IS THERE AN ETHNIC, CULTURAL OR OTHER RELATION BETWEEN THE ANCIENT GREEKS AND THE MODERN GREEKS? A couple of interesting books on the subject (written by a Greek): http://www.florina.org/html/books/hellenocentric/hellenocentric.html http://www.florina.org/html/books/kinship/kinship.html --- Interesting article and notes from it: http://radicalacademy.com/studentrefpolitics22mb.htm --- According to Renan (1823-1892), a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Man does not belong to his language or to his race. What makes a nation is not speaking the same language or belonging to the same ethnographic group. There is in humanity something superior to language; it is will [10]. In other words, the disparate (according to this view) bilingual ethnic groups, such as the Albanian-speaking Greek Arvanites (like Markos Botsaris, one of the chiefs of the Greek War of Independence) or the Romanian-speaking Greek Vlachs (like Rigas Pheraios, one of the spiritual leaders of the Greek revolt against the Ottomans) or the Slavophone Greeks, were not belonging to the same ethnographic group. That is, they were foreign to each other and had no connection to any common ethnic cultural background capable of unifying them into a single nation. Therefore, based on this view, modern Greek nation was formed on the basis of an idealistic will and not thanks to an ethnic umbilical cord that connected those ethnic groups. This theory has become quite widespread. It has deeply influenced such modern theorists of nationalism as Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson, who consider that the nation is an imagined political community and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign [11]. This theory is quite convincing, but, as will be shown, applies only to the colonialist countries of the West and the subsequent colonial countries of the 20th century; it is not valid in the case of the Balkan, Greek nation. So, the question is what is the position of Renan in the international bibliography and why it does not apply in the case of the Greek nation. According to the current international thinking, there are two main models of nation: (a) the territorial and civic model and (b) the ethnic-genealogical model. The theory of Renan belongs to the western civic model, as per which a historic territory, legal-political community, legal-political equality, and common civic culture and ideology are required for the formation of a nation [12]. According to the alternative ethnic model, which is supported by one of the most prominent modern theorists of nationalism, Anthony Smith, nation as a community is based on the common predecessors, the common descent of the different ethnic groups and their native culture [13]. The question now is which model is the most appropriate for the Greek historical reality: the civic model of Renan, Gellner and Anderson or the ethnic model of Smith. In other words, which of the two types of nationalism (emanating from the two models) applies to the Greek nation: the civic model or the ethnic model? -- A paper on the subject (mainly presenting the most anti-Hellenic view on the issue) http://www.historyofmacedonia.org/AncientMacedonia/greekmyth.html Notes from that paper following: ---- Anthony D. Smith points out, specifically in reference to the modern Greek nation, "Greek demographic continuity was brutally interrupted in the late sixth to eighth centuries A.D. by massive influxes of Avar, Slav and later, Albanian immigrants." He adds that modern Greeks "could hardly count as being of ancient Greek descent, even if this could never be ruled out.” -- Many of the views that follow explain that, whether the Greeks feel comfortable with the idea or not, their peoples are of diverse ethnic background, a great mix of the peoples of the Balkans, and have been for the past several thousand years. If all of the peoples of the Balkans were subjected to mixture of varying degrees with the invaders, as was certainly the case, then the argument might readily be made that modern-day Greeks are no more ethnically related to early Greeks than present-day Macedonians are to ancient Macedonians. Ancient Greeks. A common assumption is that ancient peoples were ethnically homogenous. As has already been noted with regard to the peoples of Macedonia, the kingdom was undoubtedly a great mix of people, and the diversity increased with the expansion of the Macedonian Empire. There was probably a comparable mix of peoples in various Greek city-states. While the Greeks who came into the Balkan peninsula became the dominant people in that area, strong influences from the earlier inhabitants remained. "For certain areas of the Greek mainland and many of the islands, the names of some fifteen preGreek peoples are preserved in ancient