Conclusion

The aim of this chapter has been to explain some of the possible ways in which cultural identities were shaped within empires rather than after them. It is nevertheless worth concluding by underlining a fact alluded to earlier, and which is perhaps the most significant legacy of empire: the mere fact that Greek citizens today identify as ‘Greeks’ (Hellenes) rather than as ‘Romans’ (Romioi).

The relative merits of the Classical Greek and Roman- Byzantine traditions consumed Greek intellectuals and pundits throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries,⁵⁴ but one could argue that the issue was essentially settled back in the eighteenth century, when the European empires had confirmed their ascendancy over the Ottomans. From that time, the Greeks, as with all Ottoman peoples, would be ineluctably drawn and subjected to the symbolic power of Europe, as witnessed by the fact that post-Ottoman peoples adopted so many of the ethnic labels ascribed to them (Greeks, Turks, Syrians, Arabs, Lebanese), along with the well-defined definitions of cultural boundaries that western Europeans preferred to use. The mere fact that Greeks in modern times are known as ‘Greeks’ (Hellenes) is largely a function of their propinquity to Europe as the burgeoning centre of global power, which was obsessed with the Classics, and which in the 1820s wanted to liberate Greeks rather than Romioi/Rum or mere Orthodox Christians. To some northern Europeans, like the poet Shelley, the Greek revolt was seen as a critical juncture in humanity’s history:

The world’s great age begins anew,

The golden years return...

The world is weary of the past,

Oh might it die or rest at last!⁵⁵

This obsession is also related to colonial imperialism. As European colonial power became ever more extensive during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europeans became increasingly convinced of their place in history.

Once the Enlightenment confirmed ‘Greece’ as Europe’s birthplace, it regarded the ‘enslaved’ Greeks of the Ottoman Empire as their living ancestors, and saw the ruins of Greece as worthy of pilgrimage. At this early stage, the result of Greece’s future ‘culture wars’, of whether they were ‘Hellenes’ (Greeks) or Orthodox Christians, had already been decided.

Notes

1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (3rd edn) (London, 2006), p. 195.

2 William Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005), p. 84.

3 Charles Tilly, ‘How Empires End’, in Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen (eds), After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires (Boulder, 1997), p. 3.

4 Ibid., p. 8.

5 On modern Greek historiography and ethnicity, see A. Liakos, Pos stohastikan to Ethnos afti pou ithelan na laxoun to kosmo? (Athens, 2005).

6 Maria Todorova, ‘The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans’, in L. Carl Brown (ed.), The Ottoman Legacy: The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East (New York, 1996), p. 48.

7 Ibid., p. 47.

8 See, for example, Umut Ozkimirli and Spyros Sofos, Tormented by History: Nationalism in Greece and Turkey (London and New York, 2008); Theodora Dragostiniva, Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900-1949 (Ithaca, 2012).

9 Cornelia A. Tsakiridou, ‘Hellenism in C.P. Cavafy’, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, Vol. 21, No. 2 (1995), p. 116

10 Quoted in ibid., p. 116.

11 Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City, Maureen Freely (trans.) (London, 2005), p. 155.

12 Philip Mansel, Constantinople, City of the World's Desire, 1453-1924 (London, 1998).

13 The exception, of course, is Turkey. See L. Carl Brown (ed.), Imperial Legacy: The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East (New York, 1996).

14 Hercules Milas, ‘History Textbooks in Greece and Turkey’, History Workshop Journal, Vol.

31 (1991), pp. 21-33.

15 Antonis Liakos, ‘Hellenism and the Making of Modern Greece’, in Katerina Zacharia (ed.), Hellenisms: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity from Antiquity to Modernity (Aldershot, 2008), p. 215.

16 More detailed discussion is found in Nicholas Doumanis, A History of Greece (Basingstoke, 2010), chaps. 6-7. A useful overview is Dimitris Livanions, ‘The Quest for Hellenism: Religion, Nationalism, and Collective Identities in Greece, 1453-1913’, in Zacharia, Hellenisms, pp. 237-269.

17 Amy Mills, ‘The Place of Locality for Identity in the Nation: Minority Narratives of Cosmopolitan Istanbul’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 40, No. 3 (2008), pp. 383-401.

18 Christine Philliou, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottoman Christians in an Age of Revolution (Berkeley,

2011), pp. xx-xxi.

19 ‘Being Greek’ in Roman times was also deemed to be something that social elites could acquire through a good education. See Greg Wolf, ‘Becoming Roman, Staying Greek’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, Vol. 40 (1994), pp. 116-143.

20 Quoted in Philliou, Biography of an Empire, p. 13.

21 Historians of Byzantium had long been disputing the ‘Greekness’ of the Byzantine Empire, with some claiming instead that it was a multi-ethnic empire and nothing beyond that. The discussion is to a large extent based on essentialised and therefore ahistorical notions of ethnicity. See Paul Magdalino, ‘Hellenism and Nationalism in Byzantium', in Magdalino, Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Byzantium (Aldershot, 1991), pp. 1-29.

