Part 1 - Introduction - Part 02

Amazingly after all that has been said about the artificial identity of the Modern Greeks, there are still Greeks out there who accuse me of “lying” for pointing out the obvious. There are still Greeks out there who insist that all these authors from whom I take quotes for my chapters are “simply crackpots” who have something against Greece or perhaps are jealous of the “glorious Greek heritage”, as I am often accused of being! In this chapter I will present the reader with testimonies from twenty different authors, all westerners and all in a mission to HELP the Modern Greeks justify their artificiality who in telling their story have inadvertently confessed to the Modern Greek falsehood. If you think telling the truth is wrong and an awful thing to do when exposing your Greek falsehood then perhaps you can explain to me how you justify denying the Macedonians their identity generation after generation. Macedonians have been denied their ethnic identity, culture, language and heritage by Greeks since Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria acquired Macedonian lands by war in 1912, 1913. For my accusers, which is more wrong, to live a lie and deny others their true heritage or to tell the truth about you? There is no denying that the Modern Greek nation is an artificial creation created by Western Philhellenes from the Slav, Vlach and Albanian immigrants who over the centuries came to live on those lands after the so-called “Ancient Greeks” disappeared. To put an end to the notion that this is somehow a conspiracy to “rob” the Modern Greek nation of its heritage, in this chapter I will present quotes from twenty different authors who basically say that; Modern Greeks are NOT the descendants of the so-called “Ancient Greeks” of 2,500 years ago but rather the descendants of the more recently arrived Slav, Vlach and Albanian immigrants. (1) Now let us start with Edward Blaquiere, Esq. in his book “The Greek Revolution; its Origin and Progress”, on page 21 we read “Tyranny and want had driven some families, whose origin, like that of nearly all the peasants, who inhabit proper Greece, was Albanian, to take refuge on these desolate crags [the islands Hydra, Spezzia and Ipsara], where they built villages, and sought a precarious existence by fishing.” (2) In the book “Greece and the Balkans Identities, Perceptions and Cultural Encounters since the Enlightenment” edited by Dimitris Tziovas on page 5 we read “In southern Albania many Orthodox Albanians and Vlachs were Hellenized during the 18th and 19th centuries.” On page 6 we read “It should be stressed, however, that the Greeks as an ethnic community during this period included many Grecophone or Hellenized Vlachs, Serbs, or Orthodox Albanians.” And on page 75 we read “For Kodrikas, and many others, it was language that determined who was a ‘Greek’ for it constituted the ‘national existence’ of the nation. But for the Phanariot Theodoros Negris, Serbs and Bulgarians were as true Greeks as any other Christian”. (3) In J. P. Mahaffy’s book “Greek Pictures” on pages 20 and 21 we read “In the middle ages, these Albanian mountaineers have brought both war like spirit, bright costume, and beauty of person, to refresh the Hellenic race. There are still, even in Attica, districts where Albanian is the common language; there are Albanian names famous in Greek annals, especially in the great War of Independence (1821-31), and even among the sailors of Hydra, so famed for their commercial enterprise and their deeds of war, the chief families were Albanian in origin.” (4) Surprisingly even Nicholas G. L. Hammond the greatest Philhellene historian and author has admitted that the Modern Greeks are not what they seem. Nicholas G. L. Hammond in his book “Migrations and Invasions in Greece and Adjacent Areas” on page 57 writes “It was during this period [1206 to 1260] that the flow of immigrants from the western area began. It became a flood in the fourteenth century. They went as mercenaries, raiders and migrants.

