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'Imagined Communities' and the Origins of the National Question in the Balkans Paschalis M. Kitromilides European History Quarterly 1989; 19; 149 DOI: 10.1177/026569148901900203

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’Imagined Communities’ and the Origins of the National Question in the Balkans

Nationalism has been one of the most powerful - and perhaps also one of the most destructive - forces shaping the course of Balkan history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After a century of national assertion the Balkans came to be known as the ’powder keg’ of Europe on the eve of World War I. The explosiveness of regional politics was due to the interplay of great-power imperialisms with the conflicting claims and aspirations of the region’s nationalities. How these claims and aspirations were shaped and articulated, and what were the origins of the national assertiveness that underlay them, are not only major questions in the political and intellectual history of south-eastern Europe, but also important issues with intrinsic theoretical significance for the understanding of the phenomenon of nationalism. The origins of militant Balkan nationalism can be traced in the so-called period of Enlightenment and ’national awakening’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. An examination of this process of intellectual and cultural change, free from the pre- conceptions and sensitivities of national attachments, can provide a revealing case study of how ethnic consciousness is cultivated so that a sense of national identity may be imprinted upon a social group. This process has been aptly described as the mental construction of nations as ’imagined communities’.1 I do not propose to address this broad range of substantive and theoretical issues. On the contrary, my objective is to approach analytically three particular but inter-related historical problems which have been totally obfuscated by nationalist mythology: first, the initial construction of concepts of ethnic identity in the writings of Balkan intellectuals; secondly, the role of the modern state

149-

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 150 in the process of national definition; and, thirdly, the antinomy between Orthodoxy - the dominant religious doctrine of the area - and nationalism. The approach is comparative and analytical, attempting to bring some concepts of the social sciences to the reinterpretation of the mass of historical material that bears on the subject. In this task the method has to be genuinely interdisciplinary, combining perspectives from political science, anthropology and sociology in an effort to test the applicability of some influential recent theories of nationalism against the evidence of the historical record. As a matter of fact, nationalism constitutes one of those fields of social science research whose fluidity and invertebrateness make interdisciplinarity imperative, in order to avoid the simplicity of the various methodological monisms and the tautology of universal explanatory propositions. This methodological approach is geared toward a revisionist substantive objective. The comparative analysis of the evidence seeks to challenge two assumptions prevailing in the historiography of eastern Europe. The first assumption to be questioned might be described as the ’national awakening’ assumption. This pervasive view posits that the ’nation’, as a community of culture and social sentiments, preceded the state. This is an assumption with a long and distinguished intellectual genealogy in European thought, traceable to the writings of Herder and Fichte. It was precisely this assumption that guided the work of the greatest historians of south-eastern Europe, men like Konstantinos Paparigopoulos and Nicolae Iorga. Balkan nationalists appropriated these ideas and tried to endow their states with a long pre-statehood history of nationality and national assertion, glorifying as a rule their medieval past and seeking to establish uninterrupted continuities of national existence since the remotest antiquity. Western historians have shared and reproduced this assumption in their writing on Balkan politics and history, despite their critical and often ironic attitude toward the aspirations of Balkan nationalism.2 The second assumption which should be re-examined is the view of Orthodoxy as the champion of nationalism. According to this assumption the Orthodox Church played a major role in preserving and cultivating the ethnic identity of the nations of south-eastern Europe under Ottoman rule and in guiding their national ’awakening’. An explicit claim of this assumption is the identification of Orthodoxy with nationality, while an unstated implication points to the recognition of the Orthodox Church as

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 151 a vanguard of nationalism. This assumption, whose intellectual origins are easily traceable to the second half of the nineteenth century, has prevailed in twentieth-century Balkan historiography with tenacity equal to the ’national awakening’ assumption.33

In considering the issue of the origins of ethnic definition I would simply like to transpose our historical understanding of a phenomenon now taken for granted, the fact of articulate national communities in the Balkans, to the point on the continuum of cultural fermentation when these communities came to ’be imagined’ for the first time. If historical perception manages to recapture that moment, our analysis of the Balkan case might shed some light on the broader phenomenon of the articulation of national communities. By focusing on a few characteristic pieces of evidence from the sources of the Greek Enlightenment I will attempt to recover some indications of the imaginative construction of national communities in the Balkans. These origins can be traced in the definitions of national communities and ethnic groups that surface for the first time in the literature of the closing years of the eighteenth and the first two decades of the nineteenth century. It was precisely in that period that an articulate movement of cultural change, reflecting the influences and espousing the values of the Enlightenment, made its appearance in south-eastern Europe, using the Greek language as its medium of transmission. The literature produced in Greek under the impact of the ideas of the Enlightenment introduced for the first time the concepts of distinct ethnic identities in Balkan society. The appearance of national definitions, which registered an awareness of ethnic distinctions among the Orthodox Christian groups of Balkan society, illustrates in a precise and documented manner the transition from the ecumenical community of Balkan Orthodoxy and the religiously defined millets to a still inchoate, inarticulate and uncertain world of modern linguistic nations. Early modern Balkan society, as it was politically unified by the Ottoman conquest and culturally homogenized by the Orthodox Church, was ideologically and psychologically held together by the bonds and traditions of eastern Orthodoxy. Headed by the Great Church of Constantinople as the supreme locus of spiritual and political leadership and with its central focus unsnakeably fixed on the old imperial capital of the East Roman emperors

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 152 and the Ottoman sultans, Balkan society in this guise remained the heir of the imperial ecumenical ideas of medieval Byzantium. It was precisely in this context that the Orthodox Church, with the Ecumenical Patriarch at its head, was transmogrified into a polity in captivity. Against this background, modern concepts of secular statehood and nationality associated with the ideas of the Enlightenment and Western rationalism came to disrupt and subvert both Ottoman rule and Orthodox unity in the Balkans. The eventual conflicting nationalisms which sprang out of this ideological transformation were the forces that brought the shared Byzantine legacy to an end in Balkan society.44

The earliest evidence of this transformation can be traced in the recordings of ethnic distinctions we encounter in Enlightenment literature. These texts register for the first time the consciousness taking root among Balkan intellectuals that their society could be conceived as a composite mosaic of nationalities rather than as a unified Christian community. I will attempt to survey this evidence as well as the debates engendered by the awareness of ethnic distinctions as to how national diversity might and should be handled. The focus will be on the Greek sources of the period, in the hope that complementary projects might follow on the same problem as viewed in other Balkan cultures. The survey of the evidence and of the pertinent debates reveals some important dimensions of the phenomenon of nationalism, which nationalist ideology itself does not willingly recognize. The recognition of the fact that Balkan Orthodoxy was composed of an ethnically diverse assortment of collectivities differentiated primarily by their language is attested by the publication of grammars and dictionaries which attempted to codify a written form for the vernaculars spoken by some of these groups. Attempts to produce a written medium of these vernaculars, the effort to alphabetize them and codify their grammar and vocabulary, constitutes a recognition of the existence of linguistically defined ethnic differences among the Balkan Orthodox. Thus Albanians, Vlachs and Bulgarians were set on the way to recognition and self-definition as collective categories by virtue of their linguistic particularities. The publication of a Greek-Vlach-Albanian dictionary by Theodore Kavalliotis in

1770 provides the earliest evidence for this.5 Such initiatives were not motivated by a nationalist logic, however. This is made clear by the cultural evangelism of another dictionary published in 1802 by Daniel of Moschopolis. This Greek-Vlach-Bulgarian-Albanian glossary opened with an invitation to the non-Greek-speaking Orthodox to Hellenize themselves linguistically and culturally with the argument that this transformation would open up avenues of social mobility.6 These early recordings of linguistic diversity, and the concomi- tant implicit acknowledgement of ethnic distinctions, were integral components of a process of Enlightenment in the most elementary and literal sense: they appeared as almost imperceptible and unintended by-products of initiatives to bring the benefits of education and cultural change to non-literate groups, some of them still in a semi-nomadic social condition. Ethnic definition and eventually nationalism were the distant products of a new ethnography that was introduced as part of the effort to raise the banner of civilization and bring the lights of learning amidst the backwardness and traditionalism of the Balkan heartlands. The connection between Enlightenment, language and nationality was fully elaborated during the 1780s by Demetrios Katartzis, a high official in the court of Wallachia and one of the foremost theoreticians on the use of the vernacular as the language of education and culture in the Balkans of the time. Katartzis extolled the virtues of the Greek vernacular as spoken by his contemporaries in the urban centres of the Ottoman Empire, and argued that as a medium of communication and expression it was equal to classical Greek and much superior to any other language. He also indicated that the cultivation of the vernacular through the composition of books in the language amounted to the best form of education for the ’nation’.7 Katartzis was probably the first among authors writing in modern Greek to use the Greek word for nation, ethnos, to describe a collectivity clearly delineated by its language and cultural heritage. The sense of a modern Greek nation defined by its vernacular language runs throughout Katartzis’s writings and forms the major premise of his argument for the linguistic reform that would elevate spoken modern Greek into one of the major languages of civilization.8 The feeling of pride in the language reflected a deeper pride in the nation, which, Katartzis stressed, existed indisputably as a distinct ’civil society’ with its civil laws and ecclesiastical institutions and partook through the privileges

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 154 of its church in the exercise of authority in the empire to which it was subjected. Thus, against the strictures of some ’Franks’ that the Greeks did not have a homeland of their own, Katartzis argued that in fact the Greeks met the criteria of Aristotle’s definition of citizenship and therefore constituted a nation, which furthermore could pride itself on a very distinguished historical genealogy.9 In the multi-ethnic empire of the Ottomans the Greeks existed side by side with other national communities, among which Katartzis was particularly concerned for the Vlachs and the Moldavians for whom he prescribed programmes of cultural reforms parallel to those of the Greeks, 1° in Katartzis’s social thought, therefore, the nations of the Balkans, as defined by their languages, were added to the broader picture of the world of nations which composed the civilization of modern Europe. Thus, on a certain basic level, the Enlightenment consisted essentially of signs that the ethnography of the Balkans was taking up a more complex character in the minds of the local intelligentsia. The older conception of a unified Orthodox Christian society which defined alien elements in religious terms had already receded with the gradual articulation of a sense of distinct historical identity among Serbian-speaking and Romanian-speaking intellectuals in areas bordering on the Habsburg Empire, and among Greeks of the diaspora and of the commercial urban centres of the Ottoman Empire. These fledgling national identities provided some of the most telling evidence of the impact of the Enlightenment on Balkan thought. The recognition of other linguistic groups as well was an additional indication of the gradual orientation of social thought toward the national question. A sense of the new awareness of ethnic diversity and its historical antecedents is conveyed most vividly in two important Greek sources of the Enlightenment. Both authors were living in the Danubian Principalities and attempted to recreate the complex ethnography of the region. Daniel Philippides, in his Geography of Romania (1816), provides a physical and social geography of the area which includes a detailed survey of ethnic groups, as defined mostly by language. I Philippides is also aware of, and attempts to explain, the phenomenon of the Vlach diaspora south of the Danube. 12 Furthermore, it should be noted that he was the first author, certainly among those writing in Greek as fare as I know but probably among those writing in Romanian as well, to use the term ’Romania’ to describe as one entity the several

