Debunking modern Greek nationalism

No. Ernest Gellner's canonical definition contains no ethnic component at all: nationhood is shared culture plus mutual recognition. Nations are artefacts of conviction, not biology — which is precisely why a Greekness assembled out of culture, religion, and commerce could be retrofitted with an 'ethnic' pedigree only after the fact.

Sources

• Two men are of the same nation if and only if they share the same culture, where culture in turn means a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating.
  — Ernest Gellner (Professor of Philosophy, LSE; later William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge), Nations and Nationalism , pp. 6–7
• nations are the artefacts of men’s convictions
  — Ernest Gellner (Professor of Philosophy, LSE; later William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge), Nations and Nationalism , p. 7

No — and this is decisive. Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, the architect of the continuity thesis, conceded openly that neither the Greeks nor any other European nation had ever been ethnically pure. His thousands of pages against Fallmerayer defended cultural, not racial, continuity. The official national narrative itself, at its very source, defines Greekness as culture rather than blood.

Sources

• neither the Greeks or any other European nation, had ever been ethnically pure in history
  — John S. Koliopoulos & Thanos M. Veremis (Professor of Modern History, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki / Professor of Political History, University of Athens), Modern Greece A History since 1821 (A New History of Modern Europe (NWME)) , pp. 2–3
• It took Paparrigopoulos thousands of pages to refute Fallmerayer’s theory by asserting the cultural, rather than racial, continuity of the Greeks
  — John S. Koliopoulos & Thanos M. Veremis (Professor of Modern History, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki / Professor of Political History, University of Athens), Modern Greece A History since 1821 (A New History of Modern Europe (NWME)) , pp. 2–3

It was religious, not national. The Ottoman millet system sorted subjects into ethnoreligious communities: the Orthodox (Rum) millet, administered by the Patriarch of Constantinople, encompassed Greek-, Slav-, Albanian-, Vlach- and Turkish-speaking Christians alike. Gregory Jusdanis states it flatly: the identity the future 'Greeks' actually carried into the nineteenth century was membership in a faith community, not an ethnicity.

Sources

• The identity formation of the millet system, insofar as it encompassed many ethnic groups, was not national but religious.
  — Gregory Jusdanis (Professor of Modern Greek, Ohio State University), Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture Inventing National Literature , p. 31

As Christians — emphatically not as Hellenes. The eighteenth-century missionary Kosmas the Aetolian, preaching to the very populations later claimed as eternal Greeks, told them: 'You are not Hellenes... you are pious Orthodox Christians.' In his vocabulary 'Hellene' still meant pagan. Religion was the boundary of the community; the national meaning of 'Hellene' had to be manufactured afterwards.

Sources

• You are not Hellenes, you are not impious, heretics, atheists; you are pious Orthodox Christians
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , pp. 59–60

Foundational. From the eighteenth century, Orthodox merchants became the indispensable middlemen of European commerce with the Ottoman Empire, displacing the French from the Levantine trade and building the diaspora networks (Odessa, Vienna, Trieste) that financed schools, books, and eventually revolution. 'Greek' was to a large extent a commercial identity: to enter trade was to enter Greekness.

Sources

• Greeks became the necessary middlemen in the commerce of all the European states with the empire
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , pp. 35–36
• Greek merchants rapidly displaced the French in the Levantine trade
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , pp. 35–36

Yes, remarkably direct. Mackridge documents that in the Balkans 'Greek' and 'Bulgarian' functioned as professional labels well into the twentieth century: Greek-speaking meant merchant, 'Bulgarian' meant poor Slav peasant — and professional soldiers, whatever their mother tongue, were called Albanians (Arvanitai). Ethnonyms mapped onto trades: commerce made you Greek, soldiering made you Albanian.

Sources

• Greek-speaking was associated with commerce and vice versa
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , p. 57
• In Macedonia, as late as the early twentieth century, both ‘Greek’ and ‘Bulgarian’ denoted professions
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , p. 57

We can't — which is the point. Mackridge notes the telling fact that the Greek-speaking Catholics of the Cyclades and the Greek-speaking Muslims did not take part in the revolution against the Ottomans. Language and descent counted for nothing without Orthodoxy: the community that rose in 1821 was defined by religion (and mobilized through trade networks), not by ethnicity.

Sources

• It is significant that the Greek-speaking Catholics of the Cycladic islands, like the Greekspeaking Muslims, did not take part in the Greek revolution against the Ottomans.
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , p. 57

Fighting the Turks and joining the culture — not descent. In the Beaton–Ricks volume it is shown that within Kolettis's Great Idea, participation in the war effort was the single most important argument for belonging to the Greek nation, which is why Slav-, Turkish-, and Albanian-speakers were mostly received with open arms. Membership was earned by deeds and adherence, exactly as one joins a culture or a church, not inherited as ethnicity.

Sources

• participation in the war effort against the Turks was the most important argument for belonging to the Greek nation
  — Roderick Beaton & David Ricks (eds.) (Koraes Professor of Modern Greek, King's College London / Professor of Modern Greek & Comparative Literature, King's College London), THE MAKING OF MODERN GREECE NATIONALISM, ROMANTICISM, THE USES OF THE PAST (1797–1896) , p. 141
• Therefore Slav-, Turkish-, and Albanian-speakers were most often received with open arms
  — Roderick Beaton & David Ricks (eds.) (Koraes Professor of Modern Greek, King's College London / Professor of Modern Greek & Comparative Literature, King's College London), THE MAKING OF MODERN GREECE NATIONALISM, ROMANTICISM, THE USES OF THE PAST (1797–1896) , p. 141

In practice, yes. Herzfeld records that a superior classical education led many Balkan aristocrats of the period — including the Romanian-Albanian writer Dora d'Istria — to refer to themselves as Hellenes; d'Istria was even granted Hellenic nationality by special decree of Parliament for her services to Greek aspirations, while simultaneously invoking her Albanian ancestry when useful. Hellenism operated as an acquired high culture, not a bloodline.

Sources

• that superior education, perhaps, that made many Balkan aristocrats of the period refer to themselves as Hellenes
  — Michael Herzfeld (Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University), Ours Once More Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece
• she was granted Hellenic nationality by a special decree of Parliament
  — Michael Herzfeld (Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University), Ours Once More Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece

Explicitly. The Phanariot scholar Dimitrios Katartzis wrote that having the Hellenes as ancestors was 'a very great honour, without claiming their name' — as Dimaras observed, he distinguished identity from descent. A generation later the nation would collapse that distinction, but at the Enlightenment's peak the most learned Greeks treated Hellenism as a cultural inheritance one honours, not an ethnicity one is.

Sources

• we had the Hellenes as our ancestors is a very great honour, without claiming their name
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , p. 51

Language and culture. Socrates Petmezas's analysis of Greek Romantic nationalism notes that language or culture was treated as the single most objective evidence of a person's national identity — a criterion chosen precisely because a descent-based one was indefensible in the post-Fallmerayer Balkans. The 'eternal nation' was operationally a linguistic-cultural club with a religious entry requirement.

Sources

• Language or culture is, in most cases, seen as the single most objective evidence of a person’s national identity
  — Socrates D. Petmezas (in Beaton & Ricks, eds.) (Professor of History, University of Crete), THE MAKING OF MODERN GREECE NATIONALISM, ROMANTICISM, THE USES OF THE PAST (1797–1896) , p. 125

According to the standard academic history of modern Greece, they helped win it. Koliopoulos and Veremis state that the Albanians and Vlachs 'generously contributed in the making of the Greek nation-state': the Vlachs through the Greek Enlightenment, the Albanians by fighting the war against the Turks. The Albanian-speaking communities of southern Greece — including the naval islands of Hydra and Spetses that supplied the revolutionary fleet — were pillars of the struggle.

Sources

• both had generously contributed in the making of the Greek nation-state in the southern Greek peninsula, the Vlachs in the Greek Enlightenment and the Albanians in helping win the war against the Turks
  — John S. Koliopoulos & Thanos M. Veremis (Professor of Modern History, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki / Professor of Political History, University of Athens), Modern Greece A History since 1821 (A New History of Modern Europe (NWME)) , pp. 3–4

The opposite: they identified with it. Koliopoulos and Veremis note that after centuries of cohabitation the Albanians and Vlachs of southern and central Greece were comfortably Hellenized, identified with Greek national aims and future irredentist objectives, and were far too numerous to be discriminated against. The heroes and the nation-builders were, to a substantial degree, the same Albanian-speaking population the later ethnic narrative rendered invisible.

Sources

• both identified with Greek national aims and future irredentist objectives
  — John S. Koliopoulos & Thanos M. Veremis (Professor of Modern History, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki / Professor of Political History, University of Athens), Modern Greece A History since 1821 (A New History of Modern Europe (NWME)) , pp. 3–4
• had been comfortably Hellenized in most respects and, in some cases, in speech as well
  — John S. Koliopoulos & Thanos M. Veremis (Professor of Modern History, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki / Professor of Political History, University of Athens), Modern Greece A History since 1821 (A New History of Modern Europe (NWME)) , pp. 3–4

By genealogical alchemy. Paparrigopoulos declared the Albanians descendants of the ancient Illyrians — kin to the oldest Greeks, the Pelasgians — their language a mixture built on 'most ancient Greek', and the Christian Albanians self-conscious omogeneís (co-nationals) of the Greeks, indigenous to the Balkans since earliest antiquity. Mackridge shows him wielding religion, descent, language, and culture at once to absorb the heroes into Hellenism and predict their imminent assimilation.

Sources

• those Albanians who were not forced later by the Turks to espouse Islam always thought of themselves as being omogeneís [members of the same race or nation] with the Greeks
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , p. 189
• Paparrigopoulos variously incorporated these groups of incomers into the Greek nation by way of religion, descent, language, and culture
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , p. 189

That the arch-'anti-Hellene' made the Arvanites the truest Hellenes. Gourgouris shows that Fallmerayer, treating the Arvanites as offspring of the ancient Illyrians and hence of the Pelasgians, effectively attributed to the contemporary population an Ur-Hellenic character — an origin older than classical Hellas itself. Greek polemics ignored this entirely: admitting it would have meant crediting the nation's antiquity to its Albanian-speakers.

Sources

• Greeks—under the signifying framework "Arvanites"—an Ur-Hellenic character
  — Stathis Gourgouris (Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature, Columbia University), Dream Nation Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition , p. 145

No — and this honest complication strengthens the debunking, not the myth. Muslim Albanian irregulars formed a large part of the Ottoman counterinsurgency apparatus, though Koliopoulos and Veremis note they habitually 'dragged their feet' when Constantinople called on them, acting as semi-feudal contractors rather than loyal subjects. Albanians fought on both sides for structural reasons of trade, faith, and contract — precisely because 'Albanian' and 'Greek' were not yet national categories.