The great majority of them were speakers of Albanian, but others joined the movement. Whatever their language they were described by the Greek and Latin writers as ‘Albanoi’ or ‘Albanitai’ or ‘Albanenses’ and the reason of this collective term can only be that they entered the Byzantine world through the district which the Byzantines knew as “Albanon’. Thus the Vlach speaking Malakasii who invaded Thessaly in 1334 were described as ‘Albanoi’ by Cantacuzenus 1.474 no less than the evidently Albanian-speaking ‘Albanensium gens’ which raided Thessaly in 1325. The southern movement of the tribes was on a very large scale. It was also rapid because towns and cities were bypassed (Dyrrachium for instance being captured c. 1368). It had two main effects. It took possession of Epirus Nova, the area inland of the coastal strip from Dyrrachium to Valona; and it sent streams of migrants into most parts of the Greek peninsula and some of the Aegean islands”. On page 59 of Hammond’s book we read “But the Albanian raids continued and Acarnea was laid to waste. In 1341 the Emperor attached the offending Albanians ‘around Pogoniane and Libisda’ (Lidisda), i.e. in the central part of northern Epirus; and then in 1355 he campaigned from Thessaly as far as the Aetolia and Arcanania and was killed in action (Cantacuzenus 3.319). These campaigns did not stop the flood. Albanians were serving as mercenaries in the Peloponnesus c. 1350, and they and their families were given land there to cultivate. Other bands of Albanians and Vlachs invaded the Catalan principality of Boetia and Attica, and a great many Albanians settled there as peasant-farmers in 1368 and later years. The penetration of the Greek mainland which we have described occurred during the hundreds or more years after 1325.” Then on page 61 we read “Once in possession of northwestern Greece, the Albanians opened the way for other immigrants. Offshoots of Vlachs and Albanians entered Boetia, Attica and Euboea…” (5) Keith R. Legg’s book “Politics in Modern Greece” on page 48 we read “As early as the 18th century, these areas were described as ‘hotbeds of chronic insurgency’. There were few Muslims here; the inhabitants, largely of Albanian stock, were only imperfectly assimilated into the Greek nation…” Then on page 86 we read “At the time if independence, the range of local dialects was significant; a substantial portion of the population spoke Albanian”. (6) In the “International Encyclopedia a Compendium of Human Knowledge” edited by Richard Gleason Greene on page 201 we read “Overrun by the Vandals and Goths it [Morea, today’s Peloponnesus] became a prey, in the second half of the 8th c. to bands of Slavic invaders, who found it wasted by war and pestilence. Gradually however these barbarians were subdued and Grecianized by the Byzantine emperors. Nevertheless, the numerous names of places, rivers, etc, in the More of Slavic origin prove how firmly they had rooted themselves, and that the Moreotes are anything but pure Greeks.” (7) In the book “Races of Europe a Sociological Study” by William Z. Ripley Ph.D., published in 1910 on page 408 we read “Since the Christian era, as we have said, a successive downpour from the north into Greece has ensued. In the 6th century came the Avars and Slavs, bringing death and disaster. A more potent and lasting influence upon the country was probably produced by the slower and more peaceful infiltration of the Slavs into Thessaly and Epirus from the end of the seventh century onward. A result of this is that Slavic names to-day occur all over the Peloponnesus in the open country where settlements were readily to be made. The most important immigration of all is that of the Albanians, who, from the 13th century until the advent of the Turks, incessantly overrun the land.” (8) In the book “Greece in the 20th Century” edited by Theodore A. Kouloumbis on page 24 we read “Primary school children were taught, in the 1880’s, that ‘Greeks [are] our kinsmen, of common descent, speaking the language we speak and professing the religion we profess’, but this definition, it seems, was reserved for small children who could not possibly understand the intricate arguments of their parents on the question of Greek identity.

What was essentially to understand at a tender age was that Modern Greeks descended from the Ancient Greeks. Grown up children, however, must have been no less confused than adults on the criteria for defining modern Greek identity. Did the Greeks constitute a race apart from the Albanians, the Slavs and the Vlachs? Yes and no. High school students were told that the ‘other races’, i.e. the Slavs, the Albanians and the Vlachs, ‘having being Hellenized with the years in terms of mores and customs, are now being assimilated into the Greeks”. (9) In Alfred P. Schultz’s book “Race or Mongrel” on page 92 we read “From the foregoing it is evident that but very little Hellenic blood is left in Greece, and that little is so thoroughly vitiated that its disappearance is but a question of time. No race inhabits Greece. The ‘Greeks’ are descendants of races so different that their crossing can never produce anything else than human mongrels. Their ancestors were Greeks, Hellenized Asiatics and Byzantine Greeks (i.e. Hamitic-Semetic-Greek-Egyptian-Negroid mongrels), Slavs, Sicilians, Spaniards, Huns, Bulgarians, Walloons, Franks