traditions, together with a number of other references. --- Bernal argues that the explanation of Greek development in terms of Egyptian and Phoenician influences was overthrown for external reasons, not because of major internal deficiencies or weaknesses in the original explanation, but because eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romantics and racists could not tolerate the idea that the crown jewel of European civilization owed its beginnings to a racial mix of cultures. For such reasons the ancient model had to be discarded and replaced by something more acceptable to the political and academic views of the time - the Aryan model (I do not agree with this view; The egyptian civilization was pathetic when it came to philosophy and science not to mention that the Greeks were the first to develop an alhabetic writing system. However, the Greek civilization was indeed based in its start on borrowings from the East and particularly Egypt) --- The Aryan model. The Aryan model, an alternative theory about the development of the ancient Greeks, first appeared in the first half of the nineteenth century. It denied any influence of Egyptian settlements and expressed doubt about a role for the Phoenicians. An extreme version of this model was propounded during the height of anti-Semitism in Europe in the 1890s, and then in the 1920s and 1930s; this particular explanation denied even the Phoenician cultural influence." According to the Aryan model, there had been an invasion from the north, an invasion not described by ancient writers, which had overcome the existing pre-Hellenic culture. Greek civilization was seen as the result of the mixture of the Indo-European speaking Hellenes and the older peoples over whom they ruled. --- By the turn of the eighteenth century, the so-called "European" Greeks were considered to have been more sensitive and artistic than the Egyptians and were seen as the better philosophers, even the founders of philosophy. By the end of the nineteenth century, some popular German writers had come to see the Dorians as pure-blooded Aryans from the north, possibly even from Germany. The Dorians were certainly seen as very close to the Germans in their Aryan blood and character. Significant British historians of the time also were enthusiastic about the supposedly pure northern, and possibly Germanic, blood of the Dorians. These ideas were developing in Europe in the same period as the Greek War of Independence, which united all Europeans against the traditional Islamic enemies from Asia and Africa. This war and the philhellenic movement throughout Europe and North America, which supported the struggle for independence, helped refine the existing image of Greece as the epitome of Europe. --- Bernal maintains that when all sources, such as legends, place names, religious cults, language and the distribution of linguistic and script dialects, are taken into account alongside archaeology, the ancient model, with some slight variations, is plausible today. He discusses equations between specific Greek and Egyptian divinities and rituals, and the general ancient belief that the Egyptian forms preceded the others, that the Egyptian religion was the original one. He says that this explains the revival of the purer Egyptian forms in the fifth century B.C." The classical and Hellenistic Greeks themselves maintained that their religion came from Egypt, and Herodotus even specified that the names of the gods were almost all Egyptian. Using linguistic, cultural, and written references, Bernal presents interesting evidence connecting the first foundation of Thebes directly or indirectly to eleventh-dynasty Egypt. He argues that both the city name Athenai and the divine name Athene or Atena derive from Egyptian, and offers evidence to substantiate this claim. He traces the name of Sparta to Egyptian sources, as well as detailing relationships between Spartan and Egyptian mythology. He says that much of the uniquely Spartan political vocabulary can be plausibly derived from late Egyptian and that early Spartan art has a strikingly Egyptian appearance. For Bernal, all these ideas link up with the Spartan kings' belief in their Heraklid - hence Egyptian or Hyksos - ancestry, and would therefore account for observations such as the building of a pyramid at Menelaion, the Spartan shrine, and the letter one of the last Spartan kings wrote to the high priest in Jerusalem, claiming kingship with him. --- Slavery in the ancient world. While it is difficult to gauge the intermixture that took place between the older established inhabitants and the infiltrating Greeks wherever they may have come from, the tradition of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean may have had an even greater impact on the physical nature