kitroeff 1999). How did Greece compare with its new neighbours in terms of administration and political institutions, military organization and armaments, economic progress, and civilization? The result of such comparisons was disappointing, and the problem started from the very top, with the king himself. This is not to imply that King George’s crown was ever in real danger; but one cannot fail to see an indirect critique of his mentality and lifestyle, sometimes even a direct one (Palingenesia, 29 March 1898). In brief, it suited the Greeks to attribute the progress of the Balkan nations to their kings, especially if those kings happened to be German. Charles I Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was the very ‘mainspring’ that kept the Romanian state-machine rolling (Palingenesia, 29 August 1883, cited in Aion, 30 August 1883). He spent most of his time with his soldiers in the barracks and never travelled abroad (Efimeris, 24 September 1877; Aion, 11 August



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1887). Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg was praised for his military achievements. He had provided Bulgaria with a perfectly trained and brilliantly equipped army (Lazopoulos 1912). Prince Nicholas of Montenegro was a poet and a fighter, a true father to his brave nation (Akropolis, 11 August 1896). Even if it was not put explicitly into words, it was obvious that King George of the Hellenes was neither a poet nor a hard worker. He was admired as a constitutional monarch, a virtue in short supply in Balkan palaces – but then, after all, how much of a virtue was constitutionalism in a Balkan sovereign? The question had a more general character. Before the turn of the century, the effectiveness of the Greek political system came to be seriously questioned. It was widely recognized in Greece that parliaments and constitutions in all the Balkan states were a farce. Governments assigned by the kings to conduct elections invariably won them. The constitutional history of Serbia was a comedy, which would soon, in 1903, turn into tragedy. Bulgaria was famous for its liberal or radical constitution, but only in theory. In practice, Bulgaria was a dictatorship in almost every respect. Even riots, which happened very rarely in that country, were organized from the top (Akropolis, 28 August 1912). Romanian antiSemitism and anti-Hellenism were shocking. After practising persecution against Greeks and Jews for several years, the Romanian state had evolved into a ‘great hungry beast’, which in 1907 ‘consumed’ no fewer than eleven thousand peasants (Embros, 14 March 1907). Even Nicholas, ruling without a constitution to the end of the nineteenth century, was nicknamed – to the Greeks’ surprise – the Nero of Montenegro (Kalevras 1912). All of this might have served as sufficient evidence that Greece was a politically mature kingdom. But it did not. Quite the opposite; for the Greeks, the secret of Balkan progress could be traced and located in the absolutist and military methods employed by their tough monarchs and prime ministers. Nikolaos Dragoumis had pointed out that revolutionary Greece would have achieved a far more efficient regime had it followed the authoritarian example of the ‘Serbian pig-farmer’ Karageorgis, or Black George (Dragoumis 1973, 30). Professor of History Dimitrios Vernardakis, in his inaugural lecture in 1862, wondered whether a military education might not be more appropriate for the descendants of the klefts, since the early intellectual rise of the kingdom had only caused it to decline. Greeks spent their time applauding the operettas of Offenbach or conducting military bands. But their weapons were getting rusty, while the bellicose Slavs were always ready for new adventures.7 The Greeks, famous for their sharpness, were proving to be the silliest nation, fit for a premier like Deliyannis, while the Bulgarians, notoriously thick-headed, were turning out to be the cleverest nation in the world, argued Vlasis Gavriilidis, famous for his severe critiques of Greek politics (Mi Hanesai, 5 and 13 May 1883). Karavelov would have made a far better prime minister for Greece, wrote Palingenesia after 7   Vernardakis 1862, 15; Synadinos 1877, 8–9. See also O Ellinikos Laos, 3 and 5 November 1877; Palingenesia, 9 August 1879.

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the 1885–6 crisis (Palingenesia, 23 June 1886). Premier Petkov was presented to the Greek public like a god of politics, a negative reflection of his contemporary Georgios Theotokis. ‘Which of our political leaders has the spiritual power of Petkov?’, wondered one newspaper. ‘When he speaks in Parliament his voice is not appealing but his logic is crushing and his will is done on the spot’ (Embros, 28 February 1907). Romanians were making headway in Macedonia while Greek politicians were making the rounds of European spas (Mi Hanesai, 5 and 13 May 1883). Even Serbia was governed better than the ‘model kingdom of George I’. The Serbs, like true descendants of Pericles, had an army, police, prisons, and an administration. The ‘model kingdom’ could be compared only to Turkey in its administrative efficiency, or rather deficiency (Akropolis, 8 September 1895). Someone had to be held responsible. The king was not untouchable, though the politicians were easier to blame, but the crisis was deeply rooted in the system itself, roared the press. In Bulgaria, deputies were paid only if they attended Parliament, they did no favours, they were men of action, not of words. Debates on grandiose politics, liberty, the constitution, and past glories did not dazzle the Bulgarians and did not bewilder anyone in that country, not even forest rangers (Akropolis, 4 January 1890). Greek deputies no longer represented either their nation or their constituencies. They stood for a limited number of political patrons. All their great words and sermons, seasoned with constitutional theories, were hollow ideas, blowing with the wind (Akropolis, 4 January 1890, 22 June 1891 and 11 November 1892, 23 June 1898). Something had to be done, in the fashion already established in the other Balkan kingdoms. One option was a royal government, responsible only to the monarch. A senate and a king with extra powers was another. Akropolis went so far as to remind Greeks that the ancient Romans in hard times had used to appoint a dictator. If the constitution was wrong, then ‘down with the constitution’. Alexander Obrenovič had made a fool of his country with his coups. But if they were to the military benefit of Serbia, then they were justified, commented a Greek reporter (Akropolis, 2 January 1891 and 6 June 1894). Especially after 1897, Balkan paradigms (or lessons) dominated the Greek political stage. They came from close at hand, were visible, comprehensible, and humiliating. Lessons on economic development from Bosnia showed that the prosperity of Macedonia could be guaranteed by Vienna rather than by Athens (‘Hellene’ 1898); lessons on military armaments were given by Serbia (Akropolis, 28 December 1903); lessons on bravery by Montenegro. When Greek children in the streets played ‘war against the Turks’, they chose to be Montenegrins rather than Greeks. There were also lessons from Romania that encouraged civil disobedience in the face of the rapacity of the tax regime (Sfaira, 23 October 1900). Most humiliating of all, lessons from Bulgaria came frequently in the shape of newspaper articles with such titles as: ‘Why are Bulgarians making progress?’ or ‘Bulgarians and us’ or simply ‘Us and them’. The inevitable conclusion was grim. There was no state in the world worse than Greece. Greece was a caricature, governed by leaders without common sense, a programme, or inspiration. They had risen to power only



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because those who stood against them were even worse, proclaimed a front-page article under the headline ‘Darkness’ (Embros, 7 February 1906). Conclusion Inferiority and superiority vis-à-vis the Balkan nations were two sides of the same coin. The ‘coin’ was what Skopetea has called the ‘national question’ of Greece. This included all the vicissitudes of Greek national consciousness trapped between the necessities and the contradictions of state-building and irredentism. Defining Greek citizenship and identity in terms of language, religion, and education, the modernization of the future and the Hellenization of the past were the basic requirements of the Greek national agenda in the nineteenth century (Skopetea 1986; Herzfeld 1986). Clearly, the people of the Balkans were not entirely strangers in the story of Greek historical development. In fact they were indispensable, no matter which way Greek nationalism might have developed. They were simultaneously both partners and aliens. This is the way it has always been: Orthodox partners in an imagined Eastern commonwealth of the past and of the future; ‘filthy barbarian enemies’ on the battlefields of the medieval past and, most probably, of the future. It is not important which view was the more soundly documented. Barba-Yannis, crypto-Bulgar or not,8 in song outlived General Chatzichristos Voulgaris, a hero invested for several decades with so much symbolic capital.9 It was simply a matter of shifting national priorities. In both cases, however, history was the nation’s most precious capital, and the Balkans an integral part of it. It was a kind of ballast that kept the nation on course but retarded its journey. Sometimes it was doubted whether this course was leading to the dream port of modernity, which other Balkan nations were already approaching, although by different routes. Was the ballast to be blamed, the destination, or the crew for its manoeuvres? No matter how painful, comparisons with the Balkans were also redemptive, since the answer to the question was obvious: to blame was the crew, by which was meant the politicians. If history was to be the measure of the nation’s need to modernize, then this need appeared to be a prime necessity, from the moment in the late nineteenth century when Greece’s ‘historic’ position at the top of the Balkan cultural pyramid came seriously under threat from ‘nations without history’. If the measure was the lengthy distance along the road to modernity already covered by the Balkan pioneers, then, again, modernization was a matter of urgency, for the Greek northern irredenta were at stake. In either case, Greek modernizers had to take control of the ship and speed it up. And this is exactly what they did.

8

  He is mentioned as ‘Barba-Yannis Kanatov’ in a satirical poem (To Asty, 24 August 1886).   In the 1950s, Chatzichristos was the main hero in a little-known shadow-theatre adventure of Karagiozis performed by Vasilaros. The script – now available at ELIA, Athens – was written by Takis Demodos Konstantinopoulos at Methoni in 1953. 9

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References Anonymous Hellene (1982 [11806], Ελληνική Νομαρχία, ήτοι λόγος περί ελευθερίας, 4th ed., ed. G. Valetas, Athens: Aposperitis. Apologia (1815), Απολογία ιστορική και κριτική υπέρ του ιερού κλήρου της Ανατολικής

Εκκλησίας κατά των συκοφαντιών του Νεοφύτου Δούκα συγγραφείσα παρά Κυρίλλου Κ. κατʹ επίμονον ζήτησιν των ομογενών, no place or publisher given. Chrysologis, A.N. (1876), Ο Ελληνικός Αγών. Βάσσος Μαυροβουνιώτης, Athens:

Varvarigos. Delta, P.S. (1967 [11932]), Τρελαντώνης, Athens: Estia. Dragoumis, N. (1973 [11874]), Ιστορικαί αναμνήσεις, vol. 1, ed. A. Angelou, Athens: Ermis. Giochalas, T. (1975), Γεώργιος Καστριώτης, ο Σκεντέρμπεης, Thessaloniki: Etaireia Makedonikon Spoudon [Society for Macedonian Studies]. Gounaris, B.C. (2005), ‘Constructing and de-constructing a common Balkan past in nineteenth-century Greece’, in R. Detrez and P. Plas (eds), Developing Cultural Identity in the Balkans. Convergence vs Divergence, Brussels: P.I.E.–Peter Lang, 195–209. Gounaris, B.C. (2006), ‘Σύνοικοι, θυρωροί και φιλοξενούμενοι: διερευνώντας τη «μεθόριο» του ελληνικού και του αλβανικού έθνους κατά το 19ο αιώνα’, in P. Voutouris and G. Georgis (eds), Ο ελληνισμός στον 19ο αιώνα. Ιδεολογικές και αισθητικές αναζητήσεις, Athens: Kastaniotis, 38–54. Gounaris, B.C. (2007), Τα Βαλκάνια των Ελλήνων. Από το Διαφωτισμό έως τον Α΄ Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο, Thessaloniki: Epikentro. ‘Hellene’ (1898), ‘Μάθημα από την Βοσνίαν και Ερζεγοβίνην’, Akropolis (31 May–23 June). Herzfeld, M. (1986 [11982]), Ours once more. Folklore, ideology, and the making of Modern Greece, New York: Pella. Ion, C. (1995), ‘The present creates the past: the “Phanariots” in the Romanian text books during the second half of the nineteenth century’, Revue des Études Sud-Est Européennes 33/1–2: 41–7. Kalevras, A. (1912), ‘Ο Βασιλεύς Νικήτας, Νέρων του Μαυροβουνίου’, Akropolis (21 August). Kitroeff, A. (1999), ‘Greek nationhood and modernity in the nineteenth century’, Balkan Studies 40/1: 21–40. Kitromilides, P.M. (1989), ‘“Imagined communities” and the origins of the national question in the Balkans’, European History Quarterly 19/2: 149–92. Kitromilides, P.M. (ed.) (2000), Ρήγα Βελεστινλή. Άπαντα τα σωζόμενα, vol. 5, Athens: Vouli ton Ellinon [Parliament of the Hellenes]. Lazopoulos, I. (1912), ‘Αι δυνάμεις των τεσσάρων συμμάχων. Βουλγαρία και Ελλάς’, Hellas (7 October). Lykoudis, E.S. (1901), ‘Νέαι πηγαί της ιστορίας του Αγώνος’, Panathinaia 1 (October 1900–March 1901): 103–10. Naxidou, E. (1988), ‘Χατζή-Χρήστος: ένας αγωνιστής της επανάστασης του 1821’, unpublished MA thesis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Oikonomidis, D.B. (1982–4), ‘Η ρουμανική ιστοριογραφία δια το κίνημα του Θεόδωρου Βλαδιμηρέσκου’, Mnimosyni 9: 57–118. Papastathis, C. (1983), ‘Un document inédit de 1726–1727 sur le conflit helléno-serbe concernant la chapelle greque à Vienne’, Balkan Studies 24/2: 581–606. 



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Ploumides, S.G. (2004), ‘Symbiosis and friction in multiethnic Plovdiv/Philippoupolis: the case of the Greek Orthodox and the Bulgarians (1878–1906)’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London. Skopetea, E. (1988), To «Πρότυπο Βασίλειο» και η Μεγάλη Ιδέα. Όψεις του εθνικού προβλήματος στην Ελλάδα (1830–1880), Athens: Polytypo. Sporidis, P.G. (1855), Ο βίος του Χατζή-Χρήστου ερανισθείς εκ διάφορων επισήμων μαρτυριών, εγγράφων και γεγονότων, Athens: Nikolaidis. Stageiritis, A. (1819), Ηπειρωτικά ήτοι ιστορία και γεωγραφία της Ηπείρου παλαιά τε και νέα και βίος του Πύρρου συλλεχθέντα εκ πολλών συγγραφέων και παραφρασθέντα εις την απλουστέραν ελληνικήν γλώσσαν, Vienna: Tsvekiou.

Stanescu, E. (1969), ‘“Roumanie”: Historie d’un mot. Développement de la conscience d’unité territoriale chez les Roumains aux XVIIe–XIXe siècles’, Balkan Studies 10: 69– 94. Synadinos, P.S. (1877), Εγερτήριον σάλπισμα επί των ημερών μας, Piraeus: Typografeion tis Synglitou. Vellianitis, T. (n.d.), ‘Αθήναι (φυσιογνωμίαι-τύποι)’, in P. Drandakis (ed.), Μεγάλη Ελληνική Εγκυκλοπαίδεια, 2. 276–7. Vernardakis, D.N. (1862), Λόγος εισιτήριος εις το μάθημα της Γενικής Ιστορίας και της Φιλολογίας εκφωνηθείς τη 20 Ιανουαρίου 1862 εν τω Πανεπιστημίω Όθωνος, Athens: Nikolaidis. Vogli, E.K. (2007), «Έλληνες το γένος»: Η ιθαγένεια και η ταυτότητα στο εθνικό κράτος των Ελλήνων (1821–1844), Heraklion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis [Crete University Press]. Zannas, P.A. (ed.) (1981), Π.Σ. Δέλτα. Πρώτες ενθυμίσεις, Athens: Ermis. Newspapers Aion, 1844, 1852, 1858, 1861, 1872–3, 1876, 1883, 1887. Akropolis, 1890–8, 1903, 1906, 1912. Athina, 1824. Embros, 1906. Efimeris, 1876–7, 1883. Efimeris (Vienna), 1791–2, 1797. Photo-reproduction (1995) edited by L. Vranousis, Athens: Akadimia Athinon. Mi Hanesai, 1883. O Ellinikos Laos, 1877. Palingenesia, 1877, 1879, 1883, 1886. Sfaira, 1900. To Asty, 1886.

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Part V the colonial experience: politics & society in the ionian islands

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11 Radical nationalism in the British Protectorate of the Ionian Islands (1815–1864) Eleni Calligas This chapter explores the nationalist ideology of the Rizospastai (Radicals) of the Ionian Islands, an exceptional group of political activists who dominated the Septinsular political arena from the 1840s until the end of British Protection in 1864, and who have been classified as the first ‘party of principles’ in modern Greece.1 We will look briefly at how the party was formed and how it developed, before focusing on the radical concept of nationalism as expounded by its chief theoreticians. The political tenets underpinning the nationalism of the Rizospastai will be discussed with reference to the Radical press, although use will also be made of contemporary political pamphlets and later works. In terms of primary material, this chapter also relies on the official administrative papers of the British Protectorate, housed in the National Archives, Kew.2 It will be argued that the nationalism advocated by the Radicals was of a piece with their broader political convictions and thus more than a mere call for union with Greece. The Ionian Radicals emerged from the ranks of the Liberals in the early 1840s. The Liberals had themselves emerged a decade earlier from the broader camp that had constituted an Opposition to the Protectorate since its establishment. In common with that Opposition, the Liberals campaigned vociferously in Corfu and London for the reform of the Septinsula’s repressive 1817 Constitution and the liberalization of the Protectorate’s rule in accordance with its founding Treaty.3 The Radicals infused reformist demands with a deeper challenge to the 1   The contrast is between political groupings based on ideology and a specific political agenda, and parties formed around sources of power, such as a charismatic individual or an influential foreign state. 2   The 1427 volumes contained in CO 136 constitute the complete archive of the British administration of the Ionian Islands, including the official Ionian Gazette and the relevant British Blue Books of Statistics. As the papers kept in the Islands were transferred to London at the end of the Protectorate and amalgamated with the corresponding Colonial Office files, there is a fair amount of duplication. In London, various documents were at times printed for the Cabinet (CO 883/1 Confidential Print, Mediterranean II–XII) or Parliament (British Parliamentary Papers). 3   Indicatively, see the Memorial submitted by Chevalier Mustoxidi and relevant correspondence in British Parliamentary Papers (1840) XL VIII; also Calligas 1994a.

From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. 151

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Protectorate, questioning the legitimacy as well as the exercise of its authority. The partial success of one of these demands, freedom of the press, in 1848, enabled the two groups to articulate their relative positions and emerge as distinct political entities courting public support.4 Although the authorities usually lumped all dissenting voices together, the Liberals’ and the Radicals’ criticism of each other was vehement. It was through such an exchange in the press that the Radicals acquired their name in 1849, when they embraced the accusation that they were too extreme, proclaiming that they were indeed ‘Rizospastai’ who sought to ‘cut to the ground the dry and rotting tree of our state […] cut it with the axe of freedom of the press, to plant in its stead a new indigenous tree, a Greek tree’.5 For reasons that lie beyond this chapter to explore, the Rizospastai were initially concentrated in Cephalonia – the largest, most populous, and poorest of the islands. Cephalonia’s second largest town, Lixuri, remained the heartland of Radicalism, but its supporters were soon active throughout the Septinsula. The press was the chief means of dissemination of Radical ideology, but there was at least one other. The Protectorate authorities regularly employed the extraordinary powers of the High Police to exile political undesirables to remote smaller islands. Elias Zervos Iakovatos, editor of the Radical paper Fileleftheros, would comment later that ‘my periods of exile, despite arbitrarily interrupting my journalistic pursuits, restricting my freedom and ruining my finances, were in another way productive and beneficial, because they were turned into Radical recruitment’.6 Indeed, after one of his exiles to Cerigo (Kythera), the island returned its first Radical representatives to the Legislative Assembly. Nevertheless it was the press that was primarily charged with Radical recruitment. ‘I was at the coffee-house’, writes a correspondent to the editor of Fileleftheros in February 1849, when the first issue of your paper came out. Several people were there and they were reading it, and I heard them all say that of all the papers that have appeared in our islands, yours is the one that speaks the truth, and some only I heard complain that it too much attacks the peroukes [wigs: a derogatory term for the Italianized aristocrats] who do not want us to be united with our brothers the Greeks (Fileleftheros 2, 26 February 1849).

Because discussion in coffee houses, barber’s shops, clubs, and other public 4   Zervos Iakovatos 1969, 88. The first papers to appear in 1849 were the reformist Mellon (Zante, 1 January), Patris (Corfu, 15 January) and Spinthir (Zante, 17 February). Between the publication of the Radical Fileleftheros (19 February) and Anagennisis (9 April) in Cephalonia, Anexartitos came out in Corfu (17 February) edited by the controversial Antonio Dandolo, to be followed by the Cephalonian and reformist Enosis (16 April) and the conservative Timoni (16 May) of Corfu. Santa Maura, lacking a printing press, produced a hand-written paper Neolaia (21 May), which was promptly shut down because the freedom of the press law was deemed to apply only to printed material; see Konomos 1964a. Also informative are Konomos 1964b, Nikokavoura 1972, and Nikokavoura 1982. 5   Fileleftheros 2 (26 February 1849) in reply to Patris (5 February 1849); see also Zervos Iakovatos 1969, 71. 6   Zervos Iakovatos 1970, 44. See also Alisandratos 1972.



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places was combined with reading aloud from newspapers and pamphlets, these political tracts reached a wider public than the low levels of literacy might suggest (Konomos 1985, 111–12). The British High Commissioner was alarmed that Iosif Momferratos, the editor of the other Cephalonian Radical newspaper Anagennisis, was ‘in the habit ... of sending 200 or 300 copies of the paper gratis to all the villages, where they are read to attentive crowds’.7 Ionian newspapers were also distributed outside their island of publication, a fact utilized by the Radical editors to combat the traditional localism of Ionian politics and resultant fragmentation of public opinion. Through a network of correspondents, they reported on matters of import from each island, linking the separate communities and unifying their experiences. If the press was the lungs of Ionian Radicalism, its operational heart lay in the political clubs. Unfortunately, too little is known about the internal organization of the Radical clubs, their decision-making processes and recruitment practices; most of the evidence relates to the policies they endorsed (Debonos 1995; Calligas 1994b, 75–86; Alisandratos 2006; Loukatos 1997; cf. Katifori 1988). The ‘Dimotikon Katastima’ of Argostoli (1847) and the ‘Omonoia’ of Lixuri (1849) differed from the essentially cultural clubs previously established by the Liberals and provided the blueprint for the overtly political associations required by the times. Crucially, Radical clubs encouraged a broad class membership and were very successful in recruiting artisans. The novel interaction they fostered between diverse social groups was an integral feature of Radicalism and closely monitored by the authorities. Members would congregate to read newspapers, discuss the issues of the day, even attend ‘courses on National Catechism’.8 But they would also meet to decide on and coordinate political activities. In common with their Liberal counterparts, Radical clubs celebrated dates of national significance, such as 25 March, with festive decoration of their premises, banquets, and speeches (Loukatos 1979). The substantial electoral reforms that returned the famous Ninth Assembly of 1850 led the clubs to assume responsibility for the Radical electoral campaign. The Liberal clubs were themselves involved in the elections and provided ballot boxes to familiarize their members with the new voting procedure. But the two Radical clubs of Cephalonia went far beyond that: they vetted candidates and established the official Radical ticket, collected the required signatures of sponsorship, and encouraged electors to register.9 Later, they provided similar backing at municipal level and scrutinized the activities of those they supported. It is a measure of their success that the High Commissioner would lament in 1851 that local councillors were ‘disposed to consider themselves much more as the organs of the passions of their constituents, than as a part of that machinery by which Government is to be 7

  Ward to Grey, 31, 1 Sept. 1849, CO 883/1 Mediterranean II, 74.   Tsitselis 1904, 563; these courses, which outlined the rights and duties of a citizen, were offered by Stamatello Pillarino. 9   See Calligas 1994b, 172–85 for a fuller discussion of the role of the Radical clubs. 8

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carried on’.10 Not surprisingly, the clubs were a particular target of the clampdown on Radicalism of the 1850s and were effectively shut down. It is, I think, already evident that the socio-economic profile of the Radicals is multifaceted. There were those who, like Zervos and Momferratos, were educated professionals whose studies in France and Italy had brought them into contact with revolutionary ideas. Many had inherited landed property, although they did not come from the most affluent sections of society. They were lawyers, doctors, philosophers, professors at the Ionian Academy, poets, and priests; and they became the cadres of the Radical movement and the newspaper editors, legislators, and club committee members of its leadership. Not all Radicals were so illustrious or so privileged, however, and when Zervos claimed that the party, ‘born of the people’s womb, expresses their views, their needs and their beliefs’, he was referring to the artisans and, especially, the peasants who made up the critical mass of Radical support (Zervos Iakovatos 1969, 91). Police records attest to the presence of artisans at public gatherings of celebration or protest, to their membership of the Radical clubs, and their contacts with the movement’s leadership. Contacts with the disenfranchised peasantry, even more worrying for the authorities, were also meticulously documented.11 For an exasperated Director of Police, it was about the effect that a ‘gang of agitators’ had on the ‘hot-headed youth’ of the towns and ‘the inexperienced and guileless peasantry’.12 But for its supporters, Radicalism was ‘not a faction [...]; it was something more noble, more powerful, and more impregnable; it was the people, it was a moral force, it was public opinion’ (Zervos Iakovatos 1969, 91). * I turn now to the ideas put forward by the Rizospastai, in particular to their views on nationalism and their support for union of the Septinsula with Greece. Their position emanated from the principles of popular sovereignty and national self-determination which they advocated as the cornerstones of good and just government and with reference to the French Revolution and the contemporary European rebellions of 1848. On the one hand, popular sovereignty was proclaimed ‘the supreme, indefeasible and inalienable right of society, the ultimate power of every social truth, the only true means of attaining any social progress, the only true and legitimate source of political power’; and on the other, it was stressed that ‘the primary task of every people has to be the preservation of their nationality, whenever it exists as integral and independent; and its recovery and re-establishment, whenever it lacks independence and integrity’ (Momferratos 1849). And the Septinsular people, who had ‘never ceased to be considered part of 10

  Ward to Grey, 173, 1 May 1851, British Parliamentary Papers (1852) XXXII 567, 147.   See for instance a report by the elder of Rachi D. Cambici, enclosed in D’Everton to Fraser, 3, 8 January 1849, CO 136/772. 12   Director of Police to D’Everton, 3 May 1848, quoted in Hannell 1985, 116. 11



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the Greek nation’, wanted to become so in actuality.13 The dawn of that turbulent century had seen the establishment of the short-lived Septinsular Republic (1800–1807), the first nominally independent Greek state since the fall of Constantinople (Koukkou 1983, 74). Subsequently, the Greek War of Independence, with its immense allure for the Ionians, had become a catalyst for Septinsular affairs (Loukatos 1972–3). Involvement in the revolt had pitted the population against the British authorities, straining the efficacy of the Protectorate and exposing its Ionian supporters as a camarilla of self-interested traitors. It had radicalized members of the influential and educated classes when support for the insurgents placed them outside the law. It had inspired the peasantry to see its own deliverance in the fulfilment of ‘national hopes’, adding resentment of the British to their more traditional bitterness against the signori whom they blamed for their economic distress. The clandestine activities themselves had united sections of society that otherwise operated in distinctly separate social spheres. And finally, the establishment of the Greek state had provided a viable alternative for the Islands that obviated the need for British Protection. Therefore, what was now required, according to the Radicals, was to demonstrate clearly and unambiguously that the Ionian people desired to be united with Greece. The role of the press was crucial in expressing this desire, and the Radicals saw it as a chief responsibility of the Septinsular newspapers to advocate the will of the people abroad as well as at home.14 The people were themselves seeking to express their ‘patriotic’ and ‘national’ sentiments and all such instances (which were usually put down quite violently by the police) were reported sympathetically by the Radical press. The circumstances ranged from popular celebrations under a Greek flag to religious events acquiring political dimensions, to occasions where the Protectorate or its supporters were overtly challenged. Even the authorities took note of those who ‘fill the streets at night with songs in honour of what they are pleased to term “Free Greece”, and with bitter denunciations of British protection’.15 As well as publicizing such denunciations, however, the Radical press provided an interpretative framework. Their editors, under evocative titles such as ‘The illegality of the Protection’, contended that the 1815 Treaty establishing the Protectorate had been concluded without the participation or consent of the Ionian people, and therefore lacked all legitimacy except for the right conferred by power (Anagennisis 3, 23 April 1849). It belonged to an era when small and weak lands, like the Septinsula and some states of Italy and Germany, […] were bartered and sold like the blacks of Africa, not differing from them except in 13

  ‘The illegality of the Protection’, Anagennisis 3 (23 April 1849).   According to Fileleftheros’s first editorial on ‘The true mission of the press in the Septinsula’ (19 February 1849), what ‘England and the rest of today’s world’ wished to find out from the Ionian papers, now that freedom of the press had been gained, were the true sentiments and desires of the people and the means by which they would achieve their goals. However, the Radical press came out only in Greek, disdaining the bilingual (Greek–French) practice of reformist papers such as Patris, which also targeted a foreign readership. 15   Ward to Grey, Confidential, 22 August 1849, CO 883/1 Mediterranean II: 61–2. 14

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that the blacks were sold each one separately and by merchants, while the small and powerless peoples were sold collectively and by kings (Zervos Iakovatos 1849, 1).

But now, the existence of an independent Greek state refuted any arguments in favour of holding the Islands under the protection of another power. Thus, ‘from the perspective of the true and eternal principles of justice, public morality and humanity, [Britain’s] occupation [of the Septinsula] was a loathsome and illegal act, an abomination that brought eternal shame on its perpetrators’.16 The Radicals’ total condemnation of the Protectorate should be seen in the context of their belief that, of all the evils to oppress society, it is foreign rule (‘alienism’, or ξενισμός, in their vocabulary) that has ‘always been the gravest, most dangerous, most fatal of all […] because its interests lie in the stagnation, retrogression or destruction of society’.17 Central to the Radicals’ analysis was the conviction that the inalienable, natural right of national self-determination, emanating as it did from the fundamental doctrine of liberty, equality, and fraternity, was in principle non-antagonistic. To ensure their harmonious coexistence, nations should not only guard their own nationality and sovereignty but also have ‘respect and brotherly support’ for those of others.18 And although such self-regulating nationalism was only really possible when power was in the hands of the sovereign people, it was precisely because this altruistic responsibility had been ignored in the past that ‘abominable selfishness, injustice, and tyranny’ had prevailed and wrought great calamities upon humanity. Just as each individual had a function to perform in society, the Radicals saw each nation as having a function within the international community, each contributing to the overall mission of humanity. Internationalist in outlook, they observed events unfolding on a world stage and welcomed the momentous changes augured in 1848. ‘Today’, wrote Zervos in December of that year, ‘we see republics established where there were kingdoms, and constitutions where there were empires’ (Zervos Iakovatos 1849, 8). In the summer of 1849, Momferratos remained convinced that soon the blood-stained thrones of the crowned tormentors, who until now have mercilessly oppressed and butchered the people, who have made the establishment of nationalities and true popular liberty impossible, will be reduced to dust and upon their ruins will rise the great and solid structure of nationality and social republicanism.19

Such optimism was not due to ignorance of the facts. The Radical press reported in great detail on external affairs, on occasion reproducing in full foreign revolutionary proclamations or political debates. Anagennisis commented extensively on the fate of the Roman Republic, stressing that the historical role of France as the birth-place of revolutionary principles made that country doubly 16

  ‘The immovable desire of the Septinsula’, Anagennisis 11 (18 June 1849).   ‘The fatal results of foreign rule’, Anagennisis 6 (14 May 1849). 18   ‘What is Greece’s political position today?’ Anagennisis 8 (28 May 1849). 19   ‘The general spirit and Greece’, Anagennisis 11 (18 June 1849). 17



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responsible, both towards its own people and to those of other nations who had a right to expect its solidarity in their struggles.20 But the Radicals remained steadfast in their belief that the principles temporarily defeated in 1849 would ultimately triumph. The failure of kindred radical movements in Italy and Central Europe did not, in their view, conclude the ‘battle between authoritarianism and republicanism, between progress and retrogression, or revolution and reaction’.21 In that epic confrontation, the popular struggle was seen as ‘the product of social progress, the work of Christianity, […] the will of divine providence and as such it is impossible for it to be reversed or cancelled’.22 Far from constituting a defeat of their ideology, the Radicals claimed that such setbacks have always been the result of that misguided policy which in time of crisis overlooks, in the name of a certain misconstrued moderation, the greatest political needs, and sacrifices the largest, the most valuable social interests, to the general and vital detriment of society.23

France was an example of how Radicalism had failed, not because it went too far, but because it did not go far enough. The Rizospastai argued against such a tendency towards moderation when they insisted that union with Greece should be demanded as a right by the Ionian people and by their elected representatives on their behalf, not begged as a favour from the British throne. * To conclude this brief discussion of the ideology of Radical nationalism, I would like to mention the Radicals’ stance towards King Otto and the Greek monarchy. Republican sentiment was rife among the Rizospastai of the Ninth Assembly, leading the High Commissioner to report – with some disdain – that ‘although nominally Greek unionists, [...] the Greece they look to is a Greek republic, upon which they are to be at liberty to engraft the socialist theories derived from their Parisian education’.24 Nevertheless, after 1843, some Radicals were prepared to tolerate or even support a monarchy in Greece. Zervos himself mentioned much later that, during their long friendship, he had always been at variance with Momferratos over the appropriate form of government for Greece, ‘because he, as an absolute democrat, favoured a purely republican administration while I, as a republican of time and place, supported a constitutional monarchy’ (Zervos Iakovatos 1888, 8). Yet both argued for union on the same basis, and the High Commissioner was right in according such importance to Radical political ideology. 20   ‘General view of the changes of 1848’, part 1, Anagennisis 2 (16 April 1849) and part 2, Anagennisis 3 (23 April 1849); see also ‘The European struggle and Greece’, Anagennisis 7 (21 May 1849). 21   ‘The issue of union and the new reforms’, Fileleftheros 10 (5 August 1850). 22   ‘What is the reaction against the people today?’, Anagennisis 16 (23 July 1849). 23   ‘General view of the 1848 changes, part 2’, Anagennisis 3 (23 April 1849). 24   Ward to Grey, Private and Confidential, 7 April 1850, CO 136/135.