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 155 geographical and political regions, including Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania, which exactly a century after he wrote made up the modern Romanian national state.13 The originality of his conception in political terms can be appreciated if it is noted that in 1781 his intellectual precursor, Iossipos Moisiodax, had listed the Moldavians and the Wallachians among several other Christian nations of Europe such as the Spaniards, the French and the Italians, suggesting no conception of a common Romanian identity Writing respectively just before and after the age of the French Revolution, Moisiodax and Philippides with their handling of the categories of ethnic definition may be taken to chart the distance travelled during the intervening tumultuous decades. Two years after Philippides, Dionysios Photinos in his History of Dacia (1818) projects the analysis of ethnic diversity in his reconstruction of the Balkan past. As indicated by his own eluci- dation of the title of his work, the ancient name of Dacia is used to denote the whole historical and geographical region comprising Transylvania, Wallachia and Moldavia. Implicit in this construction of the title is a fledgling conception of Romanian national unity. Photinos composes a historical ethnology of Romania by noting the various ethnic elements which over the centuries shaped the population inhabiting the area.15 Although his modern ethnology is not as analytical as that of Philippides, Photinos seems aware of the process of ethnic differentiation as a component of historical experience. His major contribution, however, remains his incisive analysis of the social structure and class cleavages in the environ- ment of the Principalities, which naturally constituted a much more tangible factor in social experience at the time.16 Naturally, the new ethnography was not without political implications. This was made abundantly clear by the revolutionary appeal of Rhigas Velestinlis to the subject nationalities of the Bal- kans and Asia Minor, including the Turks, to rise against Ottoman despotism: ’Bulgarians and Albanians, Armenians and Greeks’ are urged to put on the sword of freedom, but Lazes and Egyptians are also invited to join in the struggle against despotism. The impact of the Serbian revolt of 1804, especially among the Greeks, owed its psychological dynamism to the politicization of the new ethnography. Thus, the anonymous patriot who published the radical tract Hellenic Nomarchy in 1806 stressed the moral example of the Serbs as another oppressed people fighting for its freedom from Ottoman tyranny. 18

Besides its revolutionary potential, however, the new ethnography had other implications in the minds of some early-ninteenth- century Greek intellectuals. The recognition of linguistic diversity was perceived as a challenge, and as an opportunity for the Greek nation to spread its culture and thus widen its dangerously narrowed-down demographic basis. Neophytos Doukas, writing from Vienna in 1815, urged the Patriarch of Constantinople, Cyril VI (1813-18), to initiate a new cultural crusade. 19 Doukas’s argument is important because it reveals the basic premise of nationalist thinking: the definition of the nation in terms of language elaborated by political romanticism. It deserves to be quoted in full:

because our language has been, as it were, completely compressed and been confmed in the smallest possible area, Greece itself, the nation, mappropnatety, has been lessened as well, so that it is larger, on its own, than almost no other nation in Europe; however inasmuch it is in this regard reduced, it could equally derive advantages in other respects if it receives the necessary care; because no other nation might to an equal degree extend its language as we can, on the one hand through intermixture with those around us in Bulgaria, Wallachia, Albania, Asia and everywhere else, and on the other hand thanks to the elegance and usefulness of our tongue. In view, therefore, of our many present wants, if someone supposed that there might be anything more in our interest or better serving our prestige than spreading our language, he would not seem to me to be thmking soundly.2°

A number of important issues must be noted in this passage. First, there is a clear linguistically-based definition of the nation: those who speak Greek form one community, while those speaking Bulgarian, Albanian, Vlach or any other language are outside it. The older ecumenical community of Balkan Orthodoxy appears to be a thing of the past. Secondly, however, all these linguistically alien groups can potentially become members of the Greek nation if they adopt its language and culture, for aesthetic as well as practical reasons. Obviously there is a straight line running from Daniel of Moschopolis, who urged his fellow members of Balkan linguistic minorities to learn Greek and become Greek, to Neophytos Doukas, who urged the leaders of Greek culture to absorb them into it. The nation is thus conceived as essentially a cultural community. Thirdly, it is clear that cultural Hellenization was directed toward the marginal and less articulate groups which were seen as a more promising source of recruits. It is noteworthy

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 157 that in this literature references to the Serbs are virtually non- existent, indicating that they were considered a nation apart with its identity already articulate and therefore beyond absorbability into Greek culture. All this is evidence of the ethnological ferment in the Balkans at the time of the French Revolution and indicates the broad range of alternative courses which the evolution of ethnic communities could have taken. Finally, one cannot but detect in Doukas’s attitude and arguments the seeds of that culturally based national messianism which formed an integral part of political romanticism.21 For the achievement of the cultural evangelism he visualized, Neophytos Doukas urged the Patriarch to dispatch one hundred monks from Mount Athos to teach the Greek vernacular in areas where it was not spoken. The propagation of the Greek language ought to be the foremost care of all bishops of the Church, according to Doukas, and especially of those who happened to be shepherds of alien-speakers in both continents.22 Here the allusion was clear to the Turcophone Orthodox of the interior of Asia Minor as well as to the Albanian, Slavic and Vlach speakers of the Balkans. In making these arguments Doukas was essentially alluding to the omissions of the Church in what he judged to be the top priority of its obligations. Nor did he mince his words in criticizing both the hierarchy and monasticism for corruption, which he held accountable for their failures in the field of education.23 In his criticism of the Church Neophytos Doukas, an ordained priest and archimandrite of the Church himself, echoed the standard anticlerical arguments of the time which are usually associated with radicals of the Enlightenment such as the anonymous author of Hellenic Nomarchy or the also anonymous author from Smyrna who composed the recently published Libel of Prelates.24 What dif- ferentiates Doukas’s thesis from the outspoken radical patriotism of these tracts is not only his Atticizing language, which has led many to mistake him for a conservative, but the romantic tenets of his argument, which made him one of the earliest exponents of the theory of romantic nationalism in south-eastern Europe.25 Doukas’s pleas did not remain unanswered on the part of the Church. The response came from Ignatius, archbishop of Wallachia, who had fled the Ottoman Empire and was living in exile owing to his Russian sympathies. Ignatius took up the task of setting the record straight in defence of the Orthodox

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 158 clergy against Doukas’s ’calumnies’.26 The response attempted to rectify Doukas’s argument point by point. Answering the latter’s strictures against the hierarchy for indifference in educational matters, Ignatius delineated in detail the contribution of several prelates to the promotion of education in their dioceses,27 but dismissed the suggestion of the dispatch of Athonite monks as teachers of Greek as unrealistic and economically unsound.28 The debate gave Ignatius an occasion to voice his abhorrence of the French Revolution and to point, apparently as a warning in all directions, at the evils it brought upon the people of France.29 In the course of his argument, however, Ignatius confirmed with greater detail and precision the new linguistic ethnography which was presupposed in Doukas’s cultural theory:

Alien-speaking but co-religionist nations inhabiting European Turkey are the following: Moldavians; Wallachians; Bulgarians; Serbs; Vlachs of Epirus, Greece and Thessaly; Albanians; and the Tsakones, a small people m the Peloponnese. Those who inhabit the east are the Ionians, the peoples of the Pontos as far as Mesopotamia, and the Arabs.3°

In approaching and handling these Orthodox peoples, however, the Church, according to Ignatius, should not depart from traditional and familiar methods which had stood the test of time. The Church’s pastoral traditions assured, to Ignatius’s mind, a much more effective method of keeping everyone in the fold than Doukas’s fantasies of cultural evangelism. Thus Ignatius, although aware of modern historical facts, persisted in a traditional conception of the community of the faithful. The vision of the nation as a distinct community, defined primarily by its language, was not beyond the purview of his vision but was superseded by a more fundamental and essential collectivity, the community of the faithful:

The Hellenes, the Bulgarians, the Vlachs, the Serbs and the Albanians form today nations, each with its own language. All these peoples, however, as well as those inhabiting the east, unified by their faith and by the Church, form one body and one nation under the name of Greeks or Romans. Thus the Ottoman government, when addressing its Chnstian Orthodox subjects, calls them generally Romans, and the Patriarch it always calls Patnarch of the Romans.31

The debate between Neophytos Doukas and Archbishop Ignatius puts in clear relief at a quite early date the conflict between Orthodoxy and nationalism. The Church’s hostility

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 159 towards the Enlightenment, and towards the political radicalism brought to the fore by the French and Greek revolutions, is a well known and perfectly understandable historical attitude that forms part of the broader picture of the confrontation between the ecumenical and theocratic values of Orthodoxy and the parochial secular ideals of nationalism. The Church objected precisely to the ethnic parochialism of secular nationalism, which threatened, and eventually did destroy, the ecumenicity of transcendental values which held Balkan society together within the fold of Orthodoxy during the centuries of captivity. In place of this ecumenicity nationalism put the celebration of the individuality and uniqueness of linguistic communities, which fired the imagination of ’sensitive members’ of society such as Doukas, who ’carried an image of it as a nation ... in virtue of some unifying factor - language, ethnic origin, a common history (real or imaginary)’.32 The Doukas-Ignatius exchange, which depended essentially upon the new ethnography that was discovered in the Balkans by the social thought of the Enlightenment, is perhaps the theoretically most interesting and certainly one of the earliest con- frontations between nationalism and Orthodoxy which punctuated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Before pursuing the multifaceted manifestations of that conflict, however, we should turn to another, and ultimately the most critical, dimension of the process of ethnic definition, which hinges on the role of the modern state in the construction of national identity. The emergence of the state added the decisive factor which politicized the facts and myths of cultural ethnography and transformed cultural debates into power politics and eventually violent conflict.

The State and the Nation

The imaginative construction of national communities in the writings of early-nineteenth-century Balkan intellectuals inaugurated what was to become the central ideological dimension of the emergence and consolidation of independent states in the Balkans throughout the rest of the century. Against the ’national awakening’ assumption dominating the historiography of Central and Eastern Europe, I would like to argue that what actually happened in the nineteenth century was the gradual construction of the nations by the states. Concepts of national identity originally

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 160 devised by intellectual ’vanguards’ were imprinted upon social groups whose ethnic definition might have evolved in a number of alternative ways. This was an integral part of the process of national integration upon which newly independent states had to embark in order to overcome their often vicarious beginnings. In this task, of course, the states proved much more effective than the groups of Enlightenment intellectuals, with their literary appeals, were ever likely to have been. There is, nevertheless, an unmistakable continuity of purpose between the earlier generations of intellectuals, who first conceived the idea of national community, and nineteenth-century statecraft, which mobilized cultural resources and policies in order to achieve the national integration of the newly independent states. It is precisely the role of the modern state in shaping up national identity and in cultivating national consciousness among Balkan peoples that forms the critical factor in the growth of nationalism in south-eastern Europe to the point of the explosive antagonisms of rival national movements in the late nineteenth and throughout most of the twentieth century. In this perspective nation-building was a dynamic process not of ’national awakening’, but of forging collective identity as part of the creation of a sense of community that was essential in cementing the social cohesion of the new nation-states of the nineteenth century. This is not, of course, a Balkan peculiarity. It went on all over Europe in the same period, even within the oldest independent nation-states such as France.33 It was just such a model of nation-building that Fichte urged his German compatriots to follow when he stressed the bonds of language and national education as the components of constructing a new national community.34 It is pointless, therefore, to insist with Ernest Gellner that nationalism is a force of social entropy arising in response to the needs of social communication in industrial society.35 On the contrary, nationalism arose as a specifically political force closely linked to the creation of the modern state - phenomena that did not as a rule coincide with industrialization. A case in point, which might be useful in illustrating the role of the state in the growth of nationalism in the Balkans, is that of Greek nationalism in the nineteenth century. Arguments and expectations such as those that Neophytos Doukas had somehow misdirected towards the Orthodox Church, to whose principles they were fundamentally alien, received high priority on the agenda of the new, independent state that emerged in 1830 after

a ten-year war of liberation. The task that the Orthodox Church could not fulfil, because of the traditional character of its philosophy and policies, was quite suitable to the purposes of the modern state. The cultivation of national identity therefore became an integral part of its domestic statecraft and its foreign policy. Although parallel developments can easily be discerned in the history of the other Balkan states - Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and eventually Albania - the process was initiated in Greece much earlier and unfolded along two dimensions. One was internal and comprised stages and initiatives of nation-building within the independent kingdom of Greece. The other was external and involved the orientation of the Greek state toward the Greek-inhabited territories of the Ottoman Empire which were considered as integral parts of the historical patrimony of Hellenism. I should like to suggest that it was the dynamic interplay of these two processes that essentially went into the making of the Greek national self-conception. The consideration of the formation of national identity in these terms, besides providing Ariadne’s clue to an analytical unravelling of the problem of nationalism, offers a further theoretical opportunity as well: a chance to recover the political ’ role of the modern state, which recent research on the state tends to sacrifice on the altar of political economy. This is an aspect of the theories of nationalism which research on the state can profitably explore. It is precisely the political role of the state in consolidating and legitimizing its power that will emerge most clearly from a consideration of the two dimensions of nation-building in nineteenth-century Greece.

