Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (3)

INTRODUCTION

1. HISTORY IN THE THESIS

i. The Spell and the Curse of Mythology: Introductory notes (5-8)

2. THE HISTORY OF THE THESIS

ii. Thematic and Problematic Entwined: An Analysis of the Title (9-11)
iii. Dangerous Surgical Treatments in Greek History: Chronological
Limits and Limitations (12-13)
iv. The Anglo-Greek ‘encounter’: Content, Nature and Exigencies (14-15)
v. Power Relationship: British Violence and Greek Counter-Hegemonic
Discourse (16-18)
vi. The Holy Grail of History, or the Game of Research Methods (19-27)
vii. Post-mortem: When King Arthur was Arrested… (28-37)
Editorial Note (38)

PART I
DISORDER and GREECE

i. Historical Survey: Genealogy of and Discourse on Greek Brigandage

(40-42)
ii. Order and British Civilisation (43-49)
iii. Brigands, Nationalists and Colonial Discourse: Some Notes on the
British Classification of Violence (50-63)
iv. H(a)unted by the Enemy Within, I: Brigandage, Vlachian/Albanian
Greekness, Turkish ‘Contamination’ and Narratives of Greek
Nationhood (64-80)

PART II
HISTORY’S OMNIPRESENCE: AN ESSAY ON THE DEAD,
THE LIVING AND THE RESURRECTED

1. NECRANASTASIS (RESURRECTION)
i. Clio’s Necrophilia and the Writing of Greek Histories (82-95)
ii. The Gaze upon the Modern Greeks: Anglo-Greek Anthropological
Encounters (96-113)
iii. Crimes of Ethnohistory: A Manual for ‘Killing’ and Embalming Greek
Brigands (114-141)

1
 2. EXHUMATION
iv. Greek Culture in Ruins: British and Greek Reflections on Landscape
and Heritage (142-153)
v. Can this Greece be Europe? Perceptions of Greek Spatial/Cultural
Identity (154-166)

PART III
BRITISH IMPERIALISM, GREEK IRREDENTISM
AND THE GREAT IDEA

1. WHICH GREAT IDEA?

DISAGREEMENTS ON FLOATING SIGNIFIERS
i. Many Great Ideas: Official Archaeologies of a Concept (168-171)
ii. Setting out the Project of Civilisation (172-178)
iii. Experiments on Puerile Nations, or the Impossibility of Surpassing
your Father (179-191)

2. NATION-BUILDING, HEGEMONY AND

THE LIMITS OF DIALOGUE
iv. Literature and Theoretical Framework (192-194)
v. Unpaid Debts and Duties: Philhellenism, Anglophilia and the Greek
‘Other’ (195-213)
vi. Haunted by Enemies, II: Conspiracy theory, Greek Constitutionalism
and the Russian Threat (214-230)

CONCLUSION (231-240)

BIBLIOGRAPHY (241-268)

2
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to my supervisor, Professor Martin Blinkhorn for his advice and
his support during these three years; our challenging intellectual relationship has
always provided me with stimulus for work (and him with great stress). I thank
Dr. Paolo Palladino and Dr. Steve Constantine for their polemics but also their
suggestions for re-arrangement of ideas; they both helped me to considerably
improve the thesis. I am indebted to Professor John Mackenzie for his acute
comments on my first outline and the informative discussions we had over the
years. Professor John Walton deserves to be acknowledged for his support and
the opportunities he gave me to make my work better known. My thanks also to
Dr. Roger Smith, Dr. Steve Pumfrey, Asc. Professor Ioannis Mourelos and Asc.
Professor Artemis Ksanthopoulou-Kyriakou; their curiosity about the thesis
coerced me to articulate the vague aspects of my methodology.
The librarians of the Central Library of my home University, and those of the
Library of the Department of History in Thessaloniki also have a place here.
Their willingness to assist me through the labyrinths of the Greek libraries was a
time saver, but also a nice spell in my loneliness during research. The same applies
for the English librarians of the British School of Archaeology at Athens. I found
it ironic that they offered me research shelter in a house, which is still haunted by
the intellect of a famous philhellene.
This work would not have been the same without the stimulating
multidisciplinary atmosphere I lived in the past two years. This, together with the
emotional support I received from my friends, gave shape to concepts and
homage to my voice. I thank wholeheartedly Sandy Staplehurst, Chris
Armbruster, Simon Carroll, Monica Toledo, Imaru Arias-Ramirez, Gabi Novoa,
Laura and Salvador Ortiz, Dryan Kitchener, Ioanna Litsiou, Antonis Bogadakis
and Giannis and Eleonora for this.
Aspects of the thesis were subsequently published in academic journals.
Chapter I.i and I.iv were worked into an article that appeared in The Journal of
Modern Greek Studies [‘Haunted by the “Enemy” Within: Brigandage,
Vlachian/Albanian Greekness, Turkish “Contamination” and Narratives of
Greek Nationhood in the Dilessi/Marathon Affair (1870)’, vol. 20, no.1 (2002),
pp. 47-74] and parts of Chapter II.iii were published as an article in the Journal of
Historical Sociology [‘Unclaimed Colonies: Anglo-Greek Identities through the
Prism of the Dilessi (Marathon) Murders (1870)’, vol. 15, no. 2 (2002), pp. 169-
191]. An article under the title ‘Re-Orienting Greece: Textual Violence, Desire
and Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Geohistorical Discourse’, which was
published in the on-line journal Jouvert (vol. 7, no. 3), drew upon aspects of
Chapter II.v. A monograph under the title Nation-Building and Identity in Europe: The
Dialogics of Reciprocity was published in 2008 with Palgrave-Macmillan. The book
draws upon the primary material used here to develop a broader theoretical
argument, still in its infancy in this thesis.

3
4
 1. HISTORY IN THE THESIS

i. The Spell and the Curse of Mythology:

Introductory notes
The nineteenth century was the era of an agonizing struggle by the ‘Great Powers’
of Europe to discipline small subordinate ethnicities that were striving for
emancipation. In principle, the colossal empires of Austria, Russia and Turkey
were powerful enough to hold back this flood of national ‘awakening’; in practice,
the galaxy of these would-be nations constantly threatened the harmonious
imperial universe. 1
The Greek Génos or race constituted one of these historical communities that
strived for liberation from Ottoman rule. The Greeks, who had spent almost
three centuries under what they called Ottoman ‘yoke’, founded their modern
state in 1832 following a bloody revolution (1821-1828). In doing so they had the
help of three of the Great Powers of Europe: Britain, France and Russia.
However, the generosity of these Powers, which after the institutionalisation of
Greece assumed the duties of its protector, generated ambivalent feelings
amongst Greeks. The involvement of such external political actors in the new
state and their aspiration to take control over Greek political developments,
suggested that the Greeks had simply replaced one master with another.
In theory, the battle of Navarino (1827) was regarded as an unsubtle sign of
European philhellenism, which would help the ‘newly-born’ state to acquire a
decent place in the ‘European family’ of nations. But in practice, the Greece the
‘Protecting’ Powers decided to found, consisted only of the Peloponnese, Attica
and some islands and was deemed by Greek patriots to have become a plaything
Kingdom, which would serve as an arena for the diplomatic struggles of its
protectors. The Bavarian Prince Otho was designated King, but was replaced in
1863 by another foreigner from the royal house of Denmark, who became King
George I. Inevitably, many Greeks began to dream of a bigger and truly
independent state, which would include all the so-called ‘unredeemed’ territories:
Thessaly, Epirus, Macedonia, Thrace, the Aegean Islands, and the umbilical cord
of Byzantium, Constantinople. This project of reconstruction of Byzantium,
which was born on the day of the death of Constantinople in 1453, was one of
the uniting factors of Hellenism during the difficult times that followed subjection
to the Ottomans. But in the nineteenth-century context, it re-emerged with the
name ‘Great Idea’, led to a series of conflicts with the Turks and invoked the
wrath of the Protecting Powers, who could not accept Greece’s uncontrolled
expansion during a period in which she could not impose order within her
restricted borders. Ominously, a ‘Great Idea’ ignored the national dreams of other
emerging Balkan nations that were not disposed to exchange the Turkish ‘yoke’
for a new, Greek one. 2
For a nation with such a long history the Greeks had ended rather badly.
Their state was the outcome of foreign political negotiations, a reality that
automatically posed for them the question of autonomy and self-determination. It

1 R. Jenkins, The Dilessi Murders (London 1961), pp. 3-4.

2 C. Stevens, Ransom and Murder in Greece, Lord Muncaster’s Journal 1870 (Cambridge 1989).

5
was also obvious that what had contributed to Greek liberation was the
Europeans’ love for the Hellenic past (alias philhellenism) and not a sympathy for
the Neohellenes. The numerous foreign travellers that swamped the country
every year were looking for the ancient Hellenes; nobody was interested in the
living Greeks and their culture. If the patronage of Britain, France and Russia
represented the actual subjection of Greece to European political power, the
refusal of all those travellers to engage with the Neohellenes signified a symbolic
subjection of modern Greece to the European imagination. The Greeks
themselves were not oblivious to some of these processes and their implications.
Even during the revolution they had formed political factions that were attached
to one of their three Protectors. These so-called Russian, English and French
parties continued to operate during Otho’s reign 3 and to play a significant role in
Greek politics till a number of frustrating encounters between Greece and her
Protecting Powers led to their disintegration.
The actual and symbolic subjection of Greece to the Europeans had started
with the arrival of King Otho in Greece. First the Regents and then Otho himself
staffed the Greek administrative system, the army and all public services with
Bavarians. 4 Greek education was also strongly influenced by the Bavarian
educational system, and emphasis was laid on the study of Hellenic civilisation 5
— yet another practice that would have long-lasting effects on the Neohellenic
mind. The only cause in which Otho identified with the Greeks was the Great
Idea, but the price he paid for his decision was high.
King Otho was equally disliked amongst Greeks and some of the Great
Powers of Europe for different reasons. He was loathed by the first mainly
because of his Catholicism and his despotism and by the latter because of his
troublesome policy. The constitution he granted to the Greeks in 1844 following
a bloodless revolution helped him to regain popularity in the Kingdom only
temporarily. In 1854, when the Crimean War (1854-1857) between Russia and
Turkey broke out, he sent irregular bands to Turkey hoping that he would
manage to extract territories from the Ottomans. Not only did the attempt fail,
but it also provoked France and Britain who decided to ‘discipline’ the Kingdom
with an occupation. Otho’s career as King of Greece came to an end in 1862,
when the Greeks and the infuriated Britain and France decided to depose and
replace him with King George I.
Otho’s reign was an eventful period therefore because it coincided with
obvious European intervention in Greece. From the three Protectors of the
Kingdom, the one that certainly came close to transforming itself into a coloniser
of Greece was Britain. There had been rumours concerning British involvement
in the constitutional changes of 1844 and 1862, and it was evident that the British
government did not favour King Otho. However, the policy Lord Palmerston,
British Prime Minister in the 1840s, adopted in Greece’s case was destined to
leave indelible stigmata of violence on Anglo-Greek relations.
Palmerston was an ardent supporter of the European power balance that was
established by the treaty of Paris (1815), and he wanted to maintain British naval
superiority in Europe. His political strategy consisted of what became known as
‘gunboat diplomacy’, the use of naval force upon countries that transgressed the
law of European order. In 1850, in an explosion of religious fanaticism, the
Athenian mob burnt the house of a Portuguese Jew who was known as Don

3 T.W. Gallant, Modern Greece (London, 2001), p. 32.

4 G. Finlay, History of the Greek Revolution, vol. II (Athens, 1973), pp. 313, 315.
5 K. Young, The Greek Passion. A Study in People and Politics (London, 1969), p.167

6
Pacífico. When the Greek government tried to avoid compensating Don Pacífico
for his household losses, he claimed British citizenship on the grounds that he
was born in Gibraltar and asked the British government for help. 6 The
government of Palmerston, which had already demanded that the Greek
government redeem the annuity of a loan that dated back to the Greek
Revolution, found a good excuse to intervene and remind Greece of her duties
with a blockade of Piraeus. 7 The episode was engraved in the Victorian
recollection as a reminder of British power, but in the Neohellenic mind it
presented Britain as an oppressor. When four years later, during the stormy
Turko-Russian war, the Anglo-French occupation of Piraeus took place, the
Greeks became convinced that their state was at the mercy of the whims of
external agencies.
None would dispute the fact that on a political level the relationship between
Greece and Britain was a power relationship. It was regrettable that these visible
aspects of violence were complemented by other, invisible, ones. As in other
European countries, intellectual life in Britain was permeated by a Hellenic past.
In the course of the nineteenth century ancient Roman and Greek civilisations
had served in Britain as models for refashioning governance and legislation, and
as the sites of philosophical and literary perfection. Hellenic civilisation in
particular provided Britons with a surface for self-inscription when the ‘ancients’
came to epitomise for British scholars, academics and politicians the progenitors
and heralds of British modernity. 8 Because the Victorians aspired to revive in the
modern Greeks the analogue of the admired Hellenes, the realities of the
Neohellenic world were forgotten. The long-term Ottoman occupation of the
Hellenic peninsula and a different, Neohellenic, (irredentist) agenda made the
realisation of this desire impossible. Consequently, in the British imaginary world
the Neohellenes would remain a lesser, disorderly, half-Oriental ‘breed’. For all
these reasons, and in a period in which they were asking themselves who they
were and where they came from, the Neohellenes became subjected to British
criticism. Unless they managed to live up to the British expectations and to
embody the Hellenic myth, they would never be recognised as a European nation.
The reader may agree that mythopoieía or myth making is an everyday practice.
Our world is a vast repository of objects that have no meaning until we replace
them with symbols. Relationships are meaningless if they fail to represent
something in and for our inner world. 9 Our identity is the product of myth – a
myth deeply embedded in everyday interaction. We are born in the dialogue we
establish with our fellow humans and we live in spirit only in the small system of
communication we establish with our interlocutors. Examining these statements
contextually, we can observe that Neohellenic Self-perceptions could easily be
affected by the figurative value the Europeans assigned to the modern Greeks as
the modern equivalent of their forefathers. As a new nation, nevertheless, the
Greeks had to learn to imagine themselves. Through their illustrious past they had
been imagined by Britons and other Europeans in every possible way but the way
they wanted: their initial, revolutionary, aspirations to become a republic were
shattered; their longing to form a great empire was not satisfied; their autonomy
was subsequently trampled down; and their contemporary character was

6 Gallant, Modern Greece, pp. 42-43.

7 Finlay, History, vol. II, p. 205; M.E. Chamberlain, Lord Palmerston (Bristol, 1987), pp. 72-73.
8 R. Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford, 1980), pp. 30-37.
9 R. Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester, 1984),

p. 23.

7
denigrated. It would be small wonder therefore if they chose to react to these
foreign narratives of their identity.

♦♦♦♦♦♦ℵℵℵℵℵℵℵ♦♦♦♦♦♦

The reader must have noticed that whereas we started our story by examining
Greece’s relationship with Europe we have progressively concentrated on two
diametrically opposite parts of the European continent: Greece and Britain. The
purpose of this long dissertation is to enable us to deconstruct British and Greek
representations of Greek and British identities in Anglo-Greek relations. Since the
‘us’ itself is the product of my psychotic historical imagination, I will perform this
task. I will talk to you about Greece, Britain and their complex relationship that
was based on the mythologisation addressed above.
The question of Anglo-Greek relations has been thoroughly studied by social
and political historians. As will become evident later, very few of these narratives
are reliable for the kind of approach adopted in this excursus. The story of the
contact that the two nations established will not be told exclusively through or
from the premises of the Greek cause of 1821. On-going historical projects, such
as that of Anglo-Greek exchange, are not dependent upon a single event, such as
the Greek Revolution. Of course, all these reputed historians who thought so,
were not unwise. Part of the analysis that follows rather implicitly questions how
this approach came to have such a strong hold on historical imagination.
The thesis traces the trajectory of Victorian and Neohellenic narratives of
Greek and British identity respectively, but also that of Victorian and Neohellenic
Self-perceptions, and the ways such Self-perceptions were articulated in the
Anglo-Greek relationship between 1864 and 1881. It has to be noted that the
value of events, which did not appear in this sketchy introduction, is not
dismissed, but is infused into the structure of the analysis when it is necessary.
For this purpose, introductory chapters accompany each theme of the thesis. But
the chronology of events before, during and after the period of study stands alone
at the end of the thesis, demanding retribution. It is simply not my primary
concern to reproduce this mythological structure, but to contest it. As the reader
will find out, I discuss questions that go well beyond the period of study. I might
not escape politicisation of my project; I might not escape the accusation that I
read backwards. The dangerously intertwined myths of philhellenism, imperialism and
nationalism might be replaced by my myth. Following from that, I might also be
accused of imagining things differently from my sources. I simply hope that my
narrative does not coincide with the vengeance which nationalist discourse seeks
to take from the ‘other’, whether it be another nation or history.