and Albanians.” (10) In the book “Sailing from Byzantium” by Colin Wells on page 183 we read “This revival also allowed the Byzantines to decolonize the Greek mainland. The success of that effort would prove crucial to the survival of Greek culture in future centuries, after the other lands had fallen away. Having overrun nearly all of the Greek mainland, the cities, and the islands, by the tenth century the Slavs in Greece had been converted to Orthodox Christianity and thoroughly Hellenized. Today the only evidence of the Slav’s arrival is the presence of Slavic place names, some five-hundred or so of them, scattered charmingly throughout the Greek countryside.” (11) In Alexandra Halkias’s book “The Empty Cradle of Democracy” on page 59 we read “Through the end of the revolution in 1830, Greeks, including most of the 19th century nationalists, seemed to have had a vague but firm sense of continuity from ancient to modern Greece, though this was not articulated in racial terms, but on a basis of a common language, history and consciousness. In effect, at this time, who ever called themselves a Greek was a Greek. It is because of this that many Greek-speaking Albanians, Slavs, Rumanians and Vlachs were easily assimilated and indeed became important players in Greek patriotism at the time (Dakin 1972, 8).” (12) In the book “Turkey in Europe” by Sir Charles Eliot on page 267 we read “Constantinople and all of continental Greece were for centuries ruled and occupied by the Romans, and during many subsequent centuries invaded and colonized by Slavs. The crusades and the Latin conquest brought a large influx of western Europeans, commonly called Franks; and, in later times, extensive Albanian settlements were made in Greek districts. Clearly, the modern Greek must be of very mixed blood.” (13) In the book “History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century” by G. P. Gooch on pages 490 and 491 we read “General interest was first aroused by a controversy as to the racial derivation of the modern Greeks. The war of independence had won the sympathy of Europe; and it was a rude shock both to Greece and to her champions when Fallmerayer announced that her inhabitants were virtually Slavs. The race of Hellenes, he declares in his ‘History of Morea’ was rooted out and Athens was unoccupied from the sixth to the tenth century. Only its literature and a few ruins survived to tell that the Greek people have ever existed. What the Slavs had begun the Albanians have completed. Scholars had been so busy with the Ancient Greeks that they had never inquired as to what happened to them. Leake had discovered a great number of Slavonic place names but he had drawn no conclusions. ‘I now lay the foundation of a new view of Greek history and of the whole peninsula’. He recalls the invasions of the Huns, the Bulgars and the Slavs, and the second volume shows the Morea flooded by Albanian colonists and finally conquered by the Turks.”

(14) In the “Phrenological Journal and Magazine of Moral Science for the Year 1843” Vol. XVI on page 246 we read “Next to them in this respect are the modern Greeks, who, for the most part, are of Sclavonian origin, and, where they are not purely Sclavonian, are a cross-breed in which the Sclavonian enters very largely.” (15) In Rennell Rodd’s book “The Customs and Lore of Modern Greece” on page 17 we read “In the last year of the 15th century and the opening of the 16th, when the Morea was again the battle-field of Turks and Venetians, the occupants of the plains of Argos and of portions of Attica were practically exterminated, and Albanian colonists began to re-occupy the ruined lands.” (16) In the book “In Greek Waters a Story of the Grecian War of Independence (1821-1827)” by G. A. Henty published in 1893 on page 40 we read “With them [the modern Greeks] it would be a resurrection, accomplished, no doubt, after vast pains and many troubles, the more so since the Greeks are a composite people among who the descendants of the veritable Greeks of old are in a great minority. The majority are of Albanian and Suliot blood, races which even the Romans found untamable.” (17) In the “Popular Science Monthly” Volume LXXV, July to December 1919, edited by J. Mckeen Cattell on page 591 we read “The modern Greeks are largely of Slavic origin. They are not the descendants of the ancient Greeks. That noble race greatly mixed with barbarian blood during the middle ages, was completely destroyed in the course of the frequent uprisings against Turkish rule. Slavic immigrants gradually peopled the country.” (18) In William St. Clair’s book “That Greece Might Still be Free” on page 91 we read “The Albanians, some of whom were Christian and some Muslim, were torn by this dilemma, and when the need for decision became inescapable, they divided by religion and not by race. The Roman Catholic Greeks, who lived in the islands which had been under Venetian or Genoese rule, regarded themselves as a separate community. The Albanians of Hydra and Spetsae, many of whom could not even speak Greek, regarded themselves as Greek because their allegiance was to the Orthodox Church.” (19) In the 1910 “The Encyclopedia Britannica”, eleventh edition, on page 465 we read “…in 1725 the Ottomans with a large and well disciplined army set themselves to recover the