of the people. It has been estimated that in classical times the number of slaves in Attica was roughly equal to the number of free inhabitants, or around 100,000." In Sparta there was an even greater proportion of slaves, and most of them, the helots, were Messenians. While the slaves of Athens were a wide racial mix and therefore less likely to unite on the basis of a common language, these Messenian helots of Sparta all spoke Greek, and had a kind of group self-consciousness. Thus they presented "special problems of security for their Spartan masters, whose numbers were constantly on the decline." Changes in the ethnic composition of Greek city-states are illustrated by the comments about the case of Piso. Piso, who had been the recipient of an unhelpful decision by a vote of the Athenian city assembly, "made a violent speech in which he said that the latter-day Athenians had no right to identify themselves with the great Athenians of the days of Pericles, Demosthenes, Aeschylus, and Plato. The ancient Athenians had been extirpated by repeated wars and massacres and these were mere mongrels, degenerates, and the descendants of slaves. He said that any Roman who flattered them as if they were the legitimate heirs of those ancient heroes was lowering the dignity of the Roman name." Such historical ideas make it clear that even two thousand years ago the notion of ethnic purity amongst the Greeks was difficult to sustain. The ethnic mix continued over the next two thousand years. As Nicol has observed, "The ancient Greeks were, after all, of very mixed ancestry; and there can be no doubt that the Byzantine Greeks, both before and after the Slav occupation, were even more heterogenous.” --- Celtic Influence. In 282-280 B.C., a Celtic army of about 170,000 led by Brennos and Achicorius entered Macedonia and, with Bolgios, overwhelmed the country. The Celtic army swept into Greece, defeating the Greeks at Thermopylae, and went on to sack the temple of Delphi, the most sacred site of the Hellenic world, before withdrawing. The Celtic army eventually withdrew in an orderly manner, taking their loot with them. No Greek army was strong enough to attack them. The Celtic invasions had a lasting effect on Greek consciousness, being commemorated in Greek literature. Though some remained as mercenaries, the bulk of the Celtic armies moved north again, having found little room to settle in populated Greece and Macedonia. The Celts remained in Thrace, though they were Hellenized. The Scordisci had established a prosperous and strong kingdom around modern Belgrade, and one Celtic tribe settled on the slopes of Haemos. However, most went further north and east, some even settling in Asia Minor, in Galatia. --- Greeks as Slavs. In recent historical time other Europeans have held the view that the people of modern Greece have little ethnic connection with the ancient Greeks. Robert Browning, 32 a writer who is sympathetic to the Greeks, discusses the writings of the Bavarian Johann Philipp Fallmerayer, who in 1830 proposed that the Slav invasions and settlements of the late sixth and seventh centuries resulted in the "expulsion or extirpation of the original population of peninsula Greece. Consequently the medieval and modern Greeks ... are not the descendants of the Greeks of antiquity, and their Hellenism is artificial." Fallmerayer's view that not a drop of pure Greek blood is to be found in the modern Greek is often held to be extreme. A more moderate version of essentially the same idea was presented more recently by R.H. Jenkins. Browning concedes that the Slavic impact was considerable in the Balkan peninsula, and that there was great intermixture of races in Balkan Greek lands. He says Fallnierayer wits right in drawing attention to the extensive Slav invasion and settlement in continental Greece. Despite the great attention given by the Greek government to renaming towns, villages, rivers and other geographic locations, there remain large numbers of place names of Slavonic origin. Even so, Browning suggests, the majority of the Greek-speaking people lived in Constantinople and Asia Minor, and in these more distant locations were not so strongly affected by the Slavs. He says also that the original population was not extirpated or expelled, since many remained in coastal regions, cities, and inaccessible areas. --- Greeks as Albanians. Slavs were not the only groups to move into the southern part of the Balkan peninsula. Many Albanians came in also. Albanians settled in Athens, Corinth, Mani, Thessaly and even in the Aegean islands. In the early nineteenth century, the population of Athens was 24 percent Albanian, 32 percent Turkish, and only 44 percent Greek. The village of Marathon, scene of the great victory in 490 B.C., was, early in the