The internal process of nation-building attempted to bridge the gap between the new state that emerged in independent Greece and the traditional society upon which the modern state institutions had to exercise their control. Nation-building, in the sense of the cultivation of a homogenizing national identity, also had to mend the social cleavages that independent Greece had inherited from its past and from the conflicts of the War of Independence.36 One of the most problematic areas, which immediately presented a test to the authority of the new state institutions, was the effort to dis- cipline the irregulars who had fought in the War of Independence and to integrate them into a national army. This problem involved more than the military training and reorganization into disciplined

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 162 units of armed groups with a considerable tradition of banditry in their background.37 It extended beyond this into the much more complex problem of centrifugal sectionalism, which had formed the social background of the repeated civil wars that had almost ruined the War of Independence (1821-8). The problem was faced both by the first head of the independent state, John Kapodistria, who paid with his life for his determined attempt to impose state authority on sectional interests,38 and by the Bavarian regency that succeeded him. Neutralizing sectional interests and building a regular army formed one of the major components of the regency’s statecraft and of the policies of King Otto after reaching his majority.39 It was in this context that it became imperative to develop a code of unifying national values that might provide the normative framework for bringing society under the control of the new state. Already during the War of Independence the rudimentary central authorities of the revolutionary state had repeatedly made appeals on behalf of the ’greater homeland’ versus the loyalties and local attachments of the fighters to their often antagonistic regions.40 It was on this basis that a nationalist rhetoric and appeals to the common homeland, the new Greek nation, would provide the normative discourse of the new state institutions. Over the years the national army would develop into one of the major channels through which Greek society would be socialized into the values of nationalism. The regular army, once created, became a mechanism of socialization into the political culture of the new state. In the anonymously published novel Military Life in Greece (1870), we possess a perceptive first-hand testimony of the ways in which this socializing process brought together men from different walks of life, different social backgrounds, even different ethnic origins, and infused them with a common mentality and shared attitudes towards the national state. To be sure, the content of these attitudes towards the state was mostly critical and occasionally betrayed contempt for the leaders of society and the ways in which they manipulated the political, administrative and military institutions to serve their own self-seeking purposes. Despite the author’s scepticism, however, and his subtle irony, the novel does reveal three important aspects of nation-building. First, it makes plain the magnetism that the idea of a liberating national Greek army exercised on Greek populations outside the kingdom - a magnetism powerful enough to draw the anonymous author from the cosmopolitan life of Constantinople as a volunteer to the Greek

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 163 armed forces.41 Secondly, it shows how the army, even though it was found by the author far from capable of carrying out its liberating mission and hardly able to cope with the major problem of domestic social order, banditry, did fulfil a homogenizing social role in a number of ways: it Hellenized linguistically its recruits, not all of whom spoke Greek as their native tongue;42 it brought together Greeks from within and from without the kingdom into a common social experience which became the basis of the discovery of a shared identity; finally, it moved people from one region to another within Greece, cultivating through the experience of geographical mobility a sense of the common larger homeland beyond the localism of the traditional identification with the native village, island or region. It was against this background that the army and military life provided a homogenizing experience which led its recruits, even critically, first to discover and then to learn how to cope with the new state and its institutions as a fact of their life and therefore a part of their identity. A much more obvious mechanism through which national identity was cultivated was the educational system. The development of a network of elementary schools all over the territory of independent Greece, reaching into the most remote regions of the countryside, was one of the major objectives of the new state. The network of elementary schools was supplemented in the towns and at the seats of administrative authorities by intermediate or ’Hellenic’ schools, which taught ancient Greek. The expansion of the network of elementary schools was remarkable during the first fifty years of the new state. From seventy-one schools in 1830 the number rose to 1172 in 1879. This represented an increase of 1650 per cent, but it was still estimated in 1879 that two-thirds of almost four thousand settlements in the kingdom were without a primary school.43 The original decree concerning the organization of primary education, issued in 1834, set quite practical and realistic goals as the basic educational philosophy of the state. Besides teaching the Greek language and the rudiments of a general literacy, primary education was expected to propagate practical knowledge and skills that were deemed necessary to an agricultural country like Greece. Eventually, however, the most remarkable contribution of Greek education did not occur in the domain of economic development. In the 1850s serious worries were voiced concerning the inefficiency of Greek education, especially of secondary education,

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 164 which, in the judgement of the then Minister of Public Education, had failed to prepare its graduates for any useful occupation.4s What was achieved, however, through the instruction offered by the primary and secondary schools of the kingdom was the linguistic homogenization of society. This was accomplished by the end of the nineteenth century to a degree unimaginable in the 1830s. The extent of the problem of linguistic diversity within even the geographically limited space of the kingdom was made graphically apparent in one of the most popular satyrical plays of modern Greek literature, Babylonia (Babel), written by Demitrios Vyzantios in 1836. The play dramatized the consequences of the diversity of dialects spoken in different parts of Greece, which made effective communication impossible among those who were to become the members of the new body politic. The incomprehensibility across different Greek idioms did not exhaust the problem. The kingdom included within its borders alien linguistic groups who spoke no Greek at all, most notably Albanian-speaking Orthodox in continental Greece, some of the islands, and the Peloponnese, who had to be integrated into the national culture of the new state. The problem was noted by the author of Military Life in Greece, from whose account it transpires that the army was an effective mechanism for the linguistic Hellenization of its recruits. The spread of Greek education did the rest and eventually produced a linguistically homogeneous society. The spread of the language, however, presupposed a form of normative discourse for its legitimation; and in this connection nationalism supplied the most effective medium. The army and education, in Greece as elsewhere in Europe,46 were the most widely used and effective mechanisms whereby the new state harnessed society into the nationalist culture that was necessary for its integration and survival; but they did not exhaust the available resources. Another mechanism of nation-building was the judiciary. The administration of justice and the penitentiary system were notorious in nineteenth-century Greece, and at mid-century provided the object of an eloquent indictment by the eminent legal scholar and political thinker Pavlos Calligas in his novel Thanos Vlekas.47 Nevertheless the judiciary provided a powerful ideological device for the denunciation and punishment, as socially aberrant, of forms of behaviour that did not conform to the norms of the state’s nationalist culture. Although the judiciary, through either the corruption of judges or political interference,

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 165 would often fail to deal effectively with the punishment of banditry, it could be mobilized against those who attempted to evade the two major integrative and homogenizing mechanisms, the army and primary education, which were by law compulsory for all males. The extension of state control over society through the cen- tralization of power, the destruction of local autonomies and the expansion of the bureaucracy were based on these mechanisms of national integration. In turn, a nationalist rhetoric was extensively employed as a means of legitimizing the process; it was directed at promoting the idea of national unity and concord that might pull the forces of the nation together for the achievement of its external goals. Cleavages within society had to be put aside or cemented for the sake of national unity. It is not surprising, therefore, although it tends to be forgotten by critics, that the nationalist doctrine of the so-called ’Great Idea’ was elaborated in response to such an issue of domestic conflict. Although external greatness and the liberation of unredeemed brethren provided the ideological and rhetorical underpinnings of the appeal to the Great Idea, its explicit evocation in 1844 by Ioannis Kolettis came in the context of a debate over the issue of the autochthon versus the heterochthon citizens of the Greek state. Being a heterochthon himself, Kolettis naturally evoked the great idea of the unity of the entire nation, extending far beyond the borders of the rump kingdom, in advocating equal political rights for all citizens regardless of their place of birth.48 The two explicitly ideological initiatives whereby the Greek state attempted programmatically to cement its national identity were the creation of an autocephalous national church and the establishment of a national university in the capital of the kingdom. The proclamation of the independence of the Church of Greece from the Patriarchate of Constantinople was urged in the very first year of the War of Independence by Adamantios Korais, the towering intellectual leader of the Greek Enlightenment, as an essential precondition of national liberation.49 Some of Korais’s close disciples in independent Greece, most notably Theoklitos Pharmakides, later became major protagonists in the whole affair of Greek autocephaly.so The independence of the Church of Greece, which according to Orthodox canon law could only be granted by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, was proclaimed unilaterally by a local synod of Greek bishops in 1833 at the initiative of the Bavarian regency.51 This move was never recognized by the Patriarchate and it provoked violent reactions

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 166 on the part of religious conservatives in Greece, who were strict adherents to Orthodox tradition. Politically, the issue of ecclesiastical independence turned into a confrontation between the proponents of a nationalized state church reproducing Protestant models, and the zealots of the ecumenicity of a supranational Orthodox ecclesiastical community. The major spokesman of the opponents of autocephaly, Constantine Oikonomos, condemned it as an adulteration of the authentic traditions of the Church, through the adoption of West- ern models.52 Although eventually, in 1850, at the initiative of the Greek state, the Patriarchate issued a tome granting administrative autocephaly to the Church of Greece,53 the nationalization of the Church was an irreversible process. It had begun through the actions of individual bishops, who had panicipated in the War of Independence against the explicit prohibitions, threats and anathemas issued by the Patriarchate. It culminated, despite the re-establishment of canonical communion between Constantinople and Athens in 1850, with the eventual total conversion of the Church of Greece to the secular values of Greek nationalism and its transformation into an official arm of the civil state, to the point that the Church of Greece spearheaded all nationalist initiatives in the latter part of the nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century.54 This development represented a major departure from Orthodox tradition and became ideologically possible only after a profound change in the values and priorities of the Church had taken place. This change hinged precisely on the new system of values elaborated by Greek nationalism, which through a series of theoretical compromises managed to redefine the whole tradition of eastern Orthodoxy by drawing the nation and the Church together as integral parts of the same symbolic universe. The theoretical compromise on which Greek nationalism depended was the intellectual achievement of the University of Athens. The first institution of its kind in the Balkans and the Middle East, the University of Athens was founded with two basic objectives. One was to train the necessary personnel in order to staff the institutions of the new state. This was clearly stated by the dean of the Faculty of Law and Political Science in his address at the inaugural ceremony of the university on 3 May 1837.55 The second objective was broader and rhetorically vague. A role for the new university as a transmitter of Western culture to the East56 was envisaged by the first rector, C.D. Schinas, in his opening remarks

