Before the Nation: How Orthodox Christians Named Themselves Under the Ottomans

Every national narrative begins with a name, and the modern Greek narrative begins with one that the people it describes did not use. Before the nineteenth century, the Orthodox Christian populations of the southern Balkans — the very communities later enrolled retroactively as eternal Hellenes — named themselves by their faith and their empire, not by any ethnicity. Recovering how they actually spoke of themselves is not a pedantic exercise. It is the necessary first step in understanding how a national identity was constructed, because the construction consisted precisely in replacing the old names with a new one, and then insisting that the new name had been there all along.

An empire of confessions, not nations

The Ottoman Empire did not sort its subjects into nations, because the category did not yet exist as a principle of governance. It sorted them into religious communities — the millets. The Orthodox millet, administered through the Patriarchate of Constantinople, gathered together Greek-speakers, Slav-speakers, Albanian-speakers, Vlach-speakers, and Turkish-speaking Christians in a single body whose boundary was drawn by faith alone. Gregory Jusdanis, in his study of how a national literature was invented for Greece, states the consequence plainly:

“The identity formation of the millet system, insofar as it encompassed many ethnic groups, was not national but religious.”

— Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature, p. 31

This was the identity that the future “Greeks” actually carried into the nineteenth century: membership in a confessional community that cut across every line of language and descent which nationalism would later declare primordial. A Vlach-speaking merchant of Moschopolis, an Albanian-speaking sailor of Hydra, and a Greek-speaking peasant of the Morea belonged, in the empire’s eyes and largely in their own, to the same people — the Orthodox.

”You are not Hellenes”

If we want to know what ordinary people in these communities understood themselves to be, we could hardly ask for a better witness than Kosmas the Aetolian, the celebrated eighteenth-century Orthodox missionary who walked the villages of Rumeli preaching to precisely the populations that the later national historiography would claim as unbroken descendants of Pericles. His words to them, recorded and studied by Peter Mackridge, are remarkable:

“You are not Hellenes, you are not impious, heretics, atheists; you are pious Orthodox Christians”

— Peter Mackridge, Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976, pp. 59–60

Note what “Hellene” is doing in that sentence. It sits in a list alongside “impious, heretics, atheists.” In Kosmas’s vocabulary — which was the traditional vocabulary of the Orthodox world — a Hellene was a pagan, and to call his listeners Hellenes would have been to insult them. The community’s self-understanding was religious through and through: they were Christians, and the name that modern Greece would place at the centre of its identity was, for them, a term of reproach to be disavowed. The national meaning of “Hellene” had to be manufactured afterwards, against the grain of the very population it was applied to.

The deep background: a thousand years of Romans

This was no Ottoman novelty. The religious sense of “Hellene,” and the non-Hellenic self-designation of the Orthodox, reach back a millennium into Byzantium — the empire that modern Greek historiography would later annex as the “medieval Greek” middle term of its continuity story. Anthony Kaldellis, the leading historian of Byzantine identity, begins from what specialists have always known:

“It is well known that the people we call Byzantines today called themselves Romans (Romaioi).”

— Anthony Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition, p. 42

For a thousand years, the Greek-speaking Christians of the eastern Mediterranean understood themselves as Romans — heirs of an empire and its institutions, not of an ethnos. And within that Roman world, “Hellene” underwent one of the most consequential semantic inversions in history. Kaldellis notes that “pagans of any kind were called Hellenes” (Hellenism in Byzantium, p. 185), and that the shift was not merely colloquial but official:

“The word acquired a derogatory sense, to which legislation gave its official stamp, referring to the ”impious and loathsome Hellenes.””

— Anthony Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium, p. 122

Imperial law itself, in other words, fixed “Hellene” as the name of the religious enemy. When Kosmas the Aetolian told his eighteenth-century flock that they were not Hellenes but pious Orthodox Christians, he was speaking the settled language of a tradition more than a thousand years old. The popular self-designation that survived alongside it — Romioi, the Romaic identity of the Ottoman centuries — was the direct continuation of Byzantine Roman-ness, transmitted through the Orthodox Church and the millet that institutionalized it.

What the names tell us

Set these facts in a row and the shape of the problem becomes clear. The medieval ancestors claimed by the modern national narrative called themselves Romans and used “Hellene” to mean pagan. Their early modern descendants, organized by the Ottomans into a religious community, called themselves Christians and Romioi, and were told by their own most beloved preacher that they were emphatically not Hellenes. Nowhere in this long record do we find a population that understood itself as an ethnic Hellenic nation awaiting reawakening. What we find instead is a confessional civilization — Roman in name, Orthodox in substance, multilingual in fact — whose boundaries were drawn by baptism rather than blood.

None of this diminishes the people who lived under these names; it restores to them the identities they actually held. The critique falls not on Greeks but on a method of history-writing: the retrospective projection of a nineteenth-century category onto centuries that organized human belonging quite differently. The nation-builders of the 1800s did not discover a dormant Hellenic identity under Ottoman rule. They found Romans and Christians, and they set about renaming them — a renaming so successful that it now takes a deliberate act of scholarship to hear what the people of that world called themselves. The sources, when we let them speak, are unambiguous, and any honest account of modern Greek identity must begin where they begin: before the nation.