nineteenth century, almost entirely Albanian." --- Greeks as Vlachs. Also quite numerous during the eighteenth century in Greek lands and in territories that were to become Greek were the Vlachs. Hammond says that the Vlachs came in with the Albanians and provided leadership. He suggests that the Vlach peoples probably originated in Dacia, an area that is now part of Romania. Hammond says that the Vlachs managed to acquire possession of the great Pindus area. In general, they stayed in northern Greece and were never assimilated in terms of language the way that other ethnic groups were, though some groups ended the nomadic life and settled in Macedonia and in Thessaly. According to Tom Winnifrith, some Greek writers have claimed the Vlachs as ethnic Greeks. He is skeptical about this idea, claiming that these Greek historians have "been at unfair pains to eliminate almost completely the Latin element in Vlach language and history." Winnifrith comments that one of these Greek writers, M. Chrysochoos, the first to suggest that the Vlachs living in the passes crossing the Pindus mountains were the linear descendants of Roman soldiers, is inspired by misplaced patriotism to insist that these Romans were really some kind of Greeks. --- Greece was then still a very small state at the bottom of the Balkan peninsula. Finlay recognized " the vigorous Albanians of Hydra, the warlike Albanians of Suli, the persevering Bulgarians of Macedonia, and the laborious Vallachians on the banks of the Aspropotamos" who embarked together on a struggle for Greek independence, "as heartily as the posterity of the ancient inhabitants of the soil of Hellas. Nicholas Hammond tells us that in the Greek War of Independence the Albanians, above all, drove the Turks out. --- According to anthropologist Roger Just, most of the nineteenth-century "Greeks," who had so recently won their independence from the Turks, not only did not call themselves Hellenes (they learned this label later from the intellectual nationalists); they did not even speak Greek by preference, but rather Albanian, Slavonic, or Vlach dialects." He held that their culture was similarly remote from the culture of the ancient Greeks. Their "customs and habits might seem to bear as much if not more relation to those of the other peoples of the Balkans and indeed of Anatolian as they did to what were fondly imagined to be those of Pericline Athens." --- The Editor of The Sunday Telegraph argues that Greece has been ruthless in erasing traces of ethnic diversity, and suggests that the desperation of its actions, including the Greek claim to a monopoly of the classical past (in which all peoples of European origins have a share) can be explained by the fact that the Greeks today are a mixture of Slavs, Turks, Greeks, Bulgars, Albanians, Vlachs, Jews and Gypsies. --- In retrospect it is clear to me that my 12 years of Greek schooling, mainly in the 1970s, conspired to instill in me precisely one attitude: an almost unshakable belief in the purity and unity of the Greek people, language and culture ... Belief in the continuity of Greece against all odds was enabled also by the method of withholding information and sealing off interpretive paths. We had, as children, neither the capacity nor the inclination to explore disunities and "impurities.” --- Of particular interest are the population changes that have occurred in Aegean Macedonia during the twentieth century. The Greek position is that the Greek citizens of Aegean Macedonia have a genuine claim to historic connection with Macedonia and that the Slavs do not. It is implied that they have this connection since they are Greek and the ancient Macedonians are claimed to have been Greek. However, it is not commonly known, even among Greeks, that a majority of the "Greek" population of Aegean Macedonia can trace its immediate ancestors not to Macedonia, but to Anatolia, western Turkey, since they came from Turkey as refugees in the 1920s during one of the Greek-Turkish wars. The population of western Turkey at the time had been subject to many of the same forces that affected the populations of the southern Balkans, though for various reasons, including the tendency of the Byzantine Empire to move troublesome peoples to this area and the strong presence of peoples of Turkic origin, the mix was even more complex. --- Nineteenth-century European attitudes toward Greece. In 1821, after the Greek War of Independence broke out, western Europe was swept by Philhellenism." The Germans were the nationality most quickly and deeply involved. Over 300 Germans went to fight in Greece, but throughout Europe tens of thousands of students and academics were involved in support movements. Many Britons, French, and Italians went to Greece to fight, and there was a strong support