Ioannis Tzovas
Ambassador of Greece
On 10 and 11 November, the Embassy of Greece, to celebrate the bicentenary of the Revolution of 1821, organised two consecutive conferences to give a platform to Spanish historians and philologists, who made visible and highlighted the historical links between the Greek and Spanish peoples to a full house at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid.
The Greek Revolution was very well received by Spanish public opinion at the time of the Liberal Triennium, as Dr. Eva Latorre Broto discovered in her research on the precocious Spanish philhellenism of the time, which she defines as genuine, political, revolutionary, liberal, enthusiastic, fraternal, supportive and detached from any religious connotation. This researcher revealed one of the most important Spanish philhellenist fighters involved in the revolution, José García de Villalta (Seville 1801 – 1846), who fought in Greece for his liberal ideals and was later appointed Chargé d’Affaires in Athens, spending the last years of his life as a diplomat in the Greek capital.
Beyond the support that the worldwide philhellenic movement generously offered to the Greek revolutionaries, it is worth noting that the Greek people at the beginning of the 19th century were already constituted on the basis of a common language (Modern Greek) and a shared religion (Orthodox Christianity). The Greek Enlightenment, a whole ideological movement of Greek intellectuals and merchants scattered throughout Europe, had prepared the ground, minds and international public opinion by seeing in the Greek Revolution a genuine movement for freedom and the creation of a new independent state. The Greek revolutionaries were aware that they shared a common historical past that stretched from the ruins of the Agora, through Alexander the Great and all the way to Byzantium. Thus, many Greeks considered themselves to be the continuators of this inherited tradition, history and cultural background.
Of course, it is not claimed that contemporary Greeks are direct descendants of the ancient Greeks, of Pericles or Thucydides. It is not a question of blood, i.e. biological, continuity, but of wanting to be the continuator of a history that is assumed to be one’s own, of considering that past as one’s own. In this sense, Ioannis Makriyannis, a fighter for Greek independence who was illiterate and learned to write when he grew up just to record his memories, recounts an event: “I had two statues, two very beautiful, almost perfect statues: a woman and a prince. They were sculpted so perfectly that you could see the veins. When we lost a battle, some soldiers of mine took these statues and started negotiating with some Europeans to sell them. They were asking for a lot of money. The Europeans were about to buy them and so I told my soldiers: These statues, even if these Europeans offered you a million, don’t let them leave Greece, because we are fighting for these stones and these statues.
In his essay “A Greek: Makriyannis”, which he wrote using extracts from the military man’s memoirs, the Smyrna-born Greek Nobel laureate and diplomat Seferis comments that the person who rightly uttered these words was not Lord Byron, nor a learned person or an archaeologist, but an unlettered son of shepherds: “For these stones we are fighting”. Makriyannis showed with this statement that he felt himself to be the last link in a long tradition and an even longer history.
The modern Greek state, which was founded after the culmination of an armed struggle, comprised only the Peloponnese, a small part of mainland Greece and the Cyclades. The population of this new state was barely 800,000 Greeks. By contrast, the Greeks at that time numbered more than 4 million. Most of them were outside the borders of the newly created state, and the Greeks themselves considered the borders they had achieved after the successful revolution to be provisional. The diaspora lived all over Europe, mainly in coastal cities, in Eastern Europe, on the Black Sea and in cities now belonging to Turkey, such as Izmir, Istanbul and Trebizond. It was the first time in modern history that the Greeks had a national nucleus, being the first Balkan people to declare their independence and to create their own fully independent state, fracturing the Ottoman Empire. Following this dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, Greece gradually built up its territory on the basis of this nucleus and, over the course of a century, the Greeks gradually regained territory to the detriment of the Ottoman Empire, until they reached their current territorial extension of 132,000 km2. This process of gradual growth of the country through new territorial incorporations explains what is now recognised as the dispute or discrepancy between Greece and Turkey.