Morea, the Venetians were left without support from the Greeks. The peninsula was rapidly recaptured and by the peace of Passarowits (1718) again became a Turkish dependency. The gaps left about this time by the Greek population were largely made up by an immigration from Albania.” (20) In the book “Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770-1945)”, Volume II, edited by Balasz Trencsenyi and Michal Kopecek, on page 141 we read “It is funny but also sad, to see a social gathering of different Greeks, but is to say Chiots, Cretans, Albanians, Byzantines, Orientals, Ionian islanders and others, where upon the one mixes in Turkish words, the other Italian ones, the other Albanian ones, and in the same gathering, while they are all Greek, they cannot understand each other without the use of a translation or an explanation of each word as it is uttered, with the gathering thus turning into a Babel.” For those who are still not convinced that the Modern Greek identity is an artificial creation, please continue to read this book. Part 8 - Connecting the Past with the Present

When the crazy idea of creating “Hellenes” out of the Modern Barbarian ethnic groups, who during the late 18th and early 19th centuries were living on the same lands as the people from the Ancient City States of 2,500 years ago, was starting to take root a history had to be written for them. This would be no ordinary history but a history that would extend their lineage connecting their modern existence with that of their ancient. But didn’t I tell you all along that the Modern Greeks are not at all connected with the ancient ones? Didn’t I tell you that the Modern Greeks are not Greeks at all but Slavs, Albanians, Vlachs and an assortment other smaller ethnic groups? Yes I did! How then can a group of Slavs, Albanians and Vlachs be connected to a people that ceased to exist more than 2,000 years ago? All I can say at this point is that “it’s by Magic”! In this chapter we will explore the magic processes used by the Philhellenes to transform mere barbarians of the Slav, Albanian and Vlach kind into sophisticated Modern Greeks, perfect replicas of the Ancient Greeks, as envisioned by their Philhellene creators. If I can refer to Lord Byron as the “Father of Modern Greece” because of his involvement in the creation of the “Modern Greek” then I would have to refer to Johann Gustav Droysen as the “wizard of Modern Greek History” for his magical performance in making the connection between the Modern Greeks and the “Ancient” ones. Johann Gustav Droysen (1808-1884) was a German historian and a member of the Frankfurt Parliament. (Page 597, “The Columbia Encyclopedia” 3rd Edition, 1963) In “The Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece”, edited by Nigel Wilson, on page 345 we read “The first modern appearance of the concept of Hellenism and Hellenization occurs in Geschichte des Hellenismus G. Droysen’s great three volume work published between 1833 and 1843. He viewed the Hellenistic period as the time in which, in the territories conquered by Alexander the Great, Greek and Near Eastern cultures were intertwined to create the cultural background from which Christianity emerged.” The great Philhellene masterminds, it appears, were not too concerned about the Ancient to Modern Greek connection when they were concocting the idea of creating Greeks from Slavs, Albanians and Vlachs because they probably did not believe that the concept would catch on, but once it did, that job fell upon Johann Gustav Droysen to connect them to a fabled but glorious past. “In his first edition of [his book History of Hellenism] 1883 Droysen set out to bridge the gap between classical Greece and the coming of Christianity, and he found his link in what he called the Hellenistic age. ‘My enthusiasm’, he wrote ‘is for Caesar, not Cato, for Alexander, not Demosthenes’, small wonder that such a man living in the Germany of Bismarck should conceive a devotion to the rising state of Prussia, with its manifest destiny to unite the Fatherland; and Droysen’s second edition, published in 1877, under the spell of Prussian success, laid special stress on the forces making for panhellenism and the unity of Greece – above all Isocrates and the kings of Macedon. It was Droysen who really raised the national issue in Greek history.” (Page 235, “The Problem of Greek Nationality”, F.W. Walbank) Droysen, it appears, had quickly discovered that the Ancient so-called Greeks had disappeared from the face of the earth and he could not make a connection so he decided to borrow or perhaps steal from the Macedonians. Even though the Macedonians ethnically had nothing to do with the Ancient City States, Droysen made it his mission to make the connection, making it appear as if they did. Instead of appropriately calling the Period subsequent to Alexander the Greats’ time “the Macedonistic Period”, he opted for calling it “Hellenistic”, which in effect robbed the Macedonian people of their heritage and handed it to the artificial newly created Greeks. Further down in “The Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece”, edited by Nigel Wilson, on page 345 we read “The creation in the 19th and 20th centuries of modern European Empires in regions once dominated by Hellenistic kingdoms was a further spur to reassessing the Hellenistic period.