movement in the U.S. Though only sixteen North Americans reached Greece, the widespread philhellenic feelings arising from the war provided a big boost for the "Hellenic"- Greek letter -fraternities in the US. Shelley wrote: We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts all have their roots in Greece. But for Greece ... we might still have been savages and idolaters ... The human form and the human mind attained to a perfection in Greece which has impressed its images on those faultless productions whose very fragments are the despair of modern art, and has propagated impulses which can never cease, through a thousand channels of manifest or imperceptible operation, to enable and delight mankind until the extinction of the race. Throughout western Europe, the Greek War of Independence was seen as a struggle between European youthful vigor and Asiatic and African decadence, corruption and cruelty. The Greek fight for independence had attracted European sympathy because of European distrust of the Moslem Turks, sympathy with the Christian Greeks, a great respect for classical Greek scholarship, and views developing in Europe that the ancient Greeks were "northern Europeans" and the originators of philosophy and science. Despite this favorable view of the ancients, closer inspection of modern Greeks had left many western Europeans disappointed with their heroic, but superstitious, Christian and dirty, "descendants," whom some regarded as "Byzantinized Slavs.” These views were not isolated. Mark Twain, for instance, "had thought modern Greeks a libel on the ancients."" The English poet Byron was shocked when he came to Greece expecting to find the tall, blond, blue-eyed heroes of antiquity. Cheetham10 says that the new Greeks were regarded with vague suspicion in academic circles, since their association with ancient Greece was not considered to be genuine. They were, in Robert Byron’s words, "discounted as the unmoral refuse of medieval Slav migrations, sullying the land of their birth with the fury of their politics and the malformation of their small brown bodies." Cheetham says that the classical master at his school commiserated with him on the prospect of his having to consort on his holidays with what he called "those nasty little Slavs." --- It may be that European racist contempt for the Greek revolutionaries of the nineteenth century goes some way toward explaining the persisting determination of the Greeks to create an alternative racial model for themselves. If we juxtapose the nineteenth-century view of the ancient Greeks as Aryans with attitudes towards the ethnic characteristics of the Greek revolutionaries, we can see the enormous burden that the Greeks carried in their dealings with Europe. While it has been a characteristic of new nation-states during the last century and a half to manufacture a suitable cultural, linguistic and ethnic pedigree for themselves, the Greeks have carried this process through to an extent that is unparalleled in Europe. Even today, Greece clings to a European connection via its rather tumultuous relationship with the European community. It is ironic that a part of the continuing European mistrust of the Greeks, as is evident from influential editorial comments such as those cited above, has developed because of the very myths that the Greeks propagate in order to purify their image. Greek myth-making today can be seen as inspired by the wider European racism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and even a continuation of that racism. The United States State Department and international human rights organizations have claimed that Greek suppression of ethnic minorities has come out of such policies. --- Toynbee notes that Herodotus, writing in 479 B.C., put common race and language first in his definition of Hellenism, but acknowledged a role for a common culture. However, Isocrates, nearly 100 years later (380 B.C.), made the point that the Athenians "have given the name 'Hellenes' a spiritual connotation instead of its former racial one. People who share in our Athenian culture are now felt to have a stronger title to the name 'Hellenes' than people who share with us merely a common physical make-up. Robert Browning dismisses the significance of the Slavic influence in Greece by taking up this idea, arguing that being Hellene was not a matter of genetics or tribal membership, but of education. Thus Browning suggests that if you speak Greek and live like a Greek, you are Greek. Cheetharn takes a similar tack, claiming that the "original" citizens of the Balkan peninsula were intensely proud of their Hellenic culture but adding that questions about racial origins would have appeared pointless to educated persons of the high Byzantine age, since they tended to indifference