13 ‘GREEK REVIVAL’ 1669–1833

Venetian Crete was no more. But the last of the great armed struggles between the Ottoman Empire and the Christian states of Europe still had another half century to run. Almost every Greek speaker who lived through them must have been affected by these convulsions.

Fourteen years after the surrender of Candia, in 1683, emboldened by their success in Crete, Ottoman land forces struck northwards and westwards through the Balkans to lay siege to Vienna for the second time. For two months, during the late summer of that year, it looked as though the Habsburg capital would go the way of Candia. But once again, reinforcements from other Catholic states arrived just in time, and on this occasion their intervention was decisive. The retreat from Vienna and a string of defeats in the Balkans during the years that followed mark the turning point of Ottoman fortunes in mainland Europe.¹

The Venetians were quick to take advantage. Although Crete proved too distant and too strong to take back, Venetian forces, once again under the command of Francesco Morosini, seized control of almost all the southern mainland of Greece, including the whole of the Peloponnese, between 1685 and 1687. Athens was briefly taken at the end of the latter year—though not before a cannonball, fired into the Parthenon from a Venetian battery, had ignited gunpowder stored inside. The resulting explosion blew off the roof and caused much of the two-thousand-year-old building to collapse.

Venice had never before possessed so much of the Greek mainland. But the native Greek-speaking population had no enthusiasm for this enforced change of masters—since the Catholic Venetians were far less tolerant of their Orthodox faith and practices than the Ottomans had been.

The Ottoman Empire, too, was changing. The centuries of conquest were over. And as the empire changed, its rulers found themselves in need of skills that had not been much prized before this time. This was where the most highly educated among the Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians in Constantinople came into their own. Panagiotis Nikousios, who had served as one of the two negotiators for the Ottoman side in the closing stages of the siege of Candia, had studied medicine at the University of Padua. It was as a physician that Nikousios had first gained the confidence of the grand vizier whom he served. Like many sons of wealthy Greek families in the capital, Nikousios was also proficient in half a dozen languages, ancient and modern, as well as Ottoman Turkish. His reward was to be promoted to the newly created office of Grand Dragoman, or interpreter. From then on, the grand dragoman would become the senior diplomat in the Ottoman service. For more than a century, this office would be held exclusively by wealthy and highly educated Greek-speaking Orthodox subjects of the empire.²

It fell to Alexandros Mavrokordatos, the second grand dragoman, to represent the sultan in a still more demanding diplomatic task. In 1688, the Ottomans were losing badly to the Austrians and Hungarians. Negotiations failed on that occasion. But eleven years later, Mavrokordatos deserves a large share of the credit for the first peace treaty ever to be signed between the Ottoman Empire and an alliance of European powers at Karlowitz (today’s Sremci Karlovski, in Serbia) in 1699.

Now the stage was set for other highly placed Greeks to follow where Nikousios and Mavrokordatos had led. Learning, usually gained at a university in the west, was the passport to success. Soon, not only the role of grand dragoman but also other trusted positions in the Ottoman administration would become effectively Greek prerogatives. In this way a semiofficial Greek-speaking aristocracy arose within the Ottoman elite. These people would become known as ‘Phanariots’, from the name of the district in the capital where the Ecumenical Patriarchate was (and is still) housed—Phanari in Greek, today the Fener quarter of Istanbul. Orthodox Christians were of course still excluded from the very highest levels of government (Greeks could only reach those by converting to Islam); but as the eighteenth century progressed, the tight-knit Greek-speaking community of Phanariots would become an increasingly indispensable part of the Ottoman system.⁵

Individuals rose to prominence through a combination of successful commercial enterprise, state privilege, and a foreign education. It was a self-perpetuating cycle. The profits of trade could be invested in the education of the next generation. Education and wealth together would open the door to a privileged position in the service of the state, which had to be bought.

The centre of gravity for the Phanariots was naturally the capital. But from early in the eighteenth century, many of these families found themselves exported northwards, into the buffer zones that separated the Ottoman from the Habsburg and Russian Empires. The provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia, which together make up two-thirds of today’s Romania and lie immediately to the north of the Danube, had remained technically Ottoman territory after the treaty of Passarowitz. But because their populations were almost entirely Orthodox Christian, successive sultans delegated the task of ruling them, not to the native population, the ancestors of today’s Romanians, but to members of the Greek Phanariot aristocracy. In this way, throughout the eighteenth century, not just the ruling families but also a whole supporting network of Greek-speaking bureaucrats came to be transferred from Constantinople to Bucharest and Jassy (modern Iaşi) and to put down roots there.

At the same time, Greek speakers in humbler walks of life were becoming more mobile than ever. Opportunities for trade brought more and more of them to move beyond the bounds of the Ottoman Empire. In London, the first coffee houses were opened in the 1660s by ‘Nicholas the Grecian’ and one Georgios Konstantinos, whose shop was known as ‘The Grecian’. Soon the nucleus of a community had grown up in the Soho district of the capital, where the name ‘Greek Street’ remains to this day. The first Orthodox church in London opened its doors in Greek Street in 1681.

The closing decades of the century saw huge new opportunities open that would set in motion an even larger migration of Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians. The century of relative peace between the sultans and their western neighbours also saw the start of a series of wars against Russia. One of these conflicts, fought between 1768 and 1774, for the first time brought a Russian fleet from Saint Petersburg, by way of the Atlantic, into the eastern Mediterranean. Encouraged by Russian propaganda, the Greek-speaking regions of Crete and the Peloponnese rose up in revolt in 1770. These were the first really serious rebellions against Ottoman rule—more than three hundred years after the conquest of Constantinople—and they were brutally suppressed. No Russian troops landed to make common cause with their Orthodox co-religionists. But Russia still came off best and succeeded in annexing from the Ottoman Empire the whole northern shore of the Black Sea and its hinterland.