It was in this context that the Big Idea was formulated, i.e. the creation of a state that would encompass the majority of Greeks within its borders. The goal of this political project was not that small state, but to create a modern state encompassing most of the Greek populations inhabiting parts of Asia Minor and the Balkan peninsula. However, the Great Idea collapsed in 1922 in the port of Smyrna, amidst burning Greek ships and the flames of the city’s Greek quarter. The so-called “Smyrna catastrophe” marked the modern Greek consciousness of the 20th century, a defeat that put an end to the political project of territorial expansion. However, the Greeks were able to forget, to mourn and to dispense with the idea. They mourned over Asia Minor.
In the same year, together with the death of the Great Idea in Smyrna, Greece and Turkey decided and signed the compulsory exchange of populations, whereby 600,000 Turks moved to Turkey and 1,600,000 Greeks, almost three times as many, to Greece. In other words, all the Greek Christians from Asia Minor moved to Greece and all the Muslims from Thrace and Macedonia moved, in reverse, to the Anatolian peninsula. This compulsory exchange of populations, the first in modern history and so far-reaching, painful and inhumane as it was at the time, proved in the long run to be a stabilising and homogenising factor, at least for the Greek population. In addition to this exchange with Turkey, there was another, albeit voluntary, exchange with Bulgaria at the same time, and it can be concluded from both exchanges that the Greek population became more cohesive and uniform.
It seems cruel and cynical to claim that when ethnically distinct populations are separated, stability increases because the sources of friction between the different cultures diminish. Just think of the only two regions where there was no population exchange between Greece and Turkey, namely Cyprus and Western Thrace: in both territories, coexistence between Greeks and Turks, between Orthodox and Muslims, was not always easy, as there were wars, disputes or at least friction. Could this be defined as ethnic cleansing or as the pragmatism of separating conflicting populations? And could it serve, for example, in today’s Balkans?
In the Balkans there is an excess of historical memory, or, to quote Churchill, “the Balkans produce more history than they are capable of consuming”. It is in Spain above all that the concept of historical memory is most talked about. The author of this article represents a country that experienced, just after the Second World War, a very bloody civil war between 1946 and 1949 which, as we know, reached international dimensions with the involvement of foreign powers. Greece also has a past of civil war and many corpses buried in its mountains in an improvised manner.
Historical oblivion can be a value for moving forward. There is too much history in the Balkans and too many events that cannot be forgotten, but what is needed is to know how to forgive and forget, because sometimes history itself is an obstacle to progress in the present. It is said that “neither forgetting nor forgiving”, but in order to let go of the past and move forward, we must be able to forget and forgive, albeit deliberately, creatively and constructively, and not forget by omission or without conscience. In this regard, it is worth mentioning the American journalist and historian David Rieff’s “In Praise of Forgetting: The Paradoxes of Historical Memory”, a polemical essay on the idea that the cult of history is an obstacle to its own progress. After all, remembering is a human process, so all memory is selective, and therefore so is all forgetting. It is our duty to choose what we will retain and what we will forget for the sake of progress.
After two hundred years of ups and downs, revolutions, revolts, rebellions, changes and the odyssey of creating the modern Greek state from scratch, Greece is now a fully European country. It joined the European Union (1981) before Spain and Portugal (1986). It has held the presidency of the European Council five times, and belongs to the most powerful global alliances and organisations. Greece has always had a Europeanist and Western vocation, even if it was an Eastern annex to the West. After all, we Greeks belong to Western civilisation, but we are located in the far East of Europe; we are Europeans, but we are not like most Christian, Protestant or Catholic Europeans, we are Orthodox. Among the Orthodox, we are not part of the majority of Orthodox who are Slavs, but we are a non-Slavic people within Orthodoxy. We are Balkan and the vast majority of the Balkan peoples are Slavs, but we are not. Finally, geographically we belong to the Eastern Mediterranean, but we are not Muslims, as are most of the inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean basin.
Today, the challenges facing Greece have changed, for they have nothing to do with our territorial extension, since our borders are settled and immovable, so we are no longer a country of conflict in this respect. We have matured as a country and, although we do not claim anything from our neighbours, we do not concede either. Thus, the contemporary challenges we face are social and economic development, better integration into an EU that needs to be strengthened, national security, migration and so on. Greece is a European country of peace, of conciliatory proposals and always in favour of finding peaceful and lasting solutions in its environment.
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