Two Greek Revolutions

TWO GREEK REVOLUTIONS Greek nationalism under the Turkish yoke was nourished and sustained from three sources. One, the purest, was the Orthodox faith: since the Gospel and most of the patristic writings were written in Greek, a good knowledge of Orthodoxy required a good knowledge of Greek and Byzantine history in which Hellenism, the patriotic belief in the greatness of the Greek nation, was linked inseparably with its confession of the Orthodox faith. This Greek Orthodox nationalism (with the emphasis on “Orthodox”) was to be found especially among the monks of Mount Athos. Another source was a natural desire to be liberated from the Ottoman yoke. The situation of the Greeks in the Ottoman Empire was very difficult. As time passed and Ottoman power weakened, persecution of the faith increased. “The rights of the patriarch,” writes Fr. Alexander Schmemann, “were gradually reduced to nothing; all that was left to him was the ‘right’ of being responsible for the Christians. In the course of seventy-three years in the eighteenth century, the patriarch was replaced forty-eight times! Some were deposed and reinstalled as many as five times; many were put to torture. The rebellions of the Janissaries were accompanied by terrible bloodshed. Churches were defiled, relics cut to pieces, and the Holy Gifts profaned. Christian pogroms became more and more frequent. In the nineteenth century Turkey was simply rotting away, but the ‘sick man of Europe’ was supported at all points by other nations in opposition to Russia,”1 the only real protector of the Orthodox in the Ottoman empire. The Patriarch was bound by his oath of allegiance to the Sultan not to encourage protest against the Turks. However, as Sir Steven Runciman writes, “the Greek in the provinces could not understand the subtle politics of the Patriarchate. He could not appreciate the delicacy that the Patriarch and his advisers had to show in their dealings with the Sublime Porte. He looked to his village priest or to the local abbot or the bishop to protect him against the Turkish governmental authorities, and he gave his support to anyone who would champion him against the government. In the great days of the Ottoman Empire, when the administration had been efficient and on the whole just, Greek nationalism could be kept underground. But by the eighteenth century the administrative machinery was beginning to run down. Provincial Turkish governors began to revolt against the Sultan and could usually count on the support of the local Greeks. A growing number of outlaws took to the mountains. In Slav districts they were known by the Turkish name of haidouks; in Greece they were called the Klephts. They lived by banditry, directed mainly against the Turkish landowners; but they were quite ready to rob Christian merchants or travellers of any nationality. They could count on the support of the local Christian villagers, to whom they were 1 Schmemann, The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1977, p. 274. latter-day Robin Hoods; they could almost always find refuge from the Turkish police in some local monastery…”2 The first and second sources of Greek nationalism combined: it was because the faith was being trampled on that the Greek revolution of 1821 had widespread support in the Church and was understood as a struggle “for faith and fatherland” in response to the insults cast at both by the Turks. A third, less pure source of Greek nationalism was the western teaching on freedom promulgated by the French revolution, and brought back to Greece by the sons of the wealthy Phanariot families of Constantinople. By the end of the eighteenth century most educated Greeks were deeply tainted by westernism. There were other, political and economic factors exciting the dreams of the Phanariots: the conquest of the Ionian islands by Napoleon and then by the British; the rebellion of the Mohammedan warlord Ali Pasha against the Sultan in 1820; the inexorable gradual southward expansion of the Russian Empire, which drew Greek minds to the prophecies about the liberation of Constantinople by “the yellow-haired race”, the Russians; and the restrictions on the accumulation of capital in the Ottoman empire, which contrasted unfavourably with the more business-friendly regimes they had encountered in the West. However, the most important influences were undoubtedly ideological – the influence of western ideas made available by the explosion in the provision of educational opportunities for young Greeks that the Phanariots created in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth. Such an emphasis on education had been made by Hieromartyr Cosmas of Aitolia (+1779), who built over two hundred schools. But he emphasised education in Orthodoxy in order to escape the snares of western culture.3 These merchants, however, sent young Greeks to the universities of Western Europe, especially Germany. “Here,” writes Richard Clogg, “they came into contact not only with the heady ideas of the Enlightenment, of the French Revolution and of romantic nationalism but they were made aware of the extraordinary hold which the language and civilisation of ancient Greece had over the minds of their educated European contemporaries. 