It then became the policy of Catherine the Great, the Russian empress, to populate ‘New Russia’, as these territories became known, with Christians from the Ottoman Empire. Many thousands of Greeks had been compromised with the Ottoman authorities during the recent revolts, whether they had actively participated or not. The offer of grants of land to farm in a new, Orthodox homeland proved irresistible. For the first time since the ‘Empire of Trebizond’ had capitulated to Mehmed II in 1461, Greek speakers had the possibility to live under a Christian Orthodox administration, as subjects of the Russian tsars. It has been estimated that a quarter of a million answered the call.⁸ Urban communities grew up in Taganrog on the Sea of Azov and in the newly founded cities of Odessa, Mariupol, and Sebastopol (the last two with lightly Russianised Greek names).

The immigrant Greeks started out as farmers, but most soon gave up the land and went into trade. In this they were immeasurably assisted by the family networks that many maintained, whether back in the Ottoman Empire, farther west in Europe, or both. These networks would go on to dominate the international trade in Russian grain until the late nineteenth century. By the end of the eighteenth, Greek-owned merchant ships made up the largest fleet in the eastern Mediterranean, with a thousand ‘deep-seagoing’ vessels trading, mainly under the Ottoman flag.⁹ The map of Greek mercantile communities flourishing by that time—from the Sea of Azov in the east to Marseille in the west—by a quirk of history seems almost to re-create the pattern of the seventh century BCE. The historical circumstances, of course, were completely different, as the Greek language itself tacitly acknowledges. The term used for these modern communities established abroad is not apoikia (‘home from home’ in the ancient world) but paroikia, which means roughly ‘a home in a foreign land’.

This time, it was not just by sea that trading activity was becoming concentrated in Greek hands. The great rivers of southeastern Europe and Russia—the Danube, the Don, and the Dnieper—were opening up to the movement of ever more goods by water. Greeks, originally from Crete and the Aegean islands, traded wine as far north as Poland. At the same time, if probably on a smaller scale, overland trade was growing, too, both inside the Ottoman Empire and beyond its borders. From urban centres in the north of today’s Greece, caravans of camels set out to cross the mountain ranges of the Balkans to connect with the great artery of the Danube.¹⁰

By the second half of the eighteenth century, Greek elites of varying size, wealth, and political influence were established in Constantinople, in the Danubian principalities (as Wallachia and Moldavia were collectively known), in the Ionian Islands, and in southern Russia, as well as in many cities of western and central Europe. Of all these places, only the Ionian Islands, which at the time still belonged to a now-fading Venetian Republic, would eventually become part of the Greek state as we know it today; most lie far beyond its borders.

Indeed, the Greek-speaking world of the eighteenth century was nothing like a modern state. Even the relatively settled majority—the peasant farmers, herders, and fishermen who rarely make it into the history books—lived spread out across a wide geographical area. Beginning in the west with the Ionian Islands, this took in the Greek peninsula, an arc of the Balkan mainland bordering the northern Aegean, all of the islands as far south as Crete, parts of the western Anatolian seaboard, and detached enclaves in Cyprus, Cappadocia in central Anatolia, and Pontos in the northeast. In many of these areas, and particularly outside the towns, Greek speakers undoubtedly made up the largest part of the population. But there was no single heartland where everybody spoke Greek as a first language. Wherever you went in all those regions, you would hear other languages being spoken in the street, see other languages and scripts in use in public signs. Most people must have been able to function with a smattering of one or more languages other than their own.

The wider Greek world that was taking shape during the eighteenth century has often been described as a diaspora—a Greek word meaning ‘dispersal’, which had first been applied to the Jews. But the idea of a dispersal presupposes the existence of a corresponding centre. In the case of the Greeks in the eighteenth century, there was no centre.¹¹ This was a world that rather more resembled the Hellenistic one created by the conquests of Alexander—with the difference that this time Greek speakers were not the rulers but the ruled.

There was another similarity, too, though once again the historical reasons for it were quite different. Education in the Ottoman Empire was left to the different religious communities to organise for themselves. Schools had been established by the Orthodox Church in Constantinople since shortly after the conquest. The eighteenth century saw a massive expansion of education aimed at the Christian population, directed by the church, in urban centres wherever there was a community large enough to make a school viable. From the beginning, the language of instruction was Greek. Essentially, this was a more modest continuation of the old Byzantine programme of education. The Greek language had never lost its prestige; it remained the bureaucratic language of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and therefore of the higher clergy throughout the empire. As schools began to proliferate in the eighteenth century, those who were destined to become merchants or doctors, bureaucrats, priests, or sometimes even high officials in the Ottoman system would learn to read and write in Greek—even if the family spoke a Slavonic language, or Albanian, or Wallachian (Romanian) at home.¹² Becoming Greek was once again in fashion in the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire, and once again it brought practical as well as intellectual benefits.

In many parts of Christian Europe, too, Greek ways of thinking and doing were in fashion as never before. The eighteenth century was the era of Neoclassicism in the arts and of the Enlightenment in philosophy and the sciences. The century of the Enlightenment has also been called the Age of Reason because the new ideas that were being pioneered and promoted, particularly in France, were systematically based on rational principles. These, too, went back to the earliest years of Greek philosophy.