8
 2. THE HISTORY OF THE THESIS

ii. Thematic and problematic entwined:

An analysis of the title
Titles usually communicate signs, read as subtexts, but also ‘sell’ our intellectual
labour. In academic writing the Law dictates that the title is there to bear the
inscription of the thematic/problematic of a (hypo)thesis. The thematic
designates the core theme of one’s narrative — what in my case is called
representation. The ‘Greece’ and the ‘Britain’ of the title belong to the symbolic
world, in which my Greek and British protagonists tried to capture and
understand the elusive ‘character’ of each other. This symbolisation (or re-
imagining) was a necessary precondition for these observers, because the
observed object (Greece or Britain) stood outside their familiar cultural domain.
However, no symbolic structure is a watertight compartment: it is affected by
external agency (imagined or real interlocutors) and interacts with other systems
and is part of greater totalities. My argument is that the way the Greeks thought
about themselves was affected by British and European opinions; and that the
way they restructured ‘Britain’ was affected by the nature of Anglo-Greek
contacts before 1864.
But these aspects of the thematic are less controversial than some others.
What the sceptical reader could challenge is the very reality of an Anglo-Greek
‘exchange’. How can one argue that there was such a thing as a dialogue between
the Greeks and the British – what kind of ‘dialogue’?
The dialogue or exchange between Greeks and Britons was not always real
and for a number of reasons it could be described as ‘dysfunctional’. As
mentioned before, images of Greece and Britain in British and Greek cultures
respectively were the product of collective imagining. In collective imagination
the ‘other’, the observed, can act as an interlocutor or addressee. But the Greek
and British narratives which I explore were not intended for British and Greek
audiences exclusively. The audience for them was also internal (e.g. the Greek
‘nation’ for the Greeks, or Britons for the British) or external (e.g. Europe as an
entity for the Greeks, the United States or colonised peoples for the British).
Also, these narratives may have been generated, maintained or developed
independently from the Anglo-Greek exchange. Because of all these subtleties I did
not disregard internal Greek and British debates on what was addressed within
the structure of the Anglo-Greek relationship.
Because Greek and British narrations of identity cannot be sanitised from
external influences, I also looked at intermediary forms of otherness that
interfered in the process of narration. Often the Greeks used American or French
voices to grant authority to the complaints they issued against Britain. Often
British narratives of Greek identity were used by Britons to discuss their
relationship with other powerful countries, such as the United States and Russia.
The intermediaries to which the title alludes could therefore be imagined and real
addressees or defenders/contenders of Greek and British argumentation. What
mattered was that often the Anglo-Greek ‘dialogue’ was activated with their help.
A weakness in the way I treated the role of such ‘mediators’ can be detected in my
inability to resolve the tension between mediation and opinion making. In other
words, I often placed too much emphasis on what these intermediaries said

9
(knowing in advance that it influenced Greek and/or British audiences) at the
expense of how it was mobilised and used in Greek and British narratives.
The nature of (the) early nineteenth-century Anglo-Greek relations(hip)
cannot be dismissed, because it provides us with the contours of this dialogue. It
has been argued by other historians that although both the Greeks and the British
had expectations of each other, the British protectors dictated and the Greek
protégés had to obey. 10 This is true and false at the same time, depending on the
angle from which one approaches the question. The Greek struggle for
recognition of the Neohellenic ‘imagined community’ by Britain was conducted
within the space of the contemporary problematic concerning Hellas’s special
place in European history. The latter helped the Greeks to retain a delusion of
grandeur and symbolic power, which filled in the Neohellenic imagination the gap
of real power in Anglo-Greek encounters. In other words, while addressing
themselves to ‘Britain’, the Greeks could also act as her equals, disregarding the
consequences of their ‘arrogance.’ Their need to be accepted as equals, if not
superior, urged them to present themselves as such. Interestingly, their attitude
towards Europe was identical. In fact, the British were important in Neohellenic
self-perceptions mainly because they were Europeans. This is partially the
performance the title refers to: suggested by the European admiration of Hellenic
civilisation, believed and acted out by the Greeks in a specific Anglo-Greek
context.
British performance has a different story to tell. It is the story of the observer:
the traveller, the academic or the diplomat. It is fascinating that, despite their
diverse individual intentions, professional profiles and interests, most of these
observers were inclined to objectify Greece and the Greeks. In the textual world,
the Neohellenes were never treated as individuals: they were objects of scholarly
reflection and scientific experimentation for the traveller/academic, and of
political discourse for the politicians. In this respect the relationship between
Victorians and Neohellenes was unequal: these Victorians who became
acquainted with Greek culture and affairs had a pre-given itinerary and particular
aims and objectives to accomplish. Together with their travel equipment, their
cameras, their painting brush and their diaries they packed their attitudes and their
preconceptions.
But the fictitious aspect of the dialogue I explore has also to do with its
textual nature. Ironically the thesis resembles a long-forgotten theatre play which
is rediscovered and staged immediately by a crazy director. The scenery and the
scenario are ready, but the actors are missing. I am left with ghosts who speak to
me from their textual tomb. Moreover, because in the primary sources actual
Anglo-Greek encounters were limited, I had to constantly explain that the
‘interlocutors’ were not immediately available to the addresser. Rarely, in travel
books, one comes across actual dialogues, although again their recording is
affected by the standpoint of the writer, the imagined reader and the socio-
political circumstances at the time of production. This does not weaken the
intensity or seriousness of such narrations: what the Greeks said about Britain
and what the British thought about the Greeks were predicated upon concrete
historical experience.
It is the question of historical experience I want to look into now, because it
is intertwined with stereotyping — the third and most powerful concept in the
title. Because Greeks and Britons often had to imagine (instead of interacting
10 E. Skopetea, The East Sets in the West: Images from the End of the Ottoman Empire (Athens, 1992), p.

96.

10
with) their interlocutors, stereotyping came to the fore. This oversimplified
version of the other, which was so anxiously and almost unconsciously repeated
to cover up the lack of Greek/British understanding of cultural difference is
something we will come across many times. This kind of history of stereotypes
asserts tenaciously its continuity. It often creeps into the present and affects our
lives. But in the rigid post-structuralist universe, the modernity of the nineteenth-
century dead is something we left behind a long time ago. I am somehow caught
in between these two conceptions of history: that which asserts continuity, and
that which supports change. Because I live, communicate and coexist with
‘postmodern British subjects’, I can see in their attitudes something of the vices
and the virtues of their Victorian ancestors. Although their empire is irretrievably
past, it still speaks inside them with the voice of the unconscious: 11 this is
represented by the offspring of colonial families, the anglicised ex-colonised, the
child of Indian immigrants who thinks and feels like a Briton – or perhaps not
quite – the racist outbreaks and the anti-racist protests. Of course, in the political
rhetoric of the media and the academy, these realities are denied; we are ‘post-
colonial’, post-national(ist) after all. But for a displaced Greek subject like myself,
who does not quite feel Greek anymore and who decided that ‘home’ can be
Britain as much as her Greek village, the history of nationalism and colonialism
looks very alive. For this reason, the ‘now’ was crucial not only in my choice of
the subject but also in my understanding of the past I studied. Equally, after
distancing myself from Greek culture, I learned to read the signs of the Greek
overconfident conduct. And yet, I had to behave like a conscientious historian,
who starts work by distancing the subject of enquiry, ‘by making it past’.
Unfortunately, nobody can take away the feeling that dwells in the innermost
recesses of my intellect, that in the course of these three years I also acted as an
ethnographer and a folklorist. Hopefully, this confession will not lead to my
excommunication from the circle of historians.

11 B. Schwarz, ‘Actually Existing Postcolonialism’, Radical Philosophy, 104 (November-December

2000), pp. 16-24.

11
 iii. Dangerous surgical treatments in Greek
history: chronological limits and limitations
At the end of the thesis the reader will find an appendix under the title Arbitrary
Incisions in Time/Space. Historians call it chronology, a peculiar time-keeping
practice which enables first the writer and then the reader to find their way in the
chaotic historical records. It is indeed based on an arbitrary selection of events
and it supports the writer’s discourse. It is a voyage in time with stops at crucial
points of the formulated historical narrative. What is at stake is the way historians
can demonstrate a principle of selection (of these events) for the formulation of their
narrative and how they justify their choice.
Within the rationale of the period, I was able to work out a structural
approach which became my research strategy. Although I traced in the sources
many interesting British and Greek narratives, I singled out four which created
long-lasting debates in Anglo-Greek relations: the British cession of the Ionian
colonies to Greece (1864), the Cretan Insurrection (1866-1869), the
Dilessi/Marathon Murders (1870), and the Balkan crisis (1878-1881). Although I
did not restrict my empirical research to these events, the presence of such clear-
cut divisions served as a modus operandi for my hypothesis. The reader will realise
that I do not necessarily cover the whole period of study in all chapters. This
happens because (a) there was not enough space for a more detailed analysis,
and/or (b) within the period and at different times, specific historical
circumstances strengthened or weakened Greek or British narratives.
In the economy of the introduction, the burning question is the beginning
and the end of the period of study. Why did I chose 1864 as a starting-point, and
why this obsession with 1881? An imaginary rival might have argued that a
change in British and Greek narratives and in Anglo-Greek relations took place in
the 1830s, when the Greek nation attained a political centre. Nevertheless, the
emergence of the Greek state was very much a process. The genesis of the Greek
state was consolidated in 1832, but the institution of the state itself remained for
most of the first half of the nineteenth century a fiction, a series of administrative
experiments and a not fully recognised entity by the Great Powers. In 1864, when
Britain ceded the Ionian colonies to Greece, the Greeks felt that the period of
territorial redemption had begun, with the contribution of their protectors. The
act of cession was read as an act of recognition of the Greek state’s authority.
1881 is in this respect also a good choice because Greece’s involvement in the
Balkan crisis (1876-1881) led to the acquisition of another piece of territory from
Turkey and Britain was, again, involved in the negotiations. My imaginary rival
might have changed tactics then and have suggested the Pacífico affair (1850) or
the Crimean War (1854) as a starting point. This would have changed the
conceptual framework, however: the thesis is not concerned with actual British
intervention in Greece, but with symbolic forms of, or threats for, British
violence.
Yet, before I present the reader with my counter-narrative, I must do justice
to such objections. Normally, to cover such a subject, a historian should have
started their research from 1832 and have stopped in 1924, when Elefthérios
Venizélos signed the death sentence of Greek irredentism. 12 Putting aside the fact

12 For Elefthérios Venizélos consult the chronological section.

12
that the study of a whole eventful century would have taken another century to be
completed, I must admit that my project is part of a greater one. My interest in
stereotyping shows a disciple of la longue durée: stereotypes are the products of
mentalités. Their life is longer than that of a generation. Inevitably, time limitation
was in conflict with my ambitious theoretical framework.
A more viable chronological limit might have been the Turko-Greek war over
Crete (1897) for which the reader can consult the chronology at the end of the
thesis. But then I would have entered the Trikúpian period, in which the
Trikúpis-Delighiánnis political bipolarism transformed the political scene. Both
are major political figures in Neohellenic history and are remembered for
different reasons, which are tied to the adoption/rejection of the Greek
irredentist dream. Kharílaos Trikúpis (seven times Prime Minister between 1885
and 1905) stood for reform and domestic economic modernisation, while
Theódoros Delighiánnis (five times Prime Minister over the same period)
continued to promote the ‘Great Idea,’ the Greek irredentist program.
Delighiánnis’s policy led to the eruption of the Turko-Greek war in 1897, which
is known in Greek historiography as ‘the war of shame and dishonour’, because it
resulted in a humiliating Greek defeat and to the establishment of a Great Power
control of the bankrupt Greek economy. However, this choice would have
introduced direct European intervention in Greece and a more coherent Greek
approach to the ‘Great Idea’.
I must resume now and defend myself, by explaining what determines my
chronological limits. The British political world of the period is dominated by
bipolarism between Gladstonian philhellenism and Disraelian turkophilia.
Because of that I could detect different Greek responses to British policy in the
Eastern Question. Evidently, for the Greek side my starting point was concerned
with the internal political processes I explained above. In the nationalist discourse
‘Greece’ did not signify the multiplicity of socio-political experience of the
‘nation’. The fictional, uniform, ‘Greece’ which the Greeks of my texts
considered as ‘homeland’ was part of a process of self-nationalisation. Certainly
the Greek Kingdom, the Greek-speaking territories of the Ottoman empire and
the ontologised neo-Byzantine Greece of the Great Idea express different facets
of the Neohellenic cast of mind, but it has to be borne in mind that these
‘realities’ were often suppressed in nationalist discourse. To bring these realities
together and assemble the Greek dream/project took time. The 1860s and the
1870s are the decades in which the Neohellenes worked out the course they
wanted to take, and the strategy and the argumentation they would present to the
Great Powers.

13
 iv. The Anglo-Greek ‘encounter’: Content,
Nature and Exigencies
I have just set myself another trap by talking about ‘the Europeans’. What made
me choose Britain? Was she more important for Greece than France and Russia?
And how important was the fictional and the real Greece in the process of British
self-definition? These are indeed no negligible points. The classical headland of
Greece attracted many other European observers. For example, the French and
the German travellers and scholars were also infatuated with ancient Greek
civilisation; German and French foreign policies were also concerned with Greek
affairs; German and French opinions on the state of Neohellenic culture were
equally important with that of the British for the Greeks.
Of the three protectors, the one at which the Greeks looked with the most
admiration was France. The French Revolution and its political history had
provided the Greeks with ready-made examples of governing and administration
and an exemplar of social change. During the Greek Enlightenment the French
paradigm of political change was incorporated into the Greek understanding of
modernisation which was deemed to be a prerequisite for national emancipation
from the Ottoman bonds. 13 French style and mannerisms stood for cultural
capital the ‘poor’ Greeks before and after liberation had to accumulate to appear
as civilised. With Russia, on the other hand, there was a strong religious affinity
which the Greeks always took into account, even though Russian policy often
disappointed them. Finally, there was the introduction of Bavarian influences in
the Greek Kingdom. Otto’s reign and the Regency posed and posited a question
concerning the intrusion of foreign elements in Neohellenic culture. More
significantly, the Bavarian interest in ancient Greek culture and its continuity,
constructed a myth of the first order: Altertumswissenschaft, the science of ‘ancient
civilisations’, which the Bavarians first introduced in Greece, shaped modern
Greek character by examining something the Greeks themselves had never
thought of seriously: the question of whether the ‘ancients’ were truly their
ancestors. The British themselves simply followed the German example and
created a second order system of study and analysis of Greek culture, predicated
upon German academic pursuits.
To make things even more complicated, I would like to remind my reader
that geographical proximity generates long-lasting forms of otherness. Why
should I not write a thesis on the very complex history of Turko-Greek cultural
exchange? Ottoman occupation was, after all, a very straightforward form of
colonisation. The Ottoman legacy is even nowadays visible in Greek culture, and
nineteenth-century Greek sources are rich in relevant comments. Italian
unification and Garibaldi’s personal interest in the Cretan cause (1866-1869) also
figure quite often in British and Greek sources of my period. The Greeks
discussed the implications of the Risorgimento movement and the rise of Italy as a
European power (which would threaten the Greek Great Idea) as early as 1866.
Italy was regarded as a significant rival, but also a useful collaborator and a
paradigm of national fulfilment. Finally, the rise of Bulgarian and Serbian
nationalisms was among the primary Greek concerns in the 1870s. Should they be

13See P. Kitromilidis, The Neohellenic Enlightenment (Athens, 1996) esp. Introduction and Chapter I
(pp. 13-82).

14
dismissed in this thesis as ‘less important’ areas of study than Anglo-Greek
relations?
Here comes the question of where Britain fits into this group of foreign
critics and paradigms. The argument in this thesis is not that Britain was more
important than any other power or nation for the Greeks. My intention is to
investigate the British contribution to the making of Neohellenic identity within
the structure of the Anglo-Greek relationship, without disregarding Greece’s
dialogical engagement with a long list of rising nations and powers. Unfortunately,
the space allocated for this exercise is very small, and some of these other
fascinating histories had to be suppressed. Of course their presence in
Neohellenic and British narratives could not be ignored. For the aims and
objections of the thesis I chose to present some of these forms of otherness. The
Turks, the Russians, the French, the Americans and ‘Europe’ as an abstract
category were the most important ones and they were chosen for closer
examination.
In conclusion, the idea of linking Neohellenic and Victorian narratives of
Greek and British identity does not necessarily follow from a presupposition that
the Anglo-Greek relationship determined alone the formation of Greek and
British Self-perceptions. After presenting all these other forms of otherness this
claim sounds preposterous. However, it cannot be denied that Britain was
important for the modern Greeks: she was one of their protectors and perhaps
the most powerful naval force in Europe. The reverse cannot be claimed for
Britain: the only role that modern Greece had to play in Victorian Self-
perceptions had to do with the appropriation of Hellenic civilisation in the
European imagination. This imbalance forced me to place emphasis in the
formation of modern Greek identity, as opposed to the expression/assertion of British
identity in these narratives. Because this question is an integral part of the
presentation of the thesis, I will examine it more closely in the relevant sub-
section of the introduction. For the moment it is more important to make some
preliminary statements about the ways the Greeks and the British of my texts
imagined each other.

15
 v. Power relationship: British violence and
Greek counter-hegemonic discourse
The British Imagination
Research revealed that the British conceptualised and understood Neohellenic
‘idiosyncrasies’ and ‘shortcomings’ through analogy and/or identification or
opposition with nations, peoples and ethnicities that they knew from immediate
experience. Greece’s intermediary position as a British protégé but a sovereign state
was thus symbolised in simultaneous associations with the untamed forms of white
otherness (Irishmen) and internalised/integrated ‘others’ (Scots), and the
fearsome non-European ‘species’ (such as the Indians, the Maoris and the
Abyssinians). Alternatively, in British imagination the ‘civilised’ ancient Greeks,
and the ‘barbarian’ Byzantines and Ottomans were mobilised to describe the
Neohellenic character. Subsequently, all the Hellenic traces in the Neohellenic
character were praised, whereas Byzantine and Ottoman traces were criticised and
detested. In this debate there was also a hidden binarism: when the modern
Greeks were like their forefathers, they would be regarded as Europeans; when
they were discussed in relation to their Byzantine ancestors and their Turkish ex-
rulers, they would be represented as Orientals.
This inconspicuous arrangement of immediate colonial experience and
historical knowledge is what was termed discourse. Michel Foucault’s work was
important in the introduction of this notion to my work. Discourse is a basic
function of human thought related to arrangement and ordering of experience
into intelligible categories. Foucault argued that classification of what we know is
not independent from actual forms of violence a central power apparatus
exercises on people. On the contrary, actual violence and its symbolisation
coexist. Although discourse is described as a symbolic form of ‘violence’, one
should never forget that it is a creative process that opens up possibilities for the
observer to decipher information and define the limits of knowledge. In the
domain of human disciplines, which is closely investigated in this thesis, Western
discourse organised Greek social and national experience by helping the
Neohellenes to institutionalise regimes of knowledge. The importance of these
regimes was great, because they became self-explanatory forms for the Greek
nation.
It is my duty to underscore the limitations and defects of Foucault’s own
thesis. Because Foucault argues that people are not autonomous agents but
subjects constituted by the medium of the power/knowledge relationship, he also
believes that power is a force that is constituted in opposition to something else,
which represents the rulers. 14 The problem here is that the ‘power’ of the rulers
oppresses to impose itself — a thesis Foucault rejects — and therefore is
intrinsically ‘evil’ for those who are subjected to it. This generated much
misunderstanding in the field of cultural theory which appropriated this abstract
notion and used it to sanitize, if not venerate ‘hybridity,’ ‘interstitial identities’ and
the likes which in post-modern academic literature describe the right of the
oppressed to be examined and defined independently from their rulers. Homi
Bhabha and Edward Said are two examples of this appropriation that seeks
revenge of the West for its political crimes against the colonised nations. In short,
14Let us not forget the Nietzschean origins of Foucault’s theory; see for example, F. Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil (London, 1990), pp. 46, 49.

16
there is a paradox in the heart of cultural theory today: instead of studying the
politics of identity, it makes them.
The Foucaultian idea of the power relationship was used extensively by
Edward Said in both Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. Having much respect
for both works, I inevitably found analogues in my hypothesis. Nevertheless,
Said’s insistence in presenting the ‘Orient’ (a term, which is not clearly defined in
his work) as the negative ‘other’ of imperial Europe, which is deprived of its voice
by the ‘Occidental’ observer, might be misleading for this thesis. The Greeks were
not regarded as Orientals stricto sensu, although their European identity will be
discussed at length in one of the chapters of the thesis, and the interest British
observers displayed in their culture has many analogues with the Orientalist
project. It is rather that here we deal with a positivist interest concomitant to the
normalisation of knowledge on certain areas of human experience. The
productive aspect of this process should not be dismissed in the name of a
distorted post-colonial discourse. Moreover, the structure of power is more
fragile than post-colonial scholars would like to believe. It is necessary to
remember John Mackenzie’s acute observation in this instance, that counter-
hegemonic thought can emerge from the utilisation of elements of dominant
discourses; put simply, the ‘subordinate’ can take over arguments of his ‘master’
and use them to his ‘master’s’ detriment. Which is precisely what the Greeks did,
as I will proceed to explain.