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 167 at the inaugural ceremony in the presence of King Otto. This expectation could mean different things to different people. Over the years, however, the context of its restatement and repetition on different occasions reveals that this rhetorical device had concrete implications for the university ideologues, who were fast becoming the major intellectual spokesmen of Greek nationalism. Transmitting European culture to the East, through the medium of Greek language and Greek education, meant essentially the incorporation of the Greek-speaking Orthodox populations of the Ottoman Empire into the value system of Greek nationalism. This was clearly implied in the address of the dean of the Faculty of Theology, Misael Apostolides, at the inaugural ceremony, when he stated that the intellectual banquet inaugurated that day at the university was open not only to those within the Greek state but also to those Greeks who remained outside the kingdom.57 From theory to practice in this case required only a small step. In May 1838, when the rector of the university presented his report on the first year of its operation, he indicated that it had been more lenient in its requirements in the case of students from outside the kingdom in order to make its educational benefits more easily accessible to them.s8 The consequences of this policy were decisive in shaping the future progress of Greek nationalism in the unredeemed territories. The orientation of the university, from the very moment of its inauguration, towards the Greek populations outside the kingdom was symptomatic of the ideological doctrine of national unity which had been fledging in Greece since the attainment of independence.59 The doctrine of national unity, which was to be elaborated throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, was articulated on three levels. On a social level it stressed the need for national unity within Greece, with uniformity and homogenization becoming prevalent norms of cultural discourse; on a geographical level it stressed the unity of Hellenism, of the Greek nation as an integral whole bringing together its constituent parts within and outside the kingdom; and on a historical level it stressed the unity of the Greek nation along a temporal dimension, emphasizing its uninterrupted continuity throughout the centuries from Homeric through Byzantine to modern times. This multifaceted doctrine of unity represented a classic case of an ideological construct, in the Mannheimian sense in that on every one of the levels on which it could be traced, it veiled profound and often irreconcilable

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 168 structural and cultural cleavages. On the social level the appeal to unity disguised the deep-seated conflicts and divisions within the independent state; on the geographical level the ideal of unity represented a yearning for a state of the nation radically different from the actual political fragmentation marking the Greek world throughout the nineteenth century;~ finally, on the historical level the theory of historical continuity attempted to overcome the insecurities over national identity that sprang from the cultural antinomies and contradictions between the major components of the Greek heritage, classical Greece and medieval Christian Byzantium. The appeal to national unity sanctioned a general intolerance in Greek political thought, which gradually elevated the exigencies of nationalism to the only acceptable ideological orthodoxy. From the middle of the nineteenth century onward nationalism provided outlets for the diversion of domestic discontent toward external aspirations, as its populist overtones appealed to the chronic disaffections of the working classes and the peasantry. Thus, nationalism acted as a conservative force in domestic politics by denouncing as national heresies all types of questioning of its maximalist goals.61

It is against this ideological background that we must now turn to the external dimension of nation-building. This process essentially involved the export of the newly elaborated national ideas, the new norms of national identification and ethnic definition, from the independent state to the territories beyond its borders, the irredenta. The independent kingdom of Greece gradually assumed the role of the ’national centre’, the focal point of a much more extensive national community, defined by certain supposedly shared cultural characteristics - language, religion, historical memories and ethnic loyalties. If this was the claim regarding a supposed national community at the level of nationalist ideology, at the level of political and social actuality this community remained elusive and ill-defined beyond the world of intellectuals, precisely as had been the case during the Enlightenment prior to the War of Independence. As before the War of Independence and as within the independent kingdom, therefore, so in the irredenta as well the national community had to be constructed out of the confusion

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 169 and the embarrassments of actual demographic facts. If language was to be used as the hallmark of nationality, according to the trend in romantic Europe, Greek nationalism was faced with serious challenges. Just as within independent Greece there were large numbers of Albanian speakers who had to be linguisticaly Hellenized, so north of the border in Thessaly and Epirus there were not only Albanian- but also significant Vlach-speaking groups. Further north the ethnological picture became even more complex. In the Macedonian mosaic of nationalities, linguistic and religious groups, amidst Muslims and Jews speaking Turkish, Albanian, Bulgarian and Ladino, there lived an Orthodox rural majority divided linguisticaly, in proportions varying from region to region and from village to village, among speakers of Greek, Albanian, Vlach and Slavic languages. It was precisely in this area that Greek aspirations collided headlong with rival nationalist claims emanating from the other newly independent Balkan states, thus creating the exlosive knot of diplomatic antagonisms and power politics.62 The Macedonian question in the second half of the nineteenth century essentially involved the conflicts generated by the frantic attempts of the new national states to incorporate local ethnic groups into the ’imagined communities’ they represented in order to lay claim to the territories these groups inhabited. Across the Aegean in Asia Minor the picture was equally complicated because large numbers of Orthodox Christians, especially in the interior of Anatolia, spoke Turkish as their native language. Smaller numbers of Orthodox in the eastern provinces of Turkey spoke Armenian, Arabic, Kurdish and Syriac. Only in the major urban centres and along the western and Black Sea coasts of Asia Minor was Greek the language of the Orthodox population. 63 The islands of the Aegean, with some partial exceptions, the ’great islands’ Crete and Cyprus, and the seven Ionian islands which had formed the ’septinsular republic’ at the dawn of the nineteenth century and had passed under British protection in 1815 were the only geographical areas where the Greek language had survived as the sole and exclusive tongue of the inhabitants. In view of this complicated picture, who, and according to what criteria, was to be considered and claimed as a Greek? Obviously the issue became one of voluntary identification with the larger ’imagined community’ of the Greek nation, but this voluntary identification had to be instilled and cultivated, or ’awakened’, as older nationalist historiography might say, through a crusade of national education.

Fichte’s dreams and visions were accordingly to be re-enacted throughout the nineteenth century in the eastern Mediterranean, with graduates of the University of Athens in the leading roles. The drama of national education beyond the borders of the Greek state amounted to expanding the symbolic frontiers of Greek nationality through incorporating into it social groups which by virtue of their language or religion could be taught to identify with the broad ’imagined community’ of the Greek nation. This process was carried out through the activities of two complementary institutional networks, one directly under the control of the Greek state, the other operated by local Greek-speaking or Christian Orthodox communities, but both staffed by cadres trained in Athens. These were the network of Greek consulates and vice-consulates, which from 1836 onward extended from city to city in the Balkans and Asia Minor;64 and the network of Greek schools, organized by local communities but following educational models imported from the Greek state. Greek consulates in the Ottoman Empire were charged with many functions beyond their formal diplomatic and commercial duties. In the early years of the Greek state, the 1830s and 1840s, one important function of the consulates and vice-consulates was the dispensation of official Greek citizenship to local Greeks who could prove or claim some form of participation in the Greek War of Independence. This created nuclei of Greek citizens in the major cities of the Ottoman Empire. It was primarily these groups which in due course would articulate the claim for the incorporation of their regions within the Greek kingdom. The consulates also promoted the Greek press through local channels, thus spreading news about free Greece to the unredeemed brethren; supported cultural and educational activities; encouraged gestures of national identification with Greece; and abetted the symbolic defiance of the Ottoman authorities. Although such activities were frequent from a very early date in areas of major Greek settlements like western Asia Minor and its metropolis Smyrna, by the 1850s and 1860s they can be traced in remote and isolated areas of the eastern Mediterranean like Cyprus.65 Both before and after the Greek War of Independence, the establishment of Greek schools had been a focal point in the life of Greek communities under Ottoman rule. After the creation of the kingdom, and while the Greek state concentrated on constructing the educational network that would promote its

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 171 domestic homogenization, a major change began to take place in the educational system of the Christian communities of the Ottoman Empire. Whereas before the War of Independence teachers in high schools were trained either at major centres of ecclesiastical learning controlled by the Orthodox Church or in European universities, after its establishment the University of Athens increasingly became the primary supplier of high school teachers throughout the ’Greek East’. Although the Patriarchate of Constantinople maintained since 1844 a very important theological college at Chalki, one of the Prince’s islands in the Sea of Marmara, as the nineteenth century progressed Greek communities in both the European and Asiatic provinces of the Ottoman Empire turned increasingly to the University of Athens, the Rizaris Seminary and the Maraslis Teachers’ Training College, in order to meet the need for educational personnel. This was no doubt largely the result of the activity of the consuls. These high school teachers in turn trained students who became elementary school teachers. A structure of Greek schools was thus created throughout the Ottoman Empire66 which channelled the normative discourse concerning the unity of Hellenism, elaborated at the University of Athens, into the most remote areas of the Balkans and Asia Minor where Greek Orthodox communities could be found. The most important consequence of this educational endeavour was the linguistic Hellenization of large Orthodox populations. Where Orthodox communities used to speak Albanian, Vlach or Slavic languages in the Balkans, or Turkish and Armenian in Asia Minor, the extension of the network of Greek elementary and secondary schools led, within one or two generations, to a revival of the Greek language in regions where it had been spoken in the past but displaced in medieval and early modern times. Even in isolated areas like the Pontos, where a highly idiomatic medieval form of Greek had survived, the Greek teachers opened the way for the reconnection of that distant and self-contained society with the common Greek language and culture emanating from the Greek state.67 The revival of the language naturally opened the way for the cultivation of feelings of ethnic identity, the politicization of ancient memories, and the gradual transformation of traditional religious loyalties into national attachments. The teachers were soon followed by other groups who had benefited from the outlet of higher education provided by independent Greece. Lawyers, doctors and journalists, trained in Athens rather than in Italy,

France or Germany, returned to their native cities in increasing numbers toward the end of the nineteenth century. They became protagonists of the transmission of the political culture of the Greek state among the Christian subjects of the Ottoman sultan and eventually played a leading role in nationalist agitation. From the ranks of these social groups emerged the initiatives and leadership of the local cultural clubs and associations which, from the last quarter of the nineteenth century onwards, transmitted Greek nationalist ideas and values throughout Macedonia, Thrace and Asia Minor. Indeed, the club movement grew to such proportions and spread to such distant places that a leading Greek newspaper in 1892 referred to a ’club-mania’.68 Affiliated with such pre-eminent cultural institutions as the ’Hellenic Literary Society of Constantinople’ (founded in 1861), the ’Association for the Propagation of Greek Letters’ (founded in Athens in 1869), and later the militantly nationalist, Athens-based ’Anatolia: Association of Asia Minor Natives’ (founded in 1895), the local cultural clubs, regardless of the geographical, political or social circumstances of their localities, became the major instruments in the imaginative creation of the sense of a pan-Hellenic community of the Greek nation. In order to come full circle in tracing the mechanisms whereby the imaginative process worked, it should be noted that the guiding minds in the two Athens-based associations were leading professors of the University. The professors corresponded extensively with their own students, inspiring, advising and directing this effort of Greek cultural and national evangelism. In a sense, the process of cultural evengelism Neophytos Doukas had dreamed in 1815 was coming to full maturity almost a century later, with soIme of his successors at the Rizaris Seminary as its guiding lights.69 The cultural evangelism which Doukas had urged upon the Church became possible only as a project of the modern institutions which made up the independent national state. In this way, by the end of the nineteenth and in the early years of the twentieth century the imagined community of the Greek nation was created over a vast geographical area. This community, which identified vaguely with the distant Greek kingdom as the focus of its hopes for redemption, was held together by the cultural ties of education and language. It nevertheless had an entirely tenuous idea of the political capabilities of independent Greece, or of the precise nature of the experience of its citizens.