Although the actual business of government in most of the larger European states was conducted along autocratic lines, educated individuals began to exchange ideas about what might be the best, and most rational, form of government for human societies—just as once upon a time had happened in the ancient Greek city-states. Inevitably, this brought many of the new thinkers, either implicitly or explicitly, into conflict with the Catholic church—an institution that of course had no equivalent in the ancient world. Out of this ferment of ideas came the ‘social contract’ of Geneva-born Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who first began to articulate the concept of the nation as a voluntary association of individuals and groups who surrender some of their liberties in return for corresponding rights. These ideas would transform the political landscape of large parts of the world during the next three centuries.¹³

The Encyclopaedia, or Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts, published in Paris in multiple volumes between 1751 and 1772, became an extended manifesto for the Age of Reason. Encyclopaedia, as the editor in chief Denis Diderot explained, was a modern word based on ancient Greek, intended to mean ‘joined up knowledge’. The avowed aim of the project, he went on, was nothing less than to ‘change the common way of thinking’. Elsewhere in the Encyclopaedia, civilisation, another new and still rare word in French, was presented as the gift of ‘the illustrious dead, the sages of antiquity… sacred shades, the objects of veneration’. First among those, in a long list of philosophers and lawgivers drawn from the ancient Greek world, comes Socrates, who ‘braved the fury of tyrants, without fearing for his life, without fearing death, knowing no other masters than the sacred laws of enlightened reason’.¹⁴

Those words were published in 1765. A year earlier, the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann had brought out his History of the Art of Antiquity. This extraordinarily influential work set out the bold new claim that the greatest heights of European art and the human spirit had been reached not by the ancient Romans but by the Greeks before them. According to Winckelmann, who had never been there, this was because Greece was blessed with a perfect climate. As a consequence, he maintained, not only the arts but political liberty, too, had been perfected in the Greek city-states. ‘The only way for us [moderns] to become great’, he famously asserted, ‘is to imitate the Ancients.’ As the emerging modern civilisation of Europe began to define itself and to gain confidence, the intellectual, artistic, and political inheritance from the ancient Greek city-states, along with republican Rome, became deeply embedded in the entire project. From now on, the building of a modern, ‘Western’ civilisation would be founded on the rediscovery—as well as, often, the distortion or reinvention—of the legacy of the Greeks of antiquity.¹⁵

During the decades that spanned the turn of the nineteenth century, the craze for things Greek was beginning to make its mark on the appearance of cities, not only in Europe but also wherever Europeans were establishing their presence as colonists on other continents. In town planning, the grid plan that went back to Hippodamus of Miletus in the fifth century BCE and that had been adopted for all the new Greek cities founded in the wake of Alexander’s conquests, was revived in places as far apart as the ‘New Town’ of Edinburgh, begun in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and a few decades later, in several cities in North America and in Melbourne and Adelaide in Australia. In the early years of the nineteenth, the Scottish capital even began to pride itself on being known as the ‘New Athens’ or the ‘Athens of the North’.¹⁶

At the same time, the neoclassical trend reached a late peak in a ‘Greek Revival’ that would soon leave its mark on the monumental architecture of several continents. When a new parish church was built for what was then a suburb of expanding London between 1819 and 1822, its design faithfully reproduced features of the temple on the Acropolis of Athens known as the Erechtheion—including a ‘Caryatid’ porch, in which the columns take the form of draped female figures. Now grime-stained from decades of London pollution, the Caryatids of Saint Pancras New Church stare severely over the heads of pedestrians and traffic too busy to take much notice of them as they pass by on Euston Road. Winckelmann’s injunction to ‘imitate the ancients’ had fallen on fertile ground.

Wealthy connoisseurs of art from all over western Europe competed with one another to bring back prized examples of ancient Greek sculpture to their own countries. However shocking to modern sensibilities, this was a practice as much taken for granted at the time as the establishment of European colonies abroad. In the case of antiquities, it was driven by a new and emerging sense of the cultural value of the objects acquired. The most notorious of these collectors, Thomas Bruce, Seventh Earl of Elgin, removed about half of the sculpted blocks that make up the frieze of the Parthenon between 1801 and 1803. At first, Elgin had intended to use them as a prestige adornment for his country seat in Scotland. It was only unforeseen circumstances that led to the sculptures being put on public exhibition in London and, eventually, in 1816, being acquired by the British Museum.

Elgin’s actions were highly controversial at the time and have continued to arouse competing passions ever since. But it was the arrival of the ‘Elgin Marbles’ in London and the artistic judgements of the connoisseurs of the day that finally set the seal on Winckelmann’s bold claim. For the first time, the most intricate artwork that had once formed part of the rebuilding of the Acropolis of Athens in the 430s BCE could be seen in its original form in a Western city. And enough people were convinced that, yes, this was indeed superior to the best productions of ancient Rome, that the opinion has never seriously been challenged since. The marbles had passed to a dull climate in a distant land, but the prestige of their homeland and the people who had produced them had never been higher since at least the time of the Roman emperor Hadrian.¹⁷

Travellers, in increasing numbers, returned to northern Europe from seeking out the traces of Greek civilisation in the Ottoman Empire and published accounts of what they had seen and experienced. The young George Gordon, Lord Byron, suddenly became the most famous of these when he published his travelogue in verse, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in 1812. Byron speculated whether it could be possible for an ancient civilisation to come back from the dead, reincarnated by its modern heirs. Less poetically, other travellers were asking themselves and their readers the same question.¹⁸ And thanks to the astonishing success of his youthful work (Byron was only twenty-four when his poem was published), the speculative possibility of a literal Greek revival reached into households not only throughout Great Britain but also, in translation, in every corner of the European continent. By 1821, a vaguely undefined ‘Greece’ was at the forefront of public consciousness all over Europe, as well as in the young United States of America.