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As Momferratos emphasized in 1858, ‘it is not enough that we should be in accord merely and solely over some emotion regarding our mother country and national settlement; it is necessary that we also agree over principles, and furthermore over the issues and the methods of our actions’.25 But by then the Radicals were unable to agree with the new opportunistic unionism, devoid of political content, that was being advocated by Konstantinos Lomvardos, a Zantiot who had risen to the Radical leadership in the 1850s, during Zervos’s and Momferratos’s longest period of exile (Konomos 1988). The profound ideological differences were irreconcilable and led to the split in the Radical Party. Thus, in the bitterest twist of their political careers, Zervos and Momferratos found themselves arguing against union with Greece in the early 1860s, claiming that instead of liberating the Septinsula it would subjugate Greece (Momferratos 1877; Papageorgiou 1879; Panas 1880). Britain’s manipulation of the cession of the Islands in the context of Greece’s dynastic issue led them to suspect that this would become the means by which Britain would increase and extend her power over the small kingdom. But they argued contrary to popular feeling, which was euphoric at the prospect of union and uncomprehending of their objections. I have tried in this chapter to establish that the nationalism of the Rizospastai emanated from their commitment to the principles of national self-determination and popular sovereignty; and that it was an expression of their political vision but not its sole objective. Their subordination of nationalism to political principles but not to political exigencies enabled the Radicals to discern the dangers inherent in the proposed cession of the Islands. They also possessed the moral strength to advocate their objections against the tide, choosing to uphold popular sovereignty even against popular sentiment – which was a sacrifice that few nationalists in Greece were prepared to make. It is indicative of the fundamental differences between the Rizospastai and the populist nationalism then prevalent in Greece that neither Momferratos nor Zervos remained active in the political arena for long after Union. They were returned to the second National Assembly in Athens in 1864, but both retired from public life soon after, deeply disappointed with the corruption, intrigue, and clientelism permeating Greek politics. Nevertheless, the legacy of Radicalism’s old guard, and in particular the republican ideas of Momferratos, were not obliterated. They inspired a new generation of ideologues and provided the ancestry of the emerging Greek socialist movement.26

25

  Momferratos to Verykios, Cephalonia 1/13 April 1858 in Verykios 1889, 9.   Indicatively, see Stavropoulou 1987 on Panagiotis Panas, and Debonos 1984 on Roccos Choidas. 26



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References Alisandratos, G. (1970), ‘Ιωσήφ Μομφερράτου αυτοβιογραφικά σημειώματα (συμβολή στον επτανησιακό ριζοσπαστισμό)’, Deltion Anagnostikis Etaireias Kerkyras 7: 7–34. Alisandratos G. (1972), ‘Το χρονικό μιας αιχμαλωσίας του Ηλία Ζερβού Ιακωβάτου’, Nea Estia 91/1077: 646–53. Alisandratos, G. (1978–9), ‘Ανέκδοτα γράμματα του Ιωσήφ Μομφερράτου στους αδελφούς του από την Ερίκουσα’, Kefalliniaka Chronika 3: 235–86. Alisandratos, G. (1984), ‘Ο Επτανησιακός Ριζοσπαστισμός, 1848–1864’, in Ιόνιο, Περιβάλλον, Κοινωνία, Πολιτισμός, Πρακτικά Συμποσίου, Athens, 25–43. Alisandratos, G. (1986), ‘Και άλλα 3 γράμματα του Ιωσήφ Μομφερράτου’, Kefalliniaka Chronika 5: 267–74. Alisandratos, G. (1997), ‘Ανέκδοτα γράμματα του Ιωσήφ Μομφερράτου από τις εξορίες του στους Οθωνούς και την Ερείκουσα’, in Το Ιόνιον Κράτος, 1815–1864, Πρακτικά του Διεθνούς Συμποσίου Ιστορίας (Κέρκυρα, 21–24 Μαΐου 1988), Athens, 11–35. Alisandratos, G. (2006), Επτανησιακός Ριζοσπαστισμός, Σχέδιο για δοκίμιο πολιτικής ιστορίας, ed. G. Moschopoulos, Argostoli: Etaireia Kefalliniakon Istorikon Erevnon. Calligas, E. (1994a), ‘Lord Seaton’s reforms in the Ionian Islands, 1843–8: a race with time’, European History Quarterly 24: 7–29. Calligas, E. (1994b), ‘The “Rizospastai” (Radical Unionists): politics and nationalism in the British Protectorate of the Ionian Islands’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London. Chiotis, P. (1874–7), Ιστορία του Ιονίου Κράτους, 1815–1864, Zakynthos. Debonos, A.-D. (1984), Ρόκκος Χοϊδάς, ο επίγονος των Ριζοσπαστών, Argostoli. Debonos, A.-D. (1985), Η πειθαρχική Προστασία, από τους αγώνες του λαού της Κεφαλονιάς, Argostoli. Debonos, A.-D. (1995), Το Αναγνωστήριον «Η Ομόνοια» Ληξουρίου, Lixouri. Gallant, T.W. (2002), Experiencing dominion: culture, identity, and power in the British Mediterranean, South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame. Hannell, D. (1985), ‘The rebellions of 1848 and 1849 in Cephalonia: their causes and international repercussions’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wales, Swansea. Holland, R. and Markides, D. (2006), The British and the Hellenes: struggles for mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean 1850–1960, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katifori, D. (1988), ‘Πολιτικές λέσχες στη Ζάκυνθο επί Αγγλικής Προστασίας’, Parousia 6: 7–43. Konomos, D. (1964a), ‘Μια ανέκδοτη εφημερίδα της Λευκάδας του 1849’, Nea Estia 76/899: 210–24. Konomos, D. (1964b), ‘Επτανησιακός Τύπος, 1798–1864, ημίφυλλα, φυλλάδια, εφημερίδες και περιοδικά’, Eptanisiaka Fylla 5. Konomos, D. (1985), Ζάκυνθος: πεντακόσια χρόνια, 1478–1978, vol. 3: Πολιτική ιστορία 1815–1864, Athens. Konomos, D. (1986), Ζάκυνθος… Πολιτική Ιστορία 1864–1978, Athens. Konomos, D. (1988), ‘Ανέκδοτα γράμματα του Κ. Λομβάρδου στον Ι. Μομφερράτο και ανέκδοτο γράμμα του Ι. Μομφερράτου στον Κ. Λομβάρδο’, Eptanisiaka Fylla 14/3: 113–64. Koukkou, E. (1983), Ιστορία των Επτανήσων από το 1797 μέχρι την Αγγλοκρατία, Athens: Papadimas. Loukatos, S. (1972-3), ‘Επτανησιακά σώματα και η δράσις των κατά τον αγώνα της

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ελληνικής ανεξαρτησίας’, Mnimosyni 4: 61–85. Loukatos, S. (1979), ‘Εκθέσεις Ελλήνων προξένων στα αγγλοκρατούμενα Επτάνησα (1848–1849)’, Kefalliniaka Chronika 3: 70–135. Loukatos, S. (1997), ‘H ιδεολογική αποτίμηση του ριζοσπαστικού κινήματος στα χρόνια του αγγλικού προτεκτοράτου των Επτανήσων «Ενωμένων Πολιτειών των Ιονίων Νήσων» (1815–1864)’, in Μελέτες, Για την ιστορία και το χώρο των νησιών Κεφαλονιάς και Ιθάκης, Argostoli: Idryma Kefalonias kai Ithakis, 104–25. Momferratos, I. (1849), Πρόγραμμα, Cephalonia, 22 January. Momferratos, I. (1877), ‘Ιστορική Σημείωσις. Επιστολή, Κεφαλληνία 30 Iουλίου 1877’,

Parnassos 1: 647–51. Nikokavoura, A. (1972), ‘Η ελευθεροτυπία στα Επτάνησα και η Αναγνωστική Εταιρεία’, Deltion Anagnostikis Etaireias Kerkyras 9: 27–50. Nikokavoura, A. (1982), ‘Η εφημερίδα Πατρίς στην Κέρκυρα, 15 Ιαν. 1849 – 13 Ιαν. 1851’, Kerkyraika Chronika 26: 57–78. Panas, P. (1880), Ριζοσπάσται και βελτιώσεις εν Επτανήσω, Cephalonia. Panas, P. (1888), Βιογραφία Ιωσήφ Μομφερράτου, Athens. Papageorgiou, S. (1879), ‘Ριζοσπάσται και βελτιώσεις εν Επτανήσω’, Parnassos 3: 115– 23. [Paximadopoulou-]Stavrinou, M. (1985), ‘The Reformist party in the Ionian Islands, 1848– 1852: internal conflicts and nationalist aspirations’, Balkan Studies 26/2: 351–61. Paximadopoulou-Stavrinou, M. (1989), ‘Η απάντηση του Ιωσήφ Μομφερράτου από την Ερίκουσα προς τον Αρμοστή H.G. Ward’, in Πρακτικά Ε΄ Διεθνούς Πανιόνιου Συνεδρίου, vol. 2, Argostoli, 369–75. Paximadopoulou-Stavrinou, M. (1991), ‘Εσωκομματικές διαφοροποιήσεις των Μεταρρυθ­μιστών στην Επτάνησο και μία ανέκδοτη επιστολή του Ν. Ζαμπέλη

(1852)’, Πρακτικά Β΄ Διεθνούς Συνεδρίου «Επτανησιακού Πολιτισμού», Athens, 320–34. Stavropoulou, E.-L. (1987), Παναγιώτης Πανάς (1832–1896), ένας ριζοσπάστης ρομαντικός, Athens. Tsitselis, E. (1904), Κεφαλληνικά σύμμεικτα, vol. 1, Athens. Tsitselis, E. (1960), Κεφαλληνικά σύμμεικτα, vol. 2, Athens. Verykios, G. (1870), Απομνημονεύματα περί της πρώην Ιονίου Πολιτείας κυρίως δε περί του εν ταύτη επικρατούντος ριζοσπαστικού φρονήματος, Cephalonia. Verykios, G. (1889), Έγγραφα αναφερόμενα εις τον Ριζοσπαστισμόν, Zakynthos. Zervos Iakovatos, E. (1849), Ο Φιλελεύθερος ή διδασκαλία περί της καλής ή κακής χρήσεως της ελευθεροτυπίας εν Επτανήσω, Corfu. Zervos Iakovatos, E. (1888), Λόγος επικήδειος εκφωνηθείς επί τον νεκρόν του Ιωσήφ Μομφερράτου κατά την 8η Απριλίου 1888, Corfu. Zervos Iakovatos, E. (1969 [11884]), ‘Η επί της Αγγλικής Προστασίας Επτανήσιος Πολιτεία και τα κόμματα’, in Πρακτικά Τρίτου Πανιόνιου Συνεδρίου, Παράρτημα, ed. Ch.S. Theodoratos, Athens. Zervos Iakovatos, E. (1974 [11880]), Βιογραφία Ηλία Ζερβού Ιακωβάτου συντεθείσα παρʹ αυτού του ιδίου, ed. Ch.S. Theodoratos, Athens: Parnassos.

12 Class and national identities in the Ionian Islands under British rule Athanasios Gekas In many histories of the Ionian Islands the categories of class and nation are intertwined. This chapter seeks to disentangle the two categories by reviewing the relevant historiography and to demonstrate how class, derived from individual experiences, was expressed by different groups in each island through a political language of interests. This language was much more tangible than any historiographical claims to class or national consciousness, usually derived from local rebellions, about the spread of ideas about union with Greece. A comprehensive history of class and national identities in the Ionian Islands is required if we are to grasp some of the constitutive elements of nineteenth-century Ionian identities. The year 1797 holds special resonance for the Ionian Islands in the historiography of continuity and evolution of the Greek nation state, because it signifies the end of Venetian rule and the beginning of a process that would lead eventually to the islands’ integration into an expanding Greek kingdom. Unification of the Ionian Islands with Greece in 1864, another milestone in the ‘making of modern Greece’, has been called ‘primarily a measure of colonial policy in response to the effects of implacable nationalism’ (Knox 1984, 503). Such an interpretation derives mostly from examining the priorities and decision-making of British colonial policy and the failed attempts by the British to introduce changes, placate unionists, and favour pro-reform voices in Ionian political life. These are the findings of a historiography that prioritizes the issue of ‘unification’ (Calligas 1994a; PaximadopoulouStavrinou 1980; Moschopoulos 1988) over other forms of historical narrative. The advent of the first French occupation and Republican rule in the islands, shortlived but with lasting impact, was followed by the Septinsular Republic – the ‘first independent Greek State’, a description which has been criticized as historical anachronism (Petropulos 1976, 40). Enosis (Union), in turn, has been seen recently in an alternative light, as a ‘panic response’ by Palmerston ‘designed to stabilize independent Greece […] and put a floor beneath collapsing Greek institutions’ during the upheaval of 1862–3 (Holland 2005, 344). At the same time there is a consensus that after the rise of the unionist movement the islands became practically From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. 161

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ungovernable (Gallant 2002, 13). Clearly, the issue is far from resolved; between ‘implacable nationalism’ and ‘panic responses’ there is probably a different story to be told. But how ‘implacable’ was Ionian nationalism anyway? In this chapter I aim to redress the balance of the existing historiographical focus on the politics of union by revisiting the writings of several historians of the Ionian Islands. I also aim to look at Ionian class identities as they were expressed through collective action and in a language of interests. These interests are not considered as mere expressions of social position; instead, they are considered as playing a role in the historical process when they are actively and discursively converted into meaningful objectives and aims, thus revealing the attitudes of different groups towards the issue of union as well as other issues. This approach allows one to avoid the danger of assuming the attitudes of different groups towards union according to ‘objective’ criteria based on social position or occupation. At the same time, we should examine more critically the frequently asserted claim that union was popular in both town and country; in other words, historians need to establish whether, when, where, and why discontent in town and country converged against the continuation of British rule. This more discursive approach to class assumes that there is no pre-given relationship between class as structural fact and class as social identity (Smith 2002, 9). While some argue that we need to abandon the category of class and replace it with the quest for the ‘discursivities of the social, including the ways in which they are produced by, and produce, power’ (Joyce 2000, 285), class is always about power: any investigation of the former is bound to engage with the complexities of the latter. This chapter takes these debates into account, while seeking to understand the class and national identities of Ionians during the period of British rule. Class identities and the unionist movement in historiography The Ionian bourgeoisie has been a group constructed and defined much more clearly from the outside than from within. The two dimensions of the term bourgeoisie, the spatial (that of the city) and the social, have contributed to their distinct character in relation to the nobility, who also lived in the city, and to the urban labouring population. These differences have tempted most historians to adopt a socio-national narrative that culminates in the demand for union with the Greek kingdom. All too often one particular group, the Ionian merchants, has been either excluded from, or uncritically lumped together with, other groups that comprise the Ionian bourgeoisie. Lawyers, doctors, and the professions in general have been presented as the core of the Ionian bourgeoisie; education abroad has been identified as the motor that propelled political radicalization and demands for union with Greece. The uncritical categorization of Ionian merchants as part of the bourgeoisie is problematic because of unclear definitions of the bourgeoisie but also – obvious as it may seem – of who was considered (legally) a merchant



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and how these definitions changed over time. Moreover, the absence of merchants from a bourgeois ‘core’ that demanded union is convenient for the socio-national narrative. This is because merchants, and especially the wholesale merchants who controlled the islands’ imports and exports, were among those groups in Ionian society least enthusiastic about union with Greece, at least until very late on, when Britain’s decision to cede the islands to Greece had already been made. A central issue that has not been much debated in historiography is whether political changes in the islands between 1797 and 1864 improved the social and economic condition of the majority of the population, the currant- and olivegrowers of the islands.1 Subsequent successive occupations by French, Russian, again French, and finally British troops led to the radicalization of some Ionians, while the majority expressed their allegiance or opposition in various ways: by inviting foreign rule and working for its establishment; by assisting the continuation of foreign rule, especially during the British period; or alternatively by defiance. The reactions of the majority of Ionians, before the rise of the unionist movement in the 1850s, were vaguely anti-foreign in intention, local in character, and regional in impact. Even after 1850, and among the movement’s most radical elements, the social question was initially inseparable from the national (Moschopoulos 1988), only to be abandoned after union when the hopes of the majority of Ionian representatives, arguing for land reform, and the growers who had elected them, were frustrated. The ‘progressive’ character of the Ionian bourgeoisie is taken for granted in most accounts of Ionian history during this period. According to these accounts, the bourgeoisie ‘emerged’ in the late eighteenth century and became consolidated during the nineteenth, primarily through commercial prosperity, university education abroad, and national consciousness. In these accounts, one can find numerous references to the class identity of unionists either as the ‘bourgeoisie’ or the ‘upper middle class’ (Chytiris 1988; Moschopoulos 1988; PaximadopoulouStavrianou 1980; Stavrinos 1985, Leontsinis 1991). Most see a ‘rising middle class’, or bourgeoisie, from the late eighteenth century onwards in the ‘liberation of productive forces, the spread of liberal ideas among an intelligentsia’, and the division of the urban population into upper, middle, and lower bourgeois ‘elements’ (Leontsinis 1991, 502; Chytiris 1988). Ultimately, though, according to this view, both urban and rural folk transformed their Ionian consciousness (modified through changes in productive relations) into national consciousness (Leontsinis 1991, 250). These historical accounts follow a rather marxisant interpretation of history in stages of progress and a narrative first provided by Chiotis, the nineteenthcentury historian of the Ionian state, but also by contemporaries such as Zervos Iakovatos, the radical nationalist from Cephalonia. How helpful is it, though, to follow the class analysis of Zervos Iakovatos, whose sole purpose was to expose the social problems and especially the Greek national 1   An exception is the chronologically limited but empirically compelling work by Anoyiatis-Pele and Prontzas (2002) on Corfu and the 1830–32 population and production register.

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character of his island society? The accounts summarized above give particular weight to the impact of changing economic conditions and the diffusion of liberal ideas in the Ionian Islands during the nineteenth century. Yet lumping together the very different liberal ideas of merchants (especially support for free trade) with the liberal ideas of young intellectuals who, lacking the funds to study abroad, increasingly graduated from the Ionian Academy (Leontsinis 1991, 459), may lead to confusion. Particularly nebulous – but by no means unhelpful – is the distinction in the historiography between mikroastika and mesoastika strata (petite bourgeoisie and middle bourgeoisie), which apparently, and with little evidence to support the claim, ‘managed to communicate ideologically with the rural population and advance together against the Protectorate’ (Leontsinis 1991, 267). Thus the ‘bourgeoisie’, even with its internal divisions, becomes a homogeneous class, and a link between different social groups is afforded by a common aim, union with Greece. Clearly, more research into individual groups is necessary before we can reach an understanding of their class identity without assigning them a priori to social categories. This polarized image of Ionian society and the split character of the progressive bourgeoisie in its opposition to the corrupt and collaborating Ionian ruling class emerge very clearly in the work of Chiotis. In his books, radical unionists, but also other disillusioned young men, find themselves constantly up against a manipulative, conspiring, and servile Anglo-Ionian bureaucracy, or ‘camarilla’, as Chiotis called it. Members of both the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy are depicted as the intellectual and restless youth who had the qualifications but were barred from public posts, and so found in a radical nationalism and the absolute demand for union with Greece the only way out of their subordinate condition (Balia 1986). According to such a division of Ionian society, the landowning ‘nobility’ and the merchants are usually seen as the evil collaborators, while the bourgeoisie is presented as divided. On the one hand is the ‘progressive’ bourgeoisie, aware of its national consciousness, from the ranks of which the radical unionists emerged. The other group consists of the reformists, who sought to reform the Ionian state politically but not to overthrow British rule. The peasants are uniformly and conveniently assumed to be pro-union, while in fact they were hostile mostly to the landowners and their bravi with whom they interacted most frequently. The urban labouring population is lumped together into a ‘petite bourgeoisie’, also pro-union. While differences of religion and ethnicity (especially in Corfu and Zante, where many Jews lived) are totally ignored, the association of class with politics is not accidental. In Ionian historiography the Ionian Assembly becomes the main field of struggle for union with Greece, a struggle that is ultimately a constitutional one, since it takes place inside existing institutions by using them and not attempting to overthrow them by revolutionary movements (Moschopoulos 1998), with the exception of the Cephalonia uprisings of 1848–9. The conflation of merchants and the Ionian intelligentsia under the label ‘Ionian bourgeoisie’ is equally confusing. There is no reason, historical or other, why the



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interests of these groups should have converged upon the national cause of union with Greece, and there is little evidence to show that they actually did until very late. Merchants and professionals, politicians, and journalists may have shared some of the modernizing ideas that circulated in the islands at the time but their interests were noticeably different. After all, it was Ionian merchant–captains in Malta who had first invited the British Navy to the islands in 1809 and provided the perfect excuse for the occupation of the southern islands by the British, who pledged commercial prosperity and independence from foreign rule (Moschonas 1979, 400). Later in the period, it was ‘merchants’, different ones of course, who adopted an attitude by and large indifferent to the ‘national’ issue of the Ionian Islands under British rule, namely the union of the islands with Greece. Class and the language of interests The merchants and businessmen of the islands were far from united but enjoyed the ideological and practical support of British rule for the progress of society via commercial growth; within that context they advanced their own liberal ideas. These groups demonstrated their firm belief in the principles of free trade and commerce in general – another aspect of progress – and there is no evidence that they objected to the continuation of British rule, at least before the failure of the Gladstone reforming mission of 1858. The aim of improving the economic and social condition of the islands through commercial progress was time and again asserted by High Commissioners, Senators, and members of the Assembly, and especially by merchants, through petitions sent to the Ionian government. With the active encouragement of the Ionian state new commercial associations, such as the Exchange in Zante and Corfu, and Chambers of Commerce in Corfu, Cephalonia, and Zante, and new forms of business organization such as joint-stock companies, allowed merchants from the 1830s onwards to acquire greater autonomy from central authority, elect their representatives, advise the government on commercial issues, and increase their wealth, status, and power. In 1856, for example, ‘several merchants of Corfu’ successfully petitioned the High Commissioner to be appointed as assessors in the sittings of the Commercial Courts and tribunals.2 During the Crimean War, grain merchants convinced the state authorities and the Grain Administration that they could secure the islands from famine without abandoning the practice of free trade in grain, which they had promoted consistently since the 1840s. The pervasiveness of free trade and liberal discourse can be seen in the petitions submitted on issues such as the grain trade, communication by steam-boat, and commercial policies in general. Such, in fact, 2   The index of petitions records that the merchants were ‘Complaining against the administration of justice by the Commercial Courts in these Islands, for want of knowledge and experience on the part of the judges. And proposing that merchants should be elected as advisors in Commercial matters, as done in all civilized countries. And beg His Excellency that a similar practise may be introduced in the Ionian States.’ National Archives, Kew: Petition No. 149, Register of Petitions, 1856 (file no. CO 136/1056).

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were the politics of merchants. In this sense they developed their distinct identity outside the main theatre of Ionian politics (the Assembly) but in ways that were no less significant. Other groups were less ambivalent towards the issue of union by the end of the period. Among the few public demonstrations of support was the call in a newspaper for a subscription fund to collect money for the return of the exiled radical member of the Assembly, Christoforos Pofantis, in 1859. The following occupations signed as ‘guilds’ and offered to contribute money: goldsmiths, tanners, bookbinders and booksellers, coachers, barrel-makers.3 The professional and to a degree social organization of labour is for the first time intertwined clearly and one could say defiantly in 1859, with the cause of union through support for exiled radical unionists. Among wholesale merchants, however, clear lines on the issue of union were not really taken until the late 1850s, indicating their ambivalent attitude. Some had already established business networks with merchants in Greek ports before the political decision to cede the islands to the Greek kingdom was taken. In 1857, for example, the Greek consul reported that merchants were considering merging Ionian marine insurance companies with companies based in Greece, under the name ‘Greek Insurance’.4 Such evidence demonstrates that forms of business integration did not need, and in the event did not wait for, the political incorporation of the Ionian Islands into Greece and that other processes were also in play. Some merchants, however, did adopt a positive and clear attitude towards the prospect of unification. These tended to be of Epirot origin and were usually involved in medium-to-large trading activities, from the grain trade to insurance and general commerce.5 At the same time, other members of the ‘Ionian bourgeoisie’, probably not merchants, felt increasingly disenchanted with the Protectorate, especially since, according to Chiotis, the Ionian administration could not accommodate them all. On the other hand, occupational groups requested the right to be recognized by the state and to regulate their trading and working practices. In a non-industrial, port-centred commercial economy, where production took place mainly in the countryside and the crops were exported from the port towns, artisans and shopkeepers catered, almost exclusively, for the urban population, the residents of suburbs, and the villagers who visited the towns to purchase whatever they did not produce themselves. Class identities and perceptions become discernible over issues such as leisure and the provision of services during regulated opening hours. In October 1853, thirtytwo shopkeepers, tobacconists, and coffee-house owners requested permission to open their shops on Sundays and other religious holidays from nine in the morning 3   Newspapaper Eptalofos, 6, 1859, Arheio Dafni, 183, 3, Istoriko Archeio Kerkyras [Historical Archive of Corfu]. 4   Archeio Ioniou Gerousias [Ionian Senate Documents], Royal Greek Consulate, 26, Document 2842, I.A.K. For the marine insurance companies, see Gekas 2008. 5   No evidence of support for union with Greece among the numerous Jewish merchants of Corfu and Zante has been found. For the issue and the Jews of Corfu in general, see Gekas 2005.



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instead of twelve, that is, after the Mass was over. The shopkeepers claimed that no Greek would want to provoke a religious scandal by keeping his shop open during Mass, a practice that caused the rage and intervention of the Archbishop, who urged the Municipal Council to forbid the opening of shops. Their customers were ‘the lowest class of the citizens’ and the ‘working class’.6 According to the petitioners, the ‘lower classes’ frequented their wine shops and started drinking early in the morning, ‘forgetting the exercise of sacred duties’. The shopkeepers, while stressing their public role in providing entertainment for the ‘lower classes’, were careful to distinguish themselves from them. The increasing use of the word ‘class’, in all the languages in which Ionians wrote, Greek, English, and Italian, shows the ways in which social relations were organized around the middle of the nineteenth century, the ‘moment’ when the ‘social’ as a category became more and more pronounced and gradually defined. Yet language can be elusive too. Whereas contemporary discourse talked increasingly of class, in some petitions merchants, when referring to their peers, talked of a corpo (body) of merchants, which they claimed to represent and which was acknowledged as such by the High Commissioner and the Ionian government. The emergence of the merchant class as one of the most powerful groups in Ionian society can be seen in the language of interests and was neither accidental nor entirely the product of the merchants’ own agency; rather, ever since the early nineteenth century and the Septinsular Republic, the reorganization of the state apparatus and the advent of British rule had prioritized trade and its practitioners, and associated commercial with social and political progress; of this process the merchants were the principal beneficiaries. As was stated earlier, the spread of liberalism among the few educated Ionians is usually associated with their education abroad and their unionist politics (Leontsinis 1991). More specifically, however, the liberalism of the Ionian bourgeoisie is evident in the proliferation of voluntary associations, which from the 1830s onwards formulated what could be called a ‘proto’-civil society. Political, literary, and philanthropic associations were founded in the urban centres of Corfu, Argostoli, and Zante and had diverse aims, forms, size, and membership. Depending on its character, whether commercial, political, philanthropic, or literary, associational activity was a feature of the urban élites, which maintained a diverse relationship with the state. Political clubs were often banned; commercial associations were encouraged and assisted; philosophical and literary ‘societies’ were promoted by British officials. It was through these institutions of urban governance, the voluntary philanthropic associations, the literary and other ‘societies’ that, especially in Corfu but also in the other towns, a distinct and new urban identity emerged and a new urban élite was forged. Despite the formal status of the islands as a Protectorate, there is ample evidence that the Colonial Office thought of the Ionian Islands, and administered them, as 6   National Archives, Kew: Petition No. 308, ‘Several Shopkeepers. Opening hours’ (file no. CO 136/821).

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a colony; the statistical series submitted annually to the Colonial Office (known as Blue Books), as well as the classification of the islands as a colony for the needs of the Royal Navy, testify to that.7 British High Commissioners and higher officials by and large distrusted Ionians and preferred to work with some of the members of the old ‘nobility’ (as it had been constitutionally sanctioned for the first time in 1803), rather than with unknown and emerging figures among the Ionian intellectuals. The latter had questionable political opinions and attitudes to British rule. Experience in holding office and (until 1849) the selection of the candidates for the Assembly and the Senate by the High Commissioner from the double list perpetuated absolute political control by British High Commissioners and, as a result, the image of Ionian political life as covered by a façade of independence. Ultimately, this was to be the main reason for political dissent and, after 1849, for open opposition to any legislation in the Assembly. This is evident in fierce anti-British writings in some of the newspapers, whenever they were allowed to circulate in the islands after the 1849 ‘liberal’ reforms. Still, how widespread was Ionian discontent in towns and the country, and as a result how plausible are the grounds given for the spread of unionist feelings among Ionians? Young Ionians educated abroad, infused with radical ideas of liberty and justice, targeted members of the established old aristocracy who clung to political power and privileges. This was a form of ‘disenchanted bourgeoisie’, middle-class educated young Ionians who failed to see their aspirations to social and political ascendance fulfilled under the Anglo-Ionian regime. Throughout the period, the Ionian state spent substantial amounts on salaries for the administration, recorded and known as the ‘civil list’. By 1833, up to fifty per cent of the revenues was spent on salaries and pensions, a sum that was not reduced in later years (Napier 1833), while from the 1830s onwards the state budget was always in deficit. These high and very well-paid posts in the administration were reserved primarily but not only for foreigners (usually British officials but also Maltese in lower posts) and for Ionians who had managed to secure the patronage of the High Commissioner or, perhaps more importantly, of his secretary, always a Briton. Senators, Regents and Residents, judges, and other officials were amongst the very well-paid, while state employment secured an income even for low posts in the administration, as can be seen in the numerous petitions from Ionians seeking employment. This policy is bound to have created some resentment among those left out of civil employment. ‘Class struggle’ in the country Tensions such as these, created by and under British rule, were not confined to the towns. Another cleavage in Ionian society, a ‘class struggle’ between town and country, has been considered perennial, as a ‘constant’, and intensifying since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Maltezou 1979, 213). While recent innovative work has given us a much more nuanced sense of power relations both 7

  National Archives, Kew: Ionian Islands, Blue Books of Statistics (file no. CO 136/1392–1426).



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in town and in country between ‘subaltern’ and élite groups (Gallant 2002), there is a strong tendency in Ionian historiography to associate the uprisings of 1848–9 with the wave of European revolutions of the same period as well as to contextualize them within the broader context of the economic, social, and administrative reforms initiated in the islands in the 1840s by High Commissioner Seaton (Calligas 1994b, 9). It is important to note that the uprisings occurred only in Cephalonia and not in any of the other islands. Throughout the period only a minor uprising took place in Santa Maura in 1819 and even the habitually insubordinate Cerigo remained surprisingly tranquil. Thus, historians of the Ionian Islands would be on far safer ground if they were to consider the uprisings, on the one hand in the context of British imperial rule at the time, and on the other as dependent upon earlier years of discontent and uprisings that really shook the islands’ established rule, especially during the ‘revolutionary’ period of 1798–1802. The course of the first uprising in Cephalonia in 1848 demonstrates that the uprising or ‘disturbance’, as the British realistically called it, was not so much a radical break or rupture from past disturbances and uprisings; it is characteristic that in eighteenth- and even seventeenth-century style, the insurgents went straight to the courthouse where they sought to burn the records that condemned them to perpetual indebtedness and potential imprisonment (Hannell 1987). There is no reason to deny that the organizers, instigators, and country folk in general associated the uprisings with the unionist cause; however, to argue that this was the main or even the sole reason for the uprising is misleading. The absence of any direct links between the Seaton reforms and the uprisings of 1848–9 is amply demonstrated by the fact that those reforms, political as well as economic, which might have been expected to appease a substantial and powerful section of the Ionian population, had started well before 1848, probably as early as 1844; that is, soon after Seaton took over and embarked on his reform programme. That rebellions did break out in the end was the consequence of Seaton’s failed attempt to protect producers against ‘money-lending capitalists and landowners’ (Calligas 1994b, 19–20). The events of 1848–9 make more sense if seen from a ‘top-down’ imperial point of view in the context of changes in the British empire at the time. The Ionian Islands were by no means the only area under colonial rule, of one form or another, where constitutional and fiscal reforms were promoted and almost everywhere heavier taxation led to riots (Taylor 2000, 170). The Ionian Islands were unique, however, in the types of political conflict as this developed from the late 1840s to the early 1850s. Three out of four expressions of political conflict used by Taylor as criteria to identify commonalities among the colonies occurred in the islands: martial law, armed rising, and a movement for constitutional reform (present also in Corfu and Zante). There can be little doubt, at any rate, that by the late 1840s there were significant and worsening economic problems, especially in the country. Napier, back in the 1830s, had vividly described the exploitation of currant-growers and landholders by the owners of land and warehouses, who set prices in advance,

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leaving the growers with no choice and forcing them further into debt (Hannell 1989, 115; Prongoulakis 1998). The contadini (peasants) of Corfu articulated and expressed their interests no less clearly than did urban groups, in documents that clearly demonstrate their antagonistic position towards landowners and creditors. In 1851, less than a year after the law that enforced the sale of an entire property by auction for any amount of debt, a petition was submitted to the Commissioner by the inhabitants of four villages in Corfu. In a document of more than 3500 words, the villagers stated their grievances against the particular law and the practices of creditors and their law-enforcing agents. The document reveals an alternative form of constituting power relations, addressing the High Commissioner and pleading for his mediation between rural debtors and their creditors. In the document, the growers outlined the worsening economic conditions after several years of bad olive harvests had forced them to borrow four, five, and sometimes six dollars on every barrel of oil, which if they failed to repay in kind within six months, was charged at ten or twelve dollars a barrel. Growers were also forced to pay exorbitant amounts for corn, well above the value per bushel at which the grain arrived in Ionian ports. If they failed to pay their debts, they were sentenced by the courts to pay the amount three- or fourfold or were obliged to make another contract. Their crop was valued annually, even though their contracts stated that this should be done every two years. The petitioners did not fail to mention the confiscation of capital, in the form of animals and agricultural tools also seized to cover debts. Last but not least, the petition complained about the bias of the courts, in which country debtors stood no chance since landowners brought their bravi or retainers as witnesses to confirm the debts. Even if the debtors managed to avoid imprisonment by going further into debt, they had lost valuable working days by going to the towns or the country courts and had spent even more money on the fees for the avocati (lawyers) to defend them.8 Similar cases of peasant discontent were not rare in the currant-producing islands, evidence that the landlords sought to maximize gains from the greater commercialization of the Ionian economy and the currant trade by increasing rents, reducing the amount of land left to the peasants for their own cultivation, and concentrating exports in a few hands. Mounting pressures, however, forced the government to cancel all debts in 1852 to avoid social unrest, especially following the uprisings of 1848 and 1849 in Cephalonia. The response of rural debtors who had been successful in cancelling all debts gained momentum during the election campaign in 1862, after the rejection of the reforms proposed in the wake of Gladstone’s mission. A pamphlet circulated in Corfu calling for election of peasants and peasants only, written in unusually radical language and demanding, ‘What are we going to eat? Union?’, clearly rejected abstract promises of better days that would follow union of the islands with Greece. Given the limited franchise of the time, based on property, money, and university 8   National Archives, Kew: Petition No. 1092 ‘From the Inhabitants of Several Villages’ (file no. CO 136/80).



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education, not surprisingly only one peasant was elected (Prongoulakis 2003, 410). The move was repeated in the first elections after union in 1864. Although union took place amid high political tensions – both the last High Commissioner, Sir Henry Storks, and the manager of the National Bank of Greece feared that an uprising in the country would follow the departure of the British garrison – tension was defused precisely through elections. The main issue, however, remained the cancellation of all debts and ending the practice of imprisonment for debt; in fact cancellation of debts and land reform were the main reasons why growers were keen to risk their lives and property through participating in an armed uprising and supporting union with Greece (Chytiris 1988, 15). It was at this moment, after unification with Greece, that the same issue of the vicious circle of debt was expressed in political terms. After unification, the hopes that the land issue would be resolved by the Greek parliament soon vanished. The struggle was transferred to the parliament in Athens, where the interests of the country were set against those of the towns; the latter elected representatives who pledged to defend and ‘protect the sacred rights of property against the villains of the country’ (Prongoulakis 2003, 415). The debate continued in the islands (especially Corfu) through pamphlets and newspaper articles expressing opinions both for and against the cancelling of debts and land reform, as well as in the parliament in Athens, but the issue was not resolved until the laws of 1912–14 (Aroni-Tsichli 2006, 606). After several decades of British rule and the incorporation of the islands, with their social, economic, and political problems, into the Greek kingdom, the struggle was still between country and town; at issue was still the cancellation of all debts and land reform. Political power from this time on, however, would be negotiated through elections and representatives and did not escalate into riots, burnings of aristocrats, or confrontation with the authorities, as had happened in Cephalonia in 1849, images of a past that maintained a powerful but symbolic dimension. By not addressing the issue of chronic rural indebtedness or reforming the system of land ownership, the Ionian government allowed living conditions in the country to worsen, a situation that inevitably spilled over into the towns and found expression in class antagonism. Conclusion This chapter has approached the issue of class and national identities in the Ionian Islands by attempting to disentangle the categories of ‘bourgeoisie’, ‘unionists’, ‘reformists’, ‘radicals’ that dominate the historiography. Although categories fix individual responses artificially, it would be fair to say that among Ionians one group, mostly young educated Ionians, became gradually disenchanted with the expected benefits from British rule and became ardent supporters of the end of the Protectorate. The attitudes of some other Ionians, such as merchants, to the issue of union were rather different from those of the radical members of the Ionian Assembly, since there were not many reasons for the former to be discontented

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with British rule. Liberal demands for free trade and a more open economy were very different from liberal demands for unification with Greece and (for some radical unionists) social change. Nationalism concerned intellectuals, probably most villagers, and the country priests who sometimes led insurrections against British rule, and not necessarily merchants or those politicians who were content to remain under British Protection. These issues have been explored here tentatively; clearly more research is necessary to substantiate the argument put forward in this chapter. During the period of British rule a socio-spatial division and struggle between town and country continued to be as important as in previous centuries and, together with pro- and anti-Protectorate ideas, shaped Ionian regional and class identities. A reading of documents such as petitions suggests that not only union with Greece but other interests, too, were promoted in the 1850s: merchants and landowners sought to maximize profits in more competitive markets, while growers, most of them land tenants, sought to secure whatever rights they could in the increasingly harsh economic environment of the 1840s and 1850s. The strengthening of merchants and landowners during the period was the prime result of the policy of the Ionian state to favour factors of production such as land and merchant capital, and to ensure the unchallenged rule of the islands at minimum cost. While this policy worked in Corfu and Zante, it was less successful in Cephalonia, not least because of the concentration of British forces and state apparatus in the capital Corfu, where local opposition was relatively less. It was in the Ionian Assembly in Corfu, however, that national sentiments ran high from 1850 onwards. Conflicting urban and rural identities under British colonial rule were no less significant than those based on the discourses of class and nation and are central to any narrative about the rise to dominance and hegemony of the Ionian bourgeoisie during the nineteenth century. Unification of the islands with the Greek kingdom was as much the result of ‘colonial policy’ in response to the effects of ‘implacable nationalism’ (Knox 1984, 503), as it was the result of nationalist–unionist strategy in response to the effects of implacable colonialism.

References Anoyiatis-Pele, D. and Prontzas, E. (2002), Η Κέρκυρα 1830–1832. Μεταξύ φεουδαρχίας και αποικιοκρατίας, Thessaloniki: University Studio Press. Aroni-Tsichli, K. (2005), ‘Το αγροτικό ζήτημα της Κέρκυρας μετά την ένωση της Επτανήσου με την Ελλάδα μέσα από τα παφλέτια της εποχής’, in Η Ένωση της Επτανήσου με την Ελλάδα, Πρακτικά Συνεδρίου, vol. 1, Athens: Academy of Athens, 595–606. Balia, E. (1986), ‘Η ιδεολογία της Επτανησιακής ιστοριογραφίας του 19ου αιώνα’, in Πρακτικά Ε΄ Πανιόνιου Συνεδρίου, Athens, 265–85.



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Calligas, E. (1994a), ‘The “Rizospastai” (Radical Unionists): politics and nationalism in the British Protectorate of the Ionian Islands’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London. Calligas, E. (1994b), ‘Lord Seaton’s reforms in the Ionian Islands, 1843–8: a race with time’, European History Quarterly 24: 7–29. Chytiris, G. (1988), Η Κέρκυρα στα μέσα του 19ου αιώνα, Corfu: Etaireia Kerkyraikon Spoudon. Gallant, T.W. (2002), Experiencing dominion: culture, identity, and power in the British Mediterranean, South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame. Gekas, A. (2004), ‘The commercial bourgeoisie of the Ionian Islands under British rule. Class formation in a semi-colonial society’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Essex. Gekas, A. (2005), ‘The Port Jews of Corfu and the “Blood Libel” of 1891: a tale of many centuries and one event’, Jewish History and Culture 1–2: 171–96. Gekas, A. (2008), ‘A sector “most beneficial to commerce”: marine insurance companies in nineteenth-century Greek port cities’, Entrepreneurial History Discussion Papers, http:// www.ehdp.net. Hannell, D. (1987), ‘A case of bad publicity: Britain and the Ionian Islands’, European History Quarterly 17: 131–43. Hannell, D. (1989), ‘The Ionian Islands under the British Protectorate: social and economic problems’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 7/1: 105–32. Holland, R. (2005), ‘Anglo-Hellenic relations and Enosis questions in comparative perspective’, in Η Ένωση της Επτανήσου με την Ελλάδα, Πρακτικά Συνεδρίου, vol. 1, Athens: Academy of Athens, 341–54. Joyce, P. (2000), ‘The end of social history?’ in J. Tosh (ed.), Historians on History, Harlow: Longman. Knox, B. (1984), ‘British policy and the Ionian Islands, 1847–1864: nationalism and imperial administration’, English Historical Review 99: 503–29. Leontsinis, G. (1991), Ζητήματα Επτανησιακής κοινωνικής ιστορίας, Athens: Tolidis. Maltezou, Ch. (1979), Νησιά του Ιονίου. Η τελευταία περίοδος Βενετικής Κυριαρχίας, in Ιστορία του ελληνικού έθνους, vol. 11, Athens: Ekdotiki Athinon, 212–18. Moschonas, N. (1979), ‘Τα Ιόνια Νησιά κατά την περίοδο 1797–1821’, in Iστορία του ελληνικού έθνους, vol. 11, Athens: Ekdotiki Athinon, 382–402. Moschopoulos, D. (1998), ‘Κρίση νομιμότητας στο Ιόνιο Κράτος’, in A. Nikiforou (ed.), Η Κέρκυρα, μια μεσογειακή σύνθεση: νησιωτισμός, δίκτυα, ανθρώπινα περιβάλλοντα, 16ος–19ος αιώνας, Corfu: Politistikos Syllogos Corcyra, 191–211. Moschopoulos, G.N. (1988), Ιστορία της Κεφαλονιάς, vol. 2: 1797–1940, Athens: Kefalos. Napier, C. (1833), The colonies, treating of their value generally, of the Ionian Islands in particular: the importance of the latter in war and commerce, London: Boone. Paximadopoulou-Stavrinou, M. (1980), Οι εξεγέρσεις της Κεφαλληνίας κατά τα έτη 1848 και 1849, Athens: Etaireia Kefalliniakon Istorikon Erevnon. Petropulos, J.P. (1976), ‘Introduction’, in N. Diamantouros, J. Anton, J. Petropulos and P. Topping (eds), Hellenism and the first Greek War of Liberation, Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies. Poovey, M. (1994), ‘The social constitution of “class”: toward a history of classificatory thinking’, in W.C. Dimock and M.T. Gilmore (eds), Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Prongoulakis G. (1998), ‘Η τοκογλυφία και το εμπόριο του χρήματος’, in A. Nikiforou (ed.), Η Κέρκυρα, μια μεσογειακή σύνθεση: νησιωτισμός, δίκτυα, ανθρώπινα περιβάλλοντα, 16ος–19ος αιώνας, Corfu: Politistikos Syllogos Corcyra, 119–32. Smith, A.D. (1998), Nationalism and modernism, London: Routledge. Smith, S.A. (2002), Like cattle and horses. Nationalism and labor in Shanghai, 1895–1927, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stavrinos, M. (1985), ‘The reformist party in the Ionian Islands, (1848–1852): internal conflicts and nationalist aspirations’, Balkan Studies 26/2: 351–61. Taylor, M. (2000), ‘The 1848 revolutions and the British empire’, Past and Present 166: 146–80.