Sources

• Although the Albanians appear to have dragged their feet, when called by the Ottoman Government to shore up more energetically the effort to suppress the Greek insurgents
  — John S. Koliopoulos & Thanos M. Veremis (Professor of Modern History, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki / Professor of Political History, University of Athens), Modern Greece A History since 1821 (A New History of Modern Europe (NWME)) , pp. 19–20

In the Danubian provinces, Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbs who soldiered professionally were all called Arvanitai or Arnaoútides — Albanians. 'Albanian' named the warrior profession of the Balkans the way 'Greek' named commerce. When the revolution needed fighters, it needed 'Albanians' in both senses — the profession and the language community — which is exactly what the klephts, armatoloi, Souliots, and Hydriot seamen largely were.

Sources

• Greeks, Bulgarians, and Serbs who were professional soldiers were known as Arvanitai or Arnaoútides
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , p. 57

A secret society of diaspora merchants: the Filiki Etaireia (Friendly Society), founded in Odessa in 1814 by three Greek merchants, modelled on the freemasonic societies proliferating at the time. Kalyvas notes its membership profile — merchants first, professionals next — and Jusdanis describes its method: spreading revolutionary pamphlets and planting secret cells across the Balkans to inculcate a national consciousness that did not yet exist among the peasants.

Sources

• The three merchants from Odessa formed in 1814 a secret society inspired by freemason groups
  — Stathis N. Kalyvas (Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science, Yale University (now Gladstone Professor of Government, University of Oxford)), Modern Greece What Everyone Needs to Know® , p. 25
• 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 (Professor of Modern Greek, Ohio State University), Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture Inventing National Literature , p. 34

No. Its founders — Skoufas, Tsakaloff, and Xanthos — deliberately created the impression that the conspiracy had Russia's unconditional backing, which was false, in order to give members psychological reassurance and to exploit what Xanthos himself called the age-old 'superstition' that co-religionist Russia would liberate the Greeks. The nation was recruited through a fabricated great-power endorsement wrapped in messianic prophecy.

Sources

• 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.) (Historian of Greek nationalism; volume edited at the Centre for Hellenic Studies, King's College London), THE MAKING OF MODERN GREECE NATIONALISM, ROMANTICISM, THE USES OF THE PAST (1797–1896) , p. 83

The Church condemned it. Jusdanis records that the Holy Synod anathematized the Filiki Etaireia's members in March 1821 for their seditious activities — underscoring the gulf between the Orthodox establishment and the westernized nationalists. The institution that had actually held the Orthodox community together for centuries damned the plot that claimed to liberate it; the Patriarchate likewise condemned the uprising.

Sources

• anathematized its members in March 1821 for their seditious activities
  — Gregory Jusdanis (Professor of Modern Greek, Ohio State University), Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture Inventing National Literature , p. 34

To the top. Count Ioannis Capodistrias — later first head of the Greek state — was the Tsar's serving foreign minister when the Filiki Etaireia offered him its leadership in 1818 (he declined, judging revolution premature). The man who did lead it, Alexandros Ypsilantis, was a Phanariot prince holding an officer's commission in the Russian army. The 'Greek' revolution was launched by functionaries of the Russian Empire.

Sources

• was in the service of Tsar Alexander I – he was the emperor’s foreign
  — John S. Koliopoulos & Thanos M. Veremis (Professor of Modern History, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki / Professor of Political History, University of Athens), Modern Greece A History since 1821 (A New History of Modern Europe (NWME)) , p. 18
• Ypsilantis, a Phanariot Prince who held an officer’s commission in the
  — John S. Koliopoulos & Thanos M. Veremis (Professor of Modern History, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki / Professor of Political History, University of Athens), Modern Greece A History since 1821 (A New History of Modern Europe (NWME)) , p. 18

Not the Greeks — three Western admirals. At Navarino Bay (20 October 1827) the combined British, French, and Russian squadrons under Admiral Codrington annihilated the Turkish–Egyptian fleet, at a moment when Ibrahim Pasha's counterinsurgency had nearly extinguished the rebellion. Koliopoulos and Veremis add the crucial corollary: the battle simultaneously opened the way to independence and attached Greece permanently to the European powers' security system.

Sources

• In the ensuing battle, the European admirals obliterated the fleet of their opponents. The famous battle opened the way to Greek independence and at the same time attached Greece to the security system overseen by the great European powers
  — John S. Koliopoulos & Thanos M. Veremis (Professor of Modern History, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki / Professor of Political History, University of Athens), Modern Greece A History since 1821 (A New History of Modern Europe (NWME)) , p. 25
• a British, French, and Russian naval force under the British Admiral Codrington defeated a combined Turkish-Egyptian fleet and thereby effectively confirmed the victory of the Greek cause.
  — Michael Herzfeld (Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University), Ours Once More Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece

The scholarship says no. Jusdanis calls it remarkable that the Greeks won at all and states plainly that the involvement of the superpowers of the time — England, France, and Russia — was crucial to their success, each power pursuing its own strategic game over the decaying Ottoman Empire. Kalyvas is blunter still: once the rebellion petered out, Greece was rescued by the Great Powers, who imposed the new state on the reluctant Ottomans.

Sources

• Crucial to their success was the involvement of the superpowers of the time: England, France, and Russia.
  — Gregory Jusdanis (Professor of Modern Greek, Ohio State University), Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture Inventing National Literature , p. 36
• As soon as the Greek rebellion petered out, Greece was rescued by the Great Powers
  — Stathis N. Kalyvas (Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science, Yale University (now Gladstone Professor of Government, University of Oxford)), Modern Greece What Everyone Needs to Know® , p. 201

The London Protocol of 3 February 1830 — signed not by any Greek, but by the ambassadors of Great Britain, France, and Russia, with the Ottoman government's prior consent annexed. Its first article decreed in French, the language of the powers: 'La Grèce formera un Etat indépendant.' Roderick Beaton marks it as the watershed: Greece, the first new nation-state of Europe, was constituted by great-power fiat.

Sources

• the ‘London Protocol’, signed on 3 February 1830 by the ambassadors of Great Britain, France, and Russia
  — Roderick Beaton (Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature, King's College London), THE MAKING OF MODERN GREECE NATIONALISM, ROMANTICISM, THE USES OF THE PAST (1797–1896) , p. 1
• La Grèce formera un Etat indépendant, et jouira de tous les droits politiques, administratifs, et commerciaux
  — Roderick Beaton (Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature, King's College London), THE MAKING OF MODERN GREECE NATIONALISM, ROMANTICISM, THE USES OF THE PAST (1797–1896) , p. 1

The three 'Protecting Powers'. The Greek Question was settled in the summer of 1832 by Great Britain, France, and Russia, who signed the founding treaties with the Bavarian royal house of Wittelsbach — sending the teenage Otto to rule Greece. Hamilakis calls him simply 'the Bavarian monarch that European powers had selected for Greece'; even Otto's legitimation was staged through the classical antiquity Europe itself had projected onto the country.

Sources

• by the three protecting European powers – Great Britain, France, and Russia – which signed two founding international treaties, one with the Bavarian royal dynasty of the Wittelsbach
  — John S. Koliopoulos & Thanos M. Veremis (Professor of Modern History, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki / Professor of Political History, University of Athens), Modern Greece A History since 1821 (A New History of Modern Europe (NWME)) , p. 28
• the Bavarian monarch that European powers had selected for Greece
  — Yannis Hamilakis (Professor of Archaeology, University of Southampton (now Joukowsky Professor of Archaeology, Brown University)), The Nation and its Ruins Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece , p. 108

As an occupation. Kalyvas records that the regency's reputation sank so low that its rule was encapsulated ever after in the term Vavarokratia — 'Bavarian rule', formed on the same pattern as Tourkokratia, the word for Ottoman occupation. The state-building of the 1830s–40s, run by Bavarians and diaspora 'heterochtons', disarmed the very warlords who had fought the war and provoked continuous local rebellions.

Sources

• a process that became encapsulated in the term used to describe it ever since: Vavarokratia
  — Stathis N. Kalyvas (Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science, Yale University (now Gladstone Professor of Government, University of Oxford)), Modern Greece What Everyone Needs to Know® , pp. 39–40

Gourgouris uses exactly that word. Surveying the founding arrangements — independence loans holding the entire country as collateral, foreign-prescribed orthography, a Bavarian king hailed as the 'Marble King' reborn — he concludes: 'What we have here is none other than a perfectly colonial condition', calling national sovereignty in such conditions an absurdity. Modern Greece was instituted as Europe's project on Ottoman ground.

Sources

• What we have here is none other than a perfectly colonial condition
  — Stathis Gourgouris (Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature, Columbia University), Dream Nation Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition , p. 153

As a single causal chain. Commerce created a wealthy Orthodox diaspora ('Greek' as trade identity — Thesis I); that diaspora's merchants founded the Filiki Etaireia and financed the war whose fighters were largely Albanian-speaking warriors (Thesis II); and when the rebellion failed militarily, the Western Powers destroyed the Ottoman fleet, wrote the state into existence, and staffed it with a Bavarian court (Thesis III). Even during the war it was the merchants who, in the Beaton–Ricks volume's words, provided its economic backbone.

Sources

• the merchants that ran away from Chios to Syros or Mykonos or Hydra. These were the ones who had provided the economic backbone of the War of Independence
  — Roderick Beaton & David Ricks (eds.) (Koraes Professor of Modern Greek, King's College London / Professor of Modern Greek & Comparative Literature, King's College London), THE MAKING OF MODERN GREECE NATIONALISM, ROMANTICISM, THE USES OF THE PAST (1797–1896) , p. 248

Because the state manufactured it — through Paparrigopoulos's history, Politis's folklore, the purified language, and mass schooling. Kalyvas identifies the belief in seamless continuity from antiquity as the core of modern Greek identity, propagated by public education; Gellner supplies the general law: nationalism sometimes invents cultures and often obliterates the real ones — such as the Albanian, Vlach, and Romaic worlds that actually made the revolution.