Contemporary Greeks were well aware of these developments, whether they lived in the Ottoman Empire or in communities scattered across Europe. With the rapid spread of Greek schools and the movement of goods by Greek entrepreneurs, ideas travelled far and fast. As literacy increased, there was ever more demand for printed books. There were no printing presses in Constantinople (except for brief, short-lived experiments) before the nineteenth century, and elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire only in Wallachia and Moldavia, where they were sponsored by the Phanariot rulers and the Orthodox Church. But Greek publishing houses flourished in many European cities. Chief among these was Venice, where printing in Greek had begun at the turn of the fifteenth century. By the end of the eighteenth, Greek presses had been established in Vienna, Leipzig, Budapest, Trieste, Moscow, and Saint Petersburg. Among them, these presses produced some 120,000 volumes during the century before 1821, most of them translations from Western languages. Books were not prevented from circulating in Ottoman territory; many, if not most, of the readers of these ones would have been Ottoman subjects. In this way, the new secular ideas of the European Enlightenment found their way to the hearts and minds of Greek speakers, wherever they were to be found. And in response, a ‘Greek Enlightenment’ grew up during the second half of the century.¹⁹

Educated Greeks were now reading the same books as their Western counterparts. If Socrates and a dozen other ‘heroes’ of the intellect and of battles such as Thermopylae and Salamis could inspire the veneration of the editors of the Encyclopaedia, they had never been forgotten, either, by those who continued to speak and write in a form of their own Greek language. Knowledge of the ancient ‘classics’ had, after all, never been lost in the Greek-speaking east. If the nations of Europe were starting to define their own identity in terms that went back to the ancient city-states, was it not time for enlightened Greeks to claim a portion of that inheritance for themselves?²⁰

This was not as simple a proposition as it might sound. Greek speakers still overwhelmingly thought of themselves as ‘Romans’: in the language of the time, Romioi, pronounced Romyi. To be a Romios, or (in the feminine) Romia, meant above all to be an Orthodox Christian. In the Ottoman Empire, the spread of secular education had been very largely sponsored by the Orthodox Church. This meant that in the Orthodox east there was none of the tension between established religion and the new ideas of the Enlightenment that was so characteristic of the movement in the West—at least until the very end of the eighteenth century. On the other hand, when foreigners wrote about ‘Greece’ and ‘Greeks’ in their own languages, they did so in a purely secular sense. And to confuse matters further, they applied these names equally to both ancient and modern times. This was impossible in Greek because the ancients were still known by the ancient name of ‘Hellenes’. But ever since the time of Julian the Apostate in the fourth century CE, this name had signified not just an ancient but a pagan people. Modern Romans and ancient Hellenes may have been united by their language, but bonds of religion went just as deep, and in those terms, the pagan Hellenes were almost as alien as the Muslim Turks or the western Catholics or Protestants.

The idea of a bloodline had counted for little during most of the intervening centuries (Plethon, in the fifteenth century, had been the exception). But now that those long-dead Hellenes were being lionised in ever more exalted terms in the foreign books that Greeks were reading and translating into their own language, it was time for this to change. The solution that they came up with was to begin to think of themselves as the sons, or the children, of the Hellenes of old. It helped that the phrase that most naturally expressed this idea in the semiformal written Greek of the time was identical to the war cry of the Greeks at the battle of Salamis, as reported in Aeschylus’s drama The Persians: ‘Sons of Hellenes, onward.’ It was becoming a matter of pride that the Hellenes of old had been the ancestors; today’s Romans were their descendants.²¹

And because so many of those books written in other languages described the ancient Greeks as a nation, could not the same be said of the moderns, too? In the 1780s, the essayist and educational reformer Dimitrios Katartzis, writing in Greek at the Phanariot court in Bucharest, could urge: ‘We can become once again a nation, civilised and envied, to the extent that we are able to approach the education of our ancestors.’ A few years later, a book called Modern Geography, published in Greek in Vienna in 1791, gives the ancient name of ‘Hellas’ to the southern Balkan peninsula and the islands of the Aegean, while the people who live there are described as ‘modern Hellenes’ and the descendants of an ancient ‘nation’.²²

This was the beginning of a process that within three decades, between 1790 and 1820, would transform the way that many, if not yet most, Greek speakers thought about themselves. From ‘sons of Hellenes’ or ‘modern Hellenes’ it was a small step for contemporary Greeks to become simply ‘Hellenes’. At the same time, Orthodox Greek Christians began giving their children ancient names alongside their baptismal ones. Names like Themistocles, Pericles, Odysseus for boys and Penelope, Calliope, or Aspasia for girls begin to appear in the record. New family names were coined in the ancient way, by adding the suffix -ides or -ades to a personal name, just as in the Odyssey, Odysseus the son of Laertes had been known as Laertiades.