The Greek Imagination

The Greeks also developed a system to understand the complexity of Britishness.
Early on they realised that identifications with the Irish and the Scots were
important for Britons, and they used them in their counter-critique of Britain.
But, more essentially, they saw in the British their long-term experience with the
Turks. Because of an unconscious association between Turkish and British
domination they used religious images of evilness from the Orthodox repository
to describe British objections to Greek irredentism, a practice which they had
previously employed to describe their relationship with the Ottomans. In
addition, they elaborated a response to British accusations in which the image of
‘Britain’ stood in a metonymical relationship with that of the Europeans. As the
reader will have the chance to observe, most of the time the British were nothing
more than a member of the European colonial domain for the Greeks.
In this domain the Greeks were always surveyed and judged because of their
internal ‘disorderliness’. The British, who were so obsessed with the idea of
‘order,’ a symbolic arrangement of ideas and political stability, managed to draw
their Greek interlocutors into the debate on modernisation which the latter
allegedly failed to enter. To achieve modernisation and to join the community of
European ‘nations’ the Greek state had to get rid of its outlaws and the political
factions with their paralegal activities. In addition, the Greeks had to prove that
they were like their ancestors. Instead of following the demands and expectations
of the British, the Greeks reacted to British suggestions in four ways: The first
was to look at the problematic aspects of British modernity. The second was to
show that their relationship with the ancient Hellenes was not a relationship of
analogy but of cultural affinity. The third was to take up the cues of British
demands and behaviour and use them for their own interests.
At the same time, however, the urgency for the Greeks to form a modern
nation-state with rigidly organised technologies of surveillance and with an
ordered system of knowledge, came into conflict with the obstinately surviving

17
Greek longing to create a vast neobyzantine empire. The impression that the
revival of Byzantium would give the Greeks back their lost glory was consoling;
but the tide of European modernity suggested other routes. Following from this
tension, the fourth way in which the Greeks reacted to British accusations was
identical to the strategy they adopted towards other Europeans: in order to
defend their irredentist program they affirmed their cultural difference vis-à-vis
their ancestors and the Europeans.

18
 vi. The Holy Grail of History, or the Game of
Research Methods
Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a classic piece of surreal art which still amuses
young and old generations. It appears to be very superficial but in the heart of its
fragmented story lies an allegory of the historian’s relationship with the past. A
series of scenes, seemingly irrelevant to the adventurous pursuits of King Arthur,
interrupt the chronicle and make space for the voice of a talkative gentleman.
This man, who is filmed in the film for something like the BBC history series —
an old, decently dressed gentleman with a very posh accent — is a historian by
profession, who aspires to give a fascinating account of Arthur’s life. It is as if the
historian with his coherent version of events violates the past — the unfriendly
past of the film’s meta-level. It is tragic that the past can take revenge for these
interventions. Soon King Arthur will visit and massacre the historian with his
sword. The crime engages the police in a frenzied investigation till the end of the
film, when King Arthur experiences a temporally displaced arrest for his puzzling
crime.
I am fully aware that I will never play the role of the privileged film watcher
who can have both versions of the story: that of who King Arthur was and what
he did, and that of how the murdered historian thought about Arthur’s deeds. My
position is identical to that of the old gentleman who tried to make sense out of
the chaos of history. I am condemned to play a crucial role in this parody, after
three years of research on my subject, by (re)arranging my sources in a plausible
way and explicating a series of methodological interventions in the massive body
of surviving records. This section is dedicated to this process through which my
subject of study came into being.
In my research I had to cope with a major difficulty, which was entwined with
the richness of the subject itself: there was not an identified body of documents
or an archive, which could become the focus of my work. Inevitably, I had to
hunt for alternative ways to approach the diversity of my materials. I ended up
giving priority to some types of documents that work as natural repositories of
assorted categories of sources. Newspapers, pamphlets and travel accounts met
the preconditions and were selected. The treasures hidden in them consist of
reviews of travel books, governmental reports, passages from speeches delivered
in Parliament (Greek and English), Church edicts or speeches, poetry or fiction
on contemporary questions, visual material (drawings, paintings, cartoons and
photographs) and academic works.

The hypothesis: organising materials in hegemonic tropes

The three areas on which I focused my research were the outcome of repetition in
the sources. What was repeated, what was most often quoted and rehearsed in the
texts of the period is what is analysed in the thesis. This is what I call generalised
narratives: established modes of description and analysis of phenomena. Because
these narratives coexisted with other, often conflicting, ones on the same subject,
I made space to present internal controversies and contradictions. My focus,
nevertheless, remained the hegemonic Neohellenic and Victorian tropes and not the
particularity which I leave to the local historian. I apologise in advance for the use
of generic nouns, such as ‘the Greeks’ or ‘the British’, to describe these
hegemonic narratives. This often happened from lack of any other appropriate

19
description. My analysis does not apply to ‘the Greeks’ or ‘the British’ as a whole,
but to the specific hegemonic tropes I identified in my sources. I am aware that
beyond these, there are many other opinions that I never recorded or I simply
ignored.
The idea of hegemony has to be explicated, since it is central in the thesis.
Karl Marx noted first that societies in each historical era are dominated by the
intellectual ideas of the class which rules economically and politically. According
to Marx the institutions and the culture of a society are widely permeated by this
ideology which provides the key institutions and values of it with an appearance
of naturalness and inevitability. Marx did not claim that the dominant ideology is
the only one which exists in a society, but that it is the one which is employed to
explain all social phenomena. The Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci took
up Marx’s definition of dominant ideology to define the concept of hegemony,
the ideology which is pervasively reflected throughout a society in all principal
social institutions, and which permeates cultural ideas and social relationships.
A few decades ago Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe revisited the term and
gave a different definition to it through the writings of the French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan and the French philosopher Michel Foucault. In Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy (1985) Laclau and Mouffe claimed that hegemony is not about
class domination strictly speaking, but about the process through which the
dominant ideology institutionalises itself. To explain how ideological domination
works in a society they drew on the Marxian distinction between necessity and
contingency. According to Mouffe and Laclau, what defines a society, its ‘kernel’,
is always missing. What ‘fills up’ this gap, what holds together the components of
a society, is constant self-definition. But all identities fail to constitute themselves
without a constant reference to the ‘other’, which, in its turn, is never totally
internal to itself. Self-definition, which is provided by forms of ‘otherness’, is
presented as inevitable and necessary instead of contingent. For Laclau and
Mouffe, social self-narration is always overdetermined by this relational experience.
My definition of hegemonic narratives is provided by a combination of
Gramsci’s and Mouffe/Laclau’s ideas: the narratives I explore were
institutionalised and maintained by the Greek and British dominant classes. They
constituted often adversarial, but always relational, self-definitions which enabled
the operation of the social and political life in Greece and in Britain. Such forms
of self-reflection were presented by my narrators as inevitable, although they were
not: particular circumstances activated and transformed them into the only
possible ways to interpret and understand the world. Such Neohellenic and
Victorian narratives, their complex relationship with each other and with other,
external agents, constitute the thematic of the thesis.

Hegemony and national narratives: towards a reconciliation of

structuralism and hermeneutics
Perhaps I focus on the hegemonic narratives of nationhood and imperialism
more than I should, given that class antagonism within a nation brings to surface
different, conflicting ideologies. But I do believe that these narratives are
manifestations of mentalities and run deep in cultures, imbuing all social strata. I
almost manage to support this hypothesis with Greek sources. The Laclauian
conception of hegemony is used in a cross-cultural analysis in my thesis: it is more
about the ways the Greeks internalised British and European perceptions of
Neohellenic identity than about modes of thought imposed by a Greek dominant
class on the masses. I do not deny that the latter happens with the Greeks, and I

20
let Finlay talk about it in one of the chapters of the thesis. Admittedly, what I also
reproduce in the thesis for the British side is the ideology of the dominant classes
of the empire. Yet, this approach was also enriched by the dialectics of identity
and the hermeneutic idea that nothing is internalised without modification. 15
Moreover and in the final analysis, representations of Greece and Britain made
the dialogue a meaningful form of communication: they were not a chain of
misunderstandings, but a mode of understanding the ‘other’ in relation to the
‘self’. The patient reader will find this argument inscribed onto the matrix and the
planning of the thesis, which begins with a genealogy of British
power/knowledge, but concludes with a genealogy of Neohellenic resistance.

‘Authorities’ in British and Greek discourses and hegemonic tropes

In the network of the narratives that I explored the names of some individuals
appeared frequently. These were persons whose work influenced their
contemporaries; their writings were quoted, analysed and used in the
understanding of Greek and British identities. I had to trace the works of these
individuals and use them as a cursor in my understanding of the formulation of
the hegemonic narratives. This is what I call ‘strategic formation of the discourse’.
It is important to stress that in British narratives very few such ‘authorities’
could present themselves as ‘British’. Objectively speaking, none of these
influential writers could present himself as a pure English ‘gentleman’ in the way
we understand ‘Englishness’ nowadays as a category distinct from that of
Scottishness or Irishness. These ambiguities in the identity of British textual
authorities should be placed within the framework of the more general ambiguity
of ‘British’ identity, which forms part of the problématique in the thesis.
The first such writer was George Finlay, the Times correspondent in Athens
and a long-standing philhellene whose Scottish origin did not stop him from
presenting himself as an Englishman and from representing Britain in his writings
on Greece. His works were based on first-hand observations and were deemed by
both Greek and British readers important and worth engaging with. Finlay’s
loyalties were part of a British imperial project, and of that version of
philhellenism which sought for ways to convince the Greeks that they ought to be
modernised.
John Pentland Mahaffy, 16 the famous academic at Trinity College, Dublin,
was Irish, but his radical thesis on ancient Greek civilisation and the modern
Greeks influenced his English contemporaries. Behind the second edition of his
two major works, Social Life in Greece and Rambles and Studies, figures not just his
genius but also that of his student and friend Oscar Wilde who revised some of
the manuscripts. Mahaffy was a polymath, a polyglot and he had a very strong
sense of what Irishness represents in English imperial discourse. His views on
modern Greece were not dissimilar to those of imperial administrators, and his
inclination to compare Greece with Ireland was part of the British colonial
discourse. This was certainly related to Mahaffy’s background: he was working at
the bastion of Protestantism in Ireland, and he was a protestant himself. The
environment in which he was nourished was fanatically English/colonial. Equally
important and respected in Britain were Richard Jebb, Professor of Greek at the
University of Glasgow, whose lectures on ancient and modern Greece were often

15 J. Bleicher, Contemporary Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics as Method, Philosophy and Critique (London and
New York, 1980), pp. 225, 228.
16 Born in Switzerland, Mahaffy took his BA from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1859 and became

the first professor of ancient history in Dublin in 1869.

21
quoted in the British press, and Reverend Henry Tozer of the Oxford University
whose lectures on the geography of Greece were widely read. 17 Both were of
Scottish origins, but their opinions and ideas were part of the British dominant
ideology.
I could add more names to the British list. For example, the writings of Ewart
Gladstone, the famous philhellene and liberal leader, or these of Sir Thomas
Wyse, British Minister in Greece in the 1850s, were reproduced, translated into
Greek during the 1870s and quoted by both Britons and Greeks. However, I
prefer to concentrate here to the vexed question of the influential non-British
voices in the discursive formation. The reader will find out that the name of Van
Lennep, a missionary in Turkey, figures many times in my analysis. Van Lennep
lived for many years in Turkey and his ability to learn foreign languages fast
allowed him to consciously become an ethnographer. His scientific fascination
with the ‘Oriental peoples’ produced two works greatly esteemed by the British,
dealing with beliefs, codes of behaviour and customs of the peoples of Turkey.
Thus, his corpus became a substantial part of my thesis. Van Lennep’s Oriental
Album enriched British discourse and enjoyed so much publicity that I only had to
consult the American edition of the 1960s. John Murray himself, one of the most
important British publishers wrote the prologue to Van Lennep’s travel diaries.
On a different cultural plane, Edmond About, a Frenchman whose
disappointing experience of Greece was reflected in his writings, figures in British
perceptions of Greek character. His King of the Mountains, a novel on Greek
brigandage and politics, acquired a significant role in my literary analysis of
brigandage, not per se, but as a stimulus for textual production and reflection. The
fact that his narrative imbued British journalistic imagination and Greek
responses to his work was telling. Admittedly About’s work mattered less in this
thesis than Anglo-Greek perceptions of it. Another Frenchman, whose
observations were used by Greek journalists, was Emile Burnouf. Again, his
analysis of brigandage became important for the Greeks only as an appropriated
text which enabled them to articulate their own narrative.
‘Problematic’ may appear to be the American voices, but a sine qua non for my
project. Charles Tuckerman, the American Minister at Athens, became for the
Greeks a constant reference point in the debate upon philhellenism. Because for
them the Americans represented the friendly camp —the philoromaíoi, the lovers
of the modern Greeks — which was disposed to contribute to their irredentist
cause, Tuckerman received much interest in and appreciation for his writings. His
travel diaries were full of critical comments on Greece’s state of affairs, but his
gentle attitude and a positive Greek interpretation of his observations placed him
among the Greek ‘lovers’. The translation of his Greeks of To-day could be read as
a sign of Greek reciprocation of his interest in Neohellenic culture. His Greek
translator did not intervene in the text, but made many footnotes which alluded
to a textual Greek dialogue with the American side. Inversely, the British did not
welcome his writings: Finlay himself attacked Tuckerman on two occasions as a
vulgar American who thoughtlessly supported Greek territorial ambitions. He was
not alone in this engagement: many British travellers, among them Mahaffy, felt
obliged to criticise or appraise Tuckerman’s philhellenic ideas. The importance of
Tuckerman therefore is that he served as a mediator in Greek and British self-
narration.

17 The Levant Herald, 11 March 1880.

22
 Cornelius Felton, the Director of Harvard (1860) and a famous academic,
whose comparative work on ancient and modern Greek civilisation matched with
the British evolutionist cast of mind, received more positive remarks by some
Britons and he was often quoted by Tuckerman. Although Felton died in 1862
and his works precede the period of study, his influence on Tuckerman and some
British writers could not be ignored. His work represented the American
counterpart of Richard Jebb’s ideas, and a closer view shows that their discourses
were almost identical. This of course invites some thinking on the different
versions of British and American philellenisms: on the academic/disciplinary
plain, the reader will find them very similar; but on the administrative/political,
were almost rival.
The role Felton and Tuckerman acquired in my project was not restricted to
the influence they exerted on British and Greek narratives as a third, intermediary
form of otherness, sometimes respected, sometimes condemned. Surely, British
criticisms of American philhellenism dated back to the ambivalent, semi-colonial
relationship of Britain with the United States. The fact that Greek brigandage —
a subject in which Tuckerman revelled as a writer — provided British
commentators with an excuse to talk about Fenian organisations in the United
States and the American Civil war was indicative of British imperial thought. But
beyond that, the fact that neither the Greeks nor the Britons had a conception of
a uniform Anglo-Saxon philhellenism is interesting. This discrepancy was useful
for the Greeks, because they could present to ‘the British’ a different Anglo-
Saxon form of philia and invite them to emulate it. But American philhellenic
views could be outrageous for the British, because it put into question their harsh
attitude towards Greece. More significantly, American views became an
intermediary form of communication: either Greek, or British commentators
would choose not to attack British or Greek opinions respectively; instead, they
would address the answer to Americans. In the confines of British and Greek
narrations American views were often appropriated and found different uses.
The argument has a Bakhtinian vein here, fed by the idea that texts are
discursively re-ordered so as to produce different meanings in different
contexts. 18
I am talking about textual authorities and I have not mentioned a Greek one
yet. There are certainly Greek interlocutors who encapsulated Greek identity in
their works and whose reflections shaped, represented, or were integrated in the
Greek official state narratives. Their writings were often a response to imaginary
or real British interlocutors, but they could also be addressed to the Europeans in
general. John Gennadios, the author of one of the most powerful Greek
apologias to Britain and later an eminent diplomat, provides us with one such
example. His Notes on the Recent Murders by Brigands, published after the infamous
Dilessi Murders (1870), supplied the Greek arsenal of arguments with the right
weapons for the organisation of a counter-attack upon British policy. On the
other hand though, we could view his work as a collection of pre-existing
ideological state positions. But is it not the case that textual authorities
simultaneously produce and re-produce their age? To recover ready-made
statements to produce new statements, is, as Roland Barthes explained in his
Mythologies, a second-order system of communication: it utilises existing signifiers

18 Bakhtin was more interested in cross-class than cross-cultural appropriations, but his theory
found readers in the domain of cultural studies. It is more precise to say that I am using here a
version of Bakhtin’s views. See M. Gardiner, The Dialogics of Critique. M.M. Bakhtin and the Theory of
Ideology (London and New York, 1992), p. 165.

23
as signs to construct a new, powerful discourse. That is why British
commentators and politicians took John Gennadios seriously: through his text,
the Greek nation acquired the status of a powerful British interlocutor. Colonel
Pános Koronéos, Major Dimítrios Antonópoulos, journalists such as Odysseus
Iálemos and entrepreneurs such as Stefanos Xenos also became the spokesmen of
official state narratives of Greek identity.
The reader may notice later that Greek politicians are almost absent from the
analysis: should their opinions not become the priority in such a thesis? I have to
state in advance that their voice is not absent from my analysis, but concealed
behind the newspaper articles I used as primary sources. One of the peculiarities
of the political life in Greece was that each political faction, and the government
itself, had their own tools to shape public opinion; among these tools we can
identify the press.

Typology of sources and compensation for missing equivalents in the

primary material: Questions of content and quality
After having explained the rationale of my hypothesis, I can turn to the empirical
evidence that supported it, alias the nature, the content and the uses of the
primary sources. The scales did not consciously tip to the Greek or the British
side in terms of empirical research, but the quality of the Greek and the British
sources was by and large different. This was the first problem with which I had to
deal.
The masses of travel books I found in Britain could not be complemented
with any Greek empirical equivalent. This is not to say that the Greeks were not
great travellers: the mercantile Greek communities scattered across Europe
witness a great mobility of Greeks. Nevertheless, the relationship of the Greeks
with Britain was more pragmatic than that of the British with Greece. Greeks did
not aspire to depart on tours to Britain till the 1890s, when the first travel diaries
began to be published. Even then Scotland, which represented British romantic
wilderness, seemed to be the destination and not England. Moreover, these travel
diaries were the product of privileged individuals who had the money and the
inclination to undertake such ventures. The truth is that only when we find
ourselves well into the twentieth century, can we make a strong case about a
reciprocal Greek interest in travelling and cultural observation in Britain. But,
equally, British travel books had their own limitations: they were middle- or
upper-class products of the British male imagination. Exceptions were some
British women travellers, such as Georgina Mackenzie, Adelina Irby and Mary
Walker who displayed a more genuine interest in Greek peasant culture than men
but did not necessarily escape the cultural bias of the male British travellers.
The ‘Britain’ of Greece seemed to perform in my sources a double role similar
to that played by the ‘Europe’ of Greece. On a pragmatic, practical level, it was a
resource. The Greeks appeared to be a very commercial people in this respect:
they would always appeal to their fearsome protector for money and support in
their military ventures against the Ottoman empire. On the other hand, the
harrowing experience of the 1850s had irreparably identified Britain with
Palmerstonian interventionism. In this context, the Greeks had restructured the
‘empire’ as an imaginary judge of their nation, and felt weighed down by the
British demands to be otherwise, more civilised and more obedient. Obviously,
the only immediate contact with British culture for the Greeks was through the
waves of British travellers to Greece in the second half of the nineteenth century.
For these reasons, I had to make the best use of actual Anglo-Greek dialogues I

24
came upon in travel books. The value of these passages was great, because they
opened wide a door to the fascinating world of Greek rural society and they
afforded me insight as to how the average Greek would interact with the foreign
‘Lords’.
Greek pamphlets with a striking polemical style functioned as a substitute for
the missing Greek travel diaries. It was clear that, unlike British travels books,
such Greek sources did not shed light on actual Anglo-Greek encounters. In
them British individuals were replaced by an ontologised, nefarious ‘Britain’
which had either to be disciplined or to listen to apologies and excuses for Greek
‘defects’. In the scholarly arena, in which Greek and British cultures were
objectified and examined, the Greeks followed the British discourse. Interestingly,
from the three areas of research, it was the subject of brigandage that provided
me with Greek and British narratives that were closely connected and often
intertwined.
I encountered many problems in the matching of Greek and British sources
when I had to explore the development of humanist thought in Greece and
Britain, an area of research which comprises the second theme of the thesis.
British travel literature and Greek and British academic writings were examined
together as part of a disciplinary way of thinking. However, in some cases political
commentary and journalism also had a humanist and disciplinary subtext, because
the ideas that underscored these sources were disciplinary in a humanist fashion.
Because the thesis aspires to take in for questioning the formalisation of pre-
existing positivist discourses and their placing under the shield of the Greek and
the British states I could not simply discard these sources in my analysis.
I did not only explore the involvement of the state in the normalisation and
institution of disciplinary discourses, but I also sought ways to accommodate the
voice of the Greek peasant in my analysis. Some rare acquisitions — sources that
could be classified under the label of ‘popular culture’ and which made their way
to the press and the printing offices — were taken seriously as an indicator of the
extent to which British attitudes toward Neohellenic culture may have affected
the Greek peasants. Of course, it is dangerous to make generalisations even for
the peasant for a number of reasons. The first reason has to do with the fact that
what the recorded peasant voices said might be a far cry from what they thought
— yet another question that the anthropology of today asks. The second reason is
that the vast majority of my materials were generated in the upper and middle
class sphere or filtered through their values and ideas.
Press sources were useful in the formation of my subject, but their enormous
diversity called for careful selection. For the British side I used The Times as a
cursor, because Finlay’s commentary was based on first-hand information on
Greek affairs. Because of the Victorian habit of copying and repetition, other
newspapers would often use his treatises on ‘The state of Greece’ as raw material
for commentary. The Pall Mall Gazette was more radical and much more
sophisticated in its approach than other newspapers of the period and offered me
an alternative to Finlay’s historical analysis. I also chose The Morning Post and The
Daily Telegraph, because of their pro-Turkish attitude, even though the latter’s
editors were on good terms with the celebrated philhellene Gladstone. 19 The Daily
News was used to counterbalance the strong anti-Greek sentiments of the two
aforementioned publications. Till 1868, when it became the official organ of the
Gladstone government, the philhellenic pen of Skinner, whose visit to Crete was

19L. Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford, 1988), p. 63.