Sources

• a powerful belief in the seamless continuity of Greek civilization from antiquity to the present
  — Stathis N. Kalyvas (Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science, Yale University (now Gladstone Professor of Government, University of Oxford)), Modern Greece What Everyone Needs to Know® , pp. 7–8
• Having a nation is not an inherent attribute of humanity, but it has now come to appear as such.
  — Ernest Gellner (Professor of Philosophy, LSE; later William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge), Nations and Nationalism , p. 6

The revolution's largest mobilization ended in the massacre of the town's Muslim and Jewish population — the event Kotsonis treats as the template of national 'unmixing'. Milios draws the structural lesson: the new national logic demanded that whoever could not be integrated be expelled and erased. Massacres were recorded across the Morea in the same months.

Sources

• The largest single mobilization of 1821 took place in the autumn around Tripolitsa.
  — Yanni Kotsonis (Professor of History, New York University), The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism , p. 205
• any person who cannot be integrated into the nation must be necessarily expelled from the national dominion and erased from national memory
  — John Milios (Professor Emeritus of Political Economy, NTU Athens), Nationalism as a Claim to a State The Greek Revolution of 1821 and the Formation of Modern Greece , p. 111

The Ottoman devastation of Chios (1822) shocked Europe and inspired Delacroix; St. Clair calls the ruin of one of the Levant's most thriving communities total and irreversible. The Greek response weeks later was Kanaris's fireship attack that blew up the Ottoman flagship with its admiral and crew. The war was atrocity and reprisal, not a morality play.

Sources

• They burst into the mastic villages and soon the whole of Chios was given over to massacre and destruction. One of the most peaceful and thriving communities in the Levant was utterly and irretrievably ruined.
  — William St. Clair (Historian; Fellow of the British Academy), That Greece Might Still be Free , p. 115
• On June 6, 1822, Constantinos Kanaris and Andreas Pipinos dealt a severe blow to the Ottoman navy with their fireships, within the harbor of Chios.
  — eds. Kitromilides & Tsoukalas (Harvard University Press), The Greek Revolution A Critical Dictionary , p. 209

They were enslaved and sold — by both sides. Kotsonis documents Greek soldiers selling Muslim girls after Tripolitsa at prices depressed by oversupply; the Critical Dictionary describes Ibrahim's officers receiving captive women as gifts and the slave market of Methoni. National history keeps the heroines and forgets the markets.

Sources

• Soldiers leaving the massacre of Tripolitsa offered up girls at very low prices, and travelers passed homes with Muslim girls on display, for sale. The low price was a sign of oversupply.
  — Yanni Kotsonis (Professor of History, New York University), The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism , p. 221
• Then Ibrahim chose the prettiest, kept the ones he liked himself and the rest were given as gifts to his officials.
  — eds. Kitromilides & Tsoukalas (Harvard University Press), The Greek Revolution A Critical Dictionary , p. 473

The Egyptian army systematically burned the peninsula: St. Clair records that Ibrahim's troops were encouraged to burn every town and village they passed and that he vowed to destroy the whole Morea. Kotsonis adds the price paid by the invaders themselves — of 24,000 Egyptians sent by end-1826, only 8,000 remained alive, mostly to disease.

Sources

• His troops were permitted and encouraged to burn all the Greek towns and villages through which they passed.
  — William St. Clair (Historian; Fellow of the British Academy), That Greece Might Still be Free , p. 238
• By one estimate the Egyptians had sent over a total of 24,000 men by the end of 1826, and only 8,000 were still alive.
  — Yanni Kotsonis (Professor of History, New York University), The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism , p. 309

Kotsonis records the bishop of Methoni at the surrender of Neokastro abandoning four hundred surrendered civilians on a desert island to die of thirst. Religious office was no restraint in a war organized around faith, not ethics.

Sources

• tired of the shooting and stabbing, he abandoned sixty surviving families or four hundred people on a small desert island where they died of exposure and thirst.
  — Yanni Kotsonis (Professor of History, New York University), The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism , p. 205

No. Finlay — a veteran of the war — records the Hydriots massacring every civilian aboard a captured ship, including a deposed Ottoman religious dignitary's family. His sentence is unsparing.

Sources

• The Hydriots murdered all on board in cold blood ; helpless old men, ladies of rank, beautiful slaves, and infant children, were butchered on the deck like cattle.
  — George Finlay (Historian; veteran of the Greek War of Independence), History of the Greek Revolution , p. 216

Twice, in open civil war (1824–25), and endemically. Finlay describes chiefs collecting revenues for private armies while the nation's strength was 'diverted from opposing the Turks'. The civil wars are listed in his own chapter syllabus alongside the campaigns against the Ottomans.

Sources

• caused frequent civil broils, and the whole military strength of the nation was, by this system of brigandage and anarchy, diverted from opposing the Turks.
  — George Finlay (Historian; veteran of the Greek War of Independence), History of the Greek Revolution VOL.II , p. 175

Secret accommodation deals between Christian captains and the Ottomans — a normal, blame-free institution of the old world that national history had to bury. Mazower shows they underpinned Androutsos's power; the Critical Dictionary explains the practice was 'widely observed during the Greek Revolution'.

Sources

• the phenomenon of secret agreements between armatoles and the Ottomans – the kapakia as they were termed – was equally pervasive on the other side of the Pindos mountains
  — Mark Mazower (Professor of History, Columbia University), The Greek Revolution 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe , ch. on Rumeli
• The kapakia, an acceptable arrangement until then, stipulated that under certain conditions negotiations could be opened with an enemy and a truce concluded without blame.
  — eds. Kitromilides & Tsoukalas (Harvard University Press), The Greek Revolution A Critical Dictionary , p. 299

Two loans floated on the London Stock Exchange (1824–25) in the name of the London Greek Committee — heavily oversubscribed, deeply skimmed. Finlay's verdict: the Greek deputies 'and their English and American friends' misappropriated large sums in London and New York; waste was nobody's monopoly. St. Clair judges the loans decisive for the war's outcome all the same.

Sources

• The first Greek loan was floated on the London Stock Exchange in February 1824, in the name of the London Greek Committee. It was heavily oversubscribed.
  — William St. Clair (Historian; Fellow of the British Academy), That Greece Might Still be Free , p. 250
• It is now necessary to mention how the Greek deputies, and their English and American friends, misappropriated large sums at London and New York.
  — George Finlay (Historian; veteran of the Greek War of Independence), History of the Greek Revolution VOL.II , p. 164

Not Pericles. St. Clair's classic study shows educated idealists arriving to factional chiefs, unpaid service, and beggary; the 1822 arrivals 'suffered most', and returning volunteers' warnings were disregarded in Europe, where the fantasy was load-bearing.

Sources

• The majority were men of education and status in their own countries, men with a sense of service, men who felt that they were selflessly joining an honourable cause.
  — William St. Clair (Historian; Fellow of the British Academy), That Greece Might Still be Free , p. 97
• The Philhellenes who arrived in Greece in late 1822 suffered most.
  — William St. Clair (Historian; Fellow of the British Academy), That Greece Might Still be Free , p. 150

Through committees, sermons and fundraising drives. Santelli documents the Greek Committee of Boston under Edward Everett as the region's hub, with fundraising staged on Washington's Birthday and the Fourth of July — Greek liberty packaged as American patriotism.

Sources

• Committee members frequently organized fund-raising efforts around patriotic holidays, especially Washington’s Birthday and the Fourth of July, in order to gather support from the American public.
  — Maureen Connors Santelli (Historian (Cornell University Press)), The Greek Fire American-Ottoman Relations and Democratic Fervor in the Age of Revolutions , p. 82

It converted a stalling insurgency into a European romantic cause. Mazower notes Missolonghi became famous continent-wide as the place Byron died; Beaton traces the deliberate construction of the 'Byron legend' from Trikoupis's funeral oration onward — cultural capital that was cashed at Navarino and London.

Sources

• Since the spring of 1824, Mesolonghi had become renowned across the continent as the place where Byron had died
  — Mark Mazower (Professor of History, Columbia University), The Greek Revolution 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe , ch. on Mesolonghi
• The enduring ‘Byron legend’, that began with Trikoupis’ funeral oration
  — Roderick Beaton (Koraes Professor of Modern Greek, King's College London), Byrons War Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution , epilogue

Through allegory, not reportage: Mazower reads the Massacre of Chios's central figure as Greece-as-Liberty menaced by barbarism — a secularized Madonna. Contemporary critics sneered at 'le massacre de la peinture', but the image fixed the war in Europe's imagination as innocence versus the Orient.

Sources

• The defenceless female, Greece, is also the personification of Liberty, threatened by barbarism
  — Mark Mazower (Professor of History, Columbia University), The Greek Revolution 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe , ch. on Europe
• Nicknamed by contemporary critics “le massacre de la peinture,” this painting not only stirred
  — eds. Kitromilides & Tsoukalas (Harvard University Press), The Greek Revolution A Critical Dictionary , pp. 681–682

The 1770 rising was organized by the Russian state — Milios stresses it was framed as emancipation of Orthodox Christians, 'not of the Greeks', and never took root among the population. The Critical Dictionary counts roughly two dozen Russian agents behind it — the Filiki Etaireia's playbook, one rehearsal earlier.

Sources

• Orlov Revolt had been organised by the Russian state as an alleged move towards the emancipation of the Orthodox Christians (not of the ‘Greeks’!) of the Ottoman Empire
  — John Milios (Professor Emeritus of Political Economy, NTU Athens), Nationalism as a Claim to a State The Greek Revolution of 1821 and the Formation of Modern Greece , p. 91
• the roughly two dozen Russian agents responsible for organizing the 1770 revolution were dwarfed by the 1,093 known Etairists.
  — eds. Kitromilides & Tsoukalas (Harvard University Press), The Greek Revolution A Critical Dictionary , p. 116

Multi-ethnic and non-racial. Mackridge notes that Rigas' 1797 constitution names Vlachs, Bulgarians, Albanians, Armenians and Turks (Muslims) alongside 'Hellenes' as citizens of his republic. The proto-martyr of Greek nationalism designed a state that today's ethnic nationalism would reject.

Sources

• Rigas specifies Vlachs along with ‘Hellenes’, Bulgarians, Albanians, Armenians, and Turks (i.e. Muslims).
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , p. 58

Abroad. Jusdanis lists the diaspora circuit — Venice, Trieste, Vienna, Bucharest, Odessa and beyond; Mackridge quantifies it: nearly a quarter of all Greek books of 1801–20 were published in Vienna alone. The 'national awakening' was a foreign-printed import.