Part VI language & national identity

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13 A language in the image of the nation: Modern Greek and some parallel cases*1 Peter Mackridge One of the chief institutions of modern Greece that had to be ‘made’ was a national written language suitable for the expression of all aspects of the political and cultural life of a modern European nation that saw itself as the heir to a unique and glorious ancient tradition – a tradition that encompassed both the culture of pagan antiquity and the founding texts of Christianity. As Sue Wright observes, ‘language is the means by which we build our social groups’ (Wright 2004, 53). Thus it is easy to see why national identity is often partly defined by the language spoken and written by those who are deemed to be members of the nation concerned. This is certainly true of Greece, where from the War of Independence till the late nineteenth century Greekness was defined by language or religion or both. In some countries the link between national identity and national language tends to be perceived as being crucial. Such is the case with Greece, Turkey, and Israel, for example. The founders and subsequent leaders of each of these independent nation states decided that the national identity should be aligned with the supposed essence of the national language, and that the national language, in its turn, should reflect and express the supposed essence of the national identity. In other words, national identity and national language have developed through a process of mutual influence and interdependence. John Joseph writes that Benedict Anderson, in his book Imagined Communities, ‘gives all his attention to how languages shape national identities, but none to how national identities shape languages, which they do profoundly’ (Joseph 2004, 13, referring to Anderson 1991, e.g. 144–5). The influence of national identity on the formation of the national language is plain to see in the case of Greece. Joseph argues that a language is an ‘analytical artefact rather than a physical organ’ (Joseph 2004, 39). Thus the Greek national language (particularly in its written forms) can be seen as a construct, just as Greek national identity can. Moreover, the modern Greek language is highly ideologized, by which I mean that *   The title of this chapter alludes to the pamphlet by Peter Vlasto (1933), which contains the text of two lectures given at the University of London (King’s College) [sic] in October 1932.

From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. 177

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its speakers hold strong attitudes, beliefs, and dogmas relating to it. Such language ideologies can influence not only the vocabulary but even the very structure of a language. We can learn much about the development of the national written language in Greece by looking at the language reform in Turkey. There, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, certain intellectuals began to ‘discover’ that there was a nation called ‘Turkey’, which possessed an identity that was defined not by religion or by the then existing Ottoman state, but by language. The next step was that Turkish researchers, influenced by linguistic investigations carried out by European scholars into the history and prehistory of the Turkish language, began to ‘discover’ what they took to be the essence of the Turkish language, which, in their view, consisted not in the mixture of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic features that characterized the Ottoman language, but in a purely Turkish language, purged of supposedly foreign elements. They then proceeded to carry out a process of ‘purification’ by expelling the Persian and Arabic features of Ottoman grammar and, where possible, of Ottoman vocabulary, and replacing them with features that they found either in modern Turkic dialects or in old Turkish texts. At the same time they abolished the Arabic alphabet and replaced it with the Latin one, suitably modified so as to be able to record the sounds of Turkish in a rational and practical one-to-one correspondence between letter and sound. In this way they both helped to create a new Turkish national identity, secularized, modernized and Westernized, and developed a language that reflected this new identity – an identity that appeared to originate in pre-Islamic Turkish culture but at the same time was open to influences from modern European culture.1 Much of this is similar to Greek language-planning activities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We can also see certain similarities between the development of the modern Greek national language and that of Israel, even though the modern Greeks do not practise the same religion as their classical ancestors, and Greek has always been spoken by Greeks in their ancient homeland, whereas Hebrew, as the Israeli writer Etgar Keret puts it, was ‘kept in the deep freeze for 2000 years, then instantly defrosted’.2 Although modern Jews have the same religion as the ancients, for many centuries until the late nineteenth century Hebrew had ceased to exist as the medium of everyday spoken communication; Joshua Fishman has referred to it as ‘the longdevernacularized Hebrew language’ (Fishman 2000, 215). In their everyday lives Jews spoke Arabic, Spanish, Yiddish, etc., according to where they had settled or according to their place of origin. Hebrew had been preserved chiefly as a priestly language for ceremonial use. Then, in the late nineteenth century, Eliezer Ben Yahuda and various other Jews who had recently settled in Palestine swore to speak only Hebrew, even to their own children, with the result that these children became the first native speakers of Hebrew after many centuries. These forerunners of the 1

  Some of the material on Turkish here draws on Lewis 1999.   Quoted in The Guardian Review, 17 March 2007.

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Israeli state, like the following generations of Jews who settled or were born in the region, had to adapt many ancient words semantically so as to express concepts of modern culture that did not exist in ancient times. When they did not find the appropriate words in the ancient texts, they created new ones on the basis of ancient Hebrew morphemes. The result was that Israel acquired a national language that reflects and expresses a nation that has a profound awareness of its ancient descent and of the uninterrupted continuity of its religious tradition. At the same time, the apparent continuity of Israelis’ linguistic tradition reinforces their sense that their identity is defined by a unique religion and a unique language, whose words and phrases constantly remind them of their venerated and beloved religious texts and at the same time embody the modern European concepts that enable them to play an active role in European culture. The Greek linguistic situation also presents certain similarities with Arab countries, where there is a diglossia of the type that used to exist in Greece; in other words a distinct separation, in grammar and vocabulary, between spoken and written language. Like the Hebrew-speaking Jews of Israel, Arab-speaking Muslims have a profound awareness that their language is sacred. Indeed, pious Muslims believe that the text of the Koran is literally the word of God and that the vocabulary, grammar, and style of the Koranic language attained such a peak of perfection that it would be impious not to attempt, at least, to imitate this language when they write. Yet Arabs have to be able to communicate with each other, in both oral and written form, on everyday topics that have little or no connection with religion. For everyday oral use every region of the Arab-speaking world possesses a dialect that may be so different from the other dialects of Arabic that people from different Arab-speaking countries may not understand each other when they speak in their local dialects. For written use, however, they all possess a modernized and standardized pan-Arab language that is based on the ancient Arabic of the Koran but – like Modern Hebrew – is both simplified and capable of expressing all the concepts of modern culture. Most Arabs have a confused conception of the relationship between their modern written language and the language of the Koran. They would like to believe it is one and the same language, whereas in fact the Koranic language presents significant particularities, not only in vocabulary and grammar but also in pronunciation and calligraphy. In modern Egypt, for instance, the modern written language is widely revered, while the everyday spoken language is looked down on by all strata of society as being vulgar.3 Unlike the case of Hebrew and Arabic, there is no official dogma in the Orthodox Church stating that the Greek language is sacred. Nevertheless, some extreme nationalist Greeks have argued that God chose the Greek language to record and disseminate His message, and even that Divine Providence had ensured that in pre-Christian times Greek had developed into a medium capable of expressing the Word of God. For such people Greek is the sacred language of a chosen people. This was claimed by a member of the Greek parliament, Konstantinos 3

  For much of the information given about Arabic I am indebted to Haeri 2002.

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Papamichalopoulos, during a debate on the language of school readers in 1907 (Stavridi-Patrikiou 1976, xiv). Such arguments have sometimes been put forward by those who oppose the translation of the New Testament into modern demotic Greek. In a debate about the 1901 riots against the publication of the Gospels in demotic translation, the same member of parliament likened the demonstrations to the Greek national uprising of 1821: urged on purely by ‘divine inspiration’, the demonstrators had risen up in defence of the ‘divine language’, which was no less sacred than religion itself (Hatzidakis 1905, 811–14).4 * In many newly founded nation states, such as Turkey and Israel, a coordinated programme of language planning was carried out with the aim of purifying, enriching, standardizing, and modernizing the national language. Greece is unusual in that there were two rival movements aimed at the development of a modern national written language. These were the katharevousa programme and the demotic programme. Another country where there are two rival written languages that are genetically very closely related is Norway. There the linguistic differences between what used to be called Riksmål and Landsmål are related to divisions between geographical regions and social class, and to the opposition between town and country as well as to other ideological factors (Haugen 1966). In Greece, however, neither katharevousa nor demotic has a geographical basis, except in so far as both varieties have avoided (i) the deletion and alteration of certain unstressed vowels that are characteristic of northern dialects ([tuplí] for standard [topulí] ‘the bird’) and (ii) the preservation or the deletion and alteration of certain types of consonant that are characteristic of southeastern dialects, such as Cypriot ([totraúin], [tatraúθkja] for standard [totraγúδi], [tatraγúδja] ‘the song, the songs’), with the result that the phonology of both katharevousa and demotic is close to the historical pronunciation of Greek that goes back to a time before the Hellenistic Koine began splitting into the modern dialects between one and two millennia ago. This pronunciation is largely preserved in the Peloponnese (in the South of the country) and the Ionian Islands (in the West), as well as in Constantinople, which until the early twentieth century was the town with the largest Greek-speaking population. Both katharevousa and demotic were developed as written languages by members of the bourgeois élite; although demotic tended to be presented as being the ‘language of the people’, there was no mass movement in its favour, and even

4   Similar arguments were used a century later against the decision by Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens to introduce a Modern Greek translation of New Testament readings alongside the original texts into the liturgy celebrated in churches in the Attica region in 2004. The idea of Greek as a sacred language and of its divine mission to embody the Gospels seems to go back to Spyridon Zambelios (see Koubourlis 2005, e.g. 201). For sacred languages see Smith 2003.



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Rizospastis, the official newspaper of the Greek Communist Party, was not written entirely in demotic until 1932.5 One remark that Einar Haugen makes in his book on Norwegian that is equally applicable to Greece is his reference to ‘the rival claims of two standard languages to represent the nation’ (Haugen 1966, 305). The Greek language controversy is about the struggle to develop a national written language which would embody and project an ideal mental image of the modern Greeks that would, in its turn, express their relationship with the ancients. In each of the two cases, though, katharevousa and demotic, the written language aimed to express a different relationship between the modern Greeks and their ancient forebears. The antithesis between two or more ideal images of the modern Greeks was manifested in various metaphors used by supporters of katharevousa and demotic. (Some of the examples that follow date from a decade or so after the end of the period covered by this book.) In 1908 Georgios Mistriotis, the fanatical leader of the so-called glossamyntores (defenders of the language), wrote that ‘language is the impregnable fortress of our national existence and the securest anchor of our race, which is being buffeted by the waves’.6 In Mistriotis’s view, an extreme version of katharevousa was capable of repelling attacks from Greece’s enemies, while the language of the vulgarists […] is like a mire, and anyone who enters it may be polluted […]. Only our national language has the power to repel foreign words and forms, whereas the dialects readily accept alien elements, as mud and mire do (Mistriotis 1908: 6–8).

The metaphors used by Mistriotis to refer to katharevousa have connotations of immobility and staticness, while the metaphors he uses in relation to demotic allude to the changeable nature of oral language: Mistriotis depicted the Greek nation as being timid, beleaguered, turned in on itself, conservative, and bound by tradition. By contrast, demoticists of the same period connected the demotic language with life, feeling, spontaneity, originality, and creativity (Gianidis 1908). The movement known as demoticism aspired to mould a dynamic, lively nation made up of a new type of Greek, who acts freely, thinks freely and expresses himself freely as the worthy citizen of a free state. It is precisely such characteristics, encapsulated by the teacher and educationalist Alexandros Delmouzos in the term αυτενέργεια (Delmouzos 1914, 250),7 that seemed to connect the modern Greeks, in a natural and direct line of cultural descent, with the ancient Athenians.

5   The leading article was written in demotic from December 1926 onwards, a few months after the fall of the Pangalos dictatorship. 6   Mistriotis was referring to the rival claims of Balkan nationalisms (especially that of Bulgaria) to territory in Ottoman Macedonia that was being claimed by Greece at that time. 7   This word is perhaps based on the German term Selbsttätigkeit (‘self-activity, self-development, self-direction’), which was used particularly by Hegel and Marx.

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Demoticism can be seen as part of a Greek Romantic movement that began in the Ionian Islands with the poet Dionysios Solomos in the 1820s and 1830s,8 was interrupted by half a century of Athenian Romantic pseudo-classicism, and reemerged in the 1880s. In the following passage written by Delmouzos in 1911, we can almost hear the voice of Johann Gottfried von Herder, the herald of Romantic nationalism, who had died one hundred years earlier: ‘the folk songs, legends, proverbs etc. reflect the pain, desire, hope, wit, grace – all the merits and faults, in other words the character, of the modern Greek soul’ (Delmouzos 1911, 275–6).9 Mistriotis’s view of the Greeks struggling to preserve their culture and their borders against enemy inroads fitted well with the spirit of Greece’s nineteenth-century ancien régime, while Delmouzos’s image of the Greeks was appropriate to the spirit that was soon to be embodied in the person of Eleftherios Venizelos, the ‘new man’ from Crete with no connections to the old mainland political clans. This spirit, under Venizelos’s charismatic guidance, led to the ‘re-making of modern Greece’ through the massive expansion of its territory and population that Greece achieved as a result of the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913. * A mixture of national shame and national pride has played a major role in both of the Greek language reform programmes. The chief Greek cultural publicist of the period leading up to the War of Independence, Adamantios Korais, was proud to believe that the Greeks of his time were descendants of the ancients, but he was ashamed, in front of the Western Europeans with whom he consorted in Paris, of what he perceived as the dire state of the contemporary Greek language. The corrupt language of the modern Greeks, as he saw it, bore witness to their wrongheaded way of thinking and their corrupt morals, which were the outcome of the nation’s one and a half millennia of enslavement to foreign powers; Korais saw the period of Turkish rule as simply the lowest point in the downward path that the nation had followed ever since Greece had been conquered by the Macedonian king Philip II in the second half of the fourth century BCE. Korais believed that the only cure for the ‘corrupt’ language, beliefs, and behaviour of the modern Greeks was the ‘correction’ of the modern Greek language by purging it of loanwords and making it conform to the morphological rules of Ancient Greek; this ‘corrected’ language, he believed, would create a new type of Greek citizen who would be worthy of his illustrious ancient forebears. The importance of pride and shame is borne out in the following statement by Korais: To borrow from foreigners – or, to speak more clearly, to beg words and phrases, with which the storerooms of one’s language are already replete – creates a reputation for 8

  On Solomos, see further chapter 15 by Vassiliki Dimoula in the present volume.   Delmouzos is using the word ‘character’ in its ancient sense, to mean the outward mark that indicates an individual’s personality. By coincidence, after writing the first version of this chapter, I came across a passage from Herder with exactly the same content (see Politis 1984, 42). 9



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complete ignorance [απαιδευσίας] or even idiocy as well as dishonour (Korais 1805, lxxxv).

Words such as ‘dishonour’ and ‘reputation’ reveal that Korais is constantly looking over his shoulder to gauge what Western Europeans are thinking and saying about his fellow Greeks. The new written language that was developed by Korais and others before and after the War of Independence was not a modernized version of Ancient Greek (as Modern Hebrew was a modernized version of Ancient Hebrew), but a superficially archaized and fundamentally Europeanized version of the language spoken by the educated middle class. This written language, which came to be known as katharevousa, combined ancient orthography with modern pronunciation. Almost all of its morphology was ancient, while in terms of its semantics and its syntax it was mutually translatable with the chief modern European languages and capable of expressing all the modern concepts of politics, culture, and science. Words of foreign origin were expelled; ancient words were revived, while other words were newly constructed out of ancient morphemes; and, where necessary, the forms of indigenous words were ‘corrected’ according to the orthographic and morphological rules of Ancient Greek. In katharevousa, then, the modernization of the semantic content of the Greek language was achieved through the archaization of the linguistic form. This language was very quickly developed by literary figures, teachers, politicians, journalists, civil servants, and others, and was enthusiastically espoused by most members of the cultural and political élite and the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. It is characteristic of the Greek case that, while language reforms in other new states were undertaken with the help of official and semiofficial bodies, katharevousa was developed in an empirical and unsystematic fashion, without congresses, commissions, academies, and other official support; grammars and dictionaries were compiled by individuals, generally without state sponsorship. Those who developed katharevousa were highly successful in the domain of vocabulary. Where there was no existing word for some modern concept, most of their proposals have become established and are used today by all Greeks (e.g. πανεπιστήμιον ‘university’ [1810], υπουργείον ‘ministry’ [1824], δημοσιογράφος ‘journalist’ [1826], λεωφορείον ‘bus’ [1863] and ποδήλατον ‘bicycle’ [1889]).10 As for their proposals for replacing words of foreign origin with Ancient Greek words (mostly in new meanings) or with new words based on ancient Greek morphemes, many of these have also been accepted (e.g. κυβέρνησις replaced γκουβέρνο [Italian governo] for ‘government’, κράτος superseded ντοβλέτι [Turkish devlet] for ‘state’, οικογένεια replaced φαμελιά [Italian famiglia] ‘family’ and επίσκεψις replaced βίζιτα [Italian visita] ‘visit’), while others were not accepted (e.g. Ancient Greek εσθής did not displace the 10   The dates in square brackets are those given for first recorded usage, according to Koumanoudis 1900.

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indigenous φόρεμα ‘woman’s dress’, and the new coinage λαιμοδέτης failed to supplant γραβάτα [Italian cravatta or French cravate] ‘necktie’). The archaic words that were successfully transplanted into the modern language were generally those denoting concepts used in formal registers, while those that failed to establish themselves generally denoted physical objects encountered in everyday life. What the spoken language lacked was a rich resource of vocabulary for expressing the more abstract concepts of modern culture. The purists believed that this lack could only be remedied through the introduction of the greater part of the morphological system of Hellenistic Greek rather than through the adaptation of archaic vocabulary to the morphological system of the modern spoken language, as happened, for instance, in the case of words borrowed from Latin into modern Italian. What is more, as the nineteenth century progressed, calls were made by certain intellectuals for the ever greater archaization of katharevousa. Such calls were clearly motivated by a view of language as a noble edifice rather than as an efficient vehicle of communication. A written language that differed so radically from spoken usage was not destined to live for ever. The rival programme began to be systematically formulated in 1888 in the book To taxidi mou [My Journey] by Jean Psichari, who in Greek signed himself simply ‘Psycharis’.11 It is at this point that the Greek language controversy became professionalized. Whereas Korais had worked as a merchant and then trained as a doctor before taking up the cause of language, literature, and education while resident in Paris, Psycharis was an academic linguist who taught Modern Greek at the École des Langues Orientales in Paris, and Georgios Chatzidakis, the chief proponent of katharevousa and therefore Psycharis’s chief rival, was professor of linguistics at Athens University. Korais and Psycharis, working in very different linguistic directions in Paris, each believed they could provide the Greek nation with a new written language, while Chatzidakis, living amid the hurly-burly of Athenian life, preferred to defend the linguistic status quo. Psycharis’s chief collaborators were members of the international Greek mercantile élite, some of whom were even working for the same company, Ralli Brothers, in England and India. These demoticists were all concerned to increase the participation of the Greek people in the official national culture, in the hope that this would lead to the resurgence of the national endeavour to ‘liberate’ more regions of the Ottoman Empire that were inhabited by Greeks. It is ironic that while Psycharis’s mercantile family background enabled him to study linguistics and afforded him the luxury of holding egalitarian views, the élitist Chatzidakis had struggled to work his way up from a poor rural background. Psycharis and his followers employed and promoted a written language that was supposed to be based on the common features of the modern Greek dialects, largely respecting the phonology, morphology, and vocabulary of the colloquial language spoken by rural Greeks. Most demoticists believed that the rural spoken language represented, more faithfully than katharevousa, the natural and genuine 11

  On this see, further, chapter 14 by Karen Van Dyck.



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development of the Greek language since ancient times. Whereas the proponents of katharevousa favoured the revival of ancient features after a period of hibernation, demotic demonstrated, for its supporters, the unbroken continuity of the Greek language and Greek culture since antiquity. Demotic was enthusiastically espoused by almost all literary writers from about 1900 onwards, as well as by those Greeks who promoted the modernization of the national educational and economic systems of their country. Very soon, however, the demoticist movement split into two schools, each one with its own distinct linguistic norm. The radical and uncompromising version promoted by Psycharis resisted the incorporation of lexical items and phonological and morphological features from katharevousa. The other version was developed by the Ekpaideftikos Omilos (Educational Association), founded in Athens in 1910 with the aim of setting up a model primary school with demotic as its medium of teaching. It was the so-called ‘educational demoticists’, placing emphasis on teaching children the grammar of their own spoken language, that eventually won the struggle between the two rival versions of demotic. Their version was more open to those phonological, morphological, and lexical features of katharevousa that had become a normal part of educated urban speech. This latter version went on to become the one favoured by the more progressive members of the bourgeoisie. It is among the ironies of the Greek language question that, soon after katharevousa had been specified in the Constitution of 1911 as the official language of the Greek state, demotic was introduced into primary education in 1917 and then went on to be standardized in a grammar compiled under the direction of the linguist Manolis Triantafyllidis, under the aegis and with the financial support of the Greek state. The version of demotic that was promoted by the Educational Association and the Triantafyllidis grammar (published in 1941) was markedly different from the one proposed by Psycharis and his followers. Triantafyllidis and his collaborators accepted that Greeks had become so habituated to katharevousa that not only had thousands of words from the official written language become naturalized in spoken usage, but a double phonological system had developed within the spoken language (e.g. φτερούγα [fterúγa] ‘wing [of a bird]’, but πτέρυγα [ptériγa] ‘wing [of a building]’, both derived from Ancient Greek πτέρυξ [ptériks], the first through the popular oral tradition and the second through the learned written tradition). The educational demoticists also included certain features of the learned morphological system in the grammar of demotic (e.g. forms such as οι κυβερνήσεις-των κυβερνήσεων, τις μεθόδους and του πράγματος, which had fallen out of use in all the spoken Greek dialects centuries before). Faced by these phonological and morphological compromises with katharevousa, Psycharis was intransigent, and his linguistic extremism actually hindered the establishment of demotic as the written language used for all purposes. After demotic had become the language of primary education, the language question took another sixty years to reach a resolution. It is no coincidence that the official abolition of katharevousa in 1976 took place during a period of

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political reconciliation that accompanied the establishment of the first really stable democratic regime that Greece has ever known. The relative official fortunes of katharevousa and demotic during the period 1917–1974 are indicated in the changes brought about by the education policy of almost every successive government, which alternately increased and reduced the number of classes in primary school that were taught in demotic. There is no doubt that this chopping and changing had a detrimental effect on the linguistic competence of Greek children. Yet the outcome of all these developments, disputes, and compromises is that today the Greeks possess a rich and supple written language whose vocabulary consists overwhelmingly of words inherited from Ancient Greek and of constructs based on Greek morphemes, and in which the rules governing derivational morphology make it comparatively easy to create new words. The inflexional morphology of the written language adheres quite faithfully to that of the spoken language, while the syntax has developed, through the interplay between katharevousa and demotic and under the influence of various Western European languages, into an instrument capable of expressing the most complex relations. Both katharevousa and demotic were defined as much by the features that they excluded as by those they included. One result of the abolition of diglossia is that Greeks at last possess a rich stylistic repertoire that, until recently, had been restricted by the necessity to choose between either katharevousa or demotic. This unified language expresses and embodies modern Greek culture by inscribing not only the continuity of the cultural tradition from ancient Greece, through the Roman occupation, Christianity, Byzantium, and Frankish and Ottoman rule to the post-independence period, but also the intense desire of Greek intellectuals since the eighteenth century to re-establish a direct connection with both ancient Greek culture and the culture of modern Western Europe.

References Anderson, B. (1991 [11983]), Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, revd ed., London: Verso. Delmouzos, A. (1911), ‘Από το κρυφό σχολειό’, Deltio tou Ekpaidevtikou Omilou 1: 271– 92. Delmouzos, A. (1914), ‘Τρία χρόνια δάσκαλος’, Deltio tou Ekpaidevtikou Omilou 4: 197– 283. Fishman, J.A. (2000), ‘Language planning for the “other Jewish” languages in Israel: an agenda for the beginning of the 21st century’, Language Problems and Language Planning 24: 215–-31. Gianidis, E. (1908), Γλώσσα και ζωή, Athens: Deligiannis. Haeri, N. (2002), Sacred language, ordinary people: dilemmas of culture and politics in Egypt, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.



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Hatzidakis, G.N. (1905), Το πρόβλημα της νεωτέρας γραφομένης ελληνικής υπό Κ. Krumbacher και Απάντησις εις αυτόν υπό Γεωργίου Ν. Χατζιδάκι, Athens: Sakellarios. Haugen, E. (1966), Language conflict and language planning: the case of modern Norwegian, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Joseph, J.E. (2004), Language and identity: national, ethnic, religious, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Korais, A. (1805), Πρόδρομος Ελληνικής Βιβλιοθήκης, Paris: Firmin Didot. Koubourlis, I. (2005), La Formation de l’histoire national grecque. L’Apport de Spyridon Zambélios (1815–1881), Athens: Institut de Recherches Néohelléniques, Fondation Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique [Institute for Neohellenic Research (INR/ NHRF)]. Koumanoudis, S. (1900), Συναγωγή νέων λέξεων υπό των λογίων πλασθεισών από της Αλώσεως μέχρι των καθʹ ημάς χρόνων, Athens: Sakellarios. Lewis, G. (1999), The Turkish language reform: a catastrophic success, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mistriotis, G. (1908), Κρίσις του Σεβαστοπουλείου Αγώνος του ιδρυθέντος προς βελτίωσιν της σημερινής γλώσσης αγγελθείσα εν τη Μεγάλη Αιθούση του Πανεπιστημίου τη

30 Μαρτίου 1908 υπό του εισηγητού Γεωργίου Μιστριώτου, Athens. Politis, A. (1984), Η ανακάλυψη των δημοτικών τραγουδιών, Athens: Themelio. Smith, A.D. (2003), Chosen peoples: sacred sources of national identity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stavridi-Patrikiou, R. (1976), Δημοτικισμός και κοινωνικό πρόβλημα, Athens: Ermis. Triantafyllidis, M. (1941), Νεοελληνική γραμματική (της Δημοτικής), Athens: Organismos Ekdoseos Scholikon Vivlion. Vlasto, P. (1933), Greek bilingualism and some parallel cases, Athens: Estia. Wright, S. (2004), Language policy and language planning: from nationalism to globalisation, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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14 The Language Question and the Diaspora* Karen Van Dyck The national perspective on the language question The issue of language has a privileged place in Greek intellectual discourse. In America the race question has been at the forefront of political discussions over the past century and a half; Italy has its Southern Question; in Greece it is the Language Question (to glossiko zitima), that has generated an analogous amount of pages and debate. Since the eighteenth century, well before independence, Greek intellectuals, school teachers, and priests have fought over which variety of the Greek language should be the official one: demotic, the language ‘of the people’, or katharevousa, a purist language that reintroduced elements of ancient Greek in order to ‘clean up’, or ‘purify’, spoken Greek, a language supposedly contaminated by centuries of Roman, Frankish, and Turkish rule. Which register of Greek a Greek spoke – and, even more importantly, wrote – was central to what it meant to be Greek. As scholars have amply shown, the language question and the particular problem of diglossia – in the Greek case the existence of two competing varieties of the language – have been enmeshed with the major developments and cultural struggles in modern Greek history from the nation’s inception to the present, as has been discussed by Peter Mackridge in chapter 13.1 Here I propose to shift the focus from the national to a diasporic perspective on the Language Question. I begin by rehearsing the familiar story of language reform *  I am grateful to Roderick Beaton, Stathis Gourgouris, Nelson Moe, David Ricks, Dorothea von Mücke, and Clair Wills for their helpful comments, and especially to Peter Mackridge without whose knowledge and generosity this chapter would not have been written. 1   The term diglossia refers to the simultaneous existence of two varieties of the same language. The term bilingualism applies to the simultaneous existence of two different languages. Although the Greek case is usually understood in terms of diglossia, Ferguson uses the term to refer to two complementary forms of a language, each with its own range of functions (Ferguson 1959). In Greek the purist and the demotic forms compete for the same social functions. Alexiou’s term polyglossia is probably the aptest term for the Greek case, since the language question is not just about two different varieties of Greek but many. It is possible to divide the purists into at least two camps: those that promoted a highly Atticized version and those who called for a compromise (Alexiou 2002, 36–9). In fact, no two authors wrote katharevousa alike, and until recently this polyphony of registers was also true of demotic. Standardization has come very late to Greek. On this issue see Georgakopoulou and Silk (eds) 2009.

From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. 189

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in the service of nation-building, but my primary concern will be to show that the same texts that illustrate this story also illustrate another. Many of the works written by the major figures in this debate reveal, on closer examination, that issues of nation are caught up with the question of what it means to be a Diaspora Greek. In fact, the fight for a single national language seems to be as much about diasporic multilingualism as it is about enforcing monolingualism. In my reading of texts by some of the foremost writers on the language question, Adamantios Korais, Dionysios Solomos, Psycharis (Jean Psichari), and Penelope Delta, in particular, I aim to show how much the nation’s language question has been indebted to the transnational and diasporic dimension of modern Greek culture. To read the work of these writers solely through the lens of the nation involves forgetting the multilingual and diasporic journeys that make their texts possible. Here, then, are some of the key moments in the oft-told story of the language question:2 Adamantios Korais’s prefaces to ancient Greek classics starting with his edition of Heliodorus’s Aethiopica published in Paris in 1804 in which he spells out the mesi odos, the middle road, and paves the way for the eventual triumph of katharevousa as the language of government in the 1911 Constitution; the Greek national poet Dionysios Solomos’s 1824 ‘Dialogos’ (‘Dialogue’) in which he rehearses his decision to learn and write his poetry in demotic Greek, though educated in Italy; Psycharis’s 1888 manifesto of demoticism To taxidi mou (My Journey), which precipitated a turn away from katharevousa, and heralded the literary explosion in demotic of the early twentieth century; Roidis’s Ta eidola (The Idols), an attack on katharevousa in katharevousa; Alexander Pallis’s 1901 translation of the New Testament into demotic Greek which precipitated the so-called Gospel riots; Penelope Delta’s historical novels such as Ton kairo tou Voulgaroktonou (In the time of the Bulgar-slayer) (1911), which taught Greek children that demotic could be a literary language; Manolis Triantafyllidis’s classic introduction to the grammar of demotic Greek commissioned by Metaxas (Triantafyllidis 1941); the so-called ‘trial of the accents’ in 1941, in which the classical scholar J.Th. Kakridis was suspended from his post at the University of Athens for doing away with some accents and all breathing marks;3 the introduction of demotic at all levels of schooling by the then Prime Minister George Papandreou in 1964; the Colonels’ refocusing attention on katharevousa by reducing demotic’s presence in schools during the dictatorship from 1967 to 1974; the Education Act of 1976 that established demotic as the official language; and Greece’s entry into the EEC in 1981 with demotic as one of the official European languages. Recounting these landmarks reveals how the language question in Greece is often framed with regard to national security and irredentism.4 The territory of the 2   Some of the overviews of the language question that have been useful to me are Alexiou 2002, 32–42; Beaton 1999, 296–365; Bien 1972; Browning 1983; Horrocks 1997, 291–365; Liakos 2007 [12001]; Mackridge 1990; and Thomson 1960. 3   For a full account of this trial see Kakridis 1998. 4   For a comparative perspective on the relation of the language question and nation, see Anderson 1991 and 1998; Gellner 1983.



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Greek state (recognized in 1832) was only a small portion of what Greece is today and an even smaller part of what Greeks imagined had been theirs before the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Proponents on both sides of the language controversy believed that a unified language would help to bring about a unified nation and make possible a greater Greece, a Greece more in keeping with the glory of ancient days. Up until the Asia Minor Disaster in 1922 and the subsequent compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey, the two sides were united in their pursuit of the dream to reclaim Constantinople. They referred to the city as I Poli (The City), as though there was no other. To different ends, they used similar imagery in their polemics for and against katharevousa. Their linguistic register of choice was always ‘the mother tongue’. The question, though, was what language was the mother tongue? This nationalist perspective on the Language Question is clearly expressed by the writers I have chosen to discuss. Adamantios Korais (1748–1833), often remembered as the father of katharevousa, makes the connection between language and nation obvious in the prologue to his edition of Heliodorus when he writes, Just as it is true concerning each individual person that ‘a man’s character is known by his speech’, so in the same way, the character of an entire nation is known by its language (Korais 1984, 52, translated and cited in Bien 1972, 23).

His point is that a language must be respectable, proper, ‘cleaned up’, not the vulgar tongue, if a nation is to be respected. In contrast, Korais’s opponent, the poet and proponent of demotic Greek, Dionysios Solomos (1798–1857), has the poet in his famous ‘Dialogos’, already mentioned, counter the purist: ‘the teacher of words is the people’ (Solomos 1994, 535). He calls attention to his and an unnamed Korais’s different conceptions of who should be in charge, the Moderns or the Ancients, but clearly voices the same belief that language and nation are indivisible. Psycharis (1854–1929), Odessa-born, Paris-based, the son-in-law of Ernest Renan, a novelist, linguist, and professor, was best known as the father of demoticism. He opened and closed his famous 1888 manifesto My Journey with the oft-quoted phrase equating language and patrida: ‘Whoever reads me will understand with what purpose I wrote My Journey. Language and patrida are one and the same’ (Psycharis 2000, 37). Here we could use various translations for patrida: nation, country, homeland, motherland, fatherland; but in all these cases it is clear that Psycharis, perhaps even more explicitly than Korais or Solomos, connects language to politics. He repeatedly refers to his demoticist position as the ‘Idea’, a direct reference to the Megali Idea (Great Idea), and the hope that some day Greece would recover Constantinople, Asia Minor, and what is today northern Greece. Penelope Delta (1874–1941) also emphasizes that the national project depends on writing about the Greek people in the language of the Greek people.5 In her 5   While I am stressing their ideological similarities it is important to note that though Delta shared Psycharis’s moment historically, as a Greek from Alexandria she was better trained in katharevousa

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children’s novels, diaries, reviews, and letters to Psycharis and other demoticists she constantly emphasizes that demotic is a language of literature and invention. In one letter she refers to how her own daughters when writing to their aunts have difficulty in thinking of anything to say when they are writing in katharevousa, but when they write in demotic they write freely (Delta 1997, 366 n.1). For her, too, Greece’s territory and borders are also a part of the equation. In another letter she chastises Dimitri Petrococchino, another Diaspora demoticist, for his polemic on the Greek language in which he refers to three brothers from the island of Chios who had made their fortune in America. Her criticism is that to maintain Greek as the language of the people we need to focus our attention on Greeks in Greece. I would prefer them illiterate shepherds, but Greeks, instead of naval officers and millionaire Americans […]. I have much more respect for [these men’s] brothers who stayed in Chios, lived, married, and died, leaving children in Chios or Greece, the unknown dust of world history, but Greek dust, the specks that make up, along with other specks, the Greece of today (Delta 1997, 369).

Imagining the nation and a language capable of imbuing the nation with a dignity worthy of Greece’s ancient past are the explicit goals of intellectuals, regardless of their widely differing positions on whether this should be katharevousa or demotic. At the level of content and rhetoric Korais, Solomos, Psycharis, and Delta all insist that the language question is a national question. The diasporic perspective on the language question But such attention to the patriotic fervour and nationalist ambitions of the architects of the language question overlooks the fact that many of these intellectuals were not themselves natives of the Greek state. While critical discussions have centred on how the language question is about the making of a nation, it can also be viewed as an important resource for thinking about the ongoing role of the Greek Diaspora in inventing Greece inside and outside of Greece.6 It is worth observing that almost everyone mentioned thus far is not from Greece per se, not an ‘autochthon’, as the than Psycharis, who grew up in Constantinople and France. She had little problem with the presence of certain katharevousa phrases in her books since, as she repeatedly points out, this mix is the state of the language she lives in, and she is obliged to speak as she lives her life. 6   Interestingly, the players themselves noted the significance of the Diaspora for the Language Question, though it was usually cited as the reason why someone should stay out of the debate altogether. As Beaton points out, it was ‘the prescriptive interference of the expatriate who rides roughshod over centuries of written usage’ that Chatzidakis had objected to in Psycharis, and Kodrikas in Korais (Beaton 1999, 314). Clearly Psycharis is responding to such criticisms when he writes the section of his Grammar entitled ‘Europe and Greece’ that begins: ‘I often hear that it is my bad luck that I live in Paris and therefore do not know Greece. Maybe. [...] But who can accuse me, in the language question at least, of not having tried to make our Greece worthy of Europe’ (Psycharis 1929, 74). Although there is no extended discussion on the Greek Diaspora and the language question, various recent essays prepare the ground for such inquiry (Gourgouris 2005; Jusdanis 2000; Lambropoulos 1997). For comparative discussions of the Diaspora that address issues of language and cosmopolitanism, see Cheah et al. 1998; Edwards 2003.



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Greek term has it, but a ‘heterochthon’.7 These were not Greeks living in Nafplion or Athens, the capitals of the fledgling state, but Greeks born, bred, or at least working and living outside of Greece in Calcutta, Liverpool, Hull, or Paris. Greek for these Greeks was a second language or one of many possible languages (French, German, Italian, English, Turkish, Vlach, Albanian). These men and women who fought for monolingualism, whether in the name of katharevousa or demotic, were in fact all irremediable polyglots. Their concern for what kind of Greek a Greek should write reveals a great deal about what kind of nation Greece should be, but also about their own diasporic insecurities over their own hybrid Greek. A more careful look even at the canonical texts by Korais, Solomos, Psycharis, and Delta that I referred to above reveals that dwelling on the relation of the Greek language to the nation is only half the story. Their texts are not only in katharevousa or demotic, but diglossic, written in or about different forms of Greek, and multilingual, written in or about different languages.8 Repeatedly the question is not simply whether katharevousa or demotic should win out as the new nation’s language, but whether different forms of Greek can coexist, and what should be the relation between Greek and other modern languages. In the same prologue to the edition of Heliodorus in which Korais relates national character to language, we find an interesting clue to his own multilingualism: But this character cannot manifest itself as it truly is except when a person writes in his natural language – that is, in the language which he suckled with his mother’s milk and which he speaks every day, or at least more regularly than other, acquired languages (Korais 1984, 43–4, translated and cited in Bien 1972, 44).