towards such matters. They had become quite accustomed to the enormous ethnic mixture that had characterized the empire since late Roman times. Both of these explanations, though intended to be sympathetic to the Greeks, are diametrically opposed to the present Greek government position. --- Browning also notes that over time the Slavs were acculturated and were often converted to Christianity. A process of "re-hellenization" took place, led by the Greek Orthodox Church, using the vehicle of the Greek language. To use the words of Nicholas Cheetham, (in the south) "religion and Hellenization marched hand in hand." The Slavs and Albanians, in particular, converted to Christianity and learned to speak Greek. --- Eric Hobsbawn reminds us: The most usual ideological abuse of history is based on anachronism rather than lies. Greek nationalism refused Macedonia even the right to its name on the grounds that all Macedonia is essentially Greek and part of a Greek nation-State, presumably ever since the father of Alexander the Great, king of Macedonia, became ruler of the Greek lands on the Balkan peninsula ... it takes a lot of courage for a Greek intellectual to say that, historically speaking, it is nonsense. There was no Greek nation-State or any other single political entity for the Greeks in the fourth century B.C.; the Macedonian empire was nothing like the Greek or any other modern nation-state, and in any case it is highly probable that the ancient Greeks regarded the Macedonian rulers, as they did their later Roman rulers, as barbarians and not as Greeks, though they were doubtless too polite or cautious to say so. In the same way that it would be questionable for a modern Swiss-German to claim descendence from sixteenth century Dutch seafarers, it is questionable for modern Greeks to claim family affinity with the ancient Macedonians, even if the ethnological purity which such a claim requires could be established. An appeal to continuity of Hellenism through the Greek language is similarly dubious. We have already seen Roger Just's comment that by the nineteenth-century most of the newly independent "Greeks" did not call themselves Hellenes, and did not even speak Greek by preference. Furthermore, the use of a form of the Slavic language was still widespread, perhaps dominant, in the territories that were not taken into the Greek nation until later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It has been claimed that the Greek language of the nineteenth century was a corrupted ecclesiastical version of classical Greek that the ancients might have had some trouble comprehending. George Finlay was extremely critical of this language and the role of the church hierarchy based in Constantinople in reducing it to the level apparent in the mid-nineteenth century. If we consider the standard applied by Herodotus that ancestry, language and culture were the basis for Greek community, or even if we prefer the evolved definition of Isocrates that gives primary emphasis to culture, it is not an unreasonable conclusion that nineteenth-century Greeks failed to meet these criteria. After the establishment of independence, Greek intellectuals made a great effort to return their country to its Hellenic past. Classical place names were revived, and Turkish, Venetian and even Byzantine buildings were removed to reveal ancient ruins. The language was standardized in the nineteenth century as part of a concerted effort to create a new Greece. This brought some stability to the culture of the diverse "new Hellenic" peoples who could be recognized at that time. Since 1988 and the renaming of northern Greece as Macedonia, a whole new focus has been given to the Greek effort to identify with the classical and Hellenic past. --- Another article (mainly presents a moderate view) http://www.replika.c3.hu/english/02/03gavri.htm Notes follow: --- The modern Greek state came into being largely due to the intervention of the Great Powers who were, more often than not, in hostile opposition to the Ottoman Empire. The uncertainties of diplomacy coincided with a revival of the classics in Europe in which many political elites and intellectuals, British and French in particular, mingled with Greek scholars who lived abroad. Together, they idealized classical Greece as the root of Western civilization and dreamed of resuscitating antiquity in a modern Greek state. “Indeed the war was reported in the western press as a virtual replay of the Battle of Marathon and the Persian Wars. Brought up on a diet of romanticized classicism, the West offered to the Greeks a version of their ethnic identity they were simply in no position to refuse” (Just 1989: 83). The Kingdom of Greece, which emerged in 1833 poor, tiny, devoid of infrastructure and run by entrenched local notables, found itself primed to inherit the honorific title of the source of European civilization (Herzfeld 1986). Many members of the Greek elite, in particular intellectuals and folklorists, treated antiquity as an issue of positioning and strategy (Friedman 1992). They used the past as defined by an enlightened collective of western scholars and statesmen to forge a cultural identity which would be instilled in the masses though the institutions of the state and would facilitate the cultural and political shift of Greece from a waning, autocratic East to a waxing community of Enlightened western nations. ---- Elites and intellectuals, both in the state and in conjunction with it, standardized and nationalized culture through the military and pedagogical institutions of the state. Peasants in the army, collected from all parts of the country, now lived under the same shabby barrack roofs and became aware of each other’s existence. Dialects were shamed out of existence as the army operated in standard Greek (Kitromilides 1990). The schools had a similar function, teaching children about their glorious past and propagating a form of purified Greek known as katharevousa. Katharevousa, the officially de-Turkified and archaizing language, was both an attempt to win Western approval and to re-enforce the modern Greek’s awareness of his or her Hellenic descent (Herzfeld 1986: 21). As Hellenic descent offered Greece a legitimate place among western states, Greek scholars were quite protective of their theories on cultural continuity. --- The Falmerayer Thesis is one case in point. Jakob Philipp Falmerayer, a nineteenth-century pan-German nationalist, rejected the idea that Greeks had an ancient ancestry, and alleged that they were nothing less than a heavy mix of most of the Balkan’s ethnic groups. Scholars and political elites in Greece denounced Falmerayer in unison and presented counterarguments to his thesis (Herzfeld 1986: 76). --- The state’s classical bearings also brought the cultural and upper echelons of the state in conflict with the Orthodox church. The Patriarchate had opposed the state’s aggressive cultural connections with the pagan world. Moreover, the church was seen as an Ottoman political institution which could impede the state’s project to co-opt local, religious identities. The obsession of the Greek state with the classical ancestry was relaxed as the nineteenth century wore on. Scholars began to elaborate cultural continuity theories which included the Byzantine Empire as a crucial link between classical and modern Greece. Competing Slavic nationalisms also gave a sense of urgency to the state and church to cooperate in a nation-building project. The creation of the Bulgarian Exarchate in the 1870s – an independent Orthodox church which began acting according to Bulgarian national interests – is one event which further tied the Orthodox church to the nationalizing Greek state. The tension between the secular, classical bearings of the Greek state and the Orthodox ideals was never truly resolved, although creating strict dichotomies between the two is difficult. What is clear is that the state- and nation-building experience of the nineteenth century established a set of cultural artifacts which referred to several glorious Greek pasts, most notably classical Greece and secondly Orthodoxy. --- In nineteenth-century Macedonia, it was increasingly difficult for the Ottoman authorities to administer the unique blend of Greek, Slavic, Turkish, Jewish, Albanian, and Vlah (or Aromanian) peoples. The Serb, Greek and Bulgarian nation-states, in particular, built schools in Macedonia and allowed brigands to infiltrate the province in order to terrorize each others’ ethnic communities and to foster mass-based, state-oriented conceptions of nationhood among their irredenta. Each particular ethnic group had developed its own nationalist organizations, not necessarily connected to any proximate states, including the Macedonians (of Slavic extraction) who sought to distinguish Bulgarian from Macedonian national aspirations and who wanted to create a literary language out of a chosen Macedonian dialect (Friedman 1993). Bulgarian nationalists, concerned about the possible erosion of a Greater Bulgaria which was to include most of Macedonia, attacked them as separatists. --- The Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 are a watershed in the history of the peninsula. By 1913, the Ottomans had been rolled back to Eastern Thrace, Albania had gained nominal independence, and Greece and Serbia had annexed most of Macedonia, leaving just 10 percent to Bulgaria and a swath of several dozen villages to Albania.4 Assimilation to the respective ethnic group of the annexor was the rule rather than the exception, and throughout the