Sources

• Greek books were produced largely in the Greek communities of Europe and circulated, often by subscription, among readers residing in Venice, Trieste, Vienna, Bucharest, Odessa
  — Gregory Jusdanis (Professor of Modern Greek, Ohio State University), Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture Inventing National Literature , p. 155
• During the period 1801–20, almost a quarter of all Greek books were published in Vienna
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , p. 39

He condemned the Revolution and excommunicated its leaders — and was executed by the Porte anyway, for failing to prevent it. Milios states both facts in one sentence; the Church's later embrace of March 25 is retrospective liturgy.

Sources

• he had, of course, condemned the Revolution and had excommunicated its leaders.
  — John Milios (Professor Emeritus of Political Economy, NTU Athens), Nationalism as a Claim to a State The Greek Revolution of 1821 and the Formation of Modern Greece , p. 125

Korais, as an explicit compromise: popular speech 'purified' of Turkish loanwords and foreign features (Jusdanis). Frangoudaki, quoted by Mackridge, calls the result an 'ingenious compromise' that let the new state adopt a living language in disinfected form instead of resurrecting Ancient Greek. A designed language for a designed nation.

Sources

• Korais's compromise was a language based on popular speech, "purified" of Turkish loan words and foreign dialect features
  — Gregory Jusdanis (Professor of Modern Greek, Ohio State University), Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture Inventing National Literature , p. 45
• made it possible for the newly formed Greek state to opt for the living, spoken language, even if in purified form, instead of Ancient Greek’.
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , p. 165

Gourgouris reads Korais's linguistic 'correction' as the very mechanism of imagining the nation — the belief that regenerating words regenerates a people. The 'middle way' was not philology; it was nation-building conducted in grammar.

Sources

• the implication (immediate but no less implicit) of the energies of neology and linguistic correction in the formation of national identity
  — Stathis Gourgouris (Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature, Columbia University), Dream Nation Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition , p. 128

Virtually every post-classical building — mosques, houses, the Frankish tower — in what Hamilakis calls a ritual purification of 'barbarism'. The medieval and Ottoman Acropolis was erased to manufacture a purely classical stage for the new nation.

Sources

• The destruction of virtually all post-classical buildings was a ritual puriWcation of the site from what were seen as the remnants of ‘barbarism’
  — Yannis Hamilakis (Professor of Archaeology, Southampton (now Brown University)), The Nation and its Ruins Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece , p. 88

As relics of ancestors — literally. Hamilakis describes marble whiteness read as the whiteness of ancestral bones, excavations experienced as communion with the dead, and the tomb of 'Philip II' as the cult's most venerated find. This is religion, with archaeologists as clergy.

Sources

• the whiteness of bones which have been exposed to the sun, the sacred bodies of the ancestors.
  — Yannis Hamilakis (Professor of Archaeology, Southampton (now Brown University)), The Nation and its Ruins Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece , p. 293

Paparrigopoulos. Mackridge records the sequence: Zambelios supplied the inchoate idea of appropriating Byzantium; Paparrigopoulos — professor at Athens from 1851 — converted it into the coherent History of the Greek Nation, retro-Hellenizing the Byzantine Empire. Continuity was authored, with named authors.

Sources

• succeeded in converting Zampelios’ inchoate and clumsily expressed vision into a coherent narrative.
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , p. 182

A Frenchman who had never been to Greece. Fauriel's celebrated collection (1824–25) introduced Europe to Greek oral poetry — but Herzfeld notes Fauriel openly included authored patriotic poems, and never had firsthand acquaintance with Greek custom. The 'voice of the Greek people' debuted in Paris, curated.

Sources

• This is the collection of Greek folk songs that had been compiled, translated, and prefaced by the Frenchman Claude Fauriel.
  — eds. Kitromilides & Tsoukalas (Harvard University Press), The Greek Revolution A Critical Dictionary , p. 539
• Fauriel, far from pretending that these poems were from oral sources, acknowledged and praised their authors’ patriotic sensibility
  — Michael Herzfeld (Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University), Ours Once More Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece , ch. 2

Outsiders — Greeks from beyond the kingdom's borders who ran its politics. Mazower notes Mavrokordatos was 'a heterochthon in the new language of the day'; the Critical Dictionary describes the westernizing 'newcomers' (three Phanariots among them) leading the civilian side. The state needed a word to mark that its builders were not from the place they ruled.

Sources

• a heterochthon in the new language of the day
  — Mark Mazower (Professor of History, Columbia University), The Greek Revolution 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe , ch. on Mavrokordatos
• the civilian leadership of the struggle was the “newcomers,” who broadly represented the modernizing (that is: Westernizing) wing in Greek politics.
  — eds. Kitromilides & Tsoukalas (Harvard University Press), The Greek Revolution A Critical Dictionary , p. 378

Finlay, watching the landing at Nafplio in February 1833, wrote that the three most powerful governments in Europe had combined to put him on the throne. Within years the same author was chronicling 'Bavarian despotism' and the 1843 constitutional revolt against it.

Sources

• The three most powerful governments in Europe combined to establish him on his throne.
  — George Finlay (Historian; veteran of the Greek War of Independence), History of the Greek Revolution VOL.II , p. 294

No — brigandage surged under the Bavarians. Finlay records insurrections in Mani and Messenia, a wave of outrages in 1835 met by Regent Armansperg's deaf ear, and Gordon's military expedition to suppress brigands — inside the 'liberated' kingdom.

Sources

• For six weeks every day brought news of some new outrage, but Count Armansperg turned a deaf ear to all complaints.
  — George Finlay (Historian; veteran of the Greek War of Independence), History of the Greek Revolution VOL.II , p. 352

Only in 1864 — after an anti-royal revolt deposed Otto. Sotiropoulos shows the 1864 constitution finally transferred power to the nation and shut the king out of constitution-making. Even then, the sovereign 'nation' was the small kingdom's electorate, not the imagined Hellenism abroad.

Sources

• the constitution as finally promulgated in 1864 transferred
  — Michalis Sotiropoulos (Historian (Cambridge University Press)), Liberalism after the Revolution The Intellectual Foundations of the Greek State, c. 1830–1880 , p. 242

In Asia Minor, 1922. Koliopoulos and Veremis narrate the August collapse of the Greek front, the retreat, and the sealed fate of Anatolian Greeks; Lausanne then mandated the great population exchange. A century of irredentist doctrine ended in catastrophe and 1.2 million refugees.

Sources

• Within a few weeks the fate of the Greeks in Asia Minor was sealed.
  — John S. Koliopoulos & Thanos M. Veremis (Professors of History, Thessaloniki & Athens), Modern Greece A History since 1821 (A New History of Modern Europe (NWME)) , p. 93

It was the royalist slogan against continuing irredentism — quoted by Koliopoulos and Veremis in their account of the National Schism, when Old Greece's establishment resisted sharing power with the refugee newcomers. The nation that had absorbed Albanians and Vlachs choked on its own Anatolian Greeks.

Sources

• The royalist slogan “A small but honorable Greece” was a synonym for
  — John S. Koliopoulos & Thanos M. Veremis (Professors of History, Thessaloniki & Athens), Modern Greece A History since 1821 (A New History of Modern Europe (NWME)) , p. 95

That Greece was made — by Russian-sponsored rehearsals, diaspora merchants and their printing presses, a secret society's fabrications, Albanian-speaking fighters, European fleets, London money, a Bavarian court, an engineered language, purified ruins, and a written continuity. The scholarship's general law (Gellner) and the Greek particulars align completely.

Sources

• Having a nation is not an inherent attribute of humanity, but it has now come to appear as such.
  — Ernest Gellner (Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge), Nations and Nationalism , p. 6
• What we have here is none other than a perfectly colonial condition
  — Stathis Gourgouris (Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature, Columbia University), Dream Nation Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition , p. 153

Romans — Romaioi. Anthony Kaldellis, the leading historian of Byzantine identity, states it as a known fact: the label is pervasive in virtually every text and document. The people modern Greek nationalism claims as 'medieval Greeks' called themselves Romans for a thousand years.

Sources

• It is well known that the people we call Byzantines today called themselves Romans (Romaioi).
  — Anthony Kaldellis (Professor of Classics, Ohio State University (now University of Chicago)), Hellenism in Byzantium The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition , p. 42

Pagan — and it was an insult. Kaldellis calls the semantic inversion one of the most startling in history: 'Greek' came to name exactly those who had previously been barbarians, and imperial legislation officially spoke of the 'impious and loathsome Hellenes'. For most of a millennium, calling a Byzantine a Hellene was an accusation, not a compliment.

Sources

• The word acquired a derogatory sense, to which legislation gave its official stamp, referring to the ‘‘impious and loathsome Hellenes.’’
  — Anthony Kaldellis (Professor of Classics, Ohio State University), Hellenism in Byzantium The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition , p. 122
• pagans of any kind were called Hellenes
  — Anthony Kaldellis (Professor of Classics, Ohio State University), Hellenism in Byzantium The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition , p. 185

No — the question did not even occur to them. Kaldellis records that before the thirteenth century there was no clear sense among Byzantines that any ancient Greeks had survived into their own times, and no interest in the fate of the ancient Greek nation. The ancient Greeks were a foreign pagan people who happened to share their language.

Sources

• before the thirteenth century there was no clear sense among the Byzantines that any of these ancient Greeks had survived into modern times
  — Anthony Kaldellis (Professor of Classics, Ohio State University), Hellenism in Byzantium The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition , p. 185
• These Greeks were an ancient, pagan, and foreign people like the Egyptians and the Persians
  — Anthony Kaldellis (Professor of Classics, Ohio State University), Hellenism in Byzantium The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition , p. 185

Westerners — as a slur. Kaldellis explains that Latins called them Greeks precisely because they refused to call them Romans, a substitution that was 'sometimes deliberately disparaging (like calling modern Germans Goths or Huns)'. Louis II in 871 told the emperor that 'the Greeks' had forfeited the Roman title. Modern Greek nationalism adopted the Western insult as its national name.

Sources

• called Byzantines Greeks because they did not want to call them Romans.
  — Anthony Kaldellis (Professor of Classics, Ohio State University), Hellenism in Byzantium The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition , p. 336
• Yet this substitution was not ideologically neutral and sometimes was deliberately disparaging (like calling modern Germans Goths or Huns).
  — Anthony Kaldellis (Professor of Classics, Ohio State University), Hellenism in Byzantium The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition , p. 336

Kaldellis argues yes — but a ROMAN one. He calls Byzantium a tightly knit national state and even applies modern nation-state criteria to it. That is precisely the problem for Greek nationalism: the strongest scholarly case for Byzantine nationhood is a case for a Roman nation whose identity was not ethnic, and which suppressed national Hellenism until its own thirteenth-century crisis.