Evidence concerning this process is voluminous and multifold. Among a variety of sources testimonies can be gleaned from foreign visitors with a reliable first-hand knowledge of the Ottoman Empire or indirectly from writings by the participants themselves. In the early 1850s a keen French observer of the Ottoman scene, M.A. Ubicini, who also possessed a good knowledge of modern Greek intellectual and political history, noted that ’the last spark of patriotism became extinct among the Greeks of Turkey Ubicini also noted, however, that the only groups to show some political awareness, drawing them towards a sense of national identification with independent Greece, were professionals, mostly doctors and lawyers, who had been trained in Athens.71 These observations, which refer mostly to the major cities of the empire, Istanbul and Smyrna, can be considered to represent the starting point of the imaginative process which eventually extended a sense of Greek national community among Ottoman Greeks. About a decade later, in the early 1860s, a French archaeologist, Georges Perrot, supplied another testimony. An archaeological journey in Asia Minor brought him in touch with several Ottoman Greeks and with Orthodox Christian communities. On the boat to Istanbul he met a Constantinopolitan Greek banker whose contempt for the Greek kingdom, its nationalist illusions, its bureaucratic tyranny and its administrative despotism only led him to assure his interlocutor that the Ottoman Greeks had absolutely no desire to see the Hellenes, as the Greeks of the kingdom were called by Greeks still under Ottoman rule, at Constantinople. 72 Ubicini’s impressions about the state of political feeling among the Greeks in Turkey appeared to be still valid. At Ismidt, the ancient Nicomedia, however, Perrot met a local Greek intellectual, who ’knew some ancient Greek and history’ and whose nephew was a medical student in Athens. The provincial scholar ’does not speak or dream of anything else but Athens.’~3 This encounter led Perrot to observe that ’the Greeks, even though subject to the Turks ... have their eyes fixed upon Athens, toward the tiny kingdom of which it is the capital’.74 Further inland, at Kftahya, he met the richest Greek family in the city. They knew no Greek. The father spoke only Turkish: ’He is a Greek of the old school, who is hardly aware of the existence of a Greek kingdom, who never speaks of Miltiades or Themistocles.’75 Kutahya, however, had been recently endowed with a primary and a ’Hellenic’ school. ’The son of the old primate already knows some Greek and he plans on going to

Smyrna to perfect it.’~6 In the heart of Asiatic Turkey, at Ankara, he also found a primary and a Hellenic school for Orthodox Turcophone children. The Hellenic school taught mainly the Greek language and history. Perrot concluded with confidence: ’the entire generation growing up now will talk Greek’.77 The picture was not uniform, however. The process unfolded with considerable time-lags. Twenty years after Perrot, in 1879, the Reverend Henry Tozer toured the far east of Turkey, setting off from Trebizond and visiting Greek and Armenian communities. He found widespread political discontent everywhere: ’The whole population as now thoroughly disgusted with the government, so much so that all of them, the Turks included, would gladly welcome any European power that would step in. ’78 This discontent, however, made the Christian inhabitants ’long for England or Russia’.79 In the Orthodox communities of Cappadocia, at Urgub and Kayseri for example, he only found Turkish-speaking Greeks, so Only in the valleys of the Pontic Alps, in the region of Trebizond and of Sumela, did he find ’true Greeks’ speaking Greek in their prosperous villages.81 Nowhere in his entire tour of the Orthodox communities of Cappadocia and Pontos did he record any trace of political interest in or attachment to Greece, whereas pro-Russian feelings were everywhere pronounced. Yet it was in those very Pontic regions and highlands that over the next forty years a powerful sense of national identification with Greece was to grow thanks to the extension of the network of Greek schools and the active crusades of teachers and intellectuals trained in increasing numbers in Athens. At the threshold of the twentieth century, in June 1901 and in October 1902, S. Antonopoulos, the Consul Geneial of Greece in Smyrna, toured western and central Asia Minor, stopping at many of the cities visited by Perrot forty years earlier. Later he published a series of articles and a book of impressions from his two tours. This book is remarkable not only as a source of diverse information about the state of the Greek communities of Asia Minor, but especially because it is the closest one may come to a public appraisal of the progress of Greek national feeling in the irredenta from the vantage point of one of the propagators of official nationalism. The picture that emerges from Antonopoulos’s account is mixed, and might be considered surprising in view of the predictions of many earlier travellers. Furthermore, his judgement of the Church, of the communities and of the policies of the Greek state is quite

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 175 critical; none of those responsible, he charges, did as much as they should, on two counts especially: the propagation of the Greek language and the intellectual conversion of the Orthodox communities to the values of Greek patriotism. His account is replete with details concerning the low educational attainments of many communities in the interior of Asia Minor, and the sparse knowledge of Greek, even among community leaders, priests and members of school committees. He was repeatedly dismayed by the absence of feelings of attachment to Greece and by the political unawareness and ambivalence of local Greeks, especially the community leaders with whom he came in contact.82 Exceptions in this picture of ethnic ambivalence could be found only where graduates of University of Athens had been at work as teachers or doctors.83 Where teachers had been locally trained, as was the case with the Orthodox seminary at Kayseri in Cappadocia, the progress of linguistic Hellenization and national articulation was slower.g4 Some other details of his account are also interesting. At Kftahya, where forty years earlier Perrot had predicted a fast linguistic transition from Turkish to Greek, Antonopoulos found the whole Orthodox population still entirely Turcophone.85 At. Philadelphia (Ala§ehir), however, and at Iconium (Konya) he observed that among the younger generation Greek had begun to be spoken. In this connection he noted the significance of Greek nurseries in the propagation of the Greek language.86 Of special interest for an understanding of the whole imaginative process of community construction by its own protagonists are the Consul General’s conclusions and recommendations. First, his strictures are quite harsh concerning what he judges as the total ignorance, indifference and negligence of the Greek state concerning the inestimable national resource of Asia Minor Hellenism. His criticism in this connection is revealing:

It is incontrovertible that the creation of the Greek state and its natural consequence, the progress m letters and culture and other forms of development within it, influenced our brethren in Asia Minor, who, thanks to ethnic affinity and to continuity, come here in order to glean everything contributing to their progress. All this, however, is taking place, as it were, automatically, without ever the government of the Motherland contnbutmg m the slightest way.97

Finally, he insisted that for the whole process to be upgraded and to serve Greece’s vital interests in Asia Minor, it was imperative to make the educational system in Asia Minor more efficient and

responsive to the practical needs of the inhabitants; to discontinue totally the practice of ordaining in Turcophone communities priests who were not fluent in Greek; to grant financial assistance to Christian communities in order to improve local schools, but also as a concrete token of the active interest of Mother Greece in their welfare; and, most important of all, to extend and upgrade the network of Greek consulates and vice-consulates in Asia Minor.88 Besides these measures, the Consul General noted in passing that the issue of Greek education in the Ottoman Empire concerned not only the Greek Ministry of Education but also the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This also involved the election of university professors and the functioning of the University and other institutions of higher learning in Greece.89 The system of mechanisms whereby the imaginative process worked in the articulation of the national community was thus fully recognized and became an object of conscious political reflection on the part of its participants. The evidence supplied by the Consul General could be supplemented from a broad range of other primary sources: for example the writings, speeches and correspondence of those university professors and local teachers who activated the imaginative process at both ends; the archives of the clubs and associations which acted as clearing-houses and springboards for the nationalist crusades; and the reports of the consuls themselves, most of which still remain unpublished. One overriding fact emerges from this material: that the process was the result not of a consciously planned and executed state policy, but of individual initiatives and voluntary organization. Their momentum flowed from two sources: the forceful ideological climate of nationalism which had been elaborated, primarily for reasons of domestic cohesion, in the Greek state; and the process of social and cultural change that had gradually begun to mobilize the populations of the Ottoman Empire in the era of reforms. It was as a result of this process of social change that Greek nationalism found an audience in the Empire. Despite the anxieties and criticism of Antonopoulos, the eventual outcome of the process made one thing clear. the whole effort of cultural evangelism or community construction worked out so well, both internally and externally, that Greece, after absorbing the Greek populations of Asia Minor and Thrace following the exchange of Greek-Turkish populations in 1923, emerged as one of the most ethnically homogeneous states in Europe. Domestically,

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 177 a resolutely uniform national culture, transmitted through a highly centralized administrative system, stamped out regional variation, local peculiarities and different ethnographic traditions. It is remarkable how areas as different in their historical experience and political development as the Ionian Islands and the islands of the eastern Aegean, or western Thrace and Crete, came to look so much alike once integrated into the Greek state. In the irredenta, Greek-speaking Orthodox populations were effectively socialized so that they came to identify with the Greek state as their homeland. The process also operated among non-Greek speakers. Albanian, Slavic and Vlach speakers in the southern Balkans and Turkish-speaking Orthodox in the interior of Asia Minor - the groups whom Perrot and Tozer had encountered in the 1860s and in the 1880s - gradually learned Greek, shed their traditional religious identities and took up new identities and loyalties.Their eventual self-definition as Greeks articulated a primordial feeling of protest against oppression and their hope for redemption.9o This was precisely the meaning of a striking statement by a woman from Makri, in Lycia on the southern coast of Asia Minor. After recounting the tribulations of deportation, exile and long marches into inhospitable places in eastern Turkey in the years of World War I, she concluded by commenting on the final deportation, which came with the obligatory expulsion from Turkey to Greece. ’This time exile was to our own homeland.’91

Orthodoxy and Nationalism

Despite its effectiveness, the process of nation-building through the imaginative construction of a sense of ethnic community brought to the fore the fundamental, and theoretically inescapable, antinomy between Orthodoxy and nationalism. The ensuing conflict in moral values dramatized the essential incompatibility between the imagined community of religion and the imagined community of the nation. The community of the faithful, which in evangelical Christianity had been formed against all earthly distinctions of race, class and sex, of freedom and slavery, of wisdom and ignorance, provided the doctrinal backdrop of the universal Church and Orthodox ecumenicity. The community of the Orthodox Church therefore remained indifferent to the new concepts of

national identities and secular states; and when these concepts formed the bases of alternative communities for its faithful, it met the challenge with open hostility. A whole tradition of Balkan national historiography is nevertheless premised on the assumption that Orthodox Christianity and the Orthodox Church played a major role in nation-building, by preserving collective identity under the Ottomans and by preparing the advent to independence. The Orthodox Church, in short, is assumed to have cemented national identity in the years of captivity. This assumption runs throughout conventional twentieth-century Balkan historiography, both secular and ecclesiastical, especially in Greece, where official rhetoric has perpetuated it as a fundamental ideological tenet. The role of the Church in modern Greek history has consequently become the focal point of controversy between conventional and revisionist schools of historical writing. However, both apologists and critics of the Church are asking ideologically motivated questions which inevitably obscure the real historical issues. The relation between Orthodoxy and nationality can only be understood as a historical problem. On certain levels of analysis and in specific historical contexts the assumption about ’Orthodoxy as guardian of nationality’ can indeed be shown to be borne out by the evidence. But it is far from a straightforward, self-evident or conceptually unproblematical issue. The Orthodox Church in the Balkans did contribute to the preservation of collective identity under Ottoman rule by institutionalizing and safeguarding the distinction of the Christian subjects from their Muslim rulers.92 But the distinction was religious, not national, in content. One of the greatest anachronisms of Balkan, and for that matter European, historiography has been the injection of national content into that traditional religious distinction. Furthermore, the Orthodox church, and especially its monastic institutions, preserved the languages and the medieval imperial memories of the Balkan peoples, a heritage that in time was to be politicized by nationalism and made the basis of historiographical anachronisms. the Church, however, as an institution of the Ottoman state remained a supranational organization and, by virtue of its own doctrinal principles, a non-national one. It was only the confusions arising from the coincidence that power in the Orthodox Church was wielded by a Greek-speaking hierarchy that created ’ethnic’ antagonisms within