The final tacked-on phrase, ‘at least more regularly than other, acquired languages’ is a dead give-away. How much more regularly does Korais really speak Greek? Born in Smyrna, a merchant in Amsterdam, and educated in Montpellier, it is understandable that he might want to impress upon us the centrality of his mother tongue. If we look at the language Korais writes in, we can see that it is the furthest thing from what a child might suckle with a mother’s milk. His archaized morphology ‘corrects’ spoken Greek. Although he explicitly criticizes the miscegenation of the Greek language and warns of its contamination from Ancient Greek and other languages,9 his own language is full of foreign imports. Certainly his imagined language of the nation owes more to his Philhellenic circle of classically educated friends outside of Greece than it does to any Greek mother’s milk. In a revealing moment in his Vios [Life], which to a large degree is an autobiography of his linguistic training, he writes about how the lack of educational facilities in his home town caused by the presence of the Turks increased ‘the desire to deny [his] fatherland (patrida) which [he] now saw as a stepmother rather than a mother’ 7

  For these terms see chapters 8 and 9 above by Yanna Delivoria and Socrates Petmezas.   For an excellent discussion of Solomos’s bilingualism, see Mackridge 1994. 9   See in particular Korais 1984, 39–48: ‘You are in danger of filling up our common dialect with the idioms of other nations’ (39), ‘those who aspire to ancient Greek, those whom forgive me if I call mongrel-Hellenizers, or if you prefer, mongrel-barbarians [...]’ (47). 8

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(Korais 1984, xii). Greek it seems was not so much his mother tongue, but, in a phrase resonant with diasporic displacement, his stepmother tongue. Again in Solomos’s ‘Dialogos’, which deals with how the Greek language might better serve the new nation, we find as much about diasporic multilingualism as we do about which kind of Greek is to be spoken. Solomos’s story is perhaps the paradigmatic tale of how the language question is a problem of cross-cultural translation. On the eve of the Greek War of Independence, the poet returns to his native Zakynthos from his Italian education in Cremona and Pavia. Upon hearing a folk song sung by an old man in the street, he swears to relearn his mother tongue and become Greece’s first poet to write in demotic. The problem is, he does not know enough Greek. The film director Theo Angelopoulos fictionalizes this predicament in his 1998 film Forever and a Day, by having Solomos pay an island girl to teach him new words. The important role of multilingualism, apparent in Solomos’s biography, is also clear in the set of rhetorical ploys he displays in the ‘Dialogos’. Like Korais, he does not seem to be able to talk about whether he prefers demotic or katharevousa without referring to a host of different forms of Greek as well as other languages. The poet in the ‘Dialogos’ first tries to convince his interlocutor of the nobility of the people’s language by quoting Socrates in the original ancient Greek, making the usual point that Greek is a language well over two thousand years old; while his next, more innovative move involves returning to the Italian he was trained in, which is also the language of his only collection of poetry to appear during his lifetime (Solomos 1822; cf. Mackridge 1994, 61). He argues for the propriety of demotic languages by listing various ‘vulgar’ words, or words he thinks the purist will find vulgar, in Italian. His trump card is that all these words are found together in a famous passage from Dante’s literary masterpiece, the Divine Comedy (Inferno xxxiii, 1–3): The Purist. – Can you give me some example which will show me how words which appear to us vulgar may become ennobled? The Poet. – Certainly, but they never change form. But tell me first, do words like sollevò, peccator, capo, pasto, forbendo, capelli appear noble to you? The Purist. – The last three seem to me very vulgar indeed (Solomos 1994, 544).

In order to promote the use of the common tongue, Solomos first has the Poet connect it to ancient Greek and then has him quote Italian. Promoting a single national language involves resorting to other languages. The multilingualism of the Greeks outside the Greek state proves to be integral to the monolingual project of standardizing a national language.10 10   Korais’s and Solomos’s mixed linguistic allegiances also seem to contribute to their suspicion of completion, authoritativeness, and definitiveness. A fuller understanding of their multilingualism would involve an exploration of the fragmentary nature of their work. Both authors exhibit a pronounced anxiety over the impossibility of ever finishing anything. A list of Korais’s titles of the texts where he makes his most important formulations about the Greek language question reveal the speculative, disorderly, provisional nature of his writing: Mémoire sur l’état actuel de la civilisation dans la Grèce (Memorandum),



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The diasporic promiscuity of the language question is particularly clear in the cases of Psycharis and Delta. For Psycharis, as for Korais, French was his primary language. We know his parents spoke French to each other; certainly all his communication with his father was in French (Angelou 2000, 29). In the second edition of My Journey, Psycharis adds to the Homeric epigraph about defending one’s country another from Dante: Io cominciai, come persona franca (‘I have begun, as a frank individual’.) His numerous references to φράγκικα (‘Frankish’, i.e. Western European) suggest he is punning on the two senses of this idiomatic term, being frank or honest, and being a Western European and a speaker of French. Like Solomos, he can only make his argument about demotic by resorting to all sorts of other languages, most crucially Italian, French, and German. In another passage he illustrates visually how indebted katharevousa is to French and German syntax. He begins with a complete parody of this linguistic contamination when he interweaves the Greek phrase ελάμβανε τον κόπον (‘he took the trouble’) with the French translation, il prenait la peine, alternating the letters of each.11 Clearly, the call to defend one’s patria is not only about the internal peregrinations of an Odysseus, but, more to the point, of a diasporic Greek who begins his life being called Vanya in Odessa, lives most of his years as a Frenchman in Paris, and ends up writing poems in Italian (Angelou 2000, 11). Penelope Delta, though more adamant about the necessity of living in Greece, also lived her life between different countries and languages. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, she stayed there until she was thirty, when she moved to Frankfurt. In her forties she relocated with her husband and three daughters to Athens. Her correspondence is a mine of information about the language usage of cosmopolitan Greeks of these times. Of her hundred correspondents in Calcutta, Liverpool, and other places, only a very small portion were ‘autochthon’ Greeks.12 Her letters after she moved back to Athens tell us much about the struggle of a diaspora Greek to adapt to life in Greece. In them she urges Psycharis and others to come to live in Athens and write in Greek if they really want to help the demoticist cause. Nevertheless her texts, like Psycharis’s, are peppered with other languages.13 Stochasmoi aftoschedioi (Improvised Thoughts), Atakta (Disorderly Papers, or Miscellany). Solomos’s notebooks are full of sketches in Italian that he then laboriously translated into Greek and, more often than not, left in fragments. His most intriguing and most paradigmatically fragmentary work I gynaika tis Zakythos (The Woman of Zakynthos) performs the impossibility of a national language through the stammering of a Zakynthian woman. Only through huge editorial efforts did these piles of fragments become the editions we know today. 11   For a more detailed discussion of multilingualism and the mixing of alphabets and languages in Psycharis, see Van Dyck 2005. 12   The correspondence included in this volume (Delta 1997), as the editor unapologetically informs us, is only Delta’s Greek correspondence. Except for one letter from Psycharis in French (which prompts a tirade from Delta about how she hates it when he writes to her in French), her own and others’ letters written in English and French have been left out of this edition. 13   For an evocative description of the multilingual world that shaped Penelope Delta, see Patricia Storace’s Dinner with Persephone. According to Storace, even courtship in Delta’s day was a multilingual affair:

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Although she may castigate Petrococchino in the passage already quoted for writing about Chiots who had made their fortunes in America and then wrote about their experiences in English, she ironically ends her review of his book: ‘No, I do not like [your book about] the three American-Chiots, and don’t get angry with me over this; on this topic you will find I am chauvine’ (Delta 1997, 270). Even the nearest and dearest topic of nationalism and patriotism requires other languages in order to be fully expressed. The very word that communicates her fervent commitment to the nation is borrowed from French. Conclusion This review of some of the major figures involved in the Language Question shows that it is not only about Greeks trying to promote a single form of their language, but that it is also fuelled by the passions and perspectives of Diaspora Greeks who project the multilingual world of their lives in the Diaspora onto the cultural terrain of their homeland. In elaborating a monolingual solution, these intellectuals work from a multilingual template. Their texts suggest that diglossia hinges on a spectrum of registers rather than a clear opposition between two distinct varieties. Demotic and katharevousa are intertwined, just as Greek shares loan words and even at times its syntax with French, German, Italian, and other languages. The ‘naturalness’ of any one form of Greek is repeatedly undermined by an appeal to synchronic differences among languages. The Greek language, with its warring linguistic forms, is a problem for these reformers from the Diaspora, but it is also an expression of the way they have learned to live. Diglossia, to some degree, can thus be viewed as a by-product of a community of intellectuals from outside Greece, who themselves are always negotiating and reflecting upon the differences and similarities among languages. It serves as a matrix for working through the multilingualism of their diasporic existence. When seen from the perspective of the nation, diglossia can look like a lamentable division. But when viewed from the perspective of the Diaspora it is also a creative way of mapping out Greece’s position in a transnational world. Reading twice through key texts in the story of the language question allows me to showcase these different perspectives. It also helps me illustrate the particular task of literary criticism: to read texts not only for what they say, but how they say it. Even when the explicit message seems quite rigid and nationalistic, the diasporic multilingualism of these texts suggests a sensitivity and an openness to change.

Negotiating the intricate social fissures of being Greek, the young couples courted each other in foreign languages, particularly English and French, and the fragments of such courtships recorded in diaries of the period like Penelope’s give the impression that in this world of repressed sexuality, moving from language to language was itself an erotic experience, full of momentary revelations, glimpses of sudden unpredictable nakedness, charged secret vocabularies (Storace 1996, 335).



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References Alexiou, M. (2002), After Antiquity: Greek language, myth, and metaphor. Myth and poetics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Anderson, B. (1991 [11983]), Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, revd ed., London: Verso. Anderson, B. (1998), The spectre of comparisons: nationalism, southeast Asia, and the world, New York: Verso. Angelou, A. (2000 [11971]), ‘«Το Ταξίδι Μου»· μαρτυρία μιας εποχής’, introduction in Psycharis 2000, 9–36. Beaton, R. (1999 [11994]), An introduction to modern Greek literature, revd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bien, P. (1972), Kazantzakis and the linguistic revolution in Greek literature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Browning, R. (1983 [11968]), Medieval and modern Greek, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cheah, P. et al. (1998), Cosmopolitics: thinking and feeling beyond the nation, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Delta, P.S. (1997), Αλληλογραφία της Π.Σ. Δέλτα 1906–1940, 2nd ed., ed. K. Lefkoparidi, Athens: Estia. Edwards, B.H. (2003), The practice of Diaspora: literature, translation, and the rise of Black Internationalism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ferguson, C.A. (1959), ‘Diglossia’, Word 15: 325–40. Gellner, E. (1983), Nations and nationalism. New perspectives on the past, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Georgakopoulou, A. and Silk, M. (eds) (2009), Standard languages and language standards (Publications of the Centre for Hellenic Studies 12, King’s College London), Farnham: Ashgate. Gourgouris, S. (2005), ‘The concept of Diaspora in the contemporary world’, in G. Harlaftis et al. (eds), Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks: Four Centuries of History, Oxford: Berg. Horrocks, G.C. (1997), Greek: a history of the language and its speakers, London: Longman. Jusdanis, G. (2000), ‘Greek literature abroad: a stranger at the feast?’ in M. Yashin (ed.), Step-Mothertongue: From Nationalism to Multiculturalism: Literatures of Cyprus, Greece and Turkey, London: Middlesex University Press, 25–33. Kakridis, I.Th. (1998), Η Δίκη των Τόνων, 2nd ed., Athens: Estia. Korais, A. (1984), Προλεγόμενα στους αρχαίους συγγραφείς, ed. K.Th. Dimaras, vol. 1, Athens: MIET [Cultural Foundation of the National Bank]. Lambropoulos, V. (1997), ‘Building Diaspora’, Crossings: A Counter-Disciplinary Journal 1/2: 19–26. Liakos, A. (2007 [12001, in Greek]), ‘“From Greek into our common language”: language and history in the making of modern Greek’, in A.F. Christides (ed.), A History of Ancient Greek: From the Beginnings to Late Antiquity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1287–95. Mackridge, P. (1990), ‘Katharevousa (c. 1800–1974): an obituary for an official language’, in M. Sarafis and M. Eve (eds), Background to Contemporary Greece, vol. 1, London: Merlin, 25–51. Mackridge, P. (1994), ‘Dionisio Salamon/Διονύσιος Σολωμός: poetry as a dialogue between languages’, Dialogos 1: 59–76.

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Psichari, J.N. [Psycharis, I.] (1902), The language question in Greece: three essays, trans. ‘Chiensis’, Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press. Psycharis, I. (1929), Μεγάλη ρωμαίικη επιστημονική γραμματική. Μέρος Α΄: Το βιβλίο του δασκάλου, vol. 1, Athens: Kollaros. Psycharis, [I.] (2000 [11888]), Το ταξίδι μου, ed. A. Angelou, Athens: Estia. Roidis, E. (1893), Τα είδωλα: γλωσσική μελέτη, Athens: Estia. Solomos, D. (1822), Rime improvvisate dal Nobil Signore Dionisio Conte Salamon Zacintio, Corfu: Nella Stamparia del Governo. Solomos, D. (1994), ‘Διάλογος’, in D. Solomos, Ποιήματα και πεζά, ed. S. Alexiou, Athens: Stigmi, 531–51. Storace, P. (1996), Dinner with Persephone, New York: Pantheon. Thomson, G.D. (1960), The Greek language, Cambridge: Heffer. Triantafyllidis, M.A. (1941), Νεοελληνική γραμματική (της Δημοτικής), Athens. Van Dyck, K. (2005), ‘Tracing the alphabet in Psycharis’s Journey’, in G. FarinouMalamatari (ed.), Ο Ψυχάρης και η εποχή του: ζητήματα γλώσσας, λογοτεχνίας και πολιτισμού, Thessaloniki: Institute for Modern Greek Studies, Manolis Triantafyllidis Foundation, 135–51.

Part VII the nation in the literary imagination

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15 The nation between utopia and art: canonizing Dionysios Solomos as the ‘national poet’ of Greece Vassiliki Dimoula Perhaps the most controversial element in the work of Dionysios Solomos, the ‘national poet’ of Greece, is his nationalism. My aim in what follows will be to discuss a contrastive relationship between the utopian element in Solomos’s national poetry and his canonization as the ‘national poet’ of Greece. The tension between Solomos’s work and its reception has recently been discussed by Giorgos Veloudis from the point of view of the appropriation of Solomos for the needs of Greek ‘national ideology’ (Veloudis 2004). By contrast, my own focus here will be on the ideologization of the aesthetic dimension of Solomos’s work in the course of his canonization as the leading figure of Greek national literature. Although I shall not discuss the poet’s reception in any detail, my points of reference will be Iakovos Polylas and Kostis Palamas. The social-imaginary institution of the nation is by definition ideological; it constitutes ‘a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence’ (Žižek 1995, 2, cited in Gourgouris 1996, 26). In order to justify my discussion of it as a ‘utopia’ in the poetic work of Solomos, I shall refer to the transcendental poetics of his time, as well as to modern theorizations of utopia, with particular emphasis on the notion of ‘negative utopianism’ suggested by Theodor Adorno.1 Veloudis, in his recent book (2004), provides a detailed account of Solomos’s appropriation by Greek ‘national ideology’, which was based on a politically motivated distortion of his work.2 The ‘nationalization’ of Solomos in the course of 1   As a social-imaginary institution, the nation is impossible to fix as a positive entity. However, it does register a topographic desire. Its topos has been defined by some scholars as ‘heterotopia’ – in Michel Foucault’s sense of an effectively enacted utopia (Foucault 1986, 24; Leontis 1989, 43; Gourgouris 1996, 46). My use of the term ‘utopia’ instead of ‘heterotopia’ is not intended to deny the nation’s spatial grounding, but to allude to a different theoretical corpus, from Bloch to Adorno and Jameson, which proves more suitable for my purposes in this chapter. 2   Indeed, Solomos’s name is cited in connections as diverse as the ‘national’ wars of 1897 and 1922

From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. 201

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his multifaceted reception obscured the initial, historically very specific grounds of his canonization as ‘the national poet’ of Greece by the Heptanesians. The first to describe Solomos as ‘the national poet’ – as well as the first to use this phrase in Greek – was Iakovos Polylas in chapters XI and XVIII of his Prolegomena to his edition of Solomos’s literary remains in 1859 (Veloudis 2004, 81). For Polylas, ‘national poetry’ was by no means restricted to a narrow patriotic sense, but depended on the combination of the national preoccupations of the work with its aesthetic quality (Veloudis 2004, 81, 147). In this sense, it coincided with ‘Romantic’ poetry, defined as a ‘modern’, ‘urban’, ‘national’ literature, which supported the creation of the new national states in Europe during the first decades of the nineteenth century (Veloudis 2004, 300–1). Polylas’s emphasis on ‘truth’ as essential to the national, on the genius of the individual poet, and on the vision of a better Greek world in the future, is suggestive of the distinctive position of the Heptanesians on the newly formed concepts of ‘national poetry’ and ‘national poet’.3 Despite the distance that separates the Heptanesians from overtly political misappropriations of Solomos, whether later or contemporary, Veloudis sees in the ‘interpretive’ interventions of Polylas in the poet’s oeuvre the beginning of his integration into ‘national ideology’ (Veloudis 2004, 104, 108). From my point of view, I believe that the main ideological gesture of the Heptanesians is located in their emphasis on the aesthetic, the individual, the visionary. In what follows I shall draw attention to the difference between this ideology and the utopian in Solomos’s ‘national’ late work. Polylas’s emphasis on the aesthetic dimension of the newly formed notion of ‘national poetry’ places his Prolegomena at the beginning of the appropriation of Solomos’s work within the frame of an ‘aesthetic nationalism’.4 This appropriation would be completed at the end of the nineteenth century by the second major figure in Greek ‘national literature’ to play a key role in Solomos’s canonization, Kostis Palamas. Apart from some texts of a panegyrical character, which directly aimed at the integration of the poet into ‘national ideology’ (Veloudis 2004, 84), Palamas gradually prioritized the aesthetic dimension of Solomos’s work. This started as a justified move away from the patriotic, but resulted in a neglect of the national altogether and a failure to acknowledge its centrality for Solomos. The characterization of ‘The Cretan’ as the ‘most musical embodiment of the most dream-like mysticism’, and of the last period of Solomos’s work in its entirety as that of ‘metaphysical creation’, are a misunderstanding of the real significance of and the Greek ‘language question’ (Veloudis 2004, 94, 216). 3   See Solomos 1961, for the poet’s statement that ‘the nation must learn to consider national what is true’ (26). Polylas also writes of the ‘true Greece’ in ‘The Free Besieged’ (29). See also Veloudis 2004, 151–2, for Solomos’s endorsement of the views of the Heptanesians on ‘national poetry’. The utopian in Solomos in the sense given to this notion here is realized exclusively at the level of verse and not at the level of the overt statements of the poet about his poetry. 4   The Prolegomena have been interestingly paralleled with the genre of Bildungsroman by Lambropoulos 1988, 16. On ‘aesthetic nationalism’, see Redfield 1999, 60. In an earlier book (1996), Redfield discusses the Bildungsroman in connection with the problematic of aesthetics and ideology.



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the aesthetic in Solomos as an enabling condition of the utopian within the national (Palamas 1981, 46, 58). Indeed, Palamas characteristically rejects what is, from this point of view, the most crucial aspect of Solomos’s aesthetics: fragmentariness.5 His insistence on the ‘eloquent effusions of lyricism’ in Solomos’s late poetry is also telling for his intention to ground the national upon the lyrical space of aesthetic abstraction, itself based on an impressionistic identification of the lyric as the genre most unbound from history (Palamas 1981, 43). The question has been raised whether a lyric poet can also be a ‘national poet’ (Tziovas 1999, 164). In fact, it seems that lyric abstraction is no less essential than epic grandeur for the canonization of a poet as ‘national’.6 * The utopian element in Solomos’s late poetry emerges clearly through comparison with his early work. The different realization of the national at the different stages of Solomos’s poetic career is suggestive of the evolution of his poetics. The ‘Hymn to Liberty’ (1823) and the ‘Ode on the Death of Lord Byron’ (1824) engage with contemporary events in a largely documentary way, in order to serve the cause of the War of Independence.7 The revivalist aspiration of the ancient Greek past is the main ideologeme evoked in support of the ‘national cause’ in these poems. If Solomos’s early work has a utopian potential, this is only to the extent that all ideological and, more specifically, national poetry does. As Fredric Jameson puts it, the ‘simultaneously ideological and Utopian character of the national phenomenon’ offers a central example of the fact that every ideological gesture participates in a dialectic between ideology and utopia, to the extent that it involves an effort to attain universalizing (Jameson 1981, 289, 271–90). In contrast, the late poetry of Solomos resists ideology at a formal level. Its utopian potential consists in the indirectness of its engagement with the national. However, to describe this indirectness through the aestheticizing discourse which marks the rhetoric of Polylas, Solomos’s posthumous editor, is to narrow down its utopian dynamic and reduce it to what has been criticized as the ‘aesthetic ideology’ of high Romantic poetics. ‘Aesthetic ideology’ serves bourgeois hegemony precisely as an escape from the socio-political to the aesthetic realm (De Man 1996). My suggestion will be that the utopian in Solomos relies on specific formal qualities of his poetry, which resist the ‘aesthetic ideology’ implied in the discourse of the Heptanesians or Palamas devoted to his work. In support of this suggestion, I shall allude to Adorno as the thinker who, par excellence, and from within a Marxist 5   See his disapproval of the disjecta membra (λείψανα) of the poet’s oeuvre (Palamas 1981, 106) and the discussion of this issue by Angelatos (2000, 73–191). 6   See MacPhail on the canonization of Whitman as ‘the lyric poet of an epic consciousness’ (2002, 137). 7   For Solomos’s ‘conversion’ to the ‘national cause’ by Spyridon Trikoupis in early 1823, see Veloudis 2004, 73.

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vocabulary, made the case for the aesthetic against aestheticization and ‘aesthetic ideology’.8 The utopian in Solomos’s poems that I shall discuss here also differs radically from the emphasis on the future that tended to be stressed by the Heptanesians. This emphasis is, it is true, by no means absent from Solomos’s poetry, even the late poetry. It appears, for instance, in the fragment which was later given by Polylas the title ‘The Eastern War’ (1854): ‘The fourth one – look – seems to the eye to be, but is not’ (Solomos 1961, 261). As Veloudis suggests, for all its indirectness, this line refers to the vision of a better Greek world in the future (Veloudis 2004, 106). He identifies Solomos’s interest in the future in general as the ‘ideological kernel’ of ‘previous, contemporary and later utopianism’ and connects it with the ‘utopian and mysticist ideologemes’ formulated in Giuseppe Mazzini’s manifesto I doveri dell’uomo of 1841 (Veloudis 2004, 105, 128–9). From my point of view, I would argue that there is also in Solomos a utopian dimension that differs from the ideological utopianism described by Veloudis and depends precisely on the renunciation of any positive expression of hope for the future. Adorno criticized the explicitness of hope and belief in its realization as ‘positive utopia’ and opposed to it his own notion of ‘negative utopia’, which refers to the possibility of art negatively to register freedom or ‘aura’.9 As he writes in the Aesthetic Theory, if the relationship between art and utopia is not mediated by negativity, if utopia becomes the object of art, then art betrays utopia: at the centre of contemporary antinomies is that art must be and wants to be utopia […] yet at the same time art may not be utopia in order not to betray it by providing semblance and consolation. […] A cryptogram of the new is the image of collapse; only by virtue of the absolute negativity of collapse does art enunciate the unspeakable: utopia (Adorno 1997, 41).

Moreover, according to Adorno’s celebrated essay ‘On lyric poetry and society’ (1957), lyric poetry is a privileged site of negative utopia. ‘Lyric formalism’ is analysed by Adorno not as an escape from the sociopolitical, but as the only possible way of investigating the ‘new’, or the ‘not yet’ grasped, feature of what is emergent in the social.10 The connection of the utopian element with the figure of the negative originated in early German Romantic poetics, which exercised a pervasive influence over Solomos’s late work. Mark Grunert directly relates what he calls Romantic ‘utopianism’ or ‘messianism’ with the figure of the negative and argues that from Schlegel to Hegel and Benjamin to Adorno the negative as a primal figure of dialectical thinking is at the heart of the utopian programme of modernity (Grunert 8   On the rehabilitation of the aesthetic as distinct from ‘aestheticization’ by the Frankfurt School, see Kaufman (2000, 683). 9   On Adorno’s critique of what he reads as ‘concrete utopia’ in the work of Ernst Bloch, see Jimenez 1986, 192. 10   For poetry’s indirect engagement with the social through language, see Adorno 2000, 218. For the connection of this indirectness with the utopian ‘not yet’, see Kaufman 2004, 355.



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1995, 47). The Romantic ‘kingdom of god’ or ‘absolute’ is not a vague hope for the future, but is part of the transcendental consciousness, and thus inextricably linked with the infinite process of poetic self-reflection (Grunert 1995, 70). In poetry the absolute is only temporarily and imperfectly represented; it does not appear as a finished content. For Friedrich Schlegel this absolute is the ‘highest good’ which coincides with an ideal political order (Grunert 1995, 99). For Solomos, it is arguably the nation. The case of Hölderlin, for whom the ‘higher unity’ in poetry was the site of both the national and the religious, could be evoked as a closer parallel than Schlegel in support of this suggestion.11 The line from ‘The Eastern War’ (1854) quoted above admittedly differs from Solomos’s early work in that it does not refer directly to the contemporary event of the Crimean War (1854–1856). It does not explicitly name Greece either (Veloudis 2004, 106). Yet it still does not achieve the negative dynamic of the utopian, because it comes too close to a statement about the utopian, to a gnomiclike assertion of hope for Greece as a better world of the future. The much-discussed image of the tree in ‘Carmen Seculare’ (1849) offers a more representative example of lyric poetry’s negative and critical relationship with reality. The reception of this poem is divided. Polylas interpreted it as a depiction of the ‘present state of the Greek nation and its future’ (Solomos 1961, 362). Some modern scholars, on the other hand, have rejected Polylas’s focus on the nation in favour of the mystical aspect of the poem.12 The discussion of the utopian aspect of the national in Solomos is arguably a way out of the dilemma. The problem with Polylas’s interpretation is not so much that he misses the mystical aspect of the poem – the national for Solomos was programmatically a priority – but that it makes it say what it deliberately abstains from saying. Drafted at the time of the European risings of 1848, ‘Carmen Seculare’ includes explicit references neither to contemporary socio-political reality nor to any future.13 In order to allude to both, Solomos invented in this poem a figurative idiom which was innovative in modern Greek literature and broke with previous forms of political poetry. It is on the grounds of this innovation that the poem offers the formal means of prefiguring the ‘new’ and shapes the emotional and intellectual preconditions for understanding it. As a literary representation, the image of the tree sets the place of ‘figurability’, which introduces the possibility of future theoretical constructions, but has nothing of their systematicity and ideological closure.14 By contrast, the different discourse of Polylas’s commentary narrows down the utopian potential of 11   On Hölderlin, see Gaier 1986–7, 30–3, 52. As Veloudis indicates, there is no attested influence of Hölderlin on Solomos (1989, 223). However, the two poets share an indirect and complex engagement with the ‘national’ and a parallel reading would shed light on this vexed issue in Solomos. Due to limited space, I here limit myself only to some allusions to this parallel. 12   See especially Papazoglou (1995, 94), who argues for Solomos’s ‘mystical patriotism’ here. 13   Veloudis refers to the poem’s connotative engagement with reality, but does not connect it with the problematic of the utopian developed here (2004, 108). 14   At this point I also draw on Louis Marin’s foundational work (1984, 163). See also the discussion by Wegner 2002, 38.

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this figuration, inseparable from poetry’s formal means, by ‘conceptualizing’ it as ‘the future of Greece’. The implied equivalence between the religious and the national is moreover inherent in the utopian character of the latter, as the convergence of the political with the absolute in early Romantic poetics, mentioned earlier, suggests. Besides ‘Carmen Seculare’, the connection of the religious and the national is evident throughout the ‘The Free Besieged’. The dream of the women in the second draft is an allusion to the community of the nation, but at the same time echoes the vision of the river of life described in Ezekiel 47 (1–12): And one said: It seemed to me that all of us, men and women, children and old people were rivers, some small, some large and were flowing among bright places, and dark places, in gullies, over cliffs, up and down, and afterwards we arrived together at the sea with a great rush, and in the sea our waters kept their sweetness […] (Solomos 2000, 25–6, draft II, fragment 7).15

Throughout the poem the most inclusively utopian vision available, Christianity, is intertwined with the ‘national cause’. Christian connotations colour the whole treatment of the Greeks in the poem. They are repeatedly paralleled with ‘martyrs’ (draft II, fragments 4 and 13) and presented as the successors of the Israelites, the chosen people of God in the Bible. The Palm Sunday symbolism together with the symbolism of 25 March as the day of the Annunciation runs through ‘The Free Besieged’ (see draft III, fragment 1), as does the idea of the Resurrection (draft II, fragment 44). Ernst Bloch theorized religious space as a privileged site of the utopian impulse and refashioned it as a space for the vision of a society potentially realized in and through the historical process (Raulet 1976, 71–85; Moylan 1997; Levitas 1990, 97). In ‘The Free Besieged’ the nation becomes this space where religious hope has been re-territorialized after it had abandoned the field of ‘orthodox’ faith (cf. Politis 2005, 256–9). This makes it a utopian site par excellence. It should be noted, however, that the dynamic of Solomos’s late work depends on the fact that this utopian society of the nation is never actually realized. The equivalence between the national and the religious preserves its revolutionary potential on condition that it relies on the formal means of poetry and is not explicitly stated. This equivalence, as is implied by Solomos throughout the second and third drafts of ‘The Free Besieged’, is not to be confused with the wellknown programmatic declaration in Solomos’s prose ‘Thoughts’, where the use of ‘national organs’ is called upon to embody the ‘transcendental depth’ of the Idea, 15   On Jameson’s Marxist reading, this figuration of collectivity, prefiguring the ultimate utopian collectivity, would be virtually synonymous with the utopian moment in the aesthetic realm. Jameson’s powerful gesture of rehabilitating totality, in the sense of collective human desire, at the heart of utopia is formulated in an often open antagonism to Adorno’s negative utopianism (see Pizer 1993). As will be suggested below, reading Solomos in the light of Adorno suggests that fragmentariness undermines the definite character of any figuration embedded in images. Certainly, the alternative reading remains possible: to read figurations of the ultimate collectivity as the missed chance to put an end to fragmentariness, as the potential solution to fragmentariness in the unconscious of the text.



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and nationality becomes the means through which ‘metaphysics becomes physics’ (Solomos 1999, 31). What is expressed here is the philosophical idealist concept of art as the means of reconciliation of the infinite with the finite – which for Solomos takes the more specific form of the embodiment of the absolute in the national. In opposition to this maxim of identity between word and thing, art and Idea, subject and object, Solomos’s fragmentary late poetry testifies to what Adorno called the principle of ‘non-identity’ between the binaries just mentioned (Adorno, 1973, 5). It is on these grounds also that it joins the utopianism of Romantic transcendental poetics. It is utopian because the absolute coincides with the national not within the work, but outside it; both are equally absent from the work itself, which may infinitely evoke but never reach them. Seen in this light, the unfinished character of Solomos’s late work can be read as the basic condition for the utopian character of the nation in his poetry of this period. The representation of the nation in Solomos, like that of the absolute in early Romantic transcendental poetics, takes place at the level of the reflexive structure of the work of art; it is not a finished content or a realized presence. Ideology is most effectively resisted in the horizon opened up by the non-identity of the self-reflective work with itself, where a process is mobilized in which heterotopia and utopia alternate. Throughout Solomos’s work, Greece is evoked as the ‘Other’ that cannot be contained within the work. As a utopian homeland, Greece is registered negatively, through the impossibility of ever being named. At the beginning of the third draft of ‘The Free Besieged’, the poet confronts a deified Greece, who is addressed as ‘Goddess’ and ‘Mother’, against a symbolic landscape of ‘leaves of Resurrection’, ‘Palm-branches’ (in allusion to the ritual celebration of Palm Sunday), and addresses her:

But, Goddess, I cannot hear your voice, And am I to offer it straight away to the Hellenic world? (Solomos 2000, 47).

The emphasis on the ‘secret mystery’ (Solomos 2000, 47), or ‘rite’, in the same passage, as well as the endless reworking of ‘The Free Besieged’, together suggest a negative answer to the hope for directness expressed in the question. In a similar scene, but against a different landscape, Hölderlin had met the deified ‘priestess’ Germania, ‘hidden in the woods and flowering poppies’, and expressed the same idea of speaking a ‘truth’ while leaving it ‘unspoken’:

Now threefold circumscribe it, Yet unuttered also, just as you found it, Innocent virgin, let it remain (‘Germania’, in Hölderlin 2004, 497).

With Nationhood turned into a divinity, the fusion of the national and the religious resurfaces here in direct relationship with the problematic of unutterability (cf. Philipsen 2002, 358–60). In Solomos, this pattern is nowhere more successfully implied than in the ‘negative simile’ in ‘The Cretan’ (Solomos 2000, 7–8; cf. Mackridge 1984–5, 198–9). To place Greece safely at the site of the ineffable deliberately left empty by the poem would certainly short-circuit the negative

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dialectic of the figure and thus destroy the utopian as the place of Otherness. The inverse gesture is however legitimate: in the context of Solomos’s programmatically national late poetry, this ‘negative simile’ strongly suggests that, although the site of the ineffable might not coincide with the nation, the nation does in his work represent a site of the ineffable. * Solomos’s nationalism – if it may be called that – was as elusive as we might expect from one who steadily moved away from the documentary in favour of the utopian. It is no wonder that its exact nature was often missed in the history of his reception, and that indeed it still remains a contested element in the making of modern Greece. The question that may be raised as a conclusion regards this paradox of a figure so consistently misunderstood and so unanimously recognized as the ‘national poet’. A glance back to Palamas encourages the suggestion that it was precisely at the crossroads between his complex poetic idiosyncrasy and its misunderstanding by later critics that Solomos came to be canonized. In the ‘Introduction’ to the Maraslis edition, Palamas deplored the state of affairs in Greece, according to which Solomos was merely the poet of the national anthem, and respect for his name resembled a ‘duty’, one that seemed to be based on a ‘law that one is scared of disobeying, or a social contract, that […] you are obliged to observe’ (Palamas 1981, 104). However, the differences between Palamas and Solomos in terms of aesthetics complicated his programme of making amends for this situation and establishing respect for Solomos on purely poetic grounds. The difficulty is manifest when Palamas compares Solomos with Kalvos and Valaoritis. It then becomes evident that he cannot justify placing Solomos first; for Palamas, Solomos is precisely the equal of Kalvos and Valaoritis, except that he is ‘more equal’: Valaoritis is a poet ‘similarly supreme’ (όμοια κορυφαίος) to Solomos; the latter nevertheless stands at the summit alone (στέκεται στην κορυφή ασυντρόφιαστος) (Palamas 1981, 133). Kalvos is emphatically the equal of Solomos (ισοβαρής και ισότιμος), with the difference that in comparison he proves imperceptibly (αδιόρατ[α]) inferior (Palamas 1981, 154–5). Seen in this light, Palamas’s continuing preoccupation with Solomos begins to resemble an ungrounded, duty-like obedience to a ‘law’, a charge that he himself had laid at the door of those who cared only about Solomos’s patriotism. Paradoxically, this fact is immediately connected with the continuing appeal of Solomos as the ‘national poet’, to which Palamas himself largely contributed. If the concept of the ‘national poet’ still exercises an attraction today, this is to the extent that it still has the enjoyment proper to an ‘ideological form’, whose function is based on obedience to a constitutively nonsensical and unfounded ‘law’ (see Žižek 1995, 36–7, 82–4). Read out of context, Palamas’s reference to Solomos as ‘the Poet without any qualification or ornament’ (Palamas 1981, 105) comes close to explaining the function of Solomos as the ‘national poet’. Solomos is the Poet, a



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‘pure signifier’ that gives unity to the ideological field of nationality, not because it symbolizes something, but because, as a signifier with a purely structural, performative function, it resists symbolization.16 If Solomos wins out against his poetic rivals, principally Kalvos and Valaoritis, as the national poet of Greece, this is not because he is ‘more national’ but because he has always been read as ‘not simply’ national; not because he symbolizes more aspects of the nation, but because he gives little support to symbolization. References Adorno, T. (1973), Negative dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, New York: Continuum. Adorno, T. (1997), Aesthetic theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor, London: Continuum. Adorno, T. (2000), ‘On lyric poetry and society’, in B. O’Connor (ed.), The Adorno Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. Anderson, B. (1983), Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, New York: Verso. Angelatos, D. (2000), «ήχος λεπτός ... [...] γλυκύτατο[ς], ανεκδιήγητο[ς] ...»: Η τύχη του Σολωμικού έργου και η εξακολουθητική αμηχανία της κριτικής (1859–1929), Athens: Patakis. Apostolidou, B. (1992), O Kωστής Παλαμάς ιστορικός της νεοελληνικής λογοτεχνίας, Athens: Themelio. Bloch, E. (1986), The principle of hope (3 vols), trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice and P. Knight, Oxford: Blackwell. De Man, P. (1996), Aesthetic ideology, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, M. (1986), ‘Of other spaces’, trans. J. Miskowiec, Diacritics 16/1: 22–7. Gaier, U. (1986-7), ‘Hölderlins vaterländische Sangart’, Hölderlin Jahrbuch 25: 12–60. Garantoudis, E. (2001), Οι Επτανήσιοι και ο Σολωμός, Athens: Kastaniotis. Gourgouris, S. (1996), Dream nation: Enlightenment, colonisation and the institution of modern Greece, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Grunert, M. (1995), Die Poesie des Übergangs. Hölderlins späte Dichtung im Horizont von Friedrich Schlegel’s Konzept der ‘Transcendentalpoesie’, Tübingen: Niemeyer. Guillory, J. (1993), Cultural capital: the problem of canon formation, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hölderlin, F. (1943–85), Sämtliche Werke (8 vols), ed. F. Beissner, A. Beck, U. Oelmann, Stuttgart. Hölderlin, F. (2004), Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments, trans. M. Hamburger, London: Anvil. Jameson, F. (1981), The political unconscious: narrative as a socially symbolic act, London: Methuen. Jimenez, M. (1986), Adorno et la modernité. Vers une esthétique négative, Paris: Klincksieck. Kaufman, R. (2000), ‘Red Kant, or the persistence of the Third Critique in Adorno and Jameson’, Critical Inquiry 26: 682–724. Kaufman, R. (2004), ‘Adorno’s social lyric and literary criticism today: poetics, aesthetics, modernity’, in R. Huhn (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 354–75. 16

  My discussion here is based on Žižek’s analysis of the ‘rigid designator’ (1995, 95–100).