Sources

• Byzantium was a very tightly knit national state whose coherence did not derive primarily from its religion or its ruler
  — Anthony Kaldellis (Professor of Classics, Ohio State University), Hellenism in Byzantium The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition , p. 76
• The Byzantines, then, were Romans, not Greeks or Armenians in disguise
  — Anthony Kaldellis (Professor of Classics, Ohio State University), Hellenism in Byzantium The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition , p. 97

No. Kaldellis is explicit that the Romans — and after them the Byzantines — did not define their national community in terms of ethnicity; romanitas was 'precisely not an ethnic identification'. What they traced to ancient Italy were institutions, not bloodlines. The medieval model of belonging was political and cultural, exactly like the Ottoman-era Greek one that followed it.

Sources

• the Romans, and later the Byzantines, did not define their national community in terms of ethnicity
  — Anthony Kaldellis (Professor of Classics, Ohio State University), Hellenism in Byzantium The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition , p. 86
• it was not so much biological descent that the Byzantines traced to ancient Italy as it was the institutions that defined their society.
  — Anthony Kaldellis (Professor of Classics, Ohio State University), Hellenism in Byzantium The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition , p. 86

Only in the thirteenth century, after the catastrophe of 1204 — and even then as a complement to Roman identity, not a replacement. Kaldellis dates the first unambiguous ethnic use to Niketas Choniates, writing amid the sack of Constantinople. Hellenism as a national label is a product of imperial collapse, not of unbroken descent.

Sources

• unambiguously refers to the Byzantines as Hellenes, in a sense that seems to go beyond the mere fact of language and is equivalent to the ethnonym Romans
  — Anthony Kaldellis (Professor of Classics, Ohio State University), Hellenism in Byzantium The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition , p. 341
• when it was revived as a quasi-national label in the thirteenth it was accommodated within the Roman identity of Byzantium
  — Anthony Kaldellis (Professor of Classics, Ohio State University), Hellenism in Byzantium The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition , p. 121

Albanians and Vlachs — as an undeniable, unassimilated presence. Ferriman's 1910 'Home Life in Hellas' names them as the two non-Hellenic peoples of Greece whose existence admits no doubt, since they kept their languages, notes that the Albanians were scattered all over the Morea by the fifteenth century, and reports that the northern half of Andros was Albanian and resisting assimilation.

Sources

• But there are two non-Hellenic peoples in Greece of whose presence there can be no doubt, since they have in part preserved their language, the Albanians and the Vlachs.
  — Z. Duckett Ferriman (British journalist and travel writer (1910)), Home life in Hellas, Greece and the Greeks , p. 205
• The northern half of Andros is Albanian.
  — Z. Duckett Ferriman (British journalist and travel writer (1910)), Home life in Hellas, Greece and the Greeks , p. 74

By abandoning purity for mixture. Ferriman, a sympathetic writer, quotes Hogarth's verdict that the modern Greek's qualities belong to him 'in spite, not because, of his possessing a little old Hellenic blood', combined now 'with younger and ruder races'. Even philhellene literature of the period conceded that the population was mixed — the purity claim is later and more political.

Sources

• in spite, not because, of his possessing a little old Hellenic blood
  — D. G. Hogarth, quoted by Z. Duckett Ferriman (British journalist and travel writer (1910)), Home life in Hellas, Greece and the Greeks , p. 208

They converge. The genetics shows Albanians as a deeply rooted palaeo-Balkan population with modest later admixture; the history shows those same Albanian-speakers as constitutive of the Greek Revolution and of Greek villages down to the 1960s; and Byzantine studies shows that the 'Greek' medieval ancestor of the national myth called itself Roman and used 'Hellene' as a word for pagan. Every leg of the ethnic-continuity story fails on its own evidence.

Sources

• we detect continuity of West Balkan Late Bronze and Iron Age ancestry in Early Medieval Albania, to a greater degree than in neighbouring Balkan regions
  — Davranoglou et al. (Nature Human Behaviour (2026)), Ancient DNA Evidence for the History of the Albanians , p. 1
• It is well known that the people we call Byzantines today called themselves Romans (Romaioi).
  — Anthony Kaldellis (Professor of Classics, Ohio State University), Hellenism in Byzantium The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition , p. 42

St. Clair's accounting is brutal: of roughly six hundred Western volunteers in 1821–22, more than one in three died — and the traffic at the ports ran in both directions, with newcomers stepping off ships past veterans desperate to leave. The philhellenic dream had a mortality rate.

Sources

• Between the outbreak of the Greek Revolution in the spring of 1821 and the end of 1822 about six hundred men from the countries of Western Europe set out to join the cause. Of these, over one hundred and eighty are known by name to have died. If one excludes the German Legion, of whom a high proportion survived, the death-rate among the Philhellenes was about one in three, astonishingly high considering how many stayed only a few days or weeks in the country.
  — William St. Clair (Fellow of the British Academy; Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London), That Greece Might Still be Free , p. 162
• Volunteers, waiting in the European ports, were continually meeting disillusioned volunteers on their way back. Volunteers, arriving in Greek ports, were met at the quay by other volunteers eager to leave.
  — William St. Clair (Fellow of the British Academy; Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London), That Greece Might Still be Free , p. 65

Not gratitude but fury — at the Greeks and at themselves for believing the propaganda. The disillusionment began at first contact with the actual war: volunteers who had come to fight for Athens watched prisoners tortured for sport.

Sources

• Almost without exception they now hated the Greeks with a deep loathing, and cursed themselves for their stupidity in having been deceived.
  — William St. Clair (Fellow of the British Academy; Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London), That Greece Might Still be Free , p. 151
• But they were soon disgusted with the Greek methods of warfare. Hastings, a former British naval officer, saw a Turk being dragged round the deck by his beard then thrown overboard and struck at by boathooks.
  — William St. Clair (Fellow of the British Academy; Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London), That Greece Might Still be Free , p. 124

Yes — at the massacres. St. Clair records that for some philhellenes, the only combat they ever saw in Greece was trying to hold back Greek fighters long enough to save surrendered Turks. Europe's classical fantasy could not process the news; St. Clair's dry verdict is that the shock came from not having read enough history.

Sources

• For some, their only military experience in Greece had been in fighting against the Greeks themselves to try to save a few Turks from the general massacre.
  — William St. Clair (Fellow of the British Academy; Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London), That Greece Might Still be Free , pp. 76–77
• Explanations and excuses could be offered for the exuberance of a longoppressed nation suddenly rending its chains, but massacres did not fit easily into their notions of how the descendants of classical Athenians should behave although that was because they had not read enough history.
  — William St. Clair (Fellow of the British Academy; Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London), That Greece Might Still be Free , pp. 110–111

America's own revolutionary self-image. Santelli shows the cause being grafted onto Washington's Birthday celebrations, and donations surging on disaster news — the fall of Missolonghi drove giving to 'a fever pitch'. The Greeks being helped were, above all, a mirror.

Sources

• One newspaper described the “Greek Fire” as “the zeal in the cause of the Greeks” that was “spreading like wild-fire throughout this country.”
  — Maureen Connors Santelli (Associate Professor of History, Northern Virginia Community College), The Greek Fire American-Ottoman Relations and Democratic Fervor in the Age of Revolutions , pp. 16–17
• More than just holding a debate on the merits of Greece’s war for independence, the members of the committee feverishly planned a public declaration of support for the war by incorporating their devotion to the Greek cause into the upcoming celebration of “the birth of the illustrious Washington.”
  — Maureen Connors Santelli (Associate Professor of History, Northern Virginia Community College), The Greek Fire American-Ottoman Relations and Democratic Fervor in the Age of Revolutions , p. 87
• The fall of Missolonghi combined with the Greek frigate controversy increased public enthusiasm for the Greeks to a fever pitch. Donations for Greece poured into Greek relief societies in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston from all corners of the country.
  — Maureen Connors Santelli (Associate Professor of History, Northern Virginia Community College), The Greek Fire American-Ottoman Relations and Democratic Fervor in the Age of Revolutions , pp. 160–161

Because the legend needed a martyr, not a manager. St. Clair states it without sentiment: death at Missolonghi made Byron the hero he could never have become by living — failure had a sweetness success could not supply. The cause consumed its most famous volunteer and got a fundraising icon in return.

Sources

• Byron became by his death the hero he would never have been if he had lived. The glory of his failure had a sweetness which could not have come from success.
  — William St. Clair (Fellow of the British Academy; Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London), That Greece Might Still be Free , pp. 222–223

Barely three-eighths. The £800,000 loan of 1824 was issued at a 41 per cent discount, and after the London bankers took commissions and expenses, just over £300,000 remained for Greece. The arithmetic of liberation was written in the City.

Sources

• The nominal value was £800,000, but it was issued at a forty-one per cent discount, so that the sale of £100 of stock only realized £59 in cash.
  — William St. Clair (Fellow of the British Academy; Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London), That Greece Might Still be Free , p. 250
• Loughnan, Son, and O’Brien, London bankers, the contractors, then proceeded to deduct at various times a sum of about £38,000 for commissions and expenses. And so by the time all the administrative deductions had been made in London, there only remained just over £300,000 to spend on behalf of Greece out of the £800,000 loan!
  — William St. Clair (Fellow of the British Academy; Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London), That Greece Might Still be Free , p. 250

It ended a civil war, by giving the factions something to divide. Finlay records the first civil war stopping the moment news arrived that a loan instalment had reached Zante; Comstock, entirely sympathetic to the Greeks, admits the loan inflamed the very dissensions it was hoped to heal.

Sources

• It was concluded as soon as the news reached the belligerents that an instalment of the first English loan had arrived at Zante.
  — George Finlay (Historian and philhellene; veteran of the Greek War of Independence), History of the Greek Revolution VOL.II , p. 38
• But unhappily, the renewal of those dissensions in the Morea, which it was fondly hoped that the loan would heal, or enable the Government to terminate, not only prevented the prosecution of the winter campaign, but placed the cause in the greatest jeopardy.
  — John L. Comstock (American physician and historian; contemporary chronicler of the Revolution (1828)), HISTORY OF THE GREEK REVOLUTION , pp. 306–307

Never — Finlay, who lived the rest of his life in Greece, wrote that the lenders received neither a shilling of interest nor a syllable of gratitude from the thousands their money enriched. The second loan of 1825 was worse: St. Clair calls its handling scandalous and its full story unreconstructable even after parliamentary inquiries.