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 179 it before the age of nationalism. It was the eventual abandonment of the ecumenicity of Orthodoxy, and the ’nationalization’ of the churches, that brought intense national conflicts into the life of the Orthodox Church and nurtured the assumption concerning the affinity between Orthodoxy and nationality. The fundamental antinomy contained within the original rela- tionship derived from a deeper contradiction between secular history and theological principles. The historical record is replete with instances of this antinomy, which are sources of embarrassment for the proponents of conventional views on both the lay and ecclesiastical sides. The embarrassment, like the intensification of the antinomy itself, is a direct product of the total success achieved by the imaginative process of constructing national communities, which of course has radically transformed not only self-images and conceptions but also moral codes. To reconstruct the story of the antinomy between Orthodoxy and nationalism would be tantamount to rewriting the ecclesiastical history of south-eastern Europe and the Middle East in the last two centuries, and naturally cannot be attempted here. Only a brief historical illustration of the process will be presented below, in order to hint at the radical interruption of the Orthodox religious tradition involved in the ’nationalization’ of the churches which followed the advent of the national states. The earliest instances of the cleavage can be traced in the confrontation of the Church with the advocates of cultural and ideological change associated with the Enlightenment. The conflict was articulated after 1789, when it became clear to traditional religious leaders where the intellectual changes and the liberal principles of the Enlightenment were leading. The active opposition of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, especially under Patriarch Gregory V (1797-8, 1806-8 and 1818-21), to the spread of the Enlightenment in Greek education and culture and to the Greek national movement which sprang from it, constitute the clearest sign of the antinomy between Orthodoxy and nationalism. Gregory V condemned, by appealing to the principles of Orthodox doctrine, both the radical republicanism of Rhigas Velestinlis in 1798 and the outbreak of the Greek Revolution in 1821. The classic statement of the Church’s position came in the militant conservative tract Paternal Instruction (1798), attributed to patriarch Anthimos of Jerusalem (1788-1808) but probably written by Gregory V himself, which counselled the pious to submit to Ottoman rule and warned

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 180 against the pernicious consequences of revolutionary plans for the souls of the faithful.93 The Greek experience was not unique. Another instance of the opposition between the Orthodox church and nationalism arose with the vehement reactions of the Serbian hierarchy against the cultural and linguistic reforms advocated by Vuk Karadzic.94 The advent of independent states in the Balkans, seeking to solidify their independent status through the proclamation of the independence of their churches, dramatized the extent of the impact of nationalist ideas upon Balkan politics. These gestures, which broke centuries-old traditions and sought legitimization through a nationalist reinterpretation of the ecclesiastical past of the Balkans, brought to the fore an antinomy between Orthodoxy and nationalism that had been in the making since the pre-Independence, Enlightenment period. The unilateral declaration of the autocephaly of the Orthodox Church in Greece (1833), Romania (1865), Bulgaria (1870) and Albania (1922-37) created serious canonical problems with the Patriarchate of Constantinople. In the case of Bulgaria, the intense national conflicts which underlay ecclesiastical issues caused the problem to escalate into a full-scale schism lasting over seventy years (i.e. until 1945). Only the Orthodox Church in Serbia, with its stronger traditions and older religious institutions, acceded peacefully to autocephaly in 1879 by following the canonical step of receiving administrative independence conferred by the synod of Constantinople itself. It is ironical that the Church of Greece was the first to break away from the Greek-controlled Patriarchate of Constantinople, thus setting an example for the non-Greek churches in the northern Bal- kans to follow. As already noted, the independence of the Church of liberated Greece from the Patriarchate of Constantinople was urged quite early in the War of Independence by the Greek Enlightenment’s leading political thinker. Adamantios Korais insisted that it was unthinkable for the clergy of free Greece to submit and obey the instructions of a Patriarch still held captive by the nation’s oppressors. Korais’s argument crystalized the conflict between Orthodoxy and nationalism that was to rage in the Orthodox world, and especially in south-eastern Europe, for the rest of the nineteenth century. Almost half a century later it was echoed by the Romanians, in their efforts to create their own autocephalous national church.

While the regional churches of the Balkan states were thus nationalized by becoming components of the nation-states’ modern administrative structure, the Ecumenical Patriarchate in the Ottoman Empire kept its distance from the new nationalism. This placed serious obstacles in the way of those attempting to use the Church’s powerful structure and authority in order to promote the imaginative construction of national identity. Ubicini noted in the 1850s that ’the clergy in Turkey, as elsewhere, are of the ecclesiastical party and of that alone’.95 It was this party which was opposed to the new nationalists, ’the party of Hellenism’ whose proponents, still few according to Ubicini, ’simply desired to be annexed to Greece’.96 The Patriarchate, through a series of acts and pronouncements of its holy synod, made official and clear its opposition to nationalism and condemned as uncanonical initiatives motivated by nationalist considerations. Although the first occasion for such reactions on the part of the Patriarchate was the autocephaly of the Church of Greece, the solemn and public condemnation of national claims in the Church, and of attempts to turn it into an instrument of nationalism, was provoked by the Bulgarian schism in 1870. In August 1872 the Ecumenical Patriarch, along with the other Orthodox Patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem and the archbishop of Cyprus, convened a major synod which issued a condemnation of ’phyletism’, by which was essentially meant nationalism.

The question of what basis racism - that is, discriminating on the basis of different racial ongms and language and the claiming or exercising of exclusive rights by persons or groups of persons exclusively of one country or group - can have in secular states lies beyond the scope of our inquiry. But in the Christian Church, which is a spiritual communion, predestined by its Leader and Founder to contain all nations in one brotherhood in Christ, racism is alien and quite unthinkable. Indeed, if it is taken to mean the formation of special racial churches, each accepting all the members of its particular race, excludmg all ahens and governed exclusively by pastors of its own race, as its adherents demand, racism is unheard of and unprecedented ... All the Christian churches founded in the early years of the faith were local and contained the Christians of a specific town or a specific locality, without racial distinction. They were thus usually named after the town or the country, not after the ethnic origin of their people.97 The synod concluded by issuing the following condemnation of racism:

We renounce, censure and condemn racism, that is, racial discrimination, ethnic feuds, hatreds and dissensions within the Church of Christ, as contrary

to the teaching of the Gospel and the holy canons of our blessed fathers which support the holy Church and the entire Christian world, embellish it and lead it to divine godliness.98

The condemnation of ’phyletism’ crystallizes the antinomy of Orthodoxy and nationalism. Appeals to Christian doctrine and Orthodox traditions nevertheless could not stem the tide of new forces in world history. The nationalization of the regional Ortho- dox churches proceeded apace. The Bulgarian church became the major instrument for the promotion of Bulgarian national claims in Macedonia in the second half of the nineteenth century.99 To counter this, Greek bishops in the area took increasingly militant nationalist stands, to such a point that the national struggles in Macedonia were primarily fought over the control of churches and ecclesiastical jurisdictions. Albanian prelates were soon to be added to the complex picture, as they in turn assumed the leadership of the Albanian nationalist movement. loo Nationalist struggles and ecclesiastical politics in the Balkans became intertwined in an intense, often violent contest over the loyalties of the faithful. Meanwhile the newly independent churches were going through their domestic crisis over relations with the national states. The Church of Greece went through its crisis in the first twenty years of independence, ending with the total submission of the Church to the state. The Romanian Church underwent a parallel experience in the period from the 1880s to the 1920s, involving domestic conflicts with the state and external conflicts with the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The conflicts with the state involved issues of Church administration and civil jurisdiction in Church affairs. The independence of the Church of Romania was considered a necessary complement to national independence. In claiming autocephaly from Constantinople, the Romanians used an argument strikingly similar to that of Greek nationalists almost half a century earlier. The dependence of their Orthodox Church on the Ecumenical Patriarchate was considered a national humiliation since the Patriarch, situated in Constantinople, the capital of their former masters, had remained a prisoner of the Ottoman state. 1°1 Once the desire for ecclesiastical independence was canonically settled with the official recognition of Romanian autocephaly by Patriarch Joachim IV in 1885, a remarkable attempt was made to endow the Romanian Church with a distinct national past of its own. This interest in the history of Romanian Orthodoxy culminated with the

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 183 publication in 1908-9 of Nicolae Iorga’s two-volume History of the Romanian Church and the Religious Life of Romanians. The full nationalization of the Church of Romania came with its unilateral elevation to patriarchate in the context of the creation of ’Greater Romania’ after World War I. In a way, the creation of the Romanian patriarchate in 1925 was the last symbolic act in a process which over several decades produced the imagined community of the Romanian nation. Church and nation finally became one, in spite of earlier conflicts between the Orthodox hierarchy and nationalist intellectuals, especially in Transylvania. 102 Despite the original conflicts with nationalism, through the cunning of history the elevation of the regional Orthodox churches of the Balkans to patriarchates became a final act in the affirmation of national identity and autonomy. 103 Serbia accomplished this in 1920 and Bulgaria, after the termination of the schism and under communist rule, in 1953. In this case, too, although Serbia proceeded canonically and peacefully, Bulgaria proclaimed its patriarchate unilaterally and was not recognized by Constantinople until 1961. Notwithstanding its condemnation of ’phyletism’, the Ecumeni- cal Patriarchate did not remain immune from the challenge of nationalism. The struggle against pan-Slavism in Macedonia and its more specifically ecclesiastical guise, the fight against the encroach- ments of the Bulgarian Exarchate on the administrative jurisdiction of the Patriarchate in Macedonia and Thrace, brought about a common front between the nationalist claims of the Greek state in Macedonia and the insistence of the Patriarchate on the defence of its canonical rights. As a consequence a gradual differentiation took place within the ranks of the hierarchy of the Patriarchate, involving the elevation to the episcopate of a younger generation of militant nationalists with a mandate to counter the expansion of the Exarchate. The exigencies of the struggle eventually led these bishops to see eye-to-eye with Greek policy-makers as to the priorities and strategy of the defence of Greek and Patriarchal interests in Macedonia. Thus, by the turn of the twentieth century, a whole new mentality shaped by the values of nationalism crept gradually into the politics of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the condemnation of ’phyletism’ of a few years earlier notwithstanding. The new bishops were among the best-trained and ablest men in the hierarchy and included such dedicated nationalists as Germanos of Kastoria and Chrysostom of Drama, who openly advocated the subordination of the policies of the Orthodox Church in the