This was the surest sign that ordinary people, and not just intellectuals, were beginning to think of the ancients as part of the same family as themselves. The ‘hellenizing of the Romioi’, as it has been called, was the biggest reinvention by Greek speakers since the much more gradual one that had taken place under Roman rule some fifteen hundred years earlier. It was fuelled by ideas that came from western Europe. And it went hand in hand with another series of changes that were literally revolutionary.²³

In July 1776, on the far side of the Atlantic, the American Declaration of Independence set out the ‘self-evident truths’ that ‘all men are created equal’ and enjoy an ‘inalienable’ right to ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’. Seven years later, the United States of America won recognition as an independent republic after defeating the colonial power, Great Britain. Then in 1789, again in July, the storming of the Bastille fortress in Paris set in train the events we now know as the French Revolution. Under the slogan Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, revolutionaries went on to overturn the centuries-old autocratic French monarchy, abolish the role and privileges of the Catholic church, and turn France into a ‘republic’ made up of ‘citizens’. Some of the political organisation of the French revolutionary republic, while it lasted, and much of the rhetoric associated with it, were deliberately based on names and rituals revived from republican Rome. If the revolutionary French could be heirs to one ancient republic, perhaps similarly minded Greeks could revive the glories of another—in their case, democratic Athens? In some quarters, particularly among the expatriate communities of merchants abroad, and in the intellectual circles of the Danubian principalities, enthusiasm was spreading fast enough to alarm the Ottoman authorities and the highest echelons of the Orthodox Church.²⁴

In the Ionian Islands, it reached fever pitch in the summer of 1797. At the end of June, a French expeditionary force landed to take possession. Napoleon Bonaparte, at the time ‘first consul’ of the French Republic, had recently forced the submission of Venice and despatched a fleet of French warships to take over the foreign dominions that had belonged to the now defunct ‘Most Serene Republic’. For two years after that, the Greek Orthodox population of the Ionian Islands experienced what it was like to be called ‘citizens’ and to be given rights, at least notionally. Elsewhere, idealistic intellectuals, educated in the Enlightenment tradition—Rigas of Velestino in Vienna, Adamantios Korais (also known as Coray) in Paris—set about imagining in philosophical terms what a newly liberated Greece might look like. Theirs were among a chorus of voices, many of them anonymous, urging their fellow Greeks, in patriotic poems and pamphlets, to rise up against their Ottoman masters and break free. In parts of the Ottoman Empire, as well as in European cities, Greek revolutionary anthems began to be composed and sung to the tune of the French ‘La Marseillaise’.²⁵

Not all Greeks were so enthusiastic. In 1798, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church issued a stern encyclical that condemned ‘the much-vaunted political programme of liberty’. God himself had ‘raised up out of nothing the mighty empire of the Ottomans’ so as to rule over the Orthodox faithful for their own ultimate good and to guarantee the ‘salvation of the chosen peoples’.²⁶ While some Greeks looked eagerly to the west and saw themselves as ‘new Hellenes’ and potential citizens of a modern state on the French revolutionary model, the majority of Orthodox Romans, from the patriarch of Constantinople down to the humblest goatherd in the mountains or fisherman in the islands, had far more to lose than to gain from revolutionary change.

But, whatever might have been the preference of the majority, among Greeks as elsewhere in Europe, something that had been born during the French Revolution had come to stay. This spirit survived almost twenty years of the Napoleonic Wars, during which the French Republic became the French Empire, and the first consul Napoleon became emperor. No part of Europe was left untouched by these wars. After Napoleon was defeated, for the first time in 1814 and then decisively at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815, the representatives of the European powers gathered in Vienna to determine the future shape of the continent. The French Revolution and its aftermath were at an end. Nothing like this must ever happen again.

So was born the ‘Concert of Europe’, an alliance of predominantly autocratic states that determined to establish a new international order, from the Atlantic to the Urals. But the ideas that had fanned out across the continent were not to be so easily suppressed; across the Atlantic they had already taken hold. Between 1811 and 1825, the Spanish and Portuguese colonial possessions in South America followed the example of their counterparts farther north and won their independence through wars of liberation. Even within Europe, undercurrents were swirling just beneath the surface. By 1820, secret societies had sprung up in many countries; clandestine activity was rife. In the summer of that year, first in Spain and then in Naples, capital of the ‘Kingdom of the Two Sicilies’, bloodless revolutions compelled monarchs to grant parliamentary constitutions to their subjects. A full-scale uprising in northern Italy, much of it at the time ruled by Austria, was planned for early in 1821. In France, the elderly Marquis de Lafayette, a veteran of both the American and the French Revolutions, noted at the time: ‘The friends of liberty were never in such perfect sympathy as in this moment of European crisis.’²⁷

Every one of these revolutionary projects would prove abortive. But Greek speakers had been forming societies, too. Most of these were ostensibly cultural rather than political. Their members made good use of the Greek printing presses that existed in several cities of Europe to exchange and disseminate views which could broadly be described as liberal. But one of these societies operated underground, and its aims were avowedly violent: the Friendly Society, also known in English by its Greek name, Philiki Etairia, was a secret society dedicated to a war of liberation. It was said to have been founded by Greek merchants in the (then) Russian city of Odessa in 1814, though this often repeated story has been questioned. The Friendly Society may actually have begun life in the Ottoman capital, and not until three years later.

Like all these clandestine societies, this one derived its rituals from Freemasonry. From the records of its activities, it seems that the members of the Friendly Society relished the secrecy and mystification of their ceremonies almost as much as the extreme means by which they prepared to pursue their goal. During the last months of 1820, an ambitious scheme was hatched: to strike at the heart of Ottoman power by setting fire to the fleet in the Golden Horn and simultaneously starting fires in the streets of Constantinople. In the ensuing general panic, the Orthodox population was to rise up and take over control of the capital.²⁸

Events would turn out very differently. But by the beginning of the 1820s, revolutionary fervour was running high in at least some parts of the Greek-speaking world and through some sections of the population—both inside and outside the Ottoman Empire. Few people alive anywhere at the beginning of the 1820s, probably, would have bet on a Greek revolution being any more successful than so many others that had failed, still less on what the outcome might be if by any chance it did succeed. There is little sign that the secretive leadership of the Friendly Society had much of an idea. But a revolution carried out by men and women who now thought of themselves as Hellenes, in the name of an ancient nation in which so many progressive Europeans, and indeed Americans, believed that they, too, had a stake—that would turn out to be another proposition entirely.