Sources

• The lenders risked their money to deliver Greece, and they have never received a shilling of interest or a syllable of gratitude from the thousands whom their money enriched.
  — George Finlay (Historian and philhellene; veteran of the Greek War of Independence), History of the Greek Revolution VOL.II , p. 36
• If some of the dealings connected with the first loan were less than proper, the handling of the second loan was scandalous. Despite the voluminous information that was gradually drawn out by successive inquiries, the complete story still defies reconstruction. Hundreds of thousands of pounds were wasted on the schemes to build a fleet for Greece—a complex story told in a later chapter.
  — William St. Clair (Fellow of the British Academy; Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London), That Greece Might Still be Free , p. 257

A capitulated garrison and its families were slaughtered at the water's edge. Finlay's account — drawn from eyewitnesses — is among the most unbearable passages in the historiography, and it describes the victors the philhellenes had come to serve.

Sources

• Women, wounded with musket-balls and sabre-cuts, rushed to the sea, seeking to escape, and were deliberately shot. Mothers robbed of their clothes, with infants in their arms, plunged into the water to conceal themselves from shame, and they were then made a mark for inhuman riflemen. Greeks seized infants from their mothers' breasts and dashed them against the rocks.
  — George Finlay (Historian and philhellene; veteran of the Greek War of Independence), History of the Greek Revolution VOL.I , pp. 275–276

Two days after the city fell, some two thousand prisoners — mostly women and children — were marched to a ravine and murdered: not frenzy but administration. Kotsonis reads the totality as the point: brand-new national categories in whose name the vanquished had no right to exist. Even Comstock's pro-Greek account concedes thousands perished.

Sources

• After the Greeks had been in possession of the city for forty-eight hours, they deliberately collected together about two thousand persons of every age and sex, but principally women and children, and led them to a ravine in the nearest mountain, where they murdered every soul.
  — George Finlay (Historian and philhellene; veteran of the Greek War of Independence), History of the Greek Revolution VOL.I , p. 281
• It was an expression of deep resentment that was untethered and legitimized as the “nation” of “the Greeks”—terms that were just then become widespread. The violence was total because it was waged by and on totalizing categories, these ones ethnic and national. The vanquished did not have the right to exist, and this applied to the collective of a total enemy—men, women, and children.
  — Yanni Kotsonis (Professor of History, New York University), The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism , p. 230
• about six thousand Turks are said to have perished, and some thousands were made prisoners, while numbers escaped to the mountains.
  — John L. Comstock (American physician and historian; contemporary chronicler of the Revolution (1828)), HISTORY OF THE GREEK REVOLUTION , pp. 187–188

Because the war's object was demographic: a land without Muslims. The expulsions and massacres were not the revolution going wrong — they were the mechanism by which a patchwork of languages and localities was 'simplified' into two new totalities, one unified for the first time, the other erased. The categories 'Greek' and 'Turk' were the war's products, not its causes.

Sources

• But this targeted and categorical violence was not an unintended consequence; it was the goal of the warfare. Contemporaries said as much as they attacked their neighbors, and we should listen more carefully. Muslims should not inhabit the land and they should never return.
  — Yanni Kotsonis (Professor of History, New York University), The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism , p. 37
• It is better called simplification: the creation of two new national totalities, the one unified for the first time, the other erased. The disappearance of Islam is remarkable, and so is the merger of such a diverse patchwork of languages, dialects, regions, and localities into a single Greek nation. Nations destroy and nations create; they efface and they empower.
  — Yanni Kotsonis (Professor of History, New York University), The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism , p. 37
• The Greek Revolution did not simply pit Greek against Turk; it created the categories of Greek and Turk and made the literary flourishes of the few into the reality for masses of peasants and sailors. The categories were absolute, and the violence was absolute.
  — Yanni Kotsonis (Professor of History, New York University), The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism , p. 337

As religions. Kotsonis is explicit: the war was waged by Christians only, for a Christians-only state, and tens of thousands 'died and were enslaved as religions', with no evidence of anyone dying as a race. The Critical Dictionary adds that the ethnic labels themselves were so fluid that one fighter could hold two or three at once.

Sources

• This did take hold and the Greek Revolution was a war waged by Christians only, in pursuit of a Christians-only state. In the massacres and battles of the 1820s there was no evidence of people dying as races on any side; in the mass enslavements there was no talk of skin color. But tens of thousands died and were enslaved as religions.
  — Yanni Kotsonis (Professor of History, New York University), The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism , pp. 108–109
• Therefore, one cannot always definitively establish who was a “Greek,” a Romaios, a “Serb,” or a “Bulgarian” in the Greek Revolution. The same person could easily have had double or triple identities at that time.
  — Slobodan G. Marković, in Kitromilides & Tsoukalas (eds.) (Professor, Faculty of Political Science, University of Belgrade), The Greek Revolution A Critical Dictionary , p. 60

The Critical Dictionary's estimate runs from 230,000 to 600,000 civilian dead; Mazower adds that perhaps a quarter of the Peloponnese's entire population was uprooted. After Chios, the enslaved were so many that Constantinople's slave market overflowed into the fish market and the street corners.

Sources

• It is impossible to secure accurate estimates of numbers of losses and civilian casualties of the war for such a distant period, but estimates range from about 230,000 to 600,000
  — Paschalis M. Kitromilides, in Kitromilides & Tsoukalas (eds.) (Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Athens), The Greek Revolution A Critical Dictionary , p. 38
• Greece itself had emerged from a conflict that had uprooted perhaps one-quarter of the entire population of the Peloponnese alone. The tragic aftermath of the siege of Mesolonghi when thousands of Greek women and children had been sold into slavery galvanized the sympathies of Europe.
  — Mark Mazower (Professor of History, Columbia University), The Greek Revolution 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe , Introduction
• The normal slave market was too small to cope with the numbers and many had to be exposed for sale in the fish market or on the street corners. The recalcitrant and the inconsolable were killed off as being of no commercial value and their bodies left to rot in the streets or by the water’s edge in the usual Turkish way with their severed heads between their legs, to be devoured in time by the scavenging dogs which infested the city.
  — William St. Clair (Fellow of the British Academy; Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London), That Greece Might Still be Free , pp. 115–116

No. Finlay — who fought in it — says that by the summer of 1827 Greece was 'utterly exhausted' and only European intervention could prevent extermination or resubmission to the sultan. Navarino was fought months later by British, French, and Russian fleets.

Sources

• In the summer of the year 1827 Greece was utterly exhausted, and the interference of the European powers could alone prevent the extermination of the population, or their submission to the sultan.
  — George Finlay (Historian and philhellene; veteran of the Greek War of Independence), History of the Greek Revolution VOL.II , p. 169

Three foreign ministries. Mazower notes the country's fate and frontier depended on the Great Powers and their choice of ruler, not the battlefield; the 1832 protocol fixed the Arta–Volos line and attached a guaranteed loan that paid, among other things, for the Bavarian army that would garrison the new state and the indemnity owed to the Porte.

Sources

• The country’s fate – and its frontier – now depended not upon the battlefield but upon the three Great Powers and their choice of ruler: for it was with the new future king and not with Capodistrias that they would eventually reach an agreement.
  — Mark Mazower (Professor of History, Columbia University), The Greek Revolution 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe , ch. 18
• The protocol also finalized the Greek-Ottoman frontier along the Arta-Volos line and the powers guaranteed a loan of £2,400,000 to the new state, partly intended to cover the indemnity to the Porte for its loss of territory and the expenses of a Bavarian force which was to form the nucleus of the Greek regular army.
  — Ioannis D. Stefanidis, in Kitromilides & Tsoukalas (eds.) (Professor of Diplomatic History, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), The Greek Revolution A Critical Dictionary , pp. 409–410

No. Mazower describes the settlement as an agreement among monarchs in which neither the Greek people nor their representatives had any diplomatic standing; the Critical Dictionary notes the powers then 'entrusted' the country to a Bavarian king. Independence arrived as a decision made about Greece, not by it.

Sources

• Yet this was in effect an agreement among monarchs, one in which neither the Greek people nor their chosen representatives had any diplomatic standing.
  — Mark Mazower (Professor of History, Columbia University), The Greek Revolution 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe , ch. 18
• By entrusting the fate of Greece to a Bavarian King, the so-called great powers further complicated the already complex legacy of the revolution.
  — Mathieu Grenet, in Kitromilides & Tsoukalas (eds.) (Associate Professor of History, Institut national universitaire Champollion), The Greek Revolution A Critical Dictionary , pp. 79–80

The Greeks wanted an Orthodox ruler and got a devout Catholic teenager — Mazower records that none of the powers 'was much worried what they thought'. The state born of an Orthodox uprising was crowned in a faith its subjects did not share.

Sources

• Otto was a devout Catholic and the Greeks would have preferred an Orthodox ruler, but none of the European powers was much worried what they thought and the issue was not as seriously regarded then as it would later become.
  — Mark Mazower (Professor of History, Columbia University), The Greek Revolution 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe , ch. 18

Two patriarchs and twenty-one prelates, in March 1821 — including Grigorios V, later canonized as a national martyr. The Critical Dictionary records both the act and the long historiographical embarrassment over it: the national church's first official response to the national revolution was anathema.

Sources

• the two patriarchs and twenty-one prelates signed an act excommunicating the revolution, which was addressed to all the prelates and the clergy
  — Stavros Th. Anestidis, in Kitromilides & Tsoukalas (eds.) (Centre for Asia Minor Studies, Athens), The Greek Revolution A Critical Dictionary , p. 214
• Grigorios V has been severely criticized by many historians for his excommunication and the consequences this could have had—but did not—for the outcome of the revolution.
  — Stavros Th. Anestidis, in Kitromilides & Tsoukalas (eds.) (Centre for Asia Minor Studies, Athens), The Greek Revolution A Critical Dictionary , p. 217

It assassinated the president and tried the general for treason. Capodistrias was stabbed at a church door in Nauplia in 1831 by fellow Greeks; two years later the Bavarian regency put Kolokotronis and Plapoutas on trial for treason on what the Critical Dictionary flatly calls trumped-up charges.

