| The Greek Issue ;-) | |
| Misirkov | Kenneth Young, The Greek Passion, A Study in People and Politics, (J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., London), pgs. 1, 123, 146, and 172: WHAT IS GREECE? "Her blue boundaries are Upona curving sky of Time, In a dark monstrum of Water" Lawrence Durrell, Letter of Seferis to Greek What is Greece? The name is often used as though it described a fixed geographical entity existing as unchanged as the British Isles from the dawn of history until now. The fact is that the present boundaries of 52,220 square miles of the Kingdom of Greece were etablished only in 1912; and before that from its foundatin in 1830 the kingdom comprised little more than half of its present territory. In neither case did the boundaries coincide with any "Greece" of the past (a name incidently never to this day used by the Greeks themselves) -- not with the Achaia of the Illiad, nor with the city-states of classical times with their colonies in Asia Minor, France, and Italy, nor with the empire of the Empire of the Alexander teh Great, stretching from the Adriatic to India, from Egypt to teh Ukraine, nor with the Eastern Empire whose capital Constantinople, the Holy City of Greek Christianity, was the centre of hellenism for almost a thousand yeras. |
| Misirkov | And what of Athens? It has been the capital of Greece only since 1830 and even then there were a number of the newly-independent Greeks who would have prefered NAVPILON or PIRAEOS. For hundreds of years Athens was a small, ruined village; only briefly in mid-fifth century B.C. was it the capital of a small empire stretching from Attica to Delos on the Aegean and the coastal fringe of Aisa Minor. In the 13 century, Mistra in the Peloponnese was a sort of southern Greek capital under the Frankish Prince Guillaume de Villehardouin. Once long before Pella, 23 miles north-west of Salonica, could claim to be the capital... When the Turks occupied Greece -- to them it was YUNANISTAN, a corruption of Ionia -- they infliceted no blow to Greek national pride, for no such thing existed. Indeed, the idea of a nation was yet unconceived. The greek word, now translated as nation, was used by the Byzantines only to denote a tribe unfortunate enough not to have merged its identity with the multiracial ihnabitants of the Empire. As for living under an empire whose rulers were not Greek, the Greeks were used to that. The real hurt was that under the Turks they were treated as second class citizens, lumped to gether with the "rayah," cattle, and this meant that it was twice as har to live, much less to progress. |
| Misirkov | That Greece could become a national state -- how, Metternich testily inquired, can one even define Greece? -- struck most people and their governments in the 18 and early 19 centuries as a bizzare idea. Greeks had never been a nation; it was doubtful that they were even a race; officially those Greeks who were not Turkish nationals were stateless wonderers, unless they had taken out foreign citizenship. Yet that Greeks were Greeks and not Romans or Byzantines, and that they should have a land of their own had been propounded since the 15 century when Pletho had his vision of the Peloponnese as the future home of the Hellenes. The thought matured and developed. By the later half of the 18 century, poets and scholars were wandering whether the descendans, as they believed them, of those anciens whohad provided the West with the ethical and artistic foundations of its civilization, could be quite as bd as Gibbon painted them: "the present-day Greeks," he worte, "walk with suppine indifference among the glorious ruins of antiquity; such si the debasement of their character that they are incapable of admiring the genious of their predeecssors." Could it be that -- as Rousseau had suggested in general terms -- the Greeks had been deprived of the sinuous Byzantines and the brutal Turks so that their natural goodness had degenerated because they had been deprived of their rights and liberies? |
| Misirkov | That were even demostrations of the language question, which, a smentioned in earlier chapters, was a problem from Hellenic times. In the 19 century, officialdom, the armed services, and the schools used the "cleansed" form of Greek, which was largely a Byzantine gloss of Greek. Most people however, spoke a vernacular, without the elaborate grammar of the formal language and containing a number of foreign expressions. In 1901, the New Testament was translated into the vernacular; so violent was the reaction of the students that the so-called "Gospel riuots" broke out contributed to the fall of the government. Two years later, the students and some of their porofessors were out agian, raging at a modern Greek version of "Oresteia"; an innocent bystaner was killed. Many partisans of the formal language, of course spoke the vernacular in private. Yet the attempt to broaden the vocabulary, particularly of the peasant, that was inherent in the ideas of the purists, was worth making. The language question remains unsettled to this very day. Kenneth Young, The Greek Passion, A Study in People and Politics, (J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., London), pgs. 1, 123, 146, and 172. |