Those developments encouraged scholars to see Alexander and his Macedonian successors as precursors of contemporary events. In parallel, scholarship was adding new evidence to Droysen’s view of Hellenistic civilization as a mixed culture which, although Greek in character, had been enriched by the incorporation of features derived from ancient Near Eastern cultures.” In Peter Green’s book “Alexander of Macedon 356-323 B.C. a Historical Biography” on pages 482 and 483 we read “Committed liberalism, however, was not a universal feature of nineteenth-century scholarship. European history moved in various channels, some more authoritarian than others: as usual, Alexander's reputation varied according to context. One milestone in Alexander studies was the publication of Johann Gustav Droysen's still immensely influential biography, Alexander der Grosse (1833). It has often been said, with justice, that this is the first work of modern historical scholarship on Alexander: Droysen was, undoubtedly, the first student to employ serious critical methods in evaluating our sources, and the result was a fundamental study. Once again, however, Droysen's own position largely dictated the view he took of his subject. Far from being a liberal, he was an ardent advocate of the reunification of Germany under strong Prussian leadership and after 1848 served for a while as a member of the Prussian parliament. Thus we have a biographer of Alexander imbued with a belief in monarchy and a passionate devotion to Prussian nationalism: how the one aspect of his career influenced the other is, unfortunately, all too predictable. For the aspirations of independent small Greek states (as for their German counterparts) he had little but impatient contempt. In his view it is Philip of Macedon who emerges as the true leader of Greece, the man destined to unify the country and set it upon its historical mission; while Alexander carried the process one step farther by spreading the blessings of Greek culture throughout the known (and large tracts of the unknown) world. Plutarch's early essay on Alexander had made much the same point, contrasting the untutored savage who had not benefited from the king's civilizing attentions with those happy lesser breeds who had, the result of their encounter being that blend of Greek and oriental culture which Droysen, perhaps rather misleadingly, christened Hellenism. As one contemporary scholar says, ‘Droysen's conceptions were propounded so forcefully that they have conditioned virtually all subsequent scholarship on the subject.’ Whatever their views on the nature of his achievement, most subsequent biographers tended to see Alexander as, in some guise or other, the great world-mover. This view held up surprisingly well until after the Second World War. The late nineteenth century, after all, saw the apogee of the British Empire, and scholars who got misty-eyed over Kipling in their spare time were not liable to argue with Droysen's view of Alexander. But this was also the heyday of the English gentleman, and much of that fascinating if often legendary figure's characteristics also now began to figure in their portraits – Alexander's becoming lack of interest in sex, his chivalrous conduct to women, his supposed ideals and aspirations towards the wider and mistier glories of imperialism.” Droysen again sets the stage for Macedonians not only to be viewed as “Greeks” but as “Greek unifiers” missing the point altogether that Philip II of Macedonia subjugated the City States after defeating their armies in Charonea in 383 BC. But some people just see what they want to see completely ignoring reality! In the book “The Body Impolitic” by Michael Herzfeld on page 9 we read “Here is the ultimate Greek tragedy: that of a country forced to treat everything familiar at the time of the nation-state’s foundation as ‘foreign’ while importing a culture largely invented – or at least redesigned – by German classicists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

For many decades, and almost without interruption, Greeks were forced to put aside music, art and language that were deemed too tainted by the ‘oriental’ influences of the Ottoman, Arab, Slavic and Albanian culture; to forget the partially Albanian roots of modern Athens and its environs; to use in elite-controlled contexts such as schools, the media and the law courts an artificial language syntactically modeled to a surprising extent on French and German but claimed as a revival of a ‘pure’ ancient Greek that supposedly had been preserved in these quintessentially Western languages; and to contemplate the architecture of Bavarian neoclassicists as more genuinely Greek than the homes and churches that had been their cultural settings for many centuries.” Then on page 6 of the same book we read “The Greeks’ marginal status in the ‘Western Civilization’ of which they are supposedly founders, and yet in important respects also the victims, rudely batters their everyday lives at every turn: internationally embarrassed by their successive governments scandals and acutely aware of their dependency on the European Union of which Greece is a member state enjoying nominally full equality with the others, they find themselves derided for an obsession with whether or not they are ‘really European’ that is itself the product of a ‘crypto-colonial’ set of aesthetic and ethical norms.” On page 7 of Michael Herzfeld’s book “The Body Impolitic” we read “Greece is a country created and lauded by the West for virtues that were to a great extent invented in the West: the glories of classical culture, intensely studied and formulated in such universities as Gottingen and Oxford during the enlightenment, were imported during the romantic era in Greece, now under a western imposed Bavarian monarchy and Bureaucracy. In Athens, a partially Albanian small town dragged into modernity by being made the national capital, the florescence of neoclassical architecture signed the reconstruction of the present as a living past, but the local architecture (and especially those aspects of it that seemed to recall the Ottoman period) was demolished as quickly as possible. Domestic spaces nonetheless retained non classical interiors often with distinct Turkish-sounding names for the various features, in contrast to the classical names of the exterior ornament. In language, above all, ordinary speech was increasingly condemned as both decadent and foreign, a medley of Turkish and Slavic influence, and was replaced for legal and educational purposes by the newly created puristic language. Music, art and folklore – everything was reclassicised in a formula created in Germany, Britain and France.” Further down on page 7 and at the top of page 8 of the same book we read “Greek independence was thus highly conditional. The bourgeoisie that emerged out of this situation was beholden to the west; the religious imitated the rationalism of the West; and the academic establishment, especially during periods of military rule, faithfully reproduced the self demeaning ideology of Greece the European ancestors as prime instrument of its own – highly conditioned – status and power.” I find it unnecessary to add any more information; the above few quotes quite remarkably define not only the fabrication processes but also the character imposed on the south Balkan people to create this fantastic entity called Modern Greece. These few quotes go a long way in describing what went on in the fabrication of this purely artificial nation called Greece and in the falsification of its history ; and if I may add at the expense, among others, of the Macedonian people. Now a few words about the other creator of Greece; Lord Byron “It is worth while to ask, for instance, how many of those who are moved by the poetry of Lord Byron has contrasted it with his opinion of the modern Greeks, when now and then he descends to sober prose? It is somewhat curious to notice the actual origin of Lord Byron’s expedition, and the opinion he really formed in the course of it.

Dr. Millingen as his physician and constant companion, speaks with an authority on this point to which no one else perhaps can make an equal claim, and this is the account he gives; - Breaking asunder the shackles which checked their immorality, the late revolution has given the amplest scope to the exhibition of their real character, and it stands to reason that it must have placed in more glaring light the melancholy picture of their utter worthlessness. Even under the wisest government, the regeneration of a nation can be the difficult work of time, and certainly none can be less easily improvable than this. According to the same authority, Lord Byron, when asked why he fought for Greece, gave the following reason: - Heartily weary of the monotonous life I had lead in Italy for several years, sickened with pleasure, more tired of scribbling than the public if perhaps of reading my lucubrations, I felt the urgent necessity of giving a completely new direction to the course of my ideas, and the active, dangerous, yet glorious scenes of the military career struck my fancy and became congenial to my taste. I came to Genoa, but far from mediating to join the Greeks, I was on the eve of sailing to Spain, when informed of the overthrow of the liberals, I perceived it was too late to join R. Wilson, and then it was the unmanageable delirium of my military fever that I altered my intentions and resolved on steering to Greece. After all, should this new mode of existence fail to afford me the satisfaction I anticipate, it will at least present me with the means of making a dashing exist from the scene of this world where the part I was acting had grown excessively dull.” (Pages 929 and 930, “The Nineteenth Century a Monthly Review”, edited by James Knowles, July-December, 1870) And now I leave you with this; “In order for Greece to be delivered her independence from the Ottomans by the great powers of the enlightened West, Greece had to prove not only that she could become a modern nation but, somehow, that Greece, under the oriental patina of the Ottoman subject, was always already the primal modern entity. Or alternatively, Greece could have followed Ludwig von Maurer’s advice, who, in 1836 said that ‘all the Greeks have to do in order to be what they used to be is mimic the Germans.” (in Tsiomis 1985b: 144). And the Greek intellectuals understood only too well that in order for them to be considered to be European they first had to prove that they were as ‘Greek’ as the rest of the Europeans.” (Page 28, “Fragments of Death Fables of Identity an Athenian Anthropography” by Neni Panourgia). Part 9 – Language Religion and Identity