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Lambropoulos, V. (1988), Literature as national institution: studies in the politics of Modern Greek criticism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Leontis, A. (1995), Topographies of Hellenism: mapping the homeland, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Levitas, R. (1990), The concept of utopia, London: Philip Allan. Mackridge, P. (1984–5), ‘“Time out of mind”: the relationship between story and narrative in Solomos’s “The Cretan”’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 9: 187–209. MacPhail, S. (2002), ‘Lyric nationalism: Whitman, American Studies and the New Criticism’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44/2: 133–60. Marin, L. (1984), Utopics: spatial play, trans. R.A. Vollrath, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Moylan, T. (1997), ‘Bloch against Bloch: the theological reception of Das Prinzip Hoffnung and the liberation of the utopian function’, in T. Moylan and J.O. Daniel (eds), Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, London: Verso, 96–121. Palamas, K. (1981), Διονύσιος Σολωμός, ed. M. Chatzigiakoumis, Athens: Ermis. Papazoglou, Ch. (1995), Μυστικιστικά θέματα και σύμβολα στο ‘Carmen Seculare’ του Διονύσιου Σολωμού, Athens: Kedros. Philipsen, B. (2002), ‘Gesänge (Stuttgart, Homburg)’, in J. Kreuzer (ed.), HölderlinHandbuch, Stuttgart: Metzler, 347–78. Pizer, J. (1993), ‘Jameson’s Adorno, or the persistence of the utopian’, New German Critique 58: 127–51. Politis, A. (2005), ‘Με της ποίησης τα άλογα δεμένα: η απορρόφηση της θρησκευτικής πίστης στην ποιητική έκφραση του Σολωμού’, O Eranistis 25: 245–60. Raulet, G. (1976), ‘Critique of religion and religion as critique: the secularised hope of Ernst Bloch’, New German Critique 9: 71–85. Redfield, M. (1996), Phantom formations: aesthetic ideology and the Bildungsroman, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Redfield, M. (1999), ‘Imagi-nation: the imagined community and the aesthetics of mourning’, Diacritics 29/4: 58–83. Schutjer, K. (2001), Narrating community after Kant: Schiller, Goethe and Hölderlin, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Solomos, D. (1961), Διονυσίου Σολωμού Άπαντα, vol. 1, ed. L. Politis, Athens: Ikaros. Solomos, D. (1999), Στοχασμοί, ed. S. Alexiou, Athens: Stigmi. Solomos, D. (2000), The Free Besieged and other poems, trans. P. Thompson et al., Nottingham: Shoestring. Tziovas, D. (1986), The nationism of the demoticists and its impact on their literary theory, Amsterdam: Hakkert. Tziovas, D. (1999), ‘The reception of Solomos: national poetry and the question of lyricism’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 23: 164–94. Veloudis, G. (1989), Διονύσιος Σολωμός, ρομαντική ποίηση και ποιητική: οι γερμανικές πηγές, Athens: Gnosi. Veloudis, G. (2004), Ο Σολωμός των Ελλήνων, Athens: Patakis. Wegner, P.E. (2002), Imaginary communities: nation, utopia, and the spatial histories of modernity, London: University of California Press. Wellbery, D. (1996), The specular moment, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Žižek, S. (1995), The sublime object of ideology, London: Verso.

16 The novel and the crown: O Leandros and the politics of Romanticism Dimitris Tziovas In the last twenty years or so there has been a growing interest in the fictional output of nineteenth-century Greece. Forgotten novels have been reassessed and reprinted (often more than once), new studies have been published and conferences organized, which confirms that nineteenth-century Greek fiction has attracted special attention from scholars and publishers. The cosmopolitanism of the Greek fiction of this period, as well as the wider cultural questions it raises, also appeal to contemporary Greek novelists, who are similarly preoccupied with issues of identity, otherness, and multiculturalism and trying to invent a missing Greek tradition of fiction in the nineteenth century centred around its heavyweight authors: Roidis, Vizyinos, and Papadiamantis. To discuss the fiction of this period, several approaches have been developed. The first was to trace the influence of European writers or texts on specific novels.1 The second was to see the development of nineteenth-century Greek fiction in terms of literary movements (Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism), genres (picaresque, historical novel, apokrypha) or modes of writing (ethographia). In particular the issue of realism has been revisited and the realist features of nineteenth-century Greek prose reassessed. Whereas in the past it had been thought that the publication of the novel Thanos Vlekas by Pavlos Kalligas in 1855 marked the introduction of critical realism into Greek fiction, it has now been argued that some form of critical attitude towards Greek society existed in novels before that, while linguistic realism, particularly in dialogue, makes its appearance well before 1870 (Vayenas 1994, 187–98). A third approach, which has not so far been fully developed, is to examine to what extent developments in nineteenth-century Greek fiction coincide with 1   Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774/1787), Ugo Foscolo’s Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1798/1802) and Chateaubriand’s René (1802) have been examined as sources for Soutsos’s O Leandros (Tonnet 1995; Veloudis 1996); Gil Blas (1715) and the picaresque tradition for Palaiologos (Tonnet 1989; Farinou-Malamatari 1991); Walter Scott for Rangavis (Denisi 1994); Berthold Auerbach for Vizyinos (Veloudis 1992a); while Maupassant, Chekhov, and Dickens have all been compared with Papadiamantis (Politou-Marmarinou 1996).

From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. 211

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the process of state-building and the transformation of Greek society.2 This invites a more holistic approach to the nineteenth century instead of focusing on artificial time periods by drawing lines at 1850 or 1880. As I have argued elsewhere, Greek fiction of this period is more susceptible to the application of an interdisciplinary approach informed by developments in the area of cultural studies, since it raises questions regarding popular literature and culture, the role of translations, book production, the relationship between commerce, politics, and the novel, and the engagement of some writers with developments in the West, including colonialism and Victorian thought (Tziovas 2005). So far there have been broadly two ways of looking at the relationship between society and fiction in nineteenth-century Greece. The first examines the social and cultural parameters of the production and consumption of fiction, including the translation of popular foreign novels, the social origin of writers and readers, and the geography of nineteenth-century fiction. Some interesting points have been made regarding the different attitudes towards fiction and its role in commercial centres of Hellenism such as Constantinople, Smyrna, or Syros as compared to Athens (Politis 1993, 1999, 2005a, and Chapter 17 in the present volume), while the status of the novel in the Ionian Islands has been much debated (Tziovas 1994, 2002a, 2002b; Vayenas 2002a, 2002b, 2003; Politis 2003). Though distinct from and more advanced than that of mainland Greece, Ionian society seems not to have promoted and cultivated the novel as a genre to the degree that might have been expected. The other main approach to the relationship between society and fiction during the nineteenth century in Greece is to look at how social issues and concerns are represented in the texts themselves, and to what extent one can trace the phases and patterns in this relationship.3 This approach raises the broader issue of the relative importance of European literary movements or systems of thought in shaping the character of these narratives compared to the social and political problems in Greece of the time. In this respect, Panayotis Soutsos’s epistolary novel O Leandros [Leander] (1834) is a good example of how early Greek novelists engaged with social and political issues (Soutsos 1996).4 Paradoxically, in this novel, a romantic story is intertwined with evidence of strong support for King Otto, and a thinly veiled polemic against the first Governor of Greece, Kapodistrias. The political theme of the novel is placed in the middle of the narrative with the romantic story of Leandros and Koralia providing the romantic framework. Though Leandros is described as a 2   A renewed interest in Greek mystery stories (apokrypha) has led scholars to discuss the question of the social novel in Greece (see Denisi 1996–7). 3   Reference occasionally extends to wider social and political issues beyond Greece, particularly evident in some stories by Alexandros Rizos Rangavis. In his first story, ‘The prisons, or capital punishment’ (1837), he shows an interest in the penal system and its reform in America, while in another story, ‘Gloomymouth’ (1848), he represents the appalling working conditions of children in Victorian Britain (see also Gotsi 2006). 4   All page numbers, given in parentheses in the main text or in footnotes, refer to this edition.



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progressive Greek and supporter of King Otto, living during the years 1833 and 1834, the political statements in the text tend to be general and abstract. Soutsos sees the role of the king not only in political, but also in cultural and symbolic, terms. He argues that having accomplished the task of liberation and having done all they could by fighting, the Greeks now expected their king to unite them, and, most importantly, to lead a cultural renaissance by taking them to an enlightened future, making sure that Greece benefited from any advances or discoveries in Europe. Like Korais and Moisiodax before him, Soutsos also argues that Germany, through the king, should repay with interest its classical debt to Greece (p. 130). Though he is well aware of literary developments in Europe, and certainly relies on the precedents by Goethe, Foscolo, and Chateaubriand, Soutsos is eager to stress the originality of his novel right from the prologue. His strong sense of Greekness (p. 46), his reference to the mutilation of the Parthenon by Elgin (p. 70) and to James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) and his ‘free America’ (p. 43), suggest that what he is trying to do is not simply follow the European trend of the epistolary or sentimental novel, but to produce a foundational narrative for the new state, a narrative that will follow the literary conventions of its time, but will also constitute a political commentary on contemporary developments in Greece. The mention of leading writers such as Rousseau, Goethe, Scott, and Foscolo in the prologue suggests a sense of literary belatedness in relation to European literature; yet there is also a sense of modernity since the renaissance of the modern nation was associated with the birth of the novel in Greece. It should be noted, however, that Soutsos, unlike Korais, neither claims the Greek origins of the novel as a genre nor does he make any reference to the earlier Greek epistolary tradition (Veloudis 1996, 60). The references to European writers and the disregard for the Greek roots of the genre (notwithstanding other references in the text to the Greek classical past) suggest that O Leandros adumbrates the paradox in Greek fiction that becomes increasingly apparent from the 1840s onwards. That is to say that the Greek novel ignores Greek antiquity, even though Greek society, including Soutsos himself, with his influential The Resurrection of the Ancient Greek Language Understood by All (1853), was promoting a fervent neoclassical revival in other areas (language, architecture, poetry, drama) (Politis 2005b, 133). It seems to me that O Leandros, more eloquently than any other novel of the nineteenth century, encapsulates the dilemma of Greece after independence: its aspirations to be classicizing and modern at the same time. Indeed, O Leandros includes a number of disparate elements, thus reflecting both the situation in Greece at the time and the career of its author who was simultaneously a man of letters and a member of the administrative establishment of the newly established state.5 Strangely enough, in his prologue, Soutsos gives a summary of the plot and thus diminishes the reader’s curiosity. At the same time, he appears to care about his readers, trying to avoid repetition of images or a lexicon that they 5

  For details about Soutsos’s life see Lefas 1991.

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might find too demanding (τύπον τινα νευρώδους λεκτικού), arguing that he is writing for the youth of the country and urging them to complete the task of enlightening Greece. Judging by the prologue, one might expect O Leandros to be an extrovert narrative about ideas and progress. However, the main narrative verges on introversion and confession, while Leandros’s letters and thoughts give the impression of a diary.6 One is left wondering how a romantic and sad story of death and suicide could be reconciled with strong political views: is this a closet drama or a political narrative? While O Leandros used to be considered a typical example of ‘unrestrained romanticism’, rendering the novel unappealing and unreadable (Sachinis 1991: 46), more recently its political character has been highlighted,7 and the impact of SaintSimon detected (Vayenas 1997). The brothers Panayotis and Alexandros Soutsos were likely to have come across the ideas of Saint-Simon while they were in Paris at the end of 1820s, and possibly through Frangiskos Pylarinos, who published two articles on Saint-Simon in the newspaper Ilios that the brothers edited in Nafplion in 1833. The term koinonismos, apparently a translation of the French socialisme, is also found in the novels of the two brothers, O Leandros and O Exoristos tou 1831 [The Exile of 1831] (P. Soutsos 1996: 124; A. Soutsos 1994: 78).8 The term is mentioned in both novels in connection with the arrival in Argolis of the ancient king Danaus and his modern equivalent in 1833, King Otto. Vayenas argues that ‘Leandros is a utopian socialist who ultimately succumbs to the burden of romantic melancholy’ (Vayenas 1997, 49), thus suggesting that the romantic prevails over the socialist element. These different approaches to the novel raise the question whether O Leandros should be considered a Romantic, a social, or a political novel. In other words, does the novel place greater emphasis on the freedom of the individual, on the organization of society, or on the political developments in Greece at the time? Perhaps the contradictory trends in the novel have to do with the fact that its readership is not clearly defined. Soutsos, in his prologue, addresses Greek youth, but it is not clear why he is writing the novel. Is it to tell a romantic story that might appeal to a wider audience, to castigate political developments in Greece, to encourage the young (including the young king) to contribute to the enlightenment of Greece, or to compete with the European practitioners of the epistolary novel and claim the introduction of the genre into Greece? The aim of the novel is not clearly spelled out because the narrative contains diverse elements. In this respect, 6   Leandros, in his first letter, refers to opening a little book in which he had deposited his memoirs, thus reinforcing the textual allusions of the novel. 7   See the introduction by Alexandra Samouil in Soutsos 1996, 17, and Beaton 2006. Henri Tonnet (1996), on the one hand, describes the novel as ‘un pur roman romantique’ (p. 87), and on the other, refers to Leandros as ‘le premier héros de roman grec qui ait des convictions politiques’ (p. 90). 8   Veloudis disagrees with Vayenas and argues that the term koinonismos in these novels simply refers to ‘social organization’ rather than to the word socialisme (Veloudis 2004, 88, 91). Elsewhere, with reference to a passage from Rangavis’s Memoirs, he associates koinonismos with politismos (civilization) (Veloudis 2001, 347).



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the novel represents the fluid and unshaped character of Greek society and the dilemma as to whether priority should be given to individual freedom or to social commitment. To deal with all these issues we should examine different aspects of the text. Whatever the influence of Saint-Simon might be, or the particular meaning of the word koinonismos, society in the novel is portrayed in either abstract or negative terms. The perception of society as a form of slavery (p. 60) and the emphasis on freedom suggest that one of the central concerns of O Leandros is the issue of the ideal balance between duty and freedom, convention and feeling, and ultimately between society and the individual. However, this balance does not seem to be struck in the novel: the individual is presented as being oppressed by social conventions, the stifling of feelings, authoritarian practices, and the hypocrisy of politicians (p. 109). The gap between society and the individual seems unbridgeable (p. 185). Leandros has lost faith in his social world, as the following quotation suggests: I have seen, tasted, seen again and tasted again to excess the futility of the social world. […] I live isolated in turbulent Nafplion and I am afraid to propel myself into a world which has nothing to say to me. I am fed up with people and have confined myself to the wilderness (p. 107).

Though Greek society is presented as narrow, lacking the boundless horizons (p. 61) offered by the immensity of nature where great ideas are to be found (pp. 106, 144), the hero’s attitude towards society is rather abstract and often takes the form of manifesto-style statements. One has the sense that he is referring to humanity in general rather than to Greek society in particular. In his prologue, Soutsos describes the correspondence of his main character as being sarcastic about all societies (p. 44), while in one of his letters Leandros states that man has not been created to rule other men and thus feels angry when he sees the powerful exploit their fellow men (p. 50). Human societies do not appear to represent a higher form of organization that people might aspire to, because human beings in the novel are not shown as superior to animals (pp. 81–2), but as monstrous creatures with two opposing natures (p. 84). If the aim of Saint-Simon was to seek ‘universal and underlying principles that hold society together against the historical or accidental tendencies that pull it apart’ (Carlisle 1987, 25), there is no such evidence in O Leandros. Instead, the hero seeks isolation and shuns the corruption of society as far as he can. There is no evidence in the novel that the crisis in modern society could be resolved by the development of a new religion based on positivism, as Saint-Simon had argued, or that through the application of scientific positivism it might be possible to discover the laws of social change and organization. If Soutsos’s aim had been to introduce some of Saint-Simon’s ideas in fictional form, then greater emphasis would have been given to the social vision or to a new social structure. Instead, society is associated with imprisonment and not with the goal of social harmony

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nor with the development of the individual.9 Though one passage from Efrosyni’s letter to Koralia (p. 75) could be seen as a sign of women’s emancipation and SaintSimonian feminism,10 it is Koralia’s respect for marriage and social conventions that leads to her death. While men are happier because of their exposure to war or their ability to travel, women are presented as suffering, confined to the house (p. 159), and as more vulnerable to the loose and dangerous morality associated with Europe (p. 76). Thus, neither is the role of women clearly articulated in the novel nor is any plan of social change or development. The idea of freedom emphasized in the prologue to the novel, where the ideas and feelings of Leandros are listed, and described later as the Goddess of Leandros’s heart (p. 72), does not seem to be compatible with the authoritarianism implicit in Saint-Simon’s thought, which has led to his being ‘seen as an ancestor of both communism and fascism’ (Carlisle 1987, 25). The main thrust of the novel seems to emphasize the freedom of the individual rather than social organization, and, therefore, reading the novel as even a distant echo of Saint-Simonian ideas is problematic. In this novel, nature, the individual, and freedom seem to be allied against society. Consistent with its romantic origins, the novel stresses the opposition between the social slavery associated with the cities and the freedom of nature. However, descriptions of nature are abstract or idealized and lack realism. For example, in the middle of winter, nature is presented as idyllic, arcadian, and vernal: Beautiful day, spring day! In the valleys the flocks, the shepherds and their dogs; in the ploughed fields, the rustic huts and the innocent Greek peasant woman with thyme and sage adorning her head; Oh, the pure pleasures of rural life! Oh, the pure freedom of the countryside! (p. 53).

The individual here appears to be identified with nature. It seems that the representation of nature, much as happens in Werther, is determined by the mood of the protagonist. Nature seems not to exist independently from the inner self and is simply represented according to the mood of the main character (p. 103). Hence the representation is not realistic but a mental construct, with the inner self projected onto nature (pp. 85–6), while memory and imagination appear more important than reality. Therefore, the realistic representation of nature is undermined by its reflection of the emotional state of the protagonist. Nature is on the side of the individual, not only because it reflects his feelings, but because it also offers peace and solitude for reflection and communion with God (p. 97). Political realism seems to lose out to the subjectivity of nature. The novel, in turn, displays contradictory trends. On the one hand, there is an emphasis on the visual with frequent references to scenes, pictures or tableaux, and on the other, given that Soutsos himself in his prologue states that the words of the novel should be like ‘signs of ideas’ (p. 46), symbolism is a central element. 9

  Society is also presented as a form of theatre in which people wear hypocritical masks (pp. 107, 111).   See the introduction by Alexandra Samouil in Soutsos 1996, 21–2.

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Moreover, Leandros’s political involvement is contrasted with his desire to be alone. Is he, however, simply melancholic, love-stricken, and withdrawn, or is he a symbol of an emerging individualism and liberalism? Though the novel focuses on political passions and human emotions, its epistolary character and the quotations from ancient writers tend to make the narrative seem more dispassionate and distant. In other words, in the novel there is a tension between representation and symbolism, political realism (associated with Nafplion)11 and romantic abstraction (associated with Athens),12 human passion and textual distance. As a result, the romantic despondency of the novel is contradicted by its political realism, thus confusing its generic identity. Though Leandros is described in the prologue as a supporter of progress and therefore a supporter of Otto,13 it is not clear in the novel whether the emphasis is on the past or the present. In some parts of the text modernity is celebrated: Everything is new; a new generation succeeds the old; a new state of affairs, ideas, mores, customs, dress enter the gates of Greece silently and sit on the ruins of the old world while Greece is a hart thirsting for enlightenment and modernity (νεωτερισμών) (p. 126 [cf. Psalm 41]).

Elsewhere the passage of time is highlighted: Look at the world, which you first saw when you came to Greece, and how it is today; new people on the scene, new interests have arrived; new ideas; a new world has succeeded the old; everything passes over us and is ephemeral like us; others open the way to us and we open the way to others; the future succeeds the present and the future also becomes past, therefore the old picture of the world is constantly re-made (p. 183).

In other parts, again, the comparison of Greece’s past glory and its ‘diminished’ present is a cause of regret (pp. 51–8). Leandros’s wanderings through various places in Greece constitute a re-enactment of history (pp. 149–50). The landscape becomes a palimpsest of the ancient past and the recent events of the War of Independence. Thus, a personal story is blended with the historical past, but Leandros’s chief aspiration is to revive the ancient glory: ‘O Hellas! When I see you glorious, as in the era of Pericles, alive and not silent […] then death, death may close my eyes’ (p. 129). O Leandros is a novel that aspires to be at the same time romantic and social, symbolist and political; and this combination compromises its romantic character and thwarts its realist or political aims. In this novel a number of apparently contrasting elements coexist: romanticism and classicism, heart and mind, past and present, freedom and restraint. 11   Nafplion in the novel is described as a quicksilver city (υδραργυρούπολις), representing the strange hybridity of the Greek state and its architecture (p. 125). 12   For a comparison of O Leandros with O Zografos by Palaiologos, regarding the attitude towards antiquity and the representation of Athens and the Acropolis, see Voutouris 1995, 96–105. 13   Though he had praised the king upon his arrival with his ‘The Shepherd of Argolis’ (1833), Soutsos would later describe him as a tyrant when Otto was dethroned in 1862. For details, see Lefas 1991, 33, 77, 99.

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One could argue, however, that what the two overlapping storylines (romantic and political) in the novel have in common – indeed what brings the apparently opposing elements of the novel together and becomes the central theme of O Leandros – is the overcoming of separation and discord. Separation is emphasized not only by the physical separation between the two characters but even by the epistolary nature of the narrative. Koralia and Leandros had had a happy childhood and for three years lived together in Transylvania (pp. 68–9). Moreover, judging from one of Leandros’s last letters, it was the enmity of their parents that had separated them (p. 163). Thus, the novel could be seen as expressing a desire to overcome separation on an individual level, but this could be extended to society as a whole. Harmony and unity achieved at an early stage, associated with childhood and nature, should be maintained at a later social stage. Therefore, the elusive ideal formulated in the novel could be seen as political unity and the social harmony that could be found in nature or the past (either the ancient past or childhood), but not in the newly founded Greek state. An allegorical reading of the text, which would bring together the two opposing themes, the political and the romantic, would highlight the necessity for strengthening social and political unity in order to overcome the social alienation of the individual (p. 185). Leandros and Koralia respect the institution of marriage and social conventions, implying that a society should be based on the principles of duty and honour, and people should not suffer from conflict or authoritarianism. This reading presupposes that much emphasis is placed in the novel on the organization of society in order to ensure equality, stability, and consensus. However, the pessimistic ending of the novel suggests that the individual is not able to overcome his social alienation or his separation from the beloved and is driven to suicide.14 Only a belief in the immortality of the soul could ensure a posthumous reunion of Leandros with his beloved. The theme of immortality, which according to Soutsos’s prologue is one of the main ideas of the novel, is something that has not until now been discussed in relation to this text. It indicates a movement away from materiality towards spirituality and adds a metaphysical dimension to the story. The immortality of the soul and the idea of reunion after death suggest, however, a personal and spiritual solution to the problem of separation rather than a social or political one. This further reinforces the individualistic character of the narrative and diminishes its social or political purpose. Hope and the solution of earthly problems are transferred to another world and to a higher divine reality. The metaphysical or imaginary transcendence of hard social reality can also be found in later novels, and particularly the mystery novels (apokrypha) (Gotsi 1997, 153, 156). Thus, O Leandros sets the pattern for suggesting that social ills can be overcome by aspiring to a higher moral and spiritual condition. The conflicting descriptions of O Leandros as a romantic and a political novel (though these descriptions cannot always be considered mutually exclusive) raise 14   Veloudis 1992b, 120 claims that what drives Leandros to suicide is not the death of his beloved but the hated monarchy. This erroneous claim is not repeated in his subsequent studies.



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the question whether the emphasis lies on the improvement of society or on the freedom of the individual. Though one can argue that the former is a prerequisite for the latter, the novel does not suggest that political or social reform is enough to keep Leandros alive. Political or social novels tend to have specific goals. In his prologue, Soutsos represents his character as being angry, on returning to Nafplion, at the corrupt politicians, but he points out that ‘his strictures do not contain any reference to a specific person’ (p. 45); that is, they do not have any particular target. Instead, his strictures could be seen as generalized and moralizing pictures for didactic purposes: ‘They are paintings in which evil is portrayed with dark colours and in which the guilty could mysteriously see into their corrupt souls, become ashamed and improve themselves’ (p. 45). Politics give way to morality and thus the political character of the novel seems to be undermined. Soutsos faces the dilemma that others will encounter later: how do you combine politics with a romantic story, ideas with emotions? By conflating the universal values of Enlightenment, with its references to egalitarianism, and the Romantic aspirations to portray the local, O Leandros becomes a syncretic text. It manifests the tensions between the national and the transnational, the physical and the metaphysical, the individual and the political that we see to be characteristic of a number of romantic poets, including Solomos (discussed further by Vassiliki Dimoula in chapter 15 above). The novel is structured around two starkly contrasted themes: political criticism and romantic idealism, which underpin other oppositions: society–nature, ideas– feelings, engagement–distance, though not all of them can find a synthesis, and have to exist in a kind of syncretic tension. The novel, however, as a genre normally presupposes some sort of synthesis of disparate situations. What we have here is a number of oppositions that cannot share a middle ground. One of the reasons for not achieving this synthesis is the uncompromising moral opposition between virtue and evil that underpins most romantic novels. O Leandros, in a sense, offers the antithetical structure that sets the pattern for the development of Greek fiction until 1880. The two opposing trends: the critical and the idealistic, which remain incompatible in Soutsos’s novel, will constitute the two strands that later writers will follow. The early modern Greek novel is based on the antithesis between nature and society, romantic idealism and political realism, and it could be argued that O Leandros was instrumental in setting up this pattern. During the so-called ‘Romantic’ period (1830–1850), prose writers engaged with social and political issues by demonstrating on the one hand a tendency towards social escapism and, on the other, engagement in the political struggles of the period. Though some writers openly supported the young Otto or demanded a democratic constitution, they were at the same time disgusted by the corruption of the cities and sought the innocence of nature or the peace of rural life. Society was considered oppressive and corrupt and the cities as prisons.15 Return to nature and rural life is seen as a 15

  See respectively: O Leandros (1834) (P. Soutsos 1996, 50, 53–4, 60, 106, 112–13, 181, 185);

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prerequisite for peace and happiness, while nature is identified with imagination, freedom, and innocence. Though the desire to get away from society could be associated with the views of Rousseau or the arcadianism of the ancient novels, it suggests that these first novelists of independent Greece see the retreat to nature or to the past as a solution to the political and social problems of Greece. Engagement and utopia, political passion and abstract ideas, are the defining characteristics of these early novels. Soutsos’s novel introduces the antithesis between nature and society, which is a dominant feature of the early Greek novels, and will gradually become less abstract when transformed into an opposition between rural and urban life. Though Palaiologos with his novel, O Zografos [The Painter] (1842), and Dimitrios Ainian, in his short stories, tackled similar issues, Thanos Vlekas by Kalligas (1855) was the first novel usually considered to have raised awareness of the plight of Greek peasants living at the mercy of brigands as much as of the central administration. If the main concern of the earlier so-called romantic novels is the freedom to be found in nature away from the corruption of the cities, a number of novels written around the mid-nineteenth century focus on the inefficiency of Greek institutions and the tribulations of Greek peasants, by contrasting the metropolis with the countryside. Thanos Vlekas, in particular, seems to follow the line of O Leandros by combining political criticism with romantic idealism. Though Thanos Vlekas has been seen in the past as the starting point of realism in Greece, I tend to agree with those who stress its romantic and idealistic aspects.16 Kalligas’s novel is closer to O Leandros than to Palaiologos’s O Zografos, since its hero embodies an ideal of virtue. O Leandros stands at the crossroads of Greek fiction and points to its future directions.17 One could argue that two main types of narrative have been developed in Greece since the 1830s: the critical–satirical and the moral–idealistic, and they, in turn, represent two different attitudes towards Greek society. The former type, represented by Palaiologos’s O Zografos, Pitzipios’s O Pithikos Xouth [Xouth the Ape] (1847), Roidis’s I Papissa Ioanna [Pope Joan] (1866), the anonymously published I Stratiotiki Zoi en Elladi [Military Life in Greece] (1870–1), being the more critical, tend to satirize either the awkward cosmopolitanism and the nouveau riche mentality of Athenian society or the institutions of the church and army. The latter category tends to be more idealistic and constructive in trying to offer models of virtue, honesty, and enterprise with texts such as I Orfani tis Hiou [The Orphan-Girl of Chios] (1839) by Pitzipios, Thanos Vlekas (1855) by Kalligas, I Charitini (1864) by Panayotis Soutsos, and Loukis Laras (1879) by Dimitris O Exoristos tou 1831 (1835) (A. Soutsos 1994, 76, 120, 128); O Polypathis (1839) (Palaiologos 1989, 232); O Thersandros (1847) (Frangoudis 2002, 58). 16   Tonnet argues that ‘le livre par son écriture et sa philosophie est romantique’ (1996, 110), and Takis Kayalis points out that ‘Thanos is a bourgeois fantasy of the ideal peasant, an example of people who never existed and in urgent need to be constructed’ (1996, 180). 17   It should be noted that two other novels seem to imitate O Leandros. These are Ο Μεγακλής ή ο ατυχής έρως (1840) by Georgios D. Rodokanakis, and O Θέρσανδρος (1847) by Epameinondas Frangoudis (on which see also n. 15).



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Vikelas (on which see further chapter 18 by Michalis Chryssanthopoulos in the present volume), or through reference to history and to the recent events of the War of Independence. Both categories will find their extension or continuation either in the mystery novels (apokrypha), which describe the seedy and often violent aspects of urban life, or in some of the idyllic stories of ethographia, respectively. Though this distinction is not always clear cut, since novels of both categories appear to share critical, satirical, romantic, or idealistic features, it should also be pointed out that writers of the first category, such as Palaiologos and Roidis, maintain an ironic distance from their main characters, while writers of the second category tend to identify with them. O Leandros, torn between romanticism and politics, seems to adumbrate both trends. Though critical of the political situation, the novel lacks the satirical or ironic tone of the later critical narratives, while its abstract idealism is personified later in more clearly defined role models in Thanos Vlekas and Loukis Laras. Indeed, O Leandros maps out the oppositions and the contradictions in Greek society after Independence. Romanticism vies with Enlightenment, the glory of the past with disappointment in the present, rejection of society with utopian socialism, politics with metaphysics, nature with culture. In his novel, Soutsos neither resolves the contradictions nor overcomes the oppositions, and so fails to produce a synthesis that is normally the prerequisite for realism and a successful novel. Though one could say that in Soutsos’s novel these oppositions are represented more or less in equal measure, later novels tend to emphasize one side of the oppositions outlined above, at the expense of the other. Thus, one could claim that O Leandros introduces a polarity that will leave its mark on Greek fiction for years to come. Indeed, the opposition between the real and the ideal would become a central theme of critical developments during the second half of the nineteenth century (Angelatos 2002) and this is evident in Palamas’s description of Karkavitsas in 1892 as both realist and idealist (idanistis) (Palamas, 166–7). O Leandros also marks a more individualistic approach to Greek politics and society which will only give way to a more community-based approach towards the end of the nineteenth century. This can be seen from the titles of novels, which instead of using the personal names of the main characters, tend to emphasize their social characteristics. From the 1880s onwards Greek fiction would try to overcome the polarity of O Leandros by focusing on the village as a liminal space between the primitivism of nature and urban culture, or by introducing the question of social justice as a new parameter in the old oppositions (Tziovas 2006). Novelists such as Andreas Karkavitsas with O Zitianos [The Beggar] (1896),18 Alexandros Papadiamantis with I Fonissa [The Murderess] (1903), and Konstantinos Theotokis with Katadikos [The Convict] (1919), raise the issue of justice, thus adding a new dimension to the relationship between society and fiction in nineteenth-century Greece, and transcending the old oppositions that begin with O Leandros. At the end of the nineteenth century the issue of justice, whether social or moral, will 18

  It should be noted that the last chapter of this novel bears the title ‘Justice’.

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override the oscillation between romantic idealism and political criticism that marks Greek fiction until at least 1880 and seems to have its origins in Soutsos’s novel. How central, therefore, one might ask, is Soutsos’s novel to understanding the relationship between society and fiction in the nineteenth century? First, by containing antithetical preoccupations such as politics and spirituality, individualism and monarchism, progress and antiquarianism, O Leandros becomes a complex novel that mirrors the wider (con)fusion within the Athenian intellectual context of the period and the awkward blend of Romanticism and Classicism that Panayotis Soutsos himself practised in his life. In this respect, O Leandros represents the contradictions and dilemmas of Greek society, and particularly of the intellectual élite during the first half of the nineteenth century.

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Vayenas, N. (2003), ‘Για την πεζογραφία στα Eπτάνησα (και στην Eλλάδα γενικά) τον 19ο αιώνα’, Nea Estia 154/1758: 79–116. Veloudis, G. (1992a), ‘Bιζυηνός και Auerbach’, in G. Veloudis, Mονά-ζυγά: Δέκα νεοελληνικά μελετήματα, Athens: Gnosi, 37–42. Veloudis, G. (1992b), ‘Ο επτανησιακός, ο αθηναϊκός και ο ευρωπαϊκός ρομαντισμός’, in G. Veloudis, Mονά-ζυγά: Δέκα νεοελληνικά μελετήματα, Athens: Gnosi, 97–123. Veloudis, G. (1996), Introduction to Panayotis Soutsos, O Λέανδρος, Athens: Idryma Ourani. Veloudis, G. (2001), ‘Το στέμμα και η λύρα: η αυλική ποίηση στην εποχή του Όθωνα (1832/33–1862)’, Ellinika 51/2: 335–62. Veloudis, G. (2004), Tο γράμμα και το πνεύμα, Athens: Papazisis. Voutouris, P. (1995), Ως εις καθρέπτην…, προτάσεις και υποθέσεις για την ελληνική πεζογραφία του 19ου αιώνα, Athens: Nefeli.

17 Literature as national cause: poetry and prose fiction in the national and commercial capitals of the Greek-speaking world Alexis Politis The aim of this chapter is a limited one: I shall attempt only to highlight the national basis of literature in Greece indirectly, or rather by reference to its inverse. That is to say, I shall try to show that during the first fifty years of the free Greek state, which coincide with Romanticism, trends regarding literary tastes in three centres of Hellenism peripheral to Athens – the three commercial centres of Constantinople, Smyrna, and Ermoupolis (Hermoupolis) – were markedly different from those in Athens. While interest in poetry was minimal, interest in prose fiction was much more intense – and it was in translations rather than original works. Indeed, to be more precise, these differentiated trends appear to take shape fifteen or twenty years after the foundation of the Greek state, from about 1845 to 1850. The chapter will rest more on numbers than on the texts themselves, on a quantitative rather than a qualitative analysis; some preliminary remarks are thus called for. I have attempted to count the books printed in the three cities, separating them into three categories: poetry, prose fiction, and drama: my main guide is a table showing output by five-year intervals. Yet by their very nature, numbers have what I would term an uncompromising, harsh aspect to them; before we trust in them, we must refute this aspect or at least put it into perspective. First of all, we lack a bibliography for the years 1864–1880, so for those seventeen years our evidence is thin – it goes without saying that I had recourse to more specialist bibliographies and other sources to fill the gap as best I could.1 The second problem is that I have 1   This study was written before the appearance of the bibliography compiled by the late Philippos Iliou and Popi Polemi (2006). It is to some extent based on the ‘Inventory of Modern Greek Poetry 1800-1850’, a research programme being carried out under my guidance at the Institute of Mediterranean Studies-F.O.R.T.H. in Rethymnon, Crete; if all goes well, a detailed descriptive inventory of Modern Greek poetry during the period is due to appear on the internet. In addition to well-known bibliographies, I have made particular use of: Polemi 1990; Denisi 1995; Ladogianni 1982; Chatzidimos 1948–53; Kolonia 1995; printed catalogues in Ermoupolis libraries (the Gymnasion Library, Municipal Library, and the Vafia Collection); and other minor contributions. Delopoulos 1995 was mainly of use

From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. 225

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relied almost exclusively on individual books, and have only a very vague idea of newspapers and magazines. Thirdly, whether we should include a book of church hymns, or an almanac, under the category of poetic output is doubtful – the same is true of many books of all types mainly aimed at pupils, especially those at primary school. Fourthly, the city recorded as place of publication may not reflect reality: some books with nationalistic content were marked as appearing in Athens, to avoid possible repercussions, while some commercial titles were printed in Greece, but gave an Ottoman city on their title page so as to avoid the payment of royalties.2 Fifthly, I have not actually physically examined a large proportion of the books counted, so I may have placed some in the wrong category. In addition to these problems we should add difficulties of a more theoretical nature concerning literary genres. For example, to what genre should one assign the works of Anastasios Pnevmatikas or Nikolaos Stamenis? Publishing in Constantinople and Smyrna respectively, they jumble together short poems, prose narratives, and dialogues in a single book. We are skating on thin ice, but if we want to see the lie of the land we must do so – though carefully, of course. * Ermoupolis, capital of the island of Syros, was a refugee town born of the Revolution of 1821. In 1830 it had begun to resemble a city; by 1840 it may have been slightly smaller than Athens in terms of population but was far wealthier. Though it boasted its own printing presses, schools, and cultural life, the city’s tempo was determined by transit trade: ships from the Black Sea, Constantinople, and Smyrna called in for provisions at the harbour, where they would meet representatives of the merchant companies in Trieste, Livorno, and Marseille. Nevertheless the roots of revolutionary national consciousness lived on, just like the roots of the Chios Enlightenment: up until 1840 we see poetry being cultivated to a fair extent, though only in the very small circle of students at the Gymnasion, where Vamvas and Serouios taught. Their students were the young poets encountered in Ermoupolis. Added to this was the fact that the city was a in ruling out certain works. For the purposes of the present chapter, a detailed chart giving the poems, prose works, and plays written in the period was compiled. While the length of this (over 30 pages) does not permit its inclusion here, I would be happy to send an electronic version to anyone interested. See also Politis 1999. 2   One different, extremely interesting case is worth noting here: N. Dragoumis’s ten-volume translation of The Wandering Jew, which appeared in 1861, was printed in Athens by the Logios Ermis press. Yet on pages 151–60 of the tenth volume, where the list of subscribers appears, we see that eight of the ten pages are taken up by those in Constantinople and the ninth by people living in Eastern Thrace, Asia Minor, and Ottoman-ruled islands in the Aegean. Page ten yields a mere sixteen Athenians. If the S. Andreadis appearing on the title page as financier is Simeon Andreadis, the wellknown Constantinople bookseller, as I have very good reason to believe, then the problem is solved, providing us with further evidence of the multiple channels in the book trade. Furthermore, it gives us every reason to become more detailed in our descriptions at some point in the future.



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major centre; the large numbers of people who either passed through or ended up there as civil servants benefited from the printing presses in operation. Bearing in mind our earlier provisos, we can now move on to the statistics for poetry in Ermoupolis: 1831–1835: 2 original books of poetry, totalling 1.5 printer’s sheets, plus one reprint of an Athenian edition 1836–1840: 8 originals totalling 33 printer’s sheets and one 3-sheet anthology 1841–1845: 12 books of poetry amounting to a mere 10 printer’s sheets 1846–1850: no independent poetry collection, with the exception of two leaflets by pupils, though I have located a few poems, not all by authors from Ermoupolis, in magazines circulating on Syros 1851–1855: 4 books running to 15 printer’s sheets, plus one anthology of 8 sheets 1856–1860: 2 books running to 6 sheets 1861–1865: 2 books running to 6 sheets 1866–1870: 3 books totalling 10 sheets 1871–1875: no books, but one anthology of 9 sheets 1876–1880: 3 books in the last two years, running to 10 sheets, and a reissue of the previously mentioned anthology.

In outline we thus have a minor peak shortly prior to 1840, which was solely due to the activity of final-year pupils at the Gymnasion – two of the eight books represented the first work of Ioannis Karasoutsas. This continued to some extent over the following years, for as long as Karasoutsas still lived in Ermoupolis, and trickled on thereafter, up to a chance resurgence over the next five years. This saw the young Dimitris Vikelas appear on the scene while still a pupil, together with another minor poet named Myron Nikolaidis, also a pupil. The same period coincided with a sojourn by a mature intellectual by the name of Ikessios Latris. Thereafter, poetry was barely if at all present up until the last half-decade, or rather the last two years, when something began to stir once more. From the sum total of these books, two or three poems by Karasoutsas were included in contemporary anthologies; he is the only person whose work we know was reviewed. Out of a total of seventy-four entries, only two poets from Ermoupolis took part in the university competitions.3 Only one of them, Timoleon Ambelas, took part on a regular basis (he entered several competitions from 1867 onwards; I should add that he was not Ermoupolis born and bred).4 The other poet, an altogether unknown figure by the name of Emmanuel, took part twice with the same work, failing miserably on both occasions.5 His work was an unalloyed romantic epic, with all the classic 3

  There were two more, but only during the course of their student years in Athens.   Ambelas was born in Patras in 1850. He attended high school in Ermoupolis, where he later returned to practise law for a while, before settling permanently in Athens; I have yet to discover precisely when each move was made. 5   The strange thing is that he had his work printed after the first failure, and then resubmitted it already printed, in contravention of the rules: the fact that the jury knew nothing of the book confirms that it was entirely unknown in Athens. Ten years later, in 1867, another person from Ermoupolis submitted poems published in an Ermoupolis newspaper, which were excluded on those grounds: see 4

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episodes – massacres on Chios; a pasha who seizes the hero’s sweetheart; the hero wandering the face of the earth; recognition; death for all at the end. Yet the author named this national-cum-romantic work The Merchant Poet, and bewails the fact that he himself was forced to abandon the muses for the sake of commerce. He was definitely not the only person from Ermoupolis to follow such a course – in the crop of books over the half-decade from 1836 to 1840, we come across two short poems by young pupils who reproach their compatriots for forcing their children to turn away from liberal studies and take up commerce instead. So much for the quality and content of poetry on Ermoupolis. Let me just add one further detail I regard as significant: the first collections attracted subscribers from all over Greece, whereas after 1850 subscribers to books of poetry were almost exclusive to Ermoupolis. Thus the initial nationwide range of such books was lost.6 I shall now move on to a summary presentation of prose fiction output by decade. Here I count original works together with translations – rather than titles, I am counting volumes: 1831–1840: 5 1841–1850: 9 1851–1860: 7 1861–1870: 14 1871–1880: 55 Approximately fifteen percent of these represent original works. Next to novels we have plays, again by decade, with originals and translations taken together: 1831–1840: 1 1841–1850: 3 1851–1860: 2 1861–1870: 28 1871–1880: 43 In both these categories, the rapid increase over the last two decades is immediately obvious. * Moving to Smyrna, we should bear in mind that the Greek presence only became substantial in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. We should also recall the Philological Gymnasion and the presence of Konstantinos Oikonomos, who taught his pupils modern Greek poetics even before the Revolution. Finally, let us note that the Greek population grew constantly throughout the nineteenth century, increasing from 45,000 as estimated in 1838 to reach approximately 100,000 Moullas 1989, 230. Perhaps we should conclude that the competition rules were poorly known on the island. 6   Poetry output in Ermoupolis is presented in more detail in Politis forthcoming.



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by about 1880, or roughly 130,000 to 140,000 if we include the surrounding villages.7 Education was flourishing: beyond the Evangelical School, which was recognized as equivalent to the Greek Gymnasion (secondary school) and the Agia Fotini Senior School for Girls, there were thirteen community schools and as many private ones. Lastly, commerce was expanding at a dizzying rate: exports increased approximately threefold and imports sevenfold between 1839 and 1881 (Georgiadès 1885, 109–11; 188–9). I turn now to poetry output: over the first half-decade, from 1831 to 1835, there were two collections amounting to twelve printer’s sheets; from 1836 to 1840 there were two, running to 17.5 sheets and two anthologies totalling 8.5 sheets. The period 1841–1845 saw two books of poetry yet again, running to fourteen sheets, and three anthologies amounting to 15.5 sheets; the period 1846–1850, six books running to 35.5 sheets and one anthology of unknown size; 1851–55, three books using seven sheets. From 1856 to 1865 there was no book of poetry apart from a re-issue of Neos Erotokritos, the paraphrase by Dionysios Fotinos, which appeared in 1863, of the celebrated Cretan romance of c. 1600. In 1867 there was one book; twelve years later, over the two years from 1879 to 1880, there was a sudden increase, involving Neos Erotokritos once again, together with a new edition of O Odiporos [The Traveller] by Panayotis Soutsos, plus three original collections in 1879 and a further two in 1880. The picture we have is of course incomplete, because I am not counting poems published in newspapers, magazines, or in broadside form, which may have been more than a few. Nevertheless, the fact that their authors were not interested in – or not capable of – gathering their poems together in book form is, I think, a noteworthy piece of evidence.8 Before making a few comments on the contents and general trend, let me give the numbers for prose fiction and plays. Taking prose by decade first – counting volumes as before: 1831–1840: 1 1841–1850: 42 7   Statistics published in the Amaltheia newspaper; see Solomonidis 1959, 30; cf. Solomonidis 1954, 16–22 for statistics derived mainly from travellers from the eighteenth century onwards.   In 1885, Georgiadès counts the total population of the city with its environs at 200,000: Greeks 100,000; Ottomans 50,000; Jews 15,000; Catholics and ‘Franks’ 10,000; Armenians 7,000; ‘foreigners’ 5,000 (Georgiadès 1885, 94). 8   Solomonidis 1959 offers a preliminary overview of poems published in newspapers and periodicals. There are a few poems in Philologia, and several in vols 1–5 (1873–1876) of Omeros (though not in vols 5–6): see Politou 1970; Demertzis 1965. Solomonidis 1951, 100–40 has a chapter entitled ‘Poetry of Smyrna in the 19th century’, based mainly on an 1894–1896 anthology. This was Parnassos, a supplement to the Amaltheia newspaper published in Smyrna in three volumes. The first contains the ‘Deceased’ – poets from Smyrna are N. Saltelis, X. Rafopoulos and I.I. Skylitsis, comprising three out of a total of forty-five (or 76 out of 800 pages). The other two volumes contain ‘Living Poets’. Those ‘in Symrna’ are classified separately (together with Gustave Laffon, there are 23, taking up 235 of 1,636 pages). Yet if I am not mistaken, very few of them had published poems prior to 1870, or at least not in separate collections. An additional view is offered by Argyropoulos 1944; further information is to be found in Valetas 1939.

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1851–1860: 25 1861–1870: 5 1871–1880: 109 Only twelve volumes of prose fiction out of the 182 in total consist of original works, which is a markedly lower proportion even than in Ermoupolis. Turning to the theatre, the figures are:

1831–1840: 8 1841–1850: 10 1851–1860: 6 1861–1870: 12 1871–1880: 35

Thus poetry is thin on the ground up until about 1855, with a slight upturn before the middle of the century; but this is precisely the time when fiction takes centre stage, with thirty works in forty-two volumes within the space of a single decade. This piece of information is particularly important here. The first prose work printed in Smyrna was a translation of Lettres persanes by Neoklis Papazoglou, which appeared in 1836.9 In fluent, plain contemporary language, the translation bore a short prologue in the spirit of the true Enlightenment and explanatory notes, carefully printed on high-quality paper. In other words, the climate was one of advanced intellectualism. Such a climate did exist in Smyrna at the time, though it may not have been the dominant one, and in any case was soon to retreat. The Amaltheia newspaper first circulated in 1838; from 1837 to 1844 there was The Magazine of Beneficial Knowledge, produced by the missionaries, and from 1841 to 1844 Philologia, a general-interest magazine, along with numerous other generally short-lived newspapers and magazines. The next books to appear came four years later. In 1841 there were three translations of novels, including Chateaubriand’s Atala, translated or perhaps only published by a journalist named Spyros Avlonitis, who also published another French novel by an unknown writer. Judging from the title, this was clearly in the Romantic mode.10 There can be no doubt that the third work brings us to Romanticism, this being Ernest, ou le travers du siècle, translated by N. Saltelis.11 The climate was thus beginning to change somewhat. Moving two years further on, to 1843, we have a translation of Les Janissaires by a certain Alphonse Royer, a representative of the French romantic, liberal youth of 1830.12 The Greek-related title must obviously have attracted 9   Born in 1799, Papazoglou had taken part in the Greek Revolution as a soldier and diplomat. By 1836 he was teaching at the Evangelical School, where he had organized a museum and library (Papadopoulos 1963). 10   Neither of these two books has survived; we know of them from advertisements. See Servou 1988, 445. On Avlonitis’s work as a journalist, see Solomonidis 1959, 128, 287. 11  Ernest, ou le travers du siècle was the work of a certain Drouineau; the catalogue in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris reveals that it was printed twice in 1829, but no other editions are listed. Drouineau wrote a number of works, though not many by the standard of the times. 12   Born in 1803 and relatively prolific up until 1860, when his progress was being charted by



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attention, but what is most noteworthy is the speed with which it was translated: the book came out in French the following year, so the Smyrna edition must have been based on a publication in a magazine or serialization – a trend which had by then been prevalent in Europe for a decade. Nevertheless, the intellectualist tendency had not entirely retreated in Smyrna. The same year (1843) saw the publication of a rendering of Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, with an introduction extensively based on the influential one published by Korais in 1804; in 1845 there was George Sand’s Lélia, and the following year Ivanhoe and Sand’s Leone Leoni; in 1848 Werther, translated by Saltelis.13 Although these editions are definitely indicative of some interest, the opposite camp appears to have been far more cultivated: in 1845 the first four volumes of Sue’s Juif errant and the first volume of Mystères de Paris came out; the following year saw five more volumes of the Jew and the second volume of Mystères, as well as the first of Dumas’s Mémoires d’un médecin and Sue’s Mathilde. By the end of the decade, twenty fairly hefty volumes of works by Sue and Dumas had appeared on the market and a reissue of the Jew was under way, this output being added to and enriched over the years to come. The Smyrna public had suddenly discovered a new kind of book, which opened up an unknown, limitless world of imagination and mystery – the easy, entertaining, attractive book. Here we are dealing with an entirely different trajectory, or to put it more correctly, with an entirely new public.14 This torrential prose output may help us to understand why poetry reached a low-water mark: as the general demand for books rose, intellectuals had to turn to translation as a way of earning their daily bread. Skylitsis, the biggest literary name in Smyrna, became a regular professional translator, followed by members of the Lambisis family and many others who did not put their name to their work. Towards the end of the final decade of interest to us, we note a recovery in the fortunes of poetry, due mainly to two friends, Socrates Solomonidis and G.K. Yperidis. Born in 1859, they were students in Athens at the time in question, and became co-editors-in-chief of Amaltheia from 1882. Their works were probably published privately, and their overall stance reveals a delayed, perhaps provincial Romanticism: uncompromisingly purist language, a feverish tone, and a peculiar radicalism.15 The climate created by Dimitrios Paparrigopoulos and Spyridon Vapereau’s Dictionnaire universel des contemporains (Paris, 1861), which is my source of information. The Greek translation calls him Rogiros – the index to Denisi 1995 led me to the correct spelling. 13   We now also know the names of the translators of the Aethiopica and Lélia (Frangiskos 2003; Navari 2001, 166). No argument is necessary with regard to the paraphrase of Heliodorus; the translation of Lélia is a trim two-volume work with a lengthy introduction in which Sand is linked to Byron and contemporary poetic output. This evidence leads me to regard the book as ‘highbrow’ – in any case, we know that Ilias Tantalidis collaborated in producing the translation (Kasianis 1971, 30, with references to Chasiotis 1910, 229 and Skylitsis 1877, 85). With regard to the other works, I rely solely on titles and bibliographic descriptions. 14   Moullas 2004 also argues that 1845 was a turning point; my own point of view is somewhat different, cf. Politis 1997, 217–18. 15   We know that 120 copies of Yperidis’s Έμμετρα and 150 copies of his pamphlet Επί του πλοίου (an anti-royalist allegorical satire) were printed.

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Vasileiadis was transplanted to Smyrna at a time when in Athens it had begun to degenerate and address a less educated audience.16 Thus Smyrna did not produce a first- or even a second-rate poet during the years under examination – the only names worth retaining are those chosen for the Amaltheia anthology in 1894: Skylitsis, Saltelis, and Xenophon Rafopoulos, who died young. Lastly, let us add that Smyrna was entirely unrepresented in the university competitions. * In Constantinople, the only poet of interest to us during the entire period was Ilias Tantalidis, who is regarded as a remnant of the former brilliant throng of Phanariots. His first collection was printed in Smyrna in 1839, when he was twenty-one years old; his connections in that city dated back to a period of residence there. From 1840 to 1844 he studied in Athens, before settling permanently in Constantinople. Tantalidis’s reputation as a poet went back to his childhood; he was talented as an improviser and had mastered the techniques of oral composition (metre, rhythm, and rhyme) from an early age. We know that he was struck blind in 1845, which may be the reason why he never had any other collection printed, though in 1860 his friend Skylitsis gathered together several of his poems and had them printed in Trieste. Poetry output was so thin on the ground in Constantinople as to render statistics meaningless: throughout the entire fifty-year period there are only ten or twelve books of poetry, half of which covered one printer’s sheet at most. On the other hand, numerous anthologies were produced: we know of twenty in total, of varying size, most of which contained Greek and Turkish songs. Most were written in Byzantine notation, though European scores were not uncommon. Anthologies constitute an important branch of Modern Greek poetry still awaiting systematic study.17 They can be classified into two categories: on the one hand are the learned ones, which aimed to cater for the tastes of an educated readership. Between five and ten such books were produced in the entire nineteenth century. On the other hand were popular anthologies containing ditties sung at social gatherings. There were many more of these, usually produced in small format running to a mere sixteen pages, printed cheaply on low-grade paper, and they definitely circulated in much greater numbers than is known to us from bibliographic sources. All the Constantinopolitan anthologies belong to the popular 16   This last observation is somewhat sketchy; the later diffusion of the two poets’ works has not been investigated (for a few basic facts see Dimaki-Zora 2002, 885–905). Whatever the case may be, I should note that reissues of their works were published by Fexis press, which initially targeted a more popular audience. As for Yperidis’s wild character during his student years (c.1876–1880), there is no shortage of information: ‘But Yperidis’s room – what a ghastly sight and sound! Romanticism had struck the poor fellow head on! Two skulls on his table, and more or less human de-fleshed leg- and arm-bones on the walls surrounded pictures of Hugo, Lamartine and Paparrigopoulos.’ This description is by I. Damvergis in the newspaper Estia (9 January 1933); see Solomonidis 1959, 76. 17   For a preliminary approach, see Politis 1998.



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category. If we were to make even finer distinctions, we would assign them to a rank humbler still, since they contain very few songs by well-known poets. Instead there are numerous Turkish songs, alongside some European ones written to modern dance tempos such as the waltz. In other words, they do not so much represent ‘literature’ as song, entertainment, and merry-making. The Smyrna anthologies belong to the same category, with the exception of the first that appeared in 1838 and the one produced by Amaltheia between 1894 and 1896. The few anthologies from Ermoupolis are of the ‘popular’ type, as are similar ones from Athens or Patras. If we use anthologies as evidence to support our case, this further type of evidence thus confirms what we have already established on the basis of the original works produced: poetry is more absent than present.18 As with poetry, so with prose: the commanding position that the latter achieved in Smyrna was absent from Constantinople. In 1842 there were two original novels. One, O Zografos [The Painter] by Grigorios Palaiologos, was entirely Athenian in terms of inspiration and subject matter, while the other is of unknown content.19 These were followed by four translations taking up eight volumes (seven of them works by Dumas) over the six-year period from 1845–50; ten volumes and three original works between 1851 and 1860; forty-four volumes of translations (reissues having already begun) plus three original works over the following decade, from 1861 to 1870; forty-three volumes of translations (including reissues) plus eight original works in the final decade. Thus Constantinople lagged behind Smyrna in the first decade, from 1841 to 1850, overtook it in the second, and fell behind it in the third, from 1871 to 1880. In any event, let me repeat that the numbers should only be seen as indicative of certain trends. As soon as we delve deeper, many facets of the picture will be subject to alteration. With regard to details of the books themselves, there is firstly the matter of whether some of them were printed in cities other than they indicate, and secondly questions relating to paper and printing quality, the inclusion or absence of illustrations, the actual size of each publication, bookshop stamps in surviving copies and subscriber lists. Heading in another direction, there are the ways in which authors and titles were 18   By way of parenthesis, I think it is worth commenting on I.I. Skylitsis’s view of the relationship between literature and song: ‘When publishing our small poems entitled Moments [in 1847], in a short prologue preceding them we said: “Poets we have, but songwriters we have not. No one then encouraged us in that kind of poetry; no one else if not the one person we wished for – the Public, which seized upon them and sang. We continue to tread the same path, and since the crowd around us is large, let not even erudite minds scorn these futile pieces as unworthy of attention; via this base means we contribute to the purifying of the language and, paradoxically, promote it among the people”’ (Solomonidis 1959, 154, citing Efimeris tis Smyrnis, 5 August 1849). Of course, Skylitsis had in mind the sum total of what was largely an Athenian output, which catered for the educated Smyrna public for at least half the decade. Nevertheless, the need he felt to turn to more popular genres so as to achieve what was ‘nationally’ desirable forced him to aim lower than his Athenian counterparts. He did much the same in his translations of Dumas and Sue. 19   Grigorios Kandylis, Ο Ερωτομανής ή τα εν Κωνσταντινουπόλει… (Constantinople, 1842) is known to us only through an announcement reported by N.A. Veis in the newspaper Proia (13 December 1942).

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chosen, translation quality, and, in relation to originals, the contents of each work. Whatever we choose to investigate, our picture will change. Yet we proceed on the basis of what we know or, to be more precise, I am proceeding on the basis of what I know. For dramatic works the evidence arising from the statistics tells a similar story: they are very thin on the ground up until 1860, with four, seven, and then eight volumes per decade, but increase rapidly thereafter. There are twenty-seven volumes from 1861 to 1870, and forty-four during the following decade, peaking over the two years 1874–1875, which accounted for twenty-one of them, almost half the total number. Thus far I have not commented on the output of dramatic works. I will summarize my conclusion in a short phrase that applies to all three cities: the greater part of drama publishing was linked to performances in each city. This clearly emerges from the books themselves, which often list the actors next to the dramatis personae, as well as from other evidence, such as the frequent occurrence of ‘theatre series’. This may have been because the text served as an equivalent to today’s theatre programmes, or because those who missed a performance or were unable to see it wanted to keep up to date. Whatever the case may be, books of plays were thus directly bound up with the spectacle itself, with entertainment. What is more, the quantum leap observed simultaneously in all three commercial centres is entirely consistent with the needs of Athenian troupes, which were at that very time in search of an audience beyond Athens. I shall not go into the reasons here, though they have been well studied and presented: in his work on Greek theatre companies, Theodoros Chatzipantazis (2002, 150–69) terms the period from 1872 to 1875 ‘the exile years’. To judge is to compare, as our teachers told us. If I ever manage to compile a comparative table giving literary output by city, for Athens, the Greek provinces, the Ionian Islands, Ermoupolis, Smyrna, Constantinople, and the Diaspora, over the entire nineteenth century, I will be on firmer ground. For the time being I will limit myself to the two half-decades I regard as crucial: 1841–1845 and 1846– 1850. I give poetic works as the first figure in the ratio (omitting anthologies, unless they are addressed to a learned public), and prose works as the second:

1841–1845 Athens Ermoupolis Smyrna Constantinople

Poetry 25 12 2 3



1846–1850 Athens Ermoupolis Smyrna Constantinople

22 0 6 0









Prose fiction 8 7 9 3

16 3 17 4



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Though Athens appears to be on a par with Smyrna in absolute numbers for prose fiction, there are two reasons why this picture is somewhat deceptive. First, in Athens, works of a more serious nature were still being translated, or rather continued to be translated up until 1849; and secondly, the two-year period from 1849 to 1850, which saw nine out of the sixteen novels produced in the halfdecade, was precisely the moment when Athens struck back – in 1849 Dumas first appeared there. Our final conclusion is not of course that artistically sensitive people lived in Athens, whereas the population of Constantinople was uncultivated, nor that aesthetic considerations retreated for a generation or two. Instead, my intention is to link evidence of publishing to the workings of society in the cities. The bourgeoisie in the three cities we have looked at was both autonomous and selfsupporting; its members lived from commerce, rather than relying on public sector employment, as was the case in Greek rural towns and in Athens. As a result, they were somewhat indifferent to politics and the ideological constructs involved. National aspirations, which began and ended with the war against the Turks, could only have had a negative impact on them. Indeed after 1845, when national ideologies became increasingly groundless, the gap seems to have widened to include the theoretical level. Of course, we should not expect to encounter direct opposition to the irredentist mood emanating from the centre: such things are never openly stated. Yet they do leave certain traces, and I believe indifference towards even the most innocent love poetry to be one such a trace. This was because the fundamental motive – ‘the Greeks as the descendants of Homer, Pindar, etc’. – was lacking, or was at any rate less powerful. On the other hand, the merchant class had need of entertainment, relaxation, and the opening up of the imagination to other worlds of action and intense emotion – these needs, I believe, explain the turn towards the European novel. We have of course restricted ourselves to an initial level of analysis; at some point we will have to factor in the Ottoman Empire and the changes it underwent. There were the provisions of the Tanzimat issued in 1839 and the Hatti Hümayun in 1856, the imposition of official censorship from about the middle of the century onwards, and the emergence of Bulgarian nationalism in the 1860s. All of these undoubtedly brought about alterations in the way society operated, and will have had a detectable impact on literary activity. One such example is the fact that intellectuals living in Ottoman territory, closer to the realities of life there, chose to turn to the sciences and to education in particular, in contrast to the Athenians and those in Greece who, as victims of their own ideological obsessions, sought release in rhetoric. And that, in the final analysis, was no service to either poetry or prose fiction.

POETRY

1836– 1840

1841– 1845

1846– 1850

1851– 1855

1856– 1860

1861– 1865

1866– 1870

1871– 1875

1876– 1880

TOTAL

2 (1.5) 0 1

8 (33) 1 (3) 0

12 (10) 0 0

0 0 0

4 (15) 1 (8) 0

2 (6) 0 0

2 (6) 0 0

3 (10) 0 0

0 1 (9) 0

3 (10) 1 (9) 0

36 (91.5) 4 (29) 1

2 (12) 0 0

2 (17.5) 2 (8.5) 0

2 (14) 3 (15.5) 0

6 (35.5) 1 (5?) 0

3 (7) 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 1

1 (?) 0 0

0 0 0

5 (26?) 0 2

21 (138?) 6 (29?) 3

0 0 [1=1830] 0 4 (13.5)+0+1

0 0 1 10 (40.5)+ 3 (11.5)+1

2 (22.5) 1 (8.5) 2 16 (46.5)+ 4 (24)+2

0 4 (21) 1 6 (35.5)+ 5 (26?)+1

0 0 3 (8) 2 (2.5?) 0 0 7 (22)+ 3 2 (6)+3 (8) +0 (10.5)+0

4 (17) 1 (1) 1 6 (23)+1 (1) +2

1 (1) 5 (16) 0 5 (11?)+ 5 (16)+0

0 2 (16) 0 0+3 (25)+0

0 1 (0.5) 0 8 (36?)+ 2 (9.5)+2

7 (40.5) 20 (73.5) 5 64 (270?)+ 30 (131.5)+9

(Probable) number of printer’s sheets given in parentheses; figures not verified are indicated by a question mark (?) PROSE (volumes) ermoupolis smyrna constantinople TOTAL

1831–1835 0 0 0 0

1836–1840 5 (3+2) 1 (0+1) 0 6 (3+3)

1841–1845 6 (0+6) 15 (1+14) 5 (2+3) 26 (3+23)

1846–1850 3 (0+3) 27 (2+25) 5 (0+5) 35 (2+33)

1851–1855 4 (0+4) 16 (0+16) 6 (1+5) 26 (1+25)

1856–1860 3 (2+1) 9 (2+7) 7 (2+5) 19 (6+13)

1861–1865 8 (2+6) 4 (1+3) 9 (0+9) 21 (3+18)

1866–1870 6 (1+5) 1 (0+1) 38 (3+35) 45 (4+41)

1871–1875 24 (2+22) 47 (4+43) 34 (5+29) 105 (11+94)

1876–1880 31 (4+27) 62 (2+60) 17 (3+14) 110 (9+101)

TOTAL 90 (14+76) 182 (12+170) 121 (16+105) 393 (42+351)

DRAMA ermoupolis smyrna constantinople TOTAL

1831–1835 1 4 0 5

1836–1840 0 4 4 8

1841–1845 1 6 3 10

1846–1850 2 4 4 10

1851–1855 1 3 2 6

1856–1860 1 3 6 10

1861–1865 8 0 10 18

1866–1870 20 12 17 49

1871–1875 17 19 32 68

1876–1880 25 16 12 53

TOTAL 76 71 90 237

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ermoupolis originals anthologies reprints smyrna originals anthologies reprints constantinople originals anthologies reprints TOTAL

1831– 1835

236

PROVISIONAL STATISTICS



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237

References Argyropoulos, M. (1944), ‘Ένα φαρμακείον Σμυρναίων λογίων και ποιητών (18441922)’, in Χρονικά της Ανατολής. Σμύρνη, Athens, 11–22. Chasiotis, G. (1910), Βυζαντιναί σελίδες, vol. 1, Constantinople. Chatzidimos, A.D. (1948–53), ‘Σμυρναϊκή βιβλιογραφία’, Mikrasiatika Chronika 4–6. Chatzipantazis, Th. (2002), Από του Νείλου μέχρι του Δουνάβεως... Το χρονικό της

ανάπτυξης του ελληνικού επαγγελματικού θεάτρου στο ευρύτερο πλαίσιο της ανατολικής Μεσογείου από την ίδρυση του ανεξάρτητου κράτους ώς τη Μικρασιατική Καταστροφή, Αʹ1 Ως φοίνιξ εκ της τέφρας του... 1828–1875, Αʹ2 Παράρτημα,

Heraklion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis [Crete University Press]. Delopoulos, K. (1995), Παιδικά και νεανικά βιβλία του 19ου αιώνα, Athens: ELIA [Greek Literary and Historical Archive]. Demertzis, Ch.P. (1965), ‘Το περιοδικόν Όμηρος’, Mikrasiatika Chronika 12: 303–36. Denisi, S. (1995), Μεταφράσεις μυθιστορημάτων και διηγημάτων 1830–1880, Athens: Periplous. Dimaki-Zora, M. (2002), Σ.Ν. Βασιλειάδης. Η ζωή και το έργο του, Athens: Academy of Athens. Frangiskos, E.N. (2003), ‘Κοραϊκά παραλειπόμενα [Βʹ]’, O Eranistis 24: 222–7. Georgiadès, D. (1885), Smyrne et l’Asie Mineure, Paris: Chaix. Iliou, Ph. and Polemi, P. (2006), Ελληνική βιβλιογραφία 1864-1900, Athens: ELIA [Greek Literary and Historical Archive]. Kasianis, E.T. (1971), Ηλίας Τανταλίδης, Athens: Union of Greeks of Constantinople. Kolonia, A. (1995 ), ‘Traduzioni greche di libri italiani’, in M. Vitti (ed.), Testi letterari italiani tradotti in greco, Rubbettino, 399–483. Ladogianni, G. (1982), Αρχές του νεοελληνικού θεάτρου, Ioannina: University of Ioannina. Moullas, P. (1989), Les concours poétiques de l’Université d’Athènes, Athens: Istoriko Archeio Ellinikis Neolaias [Historical Archive of Greek Youth]. Moullas, P. (2004), ‘1845· ένα έτος σταθμός’, Kondyloforos 3: 11–26. Navari, L. (2001), Δωρεά Μαρίας Κυριαζή-Σπέντζα προς την Γεννάδειο Βιβλιοθήκη. Συλλογές Δαμιανού Κυριαζή, Athens: Friends of the Gennadius Library. Papadopoulos, K.S. (1963), ‘Οι διευθυνταί της Ευαγγελικής Σχολής Νεοκλής Παπάζογλους και Βενέδικτος Κωνσταντινίδης’, Mikrasiatika Chronika 10: 384– 460. Polemi, P. (1990), Τα βιβλία του Ε.Λ.Ι.Α., Athens: ELIA [Greek Literary and Historical Archive]. Politis, A. (1997 ), ‘Η μετάφραση της Κορίννας στα 1835. Η ώρα της πεζογραφίας’, in N. Vayenas (ed.), Από τον Λέανδρο στον Λουκή Λάρα. Μελέτες για την πεζογραφία της περιόδου 1830–1880, Heraklion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis [Crete University Press], 205–25. Politis, A. (1998), ‘Ποιητικές ανθολογίες 1830–1930. Ανιχνεύοντας τη γραπτή παράδοση’, in Ch.L. Karaoglou (ed.), Μνήμη Ελένης Τσαντσάνογλου. Εκδοτικά και ερμηνευτικά ζητήματα της νεοελληνικής λογοτεχνίας. Πρακτικά Ζ΄ Επιστημονικής Συνάντησης, Thessaloniki: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 405–29. Politis, A. (1999), ‘Αναζητώντας την πεζογραφία και τους πεζογράφους, 1830–1880’, in A. Argyriou et al. (eds), Ο ελληνικός κόσμος ανάμεσα στην Ανατολή και τη Δύση

1453–1981, Athens: Ellinika Grammata, 85–96.

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Politis, A. (forthcoming), ‘Ποίηση στην Ερμούπολη 1830–1880. Από την ισχνή έξαρση στη σταδιακή εξαφάνιση’, Tetradia Ergasias KNE-EIE [Publications of the Institute for Neohellenic Research (INR/NHRF)]. Politou, E. (1970), ‘Το περιοδικόν Φιλολογία’, Mikrasiatika Chronika 14: 95–117. Servou, M. (1988), ‘Ελληνική βιβλιογραφία 1800–1863’, Tetradia Ergasias KNE-EIE [Publications of the Institute for Neohellenic Research (INR/NHRF)] 10: 443–8. Skylitsis, I.I. (1877), ‘Ηλιού Τανταλίδου βίος και έργα’, Parnassos 1: 81–95. Solomonidis, Ch.S. (1951), Στις όχθες του Μέλη, Athens. Solomonidis, Ch.S. (1954), Το θέατρο της Σμύρνης, Athens. Solomonidis, Ch.S. (1959), Η δημοσιογραφία στη Σμύρνη, Athens. Valetas, G. (1939), ‘Σελίδες από την πνευματική ιστορία της Σμύρνης’, Mikrasiatika Chronika 2: 199–263.

18 Autobiography, fiction, and the nation: the writing subject in Greek during the later nineteenth century* Michalis Chryssanthopoulos This chapter examines the relationship between autobiography and fiction during the latter part of the ‘long nineteenth century’ in Greece. This was a time when the Greek state started seeing itself as the main pole of Hellenism, while at the same time the Greeks of the Ottoman Empire and of the European Diaspora were flourishing because of favourable circumstances (see Tsoukalas 1977; Dertilis 1977; Papayiannakis 1982; Skopetea 1988). Autobiography is a hybrid between history and fiction: the autobiographer is at the same time the observer and the object of observation. Moreover, it is a mode of writing of particular importance for the creation of the national subject and often mediates between conflicting interests and opposing perceptions of the Other (Olney 1980; Porter 1997). During the period under review, the autobiographical mode is bound up with the way the relationship between Greece and Europe is negotiated: namely, Europe’s image in Greece and Greece’s image in Europe. In order to examine the relationship between fictional prose and autobiography one should take into account the fact that during the nineteenth century two types of autobiography developed in Greece, in parallel to the development of prose fiction. The earlier type focused on the relationship between the writing or narrating subject and national history, and showed how the subject changed because of the emerging nation state, making systematic references to the War of Independence and attempting to link the narrator’s discourse with discourse about the emerging Greek nation. It dealt with aspects of ‘macro-history’, attempted to hide its subjective nature and fictional elements, and has a prominent place in the discourse of Modern Greek historiography: it is usually termed apomnimonevmata [memoirs].1 The later type focused on the writing or narrating subject itself, * I would like to thank Sir Michael Llewellyn Smith for his remarks and suggestions.

1   See further chapter 8 by Yanna Delivoria in the present volume. Both that chapter and this derive from a project on autobiography being carried out in the Department of Medieval and Modern Greek,

From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. 239

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considering the War of Independence as a testing environment that caused the writing or narrating subject to change its place of residence and its profession, and to adapt to difficult circumstances in order to survive, and underscoring the specificity of the narrator’s discourse. This type of autobiography dealt with aspects of ‘micro-history’, did not attempt to hide its subjective nature or its fictional elements, and has not found the place it deserves in the discourse of Modern Greek historiography: it may be termed autobiografia. At the same time, more or less, one can witness the systematic development of the Modern Greek short story (diigima). Greek fiction of the time attempted on the one hand to serve the national requirements generated by an emerging national press and political culture (that is, to contribute to the development of a unified Greek identity: ancient, medieval, and modern), and on the other to question established truths about the country and about itself. For that matter it developed its own effective form, but it also contemplated its own characteristics, it was reflexive. The condition of self-referentiality is underlined by the fact that prose fiction in the late nineteenth century is aware that it is creating the conditions for a new genre, while at the same time performing the essential function of story-telling for an emerging reading public. As diigima employs first-person narration in a quasi-autobiographical, confessional manner, autobiography can be considered as its origin; in its more elaborate forms, as exemplified by Vizyinos, Papadiamantis, and Mitsakis, it employs self-referential techniques in order to delineate its narrative mode and to comment on its relationship to autobiography (Chryssanthopoulos 1994; 1997). Greek criticism, for several decades and at least until the 1980s, had a tendency to interpret the most prominent diigimata as autobiographical, as is immediately evident from the recent bibliography on Vizyinos and Papadiamantis. This view, consciously or not, brings to the fore the element of ‘micro-history’, as the main characters of the stories are common folk, while the narrative mode they employ does not attempt to hide its subjectivity and fictionality. The grand apomnimonevmata of soldiers and politicians of 1821 do not function as the model of diigima; it is rather another type of autobiography, of tentative existence, that of the unknown survivors of 1821, that serves as the precursor of the bourgeois autobiography of the later nineteenth century. A central consideration in my approach is to take into account the geographical positioning of the writers and the reading public involved. Are they Greeks outside the kingdom of Greece (Greeks of the Ottoman Empire or Greeks of the European Diaspora) or are they Greeks within the kingdom? Do their attitudes and cultural politics change when their place of residence changes? How do the writers imagine their readers, and within which cultural contexts? And how do they see their role as far as the emerging ‘national centre’ is concerned? Dimitrios Vikelas (1835–1908), whose fictional and autobiographical works will be the principal focus of this chapter, is of central importance in the cultural sphere Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.