It began on 6 March 1821 (or 22 February according to the calendar in use in southeastern Europe at the time). A senior officer in the Russian imperial service slipped across the River Pruth, with a handful of retainers, from Kishinev (today’s Chișinău, capital of Moldova) in what was then Russian territory into Ottoman-controlled Moldavia. Like many high-ranking Russians in those days, his native language was Greek. His name was Alexandros Ypsilantis, and he had recently become leader of the Friendly Society. Two days later, in Jassy, the Moldavian capital, Ypsilantis issued a proclamation headed ‘Fight for Faith and Fatherland’:

The hour has come, o Men of Hellas!… The enlightened peoples of Europe… full of gratitude for the benefits bequeathed by our Ancestors to themselves, eagerly await the liberty of the Hellenes.

A month after that, in Kalamata, near the southern tip of the Peloponnese, a ‘manifesto addressed to Europe by Petros Mavromikhalis, Commander-in-Chief of the Spartan Troops, and the Messenian Senate’, announced that the ‘unhappy Greeks of Peloponnesus’ had taken up arms against the ‘insupportable yoke of Ottoman tyranny’ and went on:

We invoke therefore 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 regenerate our unfortunate people. Greece, our mother, was the lamp that illuminated you; on this ground she reckons on your active philanthropy.²⁹

For the first time in centuries, Greeks were ready to seize their political destiny and take their future into their own hands. During March and April 1821, all of the Danubian principalities, most of what is now mainland Greece, from Thessalonica in the north to the southern Peloponnese, and many towns and islands across the Aegean rose up in response to this call. Nothing on such a scale had ever happened before. The Ottoman state had been facing internal challenges to its authority for a number of years, not least from Muslim warlords in the Balkans, who had tried to break away on their own account. But these had been essentially local upheavals; none would have any lasting effect on the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. The Greek Revolution, as those proclamations show, was different—because it was never intended to be a matter for Greeks alone.

Even so, during the first months, fearsome Ottoman reprisals came close to stamping it out. In Moldavia and Wallachia, despite initial successes, the thousands of Greek and other Balkan volunteers who had rallied to Ypsilantis’s call were routed by an Ottoman army in June. Ypsilantis himself sought refuge in Austrian territory, where he was interned for the rest of his short life. Many of his supporters fought to the death or were captured and executed. Farther south, in Macedonia, in Thessaly, and on the seaboard of Anatolia, the revolt was ruthlessly suppressed. Despite the ambitious plans of the Friendly Society, there was no outbreak in the capital. But this did not save the Phanariot aristocracy from near annihilation.

Within a few weeks in April and May, just about every Phanariot who had not managed to escape from Constantinople in time was rounded up and publicly beheaded. Gregory V, the seventy-five-year-old patriarch of the Orthodox Church, was seized at the end of the liturgy on Easter Sunday, 22 April, and hanged from the gate of his own precinct. It made no difference that Gregory had been one of those who had condemned the very idea of liberty or revolution more than two decades before and had recently excommunicated every Orthodox Christian who had dared to rebel against the legitimate basileus, the sultan. Similarly, in Cyprus, where there had been no uprising, the archbishop and leading members of the clergy were put to death anyway, apparently just to set an example.

But in one part of the Greek-speaking world, the revolution did take hold. This was the Peloponnese. The well-known story that the standard of revolt was raised by the bishop of Old Patras at the monastery of Agia Lavra, above the town of Kalavryta, on the day of the Christian festival of the Annunciation, 25 March, is almost certainly apocryphal. But once violence had broken out all over the peninsula in early April (or late March, according to the calendar in use there at the time), there was no going back. Local leaders, backed by former brigands and irregular bands of their armed followers, seized the initiative and swept across the country.

Those Muslims who survived the onslaught took refuge with the Ottoman garrisons that remained in the larger towns and in a series of strongholds that had been built in the time of the crusaders or the Venetians. A decisive moment came in October, when the chief town of the Peloponnese, Tripolitsa (today’s Tripoli), was starved into submission and most of its inhabitants massacred, despite being promised safe conduct by the victorious Greeks. From the Peloponnese, the action spread to some of the nearby islands, notably Hydra and Spetses just off the northeast coast and Psara on the other side of the Aegean. Among them, these small islands boasted the lion’s share of Greek-owned shipping in the eastern Mediterranean. Armed merchantmen began to achieve successes against the Ottoman navy. Other, larger islands joined in, including Samos and Crete, though many did not.

At the end of the year, a first ‘national assembly’ brought together representatives from all the areas that had been liberated to draw up a constitution. The site chosen, in the northeastern Peloponnese, lay close to the remains of the ancient theatre and sanctuary of the healing god Asclepius at Epidaurus. The first provisional constitution that emerged has ever since been known as the Epidaurus Constitution. This document drew heavily on the short-lived constitutions of revolutionary France. From the Constitution of the United States it derived the strict separation of powers between the legislature and the executive. It also established for all time that the newly liberated realm was to be known by the ancient name of ‘Hellas’, and its citizens as ‘Hellenes’. So effective has that collective act of reinvention been that it requires an effort of imagination, today, to realise what a radical innovation it was at the time. Many Greeks would continue to think of themselves as Romans (Romioi), in everyday contexts and informally among themselves, for at least a century and a half after that. But the official designations, revived from the ancient world and adapted to the new political reality that was then being shaped, have never since been questioned.

