The Greek War of Independence, which was perhaps the first movement in this region produced by a conscious application of the Western national idea, [footnote: The Serbs of course revolted earlier, but Serbian independence, though the influence of Western ideas was no doubt at work from the beginning, came about more by a gradual re-grouping of certain indigenous forces in the Ottoman Empire. The movement was not so revolutionary, nor the Western idea so dominant, as in the Greek case.] occasioned massacres of Turks throughout the Morea and of Greeks at Aivali and in Khios.
One forgets that the Serbs were the first in Europe to be emancipated from Turkey. The Free Principality of Serbia lasted from 1817 to ’82, when Serbia became a kingdom. Serbia was subsumed into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918 (the others had lived under the Hapsburgs), which became the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929.
The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, A Study in the Contact of Civilizations, Constable, 1922
February 12 2012 at 9:11 pm
Such nationalistic movements are largely grounded in myth.
The majority of Greeks in the Peloponnese, but also in mainland Greece, are Christian Albanians and Christian Turks. The Greek language survived through the Church. Greece was destroyed by the Goths and the Slavonic invasion finished them off. The material culture of the Peloponnese is Slavonic, the placenames were either Slavonic or Mediterranean lingua franca. The present Greek placenames were reintroduced through Pausanias by the early Kingdom of Greece, practically not a single classical placename survived by the early 19th c.
In Argolis especially all old people as late as the 1980s spoke Albanian, although no one admitted it. Agricultural traditions were inadequate for Greece, showing a Balkanic structure. Only in the Mani agricultural tradition were they adequate for the cultivation of vines and olives. Elsewhere was totally inadequate. Vines were grown in the Islamic tradition, in a shallow pit in the ground like in Egypt and not trained on a pole. Nationalism is the cancer of society.
February 12 2012 at 9:42 pm
Yes. Although it is obviously fantasy to claim that modern Greeks are in any way at all ancient Greeks, it is less impossible to make a similar claim with Egyptians. Just look at some modern Egyptians and you recognise the faces from ancient art.
There are certainly modern Roman faces that look like ancient.
February 13 2012 at 6:58 pm
Here in Tuscany we have solid historical and genetic evidence of substantial immigration from Syria, Armenia and the Crimea (the Tartars) from after the near complete annihilation of all Romans and Etruscans in the region. There are scores of gravestones from the 5th-6th c. in the churches of Florence with Syriac names written in Greek and Aramaic. Yet the people take it personally if you show such evidence and walk out from lectures, or curse you.
Geneticists have taken DNA samples from a place near Siena where an Etruscan settlement has been excavated, showing that the place was burnt down and the site remained deserted. The DNA shows Middle Eastern genes which are described as “Etruscan” by geneticists unaware of the Middle Eastern immigration of the 6th to 15th centuries. The Renaissance in Tuscany started by virtue of a Middle Eastern immigration of Christian merchants, bankers and traders, and also icon painters, as the pigments and the wood of the earliest Florentine Sienese, Pisan etc paintings show. Yet, one cannot say such truths wich hurt the national spirit. It reminds one of Stalin’s purge of Russian archaeologists who studied migrations from the 1930 to the 50s. But still more mind boggling is the French, Italian and also British intellectual archaeologists – unlike the Russians, who went to the Siberian lagers, they obeyed Stalin and enjoyed themselves wasting time in the cafés of Paris. Today the most illustrious French medieval historian, Jacques Le Goff, has buried Roman Ghirshman’s bibliographies sustaining the thesis of France as the cradle of European culture uninfluenced by Persia, Islam, or any other “unpleasant” civilization. I have no respect for such people.
If we want to defeat war and warmongers we must begin to tell some truth as may be obtained from the evidence we have.
February 13 2012 at 10:30 pm
See Ils ne passeront pas! here.