22 Amy Mills, Streets of Memory: Landscape, Tolerance, and.National Identity in Istanbul (Athens, GA, 2010), p. 213; Philliou, Biography of an Empire.

23 On the nature of Ottoman governance, see Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2002) and Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, 2008).

24 On the de-Hellenization of Anatolia, see Speros Vryonis Jr., The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamicization from the Eleventh Century through to the Ffteenth (Berkeley, 1971). Cf.

Molly Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Princeton,

2000), which deals with the Ottoman conquest of Crete in the seventeenth century.

25 Barkey, Empire of Difference, p. 134. Although Ottoman rule appeared to vouchsafe the future of the Orthodox Church, the approval of high clergy appointments was subject to extortionate payments. See Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence (Cambridge, 1968).

26 Anthony Bryer, ‘The Pontic Greeks before the Diaspora', Journal of Refugee Studies, Vol. 4, No. 4 (1991), pp. 315-334.

27 Richard Clogg, Anatolica: Studies in the Greek East in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Aldershot, 1996), pp. vi, 82-83.

28 Marios Hatzopoulos, ‘Oracular Prophecy and the Politics of Toppling Ottoman Rule in South East Europe', The Historical Review/La Revue Historique, Vol. 8 (2011), pp. 110-111.

29 Quoted in ibid., p. 108.

30 Eli Skopetea, To ‘protypo vasileio’ kai i megali idea: opseis tou ethnikou provlimatos stin Hellada, 1830-1880 (Athens, 1984).

31 The seminal article on this topic is Traian Stoianovich, ‘The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant', The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 20, No. 2 (June, 1960), pp. 234-313.

32 Molly Greene, ‘Trading Identities: The Sixteenth Century Greek Moment', in Adnan A. Husain and K.E. Fleming (eds), A Faithful Sea: The Religious Cultures of the Mediterranean, 1200-1700 (London, 2007), p. 142.

33 Gelina Harlaftis, ‘Mapping the Greek Maritime Diaspora', in Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, Gelina Harlaftis and Ioanna Pepelasis Minoglou (eds), Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks: Four Centuries of History (Oxford and New York, 2005), pp. 152-154.

34 Paschalis M. Kitromilides, The Enlightenment as Social Criticism: losipos Moisiodax and Greek Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 1992).

35 Quoted in Peter Mackridge, Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 (Oxford, 2009), p.

136.

36 Philliou's more extensive discussion of this cultural blindness is found in ‘The Paradox of Perceptions: Interpreting the Ottoman Past through the National Present', Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 44, No. 5 (2008), pp. 661-675.

37 Christine Philliou, ‘Communities on the Verge: Unraveling the Phanariot Ascendancy in Ottoman Governance', Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 51, No. 1 (2009), p. 170.

38 Nicholas Doumanis, Before the Nation: Muslim-Christian Coexistence and its Destruction in late Ottoman Anatolia (Oxford, 2013).

39 Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (New York, 1987).

40 Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010), chap. 11.

41 Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, p. 171; Philliou, Biography of an Empire, p. 38.

42 Philliou, ‘Communities on the Verge', p. 153.

43 Philliou, Biography of an Empire.

44 M. Sukru Hanioglu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton, 2008), p. 76.

45 Kemal Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (Oxford, 2001)

46 See, for example, Charles Issawi and Dimitri Gondicas (eds), Ottoman Greeks in the Age of Nationalism (Princeton, 1999).

47 Kiraiki Mamoni and Lida Istikopoulou, Somateiaki Organosi tou Ellinismou sti Mikra Asia (1861-1922) (Athens, 2006).

48 Philip Mansel, Levant:. Splendour and Catastrophe in the Mediterranean (London, 2010), p. 190; Sibel Zandi-Sayek, Ottoman Izmir: The Rise of a Cosmopolitan Port, 1840-1880 (Minneapolis and London,

2012), pp. 173-174.

49 See Catherine Boura, ‘The Greek Millet in Turkish Politics', in Charles Issawi and Dimitri Gondicas (eds), Ottoman Greeks in the Age of.Nationalism (Princeton, 1999), pp. 193-206.

50 Doumanis, Before the Nation, chap. 2.

51 Fujinami Nobuyoshi, ‘The Patriarchal Crisis of 1910 and Constitutional Logic: Ottoman Greeks' Dual Role in the Second Constitutional Politics', Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Vol.

27, No. 1 (2009), p. 13.

52 See, for example, Esra Ozyurek (ed.), The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey (Syracuse, NY, 2007).

53 Indicative of this rekindling of interest in the pre-national milieu are the popularity of such films as A Touch of Spice (Politiki Kouzina) (2003) and My Grandfather's People (Dedemin insanlari) (2011).

54 See Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Anthropology Through the Looking Glass (Cambridge, 1987).

55 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Hellas', http://www.bartleby.com/101/607.html (accessed 6 December 2012).

Conclusion

More on the topic Conclusion: