Greek nation builders had the monumental task of creating and concretizing a Greek nation and a Greek identity before, during, and after the War of Independence against Ottoman rule in the 1820s. These nation builders had to wrestle with three broad groups of conceptions of Greekness when forming this identity: conceptions held by historical occupants of Greece such as the Romans [BL1] and the Byzantines[BL2] , conceptions held by Western powers, and most importantly, conceptions held by 19th century Greeks themselves. This paper will argue that those three inextricably linked ideas of Greekness created massive barriers to the fluid construction of the modern Greek nation.
It is a truism about 19th century nation-building that, when creating a national identity, nation builders firstly and always looked to the past and past identities as a basis for that new identity. The Greeks were no exception; and it would be easy to assume that, since the Greeks had been around since ancient times, the evolution of Greek identity would be easy to trace. But this is not the case and, in fact, in many instances the empires who dominated Greece were the owners and manipulators of Greek identity. The first group to establish hegemony over Greece and Greek identity after the Hellenistic period was the Roman Empire. Historian Maud[BL3] Gleason says, “In [the Roman period], Greek and Roman identities interpenetrated but were not fused… Romans played at being Greek: wealthy Romans had long affected a taste for Greek amenities in their private lives, while Roman emperors, particularly Hadrian, financed extensive monumental building in Greece and actively supported its cultural institutions.” (Gleason, 126) The Romans quickly adopted the lifestyles and cultures which they perceived as Greek: philosophy, literature, art, and architecture. Consequently, these were the aspects of Greekness which they actively maintained during their occupation of Greece. But furthermore, the Romans actually created their own Greece, building their own monuments which they claimed were Greek. But is this Greekness built by the Romans real Greekness? Or is this just a case of empowered colonists fetishizing their own simplistic perceptions of the culture of the disempowered, colonized people? Are the two mutually exclusive? This is one of the conflicts which nation builders in the 19th century had to confront. Greece, or at least aspects of Greekness, flourished under the Romans, and this could provide a good model for the new nation. Or, perhaps, Greece under the Romans was entirely artificial, and true Greek identity was lost under the Roman conquerors.
Even more obviously problematic in the long history of Greekness was the Byzantine occupation of Greece and the surrounding areas. Some scholars argue that the Byzantine empire maintained Greekness effectively “in the continued use of Greek language, in the transmission of ancient literature by Byzantine scribes, and in the high esteem in which it was held by Byzantine savants,” (Rapp, 133) while others argue that beyond these superficial connections, there was little Greekness in Byzantium. But the most glaring weakness of the Byzantine Greek identity was that it was, in a sense, pejorative. Anthony Kaldellis says, “From a Byzantine point of view [ancient philosophers Plato, Aristotle, and Proklos] were Greek in at least two senses: they were pagan or at any rate not Christian, and they belonged to the ancient nation of the Greeks. They were not, in either case, ‘ours’… in short, the Greeks are as foreign as the Egyptians.” (Kaldellis, 196) To the Byzantines, Greeks were foreigners: they were an ‘other.’ But even worse, to the highly Orthodox Christian Byzantines, Greekness meant paganness; this was, in the eyes of the Byzantines, a prohibitive flaw. It would have been hard enough for Greek nation builders in the nineteenth century to base an identity off of these societally outcast pagans. But nineteenth century Greeks had an additional problem to confront: modern Greeks were Orthodox Christians just like their occupiers a millennium previously. How could these two disparate Greek identities be reconciled? How could modern Greeks base their identity on something so fundamentally outdated? Nation builders continuously confronted this problem.
Western Europeans saved Greece from defeat at the hands of the Ottomans during the War of Independence in the 1820s. This much is clear. Without the intervention of the combined English, French, and Russian navy and military, the Greeks almost surely would have lost to their Turkish overlords and resumed subjugation. But Western intervention did not stop at the military, and it would not be absurd to say that these same Westerners created the new Greece. At the very least, they played a very heavy hand in that creation. Philhellenes who came to the rescue of Greece during the rebellion and who were primarily responsible for the Greeks’ success highly fetishized ancient Hellenism. According to Stathis Kalyvas, “at the dawn of the nineteenth century, many educated Europeans saw Greece not as the obscure, impoverished, and backward province of the Ottoman Empire it was, but as the birthplace of the most important ancient civilization.” (Kalyvas, 30) Westerners purely blamed Ottomans for any problems the Greeks were suffering. While the Ottomans were heavily responsible for Greek problems, this meant that Westerners assumed that Greece would automatically achieve its prior greatness once it was liberated. Consequentially, it became a trend to ignore the actual problems from which Greece suffered: problems of lack of unity, economic plight, corruption, religious feuds, et cetera, many of which will be discussed later in this paper. The fetishistic ignorance of the Western “saviors” had some very concrete effects. For example, when the Great Powers established the Bavarian prince Otto as first king of Greece in the 1830s, Otto had very little idea of what it meant to be Greek in the modern sense. He moved the capital from the prospering city of Nafplion to the ancient “city” of Athens, at the time just a town with little prosperity, simply because of Athens’ prestige as an ancient capital of Greek thought and culture. (Bastea, 9) This move, to many Greek nation builders, was counterproductive: it ignored possibilities of true economic prosperity in favor of Romantic ideals of the past. And the fetishism of the powerful Westerns remained a constant obstacle.
But Otto himself was, whether we as historians like it or not, a nation-builder himself, by nature of his power as first king of Greece. And no nation builders, even those of Greek origin, came from the same background and experienced the same Greece. Many nation builders went abroad and studied under Western academic institutions. This may have been the source of their success—studying in the West showed them the power of revolution and populism—but it was also the source of a great and perhaps unsolvable question. How could Western ideals be applied effectively to Greek realities? This problem came up quite often in the form of language, for Greek nationalists could not agree on what language was the true Greek. And language, one could argue (beyond the scope of this paper), is the glue that holds nations together. For nationalist Korais, the ideal language was Katharevousa, a midway between demotic contemporary Greek and ancient Greek. (Brewer, 222) For Voulgaris, it was ancient Greek. (Brewer, 223) For others, it was purely demotic Greek, because that was the language of the masses. There was no easy answer, because there was no single conception of Greekness, and these thinkers still grappled with what it meant to be Greek. Were the ancients Greek? Were the 19th century masses Greek? Who was more Greek than whom?
But language was not the only barrier to an easy formation of Greek identity. Nearly all of the authors we have read would agree that the Greek Revolution was heavily inspired by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Nearly all would also agree that Orthodox Christianity had become a defining characteristic of Greek identity. According to Dimitris Livanios, “the prominent role of Orthodoxy in the collective identity of Greek speakers of the East was cemented under Ottoman rule.” (Livanios, 246) The Ottomans practiced societal divisions by religion, and while these divisions were not absolute, they manifested themselves in quite obvious ways: namely, Orthodox Christians in Greece were forced to pay extra taxes and could not serve in the military, and for the most part, could also not reach any high positions in Ottoman administrative hierarchy. (Gallant, 29) This profound connection between Greekness and Orthodoxy, then, became problematic when the Greek Revolution took up the cry of Enlightenment, a social and philosophical movement that was itself fundamentally anti-religious. Enlightenment thinkers, according to David Brewer, were particularly critical of “the corruption of the Orthodox Church, an institution largely revered by Greeks.” (Brewer, 224) A crisis of identity consequently occurred. Greek nation builders threw off the chains of oppression and built their nation in the name of a movement founded on the detestation of the religion which was to be a founding principle of that same nation: this is a paradox from which there was no easy escape.
Finally, Greek nation builders faced the enormous problem of determining which people could be Greek and which could not. This issue is clearly closely related to all the problems discussed above, but it also manifested itself in unique ways. Some Greeks, firstly, were not Orthodox Christian but Muslim. Because Muslims in the Ottoman empire were given so many privileges compared to their non-Muslim counterparts, according to Gallant, “members of the Christian aristocracy, for example, converted [to Islam] and converted and kept their lands and titles.” (Gallant, 29) These people lived in Greece, but they weren’t Orthodox. They were Greek, and they weren’t. Were they Greek enough to take part in the new Greece, or were they Ottoman enough to stay part of the Ottoman Empire, or somewhere in between? There exists no mathematical equation for determining Greekness: whether or not these Muslim converts were Greek was purely subjective. The task of determining Greekness was colossal. But identity didn’t stop at religion. Greek revolutionary Rigas Feraios, for example, wanted a Greek nation that would welcome all oppressed members of the Ottoman Empire and even Ottomans themselves. (Gallant, 44) This turned out to be an impossible task, and from the start was contrary to the founding tenets of 19th century nationalism (namely, that ethnic and territorial boundaries should be coterminous). Though Rigas’s dream was not achieved, it still left other nationalists with the unsolvable question as to whom should be allowed into the new Greek state. There were people in Greece with non-Greek names, with non-Greek ancestry, with non-Greek philosophy, and with non-Greek religion. But they lived in Greece. Were they Greek, or not?
Clemens von Metternich asked, of the formation of the Greek nation, “What do we mean by the Greeks? Do we mean a people, a country, or a religion? If either of the first two, where are the dynastic and geographical boundaries? If the third, then upwards of fifty million men are Greeks.” (Livanios, 237)
On the day of writing this paper, nearly 200 years after the Greek War of Independence, this question has still not been answered. Neither has the question, “what do we mean by Americans?” in America, or “what do we mean by Chinese?” in China. Peoples, countries, religions, geographies, dynasties, and languages do not easily cooperate, and moreover do not easily share boundaries. By the time of the Greek War of Independence, Greek identity had been in development for upward of 2000 years. Orthodox, pagan, or Muslim; Byzantine, Roman, or Hellene; Attic, Katharevousa, or demotic speaking; all Greeks were and are different. So how do you make a nation out of them? These are the problems nation builders confronted.
Aidan Lilienfeld, for “Who Were the Greeks?” at the University of Chicago, November 2016
Haus Lilienfeld 