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of nineteenth-century Greece.2 As he relates in his autobiography, he established himself as a man of letters out of a professional background governed by very strict conventions: that of a merchant, and more precisely of a London Chiot merchant of the second half of the nineteenth century (1908, 319ff.). Vikelas had no formal education: he did not follow university studies, he did not even finish high school, something that was not the case with those of his contemporaries with whom he can be compared (Vikelas 1908, 115). Furthermore, he never held any government or state position, as Rangavis had done, or, of course, any university post, like Kalligas or Psycharis; nor was he an intellectual that aspired to such a post, like Vizyinos; he was not a public functionary and journalist, like Roidis, or a writer living by his pen, like Papadiamantis or Mitsakis. He was par excellence an amateur: writer, translator, publisher, who never made money out of those activities, because he did not care to. (Critics have argued that he did not need to, but who can ever define the meaning of needing money?) As a merchant he was rather well off and no doubt financially independent, but not rich, even within the context of Greece in the later nineteenth century.3 He worked as part of a system, the London Chiot merchants of the second half of the nineteenth century and for twenty-four years (1852–1876) he earned his living and eventually his small fortune by abiding by the rules of that system. Earning money went side by side with the establishment of a profile as an independent scholar who is actively reading, translating, writing, travelling, and living in different places: Syros, Nafplion, Constantinople, London, Paris, and eventually Athens. Vikelas kept his residence in Paris until 1902, and one should take due notice of the fact that only during the last five years of his life did he have a single residence, in the capital of the kingdom of Greece. Vikelas was much involved in Greek affairs, although his attitude was that of a Greek of the European Diaspora. If one considers his activities during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, after he dissolved his commercial concern in 1876, one sees the breadth of his involvement in Greek cultural politics: president of the organizing committee for the 1896 Olympic Games in Athens; author of the nineteenth-century Greek novel most translated abroad; translator of Shakespeare into Modern Greek (see Gementzidou 2004); promoter of Greek culture abroad with his writings in French about the history of the Byzantine Empire and about Modern Greek literature. Furthermore his role in the cultural scene was enhanced with the establishment in 1899 of the Society for the Dissemination of Useful Books (Syllogos pros Diadosin Ofelimon Vivlion), that was very successful, at least during his lifetime (Angelou 1997, 57*). Omnipresent in the cultural arena, Vikelas puts himself forward as the prototype of self-restraint. Schoolmate of Roidis in

2

  On the life and career of Vikelas see, in English, Llewellyn Smith 2006.   Vikelas had a yearly income of £1,300 in the 1890s with assets of £24,000; the banker Andreas Syngros, for example, bequeathed £500,000 to various recipients when he died; see Angelou 1997, 20*. 3

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Ermoupolis at the age of fifteen, a cousin of Psycharis, he stands in marked contrast to both: sober and irenic, extremely successful nevertheless.4 Two texts by Vikelas will be considered in order to examine the debt of autobiography to fictional prose (or should one say the opposite?). One is his first major work, Loukis Laras – a fictional autobiography, as the subtitle Reminiscences of a Chiote merchant during the War of Independence suggests – which appeared in the periodical Estia from January 1879 onwards and was published in book form in June 1879; and his last important work, his autobiography, I zoi mou [My Life], published posthumously in 1908. By focusing on the preface and following the itinerary of the translations and publications of Loukis Laras, and by reading carefully the two prologues and taking into consideration the planned, and as it turned out posthumous, publication of I zoi mou, one can gradually discern the underlying project of Vikelas, as far as Greek culture of his time was concerned. With the first work, addressed not only to Greeks but also to a public living in Western Europe, he attempts to construct an image of Greece and the Greeks different from the heroic one prevailing in Europe after the 1821 War of Independence. With the second he constructs a positive image of the European Diaspora and an image of himself as a competent London merchant and Greek intellectual of the Diaspora who can negotiate in both material and cultural goods, addressing a public living in the Greek kingdom. Loukis Laras has been hailed by Greek criticism as the first work in the long catalogue of successful fiction that signalled the revival of the genre in the 1880s, leading the way to the short stories of Vizyinos, Papadiamantis, Mitsakis, and Karkavitsas;5 I zoi mou, on the other hand, has hardly been mentioned. Close reading of Loukis Laras and I zoi mou raises three most important issues relative to the mode in which they were written, their reception by the public and their evaluation: first, the relationship between prose fiction and autobiography; second, the diversity of expectations on the part of the late nineteenth-century reading public depending on its place of residence, whether the Greek Diaspora and, by extension, the European public, or Greeks of the kingdom; third, the difference between what I would term ‘macro-history’, or the history of the nation, and ‘micro-history’, or the histories or stories of individuals. Loukis Laras is perhaps the most prominent example of the dialogic relationship between the short story (diigima) and autobiography. It was composed at the crossroads between – allegedly – the autobiography of Loukas Zifos and Vikelas’s own. Being closely related to Vikelas’s own autobiography, which would be published by his own publishing house and following his own instructions posthumously (Vikelas 1908, frontispiece), as well as to a diary about the War of 4   Psycharis gives a very interesting picture of Vikelas’s importance, connections, and success, even though (or perhaps because) it is a critical one (reprinted in Vikelas 1997a, 359–65). 5   The fictional autobiography of the Chiot merchant is mentioned in histories of Modern Greek literature as occupying a seminal position in the evolution of Modern Greek prose, ‘in the borderline between historical novels and the genre story [ethographia]’ (Politis 1973, 164) and as blurring ‘the boundary between fact and fiction’ (Beaton 1999, 63).



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1897 (Vikelas 1997, 251–346), its presumed verisimilitude is enhanced. At the same time the fictional element is presented by the novelistic narrative techniques employed. Loukis Laras consists, as its title and subtitle suggest, of the reminiscences of the hero that bears that name, a young Chiot born in 1800, while living and working as a merchant during the early years of the War of Independence. The story is narrated in the first person, several decades after the events, when the main character has become a mature and well-off person, who can describe his situation in these terms: in the enjoyment of the repose and well-being of to-day, I recollect the past, and I compare the calmness attending the close of my life with the sorrows, the dangers and the privations of that eventful time (Bikelas 1881, 114).

The years that have elapsed and the difference in circumstances between the time of action (1821–2) and that of the narration in the early 1870s (see Bikelas 1881, 119) create an interesting point of view of the War of Independence and of the role of the majority of the population that had not participated actively in it. A prefatory note enhances the temporal distance between the actions of the participant and the narration of the rather detached observer: Those of our countrymen who have resided in England will easily recognise the old Chiote merchant, who is here concealed under the name of Loukis Laras. Often have I heard him relate the vicissitudes of his early years; and it was at my suggestion that, towards the close of his life, he undertook to write his memoires. When, a few years ago, he died his manuscript notes were found among his papers under cover, addressed to me. In publishing them now, I wish they may be read by others with as great an interest and pleasure as I experienced whenever I listened to the narration of the old gentleman (Bikelas 1881,1, emphases mine).

One can observe the equal handling of writing (‘to write’, ‘manuscript notes’) on the one hand, and listening (‘to hear’, ‘to listen’) on the other. ‘Pleasure’, however, derives from the latter, the oral version. Furthermore, in the 1880 preface to the English edition of Loukis Laras, written by the translator John Gennadius (1844–1932), Greek chargé d’affaires in London and vice-president of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, founded in 1879,6 the tension between fictionality and referentiality is commented upon as follows: The short intimation prefatory to the first chapter may, in fact, be considered only as a novelist’s device. It is true in substance; but the MS. notes left by the prototype of Loukis Laras were of the most elementary and meagre description, and our author has created both the simple but interesting plot which exists in the work, and most of the persons in the story (Bikelas 1881, xi).

6   Gennadius had arrived in London in 1862 to work for the firm of Ralli Bros; Vikelas had been in a similar profession since 1852.

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The English version of the book is, I believe, nearer than the Greek original to the intention of documenting the referentiality of the story while, at the same time, establishing its fictional element: it proposes its reading as a true (referential) story (fiction). Gennadius, due to his status among the London Greek community, does not wish to raise any doubts about Vikelas’s intention to remain near the solid core of truth. The question at issue is, where does the fictional construction begin, and to what purpose? This question is further complicated by the fact that a copy has been found in the archives of Vikelas, in his own handwriting, of the so-called manuscript of the autobiography of the self-introduced Loukas Zifos.7 What exactly did Vikelas copy? One possibility, the most remote, is that he copied the original manuscript, the one that allegedly existed in the archives of Zifos. According to the text of the so-called autobiography itself, Zifos was a London Greek of the Diaspora born in 1800 in Chios: appropriately, or rather too much so, he was of the same age as the main character of the novel, Loukis, who says that he was nearly twenty at the beginning of 1821. The story reads well as an autobiography, and one would argue that its writer did not lack narrative technique. A second possibility, however, is that Loukas Zifos will prove a tzifos (fake) for any attempt to identify him,8 and that Vikelas collected information about London Greeks originating from Chios and actually himself wrote the autobiography of Zifos and left it in his archives as a proof of the referential dimension of the text or as a way to tease his biographers. A third possibility lies in between the two mentioned already: some kind of manuscript notes from someone who was not necessarily named Zifos did exist; Vikelas got hold of them and supplemented them with information he possessed about London Greeks originating from Chios, in order to compose the so-called autobiography of Zifos. He wrote down a supposed autobiography as a guideline for his fictional work and as a decoy, in order to contribute to the expectations of referentiality on the part of his imagined audience. The prefatory note and Gennadius’s preface confirm that someone from Chios had been known to exist within the London Greek community. One could therefore argue that the so-called autobiography of Loukas Zifos has been composed by Vikelas, based on the oral narrative and perhaps some ‘MS. notes left by the prototype of Loukis Laras’, as Gennadius argues. Vikelas, on the other hand, when he addresses his public, asks for the story to be read ‘with as great an interest and pleasure’ as he himself had experienced whenever he listened to the narrative. Loukis Laras can therefore be used to bring out the relationship between the second type of autobiography, autobiografia, in the form of bourgeois autobiography, and prose fiction.9 The construction of an autobiography prior to Loukis Laras 7   See Ditsa 1991, 25* for details, and Vikelas 1991, where the copy of the manuscript is reproduced. 8   As Kechagioglou 2004, 99–109 argues in his satirical account of this and other possibilities, where he also puts forward his view of Vikelas as a satirist. 9   On the development of bourgeois autobiography in nineteenth-century Europe, see Gay 1995.



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(that of Loukas Zifos) is supplemented by the construction of Vikelas’s own later autobiography. In his prologue to the first part of I zoi mou, completed by 1898, Vikelas argues that to write down his memories in old age, which he defines as being past sixty, had been a longstanding project (Vikelas 1908, 1–2). So in the very first paragraph of his autobiography we have the avowal that the self-narrative that is going to follow has been planned for some time. From the time of the writing of Loukis Laras and of the ‘copying’ of the autobiography of Loukas Zifos? This is probable. I zoi mou consists of two parts: ‘Childhood Reminiscences’ and ‘Years of Youth’. It covers the writer’s life from early childhood until his thirtieth birthday in the mid-1860s. Strangely enough, each part has a separate preface, justified because the first had been written by 1898, while the second was written between 1901 and 1907; and also because during the writing of the first part Vikelas’s mother was alive, while during the second she had died (Vikelas 1908, 1–3, 177, 422). The main theme of the first prologue is narcissism: will the autobiography that follows be of interest, what image will emerge about the writer, how necessary is a posthumous publication? Vikelas the writer tries, in the main narrative of ‘Childhood Reminiscences’, to justify Vikelas the merchant and the reasoning behind his choice of profession. The second part, ‘Years of Youth’, is less defensive as far as the choice of the writer’s profession is concerned; the reason is that the vanity of leaving one’s traces by writing an autobiography has already been dealt with in the prologue to the first part. Vikelas’s mother has died at a very old age, when he himself was sixty-six, and her death is presented as a watershed. In this second part the merchant blends happily with the writer and, in a way, a causal link is created: from commerce to culture – how one moves from dealing with material goods to dealing with immaterial ones; or, rather, why commerce is a prerequisite of culture. At stake, one could argue, is the issue of sublimation, the movement from the material to the spiritual.10 To sum up the relationship between the fictional and the autobiographical text, one could argue that Vikelas composed a fictional narrative which describes the character of a young merchant who tries to survive in the eastern Mediterranean in the 1820s, and has as a narrator the same character who has become an aged and well-established London Greek in the 1870s. Similarly, his autobiographical narrative describes a child in the eastern Mediterranean and a young merchant who works in London in the 1850s and early 1860s, and has as a narrator an aged and well-established Greek of the Diaspora at the beginning of the twentieth century. Both are published after the death of the fictional or real narrator. The autobiographical fiction is used to pave the way for Vikelas’s personal narrative, which was published posthumously as the justification of his life. One should therefore read Loukis Laras as the grounding of a life that tries to create its own particular context within which a future public can read it. 10   The example of Andreas Syngros is an interesting counterpart, as he too, at about the same time, moves from commerce to banking, from material goods to non-material values. See Syngros 1998 and, for a parallel reading of Syngros’s and Vikelas’s autobiographies, Chryssanthopoulos 1998.

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In order to examine the issue of the diversity of the expectations of the late nineteenth-century reading public depending on its place of residence, the translations of Loukis Laras into various European languages will now be considered. According to Walter Ong (1977), ‘The writer’s audience is always a fiction’; and the process of creating and addressing that audience is part of the structure of the narrative. In the present case, of a quasi-autobiographical novel of the late nineteenth century, the public addressed depended on its place of residence: the Greek Diaspora in Europe and Greeks in the Greek kingdom. These are also the places of residence of the writer himself. Loukis Laras was first translated into French by a friend of Vikelas, the Marquis de Queux de Saint-Hilaire, and came out in September 1879, only a couple of months after the Greek publication in book form.11 As Ditsa argues (1991, 110*–13*), Loukis Laras is thus a ‘double’ book, written in Greek and translated into French in parallel, and therefore addresses at a stroke two different audiences. That is why the French edition is supplemented with a preface by the translator, with extensive notes on the history of the first years of the War of Independence, with extracts from the Mémoire sur l’île de Chio by Fustel de Coulanges (1857) and with a direct reference to the painting by Delacroix in the Louvre, Le Massacre de Chio. Similarly, the English edition (1881) is supplemented with a preface by the translator, John Gennadius, and with extensive notes using extracts from Thomas Gordon’s History of the Greek Revolution (1832), George Finlay’s History of the Greek Revolution (1861), the Mémoire of Coulanges, and Insurrection et Régénération de la Grèce by Gervinus (1863). The explicit reference in the English edition to the painting by Delacroix constitutes a comment on the purposes of the French edition and underscores the underlying scheme of the potential dialogue between the various European editions of the book: ‘Le Massacre de Chio, now in the Louvre, had popularised in France this tragic episode of the Greek war of Liberation’ (Bikelas 1881, 265–6). A year or so after the RussoTurkish war of 1877–1878, during which atrocities had been committed by both sides, the French public could be sensitized to the massacre of women and children, while being rather indifferent to the past heroics of the Greeks; especially because the Greek state had carefully avoided any involvement in the Russo-Turkish war, in which both the heroes (the brave army) and the victims (the massacred population) had been Bulgarians. The only ‘heroic’ act of Greece during that war had been to appoint a coalition government headed by the hero of the Revolution and the punisher of the Turks for the massacre of the Greek population in Chios, the aged Admiral Konstantinos Kanaris, who did not survive in this role. The story narrated by the elderly and affluent London Greek, Loukis Laras, aims to convince the Greek public of the Diaspora, as well as a European public, that someone now among their ranks, by persevering during the War of Independence, by passively resisting and surviving, 11   The French translation was followed by Wilhelm Wagner’s German one a couple of months later, in 1879, and this in turn by Italian and Danish versions.



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had become successful in the financial life of London in the 1870s, and could contribute through his way of life towards a positive, though not heroic, image of Greece.12 This seemed to be by all accounts the most sustainable point of view in order to present the Greek case for territorial expansion (which would be negotiated after a couple of years in Berlin) to European public opinion after the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–1878; and Vikelas created the imaginative context within which it could be presented.13 Finally, as far as the difference between what I have termed ‘macro-history’ and ‘micro-history’ is concerned, the texts by Vikelas under consideration are designed to vindicate a certain viewpoint: that the outcome of the Greek War of Independence had depended crucially not only on the heroes who fought (agonistes), the klefts and armatoloi, epitomized by the fighters of Missolonghi or Dervenakia or Psara, but also upon the population that struggled to survive, the people that tried to save their skins and earn a living, the merchants that ran away from Chios to Syros or Mykonos or Hydra. These were the ones who had provided the economic backbone of the War of Independence as they continued to work as small merchants during a very difficult and long period of time, according to the rules of negotium prevailing in the area for centuries if not millennia. In other words, the exercise of commerce has always been the backbone of life in the eastern Mediterranean, it was so during the Greek War of Independence, and it continued to be so during the later nineteenth century. The Greek kingdom of the later nineteenth century is therefore presented to the mainly mercantile Greeks of the European Diaspora of the later nineteenth century and to the European public as the result of a long line of commerce. Loukis Laras is a piece of fictional prose that underscores the relationship between autobiography and prose fiction when linked to Vikelas’s own autobiography as far as the function and importance of commerce and the role of the unknown soldier – who can very well be a merchant – is concerned. Vikelas equally ingeniously contributes to the creation of a genre in order to resuscitate a form of self-narrative that had previously been completely neglected, if not discredited: the self-narrative not of princes, generals, or politicians but of the commoner, the small merchant. Vikelas moves within the boundaries of micro-history, the history of the people caught in a war who try to survive. Such people play a crucial role in the building of a society and in the structuring of a nation.

12   Elsewhere, Vikelas argued that the London Greeks have become gradually Anglicized, being unable to read or speak Greek (Vikelas 1908, 335–40). 13   To reinforce my argument, Angelou 1997, 27*–8* argues that what is characteristic of the first Modern Greek novelists is their lack of imagination (φαντασία, 27*) and of literary consciousness. The writers of Papissa Ioanna, Thanos Vlekas, I Stratiotiki Zoi en Elladi, Stratis Kalopicheiros, and Loukis Laras were all writers of a single novel, never making a second attempt in the genre; they were mostly intellectuals (λόγιοι) and very active indeed in other spheres of public life.

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References Agriandoni, Ch. (1986), Οι απαρχές της εκβιομηχάνισης στην Ελλάδα τον 19ο αιώνα, Athens: Emboriki Trapeza tis Ellados [Commercial Bank of Greece]. Angelou, A. (1997), in Vikelas (1997a), 11*–45*. Beaton, R. (1999 [11994]), An introduction to modern Greek literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bikelas [= Vikelas], D. (1881), Loukis Laras (Reminiscences of a Chiote merchant during the War of Independence), trans. J. Gennadius, London: Macmillan. Chryssanthopoulos, M. (1994), ‘Το διήγημα ως αυτοβιογραφία: Βιζυηνός, Παπαδιαμάντης, Μητσάκης’, Entefktirio 28–9: 100–5. Chryssanthopoulos, M. (1997), ‘Anticipating Modernism: constructing a genre, a past and a place’, in D. Tziovas (ed.), Greek Modernism and Beyond, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 61–76. Chryssanthopoulos, M. (1998), ‘Ρευστή ταυτότητα και εσωτερική ετερότητα: έξω και μέσα Έλληνες στον ύστερο δέκατο ένατο αιώνα’, in Gramma, vol. 6 (Of People and Places: De-Centering Ethnicity): 31–60. Dertilis, G. (1977), Κοινωνικός μετασχηματισμός και στρατιωτική επέμβαση, Athens: Exandas. Dimaras, K.Th. (1983 [11948]), Ιστορία της νεοελληνικής λογοτεχνίας, Athens: Ikaros. Ditsa, M. (1991), ‘Εισαγωγή’, in Vikelas 1991, 27*–133*. Gay, P. (1995), The naked heart, London: Norton. Gementzidou, Ch. (2004), ‘Ο Δημήτριος Βικέλας ως μεταφραστής του Shakespeare’, unpublished MA thesis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Kechagioglou, G. (2004), ‘Σωκράτης, Λάρας, Λουκής, Σίμων: σχόλιο για τις περιτομές του «βυρωνομανή» αιώνα και για τον τζίφο «τζούφιων εκδόσεων»’, in Μνήμη Άλκη Αγγέλου, Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 99–109. Llewellyn Smith, M. (2006), ‘The exemplary life of Dimitrios Vikelas (1835–1908)’, The Historical Review/ La Revue Historique [Institute for Neohellenic Research, INR/NHRF, Athens] 3: 7–31. Olney, J. (ed.) (1980), Autobiography. Essays theoretical and critical, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ong, W. (1977), ‘The writer’s audience is always a fiction’, in W. Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Papayiannakis, L. (1982), Οι ελληνικοί σιδηρόδρομοι (1882–1910), Athens: MIET [Cultural Foundation of the National Bank]. Politis, L. (1973), A history of Modern Greek literature, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Porter, R. (ed.) (1997), Rewriting the self: histories from the Renaissance to the present, London: Routledge. Skopetea, E. (1988), Το «Πρότυπο Βασίλειο» και η Μεγάλη Ιδέα. Όψεις του εθνικού προβλήματος στην Ελλάδα (1830–1880), Athens: Polytypo. Syngros, A. (1998), Απομνημονεύματα (3 vols), Athens: Estia. Tsoukalas, K. (1977), Εξάρτηση και αναπαραγωγή: ο  ρόλος των εκπαιδευτικών μηχανισμών στην Ελλάδα (1830–1922), Athens: Themelio. Vikelas, D. (1908), Η ζωή μου, Athens: Syllogos pros Diadosin Ofelimon Vivlion. Vikelas, D. (1991), Loukis Laras, Athens: Ermis. Vikelas, D. (1997), Άπαντα, vol. 1, Athens: Syllogos pros Diadosin Ofelimon Vivlion.

19 In partibus infidelium: Alexandros Papadiamantis and Orthodox disenchantment with the Greek state David Ricks The date cited in the subtitle to this volume, the first Olympic Games of the modern era, held in Athens in 1896, clearly marked a rite of passage for the new nation, both in the eyes of the world and in terms of self-understanding (Llewellyn Smith 2004). Yet just what sort of passage that was was a matter of dispute. How far, we can see from two contributions made to the commemorative album for the Olympics by the leading short-story writer of the time, Alexandros Papadiamantis, as well as from the journalism he had been writing for the Athenian press in the preceding years. Papadiamantis (1851–1911) could not unreasonably be called the National Pezographos (Prose-Writer) (as Solomos is, however paradoxically, the National Poet: see chapter 15 by Vassiliki Dimoula in this volume) if there were such a thing. With his provincial origins in a poor clerical family on the island of Skiathos, his emphasis (though by no means exclusively) on a lost rural life, and his persona – vividly captured in a famous photograph – as a Poor Saint, almost a Holy Fool, Papadiamantis has always been understood by many Greeks to represent – in fact, is often prized as representing – an Eastern Orthodox reaction against modernity; and the largest selection of his work for the English reader (2007) has been produced partly in this spirit. Yet, as with his master Dostoevsky, there is little point in segregating him to an anti-Occidental zone without examining with care the nature of his critique of the modern.1 And for Papadiamantis that critique is of the modern Greek state in particular. Twenty years ago, I threw out the following hint: I do not mean to suggest that Papadiamantis goes as far as the ultra-Orthodox Jews in today’s Jerusalem who regard the State of Israel as a secularist abomination; but through his writings we find a persistent caginess, at least, about the Greek State and a hankering for the days of old (Ricks 1988, 28–9). 1   Papadiamantis’s journalism has been exploited thus far in a thoroughgoing neo-Orthodox vein by Triantafyllopoulos 1996.

From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. 249

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Here, I want to see how far a look at the religious journalism of this greatest of modern Greek prose writers sheds light on the following (Renan-inspired) question: how far did the making of the modern Greek state, on its best behaviour for the 1896 Olympics, appear to entail the unmaking of what, in the shape of Greek Orthodoxy, could colourably be considered the heart of Greekness? In returning to the question, with reference to this category of material – some 130 pages in the standard edition (1998, 67–211), spanning almost twenty years – it is my aim to discuss the question of Papadiamantis’s views on the topic with something of the closeness of analysis which a large body of criticism has brought to bear on the short stories and novels.2 In an essay that takes Papadiamantis’s perspective seriously, and does not write it off as yet another trope, Robert Shannan Peckham (1998), concentrating on Papadiamantis’s fiercely anti-Western early novel, The Gipsy Girl, has gone so far as to use the term ‘the theft of Byzantium’ to describe Papadiamantis’s view of the displacement of Orthodoxy by a Greek state which was, as he saw it, a veritable cuckoo in the nest. And nowhere does this reaction emerge more clearly than in a short piece, ‘Town priests and country priests’, that Papadiamantis contributed to the commemorative album for the 1896 Olympics (193–8).3 There, as we shall see, he presented in perhaps its most bilious form a critique of the Greek state’s guardianship of Greek Orthodoxy which underlies his writings as a whole. Through attention to the rhetoric of these journalistic texts, the great majority of them published (like ten of his stories) in the newspaper Ephemeris from 1877 on, I aim to point out some of the – not always predictable – ways in which, surely articulating the feelings of some wider constituency, Papadiamantis understands the making of a modern Greece to threaten the unmaking of Orthodoxy – in Greek national territory, at least. As a consequence, the authentically Orthodox writer, the authentically Greek writer, may become no more than a sojourner in partibus infidelium. Papadiamantis’s use of this Western term is characteristically mordant. It appears in a somewhat earlier article (1892), one of several devoted to Holy Week in Athens – a combination which Papadiamantis now finds to be an oxymoron. The incongruities of the contemporary situation are encapsulated for him in a religious gathering held by some prominent theologians in the secular setting of a club: We are not over-particular, and we can clearly see that, just as there are, e.g., fashionable photographers, fashionable tailors, etc, so it follows that there will be fashionable theologians. But much less of a men-pleaser, and, we would almost say, much more of a theologian is Mr Roidis, who, though a foe to Christianity, has at least grasped one thing, that Christianity is, at bottom, ascetic, entirely spiritual and world-renouncing. We are, however, curious to learn whether these two missionaries in partibus ever spoke to their audience about miracles, about the existence of demons, about warring

2

  For a judicious selection, and full bibliography, see Farinou-Malamatari 2005.   All page numbers, given in parentheses in the main text, refer to Papadiamantis 1998 (for details of first publication of this and other items: 574–86). 3



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with evil spirits, about fasting, etc, or whether they ever recalled to their pious lady hearers the verses of S. Gregory the Theologian: Pile not high your heads with false tresses, women. [...] Nor bespread countenances that are of God with foul hues, So as to possess a mask and not a face (178).

It is not hard to see from such a passage where Papadiamantis and Roidis are kindred spirits in spite of themselves; and Roidis’s late prose (1978) forms a neglected point of comparison with Papadiamantis. In their misogyny and their allusiveness (‘menpleaser’ is from Ephesians 6.6) the two writers find common ground.4 But it is also clear that the phrase in partibus not only portrays the modern-minded Orthodox clerics as being as inauthentic as a Western titular bishop of a long-lost Eastern territory ‘i.p.i.’, but also conveys a sense that modern Athenian society, with the rest of the country no doubt following in its wake, is a milieu that now stands in need of being re-evangelized. Now the relationship between Greek nationalism and (Greek?) Orthodoxy is a complex one which comes in for discussion elsewhere in this volume, notably in Effi Gazi’s conspectus of the Greek Enlightenment, Marios Hatzopoulos’s examination of the language of rebirth in relation to the War of Independence, and Socrates D. Petmezas’s study of the writers associated in the mid-nineteenth century with the Spectateur d’Orient. But close attention to the way in which Papadiamantis’s attitudes harden over the 1880s and the first half of the 1890s, a period of rapid modernization, can help us to see what is at stake. A central point we should bear in mind, however, is that Papadiamantis, a fervent admirer of the liberal modernizing prime minister Charilaos Trikoupis (276), does not represent a merely reactionary case like that of the recalcitrant Old Calendarists (Mavrogordatos 1983), but is, like the Slavophile intellectuals of Russia to whom he owes a debt, highly cognizant of the gains as well as the losses of the modern. Papadiamantis’s religious journalism, in a newspaper that over the same period published a range of very different comment from the pen of his most prominent poetic and critical contemporary, Kostis Palamas (about whose attitude to the Church I shall have more to say later), itself exemplifies the paradoxes of modernity: a community authentically rooted in the Orthodox year might seem to require no journalistic assistance to orientate itself or be recalled to its true vocation (Palamas n.d., 9–347). And Papadiamantis’s first foray into this genre, a series of short articles presenting Holy Week in 1877, is largely descriptive and unideological (67–78). As the years go by, however, we increasingly detect shafts against modernism in religion and particularly against the role played by the Greek state. The process is well under way in a Holy Week article ten years later, where the false piety of Athenians who flock to church only at Easter is lambasted: ‘For my part, I hold 4   A comparison would be worth making not least because of the ageing and embittered liberal Roidis’s fruitful experiments with the short story. Reading the Greek fin de siècle through these old adversaries, who to this day attract different readerships, might prove illuminating.

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the libres penseurs of the West, who have straightforwardly and thoroughly broken all relation and contact with the Church, more reasonable than ourselves, who continue to ape Christian worship without faith or a good conscience’ (96). The next day, ‘the question whether the State in Greece has corrupted and enslaved the Church’ is raised, though then shelved in favour of an attack on the idleness of the lower clergy (100). A few days later, Papadiamantis reports that ‘In flight from the roar and hubbub of that day [Good Friday] in this little Babylon I went off with a friend to celebrate Easter in one of the country villages of Attica’ (119). He is satisfied with what he finds, and especially with the fact that Our Lady is, as he puts it, the only grand lady present. Indeed he observes with approval that two old village women remain in church after Vespers whispering an Albanian lament for Christ (120). Here the Attic peasant, often deemed un-Greek, possesses an authenticity denied to her Athenian cousin.5 Alas, all is not perfection even in the Mesogeia: Yet, however far one flees Athens and its commotion, however unadulterated one wishes the commemoration of those days to be, the ghost of modern civilization follows one at every step, modern inventions pursue one [...] Bengal lights and other unholy devices were lit outside church as soon as we came out to celebrate the Resurrection [...] Their smoke mingled irreverently with the sacred odour of the incense, the missiles’ din mingled with the ringing of the bell (123; cf. 311).

Modernity, however, casts only a brief shadow over the authentic rural Easter, and the whistle of the train that takes the writer back to the big city in the last sentence is taken neutrally, as if technology can as readily afford the means to return to tradition as to stray from it (124).6 If technology is neutral, the same cannot be said of the government machine and its relation to the autocephalous Church. Commending the writings of a theology professor, Ignatios Moschakis, in 1888, Papadiamantis fears that his gifts as a preacher are likely to be neglected: But we can expect neither the Ministry nor the Synod to do well by the Church. The Synod has indeed shown itself utterly inadequate, from the time of its establishment in Greece, to bring about the slightest good for the Church. On the contrary, it has dealt her a mortal wound by ignoring her true vocation and deeming her hitherto a factory of bishops and priests [...] We repose all our hopes in the private initatives of those who, still the possessors of high religious feeling and animated by concern for the Church’s honour and dignity and of the religious upbringing of our Nation, are both willing and able to contribute to the increase of the Church’s prestige and the fanning into flame of religious sentiment among us (144).

5   This passage has an interesting affinity with the equally favourable impression by Revd (later Bishop) Christopher Wordsworth on his visit to Attica in 1832–3: ‘These are the Vespers of an Athenian cottage’ (Wordsworth 1836, 220). 6   That other anti-modern recluse Thoreau can also take trains in his stride (1985, 414).



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The anti-Erastian voice we hear in this passage is strikingly similar to that of the Anglican Newman; and it again reminds us that for Papadiamantis the autocephalous Greek Church is at its worst a hydra-headed monster (184). Stung by the accusation that it was failing to promote good preaching, the Synod instantly responded through a mouthpiece, but it did not find its critic in conciliatory mood. The example of the sort of preacher that Papadiamantis thinks is favoured by the Establishment is a significant one: ‘Perhaps they will point to Mr Damalas with his prophecies of the imminent capture of Constantinople by the Greeks.’ Meanwhile, as Papadiamantis gets into his stride, he ascribes the spread of unbelief in the upper classes and crime in the lower to the Synod’s abject failure, in contravention of its legal obligation, to supply a serious religious education (148). Only the persecuted Church can live up to its high vocation; and here Bismarck’s Kulturkampf is adduced: The Church has triumphed in this world without the slightest aid from the state, being on the contrary often persecuted and oppressed by the latter. This was not the case in the first centuries of Christianity alone. Even today the Church triumphs over every persecution when her leaders are conscious of her high mission and seek its fulfilment by every means. Shortly after the war between France and Germany Bismarck, at the peak of the might of the Prussian and German state declared a merciless war on the Western Church. He removed, gaoled and exiled from Prussia as common criminals all the bishops and most of the priests. And yet in the face of that persecution the Western Church conceded nothing, but remained steadfast to the end and emerged the glorious victor in that long campaign, having drawn from it new strength (149– 50).

The verdict might be disputed by modern historical scholarship, but the implication for Papadiamantis is clear and uncomfortable: the Greek Church lacks such powers of regeneration precisely because of the homogeneously Orthodox population of the Greek state. Perhaps, he suspects, only disestablishment can save the Greek Church from scandal (150). Such reproaches, often with reference to the ignorance and licentiousness of the clergy, are commonplace; but whereas Roidis brings them in with a certain gusto in Pope Joan (1866) – not to mention the controversy that erupted around it – Papadiamantis, as the son of a rural priest, and with the priestly character inscribed in his choice of surname, cannot but view this with chagrin.7 Yet what is the alternative to the Greek Church as it is? One recurrent theme for Papadiamantis (128, 158) is the consolation that the Areopagus is sacred ground because the Apostle Paul preached there and (more dubiously) Dionysius the Areopagite took his name from it. A telling use of these figures comes in a second short piece that Papadiamantis contributed to the Olympics album, ‘Athens as an oriental city’. The bulk of this suggestive piece 7   See Roidis 1993. It is worth emphasizing that Papadiamantis’s surname was his own choice, and a change from what he had previously used, at a period when Greek surnames were still in flux (Politis 2000, 158).

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(which has been richly drawn on by Georgia Gotsi 2004, 177–205 in her study of Athens in turn of the century prose fiction), is devoted to the Ottoman past, a past portrayed as less rapacious, and in its way more authentically Greek, than the present. But it ends with a description of the Anafiotika neighbourhood huddled below the Acropolis. ‘There two bright visions are sometimes seen [...] Both visions are tall, imposing, grand. The first is called Paul, the second Dionysius.’ The piece ends with a striking variation on the travelogue trope: ‘Let us make our way back, or rather let us stop here. Fleshly, materialistic and sluggish men cannot ascend the holy rock of the Acropolis’ (272). Two things are worth drawing attention to in this passage. In the making of modern Greece, no image could have, or has had, the force of the Acropolis, remade by the stripping away of its post-Periclean accretions; and such an image is characteristically invoked as ‘sacred’ (cf. Giannakopoulou 2002). Yet for Papadiamantis this place is sacred for quite different reasons and with quite different associations. Moreover, the Acropolis here is presented not in its materiality, as a bastion on which to assert Greek national belonging, but – and this is much more like Cavafy’s evocation (2007, 70) of a lost paganism in his poem ‘Ionic’ – as a place of evanescent and intermittent visions which are both awe-inspiring and, for good or ill, non-material and discerned by the elect alone. Once again, though, context is important. Papadiamantis speaks of Hellenism rather than Byzantium here to emphasize Greek Orthodox roots now imperilled by excessive Russian influence on Athos: The flood coming down from the North has brought with it, along with the roubles and the political designs, a number of customs and ideas out of harmony with the authentic Byzantine traditions [...] But the wealthy and flourishing Greek monasteries, the Lavra, Vatopedi and the Iviron have closed their doors and ears to this and introduced none of this gimcrackery into their churches. There is thus the hope, as long as these uncontaminated establishments exist (and exist they will so long as Hellenism outside Greece is not, alas!, utterly corrupted in its religion along with the free territory), there is hope that Hellenism will withstand the foreign invasion there. Because we see no hope of aid from free Greece. Today’s [word lost] may serve Greece as a State, but it does not serve it as a Nation; that is our view (158).8

There are details to unpick here, as Papadiamantis links his preferences in church vestments and icons to a wider national condition. The current wave of Russian influence was soon to come an end (and the term Panslavism is never invoked in this passage); so too, of course, was the Greek presence in Turkey outside Istanbul. The way of contrasting Hellenism outside Greece (ο έξω ελληνισμός) with the Greek state (the phrase for ‘free territory’ here is in fact ‘free corner’, with something of the disparagement often used – by Irish nationalists – of the Free State) does not fall within the customary rhetoric of redeemed versus unredeemed. Instead, the Greek state is a religiously fallen community over which the Greeks outside Greece 8   Papadiamantis’s views on this are discussed by Peckham 1998; they chime with those of a contemporary English observer (Riley 1887, 81).



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may have some redemptive influence, though not territorially conceived. Such rhetoric is certainly compatible with versions of Great Idea irredentism, but it is not coterminous with it, as we shall see. (The final sentence, in which probably the missing word is ‘Government’ or, conceivably, ‘Church’, is closer to the standard rhetoric about the need for the Greek state to extend a helping hand.) Covering Holy Week once again in 1892, Papadiamantis’s proclamation of the glories of the Liturgy seems to have taken on perhaps a little more of the hue of the Great Idea: How grand and unparalleled in their brilliance are the ceremonies of the Orthodox Church of Christ (nor could it be otherwise, given that only here, in the East, did there exist for twelve centuries a Christian Greek-speaking empire, constantly warred on but ever triumphing, and that only here was the Christian idea ever cultivated in depth and breadth) (180–1).

This kind of nostalgia – related to, but quite different from, Cavafy’s ambivalence in his slippery poem ‘In Church’ (2007, 65) – seems like a throwback to the crude anti-Occidentalism of Papadiamantis’s early novel, The Gipsy Girl, and some way from the sentiment of his short stories, in which the Byzantine empire seems as remote as, if less oppressive than, the modern Greek state. And sure enough, the passage just quoted is followed by an outburst against the Uniates and against an unnamed young aesthete (probably Konstantinos Christomanos) who has expressed admiration for Romish ritual. But once again there is a (however disputable) theological core to the claim that takes it out of the sphere of nationalist triumphalism. Politics is for Papadiamantis the root of all evil: ‘In Athens, I say, everything, religious and social and other, is formed in the image and likeness of politics’ (184); priests who are ashamed to read saints’ lives in church are happy to retail notices from mayors, tax inspectors, and prefects about all manner of things, elections especially (191), ‘As if there were need of anything but a pious king, the anointed of the Lord, the only one worthy to choose his counsellors and generals, and mighty and defeated simply in the “In this sign conquer”’(192). Once again the rhetoric is misleading if we infer from it that Papadiamantis was an authoritarian and a monarchist. (Nor did religion in Greece ever form an alliance as unholy as Action Française.) He has an ingrained suspicion of the state that finds harsh expression in that not very celebratory piece ‘Town priests and country priests’ which he contributed, along with ‘Athens as an oriental city’, to the Olympic souvenir. In Papadiamantis’s sights is a government proposal to introduce three grades of priest, with matching state stipends (193), which leads to the quite justified suspicion that Holy Orders will become an object of electoral bribery (194). Already the Rizareios theological college sends out ‘a swarm of lawyers, a herd of professors, doctors, bankers and politicians’ (195) and scarcely a decent priest. The precarious literacy of a good traditional parish priest is favourably contrasted with the chatter to be expected from his modern successor (196), who will be influenced by the ruling class’s open disrespect for religion. Whatever the justice of these attacks on

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any church-state relation in Greece (and the assessments of outside observers have varied), there can be no doubt that the opportunity to celebrate Greek Orthodoxy for a prestigious national event in 1896 is one that Papadiamantis conspicuously fails to take, so deep is his feeling that true religion exists in the margins of Greek life which are not subject to the depredations of a deracinated Greek state. We have spoken of unholy alliances between the Church and politics in other countries. In Papadiamantis’s case, a recurrent rhetoric of internal exile exhibits his essential ideological loneliness. Yet there were trains of thought in Greece quite unwholesome enough, and some of them flourished during the disastrous war of 1897, just outside the chronological boundaries of this volume. In seeing how Kostis Palamas, one of the most acute literary minds of the time, could fall victim to the fervour of that year, one need look no further than a short piece he published in the newspaper Akropolis on 11 April 1897. That story exhibits to the full one kind of religious–national attitude to which one cannot imagine Papadiamantis being tempted. In some early articles on national festivals (1884), Palamas, not surprisingly (see Hatzopoulos, chapter 6 in the present volume) conflates the Annunciation with the declaration of the War of Independence, and the final Exodus from Missolonghi with Palm Sunday (Palamas n.d., 9–10, 15–16). By 1897, however, the tug between religious sentiment and other motives in Palamas’s mind (on which see Hirst 2004) has been decisively resolved in favour of Greek nationalism, even where – especially where – it is thought to repudiate a fatalist, Romaic, and Orthodox outlook. The short story in question (Palamas n.d., 438–41) was published in the very month when Greek forces were disastrously engaged against the Ottomans. ‘The Precentor at the Good Friday Procession’ tells how the protagonist suddenly – there is little attempt at psychological realism here – divines at a procession on 25 March that ‘in these days the only true priest and authentic cantor is the soldier’. At the Good Friday procession subsequently, his recollection of the processional liturgy’s phrase, ‘The sword was polished against Thee, Christ, and the sword of the mighty one has been blunted’, resolves the timid precentor’s mind and results in the story’s last sentence: ‘And the next day he joined up’ (Palamas n.d., 440– 1). It is not hard to see just how different Papadiamantis’s outlook is; and this is only confirmed by recourse to the piece that Palamas (n.d., 344–7) had written for the same Olympics album to which Papadiamantis contributed the two pieces we have glanced at. In ‘The Brave Lad’ (To pallikari) Palamas explicitly foregrounds athletics as the incarnation of nationalism and the rehearsal of combat, almost in a Wellingtonian spirit. (Yet, while it is just possible that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, it would be laughable to assert that the war of ’97 was lost in the magnificent Stadium built for the Athens Olympics.) The Byzantine epic hero Digenes Akrites can make an appearance to exemplify Greek values (carefully eliding Orthodoxy, but with a tinge of eugenics, as that hero’s mixed ancestry is held to strengthen his valour), but the inebriation of the Great Idea here takes



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Palamas much further from reality than the unworldly Papadiamantis. In two powerful, but cumulatively over-polemical, recent books Michael Burleigh has brought to the fore in compelling manner the complexities of relationships between state and religion in Europe since the French Revolution (Burleigh 2005, 2006). As it happens, the Greek-speaking world plays relatively little part in his analysis. Yet if we reflect on some of the unfinished business in the matter of church–state relations in Greece more than a century since the Papadiamantis journalism we have looked at – the specifying of religion on identity cards and the status of seminaries in relation to the state universities, to look no further – we can see that, in the European context, one writer’s scattered and admittedly incoherent attempts to diagnose the problems still have value. So too does his refusal, however connected they may be, to conflate Greek nationalism and the Orthodox religion.