It was one thing to talk of national assemblies, political rights, and the separation of powers, but the realities of liberation on the ground looked rather different. The majority of those who took up arms did so in the name of their Orthodox Christian faith. The enemy, usually called simply ‘Turks’ in Greek, were identified by their religion, not by what we might term their ethnicity. At the grassroots level, it was a war of religion.³⁰ The new talk of Hellenes, Hellas, and the heroes of Marathon and Thermopylae had yet to filter through to villagers, or even chieftains, who had never learned to read. When it did, it would remain only a thin veneer for some time. The most popular slogan under which people fought was ‘Liberty or Death’.

But ‘liberty’, once it began to be achieved, meant rather different things to the architects of the first constitution, on the one hand, and to the warlords, who now vied with one another and with the official provisional government to impose their will upon the local areas they had liberated. During a relative lull on the external front, in 1823 and 1824, the Greek Revolution faced its first political test.

On the one side was Alexandros Mavrokordatos, who had chaired the national assembly and was elected the first president of the executive—in effect, president of independent Greece. This was the descendant of his namesake who had served as grand dragoman at the end of the seventeenth century and had founded one of the most successful dynasties of Phanariots. The younger Alexandros, one of the few men in revolutionary Greece to sport a western European frock coat, cut an unheroic figure, standing not much more than five feet tall, stout, and wearing thick-lensed spectacles for his myopia. But Mavrokordatos was a consummate politician, master of eight languages, committed to the humanitarian and secular ideas of the European Enlightenment, and deeply versed in the political theory and geopolitics of the day. He had been primarily responsible for the final draft of the Epidaurus Constitution and had successfully steered its provisions through the assembly.

On the opposing side, the most powerful among the warlords in the Peloponnese was Theodoros Kolokotronis, a former brigand and paid soldier of successive foreign governments in the Ionian Islands. Nicknamed ‘the Old Man of the Morea’ (he was fifty years old when the revolution began), Kolokotronis was a formidable guerrilla chieftain. By the second year of the revolution, he had a string of victories to his credit. Among them was the annihilation of an Ottoman army that had tried and failed to relieve the besieged garrison in Nafplio and had then been trapped by Kolokotronis’s men in the narrow pass of Dervenakia, near Corinth, in June 1822. The Scottish historian George Finlay, an eye witness to many of the events he described and the author of one of the most definitive early histories of the Greek Revolution, gives this pen portrait:

A large head, a bold countenance, a steady eye, and a profusion of black hair, gave some dignity to an aspect that did not conceal looks of cunning and ferocity.… Nurtured as a brigand, he could never distinguish very clearly right from wrong, justice from injustice; and he had an instinctive aversion to order and law.³¹

Conflict between two such different individuals was inevitable. And, of course, it was a conflict not just between individuals but between whole concepts of what liberty was going to mean for the Greeks ever after. Armed conflict broke out between the provisional government and an alliance of warlords led by Kolokotronis on two separate occasions during 1824. On both occasions, government forces came out on top, with decisive consequences for the shape of the future Greek state. But both the conflict and the character of the protagonists have left a profound legacy that has never entirely gone away since and that would resurface as a fault line in many different later crises in Greek history.³²

By this time, events in Greece were beginning to make an impact abroad. Those first appeals to Europe had fallen on predictably deaf ears. But if governments still shunned the insurgents, the same could not be said for individuals and pressure groups in many countries. Volunteers came from every corner of the European continent and from as far away as America. They were known as ‘philhellenes’ (lovers of things Greek). The most famous of them all was Lord Byron. A high proportion of them died in Greece, whether in action or, like Byron in April 1824, from disease. Often these volunteers had to evade the surveillance of their own governments, which did their best to try to stop them from going. Altogether about twelve hundred arrived in Greece between 1821 and 1827. But far more numerous, and in the end a great deal more influential on the outcome of the revolution, were those philhellenes who stayed at home to organise committees, pressure groups, and press campaigns in their own countries to lobby governments and to raise funds in aid of the Greek cause.³³

It was very much as a result of these activities that governments abroad slowly, and usually reluctantly, began to reassess their position towards Greece. Great Britain was the first to break ranks among the ‘Concert of Europe’. Early in 1823, George Canning, who had recently been appointed Foreign Secretary, recognised the captains and crews of Greek ships on the high seas as legitimate belligerents (rather than as pirates). At the end of the same year, in the USA, President James Monroe came close to recognising Greek independence in a famous speech to Congress. Mainly remembered for setting out the Monroe Doctrine, which defined respective spheres of influence for Europe and the New World, the presidential address of 2 December also included these words: ‘There is good cause to believe… that Greece will become again an independent nation. That she may obtain that rank is the object of our most ardent wishes.’ A little over a year later, a bill was introduced to Congress that, if it had passed, would have had the same effect. Even though it failed, public support in America remained strong enough to allow the fighting frigate Hellas to be built in a New York shipyard and delivered to the Greek government at the end of 1826.³⁴

In Europe, no government was yet prepared to go so far. In 1824, Tsar Alexander secretly sounded out the British and French about carving out ‘zones of influence’ for each of them in an autonomous Greece which would still be nominally subject to the Ottomans. When the tsar’s proposal was leaked, most of the Greek leaders saw this as a betrayal and turned instead to Great Britain. Although the British government refused to take the insurgents under its protection, and while rival Greek factions put out alternative feelers to both France and Russia, a diplomatic dialogue was beginning. Greece was firmly on the agenda of the chief maritime powers of the day.