By now everyone who has read the previous chapters in this book should be aware of the history of how the so-called Greek nation was created. But what we have not discussed so far is the criteria used in identifying who was Greek and who wasn’t given that the Modern Greek nation was created from Slavs, Albanians and Vlachs. Putting the question another way, in the early 19th century when the Greek state was being created for the first time ever, how did one recognize a Greek from a non Greek given that the majority of ethnic groups living in the land who became Greek were predominantly Albanian, Slav, or Vlach? In James Knowles’s monthly review “The Nineteenth Century and After” volume LXXXVI, July – December 1919 on page 645 we read “But who are the Greeks? At least five-sixths of them, if not more, are Christian Albanians of the Orthodox faith, Albanians in sentiment and in language, who because they acknowledge the Patriarch of Constantinople are declared to be Greek in point of ‘national consciousness’. In point of fact, the greater number of the Christian Albanians, whether Orthodox or Catholic, are thoroughly Albanian in sentiment as well as in race and language, and have nothing whatsoever in common with Greeks except allegiance to a Church which styles itself Oecumenical or universal, not national or Greek.” In this author’s estimation, an Albanian whose allegiance was to the Orthodox religion was considered to be Greek. In the book “Greece in the Twentieth Century” edited by Theodore A. Couloumbis on page 25 we read “Greeks are those who speak Turkish but profess the Christian religion of their ancestors.” In the book “The Empty Cradle of Democracy” by Alexandra Halkias on page 59 we read “Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the average inhabitant of Greece called himself of herself Roman (Romios), and the (Greek) language Romeika.” “…though this was not articulated in racial terms but on the basis of a common language, history and consciousness. In effect, at this time, whoever called themselves a Greek was a Greek. It is because of this that many Greek-speaking Albanians, Slavs, Romanians and Vlachs were easily assimilated and became important players in Greek patriotism at the time. (Dakin 1972, 8)” “To some extent – the consciousness of the modern Greek of his classical ancestry is a product of Western scholarship.” Here Alexandra Halkias tells us that before Greece became a country in the early 19th century some of its people called themselves Romios meaning Romans and the language Romeika. But no sooner had Greece been created by its Philhellene patrons than Romios and Romaika became Greek and all those who spoke Romaika, irrespective of their ethnic origins be it Slav, Albanian or Vlach, became instant Greeks. In the book “Greece and the Balkans” edited by Dimitris Tsiovas on page 43 we read “…common phenomenon in Balkan history: the ‘ethnicization’ of religious, social or occupational groups. Very often, such groups were denoted by the names of ethnic communities and they used these names to denote themselves as well. As we saw ‘Greek’ (Romaios) could mean ‘Orthodox Christian’ but also “city dweller’ and well to do ‘citizen’ in particular. In the same way ‘Turk’ often means ‘Muslim’. Bulgarian was used to denote ‘villager’, with or without pejorative connotation. ‘Vlach’ could mean ‘shepherd’ or ‘nomad’ in General.” In the book “Politics in Modern Greece” by Keith R. Legg on page 86 we read “The term ‘Greek’ differentiates the language spoken by inhabitants of modern Greece from the languages of the surrounding countries; but there is disagreement on what the Greek language was, is, and should be. At the time of independence, the range in local dialects was significant; a substantial portion of the population spoke Albanian.” In the book “Political Science Quarterly” edited by The Faculty of Political Science of Columbia University, Twenty-Third volume, published in 1908 on page 307 we read “There was little interest as to the nationality of the rayahs while Turkish rule was strong.

They were nearly all Christians of the Byzantine kind, those in Europe at least, and were hence regarded as one people, for oriental theocracy cannot conceive of nationality apart from religion. They themselves knew the differences in their origins and in such traditions as they had; some were Slavs, some Vlachs and some Albanians…” “But they felt more deeply than they thought; the hardships of their common lot and the common worship of their church gave them a stronger sense of unity than disunity; they were all non-Muslims, all rayahs and in a sense all Greeks.” Here the authors do not hesitate to equate “Greek” with “Orthodox Christian” as was truly the case back in the 19th century, a formula that the Greeks, Serbians and Bulgarians would later use to make Greeks, Serbians and Bulgarians out of the Macedonians. “When we read that the Roumanians are Latins; that the Bulgarians and Servians are Slav, according to the opinion of this and that writer, or that they are Greeks, as Greece contends, we get the common coin of diplomatic exchange; but it is spurious and counterfeit if passed as historical truth.” (Page 307, “Political Science Quarterly” edited by The Faculty of Political Science of Columbia University, Twenty-Third volume, published in 1908). In the book “Romaic Grammar” by E. A. Sofocles, A. M. published in 1842 on page iii of the preface we read “Romaic, or, as it is often called, MODERN GREEK is the language spoken by the modern Greeks.” Then on page iv in the same book we read “The revolution of 1821 has restored the ancient appellation ‘Ellines’ but as it is used chiefly by the