25
saluted with joy by the Greeks, offered interesting insights into friendly British
perceptions of Greece. I also scanned The Illustrated London News, which provided
me with visual representations of Greek culture. To escape the London
journalistic circle, I turned my attention to the non-metropolitan press. The Levant
Herald of Istanbul was chosen because of its immediate reception of events in the
East, but it also turned out to be informed in academic issues. The Scotsman of
Edinburgh gave me an idea about Scottish perceptions, which were often pro-
Greek, and helped me highlight even more the nuances of British perceptions of
Greek culture and politics.
The Greek press presented a challenge of a different sort. Greek printing
offices and newspaper agencies bore testimony to the accumulation of cultural
capital in the small Kingdom, which would allegedly compensate for Greek
political shortcomings. One of the things that attracted the attention of foreigners
in the Greek-speaking territories was the relatively fast dissemination of
information even in the remotest areas. 20 One of the commonest practices was
the gathering of peasants at Greek coffee shops, the collective reading of the
news, and the exchange of ideas. 21 Obviously, the hunger for political news gave a
further boost to Greek journalistic culture: in the end, every political party had its
own newspaper and its own circle of readers. Interestingly, most of these
newspapers were Athenian.
From this kaleidoscope of opinions and ideas I chose to concentrate my
research on Aión (Century), Palingenesía (Regeneration), Méllon (Future), Clió (Clio)
and the Efimerís tis Kiverníseos (Government Gazette), most of them published in
Athens. I singled out Aión and Palingenesía as newspapers of higher quality, whose
readership extended outside the Greek borders. Their editors established a strong
network in Europe with two main nuclei: Marseilles and Trieste, the two
crossroads for European news. Trieste was the location of the Clió agency, a
conservative Greek newspaper of great repute abroad - a kind of Greek Times that
fed the press network in Greece with foreign news. 22 This was the voice of the
Greeks of Diaspora in my thesis: critical of the problematic political life of the
Kingdom, but still patriotic. In addition, Clió was interested in academic and
educational questions.
Aión was Russophile until 1854, when its acrimonious critique of Great
Britain and France led to the arrest of its editor. From 1857, when it re-appeared,
it became an ardent supporter of the constitution, and of the civil rights which
had been suspended or violated during Otho’s reign. Aión was involved in the
anti-royalist struggle together with other newspapers which Othonian censorship
managed to transform into strong defenders of liberal ideals. 23 It was only after
the succession of the new dynasty and the constitution of 1864 that Aión became
attached to the throne. 24
Palingenesía appeared shortly after Otto’s dethronement in 1862 within the
framework of the constitutional change in 1863. Usually hypercritical of any anti-

20 S.L. Poole, The People of Turkey: Twenty Years Residence among Bulgarians, Greeks, Albanians, Turks
and Armenians, by a Consuls’ Daughter and Wife, vol. I (London, 1878), p. 38.
21 P. Kallighás, Thános Vlékas (Athens, 1987), pp. 190-204; S. Casson, Greece and Britain (London,

1943),
p. 173.
22 K. Mayer, History of the Greek Press, vol. I (1790-1900) (Athens, 1957), p. 145.
23 S. Papadopulos, ‘Crimean War and Hellenism,’ vol. XIII (Athens, 1980), p. 165; O.

Dimitrakopulos, ‘The Focus of Government Policy on the Progress of the Country,’ in History of
the Greek Nation, vol. XIII (Athens, 1980), pp. 106-109.
24 Aión, 6 April 1870. See also Mayer, Greek Press, pp. 69-72.

26
irredentist voices, it represented the Koumoundoúros nationalist party and it
often indulged in xenophobic propaganda. I chose Méllon to compensate for the
distorted political narratives of Palingenesía. The reader has to bear in mind that
the former often played the role of devil’s advocate while ‘monitoring’ other
political parties in Greece. Under the anti-nationalist surface of its articles there
was always a strong Europhilia which other newspapers considered anti-Greek.
The urgency I felt to compile a list of sources that would embrace the Greeks
of Diaspora and the Greek-minded territories of the Ottoman empire was
symptomatic of my ambitions. From the beginning I aspired to write a thesis that
would capture the moment in which hegemonic narratives recognised the Greek
nation as an imagined community. How could I ignore those who felt and
thought as Greeks, even if they were not Greek natives (αυτόχθονες), citizens of
the small Kingdom? For this reason, some of my sources were the products of
Greeks who lived outside the Greek Kingdom. Similarly, some of the British
reflections on Greek culture were the result of tours outside the Kingdom of
Greece, in regions that were deemed by the Greek state to be Greek or in which
populations thought of themselves as Greek. To be sure, I still had to work with
samples from these regions because the whole has been lost forever. Perhaps the
diversity of textual backgrounds and author profiles has made the thesis more
problematic. However, I preferred to be accused of ambition than to repress the
most potent aspect of what constituted the common desire of the Greeks to be
united under the shield of a single state. After all, what constituted territorially as
well as culturally the European Greece was one of the favourite themes in the
British and Greek narratives.

27
 vii. Post-mortem: When King Arthur was
arrested…
…historians resumed their reconstructing duties. All the Arthurs of history are
dead, after all. Thus it is in my narrative, which violates ‘historical reality.’ What
remains to be done is a presentation of the thesis and its own ‘interlocutors’,
thinkers whose work played an auxiliary role in my writing. I will position myself
in current historiography and declare my loyalty to certain academic milieus.
The thesis does not follow the traditional chapter division. It is divided
instead into three major themes: Disorder, disciplinary thought in Greek and
British contexts, and Greek nationalism and British imperialism. Each theme is
further subdivided into sections or chapters which are numbered for the reader’s
convenience.

PART I
Chapters I.i,ii
The first part deals with the debate on Greek ‘disorder’. The question of political
‘order’ was central to state formation throughout the nineteenth century.
Legitimisation of central state power was, undoubtedly, entwined with the idea of
monopoly of power; those groups and subjects that refused to succumb to it,
would often be reconstructed as the uncivilised ‘other,’ the ‘carcinogenic’
elements of society, and the state would wage war against them. Yet, the state
itself used illegal practices to come into being. That was the case with the Greek
Kingdom, whose powerful political functions were engaged in a game of
competition. The winner would represent the state and monopolise its violence.
In this process brigandage played a significant part, both as a para-state practice
and as the enemy of domestic ‘order’. In this analysis, which begins in chapter I.i
(an introduction to the notion of brigandage) I follow the writings of Nobert
Elias and Max Weber but I re-infuse them into my understanding of Michel
Foucault’s discursive theory.
At stake in Greece’s case was her independent development into a nation-
state, because her protectors had the power to intervene and impose their own
decisions. For the British in particular, public safety and successful governing
were the embodiments of political order. Their colonial experience and their
persistence in viewing Greece as their ‘apprentice’ helped them construct a
discourse in which they represented ‘order’ and Greece with its binary opposite.
This discourse, which was entwined with actual British control over Greek
political affairs, forms the subject of the second chapter.

Chapter I.iii
In the British mind, Greek brigandage was both the result and the perpetrator of
Greek disorder. This confusion of cause and effect was due to the nature of the
associations that the British mobilised to understand the phenomenon. On the
one hand, they would recognise the Greek state as the legitimate power in the
Greek Kingdom and identify something of themselves in the difficulties it had to
deal with. Thus, they would see in Greek brigandage similarities with Irish
Fenianism, which threatened the stability and prestige of the British empire. In
this discourse, British colonial power and Greek state were interchangeable terms.
But simultaneously the supplementary role brigandage played in Greek irredentist

28
plans made the British commentators see in the Greek state itself a threat to
Eastern order. Thus, Greece and Ireland were identified as troublemakers for
Britain. In this case the British commentators and politicians projected their
domestic problems onto the fabric of their foreign policy and their role in the
East. Talking about their internal problems, nonetheless, Britons exposed
themselves to the Greeks. In their counter-attack the latter used British
reflections to mar the British binarism British order vs. Greek disorder and
represent Britain as another disorderly country. One should not miss here the
importance of Irishness for British/English self-recognition and Greek
conceptualisation of Britishness/Irishness/Englishness. This is the theme of the
second chapter.

Chapter I.iv
Alongside state-formation, the Greeks were undergoing the process of nation-
formation. In this process there had three things to consider: their Great Idea of
expansion towards the former boundaries of the Byzantine empire, the diversity
of cultural and social backgrounds of the Greek-minded populations and the
objections their protectors posed to the realisation of their imperial ‘dream.’
Because of these preoccupations the Greeks had to find ways to wash away the
smear of brigandage that the ‘nation’ had to bear. A new discourse, which
opposed that of the Europeans and the British, began to take shape. In this
discourse, brigandage was an epidemic phenomenon communicated to Greece
from Turkey. Accomplices in this Turkish ‘conspiracy’ against the ‘nation’ were
the Vlachs and the Albanians of the Greek Kingdom (two significant Greek
‘others’), who were subsequently expelled from the ‘nation’ through a series of
symbolic actions. The discourse, which was crystallized after the Dilessi Affair
and influenced British observers, assumed a double function in the Greek
imaginary: as a response to British and pre-existing European accusations against
Greece, and as an expression of the Vlachian/Albanian contribution to the
process of Neohellenic self-recognition.

State Discourse and National Imaginary

This chapter (I.iv) presented me with a problem I had to solve, because it would
re-appear later in the thesis: how could I mobilize ‘state discourse practices’ and
the idea of a ‘national imaginary’ at the same time? Is the Foucauldian conception
of discourse very different from that, which Lacanian theorists, such as Žižek and
Balibar, promulgate in political theory today?
Before I confuse my reader, I must at least explain what the puzzling term
‘national imaginary’ means. The term ‘imaginary’ (imaginaire) comprises part of the
Lacanian theory of the triadic order imaginary-symbolic-real. Lacan’s reading of
Freud suggested that the substantial Cartesian self exists only through a system of
symbolic functions. The ‘real’ is not identical to what we call reality; for Lacan the
real is what escapes and resists symbolisation, what undermines social life. Thus,
Lacan’s symbolic became a primordial law that exists prior to the individual
subject, and which the subject has to acknowledge and obey in order to assume
its social identity. The symbolic order is the prerequisite for the social, since the
latter is predicated upon a set of pre-agreed laws and regulations, which actualise
it. 25 I will use the term symbolic/social in a very specific way to designate the
relationship the Greeks tried to establish with their powerful interlocutors, Britain
25 For the initial meaning of the concepts, see Lacan’s late seminars in The Four Fundamental

Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London, 1998).

29
and Europe. The Greek symbolic is therefore constituted as a Neohellenic
attempt to join the European imagined community by accepting the European
Law of ‘political order’ that regulated nineteenth-century European societies.
The Lacanian imaginary co-exists with the symbolic, but it is not transcended
by it. Whilst the subject has to enter/be inscribed in the symbolic order, no
subject lives only on the symbolic plane, that of language and communication: a
series of unconsciously constructed imageries always coexist with it. In the thesis
I try to explore the Neohellenic repository of nationhood imageries (the ‘national
imaginary’) by investigating a set of not fully conscious rituals of (Vlachian and
Albanian) exclusion from the Greek imagined community. My hypothesis is that
Greek stereotyping of the Vlachs and the Albanians belongs to the imaginary
plane, 26 though in the context of the Anglo-Greek and European-Greek
relationship it ends up assuming a symbolic function. The Greeks associated the
Vlachs and the Albanians with their Turkish enemies (the Greek ‘other’) in order
to be discharged of the accusation that they harbour brigandage, and so to be
recognised by their protectors as an orderly European state.
Therefore, the Greek national imaginary is not identical with Greek state
discourse. It embraces ideas and ideals, demands and ways of living, images and
conceptions, modes of action and dreaming, which pre-existed the Greek state
and outlived my period of study. It is the form the collective national unconscious
takes, if I may acknowledge the legacy of Freud the historian in my study. In the
unfortunate conjunction of circumstances I explore, however, the Greek state
transformed it into social/symbolic, and incorporated it in the adventurous
project of Greek modernisation. However, at the same time, the national
imaginary assumes its autonomous voice through my non-official sources. After
all, the Greek imagined community was never identical to the Greek state, albeit
the latter and its loyalties to its European protectors helped it come into being as
a modern entity. The Greek narrative I explore in this chapter was addressed
during the Dilessi episode to three different audiences: a Greek, a European and a
British.

Part II
The second part of the thesis introduces us to the complex processes of Greek
modernisation as it took place in one of the most fascinating spheres of human
experience: that of the human sciences. In this part I look at the development of
Greek and British ‘disciplinary’ practices in academic and non-academic contexts.
My strong disagreement with the old school of historiography is the assumption
that philhellenism manifested itself only in the diplomatic arena. Aligning myself
with more recent discussions, I argue that its late, post-independence presence as
a distinct Orientalist project had long-lasting effects upon the Greek way of
thinking. I set out to study the philhellenic Orientalism of the Britons and its
implications, without discarding the importance of other European and
Transatlantic philhellenisms in Greece.
In British hegemonic thought Greece was symbolically
disciplined/appropriated with the study and objectification of modern Greek
culture vis-à-vis ancient Greek civilisation. But against the Saidian polemic, I
believe that this, alongside similar practices of other European nations, had a
beneficial role to play in the development of modern Greek thought. Ultimately
this process posed the problematic of Greek modernity: what is to be a

26 H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York, 1994), pp. 74-79

30
Neohellene? Can the Neohellenic identity be presented (to a British/European
and a Greek audience) as a linear historical construct, despite the contradictions
inherent in the history of the Greek nation?

Chapter II.i
The first chapter of this part goes back to the favourite topic of historians of
philhellenism: the writing of Greek history. I try to evaluate the centrality of the
writings of Jacob Fallmerayer, who contested the continuity of Greek culture, in
British and Greek narratives. I also look into the ways the British and the Greeks
created periodologies in Greek history. Travel diaries, the non-academic
counterpart of historiography, reflect the same problematic by juxtaposing
ancient and modern legacies in Neohellenic culture and by creating a schema of
historical continuities and discontinuities. The legacies of conquest in the Greek
peninsula are very important in this instance.
Like the British, the Greeks also acknowledged (dis)continuities in Greek
history in their writings. But the aim of the chapter is not to trace direct links
between British and Greek history writing, more than to juxtapose them. My
intention is to use these observations as a cursor in the following chapters. What
is important is to see if and how the Greeks reiterated, challenged and re-
examined the European writing of their history. I managed to successfully
juxtapose British and Greek approaches when I moved on to the domain of
‘modern’ Greek history. In modern Greek history the favourite subject was that
of British agency in the formation of the Greek state, a subject with political
implications. Because British agency became meaningful in the conjuncture of the
struggle for Greek independence, it was coloured politically in different ways by
the Greeks and the British.

Chapter II.ii
British observation on Greek culture was not always conducted by ‘armchair
scholars’, if I may be allowed to use the contemptuous tone of modern
anthropologists. The second and third chapters of this part are dedicated to the
‘fieldwork’ British travellers and academics conducted during their Greek tours.
Here I try to work at three different levels. The first is an examination of the
British anthropological ‘gaze’: British observers displayed a series of recurring
patterns in their analyses of Greek folklore. Often they would try to associate
Greek customs with English vices, projecting once again their own
psychopathologies onto modern Greek life. Ottoman character was also sought in
modern Greek practices, only to feed back a dialogue on the nature of the Anglo-
Greek relationship. The colonised peoples of the British empire were used in
comparison and contrast with the observed Greeks. This exchange had an impact
on the way the average Greek imagined and engaged with the ‘representatives’ of
Britain. The British gaze disturbingly rebounded, and the ‘Lords’ were placed
under scrutiny, becoming thus the observed. The Greek response forms the
second level of my analysis.
This Greek reaction was not exclusively the outcome of British observation:
other European observers had contributed to it. Their study of Greek life was
appropriated in the Neohellenic mind, and aspects of Greek everyday life and
practice, which were never questioned or acknowledged before, assumed the role
of commodity in Anglo-Greek exchange in particular. Again, the Greek imaginary
repository was utilised in the Anglo-Greek exchange in symbolic ways and the

31
British observer learned that there is always a price to pay for his scholarly
interests.
This chapter also briefly examines the method with which the educated
Greeks appropriated European scientific endeavours. The argument I present is
that the Greek folklorist movement was born with the help of the European
anthropological gaze (the third level of analysis). This is not the ‘invention’ but
the ex post facto discovery of Greek tradition. Because my main concern is the role
of the British in particular in this process, I use brigandage as a ‘case study’ in the
following chapter.