References Burleigh, M. (2005), Earthly powers: religion and politics in Europe from the Enlightenment to the Great War, London: HarperCollins. Burleigh, M. (2006), Sacred causes: religion and politics from the European dictators to Al Qaeda, London: Harper Press. Cavafy, C.P. (2007), Collected poems. A new translation by Evangelos Sachperoglou, with parallel Greek text, ed. A. Hirst, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Farinou-Malamatari, G. (2005), Εισαγωγή στην πεζογραφία του Παπαδιαμάντη, Heraklion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis [Crete University Press]. Giannakopoulou, L. (2002), ‘Perceptions of the Parthenon in modern Greek poetry’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 20: 241–72. Gotsi, G. (2004), Η ζωή εν τη πρωτευούση, Athens: Nefeli. Hirst, A. (2004), God and the poetic ego, Berne: Peter Lang. Llewellyn Smith, M. (2004), Olympics in Athens 1896: the invention of the modern Olympic Games, London: Profile. Mavrogordatos, G.Th. (1983), Stillborn republic: social coalitions and party strategies in Greece, 1922–1936, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Palamas, K. (n.d.), Άπαντα, vol. 15, Athens: Biris. Papadiamantis, A. (1998), Άπαντα, vol. 5, ed. N.D. Triantafyllopoulos, Athens: Domos. Papadiamantis, A. (2007), The boundless garden, ed. Lambros Kamperidis and Denise Harvey, Limni (Evia): Romiosyni. Peckham, R.S. (1998), ‘Papadiamantis and the theft of Byzantium’, in D. Ricks and P. Magdalino (eds), Byzantium and the Modern Greek Identity, Aldershot: Ashgate, 91–104. Riley, A. (1887), Athos: or the mountain of the monks, London: Longmans, Green. Politis, A. (2000), Το μυθολογικό κενό, Athens: Polis. Roidis, E.D. (1978), Άπαντα, vol. 5, ed. A. Angelou, Athens: Ermis. Roidis, E.D. (1993), Η Πάπισσα Ιωάννα, ed. A. Angelou, Athens: Ermis. Thoreau. H.D. (1985), A week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers – Walden; or, Life in the Woods – &c, New York: Library of America. Triantafyllopoulos, D.D. (1996), Πελιδνός, ο παράφρων τύραννος, Athens: Nefeli. Wordsworth, C. (1836), Athens and Attica: journal of a residence there, London: Murray.

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Afterword Michael Llewellyn Smith We are the music-makers And we are the dreamers of dreams [...] [...] We are the movers and shakers Of the world for ever, it seems. (Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy, ‘Ode’, 1874) Neither the Making nor the Modern of this book’s title is entirely straightforward. ‘ Modern Greece’ is a broad concept, itself challenged by at least one well-known historian, but nonetheless useful. It is a wider concept than the Greek nation state, encompassing state, nation, culture, religion, language, literature, and ways of life. How were these ‘made’, and how are they made or remade, since we are speaking of a continuous process? The answer is, in many different ways and from many different elements, which explains the varied nature of the preceding chapters. But ‘making’ requires a maker or makers, and there is a large question concerning who were the prime movers in the process. Were they, as C.M. Woodhouse romantically argues in his short history of the War of Independence, the Greek people? The achievement of Greek independence was an astonishing and admirable episode of European history, for which the credit is due to no man’s design but to the indomitable spirit of an inspired people. The Philiki Etaireia, the Phanariotes, the philhellenes, the primates, the politicians, the amateur and professional soldiers, could none of them, singly or collectively, have brought to pass what the statesmen of Europe were determined to prevent, without the divine fire that had entered into the Greek people at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Woodhouse 1952, 159).

In other words, without the inspiration of the Greek people, there would not have been a Greek nation state in 1830. One can concede this without detracting from the role of the other actors mentioned by Woodhouse. Each contributed to the achievement of independence, and so did the Great Powers once they saw their interest in so doing. But others also contributed, as set out in this book, to the making of the nation state and of modern Greece in the broader sense: Korais and Enlightenment intellectuals; priests who drew on the Orthodox theme of resurrection; poets and writers, historians both Greek and foreign who helped to construct a new theory of the continuity of Hellenism from the ancient through the Byzantine to the modern age. These, and the politicians who had to grapple with From The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797– 1896) ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Copyright © 2009 by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK. 259

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the practical issues of state formation, were among the ‘movers and shakers’ evoked 1 in another context by the poet O’Shaughnessy. The modern Greece which they made has combined a complex relationship with antiquity with a powerful drive to be modern, progressive, civilized, and European (a drive that explains Greece’s investment in the Olympic idea in 1896 and 2004). The result was unique, as every nation is unique, but elements of the process of construction were common to Greece and other nations, as chapter 3 by Henrik Mouritsen on Italy clearly shows. Given the complexity of nationalism, it is not surprising that this book ranges across many fields, from theoretical questions on nationalism, through historiography, religion, language, and literature, with excursions to the wider world of the ‘outsiders’, the Balkans, and the Ionian Islands. One important ingredient in the make-up of the nation that is not addressed in a separate chapter, though it is certainly present in the mind of the editors, is archaeology and monuments, which have recently been treated exuberantly by Yannis Hamilakis in his book The Nation and its Ruins (Hamilakis 2007; cf. Beaton 2008). Hamilakis shows how important a role the ruins and their treatment played in the creation of what he calls the Greek ‘national imagination’, in which antiquity is reshaped for the modern era to conform with Greek requirements and present the requisite image both to Greeks themselves and to the outside world. These essays give a perspective on nineteenth-century Greek nationalism in its comparative context. They also yield some insights into the current state of Hellenic studies in Greece and Europe. The bibliographies attached to each chapter indicate intellectual influences that may in turn point towards emerging intellectual traditions, a part of the process of canonization which Paschalis Kitromilides seeks. Authoritative sources on the theory of nationalism – Benedict Anderson, Anthony Smith, rather less so Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm – feature strongly; whereas Elie Kedourie and Stephen G. Xydis, despite their exemplary status referred to by Beaton and Kitromilides, are ignored by other contributors. Anderson and Smith are used in a way that suggests that their work has become an acquis taken as unquestioned by younger scholars. In the general field of Greek nineteenthcentury political history and the development of the Greek kingdom Elli Skopetea stands out, as does K.Th. Dimaras in the fields of literature and the history of the Greek Enlightenment. Two or three papers on literature, language, and religion pay tribute to a different set of writers, extending from Adorno and Foucault to Homi Bhabha, Artemis Leontis, and Stathis Gourgouris. The historian who scores highest, however, in the bibliography test is, interestingly, Kitromilides himself, whose various works feature in the reading 1   O’Shaughnessy, from the other end of Europe, evokes the sense of flux and renewal that was also a part of Panayotis Soutsos’s Leandros: ‘For each age is a dream that is dying, / Or one that is coming to birth.’ Compare the quotations in Dimitris Tziovas’s chapter on Leandros: ‘A new world has succeeded the old; everything passes over us and is ephemeral like us...the future succeeds the present and the future also becomes past, therefore the old picture of the world is constantly remade’; and Greece is a ‘hart thristing for enlightenment and modernity’ (p. 217 above).



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lists of most contributors. Partly, obviously, this is because his field of expertise is of relevance to the subjects of the conference from which this book derives. But it may be also, I would suggest, that the kind of history he calls for and himself represents, requiring a ‘sense of the growth of knowledge in a field’, and close engagement with the evidence as well as with theory, yields results in his hands that cannot be ignored. The notional end point of the book is 1896. This has an extraordinary appropriateness in that the 1896 Olympic Games were crafted by the Greeks in order to assert both the ancient heritage on which the Greek nation state was founded and, even more important, the modern credentials of this same state and its place – potential and to some extent actual – among the ‘civilized’ states of Europe. But the events of the very next year – the ill-fated war of 1897 with Turkey – came as an unpleasant reminder of the unfinished nature of the business of state formation. The point at which the nation state found a stable territorial shape was the period 1923–1948, in which with the end of the Megali Idea the nation came to coincide, more or less, with the state. But as a number of contributors state or imply, if modern Greece in the broader sense is in a continuous process of making and remaking, the story is not over. Renan’s quotation, cited by Beaton, says as much: ‘Nations are not something eternal. They begin, so they will come to an end.’ But Renan’s prediction that a European confederation would probably replace them has stumbled, so far, on the cussed ability of nations to survive in parallel with a Union that sees itself as a federation in the making. The forms of national life, state, and culture which developed in the nineteenth century have proved tenacious. Since the watershed of 1922–3, for all the turbulence of war, civil war, and dictatorship, the main lines of the Greeks’ image of themselves have continued to fit the mould crafted by Paparrigopoulos and the nineteenth-century pioneers; while the Greeks have moved towards consensus, in 1975 over the form of regime, in 1976 over the Greek language, in the early 1980s over the embedding of Greece in the European club and the reconciliation of the two political halves of the Greek nation. What unfinished business does that leave? Perhaps further developments in relations between church and state; perhaps increasing tension between dedication to Western materialism and the ever-clearer need for respect for the environment (on which the Ecumenical Patriarch has given a lead); perhaps a new attempt to develop a political and social system that gives more weight to the common interest than to politically privileged sectional or individual interests. Just as likely, as new ages replace the old, there will be business we do not yet dream of. Following the advances of the last century in the theory and history of nationalism, Greek and foreign scholars have made substantial contributions to filling out, refining, and where necessary challenging acquired knowledge about the formation and development of the Greek nation state. Nevertheless, a book like this is bound to be fragmentary. Is there perhaps, somewhere, a historian of ideas and of society, culture, and politics who could create a comprehensive account of

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the development of the Greek nation state: a modern Paparrigopoulos or Finlay, Greek or foreign, who would know everything, fulfil Kitromilides’s prescription of balancing theory with respect for and engagement with the sources, and be open to the insights available from new sources and new forms of exploration? Books such as The Making of Modern Greece will be meat and drink to such a paragon. Two recent approaches which come to mind are the large-scale venture of Koliopoulos and Veremis (2006, in its more comprehensive Greek edition), and the shorter but still wide-ranging history of Thomas Gallant (2001). They will not be the last word.

References Beaton, R. (2008), ‘Stories in the stones’ [review of Hamilakis 2007], Times Literary Supplement 5470 (31 January): 13. Gallant, T.W. (2001), Modern Greece, London: Arnold. Hamilakis, Y. (2007), The Nation and its ruins: antiquity, archaeology, and national imagination in Greece, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Veremis, T. and Koliopoulos, G. (2006), Ελλάς, η σύγχρονη συνέχεια: από το 1821 μέχρι σήμερα, Athens: Kastaniotis. Woodhouse, C.M. (1952), The Greek War of Independence: its historical setting, London: Hutchinson.

Index

Abel, Otto, 60 Adorno, Theodor, 201, 203, 204, 207, 260 Agathangelos, Vision of, 84, 98 Ainian, Dimitrios, 220 Albania, Albanians, 139, 140 Alexander I, Tsar of Russia, 88–9 Alexander the Great, 58, 68 Alexandria, 195 Alexiou, Margaret, 189n. Ambelas, Timoleon, 227 America, 9, 22, 23, 25, 39, 98, 100–1, 189, 192, 196, 213 Amsterdam, 193 ancient Greece, Greek, see Greece, Greek Anderson, Benedict, 13–14, 25, 27, 28n., 29, 44, 95, 177, 260 Andreadis, Simeon, 226n Angelopoulos, Theo, 194 Apostolidis, Misail, 99 Arabic (language), 13, 178, 179 archaeology, 22, 260 Argos, 102, 117 Argostoli, 153, 167 Argyriou, Asterios, 89, 90n. Arnold, Thomas, 67n. Assembly, Ionian, see Ionian Islands, Legislative Assembly Athens, ancient, 67, 68; Greek books printed in, 225–38 passim; modern capital city, 12, 137, 195, 214, 217, 220, 222, 232, 234, 241, 250, 251, 252; Parliament of the Hellenes in, 171; University of, 127–30, 132, 133, 184 Athos, Holy Mountain of, 254 Auerbach, Berthold, 213n. Austria, 35, 36, 87 autobiography, 109–35 passim, 193, 239–48 Autocephalous Church of Greece, 97–104 passim, 130, 150–9 passim

autochthons (‘inside’ Greeks), 13, 109–35 passim, 192, 195 Avlonitis, Spyros, 230 Balkan Wars (1912–1913), 142, 182 Balkans (see also specific nationalities), 13, 67, 71, 81, 131, 137–47, 260; medieval empires of, 28; nationalism in, 25, 133, 181n. Battenberg, Alexander, Prince of Bulgaria, 137–8 Bavaria, Kingdom of, 4, 35, 99, (111), (112) Belgium, 1, 2, 10, 33 Belgrade, 138 Benjamin, Walter, 204 Berlin, Congress and Treaty of (1878), 1, 73, 247 Bhabha, Homi, 53, 97, 260 Bible, 85, 89, 206, 251 Bismarck, Otto von, 253 Blackie, John Stuart, 74 Bloch, Ernst, 204n., 206 Böcklin, Arnold, 40n. Boeckh, August, 38 Bosnia, 144 Bouchard, Jacques, 118n. Brailsford, Noel, 74 Breuilly, John, 8 Britain, (193), (195); attitudes to Greece in nineteenth-century, 12, 65–77; current scholarship in, 22; Protectorate of, in Ionian Islands, see Ionian Islands Bucharest, 81 Bulgaria, Bulgarians, 1, 74n., 137–47 passim, 181n., 237 Bulgarian schism, 13, 102, 133 Burleigh, Michael, 9, 13, 26n., 257 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 34, 88, 231n. 263

264

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Byzantium, Byzantine empire, 48, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61, 69, 70, 83, 84, 186, 250, 254, 255, 256, 259 Calcutta, 193, 195 Canada, 22 Capodistrias, see Kapodistrias Catholicism, Catholics see Roman Catholicism Cavafy, C.P., 254, 255 Cephalonia (Kefallinia), 152, 153, 163, 164, 165, (167), 169, 170, 171, 172 Cerigo, see Kythera Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 40 Charles I (King of Romania), 142–3 Charles X (King of France), 3 Chateaubriand, François-René, 211n., 213, 230 Chatzichristos Voulgaris, General, 138, 145 Chatzidakis, Georgios, 184, 192n. Chatzipantazis, Theodoros, 234 Chekhov, Anton, 211n. Chios, 192, 196, 226, 228, 243–7 passim Chiotis, Panagiotis, 163, 164, 166 Christodoulos, Archbishop of Athens and All Greece, 180n. Christomanos, Konstantinos, 255 Chryssanthopoulos, Fotakos (Fotios), 86– 7, 109, 110, 113–15, 116, 117, 120 Church (of Greece), see Autocephalous Church of Greece; Orthodoxy Church, Richard, General, 118 Clarke, J.F., 25 classical Greece, see Greece (ancient civilization of) Clogg, Richard, 2n., 99 colonial experience, 10–11, 13, 149–74 passim Constantinople, 180, 192n.; Byzantine capital, 55, 59; Ecumenical Patriarchate in, 96, 99, 100, 102; Fall of (1453), 60, 84, 85, 102, 132, 155, 191; Greek books printed in, 225–38 passim; national claims to, 34, 85, 138, 191, 255; Ottoman capital (Istanbul), 87, 212, 241, 254

Cooper, James Fenimore, 213 Corfu, 104, 151, 164, 165, 166n., 169, 170, 171, 172 Crete, 34, 85n., 133, 142 Crimean war (1854–1856), 102, 129, 165, 205 Curtius, Ernst, 37 Cyprus, 180 Dakin, Douglas, 11 Dante Alighieri, 194, 195 Danubian principalities, 81, 87, (87), 140 Dapontes, Kaisarios, 84, 85 Daskalogiannis (revolt of, Crete), 85n. Delacroix, Eugène, 246 Deliyannis, Theodoros, 143 Delmouzos, Alexandros, 181, 182 Delta, Penelope, 137, 190–6 passim demoticism, 181, 182, 185, 195; see also language question Denmark, 45 Deussen, Paul, 40 Diaspora (Greek, in modern times), 13, 189–98, 234, 239–48 passim Dickens, Charles, 211n. diglossia, 179, 186, 189, 196 Dimaras, K.Th., 53, 96, 97, 111, 260 Ditsa, Marianna, 246 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 249 Dragoumis, Nikolaos, 118, 123–33 passim, 143, 226n. Droysen, Johann Gustav, 12, 48, 60, 61 Dumas, Alexandre, 231, 233, 235 Eastern Crisis (1876–1878), 141 Eastern Question, 73, 129, 130, 138 Eastern Roman empire, 69, 70, 84, 85 Eastern Rumelia, 1, 137, 138 Educational Assocation, 185 Egypt (modern), 179, 195 Elgin, Thomas Bruce, Lord, 213 Emerson, James, 55–6, 57, 58 Engels, Friedrich, 35 England, 100; see also Britain Enlightenment, 9, 26, 28, 35, 37, 82, 86, 96, 100, 123, 125, 138, 219, 251, 259 Ermoupolis (Syros), 225–38 passim, 242



index

Etruscans, 47 Exarchate, Bulgarian, see Bulgarian schism Fallmerayer, Jacob Philipp, 4, 5, 40, 54, 130 Farmakidis, Theoklitos, 99, 102 Ferdinand (King of Bulgaria), 143 Ferguson, C.A., 189n. Ferraios, Rigas, see Rigas Velestinlis Finlay, George, 12, 55, 56, 57–9, 69, 70, 71, 246, 262 Fishman, Joshua, 178 Foscolo, Ugo, 211n., 213 Fotakos, see Chryssanthopoulos, Fotakos Fotinos, Dionysios, 229 Foucault, Michel, 201n., 260 France, 3, 9, 53, 66, 154, 157, 192; see also Paris Frangoudis, Epameinondas, 219n., 220n. Franks, medieval, 60, 186, 189; nineteenth-century Catholics, 102 Freeman, E.A., 12, 70–1 French (language), 195, 196 Friendly Society, see Philiki Etaireia Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis, 246 Gallant, T.W., 262 Garašanin, Ilija, 132 Gavriilidis, Vlasis, 143 Gellner, Ernest, 8, 27, 260 Gennadios, Interpretation of (oracles), 84 Gennadius, John (Ambassador to London), 103, 243–4 George I (King of the Hellenes), 126, 137, 142, 143, 144 Germany, 1, 22, 46, 72; nationalism in, 12, 33–42, 44; poetic and intellectual tradition of, 14, 45, 54, 60, 204–9 passim Gervinus, Georg Gottfried, 246 Gewehr, W.M., 25 Giannoulopoulos, Giannis, 110 Gibbon, Edward, 54, 58, 59 Gladstone, William Ewart (mission to the Ionian Islands, 1858), 165, 170 Glarakis, Georgios, 128

265

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 34, 37, 38, 211n., 213, (216), (231) Gordon, Thomas, 87n., 246 Gounaris, Basil (Vasilis), 7 Gourgouris, Stathis, 260 Great Idea (Greek irredentism), 10, 109, 138, 140, 141, 145, 191, 255, 256, 261 Greece (ancient civilization of), 21, 22, 26, 33, 43, 56, 65, 81, 96, 112, 118, 119, 186, 213 Greek language, ancient, 182, 185, 186, 193, 194, 213; see also Language Question Greekness, 34, 70, 103, 118, 177, 213, 250 Grimm, Jacob, 38 Gritsopoulos, Tasos, 115n. Grote, George, 12, 66, 67–71 Güthenke, Constanze, 4n. Hamilakis, Yannis, 7, 260 Haugen, Einar, 181 Hebrew (language), 13, 178–9, 183 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 37, 38, (44), (56), 181n., 204 Heisenberg, August, 39n. Heliodorus of Emesa, 190, 191, 193, 231 Hellenic Nomarchy (anon.), 86 Heptanese, see Ionian Islands Heptanesian (school of literature), 202–9 passim Herbst, Wilhelm, 39 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 11, 44, 45, 182 Hermoupolis, see Ermoupolis Herzfeld, Michael, 7 heterochthons (‘outside’ Greeks), 107–35 passim, 140n., 193 Hilarion of Mount Sinai, 99 historicism, 44, 54, 56, 60 Hitchins, Keith, 25 Hobsbawm, Eric, 8, 25, 260 Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, see Charles I of Romania Hölderlin, Friedrich, 36 n., 205, 207 Holland, Robert, 7 Hugo, Victor, 232n.

266

index

Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 37, 38 Hursit Pasha, 138 Iliou, Philippos, 225n. India, 40, 193, 195 ‘inside Greeks’, see autochthons Ionian Islands, British Protectorate of (1815–1864), 13, 112, 117, 119, 149–74, 260; language in, 180, 182; Legislative Assembly (Parliament) of, 133, 153, 157, 164, 166, 168; part of Greek kingdom, 103, 234; Septinsular Republic (1800–1807), 155, 167; see also Heptanesian (school of literature); individual islands Ireland, 45 irredentism, see Great Idea Israel, 177, 178–9, 180, 249 Istanbul, see Constantinople Italian (language), 184, 194, 195 Italy, 1, 33, 117, 154, 189, 194; nationalism in, 12; 43–9, 260 Ithaca, 88 Jameson, Fredric, 203, 206n. Jassy, 87 Jelavich, Charles and Barbara, 25 Jews, 37, 38, 103, 104, 143, 164, 166n., 178–9, 249; see also Israel; Hebrew (language) Joseph, John, 177 Just, Roger, 7 Kakridis, I.Th., 190 Kalligas, Pavlos, 127, 133, 211, 220, (221), 241, (247n.) Kalvos, Andreas, 208–9 Kanaris, Konstantinos, 246 Kant, Immanuel, 38 Kapodistrias, Ioannis (Governor of Greece), 113, 117, 212 Karageorgis of Serbia, see Petrovič Karaiskakis, Georgios, 116 Karasoutsas, Ioannis, 227 Karavelov, Petko, 144 Karkavitsas, Andreas, 221, 242

Kasomoulis, Nikolaos, 86, 109, 110, 116–17, 120 Katartzis, Dimitrios, 5n. Kechagioglou, Giorgos, 244n. Kedourie, Elie, 8, 9, 25, 26, 28, 260 Kefallinia, see Cephalonia Keret, Etgar, 178 King, Jonas (American missionary), 100 Kitromilides, Paschalis, 2, 5n., 6, 7, 12, 88, 260, 262 klefts, 56, 143, 247 Kodrikas, Panagiotis, 192n. Kohn, Hans, 25 Kolettis, Ioannis, 111, 116, 118, 125–8 passim, 138, 140 Koliopoulos, John (Yannis), 6, 262 Kolokotronis, Theodoros, 111, 113–15, 117, 120 Komninos-Ypsilantis, Athanasios, 85 Korais (Koraes, Coray), Adamantios, 9, 25, 34, 61, 98, 127, 182–3, 184, 190–5 passim, 213, 231, 259 Koran, 179 Koumanoudis, Stefanos, 126 Kozani, 116 Kyrillos Lavriotis (monk and author), 89–90 Kythera (Cerigo), 152, 169 La Vopa, Anthony, 35, 39 Language Question in Greece, 10, 13, 119, 131, 139, 140, 175–98 Latris, Ikessios, 227 Lawrence, Paul, 8, 10–11 Lederer, Ivo, 25 Lefkada (Santa Maura), 103, 152n., 169 Leo the Wise, Oracles of, 84 Leontis, Artemis, 260 Lesage, Alain-René, 211n. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 37 Lévi Alvarès, David, 54 Liakos, Antonis, 6 Liberal Party (Ionian Islands), 151, 152, 153, 172 Ligaridis, Paisios (metropolitan of Gaza), 85 Lomvardos, Konstantinos, 158



index

London (Greek community of), 241–7 passim Ludwig I (King of Bavaria), 35 Lykoudis, Emmanuel, 141 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 66 Macedonia, Macedonians, ancient kingdom of, 48, 53, 54, 58, 59, 61, 68, 182; Former Yugoslav Republic of, 6; region in the nineteenth century, 34, 116, 138, 144, 181n. Mahaffy, J.H., 74n. Makrakis, Apostolos, 102–3 Makriyannis, Ioannis (Yannis), General, 88–90, 109, 110–13, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120 Mani, Maniats, 87, 102, 114 Manousis, Theodoros, 128 Marin, Louis, 205n. Markides, Diana, 7 Marseille, 226 Marx, Karl, 35, 181n., (203), (206n.) Matalas, Paraskevas, 101 Maupassant, Guy de, 211n. Maurer, Georg Ludwig von, 55, 99 Mavrokordatos, Alexandros, 111, 114, 116, 118, 127, 132 Mavromichalis, Petros (Petrobey), 87 Mavrovouniotis, Vassos, 138 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 72, 204 Megali Idea, see Great Idea Meinecke, Friedrich, 24 Metaxas, Konstantinos, 111 Methodios, see Pseudo-Methodios Metternich, Klemens von, 3, 35 Milies (Pelion), 87 Military Life in Greece (published anon.), 220, 247n. missionaries (in Greece), 98–101 Missolonghi, 116, 247 Mistriotis, Georgios, 181, 182 Mitford, William, 66 Mitsakis, Michael, 240, 241, 242 Moisodax, Iosipos, 97, 213 Moldavia, Moldavians, see Romania; Danubian principalities

267

Momferratos, Iosif, 153–8 passim Mommsen, Theodor, 46–8 Montenegro, Montenegrins, 1, 8, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144 Moschakis, Ignatios, 252 Nafplion, 215, 216, 219, 241 Napier, Charles, 169–70 Napist party, 126, 128 Napoleon, 88–9, 118 National Bank of Greece, 129, 130, 132–3, 171 Newman, John Henry, 253 Newton, Charles, 73–4 Nicholas I (Tsar of Russia), 3 Nicholas, Prince of Montenegro, 143 Nikitaras (Nikitas Stamatelopoulos), 117 Nikolaidis, Myron, 227 Nipperdey, Thomas, 35 Norway, 45, 180 Norwegian (language), 13, 180, 181 O’Shaughnessy, Arthur William Edgar, 259, 260 Obrenovič, Alexander, 144 Odessa, 81, 195 Oikonomos, Konstantinos, 102, 228 Olympic Games, ancient, 68; modern (Athens 1896), 5, 11, 12, 241, 249–57 passim, 260, 261 Olympus, Mount, 116 Ong, Walter, 246 Orthodoxy, 14, 37, 48, 56, 61, 70, 72, 79– 106 passim, 131, 132, 140, 141, 179, 249–57, 259; see also Autocephalous Church of Greece; religion Otto (King of Greece, 1833–1862), 1, 35, 99, 113, 117, 126n., 132, 133, 138, 157, 212, 213, 214, 217, 219 Ottoman empire (in nineteenth century, to 1923), 67, 73, 97, 103, 109, 144, 178, 184, 235, 239, 240, 254, 256, 261 Ottoman period (of rule in southeast Europe), 35, 56, 60, 81–93 passim, 114, 132, 182, 186, 189, 254 ‘outside Greeks’, see heterochthons

268

index

Palaiologos, Grigorios, 211n., 217, 219n., 220, 221, 233 Palamas, Kostis, 201, 202, 203, 208–9, 221, 251, 256–7 Pallis, Alexander, 190 Palmerston, Henry J.T., 161 Papadiamantis, Alexandros, 14, 213, 221, 240, 241, 242, 249–57 Papamichalopoulos, Konstantinos, 179–80 Paparrigopoulos, Dimitrios, 231 Paparrigopoulos, Konstantinos, 5, 6, 12, 53–63, 123–33 passim, 261, 262 Paparrigopoulos, Petros, 123–33 passim Paparrigopoulos, Stephanos, 129 Papazoglou, Neoklis, 230 Papoulakos, Christophoros, 102 Paris, 182, 184, 190, 193, 195, 214, 241 Patriarchate, Ecumenical, see Constantinople, Ecumenical Patriarchate Peckham, Robert Shannan, 250, 254n. Pelion, Mount, 87 Peloponnese, 81, 87, 102, 113–15, 180 Persian (language), 178 Petkov, Dimitar, 144 Petrobey, see Mavromichalis Petrococchino, Dimitri, 192, 196 Petrovič, ‘Black George’ (Karageorgis), 138, 143 Phanariots, 56, 81, 112, 114, 123–33 passim, 232 Philemon, Ioannis, 87 Philhellenes, 1, 33–42, 65–77, 193, 259 Philiki Etaireia (Friendly Society), 81, 82–3, 86, 87, 117, 259 Philip II (King of Macedonia), 68, 182 Philippidis, Daniel, 97 Philorthodox Society (1839), 102, 125, 128 Pitzipios, Iakovos, 220 Pnevmatikas, Anastasios, 226 Pofantis, Christoforos, 166 Poland, Poles, 33, 38 Polemi, Popi, 225n. Politis, Alexis, 6 Politis, N.G., 85n. Polylas, Iakovos, 201–9 passim

Pouqueville, François, 55 Protestantism, Protestants, 13, 34, 37, 96, 98–101, 142 Prussia, 35, 36, 47, 48 Pseudo-Methodios, Revelation of, 83–4 Psycharis (Jean Psichari), 184, 190–6 passim, 241, 242 Pylarinos, Frangiskos, 128, 214 Pylos (Messenia), 102 Queux de Saint-Hilaire, Marquis de, 246 Radical Party (Ionian Islands) (Rizospastai), 151–60, 164, 166, 172 Rafopoulos, Xenophon, 231n., 232 Rallis, Georgios, 128, 132 Rangavis, Alexandros Rizos, 123–33 passim, 211n., 212n., 214n., 241 Ranke, Leopold von, 44 religion, 12–13, 14, 37, 79–106, 115, 140, 177, 206, 249–58, 259; see also Autocephalous Church of Greece; Orthodoxy; Protestantism; Roman Catholicism Renan, Ernest, 14–15, 191, 250, 261 Renieris, Markos, 123–33 passim Rigas Velestinlis (Ferraios), 11, 138, 139 Rizos Rangavis, see Rangavis Rizospastai (Radicals, in Ionian Islands), see Radical Party Robert, Cyprien 72, 73 Rocker, Rudolf, 29 Rodokanakis, Georgios, 220n. Roidis, Emmanuel, 190, 211, 220, 221, 241, (247n.), 250, 251, 253 Roman Catholicism, Catholics, 37, 56, 72, 98, 99, 102, 119, 126n., 142 Romania, Romanians, 1, 8, 139, (140), 141, 142, 143, 144, 144; see also Danubian principalities Rome, ancient civilization of, 43–9, 54, 58, 60, 65, 70, 73, 144, 157, 186, 189; modern capital city, 47; see also Eastern Roman empire Ross, Ludwig, 33 Rossi, Pellegrino, 118n. Roumeli, 110, 117



index

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5n., 11, 213, 220 Royer, Alphonse, 230 Russia, Russians, 3, 83; attitudes towards, 67, 72, 84, (88–9), 97, 126, 130, 141; influence of, 251, 254; policy of, 100, 102, 126, 142 Russo-Turkish (Ottoman) war, of 1768– 1774, 84–5; of 1877–1878, 246, 247 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 214–16 Saltelis, N., 229n., 230, 232 Sand, George, 231 Santa Maura, see Lefkada Saripolos, Nikolaos, 126, 133 Saxe-Coburg, see Ferdinand (King of Bulgaria) Saxony, 36 Schiller, Friedrich, 3, 38 Schinas, Konstantinos, 133 Schinkel, Karl, 38 Schlegel, Friedrich, 204, 205 Scotland, 45, 74 Scott, Walter, 211n., 213, (231) Seaton, John Colborne (High Commissioner, Ionian Islands), 169 Seferis, George, 110 Septinsular Republic, see Ionian Islands, Septinsular Republic Serbia, Serbs, 1, 8, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144 Serouios, Georgios, 226 Seton-Watson, R.W., 25 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 3, 4 Skenderbey (Scanderbeg), 139 Skendi, Stavro, 25 Skiathos, 249 Skopetea, Elli, 4n., 6, 110, 145, 260 Skoufas, Nikolaos, 82–3 Skylitsis, I.I., 229n., 231, 232, 233n. Slavs, 70–3, 74, 140, 141, 143; see also individual nationalities Smith, Anthony D., 9, 10, 13, 82, 95, 96, 260 Smyrna, 193, 212, 225–38 passim Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, 73–4, 243 Solomonidis, Christos, 229n.

269

Solomonidis, Socrates, 231 Solomos, Dionysios, 14, 118, 182, 190–6 passim, 201–11, 249 Soutsos, Alexandros, 123–33 passim, 214, 219n. Soutsos, Ioannis, 127n., 129n., 130, 132 Soutsos, Panagiotis, 123–33 passim, 211– 24, 229, 260n. Sparta (ancient), 67–8 Spectateur d’Orient, 129, 132, 251 Stavrianos, L.S., 25 Stavros, Georgios, 133 Stemanis, Nikolaos, 226 Stokes, Gale, 25 Storace, Patricia, 195n. Storks, Henry (High Commissioner, Ionian Islands), 171 Stornaris, Nikolaos, 116 Sue, Eugène, 231 Sugar, Peter, 25 Swiss Confederation, 1, 2 Syngros, Andreas, 241n., 245n. Syros, 212, 226, 241, 247; see also Ermoupolis Tacitus, 10, (46) Tantalidis, Ilias, 231n., 232 Tertsetis (Terzetti), Georgios, 109, 117– 19, 120 Theotokis, Georgios, 144 Theotokis, Konstantinos, 221 Thierry, Augustin, 53 Thiersch, Friedrich, 35, 39n. Thirlwall, Connop, 67, 68 Thoreau, David Henry, 252 n. Tonnet, Henri, 220n. Toynbee, A.J., 4n., 24–5 Triantafyllidis, Manolis, 185, 190 Trieste, 226 Trikoupis, Charilaos, 138, 251 Trikoupis, Spyridon, 113n., 115 Tripolitsa, 116 Tsakaloff, Athanasios, 82–3 Tsoukalas, Konstantinos, 115n. Turkey (pre-1923), see Ottoman empire Turkey (Republic of, post-1923), 30, 177, 178, 180

270

index

Turkish language, 140, 178; studies (modern), 22, 30 Turks, 111, 112, 116 Tziovas, Dimitris, 7 USA, see America Valaoritis, Aristotelis, 208–9 Valetas, Georgios, 118 Vamvas, Neofytos, 226 Vasileiadis, Spyridon, 231–2 Vasiliou, Georgios, 123–33 passim Vayenas, Nasos, 214 Veloudis, Giorgos, 201, 202n., 204, 205n., 214n. Venetians, 57, 104, 161 Venizelos, Eleftherios, 182 Veremis, Thanos, 6, 262 Vernardakis, Dimitrios, 143 Vico, Giambattista, 118n. Vienna, 139, 144 Vikelas, Dimitrios, 14, 220, (221), 227, 239–48 Villemain, Abel, 55 Vizyinos, G.M., 211n., 240, 242 Vlachoyannis, Yannis, 110, 115n., 117 Vlasto, Peter, 177n. Voulgaris, Evgenios, 97 Voulgaris, Chatzichristos, see Chatzichristos

Wagner, Wilhelm, 246n. Wallachia, Wallachians, see Romania; Danubian principalities Walsh, Robert, 87 Wellington, Duke of (Arthur Wellesley), 3, (256) West, Rebecca, 25 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 34, 35, 37 Winterer, Caroline, 39 Wolff, Robert Lee, 25 Woodhouse, C.M., 2n., 259 Wordsworth, Christopher, 252 n. Wright, Sue, 177 Xanthos, Emmanuel, 82–3, 86n. Xydis, Stephen, 30, 260 Yahuda, Eliezer ben, 178 Yperidis, G.K., 231, 232n. Ypsilantis, Alexandros, 81, 86, 87, 113n., 115, 117 Zachariadis, Nikos, 5n. Zakynthos (Zante), 103, 117, 164, 165, 166n., 167, 169, 172, 194 Zambelios, Spyridon, 5, 57–8, 59, 60, 61, 123–33 passim Zervos Iakovatos, Ilias, 152–8 passim, 163 Zinkeisen, Johann Wilhelm, 55–7, 58 Zionism, 28