From the point of view of the Greeks, it was not a moment too soon. By the time the plea to the British government was issued, on 1 August 1825, the Ottoman counterattack had begun. Ottoman land forces from the north were matched by a newly modernised fleet from Alexandria, commanded by Ibrahim Pasha, the son of the sultan’s vassal, Muhammad Ali of Egypt. Ibrahim landed on the south coast of the Peloponnese in February 1825. Over the next two and a half years, the Ottoman army and the Egyptian fleet between them reversed nearly everything that the Greeks had gained since 1821. By the early summer of 1827, liberated Hellas had all but disappeared.

But too many Greeks had struggled for too long to think of going back now. Ibrahim Pasha, who had been promised the Peloponnese as his reward, was threatening to kill or enslave the remaining population and people the entire region with Muslims transported from North Africa. It was not only Greeks who were galvanised by these threats. Philhellenes throughout the world had been mobilised by the conviction that this was not just a distant squabble in a foreign land but that something fundamental to their own civilisation was at stake. It was becoming more difficult for governments to ignore them—and this at a time when the fate of Greece was increasingly becoming a matter of hard-headed geopolitics.

From the spring of 1826, the three Great Powers that had interests in the eastern Mediterranean—Great Britain, France, and Russia—had embarked on a delicate series of negotiations, not with the Greeks but with each other. If Ottoman power was going to be seriously weakened in Europe, it mattered a great deal to each of the three that neither of the others should gain a geopolitical advantage from the outcome. This was the diplomatic dilemma that would in due course become known as the Eastern Question; it would not finally be resolved until after the First World War. A year later, in 1827, while Canning was briefly prime minister of Great Britain, the three powers agreed to send a joint naval taskforce into the Aegean, charged with enforcing a truce between the belligerents. Not surprisingly, the Greeks welcomed this sign of military intervention; the Ottomans repudiated it as an unjustifiable interference in their internal affairs. The unintended consequence was a naval engagement in Navarino Bay, off the southwest coast of the Peloponnese, on 20 October 1827. The combined Ottoman and Egyptian fleets were all but destroyed, and Ibrahim was forced to abandon the Peloponnese shortly afterwards.

The success of the Greek Revolution, in some form, was now assured. But the eventual settlement had been taken out of Greek hands. It was now up to the three Great Powers to find a resolution—though this did not happen immediately. In the meantime, it was the provisional government of Greece, and not any external agent, that appointed an interim head of government for the state that still had no formally recognised existence. His name was Ioannis Kapodistrias, also known as Count John Capo d’Istria. Originally an aristocrat from Corfu, he had joined the Russian service and risen to become joint foreign minister of Russia from 1814 to 1822. Kapodistrias arrived in the Peloponnese early in 1828, with the title Kyvernitis, which exactly translates the Latin-derived term ‘governor’.

Kapodistrias was at once an outsider—he had never been to mainland Greece before—and a Greek. His appointment was accepted by the representatives of the Great Powers, who were now in charge of the negotiations for Greece’s future, though for different reasons he was distrusted by the governments of all three. But at least, from their point of view, they were dealing with a statesman whose credentials were widely recognised—Kapodistrias had after all helped to represent Russia at the Congress of Vienna. His arrival was another significant step towards the emergence of Greece onto the European stage.

The new governor set about establishing the institutions of the future nation-state and did his best to negotiate the most favourable terms for Greece with the representatives of the three Great Powers. But the decisive breakthrough seems not to have been due to Kapodistrias but rather to the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by Russia in yet another Russo-Turkish war in September 1829. The war had been fought mainly in the Caucasus; the future of the Greeks had not been its main cause. But when Russian troops came as close to the Ottoman capital as Edirne (Adrianople), even the Duke of Wellington, at the time prime minister of Britain and no friend to revolutions in general or to the Greeks in particular, suddenly saw the force of the Greek point of view: with the Ottoman Empire in decline, only an independent Greece could serve as a counterweight to Russia in the Balkans and the Aegean. The decisive moment came on 3 February 1830. A protocol signed in London on that day, on behalf of the governments of Great Britain, France, and Russia, declared for the first time, and under their joint guarantee, that: ‘Greece will form an independent State, and will enjoy all those rights—political, administrative, and commercial—attached to complete independence.’³⁵

In October 1831, Kapodistrias was assassinated by two political opponents as he was entering church in Nafplio. The powers had already decided that the new state must be a monarchy, not a republic as its provisional constitution had declared. In May 1832, a new treaty determined that Prince Otto, the second son of the philhellene king of Bavaria Ludwig I, would be the first king. Frontiers for the kingdom were drawn up at the same time. They included only the Peloponnese, less than half of mainland Greece as it is today, and those islands closest to it in the Aegean. The remainder was still part of the Ottoman Empire, except for the Ionian Islands, which had been awarded to Great Britain to rule as a protectorate in 1815. Neither the Greeks nor the Ottomans had any say in these decisions.

At the time and for long afterwards, even today, many Greeks have felt sore at this outcome. What had been won fell some way short of the absolute ideal of ‘Liberty or Death’ that so many had fought and died for. On the other hand, the revolution had begun with those appeals to the conscience of Europe. And if the outcome had little to do with conscience and everything to do with geopolitical calculation, it also firmly integrated the newly independent state into the evolving geopolitics of the continent, and indeed of the wider world. When the future king, Prince Otto, arrived at Nafplio aboard a British warship on 6 February 1833, Greece (‘Hellas’ in Greek) was ready to take its place among the political states of Europe—for the first time in all the long history of the Greeks.