Sources

• In the act of falling he received the stab of a yataghan through the lungs, and he expired without uttering a word.
  — George Finlay (Historian and philhellene; veteran of the Greek War of Independence), History of the Greek Revolution VOL.II , pp. 253–254
• In 1832, he was nominated by the Bavarian regency to be the president of the law court of Nafplio, which had to judge Theodoros Kolokotronis, Dimitrios Plapoutas, and other former leaders of the War of Independence on trumped-up charges of treason.
  — Roxane D. Argyropoulos, in Kitromilides & Tsoukalas (eds.) (Research Director Emerita, National Hellenic Research Foundation), The Greek Revolution A Critical Dictionary , p. 444

Finlay, writing in 1861, called the patriotic klepht 'a creation of yesterday' — Robin Hoods manufactured by back-dating. Even Kolokotronis's celebrated early career he files under highway robbery and sheep-stealing, at the expense mostly of Greek peasants.

Sources

• The Greeks make Robin Hoods, or deini-heroes, of their leading klephts ; they magnify the exploits of the class, and antedate its existence. The patriotic brigands of modern Greek poetry are a creation of yesterday.
  — George Finlay (Historian and philhellene; veteran of the Greek War of Independence), History of the Greek Revolution VOL.I , pp. 40–41
• Even the klephts of the Morea, who were mere brigands, were not numerous until after the social disorganisation caused by the Russian invasion and the insurrectionary movements of 1770. The exploits of Zacharias and of Kolokotroni, though celebrated in unpoetic verses and in bombastical prose, were only the deeds of highwaymen and sheep-stealers.
  — George Finlay (Historian and philhellene; veteran of the Greek War of Independence), History of the Greek Revolution VOL.I , pp. 44–45

By forgetting what they did to each other. Mazower notes the heroes 'loathed, maligned, ousted, betrayed and even occasionally killed one another' before posterity recast them as emblems of virtue — Kolokotronis followed his victories by fomenting civil war, Karaïskakis first worked for the Turks. Paparrigopoulos's continuity thesis then supplied the frame that made the whole pantheon eternally Greek.

Sources

• many of the heroes of 1821 had in reality loathed, maligned, ousted, betrayed and even occasionally killed one another. Yet with time they became emblems of moral virtue, inspirations and models of patriotic self-sacrifice for future generations.
  — Mark Mazower (Professor of History, Columbia University), The Greek Revolution 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe , Introduction
• Kolokotronis and Karaïskakis – the two fighters most familiar to Greeks today – both played important roles, but the former followed his most remarkable exploits against the Turks by fomenting civil war while the latter actually worked with the Turks before going to war against them.
  — Mark Mazower (Professor of History, Columbia University), The Greek Revolution 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe , Introduction
• The assumption underlying his magnum opus is the continuous existence since remote antiquity of a Greek people assuming different characteristics at each historical age (e.g., the adoption of Christianity) which, however, did not alter its enduring cultural identity.
  — Pericles S. Vallianos, in Kitromilides & Tsoukalas (eds.) (Professor of Political Philosophy, University of Athens), The Greek Revolution A Critical Dictionary , p. 740

Hatred of the Turks and devotion to the Tsar — Finlay's words, not a polemicist's. He adds that the society would have died of inanition had it not traded on Alexander I's presumed secret protection, and the man who finally raised the standard, Ypsilantis, was a serving Russian major-general.

Sources

• Subscriptions were easily collected; and agents, called apostles, were sent among the orthodox population of Turkey to preach hatred to the Turks and devotion to the czar of Russia.
  — George Finlay (Historian and philhellene; veteran of the Greek War of Independence), History of the Greek Revolution VOL.I , p. 134
• In all probability the Philike Hetairia would have soon expired of inanition had it not been kept alive by its members making use of the name of Alexander I., Emperor of Russia, who was generally supposed to grant it his secret protection.
  — George Finlay (Historian and philhellene; veteran of the Greek War of Independence), History of the Greek Revolution VOL.I , p. 135
• Another person, who appeared about the same time, and on whom great reliance was placed, was Alexander Ipsilanti, a prince by birth, a Major-General in the Russian service, and son of the late governor of Walachia.
  — John L. Comstock (American physician and historian; contemporary chronicler of the Revolution (1828)), HISTORY OF THE GREEK REVOLUTION , p. 146

About a third. Mazower's count of Ypsilantis's original force: some 2,500 Greeks, the rest Russians, Ukrainians, Serbs, Montenegrins, Albanians, and Bulgarians. The 'national' uprising began as an Orthodox international brigade under a Russian officer.

Sources

• Only about 2,500 of the original force were Greeks; the rest were Russians and Ukrainians, Serbs, Montenegrins, Albanians and Bulgarians.
  — Mark Mazower (Professor of History, Columbia University), The Greek Revolution 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe , ch. 1

Under the Ottomans — as an experiment. Kaldellis states the Byzantine Romans never defined themselves ethnically, and that only after centuries of Ottoman rule did part of the Greek-speaking Rum millet begin experimenting with notions of Hellenic nationality. His summary of Byzantium is the cleanest in the literature: Romans who happened to speak Greek, not Greeks who happened to call themselves Romans.

Sources

• Nor, as we have mentioned, did the Romans of Byzantium define themselves ethnically. It was only after centuries of Ottoman rule that a segment of the Greek-speaking portion of the millet of Rum began to experiment with notions of Hellenic nationality, involving a variety of linguistic, cultural, religious, and ethnic criteria.
  — Anthony Kaldellis (Professor of Classics, University of Chicago), Hellenism in Byzantium The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition , p. 58
• Few who speak English today are English. Likewise, the Byzantines were Romans who happened to speak Greek and not Greeks who happened to call themselves Romans.
  — Anthony Kaldellis (Professor of Classics, University of Chicago), Hellenism in Byzantium The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition , p. 127
• ‘‘Greeks,’’ then, now included exactly those who had previously been barbarians. Given the canonical status of the classical polarity, this must count as one of the most startling semantic reversals in history, and is partly attributable to the fact that it was the first time in history when what it meant to be Greek was being (re)defined by people who rejected the Hellenic ideal.
  — Anthony Kaldellis (Professor of Classics, University of Chicago), Hellenism in Byzantium The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition , p. 136

The Albanians — 'nay, without them it would never have been won'. Ferriman, an unabashed friend of Greece, names Hydra's seamen and Souli's soldiers, Miaoulis and Botsaris, as Albanians who were Hellenes 'in heart and soul' — conceding the whole debunkers' case while intending a compliment: Greekness as culture and allegiance, not descent.

Sources

• The Albanians bore the brunt of the War of Independence—nay, without them it would never have been won. The seamen of Hydra, the soldiers of Suli were Albanians, and they included such men as Miaoulis and Marco Bozzaris. Yet these were all Hellenes in heart and soul.
  — Z. Duckett Ferriman (British philhellene author and traveller; writing in 1910), Home life in Hellas, Greece and the Greeks , pp. 244–245
• The Albanian population of Greece is completely Hellenised. It is of Toskh origin.
  — Z. Duckett Ferriman (British philhellene author and traveller; writing in 1910), Home life in Hellas, Greece and the Greeks , p. 12

Albanian. Finlay's roll call is devastating for the continuity myth: Marathon, Plataea, Salamis, Olympia 'are now inhabited by Albanians, and not by Greeks', and Albanian was still the children's street language beside the Theseion decades into the Greek kingdom. He compares the displacement to the Saxon conquest of Celtic England.

Sources

• Marathon, Plataea, Leuctra, Salamis, Mantinea, Ira, and Olympia, are now inhabited by Albanians, and not by Greeks. Even in the streets of Athens, though it has been for more than a quarter of a century the capital of a Greek kingdom, the Albanian language is still heard among the children playing in the streets near the temple of Theseus and the arch of Hadrian.
  — George Finlay (Historian and philhellene; veteran of the Greek War of Independence), History of the Greek Revolution VOL.I , p. 48
• Some Albanian colonies settled in Greece before it was conquered by the Othoman Turks ; and within the greater part of the limits occupied by the Albanians at the present day, the Greeks have been as completely expelled as the Celtic race in England by the Saxon.
  — George Finlay (Historian and philhellene; veteran of the Greek War of Independence), History of the Greek Revolution VOL.I , p. 47

The 2026 Nature Human Behaviour study — over 6,000 ancient West Eurasian genomes plus 74 newly sequenced ethnic Albanians — finds that present-day Albanians descend predominantly from a remnant palaeo-Balkan population showing continuity of West Balkan Bronze- and Iron-Age ancestry through Early Medieval Albania, to a greater degree than in neighbouring Balkan regions. Medieval Albanian samples derive 68–84% of their ancestry from local Bronze/Iron Age populations.

Sources

• We find that present-day Albanians predominantly descend from this remnant palaeo-Balkan group, which by at least 800–900 CE already exhibited a genetic profile suggesting that they are ancestral to many modern Albanians.
  — Davranoglou, Lauka, Aristodemou et al. (Nature Human Behaviour (Tel Aviv, Oxford, Panteion, Academy of Sciences of Albania, Ohio State, European University Cyprus)), Ancient DNA Evidence for the History of the Albanians , p. 1 (abstract)
• The results indicated that 68–84% of Albania_Medieval’s ancestry came from an Albania_BA_IA-related population
  — Davranoglou et al. (Nature Human Behaviour (2026)), Ancient DNA Evidence for the History of the Albanians , p. 5

Far less than their Slavic-speaking neighbours. The study measures 10–20% Medieval East European-related admixture on average, and finds ~19% of Albanian paternal lineages come from Migration-Period haplogroups — against 36–70% in present-day South Slavic peoples, whose Slavic autosomal ancestry runs 55–70%.

Sources

• we observe geographically structured admixture with Medieval East European-related groups, averaging 10–20% across present-day Albanians
  — Davranoglou et al. (Nature Human Behaviour (2026)), Ancient DNA Evidence for the History of the Albanians , p. 1 (abstract)
• Albanians derive approximately 19% of their paternal ancestry from Migration Period-associated Y-chromosome haplogroups (R1a-M417, I2a-M423, I1-M253; Supplementary Fig. 10), in contrast to present-day South Slavic peoples, where these lineages reach 36–70%
  — Davranoglou et al. (Nature Human Behaviour (2026)), Ancient DNA Evidence for the History of the Albanians , p. 8

In the mountains of the north-western Balkans, on the genetic evidence. The study places the proto-Albanian homeland in northern Albania (Mat, Martanesh, Dibër, Mirditë), south-west Kosovo and part of North Macedonia — the ancient contact zone between 'Illyrians' and the Dardanians. Notably it also cautions that ancient ethnonyms like 'Illyrian' and 'Thracian' are largely artificial constructs.