Chapter II.iii
Like the previous chapter, this chapter suggests that history and anthropology, the
diachronic and synchronic study of Greek culture, were in the late nineteenth
century part of a single romantic/political project. In the second half of the
nineteenth-century, and mainly after the Dilessi incident, which (re)presented
Greece as a country of bloodthirsty barbarians, more space was made within the
trajectory of the British romantic tradition for some interest in the Neohellenic
wilderness. And wilderness stood in an almost metonymical relationship with
brigandage for the Greek Kingdom.
It is my intention to reconstruct the Anglo-Greek positivist interest in the
history of Greek brigandage and the scientific study of brigands. More
specifically, I would like to explore the different ways the British and the Greek
observers commented on the phenomenon of brigandage as an important part of
modern (post-revolutionary) Greek history. I would also like to explore why
Britons used brigandage as a starting-point for reflecting on the history of the
Scottish Highland outlaws. Similarly, I would like to explore how the individual
brigand becomes another Darwinian species, which is suitable for research,
classification and exhibition in the photographic albums of ambitious Greek and
British collectors. This (mainly British, but also Greek) interest should be
regarded as part of the development of history and anthropology as modern
academic disciplines.
According to British and Greek commentators Greek brigandage was a
dangerous phenomenon for the modern Greek state, but also a survival of an
irrational age that could become the object of scholarly scrutiny and could thus be
romanticised. My argument is that this controversy rested in the heart of the
process of Greek and British modernisation. Unlike Hobsbawm, who identified
in the idealisation of social banditry the pre-capitalist cast of mind or surviving
fragments of it in urbanized societies 27 the thesis here is that the process was
concomitant with the rationalisation/modernisation of the Greek and the British
mind. It was the state and its educated classes that identified in this social
phenomenon something of their history, or an object of observation and analysis.
Through the documents they produced, we are in a position to investigate the
phenomenon. For me Hobsbawm’s division of banditry into criminal and social 28
does not reflect the divide between Greek rural and urban appropriations of the
phenomenon.
There is an anti-structuralist overdose this chapter. Lévi-Strauss argued that
the structural study of social forms should focus on the ‘now’ and not the past of
the community under inspection. However, the ways the past is interpreted in the
present is more important for a historical thesis. Alki Kyriakidou-Nestoros, the
27 E. J. Hobsbawm., Bandits (London, 2000), pp. 47, 142.
28 Ibid., 176 cf.

32
celebrated Greek student of Lévi-Strauss, explained how the Neohellenes were
forced to adopt this historical methodology in disciplinary analyses to prove their
racial affiliation with the ancient Greeks: Neohellenic tradition was read against
ancient Greek ways of thinking.
Following from these observations I argue in this chapter that the Greeks and
the British displayed an inclination to adopt a similar methodological approach in
their study of Greek brigandage. I believe that this was a symptom of their need
to explore their own identities through the identity of each other. This ethno-
historical approach enabled the Greeks to romanticise brigandage and
acknowledge its contribution to Greek independence, but also to ‘demonise’ it
and represent it as the ‘other’ of the ‘civilised modern Greece’. Interestingly, it
also helped Britons present the Scottish traditional outlaw as the romantic past of
Britain and a significant stage in the formation of English-Scottish, British
identity.

Chapter II.iv
This chapter is concerned with the ‘autopsy’ Greeks and Britons conducted in
Greece in order to make ancient Greek culture visible. It begins by analysing how
the British began to see in Greek landscape something of their ‘home’. These
romantic visions of Greece were not innocent and detached from politics. They
were accompanied by comparisons between British and Greek nature/culture and
subsequent, unfavourable, comments on the uncivilised manners of the
Neohellenes.
In the chapter I do not see this discourse of naturalisation separately from the
archaeological excavations and the classical studies of British travellers, scholars,
and academics because, as Artemis Leontis argued, textual citation and physical
sites co-existed in the Europeans’ mind. Because of this subtle relationship
between romantic vision and classicism, I emphasise the inclination that the
British had to appreciate the Greek cultural landscape but to condemn any
modern Greek traces upon it. I argue that this attitude presents us with a form of
de-historicisation of modern Greece that allowed British observers to present
themselves as worthy inheritors of the physical traces of ancient Greek
civilisation. British self-inscription on ancient history and the denial, if not
repugnance for modern Greek identity, was expressed by means of repressing all
Greek history after the Hellenic golden age. The ancient landscape, divested of
modern life, was what interested the British observer.
In the meantime, the European imagination had forced the Neohellenes to
identify in the ancient ruins a past that had to be preserved. This re-evaluation of
the Hellenic past in modern Greek culture is examined from the standpoint of
both the Greek peasant and the Greeks elites. But because I am specifically
concerned with Neohellenic reactions to British archaeological interests I try to
explain the way in which a pile of ruins assumed its value as cultural capital and
heritage for the Greeks during their encounters with British travellers and
archaeologists. Also, I examine how these Britons missed this change in Greek
attitudes and criticised the Neohellenes. For these Britons Greece had to be
occupied and preserved as a living museum of the European past by someone
who valued Hellenic culture more than the Neohellenes. In this way, they claimed
Greek heritage for themselves.

33
Chapter II.v
Historians and scholars of Modern Greece use in their writings at least three
different versions of Greece: the political/administrative center of the nation (the
Greek Kingdom with its historical capital, Athens), the imaginary Byzantine
Greece of the Great Idea, and that of the Greek-speaking or Greek-minded
territories of the Ottoman empire. The fifth chapter looks into Greek and British
definitions of Neohellenic identity with specific references to the geographical
location that hosted the Greek nation for centuries. It mainly explores British
travellers’ reflections on modern Greek geographical/cultural identity which in
the nineteenth century often appeared as Oriental/Eastern. It will suggest that
this conflation of culture and space, inside and outside, dirt and danger, implied a
preoccupation with modern Greek disorder, the place of modern Greece in
European culture and its symbolic extensions.
The Ottoman legacy in modern Greek culture played a significant role in the
conceptualisation of Greece as a half-Oriental country. The idea, however, of
cultural contamination, which was allegedly visible in everyday Neohellenic life,
says more about the British than the Greek side. I decided to examine this
question when I encountered Maria Todorova’s book Imagining the Balkans in
which she explained how the Balkans came to represent the ‘other/same’
speculum of the Western Europeans. I was intrigued by Todorova’s reductionism,
because the relationship of each of the Balkan peoples with the ‘West’ had a
different story to tell. I was also struck by the fact that she disregarded the danger
of moving to a mythological reconstruction by promoting the idea of affiliation of
balkanism (the Balkan Orientalism) and philhellenism as twin parts of the same
discourse. Is ‘Greece’ to be seen as a ‘Balkan’ country in the course of the
nineteenth century, after all? Is this not a political statement? Though Todorova’s
Saidian association of balkanism and Orientalism makes a very important point,
primary sources revealed that in the Greek case the relationship between the two
is more complex than she thinks. The sources suggested that ‘Greece’, which was
a volatile concept and a geographical unit just coming into being over the period
of study, performed multiple functions. I was led to conclude that in the British
observer’s imagination ‘modern Greece’ had two conflicting and equivocal roles
to play: that of a desirable, yet perilous adventure, which could subvert the
observer’s self-perception, and that of a subordinate/childish culture, which
valorised the British colonial self-image.

Part III
The last part of the thesis looks into the way that Greeks re-articulated and
expressed their national yearnings to an imagined European and British audience.
I do not make a distinction between the Europeans and the British here because,
as the reader will realise, the Greeks themselves do not always separate the two.
But British criticism of Greek hegemonic plans in particular had jeopardised the
Anglo-Greek friendship. To be sure, the primary sources suggest that Greek
commentators imagined other European nations similarly, as the harsh ‘judges’
and critics of modern Greece and of the Greek irredentist dream. However, the
European verdict that modern Greece was an unworthy inheritor of ancient
Hellenic civilisation was reversed in the Neohellenic mind and turned into a
powerful image of the Greeks as the ‘chosen people’. In their counter-
argumentation the ‘neobyzantine’ Hellenes presented themselves as the guardians

34
of ancient Greek glory, to whom the British, and indeed the whole of Europe,
owe their existence as modern nations.
Because Greek nationalism is embodied in the Great Idea project, the whole
part focuses on it. A difficulty with which I had to deal in this part was that there
was always a disjunction between whom the Greeks addressed as an imagined
interlocutor, and the British accusations directed specifically to the Greeks. Often
the sources provided me with more information about the ‘dialogue’ the Greeks
imagined with the Europeans than about that with Britain. Again, this shows that
Britain in particular was an entity of secondary importance in the Neohellenic
imaginary. Interestingly, the British addressed their discontent directly to the
Neohellenes, and often used them as an intermediary in order to criticise their
main rival in the Mediterranean region, Russia. This of course betrays confidence
and highlights the power structure of the Anglo-Greek relationship.

Chapters III.i and III.ii

To examine these nuances I concentrated my analysis on British and Greek
narratives of Greek irredentism, which is embodied in the concept of the ‘Great
Idea’. The first two chapters of this part pull together different conceptions of the
Great Idea, the Neohellenic irredentist plan. The first chapter gives the official
(historiographical) genealogy of the concept and the second some of the
nineteenth-century Greek and British ideas that were associated with it. The
conclusion is that although there were some similarities to be identified in these
discourses, the ‘Great Idea’ did not have a clear meaning.

Chapter III.iii
Because the Great Idea would often be the cause of unrest in the Southeastern
part of the Mediterranean region, it would present Greek policy to Britain as a
‘real’ threat to the Eastern order. In the third chapter I explore forms of rhetoric
that were used in Greek and British narratives to describe the tensions that the
Great Idea introduced in Anglo-Greek and European-Greek relations. Empirical
evidence suggested that the discourse formed by Britons to discipline ambitious
Greece became progressively gendered: the empire was presented as a good
uncle-father of the ‘naughty’ Greek Kingdom-boy. Frequent Greek incursions
into Turkey were seen as transgression of the ‘law’ of ‘protection’, and Britons
mourned the fact that the Kingdom to which they had given life was not born ‘in
their own image’.
This narrative of benign and humane British interest was not internalised by
the Greeks without modification. To reconcile British imageries with the absolute
necessity to address themselves to the ‘unredeemed’ Greeks, the ‘liberated’
Greeks articulated a forked language in which the images of the oppressor and
the oppressed were merged. This language encompassed representations of
Greece as a loving mother who must reclaim her lost ‘sons’ from Turkey. The
same language was used by Greeks to describe the relationship of Greece with
Europe.
These patterns of communication have something to say about British and
the Greek hegemonic modes of thought. A conflation of family and clinical
tropes of discourse suggest that the Greeks would often be represented as
subordinates in the Anglo-Greek and European-Greek relationships. Bearing this
in mind I explain, through Frantz Fanon’s and Homi Bhabha’s work, how Greek
responses combined mockery and imitation of the European rhetoric of
protection. The second aim to be achieved is the investigation, through Paul

35
Gilroy’s and Anne McClintock’s work, of the role of the mothering vocabulary
within the Greek nation. I thereby maintain that in the Greek political arena the
family trope was complicit in Greek nation building because it coincided with the
debate on Greek citizenship. This vocabulary presented the Greek Kingdom as
the centre of a Greater Hellenism, which was seeking its self-accomplishment by
means of territorial expansion.

Chapters III.iv and III.v

The problem with the British and the Greeks was that both wanted to discipline
each other. The Greeks were definitely more vulnerable, possibly therefore more
inventive. I must remind my reader at this point that the Greek peasants of the
British sources tried to take advantage of what they read in British philhellenism.
My intention in the fifth chapter is to show that the Greeks identified in different
facets of philhellenism a resource for the promotion of their own cause. The
three versions of Greekness are represented in the sources that I use in this
chapter to attack romantic perceptions of philhellenism and anglophilia. I will
argue that these ideological trends should have been grounded on reciprocity and
mutual recognition that was absent in the nineteenth-century context.
That is why I try to shed light on the most obscure side of these two philias or
‘friendships’: that one on which a ‘relationship’ between the representatives of
two empires (the British and the elusive Byzantine the Greeks aspired to re-build)
was established. This relationship revolved partially around the question of who
‘owes’ what to whom, which complicated the relationship between Greece and
Europe, and which reappeared in the relationship between Britons and the
Greeks. The firm belief of the late British philhellenes that the modern Greeks
owed them for Britain’s contribution to the foundation of the Greek Kingdom in
1832 was eventually undermined by their excessive fondness for ancient Greece,
in which they saw the ‘cradle’ of European civilisation. This happened because
the nineteenth-century Greeks had previously sought in European philhellenic
affection and admiration for ancient Hellenic civilisation justification of the
Neohellenic mission to ‘civilise the East’ by means of territorial expansion and
hellenisation of other Balkan peoples. However, as was stated above, British politics
were opposed to the idea of creation of a new ‘order’ in the East, which would
have allowed the Greeks to take the lead. In their attempt to present themselves
as the potential successors of the Ottoman Empire and to chastise ‘Britain’ for
her political reservation, the Greeks of my sources invoked the powerful religious
image of ‘the chosen people’, whose nature and task should not be questioned by
‘Britain’ and ‘Europe’ in general. My argument is that this imagery provided the
Great Idea with a content and a meaning which it initially lacked.
By whom were the Greeks ‘chosen’ to perform the agents of civilisation? My
intention is to investigate how Greeks restructured their ‘nation’ as elected at
once by God and philhellenes. At the same time, I will examine how the British in
particular sought to use their role as Greece’s ‘protectors’, who should be obeyed
and respected for their philhellenic ‘kindness’, in order to ‘police’ the Greek
imperial mind.

Chapter III.vi
The last chapter of the thesis explores the links between and the function of
internal and external ‘enemies’ in Greek national and British imperial narratives.
The narratives I selected operated within the structure of the Eastern Question
and the role of Britain and Greece in it.

36
 The conception of external overdetermination is used to explain how in the
Greek national imaginary the British were represented as a threat for Greek
autonomy and constitution. Greek metropolitan journalism suggested that British
politicians worked their way through to damage Greek constitutional life. Greek
politicians and journalists, who refused to cover up Greek scandals or were
simply too critical of Greek defects, were represented by Greeks as British
collaborators and national traitors. Here we can see that the enemy is at once at
the margins (non-Greek) and internal (Greek). Although the role of Britain in
these conspiracy theories was my main interest, I could not disregard other
variations of the same Greek narrative. This diversion enabled me to show that
Britain’s presence in these narratives was contingent. The narrative of conspiracy
itself became therefore the main theme of the chapter as a mechanism of
Neohellenic self-recognition. Alongside that I examined (a) the question of
deception and trust between the Greeks and the British in order to explain how
this conspiracy mechanism affected Greek and British interaction (b) differences
in Greek perceptions and representations of the British, French and Russian
‘enemies’, and (c) the uses of the religious vocabulary in Greek narratives of
European conspiracy against Greece.
British concerns were different from the Greek ones: in another narrative
Britons presented Greek agency in the East as an external threat for British
imperial interests. In this narrative the real British enemy was Russia, the main
British rival in Eastern affairs. It was obvious that the British commentators
expressed concerns about Greek irredentism not per se, but because it was
constantly backed up by Russia. Ultimately, their criticism of the Greek Great
Idea was utilised as an indirect way of expressing their opposition to Russian
interests and intervention in Ottoman affairs.

37
Editorial Note
Greek book and article titles are translated/transliterated
into English for the readers’ convenience. The original
titles are given only in the bibliography and in Latin.
Greek newspaper titles are given in Latin characters,
except for the Efimerís tis Kiverníseos (translated as The
Government Gazette) whose title is long and
incomprehensible to the non-modern Greek Studies
scholar. Quotes from sources are indented and typed in a
different font — another whim of mine, which originates
in the idea that I do not deal with a farrago of opinions,
but with intelligent opinion makers. Moreover, because
my interpretation of the sources is not necessarily correct
it is my duty to provide my readers with the opportunity
to revise it. In addition, I thought that with this technique
I would grant the thesis the quality of a ‘documentary’ or
that of an ‘interview’. I expect that no complaints will be
legally justified for this cut-and-paste business because
death certificates disqualify all potential complainants.

38
 PART I
Disorder and Greece
With all the value that may adhere to the true, the genuine, the
selfless, it could be possible that a higher and more fundamental value
for all life might have to be ascribed to appearance, to the will to
deception, to selfishness and to appetite. It might even be possible
that what constitutes the value of those good and honoured things
resides precisely in their being artfully related, knotted and crocheted
to these wicked, apparently antithetical things, perhaps even in their
being essentially identical with them. Perhaps! – But who is willing to
concern himself with such dangerous perhapses!
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (London, 1990), p. 34.

What would be the course adopted in England – where the law is

clear, where constitutional restraints are safely guarded, and where
order is preserved not more by army force than by the weight of
opinion – affords no precedent for a country where infractions of law
are systematically winked at by those who are paid to uphold it; where
the “Constitution” is the sport of contending factions, being strained
or ignored as interest or passion may impel; and where social order is
neither upheld by the ruler’s sword nor cherished by the general
sentiment…The Ministers of KING GEORGE, anxious for the good
opinion of Europe, seemed to have thought it derogatory to the
dignity of a nation dominated by a transcendental “idea” to negotiate
with bandits on terms of equality. We assure them that no sense of
inequality in such a juxtaposition would have troubled most Westerns.
We have got so accustomed to identify Greek statesmanship with
buccaneering, and Hellenic finance with robbery…
The Daily Telegraph, 26 April, 1870.

39
 i. Historical Survey: genealogy of and discourse
on Greek brigandage
In the introduction I explored the nature of encounters between the Greeks and
the British within the political framework in which Anglo-Greek relations were
established. I also briefly explained why Britons became interested in modern
Greece and how episodes that took place before the period of study forced the
Greeks to imagine their British protectors. This part of the thesis looks at a more
specific Greek political phenomenon, which prompted debates in Greece and in
Britain. These debates were often concerned with the nature of the modern
Greek state and its relationship with European modernity.
As was mentioned before, the ‘Great Idea’ was the Greek political project that
aimed at the liberation of the Greeks who still lived under Turkish rule. This
political programme had come in conflict with the irredentist programme of other
emerging Balkans nations. This project was a heavy burden for the Greek state
that did not have the actual resources to realize it. Admittedly, the Great Idea
drained financially the country and did not leave any space for internal
improvement. This was not a negligible point and it certainly displeased the three
European protectors of Greece. One of the most frequent accusations leveled at
the Greek governments by the magnanimous protectors was that of their
incapability in suppressing the criminal elements that infested the mountainous
and remote districts and appeared to overrun the country. These elements
constituted what contemporary Greeks called listía or brigandage – a
phenomenon the British patrons of Greece in particular found unacceptable for a
country that wanted to claim a European identity.
Of course, things were easier said than done. The harrowing political
experience of the post-independence era made Greek brigandage a perfect form
of what Thomas Gallant has termed ‘military entrepreneurship’ subsidized and
supported by the state itself. 29 The ‘Bavarisation’ of the Greek administrative
machine, which ignored the actual social problems of the Kingdom, and the
European call for a rapid modernization of the country, acted as a catalyst in the
Greek body politic and the wider society of Greece. The failure to compensate
the veterans of the War of Independence (1821-1828); the pending question of
land distribution; the use of bands for the intimidation of the electorate by
various factions that began to operate within the constitutional framework in the
1840s; 30 and the use of brigands as an irregular army force against the Ottoman
empire for the promotion of the ‘Great Idea’; 31 these were some of the underlying
reasons for the transformation of the phenomenon into an institution. 32

29 T. W. Gallant, ‘Brigandage, Piracy, Capitalism, and State-Formation: Transnational Crime from

a Historical World-Systems Perspective’ in J. McC. Heyman, States and Illegal Practices (Oxford and
New York 1999), p. 42; See also J. Dickie, ‘A Word at War: The Italian Army and Brigandage
1860-1870,’ History Workshop Journal 33 (1993), and Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes on the
Mezzogiorno, 1860-1900 (New York, 1999), pp. 26-51.
30 Finlay, History, vol. II, p. 313; N. Diamantouros, ‘The Period of Constitutional Monarchy,’ in

History of the Greek Nation, vol. XIII (Athens, 1980), pp. 119-120.
31 W.W. McGrew, Land and Revolution in Modern Greece (Kent and Ohio, 1985), pp. 184-185;

Stevens, Ransom and Murder, p. 12; N. Moschonas, ‘The Greek State from 1862 to 1881,’ in History
of the Greek Nation, vol. XIII (Athens, 1980), pp. 221-222.
32 J. Koliopoulos, Brigands (Athens, 1988), pp. 218-219; Kallighás, Thános Vlékas (Athens, 1987),

pp. 152-154; McGrew, Land and Revolution, pp. 9-11; J. Petropoulos- A. Koumarianou, ‘The Greek
State from 1833 to 1862,’ in History of the Greek Nation, vol. XIII (Athens, 1980), pp. 38-39.

40
 Who was to be blamed for this chaos? The role played by brigandage in the
process of nation building was, after all, equivocal. On the one hand, after the
creation of Greece it kept alive the popular belief in the heroic spirit of klephtism,
the only spasmodic form of resistance developed by the Greek and the Balkan
peoples against their rulers - whether these be Turks, Albanians, or indeed
Greeks– during the ages of ‘thralldom.’ 33 This romanticization of the klepht-
brigand (for the two were inevitably confused in the Greek mind) was further
reinforced by the fact that brigandage was incorporated into the logic of the
Great Idea. On the other hand, brigandage subverted the image of modern
Greece as the heiress of ancient Greek civilization – the unifying European
signifier of order, harmony, democracy and intellectual rigor. This split response
to the socio-political phenomenon of listía, made it stand in the Neohellenic
imaginary both for a ‘scourge’ and a demonstration of Greek irredentist heroism,
a dangerous disease and an almost innate Greek virtue. The present-day
historiography of Greece does not always escape this confusion. It needs to be
borne in mind that listía and klephtism were not necessarily recognised by the
nineteenth-century commentators as separate and distinct categories; and when
they were, they may have signified different practices from the ones we tend to fit
nowadays into these two concepts.
Before setting out to examine nineteenth-century Anglo-Greek
representations of Greek brigandage, it is therefore desirable to present the state
of affairs at the start of the period of study. It is necessary to bear in mind that
Greece was economically depended upon its patrons, among whom Britain
appeared to be the most dissatisfied with the course things had taken in the tiny
Kingdom. Objectively, the Kingdom suffered from maladministration. When
King George assumed his duties in 1864, the state machine was in ruins. The
corruption of the army had its roots in the Ministry of War itself. That slow-
moving machine, whose inefficiency was also due to the incessant changes of
government, could not take on the pursuit of the brigands. 34 The Greek judicial
system, influenced by external factors, was even more inefficient, with courts
often releasing criminals because of their powerful backers. 35 Agricultural work
had been violently interrupted by brigand raids and foreign visitors were able to
observe that across the country fertile and beautiful valleys in the mountainous
districts remained desolate and visited only by goats. 36 State records show that
from April to August 1865, the government had put a price on the head of at
least forty chief brigands and that in many cases it raised this three and four times,
looking for informants in vain. Troops were sent everywhere to hunt brigands,
but all attempts proved fruitless.
Bearing all these Greek domestic problems in mind, one can begin to
understand why the prospects for a healthy Anglo-Greek co-operation were
limited. However, Greek public insecurity was not a unique phenomenon in the
Mediterranean region and in Europe in general. With regards to brigandage, as
Martin Blinkhorn explained in a recent article, the third quarter of the nineteenth
century was rich in episodes of kidnapping in other European countries as well. 37
33 S. Damianakos, Tradition of Revolt and Popular Culture (Athens, 1987), p. 78; Jenkins, Dilessi; E.J.

Hobsbawm, Bandits (New York, 1972) and Primitive Rebels (Manchester, 1959).
34 M. Vitti (ed), The Military Life in Greece (Athens, 1990), pp. 210-21.
35 Kallighás, Vlékas, pp. 83-86.
36 The Times, 29 April 1870
37 M. Blinkhorn, ‘Liability, Responsibility and Blame: British Ransom Victims in the

Mediterranean Periphery, 1860-1881,’ Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol I (3), September
2000.

41
Britain had its own domestic problems of disorder to think about, problems,
which contact with the Greeks brought to surface. It was inevitable that the
British observer, while speculating on the nature of Greek crime and political
turmoil, should think again about all these sources of internal disorder that
destabilised or put into question English authority in the British empire. Both the
ways in which the British conceptualised Greek brigandage and its political
implications, and those in which the Greeks responded to British reflections are
examined in next three chapters.

42
 ii. Order and British Civilisation
Sotíris Sotirópoulos was MP for Trifilía in the Peloponnese when he was
kidnapped by the notorious band of Kítsos Laphazánis in the summer of 1866.
Sotirópoulos had been Minister of Finance in the Koumoundoúros cabinet
between 1864 and 1865 and was an adherent of the Koumoundoúros party, a
faction-based party with no political programme save the promotion of the Great
Idea. Sotirópoulos was convinced that his abduction had been carefully planned
by his political opponents, who were by this time in office. In the course of the
thirty-six days he spent as a hostage, his captors had daily offers from his political
enemies to ‘put him out of the way’. At least that is what Sotirópoulos claimed in
the account he produced and published in November 1866 following his release.
38
. In fact, nobody waited for his allusions before concluding that the whole
episode had been plotted by his mysterious political enemies; Greek newspapers
such as Alíthia(Truth) and Chártis (Chart), which were controlled by
Koumoundoúros, had cast the seed of such suspicions while the unfortunate MP
was actually undergoing the usual night marches and daily privations as a hostage.
Alíthia in particular was as much outspoken as Sotirópoulos himself in his
account. On 11 August 1866, the following article created an uproar in Greece:

The unfortunate case of Mr. Sotirópoulos ought not to be placed into the common
category of lestric captures, as if it fairly presented the treatment, which the
prisoner receives at the hands of the authorities. The abduction of a man who
belongs to the more select and distinguished circle of politicians, is an event of
much greater importance […] And we are coerced to speak of it particularly
because we see in it the seeds of a most vicious and pernicious institution. The
honour of the Government, therefore, imperatively demands that it do not permit
the notion to spread abroad that it has invented a new mode of extirpating the
politicians […] 39

Readers’ letters followed, containing similar insinuations, 40 which had already

become an open secret abroad. It was not therefore surprising that two years after
the episode Sotirópoulos’s Thirty-Six Days of Captivity and Consort with the Brigands
was translated and transformed by an Anglican clergyman in Zante, Rev. Oscar
Bagdon, into the British best seller The Brigands of the Morea. Bagdon was gifted
with great editing skills, but he refrained from admitting them in the book. His
intervention almost recreated the diary and added new dimensions to the
narrative. It is nevertheless striking that he noted among the causes of brigandage

The innate love of lawless liberty and predisposition to strife, which is so

prominent a feature in the early history of many of the Grecian states […] the
fierce and unreasoning desire for revenge which has been engendered and
nourished by many generations of ruthless and wanton oppression […] the deeply
rooted antipathy to social laws and ordinances [and] the connivance and secret

38 A short version of his account was published in The Times in 12 November 1866.
39 S. Sotirópoulos, Thirty-six Days of Captivity and Consort with the Brigands (Athens, 1866), pp. 102-
103.
40 Rev J.O. Bagdon, The Brigands of Morea, A Narrative of the Captivity of Mr. Sotirópoulos vol I

(London, 1868), pp. 105-110.

43
 encouragement of the authorities, arising from the extreme venality of some of
those whom the popular favour has raised to offices of power. 41

Despite this confusing accumulation of arguments the curious repetition of the

idea of disorder (lawlessness, strife, desire for revenge, lack of ordinance) works
as a compass for the reader. On the one hand lawlessness represents an opposing
value to that of the central state, but on the other it is part of the very process of
Greek state-formation. That this is one of the ways whereby the British observer
approached Greek political reality is inserted in the highly influential travel diary
of Sir Thomas Wyse, 42 written in the 1850s but published in the 1870s by his
niece. In her Introduction, Winifrede Wyse recorded many cases of kidnapping,
among them the Sotirópoulos incident, as examples of Greek public insecurity. 43
For Thomas Wyse, in Greece intimidation of voters, brigandage and political
instability belonged to a common category of vices 44 that the Greek government
was anxiously trying to cover up. Winifrede Wyse referred to two occasions on
which the Greek authorities denied the existence of politicised crime and placed
the British Minister’s life in danger. 45 It is about time ‘to put all in order, and this
law amongst others,’ 46 Thomas Wyse concluded. His long stay in Greece had
convinced him that Greek governments were always willing to perform for the
distinguished foreigner while doing nothing to improve the actual situation.
Accurate information about the state of the country could be exacted only from
the peasant. One of the monks of the monastery in Aràchova had a tale to tell
about how the Greek government tried to make a ‘show of order and security’ for
an ‘Anglos’:

Smith O’Brien came to Athens during the interval between his being permitted
to leave Australia and return to Ireland. Becoming violently Philhellenic and
devoted to the Greek Government, he would not believe in the existence of
brigandage or any of the evils so much complained of. Finally he made a tour in
the interior, when orders were sent to all the authorities to hide all defects, and to
take the utmost precaution to prevent his being captured by the robbers, who
abounded in the districts he intended to travel through. On his return to Athens he
published a letter eulogising the state of the country, and denying the grievances
alluded to, but unluckily a secret report of the authorities got into the papers at the
same time, and revealed the systematic deceit, which had been practised on him.
‘We all know the secret orders given, when a certain ‘Anglos’ (he could nor
make out the pronunciation of the Anglo-Celtic names, but he was quite up to the

41 Ibid., pp. 6-7.

42 Sir Thomas Wyse was a distinguished politician and diplomat. In 1849 Palmerston conferred on
him the diplomatic post of British Minster at Athens, which he retained until his death in 1862.
Wyse’s stay coincides with two embarrassing episodes in Anglo-Greeks relations, the Don Pacifìco
Affair and the Anglo-French occupation of Piraeus during the Crimean War. In 1857 he was
raised from the rank of Minister Plenipotentiary to that of Envoy Extraordinary, a post that gave
him the power to forward the plan of creation of a commission of the three Great Powers to
enquire into the financial resources of Greece when the latter failed to pay interests on the loan
that they had guaranteed in 1833.
43 Sir T. Wyse, Impressions of Greece (London, 1871), p. 42.
44 Ibid., p. 236.
45 Ibid., pp. 27-30.
46 Ibid., p. 125.

44
 identity), was travelling; -what pains to make a show to him of order and security!
Poor Lascarìdes was well punished for letting the secret out.’ 47

Note that Smith O’Brien was treated not as a representative of Irish nationalism,
so much as an ‘Anglos,’ a visitor from Britain. The Greek government’s feeling
that it was under ‘surveillance’ is very prominent in the narrative, as well as in the
punishment inflicted upon ‘poor Lascarìdes.’ Greek administrators understood
the British perception of ‘order’ as involving a superficial application of law and a
‘security performance.’
A very similar performance is traced in a rather more complicated episode
that followed the Dilessi Murders in 1870. The Dilessi or Marathon affair
involved the kidnapping and murder of three Englishmen of high rank and an
Italian aristocrat by the Arvanitákis brigand band in a location close to Athens.
Ransom negotiations which had failed, due to a lack of co-ordination in the
movements of the Greek government and the British Minister at Athens, Edward
Morris Erskine, 48 led to the tragic conclusion of the story. One of the missing
pieces of the puzzle was the identity of those who had encouraged the brigands to
insist upon their being granted an amnesty, an anti-constitutional action in
Greece. 49
Rumours had been circulated from the very beginning that ‘the capture was
part of a political movement for embarrassing and affecting a change in the
government.’ 50 That was reported by Thomas Cook, the founder of the famous
British tourist company, who had stayed in the same hotel as the victims. Over
the same days some Greek newspapers began an anti-government campaign,
because the Zaímis cabinet had delayed the convening of the National Assembly
for the election of a new government, which ‘could solve the vexed question of
brigandage.’ 51 It was very unfortunate that Zaímis himself had confided in
Erskine his suspicion that ‘leading members of the opposition’ were involved in
the kidnapping. The comment was passed on by the foreign secretary, Lord
Clarendon, in a memorandum of 16 April to Gladstone, the British Prime
Minister. The question was laid before the British Parliament on 28 April and
caused a ministerial crisis in Greece. 52 Zaímis had conspicuously failed to deny
that he had stated something, but he did not hesitate to change his statement: it was
not ‘leading members of the Opposition’ he had alluded to, but persons ‘acting
under the spirit of Opposition.’ Obviously Zaímis’ argument put the blame for
the murders on unspecified individuals, refusing in this way to present brigandage
as a permanent political malady.
The debate on Greek ‘political disorder’ was enriched by a couple of attempts
on the part of the Greek press to find an expiatory victim: first a certain
Thanòpoulos from the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and then Michael

47 Ibid., p.124.
48 Jenkins, Dilessi, pp. 47-48 and 61-64.
49 The brigands knew - from unknown sources – about the status of their captives. They were

encouraged by the same instigators to insist upon the question of amnesty. Unfortunately, the
amnesty could not be granted, because the constitution of 1864 allowed the granting of amnesty
only for political offences. For details see Stevens, Ransom and Murder, p. 4 and Kofos,
‘Retrenchment,’ p. 306. For the article on the constitution see The Government Gazette, 17
November 1864.
50 The Morning Post and The Times, 25 April 1870.
51 Palingenesía, 16 April 1870.
52 The Opposition invited Zaìmis to account on his statement twice. See Mellon, 28 April 1870.

45
Averof, an MP, appeared to be the ‘godfathers’ of the brigands. 53 Then Major
General Soùtzos, the Minister of War, was accused of having connections with
brigand bands and was asked to resign. 54 The truth was that in the 1850s Soùtzos
had indeed been a notorious godfather. 55 When his negligence in providing the
Muncaster party 56 with an escort was discussed abroad, he organised a counter-
attack in his report on the kidnapping. First of all he stated that it was the
Minister of Interior who did not inform him of Muncaster’s arrival; then he
reminded his audience that the widespread dispersal of the military forces during
the recent elections had given many brigands the chance to move around the
country. 57 None paid attention to Soùtzos’ excuses, and the dishonour was never
washed away. But it is worth noting the issue of The Times in which the War
Minister’s report was examined together with an article from the Greek
newspaper La Gréce. In this article ‘disorder’ was linked to ‘Greece’s unhappy
position before the civilised world’ when Zaímis failed to release the captives. 58
The ‘civilised world’ signified the British government; Greece signified ‘disorder’
and lack of civilisation. This is rather harsh, especially because it was composed
by a Greek journalist, but it emphasised the idea that a political assessment of
Greece and Britain should be subject to the same principles of security.
As we have seen, however, the linking of disorder with brigandage did not
begin with Dilessi. George Finlay, The Times correspondent in Greece and one of
the most caustic critics of the Greek political system, used the term ‘Greek
disorder’ extensively in his writings. In 1864, after the dethronement of King
Otho and his replacement by the Danish Prince George of Glücksburg (King
George I of the Hellenes) the Greeks drafted a new constitution, which was one
of the most liberal in Europe. 59 Finlay was rather sceptical about the actual
implementation of constitutional principles from the very beginning, but a couple
of incidents added fuel to the fire. In October 1864 there was an attempt at
murdering Koumoundoúros, at the time Minister of Interior. Although the
‘transaction’ almost ended with Koumoundoúros’s assassination of the would-be
assassin, Finlay could not stop thinking of the profundity of the incident. In his
article to The Times he commented:

The murderer, of course, pretends to be an injured man and a true patriot; but the
great national grievance which he felt himself called upon to avenge was that
Koumoundoúros, though he is virtually Prime Minister, has failed to give effect to
that great constitutional principle upheld by Balzac, which would give Greek

53 For the episodes see Méllon, 5 May 1870; Ethnicón Peúma, 16 June 1870; Aión, 7 May and 25 July
1870.
54 Aión, 6 May 1870.
55 Soùtzos had been Minister of War in 1854 during the revolt in Thessaly, one of the regions

under Ottoman rule that King Otho claimed for Greece when the Crimean war broke out. He was
notorious for having released some rebels imprisoned in Chalkis, who later joined other bands in
Thessaly to continue the ‘resistance’ against the Turks. For Soùtzos’ background there are some
information in Koliopoulos’s work (Brigands, pp. 83 and 255-256). For more information consult
Wyse’s diary (pp. 24-25).
56 Lord Muncaster was one of those Englishmen who were kidnapped by the Arvanitákis band of

Dilessi. Muncaster was the only male captive who was released in order to negotiate a ransom. I
use the term ‘Muncaster party’ here to refer to the group that was kidnapped in Oropós, including
the four murdered persons, Muncaster, a woman and child, who were also released later.
57 The Morning Post, 21 April 1870.
58 The Times, 20 May 1870.
59 Moschonas, ‘The Greek State,’ p. 222; Casson, Greece and Britain, pp. 106-107.

46
 liberty a real value by opening a bank account at the public treasury for every
Greek citizen… 60

Finlay closed his article with a paragraph on the inefficiency of the ‘disorganised’
troops who were sent across the country to eliminate brigandage. This is Finlay’s
article-writing formula: first general political comments, then analysis of
brigandage. This pattern also appeared in his article on the constitutional oath
King George was obliged to take in 1864. Finlay’s reflections were rather
negative: in Greece, he wrote, one could work as a ‘political arithmetician who
can calculate the duration of a constitution by knowing the name of the Prime
Minster and the amount of discord that exists in his cabinet.’

On hearing the King’s words it was impossible to shut out the melancholy
reflection that hitherto neither the rulers nor the people in Greece have shown
much respect of any of the five preceding Constitutions nor for any law but
martial law. The state of public credit and the prevalence of brigandage at this
moment afford decisive proofs that the faithful execution of the law has not yet
been attained. 61

For Finlay brigandage is the last link in a chain of ‘evils’: the political mentality of
the Greeks has to change. In most of his articles Finlay sees the political
developments in the Greek Kingdom through the prism of a constitutionalism
condemned to death. Ministerial crises 62 reinforce ‘disorder’ 63 in a country where
everybody violated the spirit and the letter of the constitution. The formula sheds
light on a double and often antithetical conception of disorder: on the one hand,
it is part of the administrative and political system of Greece, discrediting Greek
state authority and capability to sustain a civilised, orderly political and social
environment. 64 But at the same time, the state is the only legitimate power in
Greece, and needs ‘guidance’. The two antithetical analyses coincide and
complement each other when it comes to the harbouring of brigandage in
Greece. This type of crime makes Greece a ‘semi-Oriental’ country. The inability
of its administrators to follow the paradigm of England in the extirpation of
brigandage has allowed for the Kingdom to ‘fall behind Turkey, Egypt, Roumania
and Serbia in the career of material progress.’ 65
The debate linking constitution, brigandage and orderliness reached its climax
after the Dilessi Murders, when Clarendon, and Sir Roundell Palmer, later Earl
Selborne, attacked the Zaímis cabinet for its refusal to grant the anti-
constitutional amnesty to the Arvanitákis band. The order-disorder antithesis
returns in one of Clarendon’s characteristic explosions:

Don’t talk to us trash about your constitutional scruples, as though Greece were
a civilised nation ruled by law, and to be judged by the same canons as an orderly
and well-governed country. Talk about any difficulty in violating constitutional

60 The Times, 22 October 1864.

61 The Times, 10 December 1864.
62 The Times, 19 June 1866 and 11 January 1868.
63 The term appears frequently and is always connected with brigandage, politics and

constitutionalism. See for example The Times, of 19 February 1869 for Greek factionalism and of 3
January 1872 for the backwardness of agricultural areas that work as a manufacture of ‘well
seasoned brigands’.
64 The Times, 11 January 1868 and 15 May 1869.
65 The Times, 27 January 1872.