inhabitants of Bavarian Greece, who perhaps do not constitute more than one-fourth of the Greek nation, it may safely be said that the mass of the people still call themselves Romeii and their language Romaiki.” In James Knowles’s monthly review “The Nineteenth Century” Vol. VI, July-December 1870, on pages 948 and 949 we read “The Orthodox Church, it is true, has striven more successfully to make Christian Greeks than to make Greeks Christians; but to assert that a Greek Christian is a Hellene it is as reasonable as to call all Roman Catholics Italian; and to claim a Slav or Albanian as a Hellene because he speaks Greek, is much the same as calling an educated Russian French, or an Irishman English, because they prefer French or English to their own less developed languages.” In William St. Clair’s book “That Greece Might Still be Free” on page 8 we read “In the eyes of the majority of Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, it was primarily their religion that distinguished them from the Turks, Arabs, Armenians, Jews and others who made up the population of the Empire. All their feelings of being a community centered on the Orthodox Church with its Patriarch at Constantinople, and they felt themselves as alien to the Roman Catholic Greeks who inhabited some of the islands as to the Muslims. Their tradition lead back to the great days when a Greek-speaking Roman Emperor sat on the throne of a Christian Empire at Constantinople and the Orthodox Church and the Patriarchate had an unbroken succession which had been little affected by the Turkish conquest. The Greek language which they spoke was known as ‘Romaik’ from the time when they had been citizens of the Eastern Roman Empire. They called their children after the saints of the Orthodox Church, Georgios, Dimitrios, Spyridon. Most Greeks of the Ottoman Empire had no comprehension of that complex of ideas relating to territorial boundaries and cultural and linguistic uniformity which makes up the European concept of a nation state.” Then on page 9 of St. Clair’s book we read “The Albanians of Hydra and Spetsae, many of whom could not even speak Greek, regarded themselves as Greek because their allegiance was to the Orthodox Church.” And finally on page 22 of St. Clair’s book “That Greece Might Still be Free” we read “In Greece itself the Greeks still thought of themselves as the Christian inhabitants of a Muslim Empire, not as the descendent of the Hellenes.

The veneer of philhellenism in Greece was very thin indeed. The Greek leaders in Greece itself who joined the conspiracy were content to adopt the propaganda of their expatriates, but they knew that their power over their people depended on something else entirely. A policy of establishing a European nation-state based in ideas about ancient Hellas formulated in Western Europe was far from their minds. Their aim was much simpler. They wanted to get rid of the Turks and take their place as rulers of the country. But they had no wish to set up European political institutions, to assume Western or ancient clothes, or to speak ancient Greek. They did not want to be ‘regenerated’ at all. They were content with the primitive semi-barbarous Eastern way of life they had always known.” It is a shame indeed that so many living and vibrant cultures had to be destroyed to make room for “Hellenism”, something dead and artificial. In Michel Herzfeld’s book “The Body Impolitic” on page 7 we read “In language, above all, ordinary speech was increasingly condemned as both decadent and foreign, a medley of Turkish and Slavic influences, and was replaced for legal and educational purposes by the newly created puristic language. Music, art and folklore – everything was reclassicized in a formula created in Germany, Britain and France.” Again, so many wonderful and vibrant mother languages destroyed to make room for an ancient 2,000 year old dead language artificially resurrected and engineered for the artificially created Hellenic identity which bears no resemblance to the real identities that it replaced which existed on those lands before they were destroyed just in the same way the Greeks are attempting to destroy the Macedonian language spoken north of Mount Olympus. And now I will leave you with this; In Bayard Taylor’s book “Travels in Greece and Russia” published in 1872 on pages 261 and 262 we read “The fact is, a few deeds of splendid heroism have thrown a deceitful halo over the darker features of the Greek War of Independence, and most of those who bend in reverence to the name of Marko Pozzaris do not know that his uncle Nothi stole supplies from his own troops to sell to the Turks – that, which Canaris and Miaulis were brave and incorruptible, Colocotroni filled his purse and made cowards of his men, - that, while Karaiskais was honorable, others broke the most solemn vows of their religion and murdered the captives they were sworn to spare. One can only say that the Greeks are what the Turks made them – that we should not expect to find in slaves the virtues of freedom; but treachery and perjury were never the characteristics of the Moslem. It is the corrupt leaven of the Lower Empire which still ferments in the veins of this mixed race. I have already said, and I will repeat it, that not one-fifth of the present population can with justice be called Greeks. The remainder are Slavonians, Albanians and Turks, with a slight infusion of Venetian blood.” Part 10 - Why expose the Greek Fraud?