2 Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, Cambridge University Press, 1968, p. 391. 3 “It is better,” he said, “my brother, for you to have a Greek school in your village rather than fountains and rivers, for when your child becomes educated, then he becomes a human being. The school opens churches; the school opens monasteries.” And to the people of Parga he said: “Take care to establish without fail a Greek school in which your children will learn all that you are ignorant of [because] our faith wasn’t established by ignorant saints, but by wise and educated saints who interpreted the Holy Scriptures accurately and who enlightened us sufficiently by inspired teachings” (Nomikos Michael Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ: Orthodox Christian Neomartyrs of the Ottoman Period 1437-1860, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000, p. 202). The Europeans were originally interested only in the ancient monuments. Hence the removal of the Elgin marbles and the Venus of Milo to London and Paris respectively. However, attitudes were changed, as Adam Zamoyski points out, “by Lord Byron’s visit to Greece in 1809, whose fruits were the second canto of Childe Harold, published in 1809, The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos (1813), and The Siege of Corinth (1816). More interested in people than in stones, Byron concentrated on depicting the craggy nobility of the natives. He was also much affected by the notion of a once great people under alien oppression. The negative picture of the Turks and their culture – rococo Ottomania had given way to priggish neoclassical contempt – made the oppression all the crueller to the European imagination, in which the Turk combined lustfulness with barbarity. The educated European of 1800 was as disgusted by the idea of the ‘terrible’ Turk defiling Greece as his twelfth- century forebear had been at the idea of Saracens profaning the Holy Land. And just as the Holy Land called out to Christendom for vengeance and crusade, so the oppressed Greek land called out for liberation” 4 “During the centuries of the Tourkokratia,” writes Richard Clogg, “knowledge of the ancient Greek world had all but died out, but, under the stimulus of western classical scholarship, the budding intelligentsia developed an awareness that they were the heirs to an heritage that was universally revered throughout the civilised world. By the eve of the war in independence this progonoplexia (ancestor obsession) and arkhaiolatreia (worship of antiquity), to use the expressive Greek terms, had reached almost obsessive proportions. It was precisely during the first decade of the nineteenth century that nationalists, much to the consternation of the Church authorities, began to baptise their children with the names of (and to call their ships after) the worthies of ancient Greece rather than the Christian saints.”5 Such nationalistic worship of Greek pagan antiquity could be combined with contempt for the real glory of Greece – the Orthodox Church. A case in point was Adamantios Korais. Runciman writes: “He was born at Smyrna in 1748 and went as a young man to Paris, which he made his headquarters for the rest of his life. There he made contact with the French Encyclopédistes and their successors. From them he learnt a dislike for clericalism and for tradition. From reading Gibbon he came to believe that Christianity had ushered in a dark age for European civilization. His friend Karl Schlegel taught him to identify nationality with language. ‘Language is the nation.’ He wrote; ‘for where one says la langue de France one means the French nation.’ The Greeks of his time were therefore of the same race as the ancient Greeks. But to make the identification closer he sought to reform the language so that it would be nearer to the Classical form. He was, in fact, primarily responsible for the 4 Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999, p. 233. There is a tradition in Greece that Byron died as an Orthodox Christian… (V.M.) 5 Clogg, A Concise History of Greece, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 27-28. introduction of katharevousa... For the Byzantine past of Greece and for the Orthodox Church he had no use at all. His writings were eagerly read by the young intellectuals at the Phanar and by men of education all over Greece.”6 One of the few defences that the Church was able to muster against this rampant westernism was a work entitled The Paternal Exhortation and published in 1798.

Load more