47
 rules! You have violated those rules every month of your life […] only get the
prisoners first back and then adopt any constitutional course you please. 66

The question aroused comments in the press, especially following the open
conflict between Gladstone and Palmer. 67 Readers’ letters and editorials in various
newspapers echoed Clarendon’s outburst and labelled Greece an
‘unconstitutional’ and anarchic country. 68 What is striking is the language
employed for the construction of arguments. The following example is
representative:

What would be the course adopted in England – where the law is clear, where
constitutional restraints are safely guarded, and where order is preserved not more by
army force than by the weight of opinion – affords no precedent for a country
where infractions of law are systematically winked at by those who are paid to
uphold it; where the “Constitution” is the sport of contending factions, being
strained or ignored as interest or passion may impel; and where social order is
neither upheld by the ruler’s sword nor cherished by the general sentiment […]
The Ministers of KING GEORGE, anxious for the good opinion of Europe, seemed
to have thought it derogatory to the dignity of a nation dominated by a
transcendental “idea” to negotiate with bandits on terms of equality. We assure
them that no sense of inequality in such a juxtaposition would have troubled most
Westerns. We have got so accustomed to identify Greek statesmanship with
buccaneering, and Hellenic finance with robbery. 69

This passage is dominated by the same rationale as the previous ones: in all of
them, we notice that Greece is restructured as the land of instability. ‘Disorder’ is
not just a concept, it is a process: political corruption leads to constant misuse or
violation of the constitutional principles and subsidises a form of organised crime
known as brigandage. In counterposition to Greek ‘disorder,’ England presents
the virtues of a stable country, which are exactly the opposite of those mentioned
above. Evidently, we are dealing here with a game of classification, forced by a
powerful country upon a weak one. Interestingly, The Scotsman, an influential
Scottish newspaper, avoided this extreme thesis, and defended the Greek
government’s refusal to grant the amnesty. 70 This is not to say that Scottish
opinion was intrinsically and generally different; but one of its opinion-makers
was against the attitude adopted by the Palmerstonian survivors in the
government and the Foreign Office.
Analysing this phenomenon in Foucaultian terms, we obtain some insights
into the British way of thinking. Michael Foucault’s main argument, that power
and knowledge are interdependent, is constructed around the idea that the

66The Daily Telegraph (27 April 1870) published this telegram of Clarendon to Erskine from the

corpus of the Correspondence Respecting the Capture and Murder of British and Italian Subjects by Brigands in
Greece. The Scotsman was against the granting of amnesty.
67 Cabinet Papers, 7 and 14 May 1870, in H. C. G. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. VII

(January 1869 - June 1871) (Oxford, 1982), pp. 286, 290; Palmer's speech in The Morning Post, 21
May 1870. See also The Times, 21 May 1870. Gladstone was against the Palmerstonian guideline of
Clarendon and the passionate anti-Greek speeches of Palmer. Although he defended Greece (for
his speech see Aión, 22 May 1870), the British press supported Clarendon’s foreign policy (see for
example the article in The Times, 3 May 1870 and The Daily News, 27 April 1870).
68 For reader’s letters and comments on the constitution consult the issues of The Morning Post, 2

May and 28 April 1870; The Times, 2 April and 13 May 1870 and The Daily News, 18 May 1870.
69 The Daily Telegraph, 26 April 1870.
70 The Scotsman, 8 May 1870.

48
physical, social and intellectual world cannot be deciphered and dominated
without a symbolic from of violence. Discourse is a violence we do to things in
order to make them make sense for us and to legitimise a practice that we impose
on the world. Every discourse orders itself externally and internally: it marks off
itself against the kinds of language it excludes, while it builds up a whole inner
system of classification and arrangement. Thus, classification carries out a policing
function within the realm of discourse by assigning positions and enforcing
boundaries.
Behind the passages analysed above can be discerned the well-known Western
European binarism, a set of polarities that together acquire the value of a system
of ethics: modern versus primitive, savagery versus civilisation, order versus
disorder. Such binary divisions are often used by those who generate and sustain
the discourse, as clothes in which they disguise themselves and their cultural
‘rivals’ or others. Thus England is dressed up as civilisation, Greece as savagery.
Unfortunately, these clothes are only part of a ritual which starts as a cloakroom-
game and ends up as a theatre in which everybody has a role: England becomes
the master, Greece the ‘apprentice’ that has to be chastised for her disobedience.

49
 iii. Brigands, nationalists and colonial discourse:
some notes on the British classification of
violence
Greece and Ireland
It is worth analysing the rationale of British discourse – that is, the ideas that the
British mobilised to legitimise their attitude and their interference in Greek affairs.
The analysis will begin with a pamphlet, Notes on Turkey, written by an anonymous
Englishman and published in 1867. The theme of this pamphlet is the political
complications introduced by the Cretan insurrection in the East. The Cretan
struggle of 1866-1869 became a central issue in Greece, because Crete was one of
the islands the Kingdom wanted to annex from the Ottoman Empire. The
governments of Greece repeatedly sent financial and military aid to the rebels, an
attitude that provoked anger in both Britain and France, because it was contrary
to the spirit of the treaties signed to confirm Greek independence. 71 The attitude
of the Koumoundoúros government of 1867 further worsened Greece’s
relationship with her protectors. It was not only that Koumoundoúros negotiated
with brigands in order to send them as irregular forces to assist the Cretans, 72 but
also that he made sure that the Cretan Question would be examined as part of the
so-called Eastern Question, thus entangling the cause in wider European
decision-making processes. 73
The anonymous author of Some Notes makes some extremely provocative
comments regarding the attitude of the Greek State towards Crete. First of all he
notes that Greece belongs to the category of trouble-making countries, which
cannot have a regular army and which support their so-called national interests
with ‘robbers who plunder mercilessly’ 74 in the same way that the Turks do. Here,
it is clear that the Turkish ‘robber’ is placed very low on the scale of outlaws. But
soon one acknowledges a shift in terms of focus, as the author stops discussing
Crete and moves on to British politics:

Whatever may have been the real hold which the insurrection had upon the people,
the proof of Turkish misgovernment which is drawn from it, is subject to this
observation – if the American government, instead of acting as becomes the head
of a nation which is alive to its international duties, had given free reign to every
Irish revolutionary project which could be organised in America, and had
encouraged it in order to carry favour with the people; and further, if, for other
reasons, it had been impossible for England to resent such conduct, or even to
threaten the alternative of an observance of the law of nations or of war – under
such circumstances few persons will believe that Ireland would be at peace; and
yet the Fenian disturbances so caused would neither prove that Ireland is
misgoverned, nor that the Fenians represent the real opinions of the intelligent

71 G. Daphnis, ‘The Greek State’s Attitude to the Cretan Insurrection,’ in History of the Greek

Nation,
vol. XIII (Athens, 1980), p. 287.
72 Koumoundoúros’s attitude was very much criticised by the Greeks as well. See Aión, 9 April

1870 and Cornhill Magazine no. 126, June 1870, p. 702.

73 I. Diamandourou, ‘The Cretan Insurrection,’ in History of the Greek Nation, vol. XIII (Athens,

1980), p. 266.
74 Anonymous, Some Notes on Turkey (London, 1867), pp. 29-30.

50
 Irish people. This was the position of affairs in which the Cretan Insurrection was
maintained. No one who knows the facts would for an instant compare the Turkish
government of Crete with the government of Ireland; but, in the peculiar
circumstances of the case, the continuance of disturbances is no more a proof of
misgovernment in one case than in the other. 75

Fenianism, an Irish secret brotherhood with branches in the other side of the
Atlantic, was a seriously disruptive force for Britain and the United States in the
1850s and the 1860s. Organized for the purpose of winning Ireland's
independence by force, the Fenians revealed Irish-American nationalism in its
finest flowering and full ambiguity. Fenianism was rooted more in the hard life of
the Irish immigrants than in Irish Catholicism in Britain, which unambiguously
became a form of Irish self-definition against the English oppressor. Eventually
the Fenians became the only organization in US history that attracted so much
public attention. The Fenians invaded Canada in the 1860s for the purpose of
using seized land as a stepping-stone for the invasion and liberation of Ireland. In
1868 Gladstone admitted privately that the existence of this secret ‘society’ had
grave importance in questions of policy-making for Ireland. 76 For some
researchers, the Fenian organisation emerges ‘not as a manifestation of
indefeasible nationality, but rather as the product of a range of political, social,
economic and intellectual-sentimental factors, and of assorted contingencies of
personality, time, place and interest.’ 77 Richard Comerford attributes the
emergence of Fenianism to the rapid changes in the economic life of Britain in
the mid-Victorian era, which made a deep impact on Ireland. The new railway
networks, the rapid industrialisation, the subsequent rise of urban populations
and the massive emigration of the Irish to England and North America
transformed the social and cultural structures of the country. For Comerford the
Fenian movement can legitimately be seen as a reaction against these changes and
as a movement that would find for the rebels a place in the new dispensation.
The harbouring of the Fenian brotherhood in Canada during a period of high
tensions in British-American relations, 78 explains why the ‘Anonymous’ inserted
such comments in his pamphlet. Nevertheless, the equation of Greek brigandage
with Irish Fenianism shows that in our case the nationalist legend, which has
strongly suggested that Fenianism was only another manifestation of the ‘phoenix
flame’ 79 matters more than any accurate historical analysis and interpretation of
this Irish movement of protest. Such romantic assumptions of innate Irish
national consciousness 80 existed in Greece over the same period – and,
moreover, were propagated abroad. It was not only that the Greek nation was
seen as a resurrected entity from the flames of the War of Independence, but also
that the brigands-listés had been irreparably identified with Greek expansionism.
On the other hand, however, Greek brigandage was never an international
organisation; indeed, it was not an organisation at all. But the fact that the British
observer saw in it an institution that disturbed ‘Europe’s peace’ 81 provided the

75 Ibid., pp. 44-45.

76 D.G. Boyce, The Irish Question and British Politics 1868-1986 (London, 1988), pp. 19-20.
77 R.V. Comerford, The Fenians in Context. Irish Politics and Society 1848-82 (Dublin, 1998).
78 The involvement of British agents in the American civil war and their activities in Canada were

unwelcome and caused a crisis in British-American relations in the beginning of the 1860s.
79 F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland since the Famine (London, 1971), pp. 20-21.
80 C. Townshend, Political Violence in Ireland. Government and Resistance since 1848 (Oxford, 1984), pp.

26-28.
81 The Times, 8 February 1868.

51
essential starting-point for comparisons. Finally, one must not forget that the
Fenians organised an insurrection in 1867 82 , which helped the British observer to
maintain analogies with the ‘nationalist’ Greek brigands.
If we now return to the passage from ‘Anonymous,’ a number of points can
be highlighted: ‘Order’ ceases to be a domestic Greek problem; although the
pamphlet is concerned with a conjuncture of the Eastern Question, ‘order’ in the
passage is examined as a British imperial problem. England appears as the
guardian angel of ‘order’ with the force of arms and the Fenians are the threat.
The Fenians and the Greek agitators are placed in the same system of
nomenclature. Evidently, while the regulatory function of classification is the
same as the one examined in the previous chapter, the nature of classification is
more complex. Nevertheless, it is not clear if this analogy has as an end the
analysis of Greek irredentism and the politics of brigandage as a form of national
resistance. It could be that the ultimate aim is the examination of Fenianism as a
form of nationalism.
The use of the term banditti during this period also enhanced comparisons
between Greek brigandage and Irish nationalism. The British travellers of the
1860s and 1870s used the word to describe Greek brigands. The term was used
several times after the Dilessi Murders both in the House of Commons 83 and in
the English press. 84 Although its root is the Italian verb bandire, meaning to exile
or banish, 85 its English connotation was usually much more specific. ‘Banditti’
was the exotic label attached to Ribbonmen, the early nineteenth-century secret
societies which operated within the Irish rural context. These societies were
proscribed mainly because they resisted the government’s law, although their
members were not true rebels since they probably had no conception of
overthrowing the state. Their protest for land redistribution in Ireland, their
hatred towards the British government, their interest in the national cause were
rather ill-defined; Ribbonism or Whiteboyism, just like Fenianism had an ambiguous
political and national programme. They were spasmodic rural movements more
than purely nationalist organisations. 86
Associations of Fenianism and Greek disorder/brigandage should be seen as
part of a narrative on Greek and Irish national politics. The British commentators
on Dilessi had a fascination with the supposed similarities and differences
between the Irish and the Greeks. When Greek governmental actors began, in the
country’s press, to direct accusations against the opposition in the Kingdom, and
vice versa, The Pall Mall Gazette observed:

The late Daniel O’Connell maintained that whenever an Irishman had to be

roasted there was always another hand ready to turn the spit. We are far from
complaining that the analogous state of things should exist in Greece, as the
information elicited by these differences can only tend to complete the picture,
which the Greeks are unconsciously drawing of themselves. The more we know
about them, the better our chance of successfully dealing with a state of things,
which is a standing disgrace to Europe. 87

82 In 5 March 1867 there was an unsuccessful Fenian rising in Kerry, Dublin, Cork, Limerick,
Tipperary and Clare, which was regarded as the beginning of an Irish struggle for independence.
See R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600-1972 (London, 1988), pp. 390-395 and the previous page.
83 The Times, 21 May 1870.
84 The Times, 29 April 1870.The Daily News, 16 May 1870; The Daily Telegraph, 4 June 1870.
85 Gallant, ‘Brigandage, Piracy, Capitalism’, p. 26.
86 Townshend, Government and Resistance, pp. 14-16; Foster, Ireland, pp. 292-294.
87 The Pall Mall Gazette, 6 July 1870.

52
If we bear in mind that O’Connell was a leader of emancipation in Ireland and
that he was linked by his contemporaries to the foundation of the revolutionary
organisation of Young Ireland, then the journalist’s acid comments imply a
preoccupation with imperial problems and a profound subordination of the
Anglo-Greek relationship to them. Unfortunately, when the British were
engineering these arguments, they did not anticipate the development of a
counter-discourse from the Greek side. Immediately after the Dilessi Murders,
the journalist Jean Lemoinne published a pro-Greek article in the French
newspaper Journal des Débats, in which he attacked the more bellicose members of
the Gladstone government, who wanted to restore British honour after Dilessi
with an occupation of Greece. But his comments on Britain’s inability to suppress
Fenianism helped the Greeks to organise their counterblast. The journalists of
Aión, a Greek pro-government newspaper, wrote the very same day Lemoinne
published his article:

Is the Greek government the first one that cannot eliminate internal evils? Can
the situation in Ireland convince somebody that governments are powerful and
that they are in a position to solve domestic irregularities as they wish? It is true
that there is no rural crime close to London; but if the Fenians want, they can
commit massacres even there. Tallaghill is not that far from Dublin, it is very
likely that the gangs of Fenians are lurking somewhere in the suburbs of the big
cities. 88

Aión continued this organised attack in its issue of 30 April, in which it

reproduced a report from an Italian newspaper that the London offices of The
Times and of other newspapers, had to be guarded by police because the editors
received threatening letters from the Fenian brotherhood. In addition, eight Irish
counties had to be declared in a state of siege after a series of murders. 89 When in
May 1870 Woolwich dockyard also had to be placed under guard, from fear of
new Fenian attempts to blow up the nearby powder magazines, the tone of the
Greek commentators hardened: 90 ‘There are, in the bosom of the most moral, the
most civilised and the well-organised societies, social plagues, forming the
accumulated heritage of history that social sciences cannot heal.’ 91 If England
could not cope with such ‘plagues’, then how could she condemn newly born
Greece for a similar failure?
The argument aims at the heart of British discourse and destroys the
equilibrium between England-order and Greece-disorder, because it alters the
conceptual categories. The Greeks present the British Empire as a disorderly
place, and expose England’s inability to cope with crime. ‘England’ is still
signifying civilisation, but not order. For the same underlying reasons the Greeks
reported in May 1870 the abduction of ‘four English citizens’ 92 in Gibraltar by
Spanish brigands. How was it possible for the British to let such an atrocity take
place ‘so close to a fortress guarded by powerful English army forces?’ 93 In fact,

88 Aión, 27 April 1870.

89 Aión, 30 April 1870.
90 Reported by The Levant Herald of 22 May and recorded by Aión, 25 May 1870.
91 Aión, 7 May 1870.
92 Aión, 18 May 1870.
93 Aión, 18 and 28 May, 2 June 1870. See however Finlay’s article in The Times of 2 March 1871, in

which he uses Greek arguments to prove that statistically there is more crime in Greece than in
Ireland.

53
the captives turned out number only two, but numbers mattered little and the
Greek readership was convinced by the argument. Strangely enough, the Greek
argument implied that ‘Britain’ ought to use physical force against Spain to secure
order. The use of force was permissible if it was directed against the sovereignty
of other countries, but unacceptable in the case of the Greek Kingdom.
It is the game of ‘counter-hegemonic thought’ 94 that the Greeks try to play
here, and they play it very well. Even before Dilessi, Greeks often used their
knowledge of British imperial problems, and especially Fenianism, to attack British
argumentation. But interestingly, their sympathy for Ireland was based on that
selfsame principle of affinity between their nationalist projects that the British,
over the same period, also identified. Fenianism was used as a metonym for
brigandage, and the British government’s harsh attitude towards the Irish struggle
for independence as a ‘brutal violation’ of Habeas Corpus, ‘the symbol of English
tolerance and forbearance.’ These were the words of a journalist of Palingenesía in
1866, when the British government had to take emergency measures against
Fenianism, and the following is his epilogue:

But should we, on the other hand, always have to have revolutions, and should we
always have to see them being suppressed? Should we always bear witness to
injustice and to natural satisfaction of the maltreated? Is that what the Holy Bible
that the English rulers have in their hands all the time dictates? Is this the way the
politics of the most important European country perceives as “common good”?
Is that what the conscience of honest people dictates? Should they not give to the
Irish all the rights and privileges the English and the Caledonians themselves
enjoy for centuries now? […] If parental love unequally given to the children
gives birth to jealousy and strife, imagine what happens in case of the ruler’s
maltreatment of the ruled! 95

The trope of parental love and paternalism is suggestive. It shows how the
Greeks conceptualise Anglo-Irish relations, and subsequently their own
relationship with the British government. But Greek feelings of solidarity were
used for the promotion of Greek nationalism in other ways too. In 1868, when
the anonymous Greek author of the East and West (1866), an influential work on
the Eastern Question and the role of Greek nationalism, published his second
pamphlet, the argument he presented was very different. The ‘Oriental and
Former Rayah,’ who was a defender of the creation of a Greater Greece, argued
that England should not oppose Greek plans in Crete or elsewhere, for the simple
reason that a Greek empire could become a recipient of all the Irish rebels who
were constantly causing trouble in the British empire. 96
From the dates of the historical sources that were used in the analysis thus far,
it becomes evident that the debate upon Irish and Greek politics was the product
of the difficult decade of the 1860s. The Dilessi conjuncture however made
Ireland and English rule referential loci for British and Greek politicians. 97 Even
long after the Dilessi turmoil, the Greeks would continue to allude to this
question of disorder and English cruelties in Ireland, and to identify Greece with
Ireland. 98 It is easy to recognise that despite the vibrancy of their argumentation,

94 J. Mackenzie, Orientalism (Manchester, 1995), p. 12.

95 Palingenesía, 26 February 1866.
96 An Oriental and Former Rayah, The East and the West (Athens, 1868), p. 55.
97 See for example the speeches of Milísis, MP for Hermionís (Two Speeches, pp. 29 and 16).
98 O. Iálemos, Rights and Duties of the Greeks (Athens, 1877), pp. 125 and 129.