twentieth century the once “bewildering set” of ethnic groups and subgroups (Lunt 1986: 730) was steadily simplified. The Greek, Serb and Bulgarian states, moreover, resettled refugees in their respective sectors of Macedonia to dilute minority populations. --- A controversial article by Samuel Huntington titled “The Clash of Civilizations?” offers an explanation of the Greek-European dialogue that emerged from the Macedonia impasse. Huntington argues that the collapse of ideologically defined states in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union allows traditional ethnic identities and hatreds to reemerge with a vengeance (Huntington 1993 and 1996). Furthermore, economic modernization compromises the nation-state as the source and focus of identity. As a result these two processes, broader civilizational affiliations will become the decisive components of identity. Religion is the most likely determinant of civilization, and thus Europe can be divided into three religious zones: Latin, Orthodox and Muslim. The future, according to Huntington, may very well bring confrontation and conflict between these civilizations. --- Huntington’s argument, on the surface, seems to apply to Greece. Since the demise of Cold War political ideology, Greece has increasingly identified with Christian Orthodox Serbia and Russia at the expense of the Latin West and Muslim Turkey. Papandreou, before his stunning comeback to power in 1993, criticized the conservatives’ foreign policy warning that Greece “should not betray Serbia” (Greek Press 1993b). Serbia’s defeat would deprive Greece of a natural ally, upgrading the role of Turkey and the West in the Balkans. Furthermore, the bitter exchange regarding the status of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia superficially seems to verify Huntington’s thesis. The West supported this circumlocutory republic, full of brainwashed Serbians or Bulgarians as many Greeks alleged, to keep the Orthodox countries divided. Many Greeks also alleged that Turkey was supporting the significant Albanian and smaller Turkish minorities in the republic in an attempt to create a greater Muslim sphere of influence in the Balkans. --- The Huntington thesis would lead us to believe that what has transpired over and beyond the Macedonia issue is an inherent trend where religious and cultural ties supplant Cold War political ideology, forming tight civilizational alliances that are bound to clash with one another. --- To legitimate Greece as European, the moderate-right responded to criticism by reference to the ancient past, whereas the left tended to respond with angry distancing comments, placing Greece in a non-European association of Orthodox underdogs. In the process, both parties selectively emphasized their respective values and symbols and standardized them for both domestic consumption and the international response. These symbols were selected among a set of cultural artifacts which are residues of the state and nation-building processes begun in the nineteenth century. --- If we take into account political affiliation, we discover that individuals who identify with the left political spectrum tend to be more hostile toward an imagined collective of European states while rightists tend to engage in rhetoric which laments Greek corruption and disorder, the very things that, in their eyes, Europe has brought under control. --- Paper on the 1453-1821 history of Graeco-Balcan populations: http://www.arts.yorku.ca/hist/tgallant/courses/documents/roudometofJMGS16_1.pdf --- My two eurocents: Albanian-Arvanites, Romanian-Vlachs, Slavs, Turks and ancient Greeks (middle-eastern and African aboriginals, Achaeans and Dorians), as well as various other races that were mixed during the eras of the Roman and Byzantine empires is what constitutes the ethnic mix of the modern/contemporary Greeks (in the past 10 years a second Albanian invasion has occured in the guise of thousands of political and economic refuges). The modern Greek nation came together mainly because of a somewhat common hellenistic tradition and culture of the local peoples (and not so much because of a pure common ethnic descendancy), a common Christian religion as well as a strong western-born drive to ressurect the Greeks via a rigorous process of Hellenization (led by western-bred intellectuals of Hellenic descent, modern Greek people started learning Greek - only a relatively small elite spoke it at the start of the 19th century - and the glorious past of their partial ancestors). If I am Greek, I am European. Glory to the UK, France, US, Germany and other Western powers for helping give us Greeks our distinct and proud national identity. Glory to the ancient spiritual and intellectual forefathers of all Westerners - the migthy Hellenes. F.