The Filiki Etaireia: A Secret Society's Useful Lies

Nations like to remember themselves as awakening; this one was recruited. The organization that engineered the Greek Revolution was not a spontaneous rising of an oppressed people but a secret society of diaspora businessmen — the Filiki Etaireia, the “Friendly Society” — founded far from the Greek lands, on a foreign model, and expanded by methods that included, on the plain testimony of the scholarship, deliberate deception of its own members. To say so is not to sneer at the founders, who were resourceful men playing a dangerous game. It is to describe how a national consciousness is actually manufactured when it does not yet exist.

Three merchants and a freemasonic template

The facts of the founding are undisputed. Stathis Kalyvas states them with characteristic economy:

“The three merchants from Odessa formed in 1814 a secret society inspired by freemason groups”

— Stathis N. Kalyvas, Modern Greece: What Everyone Needs to Know, p. 25

Odessa — a Russian Black Sea port, node of the Orthodox commercial diaspora — not Athens, not the Morea. Merchants — Skoufas, Tsakaloff, and Xanthos — not priests, not peasants, not klephts. And the organizational technology was imported wholesale from the freemasonic and carbonari societies then proliferating across Europe: initiation rituals, grades of secrecy, cells. The society’s membership profile followed its founders — merchants first, professionals after them.

What did this apparatus set out to do? Gregory Jusdanis describes the mission in terms that deserve to be read slowly, because they invert the national myth’s causality. The Etaireia, he writes,

“was organized in Odessa in 1814 by merchants to inculcate in peasants a national consciousness by spreading revolutionary pamphlets and establishing secret cells in the Balkans.”

— Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature, p. 34

To inculcate a national consciousness: the consciousness was the product of the conspiracy, not its cause. The peasants of the Balkans did not send for the Etaireia; the Etaireia came for them, pamphlet in hand, because the nation it spoke for did not yet exist outside its correspondence.

The Russian fiction

A secret society asking men to risk impalement needed more than pamphlets; it needed confidence. The founders supplied it by fabrication. Marios Hatzopoulos has reconstructed the recruitment strategy: the leadership deliberately created the impression that the conspiracy enjoyed

“the unconditional backing of Russia in order to instil among Society members the psychological reassurance of having a strong foreign ally”

— Marios Hatzopoulos, in Beaton & Ricks (eds.), The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, and the Uses of the Past (1797–1896), p. 83

The backing was false — Russia had endorsed nothing — but it was believable, and the founders knew exactly why. Xanthos himself spoke of the age-old “superstition,” as he called it, that co-religionist Russia would one day descend to liberate the Orthodox. The Etaireia did not have to invent the messianic expectation; it only had to counterfeit its fulfillment. Recruits swore their oaths believing a great Orthodox empire stood behind the door. The Revolution was thus set in motion on the strength of a great-power endorsement that existed only in the society’s initiation patter — one of history’s more consequential useful lies.

Anathema: the Church against the nation

The deepest correction the record makes to the national narrative concerns the Church. In the schoolbook telling, Orthodoxy and revolution are one flame. The contemporary documents say the opposite. Jusdanis records that the Holy Synod

“anathematized its members in March 1821 for their seditious activities”

— Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature, p. 34

An anathema is not a mild disapproval; it is the Church’s severest spiritual sanction, hurled at the conspiracy in the very month the rising began. And it came from the top. John Milios states the Patriarch’s position in a single unsparing sentence: “he had, of course, condemned the Revolution and had excommunicated its leaders” (Nationalism as a Claim to a State, p. 125). The institution that had actually held the Orthodox community together for four centuries — the millet’s own head — damned the plot that claimed to be liberating it. The gulf between the westernized nationalists of the diaspora and the Orthodox establishment could not be marked more starkly.

The sequel is one of the era’s cruelest ironies, and Milios records it in the same breath: the Porte executed Patriarch Gregory V anyway — not for supporting the Revolution he had condemned, but for failing to prevent it. The Ottoman government held him answerable for his flock as the millet system’s logic required; the Greek national tradition then claimed him as a martyr of the cause he had excommunicated. Both empires of meaning, the old religious one and the new national one, conscripted the same corpse.

None of this was aberrant by the standards of nineteenth-century conspiratorial politics; secret societies across Europe traded in inflated promises, and established churches everywhere anathematized them. That is precisely the point. The Filiki Etaireia belongs to the ordinary machinery of the age of revolutions — merchants’ capital, masonic organization, propaganda, and strategic falsehood — not to the sacred machinery of national awakening. The nation did not rise and create the society; the society organized, financed, deceived, and thereby created the conditions for the nation.

What remains, once the myth is set aside, is in some ways more impressive than the myth: three merchants in a foreign port, armed with nothing but a template borrowed from the freemasons and a fabricated tsar, talked a scattered Orthodox world into becoming a nation — over the anathema of its own Church. That the story required useful lies to begin, and required the erasure of the anathema to be retold, tells us less about the men of 1814 than about the narrative built over them. Nations, the record suggests, are not born; they are recruited, one oath at a time, and the recruiting sergeant does not always tell the truth.