Sources

• an original proto-Albanian homeland spanning mountainous regions in present-day northern Albania (Mat, Martanesh, Diber and Mirdite), southwest Kosovo and part of North Macedonia
  — Davranoglou et al. (Nature Human Behaviour (2026)), Ancient DNA Evidence for the History of the Albanians , p. 15
• all of the ethnonyms of ancient Balkan peoples, such as ‘Illyrian’ and ‘Thracian’, are probably artificial constructs
  — Davranoglou et al. (Nature Human Behaviour (2026)), Ancient DNA Evidence for the History of the Albanians , p. 2

Recent linguistic work proposes a sister-group relationship between Albanian and Greek — the two are the only palaeo-Balkan languages that survived at all. The genetics paper notes this while stressing the Albanian language's own prehistory remains enigmatic: it is attested only from the fifteenth century CE.

Sources

• These events ultimately led to the extinction of all palaeo-Balkan languages except Greek and Albanian.
  — Davranoglou et al. (Nature Human Behaviour (2026)), Ancient DNA Evidence for the History of the Albanians , p. 1
• Recent linguistic hypotheses propose a sister-group relationship of Albanian to Greek
  — Davranoglou et al. (Nature Human Behaviour (2026)), Ancient DNA Evidence for the History of the Albanians , p. 2

The study links the Arbëresh of southern Italy — settled from the sixteenth century — primarily to Peloponnesian Arvanites, and finds they carry East European-derived Y-lineages, showing that admixture had begun before their migration. The Arvanites of Greece are thus genetically part of the same Albanian ethnogenesis, not a separate ancient population.

Sources

• the Albanian-speaking diaspora in Southern Italy, known as the Arberesh, who settled from the sixteenth century onwards and originated primarily from Peloponnesian Arvanites
  — Davranoglou et al. (Nature Human Behaviour (2026)), Ancient DNA Evidence for the History of the Albanians , p. 15

Romans. For roughly a thousand years the people we now file under 'Byzantine Greeks' identified as Romaioi — Romans — and Anthony Kaldellis argues their state was, in effect, the nation-state of the Romans, not of the Hellenes. The supposed middle link of the eternal Greek nation did not think of itself as Greek at all; that label was pinned on it retroactively by modern nationalism.

Sources

• It is well known that the people we call Byzantines today called themselves Romans (Romaioi).
  — Anthony Kaldellis (Professor of Classics, Ohio State University), Hellenism in Byzantium The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition , pp. 55–56
• Byzantium was not ‘‘a universal, Christian, multiethnic empire,’’ as all think today, but a nation-state like most modern nation-states, in this case the nation-state of the Romans.
  — Anthony Kaldellis (Professor of Classics, Ohio State University), Hellenism in Byzantium The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition , pp. 18–19

It meant pagan — and had done so since the Gospels. For the ancestors of today's Greeks, 'Hellene' was a religious insult, not an ethnonym; the handful of late Byzantine literati who toyed with the word were indulging an antiquarian conceit, not expressing national identity. A community whose own name for the 'Hellenes' meant unbelievers can hardly have been an eternal Hellenic ethnicity.

Sources

• For eastern Christians since the time of the Gospels, the word Ellin [Hellene] had meant a non-Christian, that is, a pagan.
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , p. 66
• Such uses were a rhetorical conceit confined to a small intellectual elite, and they were hardly ever intended to imply that the authors felt that they and their compatriots were to be identified with the ancient Hellenes.
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , p. 66

No — he was spreading a liturgy. Mackridge shows that Kosmas promoted Greek as the language of Orthodox Christianity, not of any nation, so that Albanian- and Vlach-speaking Christians could follow the scriptures. Even the famous nationalist coda attributed to him — 'and our nation is Hellenic' — appears to be a twentieth-century fabrication, invented precisely because the authentic record would not say what nationalism needed it to say.

Sources

• he saw Greek as the language of Orthodox Christianity, not the language of the Greek nation.
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , p. 76
• It is likely that this additional phrase is a nationalist fabrication by Michalopoulos. Michalopoulos claims he is quoting from a manuscript in his possession, but this manuscript is not extant today
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , pp. 75–76

Because the boundary of 'the Greeks' was religion, not ethnicity or language. The Greek-speaking Catholics of the Cyclades and the Greek-speaking Muslims — native speakers, often of Christian descent — simply did not join the war of 1821, and the Muslims were never counted as members of the nation at all. Wrong church, no Greekness: the test was confessional, and everyone at the time knew it.

Sources

• It is significant that the Greek-speaking Catholics of the Cycladic islands, like the Greekspeaking Muslims, did not take part in the Greek revolution against the Ottomans.
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , p. 73
• Greek-speaking Muslims have not usually been considered as belonging to the Greek nation. Some communities of Greek-speaking Muslims lived in Macedonia.
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , p. 82

They crossed themselves and answered 'we're Christians' — the question itself was unintelligible. Kalyvas records that national identity had yet to take hold of people's consciousness decades after the Greek state existed, which is why the rival Balkan states opened hundreds of schools to manufacture Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, and Romanians out of the same undifferentiated Christian peasantry. Nationality was the output of the school system, not its input.

Sources

• Whenever I asked them, what they were—Romaioi [i.e., Greeks] or Voulgaroi [Bulgarians], they stared at me incomprehensibly. Asking each other what my words meant, crossing themselves, they would answer me naively: ‘Well, we’re Christians—what do you mean, Romaioi or Voulgaroi?’
  — Stathis N. Kalyvas (Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science, Yale University (now Gladstone Professor of Government, University of Oxford)), Modern Greece What Everyone Needs to Know® , p. 67
• Later on, they tried to shape, as it were, these ethnographic maps on the ground by opening hundreds of local schools to make Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, or Romanians out of the local Christian peasantry.
  — Stathis N. Kalyvas (Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science, Yale University (now Gladstone Professor of Government, University of Oxford)), Modern Greece What Everyone Needs to Know® , p. 67

No — and the roll-call is startling. Kotsonis lists Botsaris, Tzavellas, Androutsos, Karaiskakis, Miaoulis, Kanaris, and Bouboulina as leaders who spoke Greek in public but 'swore and sang in Albanian', while Rigas, the Revolution's prophet, was a Vlach. Nor were these exceptions: most revolutionaries from Roumeli and most of the Aegean sea captains were Albanian speakers. The pantheon of the war of Greek liberation was, linguistically, to a remarkable degree Albanian.

Sources

• the leaders of the Revolution spoke Greek but swore and sang in Albanian: Botsaris, Tzavellas, Androutsos, Karaiskakis, Miaoulis, Kanaris, and Bouboulina, to name only a few. The Greek revolutionary Righas Velestinlis was Vlach.
  — Yanni Kotsonis (Professor of History, New York University), The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism , pp. 41–42
• That they spoke Albanian is one of the awkward truths of the Greek Revolution, but in this the Souliots were not exceptional. Most of the Greek revolutionaries from Roumeli spoke Albanian, as did most of the Greek sea captains from the Aegean Islands.
  — Yanni Kotsonis (Professor of History, New York University), The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism , p. 128

Albanian-speaking islanders. Finlay, who fought in the war himself, recorded that Hydra held nearly twenty thousand inhabitants 'of pure Albanian race' on the eve of the Revolution; Beaton notes that the shipowners of Hydra and Spetses spoke Albanian as their mother tongue and were only then adding Greek endings to their surnames. The naval arm that won Greek independence was an Albanian-speaking institution — a fact the national narrative quietly filed away.

Sources

• The island of Hydra contained nearly twenty thousand inhabitants of pure Albanian race before the Greek Revolution.
  — George Finlay (Historian and philhellene; veteran of the Greek War of Independence), History of the Greek Revolution VOL.I , pp. 49–50
• most of the inhabitants of Hydra and Spetses spoke Albanian as their mother tongue, but now began to add Greek endings to their family names
  — Roderick Beaton, quoted by John Milios (Professor Emeritus of Political Economy, National Technical University of Athens), Nationalism as a Claim to a State The Greek Revolution of 1821 and the Formation of Modern Greece , pp. 118–119

No. Ioannis Kolettis was a Vlach (Aromanian) from Syrrako in Epirus who served as physician at Ali Pasha's court and commanded a division of the Russians' 'Italian Legion' as 'Giovanni Coletti' before reinventing himself as Greece's archetypal politician. The 1844 assembly that tried to bar 'heterochthons' from office had to carve out an exception for him — the same year he proclaimed the Megali Idea, the mission statement of Greek nationalism. The doctrine of eternal Hellenism was announced by a man whose mother tongue was not Greek.

Sources

• Kolettis, a doctor of Aromanian origin from Syrrako in Epirus, who had served as physician to Ali Pasha of Yannina and subsequently as Greek ambassador in Paris.
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , pp. 192–193
• The Italian Legion that was formed by the Russians on the islands in 1801 had divisions commanded by Charalambos Grigorakis and one Giovanni Coletti—better known as Ioannis Kolettis, a future leader of the Greek Revolution and a statesman of independent Greece
  — Yanni Kotsonis (Professor of History, New York University), The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism , p. 93

Largely not. The revolutionary administrations of Roumeli were handed in 1822 to two arriving Phanariots from Constantinople — Mavrokordatos and Negris — as president and vice-president, the first governor was a Corfiot count whose native language was Italian, and Koliopoulos and Veremis conclude that the 'heterochthons', Greeks born outside the kingdom, constituted its most vital element. The state was built by outsiders whom the 'autochthons' repeatedly tried to exclude from office.

Sources

• Whereas the autochthons formed a majority in the realm, the heterochthons constituted its most vital element.
  — John S. Koliopoulos & Thanos M. Veremis (Professor of Modern History, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki / Professor of Political History, University of Athens), Modern Greece A History since 1821 (A New History of Modern Europe (NWME)) , p. 20
• In 1822 at Piada the Phanariots Mavrokordatos and Negris were given the highest offices of president and vicepresident.
  — Yanni Kotsonis (Professor of History, New York University), The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism , pp. 256–257

Yes — by design. Mackridge shows that the Hellenic national project did not stress common ancestry: an Aromanian or an Arvanite became a Hellene by being Christian and espousing the cause. Precisely because their own languages were unwritten, many Vlach- and Albanian-speaking Orthodox Christians embraced Hellenism as a career and an identity. Greekness in the 1820s was an enlistment, not an inheritance.

Sources

• you could become a Hellene even if you were an Aromanian or an Arvanite, provided you were a Christian and espoused the Hellenic cause
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , p. 31
• given that they could not base a claim to nationhood on the historical past, many Aromanian- and Albanian-speaking Orthodox Christians were content to embrace the Hellenic national cause.
  — Peter Mackridge (Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek, University of Oxford), Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 , p. 79