Ottoman Empire to the directives of the national centre at Athens. This stand represented a radical break in the tradition of the Patriarchate, which had followed a policy of accommodation with the Ottoman state, knowing full well from the long experience of centuries that loyalty to the Sublime Porte was the key to the survival of both the Church and its flock in the Empire and the guarantee of the Patriarchate’s traditional privileges. This was the view of the Ecumenical Patriarch Joachim III (1878-84 and 1901-12), who took a firm stand against the militancy of the new bishops and insisted on the independence of the Patriarchate from Athens. The violent struggle that ensued between the Patriarch and the nationalist bishops was symptomatic of the attempt to ’nationalize’ even the centre of supranational Orthodoxy under the onslaught of Balkan nationalism,.104 At about the same time, similar conflicts between nationalist and traditional parties in the hierarchy occurred in the Orthodox churches of the Middle East. The Patriarchate of Antioch experienced such a crisis when in 1897 its Arab bishops, urged on by years of Russian propaganda and after a protracted struggle, forced the resignation of their Cypriot-born patriarch Spyridon, the last in a long line of Greek Orthodox patriarchs of Antioch. 105 Even the smallest of the Ortho- dox churches, the insular Church of Cyprus, was subject to the pressures of nationalism. A protracted conflict over the succession to the archepiscopal throne, lasting from the death of Archbishop Sophronios in 1900 to 1909, ended with the election of the nationalist Cyril II (1909-16). From this point on, the Church of Cyprus assumed the leadership of the Cypriot nationalist movement which opposed British rule in the name of union with Greece. As a consequence of these ecclesiastical struggles and the gradual nationalization of the regional Orthodox churches, the unity of the ’Orthodox commonwealth’, which for almost ten centuries had extended over the whole of eastern Europe and the Middle East, was irrevocably broken. The imagined community of Orthodox Christianity, which since the conquest had determined the common identity of the Orthodox Christian subjects of the sultan, was destroyed. It was gradually replaced by the new sense of community cultivated by the national states, which, after administratively and linguistically homogenizing their societies, found in religion a powerful additional support for their national unity and external aspirations. Clearly, however, religion came last in the struggle to forge new national identities and did not become

a functional element in national definition until the nation-states had nationalized their churches. Whereas language had provided the initial criterion in delineating the imagined communities of the hoped-for nations, Orthodoxy was enlisted last, its powerful psychological and symbolic force helping to cement the unity of the new nations which the states had created.

Epilogue

This analysis of the character of Greek nationalism may be concluded with two very brief observations, one methodological, the other substantive. On a methodological level I should like to suggest that processes such as those here described, concerning the role of the Greek state in the creation of the Greek nation, could also be traced in the cases of the other Balkan states. In the nineteenth century Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria had to face similar challenges arising out of domestic social cleavages, and had to embark on external irredentist projects in order to achieve the national integration which in the twentieth century produced Yugoslavia, greater Romania and modern Bulgaria. These needs found expression in the rival Balkan nationalisms of the nineteenth century. Only this comparative perspective can place Greek nation-building in its rightful broader context and explain the violent intensity of Balkan national conflicts, since to a considerable extent these parallel processes of nation-building and national integration involved claims to the same territories and the same populations. The contest over the territories of the declining Ottoman Empire had to be fought largely in the conscience of populations lured into mutually hostile ’imagined communities’. The substantive conclusion is simply a suggestion concerning the structure of nineteenth-century Greek nationalist ideology. Social cleavages and ideological antinomies such as those discussed above provided motivation for the elaboration of the Great Idea’s symbolic language. Latter-day critics, especially among casual observers and propagandists, tend to associate the Great Idea with Greek ’expansionism’, which aspired to resurrect the nationalities in the Balkans and Asia Minor. What I hope has been clarified by the foregoing analysis is that Greek nationalism, as expressed in the great Idea, was motivated by concerns about social and ideological cohesion at least as much as, it not to a considerably

Downloaded from http://ehq.sagepub.com by Vilana Pilinkaite on November 24, 2007 © 1989 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 186 greater degree than, by aspirations of territorial aggrandisement. Among other things the symbolic universe of the great Idea attempted to bring together the nation and the Church - hence, in contrast to the legacy of the enlightenment which had provided its initial impulse, Greek nationalism in the middle of the nineteenth century emphasized Byzantium and Greece’s Byzantine past. These later nineteenth-century ideological developments brought the elaboration of nationalist doctrine full-circle, the original ethnic definitions proposed by the Enlightenment against Orthodoxy and Byzantium being transcended to the point at which Orthodoxy was encompassed within the ethnic definition of Hellenism. This was essentially the theoretical project which nineteenth-century Greek nationalism set itself in order to meet the political aspirations of the Greek state. In view of the tenacity and resilience of these nineteenth-century, essentially romantic, ideas, in the definition of ideological orthodoxy in Greece down to the present day, we must conclude that as a theoretical project Greek nationalism proved highly successful.

Notes

Earlier versions of sections of this paper were presented at the Modern Greek Studies Association Symposium ’Modern Hellenism in the Context of Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean’, Columbus, Ohio, in November 1985; at a meeting of the Seminar on the Modern Greek State at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in March 1987; and at a meeting of the Greek Study Group, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, in April 1987. The greatest part of the research for the final version was carried out while I was on a visiting appointment at Brandeis University in 1987. I am grateful to the Department of Politics, Brandeis University, for its support. At its successive stages my research was supported by faculty research grants from the University of Athens. 1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London 1983), 15-16. Cf. Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London 1964), 150-3, 174-5. 2. For example, R.W. Seton Watson, The Rise of Nationality in the Balkans (London 1917), and Wesley M. Gewehr, The Rise of Nationalism in the Balkans, 1800-1930 (New York 1931). The same holds of the several authors in Peter F Sugar and Ivo J. Lederer, eds, Nationalism in Eastern Europe (Seattle and London 1969). 3. The most serious statement of this view in recent Western scholarship is George G. Arnakis, ’The Role of Religion in the Development of Balkan Nationalism’, in Charles and Barbara Jelavich, eds, The Balkans in Transition (Berkeley and London 1963), 115-44.

4. In this argument I follow Nicolae Iorga, Byzance après Byzance (Bucharest 1935),242-5. 5. Theodoros A. Kavalliotis, Protopeiria (Venice 1770). For bibliographical and other details see Emile Legrand, Bibliographie hellénique, XVIIIe siècle, Vol. II (Paris 1928), 126-8. For a philological study of Kavalliotis’s glossary see Gustav Meyer, Albanesische Studien, Vol. IV: Das griechisch-südrumanisch-albanesische Wortverzeichniss des Kavalliotis (Vienna 1895); and for a general appraisal of his case see Alfred Uci, ’T.A. Kavalioti - Un représentant albanais des lumières (XVIIIe siècle)’, Actes du Premier Congrès International des Études Balkaniques et Sud-Est Européennes (Sofia 1971), Vol. VII, 139-50. 6. Daniel of Moschopolis, Eisagogiki didaskalia (Constantinople 1802). See also A.J.B. Wace and M.S. Thompson, The Nomads of the Balkans (London 1914), 6. An excerpt of the preface in an English version is included in Richard Clogg, ed., The Movement for Greek Independence 1770-1820 (London 1976), 91-2. Cf. also P.M. Kitromilides, Iossipos Moisiodax (Athens 1985), 37-8 and 241-2, n. 12. 7. Demetrios Katartzis, Ta Evriskomena, edited by K.T. Dimaras (Athens 1970), 10. 8. Ibid., 22-4. 9. Ibid., 44-5. 10. Ibid., 24-5 11. Daniel Philippides, Geographikon tis Roumounias (Leipzig 1816), 23-36. Ten distinct nationalities are listed in this survey (see 23-4). 12. Ibid., 28-31. 13. Daniel Philippides, Istoria tis Roumounias (Leipzig 1816), 464. Cf. Philippides, Geographikon tis Roumounias, 7-8, on the geographical extent of the newly defined national society. On the significance of this conceptualization, cf. P.M. Kitromilides, ’The Enlightenment East and West: A Comparative Perspective on the Origins of the Balkan Political Traditions’, Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring 1983), 51-70, especially 58. 14. Iossipos Moisiodax, Theoria tis Geographias (Vienna 1781), 89. 15. Dionysios Photinos, Istoria tis palai Dakias, ta nyn Transilvanias, Vlachias kai Moldavias, Vols. I, II, III (Vienna 1818-19). See especially Vol. I, 300-11. 16. Cf. P.M. Kitromilides, Iossipos Moisiodax, 256-7, n. 43. 17. Rhigas Velestinlis, Thourios, verses 45, 63-84 and 87-104. See L. Vranoussis, Rhigas (Athens 1953), 392-3. 18. Anonymous the Hellene, Elliniki Nomarchia (Italy 1806; reprinted Athens 1976), 246. Cf. M.T. Laskaris, Ellines kai Servi kata tous apeleftherotikous ton agonas (1804-1830) (Athens 1936), for a survey of the historical record. 19. Neophytos Doukas, Epistoli pros ton Panagiotaton Oecumenikon Patri- archin Kyrion Kyrillon peri ekklesiastikis eftaxias (Vienna 1815). 20. Ibid., 26. 21. Cf. H.G. Schenk, The Mind of the European Romantics (Oxford 1979), 187-94. 22. Doukas, op. cit., 27. 23. Ibid., 7-30. 24. See P.M. Kitromilides, ’Religious Criticism between Orthodoxy and Protestantism’, XVI Internationaler Byzantinistenkongress Akten II/6/Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 32/6 (1982), 115-24. For extensive excerpts of the original text see, by the same author, ’Ideologikes synepies tis kinonikis

diamachis sti Smyrni (1809-1810)’, Deltio Kentrou Mikrasiatikon Spoudon, Vol. 3 (1982),9-39. 25. On the connection between romanticism and nationalism see Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (London 1969), 85-9, and Schenk, op. cit., 15-18, 195-201. Interest in language was not, however, an exclusive concern of romanticism. Although in a different spirit, research into language had been initiated by the Enlightenment. See Irene Monreal-Wickert, Die Sprachforschung der Aufklärung im Spiegel der grossen französischen Enzyklopddie (Tubingen 1977). The emergence of the modern literary languages of the Balkans, however, was largely a project of philological romanticism. See Stavro Skendi, ’The Emergence of the Modern Balkan Literary Languages: A Comparative Approach’, Sudosteuropa - Schriften, Vol. 6 (1964), 303-21. An exception to this was the case of Modern Greek which was philologically elaborated by Adamantios Korais, exclusively within an Enlightenment theoretical framework. See P.M. Kitromilides, ’Tradition, Enlightenment and Revolution: Ideological Change m Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Greece’ (Harvard University Ph.D. dissertation 1978), 414-28. 26. See Ignatius of Hungary-Wallachia, Apologia istoriki kai kritiki yper tou ierou klirou tis Anatolikis Ekklesias kata ton sykofantion tou Neophytou Douka (Vienna 1815). The book was published pseudonymously under the initial ’K’, but attribution of authorship to Ignatius cannot be doubted. See M.I. Gedeon, Patriarchikai Ephemerides (Athens 1936), 381-2. 27. Ignatius, op cit., 73-6. 28. Ibid., 85-6. 29. Ibid., 89. 30. Ibid., 86. For details see 86-93. 31. Ibid., 108-9. 32. Isaiah Berlin, ’Nationalism’, in his Against the Current (Oxford 1981), 345. 33. Cf. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870-1914 (London 1976). 34. See J.H. Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, translated by R F. Jones and G.H. Turnbull (Westport CN 1979). 35. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford 1983). 36. On this background see J.A. Petropulos, Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece 1833-1843 (Princeton 1968), 19-106. These conflicts persisted despite the confrontation of Greeks and Turks, Christians and Muslims, during the War of Independence. It is therefore irrelevant to suggest that fighting in the War of Independence was a sufficient condition for the creation of nationalism as a force of social cohesion. The background of civil wars and sectional conflicts can also provide a perspective on the class contexts of national definition, which obviously did not operate through the same mechanisms for peasants, primates, urban artisans, mercantile groups and magnates of the diaspora. 37. John S. Koliopoulos, Brigands with a Cause: Brigandage and Irredentism in Modern Greece 1821-1912 (Oxford 1987), 39-104, 135-66. 38. Stephanos P. Papageorgiou, ’The Army as an Instrument for Territorial Expansion and for Repression by the State: The Capodistrian Case’, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Winter 1985), 21-34. 39. Petropulos, op. cit., 165-72, 252-3, 322-5 andpassim.

40. P.N. Diamandouros, ’Political Modernization, Social Conflict and Cultural Cleavage in the Formation of the Modern Greek State: 1821-1828’ (Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation 1972), 195-8, 207-16, 249-56, 310-13. 41. I stratiotiki zoi en Elladi (second edn, Athens 1977), 6-14. 42. Ibid., 98-9. 43. G. Chasiotis, L’instruction publique chez les Grecs (Paris 1881), 174. 44. G. Chasiotis, op. cit., 177. 45. See Alexis Dimaras, ed., I metarrythmisi pou den egme, Vol. I: 1821-1894 (Athens 1873), 149-51. 46. Cf. Weber, op. cit., 292-302. 47. Thanos Vlekas, one of the earliest literary attempts at social realism in nineteenth-century Greece, was first published anonymously in 1855. Besides the problem of penitentiary justice, the work was quite eloquent in its denunciation of the connections between brigandage and public authority. 48. On the enunciation of the doctrine of the ’Great Idea’ see Paschalis M. Kitromilides, ’The Dialectic of Intolerance: Ideological Dimensions of Ethnic Conflict’, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Winter 1979), 5-30. 49. In the prolegomena to his edition of Aristotle’s Politics. See A. Korais, ed., Aristotelous Politikon ta sozomena (Paris 1821), cxx. 50. Charles Frazee, The Orthodox Church and Independent Greece 1821-1852 (Cambridge 1969), 102-5, 109-10, 187-9 and passim. 51. Ibid., 89-124; and Petropulos, op. cit., 180-92, 483-6. 52. Frazee, op. cit., 146-54, 164-5, 168-70. 53. On the ecclesiastical settlement see Frazee, op. cit., 171-95, and Philippos C. Spyropoulos, Die Beziehungen zwischen Staat und Kirche m Griechenland unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der orthodoxen Kirche (Freiburg 1979), 60-74. 54. For a survey of church history from this point of view by a nationalist churchman, see E. Kostarides, I sygchronos elliniki ecclesia (Athens 1921). 55. The inaugural addresses have recently been conveniently assembled by K.T. Dimaras, En Athinais te 3 Maiou 1837 (Athens 1987). See 125-30 for the address of the dean of the Law Faculty. 56. Ibid., 34. 57. Ibid., 118. 58. Ibid., 39 59. See Kitromilides, ’The Dialectic of Intolerance’, op. cit., 11-16. 60. Political fragmentation gave rise to the theory of the ’national centre’, whereby the Greek kingdom attempted to legitimize its claim of primacy over the traditional leadership exercised by the Ecumenical Patriarchate. This resulted in the rivalry of the two ’national centres’, Athens and Constantinople. See P.M. Kitromilides, ’To elliniko kratos os ethniko kentro’, in D.G. Tsaousis, ed., Ellinismos - Ellinikotita (Athens 1983), 143-64. At least one nineteenth-century commentator (Ilias Zervos Iakovatos, Ai dyo protevouse tis Anatolis kata to 1858 kai 1860 [Cephalonia 1973]) suggested that up to 1864 there was a third ’national centre’ at Corfu, the capital of the United States of the Ionian Islands. The force of nationalism, however, dictated as the only conceivable course open to these political entities the path of submission to Athens through union with the Greek kingdom. 61. See Nikolaos Dragoumis, Istorikai anamnisis (Athens 1973; first published 1874), 116-20, 176-7.

62. On the ethnological context of the Macedonian Question, see L.S. Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453 (New York 1958), 517-43. See also Douglas Dakin, The Greek Struggle in Macedonia 1897-1913 (Thessaloniki 1966), 3-25, 117-19 and passim. 63. On the Greek ethnography of Asia Minor see Paschalis M. Kitromilides and Alexis Alexandris, ’Ethnic Survival, Nationalism and Forced Migration: The Historical Demography of the Greek Community of Asia Minor at the Close of the Ottoman Era’, Deltio Kentrou Mikrasiatikon Spoudon, Vol. 5 (1984-5), 9-44. 64. A list of Greek consulates appears in Ephimeris tis Kyverniseos tou Vasiliou tis Ellados, No. 46 (10 September 1836), 237, preceded by the official text of instructions to the consuls on their duties. 65. George Hill,A History of Cyprus, Vol. IV (Cambridge 1952), 496. For more details see Kitromilides, ’The Dialectic of Intolerance’, op. cit., 18-24. 66. For details see Chasiotis, op. cit., 355 ff. 67. A.A.M. Bryer, ’The Pontic revival and the new Greece’, in his collection, The Empire of Trebizond and the Pontos (London 1980). 68. ’Syllogomania’. Recorded in Stephanos Koumanoudes, Synagoge neon lexeon (Athens 1900; reprinted 1980), 943. On the political importance of these clubs see Sir Charles Eliot, Turkey in Europe (London 1908), 302. 69. A case study, revealing of the mechanisms of the whole process, is that by Magda M. Kitromilides, ’Paschalis D. Paschalides, o ierodidaskalos tou Choudiou’, Mikrasiatika Chronika, Vol. 18 (1988), 241-74. 70. M.A. Ubicini, Letters on Turkey, translated by Lady Easthope (London 1856), Vol. II, 233. 71. Ibid., 238. 72. Georges Perrot, Souvenirs d’un voyage en Asie Mineure (Paris 1864), 11. 73. Ibid., 59. 74. Ibid., 60. 75. Ibid., 165. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., 334. 78. Henry F. Tozer, Turkish Armenia and Eastern Asia Minor (London 1881), 42. 79. Ibid., 136-7. 80. Ibid., 138-9. 81. Ibid., 448-9. 82. Stamatios Antonopoulos, Mikra Asia (Athens 1907), 16-17. 83. Ibid., 21, 203. 84. Ibid., 232. 85. Ibid., 202. 86. Ibid., 172, 213. 87. Ibid., 236-7. 88. Ibid., 239-45. 89. Ibid., 242. 90. It is precisely this symbolism that provided Greek irredentism with its psychological dynamism and which can account for its success in converting large numbers of people. This might be considered a case of the moral outrage and sense of injustice which can explain the growth of nationalism. Cf. Barrington Moore, Jr., Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (New York 1978), 484-9.

91. Centre d’Études d’Asie Mineure, I Exodos, Vol. II (Athens 1982), 477. 92. For a general appraisal referring to the whole of Eastern Europe, cf. Emanuel Turczynski, ’Nationalism and Religion in Eastern Europe’, East European Quarterly, Vol. 5 (1972), 468-86. It is characteristic, however, that Dimitri Obolensky, ’Nationalism in Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages’, in idem., The Byzantine Inheritance of Eastern Europe (London 1982), connects the appearance of phenomena of ’nationalism’ in the Middle Ages only with those cases marked by ’the rise and consolidation of states’. 93. See Richard Clogg, ’The Dhidhaskalia Patriki (1798): An Orthodox Reaction to French Revolutionary Propaganda’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2 (May 1969), 87-115. 94. See Gale Stokes, ’Church and Class in Early Balkan Nationalism’, East European Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Autumn 1979), 259-70. See also Duncan Wilson, The Life and Times of Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic 1787-1864 (Oxford 1970), 46-9,323-30. 95. Ubicini, op. cit., Vol. II, 236. 96. Ibid., 237. 97. In the semi-official translation quoted below the term ’phyletism’ is rendered as ’racism’, which may obscure the real target of the nineteenth-century condemnation. See Maximos, Metropolitan of Sardis, The Oecumenical Patriar- chate in the Orthodox Church (Thessaloniki 1976), 303. 98. Ibid., 308-9. 99. S. Zankow, Die Verfassung der bulgarischen orthodoxen kirche (Zurich 1918), surveys the subject from the vantage point of Bulgarian nationalism; while M.I. Gedeon, ed., Eggrapha patriarchika kai synodika peri tou boulgarikou zitimatos (1852-1873) (Constantinople 1908), codifies the official pronouncements of the Patriarchate of Constantinople on the problem. See also L.S. Stavrianos, ’L’institution de l’exarcat bulgare: Son influence sur les relations interbalkaniques’, Les Balkans, Vol. IX (1939), 56-69. 100. Stavro Skendi, The Albanian National Awakening 1878-1912 (Pnnceton 1967), 161-4, 174-5, 179-80, 296-302. 101. See George R. Ursul, ’From Political Freedom to Religious Independence: The Romanian Orthodox Church, 1877 to 1925’, in Stephen Fischer-Galati, Radu R. Florescu and George R. Ursul, eds, Romania between East and West. Historical Essays in Memory of Constantin C. Giurescu (Boulder 1982), 224. 102. Cf. the very interesting study by Keith Hitchins, Orthodoxy and Nationality: Andreiu Saguna and the Rumanians of Transylvania, 1846-1873 (Cambridge MS 1977). 103. It is interesting to note that the autonomous Church of Georgia, one of the oldest Orthodox churches m the Caucasus, raised the issue of its elevation to autocephaly and patriarchate during the visit of the Patriarch of Constantinople Demetrios I in August 1987. This suggests that the question of ecclesiastical status still remains a major concern and probably provides an outlet of national assertion and self-recognition in the absence of independent statehood. 104. On the historical and theoretical significance of these conflicts see Paschalis M. Kitromilides, ’To telos tis ethnarchikis paradosis’, Amitos sti mnimi Photi Apostolopoulou (Athens 1984), 486-507. 105. On the background, see Derek Hopwood, The Russian Presence in Syria and Palestine 1843-1914: Church and Politics in the Near East (Oxford 1969),

159-79. The dislocation of the Greek Patriarch of Antioch was considered ’the first real victory for Arab nationalism’.

Paschalis M. Kitromilides is Professor of Political Science at the University of Athens and director of the Centre d’Etudes d’Asie Mineure. His published work includes Small States in the Modern World (1979), Culture and Society in Contemporary Europe (1981) and Iossipos Moisiodax: The Coordinates of Balkan Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1985).