54
the Greeks initially remained trapped in the web of a typical Western European
discourse, whose primary binarism is constructed and construed on the basis of
progress. But, nevertheless, the British had provided the Greeks with raw material
that they could transform into a language of resistance. A good example (which
reminds us of the previous quote) is a pamphlet written by Colonel Pános
Koronéos 99 during the Dilessi crisis. Koronéos’s disquieting argument was
constructed on the idea that British interference was actually responsible for
internal Greek disorder, because it held back the political regeneration of the
Greek Kingdom. England had as much right to deprive Greece of her freedom as
France and Russia had to interfere in the ‘civil conflict between England and
Ireland’.

Because even [in Ireland] violence is exercised under the power of a minority
[England] of the same ‘family,’ while we admit our fault and we want to make
up for it. And we will, there is no doubt, before England manages to diminish the
existing malfunctions in her very heart. 100

This is a rather bold argument because it presents England and Ireland as ‘family
members’ and their rupture as civil conflict. Even bolder were the words of John
Gennadios, a young Greek clerk in London, whose treatise Notes on the Recent
Murders by Brigands in Greece became the apologia of the Greek nation. Stressing
that Britain has different moral laws for the strong, like herself, and the weak, like
Greece, he proceeded to say:

And what need we say of Ireland? Will England with that appalling spectacle
before her [i.e. Fenianism] taunt poor Greece? England, who with her enormous
power, her centuries of political life and experience, and in the midst of her
immense prosperity, has failed ignominiously, not only in making life secure, but
even in governing that unhappy country in a decent way. The assassinations
committed there were once upon a time considered “agrarian outrages”. But
101
now men are “tumbled” even for the dismissal of a servant.

The way in which Gennadios associated the Dilessi episode with contemporary
English anxieties was beautifully illustrated in his attempt to transform British
arguments into a boomerang. Gennadios positioned himself in the debate upon
Greek constitutionalism but took another line of argument. In his argument he
likened the problems Fenianism introduced in Anglo-American relations to the
British unconstitutional demands in the Dilessi affair.

An analogous case would have been, if a body of Fenians had carried off to the
mountains of Kerry a couple of Americans, and, as the conditions of their release,
demanded an amnesty in favour of themselves, and other Fenians in prison – say,
Rossa – both for past crimes and for that offence. Would Englishmen grant it,

99 Pános Koronéos was appointed in 1869 to extirpate brigandage in Acarnania. The report he
produced on the results of his venture was published the same year under the title Reflections on the
Establishment of Order (Sképsis peri tis Empedóseos tis Tákseos) It was a very perceptive work, in which
one can detect allusions to the political extensions of brigandage, John Koliopoulos (Brigands, pp.
176-177) provides more information about Koronéos in his work.
100 Koronéos’s article was translated from French into Greek and published in the form of a

pamphlet. The quoted passage is from his pamphlet Addressed to the English State (Athens, 1870), p.
29.
101 J. Gennadios, Notes on the Recent Murders by Brigands in Greece (London, 1870), p. 135.

55
 and how would they answer any remonstrances of the American government,
urging such a course? But we forget the bitter truth and there is one law for the
strong and another for the weak! 102

It might have been unfair to associate the British press in general with violent
counterattacks: The Scotsman, for example, did not hesitate to defend an argument
similar to that of Gennadios. The Scotsman explained that an analogous episode in
Britain and a demand by another couther country upon her to take
unconstitutional action would have presented the British government with a
dilemma. 103 But some newspapers in London chose to react to Lemoinne’s
comments who had introduced the subject of Irish disorder in the Dilessi debate.
The Daily News, the pro-Gladstone newspaper with a moderate policy, translated
his article and silently accepted Lemmoine’s reflections. 104 The Morning Post and
The Daily Telegraph adopted a more polemical style. The Morning Post expressed its
disapproval of the French journalist and refused to discuss ‘so ridiculous a thesis.’
105
The Daily Telegraph, on the other hand, found it necessary to engage seriously
with the question. In an article on 4 June, Greek brigands were named ‘Fenians
after the continental fashion’ and false patriots.

A man can be a rebel without being a brigand […] Spasmodic and nomadic
patriotism has this in common with brigandage - that its beginning is lawless and
its end is the subversion of the law […]
The makers of little rebellions […] would do well to take this lesson to heart; and
we can only hope that, even as war steamers have proved adequate to extirpate
piracy, and railway locomotives have scattered brigands wherever they have come
across them, as the opening-up and development of the moral high roads of
civilisation of education of progress, of constitutional government, of a freer press,
and of justice, may ere long teach ‘student cliques’ and patriotic associations
‘limited’, that about the very worst way of helping their country is to break its
laws and disturb it [sic] peaceable inhabitants. 106

The account of the virtues of Western civilisation (education, progress,

constitution) presented in this passage reminds the British reader of his privileged
place in the scale of civilisation and offers him reassurance through the cherished
division of ‘we’ versus the ‘others’. At the same time one observes The Daily
Telegraph journalist’s fear that Greek brigandage is presented as a ‘nationalist
movement.’ The journalist’s refusal to continue this game of identification leads
him to draw distinctions between patriotism and outlawry. We should not forget,
however, that he is writing after the committing of a crime in Greece with serious
political repercussions. The more brigandage appears as a stigma on ‘civilisation’,
as primitive ‘lawlessness’, the more it is disconnected from serious national
aspirations and the better the British government’s decision on the fate of Greece
is legitimised. The chain effect works perfectly; for, if Greek brigands are rogues
and not patriots, so too are the Fenians.
Affinities between Ireland and Greece were a favourite subject of those
Irishmen who participated in the British discourse. John Pentland Mahaffy, the

102 Gennadios, Notes, p. 30.

103 The Scotsman, 24 May 1870.
104 The Daily News, 28 April 1870.
105 The Morning Post, 29 April 1870.
106The Daily Telegraph, 4 June 1870.

56
famous classicist at Trinity College, Dublin, and an expert on ancient Greece,
claimed in his writings that there were many similarities between Greek and Irish
political life. The anarchy that prevailed in the two countries would never be
‘cured’ unless both were placed under the vigilance of a dictator chosen by
themselves. 107 Mahaffy criticised the excessive ‘European fondness’ for
constitutionalism, which was connected with the usual question of ‘disorder.’
There was something interesting in Mahaffy’s reflections. Notwithstanding his
rejection of English ‘hegemony’ in Ireland, he nevertheless concluded that both
Greece and Ireland were uncivilised compared with England and Scotland. 108 Like
Wyse, Mahaffy, thanks to his Protestantism and his professional position,
belonged to the section of Irish society that was marginalized, if not indeed
alienated, and his ideas said more about the imperial cast of mind than about the
average Irishman’s opinion.
The question, which is still pending, is if the ideas Mahaffy and some of
his contemporaries supported were time-resistant and/or influential. It is very
difficult to speculate on that, but some traces are left in an influential academic
publication much latter. The 1933 edition of The Oxford English Dictionary states
that associations of Ireland, Greece and disorder first appeared in British sources
at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The ‘unruly districts’ of Ireland are
termed ‘Grecian’ in a source that dates back to 1823. According to The Standard of
3 September 1872 we are informed that the term ‘Greek’ was ‘colonial slang for
the Irish.’ 109 What the Greeks and the British commentators had in mind when
they engaged in this dialogue on disorder is more obvious now. The former could
see in the Irish cause something of their nationalist cause. The auxiliary role
brigandage and Fenianism and the obtrusive role England played in this cause
were incontestable. For the British on the other hand, Greece deserved to be
treated as a colony. Greek brigandage and political disorder were read against the
role the ‘unruly’ Irish played in the British empire: that of an internalised
‘other’, 110 so essential for British imperial self-definition. Evidently, for both sides
the ‘dialogue’ ended up by being mere self-reflection – and a very dangerous one,
as I will proceed to explain.

Beyond the Pale of ‘Europe’

Ireland was not the only colonised country which some British used in their
reflections on Greek ‘disorder.’ Other, not always British, colonies also found a
place in it. The ‘Anonymous’ of Some Notes may once again serve as a starting
point. For ‘Anonymous’ the Cretan brigand rebels were never representatives of a
general discontent against Turkish rule but were rather its creators and
perpetrators. This inspires reflection on an episode of British imperial history,
which has nothing to do with the Cretan Insurrection and its brigand nationalists.

Without roads it was difficult to bring [the Cretan brigands] under subjection as it
was difficult to reduce the 700 New Zealanders, who made head for years against
a force of several thousand British troops. 111

107 J.P. Mahaffy, Rambles and Studies in Greece (London, 1876), x-xii.
108 Ibid., xii-xiv.
109 The Oxford English Dictionary, vol. IV (Oxford, 1933), p. 395.
110 Mackenzie, Orientalism, p. 12.
111 Anonymous, Notes, p. 44.

57
New Zealand had been a British colony since the signing of the treaty of Waitangi
in 1840. The misinterpretation of the wording of the treaty by both sides,
however, led to conflict between the British rulers and the Maoris, who were not
disposed to submit to British rule. The anonymous author of the Notes refers to
the bloody New Zealand Wars that erupted in the 1840s and continued down
through the 1860s. James Belich has shown that the British experience of initial
defeat in New Zealand was so shocking that it led to fabrication of evidence and
to the generation of a British historical mythology on the New Zealand Wars.
One of the most common explanations of British defeat involved attributing it to
the Maoris’ ‘natural advantages,’ such as their guerrilla tactics and the
inaccessibility of the country. 112 The British, who always equated racial superiority
with military superiority, ignored or suppressed records on the military skills of
the Maoris, who based their attacks on their own, centuries-long, tradition of
warfare. 113 British defeat had to be written out of history, because it damaged the
British colonial prestige. What we see in the passage from the Notes is the
invention of history of the New Zealand Wars. It is easier for ‘Anonymous’ to
attribute the victories of the Maoris and the Cretans to natural difficulties, than to
acknowledge their military skills. But beyond that, the absence of technology in
Crete and in New Zealand (roads) represents both the Maoris and the Cretans as
the binary mate of civilisation: savagery.
Such comments touched the British on the raw because they stood as a
reminder that civilisation could fail to assert its superiority towards what was
named ‘uncivilised’. Another article will serve to explicate the point further. When
the fate of the Cretan Insurrection was decided by the Great Powers, the Greek
volunteers and the Cretan rebels, after some resistance, had to capitulate. The
Morning Post journalists found the end of the Insurrection instructive for the Turks
and the rebels, but also for themselves.

The results of three operations, so satisfactory to the Porte, are instructive and
significant in the extreme. They prove once more, if proof were required, that in
war scientific skill is vastly more reliable than haphazard and dash. They confirm,
if confirmation were necessary, the wisdom of the strategy employed in Abyssinia.
They suggest ideas for the subjection of the Maoris in New Zealand. And they
will, it is to be hoped, help to convince the SULTAN and his advisers that in every
department of life and government the forms and usages of high civilisation are
the most economical and effective. 114

The Abyssinian expedition, which is analysed below, was not the most
economical enterprise and it had no positive outcome for the British, except for
moral satisfaction. The ‘savage’ Maoris of New Zealand were more skilful
warriors than the journalist suggests here. In this passage, the writer represses the
shameful aspects of British encounters with non-European peoples. What
remains unsaid is that highly organised forms of governing and technologies of
power that defined nineteenth-century British civilisation could be defeated by
those who lived in non-European environments.
The deeper the historical eye penetrates discourse, the more one becomes
convinced that nomenclature was for British commentators a prerequisite for the

112 J. Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (Auckland, 1986),
pp. 315-316.
113 Ibid., pp. 322-323.
114 The Morning Post, 5 January 1869.

58
implementation of theory 115 on the observed and classified subject: Greece. In
British colonial discourse ‘imperial theory’ involved a call for the restoration of a
lost order on subordinate – or, potentially subordinate - peoples, even at
gunpoint. Napier’s expedition to Abyssinia in 1868, the episode The Morning Post
alluded to, provided a potential example of British occupation of Greece after the
Dilessi episode. The decision in 1864 of King Theodore, an ex-brigand who had
named himself King of the Abyssinians, to detain the representatives of the
British government among others in Magdala as hostages, an eccentric reaction to
a misunderstanding, was seen by Britain as a serious offence, a disgrace that had
to be avenged. 116 The Liberals tried to avoid a conflict, but British public opinion
eventually forced the Conservatives, later in office, to organise an expedition for
the restoration of British honour. The episode was subsequently used many times
in reflections on Greek disorder. One of the things the British wanted to assert in
Anglo-Greek relations was their imperial identity and their power to command
their symbolic and territorial universe.
Following the Dilessi Murders, the Greek brigands and their relationship with
the Greek state were frequently likened to King Theodore’s regime in
Abyssinia. 117 The impression that the Greek state was the product and the
perpetrator of anarchy was prominent in British Dilessi journalistic discourse. The
Abyssinian expedition was deemed to be a good way for the British government
to ‘put the record straight’. Again, the implicit suggestion was that Greece was not
to be regarded as a European, civilised, state. As I stated above, British journalists
had previously speculated on the nature of the Cretan Insurrection as a
disorganised rebellion, which could be easily suppressed. In 1868 a certain Charles
Wells wrote a long analysis on the Cretan Insurrection which was published in
The Times. In it there was again a suggestive comparison between Irish and Greek
anarchy, which inspired the frequent Times writer ‘Omicron’ 118 to produce his
own analysis, in which he labelled the 14 Cretan generals and leaders of the
Insurrection ‘savage brigands’. The Greek journalists of Clió were furious with
this comment, declaring

The Cretan Generals might have not studied in the great military schools of
Europe; they might not be rich […] or have the genius of Sir Robert Napier […]
who conquered Magdala without losing a soldier’ they said. ‘But they are
fighting without soldiers, and still beat the Turks […] which is worrying, because
it exposes the state of paralysis in Turkey!!! 119

The Clió journalist acknowledged British organisation and skills, but he regarded
Greek patriotism superior. One should not, nevertheless, miss the fact that he
drew on the principles of the British discourse on civilisation to defend his
country.
The discourse is capable of even further ramification. Another country that
attracted much attention in this respect was Mexico: a relatively new nation,
which had undergone a Revolution (1810-1821) for the overthrowing of Spanish

115 P. Barker, Michel Foucault An Introduction (Edinburgh, 1998), pp. 10-12.

116 The episode is described in A. Moorehead, The Blue Nile (London, 1970).
117 The Times, 26 April 1870. Similarly, the Daily Telegraph (27 April 1870) recalled the Don Pacífico

affair (1850) as a model of occupation.

118 ‘Omicron’ was a reader of The Times who considered himself an expert in Greek affairs. He sent

letters to the newspaper during the Dilessi crisis as well. There were rumours that he was a British
politician, and some identified him with Sir George Campbell.
119 Clió, 20 September 1870.

59
rule and a devastating war in principle related to the constitution of 1857, but in
practice to the change of power balance and the emergence of new socio-political
forces within the racially, culturally and linguistically fragmented country.
Independence brought only a succession of pronunciamientos or attempted coups
d’état on the part of factions eager to acquire power. Pillage, highway robbery,
brigand raids in towns and cities became a mode of expected and accepted
behaviour. 120 The immediate Mexican experience reminded the British of the
Greek War of Independence, the subsequent constitutional changes and the
political instability of the Greek Kingdom. These superficial similarities generated
the preconditions for British reflection.
At the beginning of the Cretan Revolution George Finlay saw in Greek plans
for expansion the possibility that a version of the Mexican anarchy might appear
in the East. For Finlay Mexico and Greece never possessed the ‘inherent strength
to deliver themselves from such evils’ as ‘disorder.’ 121 The Daily Telegraph also
argued, following the Dilessi Murders, that both Greece and Mexico were
afflicted by ‘chronic brigandage’. The Mexican War of Independence destroyed
the Spanish road-system, which the journalist called ‘the remedy for organised
robbery’, and left the country in a state of disintegration. 122 The comment became
suggestive when it was linked to Sir Edward Watkins’s 123 proposal for the
construction of a railway and road system in Greece 124 – a plan that was
immediately put into practice by the Head for Public Works Department,
Emmanuél Manitákis. 125 These comments contain one of the rhetorical features
characterising Western political analysis: a patronising tone and incessant
preaching to the ‘uncivilised’ as to how they should govern themselves, 126
according to a single standard of economic and political organisation to which
every nation and country should aspire. 127
Indian experience was also included in the taxonomic device. British
commentators on Dilessi reflected on the most heart-rending memories from the
days of the Indian Mutiny: the Cawnpore and Delhi massacres of English
populations by the Indian rebels. 128 The Greek brigands deserved the same
treatment as Nana Sahib and Tantia Trophee (Tope), the leaders of the Indian
Revolution, exclaimed The Daily News. 129 The Greeks deserved a Viceroy, just like

120 F. Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution: Mexico After 1910 (New York and London, 1966), pp. 61-
63, 74-83.
121 The Times, 20 October 1866.
122 The Daily Telegraph, 5 June 1870. Similar comments were made in The Pall Mall Gazette of 16

May 1870.
123 Sir Edward Watkins (1819-1901) was a visionary entrepreneur who dreamt of establishing a

great rail network linking his own Great Central Railway to Europe via a Channel Tunnel
terminating at Marylebone Station. The project did not eventually work.
124 Watkins contributed financially to the construction of the first rail line in Greece in 1869. He

sent his report to The Times; Aión translated and published it in 14 May 1870.
125 Aión published his report (18 May 1870).
126 D. Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial

Administration (Durham and London, 1993), p. 62.

127 Less relevant to the specific episode, but significant in terms of British government attitudes

toward Greece, is the article published three years later in The Levant Herald of Constantinople (22
March 1873). In this article the same language is employed on the state of Greece and her
technological progress.
128 The Times, 26 April 1870. For an account of massacres see C. Ball, The History of Indian Mutiny

(New Delhi, 1981), pp. 68-104, 302-390.

129 The Daily News, 4 June 1870. T. Hoppen, Mid-Victorian Generation 1846-1886 (Oxford 1998), p.

190.

60
India, 130 because it was evident that King George could not ‘tame’ them,
according to The Times editor. One must not miss the point here: the Delhi and
Cawnpore incidents, during which many British were slaughtered by Indians,
were regarded by the natives as part of the Indian resistance to the foreign,
British, oppressor. Palmerston had managed to present in 1857 Indian ‘disorder’
as a ‘national crisis’ to be treated in the light of the ‘patriotic duty’, and the British
army’s success in suppressing it as Britain’s retrieval of ‘honour.’ 131 It is obvious
that British commentators on Dilessi restructured Greek brigandage as a form of
national resistance and proposed a solution to the problem in Greece analogous
to that in India: restoration of order by colonisation. The suggestion had not
come from the headquarters of British colonial administration, the Colonial
Office (a mid-nineteenth century offshoot of the War Office) but from the
Foreign Office, immediately after the murders. And yet, the discourse that
suggested that Greek and Indian affairs should be examined in the same way
occupied space in the writings of colonial administrators, such as Sir George
Campbell, long after Dilessi. Campbell’s long tenure of office as an Indian
administrator led him to comparisons of the ‘Christian Cause’ in the East with the
Indian Mutiny, and once again, the Irish cause. 132
In the aforementioned reflections criticism of Greek aspirations to a Greater
Greece and the role of brigandage in them were an indirect attack upon the Greek
state itself which subsidised brigandage. There were, however, other instances in
which the Greek state was called upon to restore internal order. This idea
predominates in the report of the Secretary of the British Legation at Athens,
Watson, in 1872. Watson’s concern was that Greek administrators were not
willing to take any immediate action against the damage the Dilessi Murders did
to tourism in Greece, although

Mr Watson maintains that the difficulties in the way of suppressing brigandage in

Greece are far from being insurmountable, and that a little of energy […]
exhibited by Englishmen in putting down lawlessness on the north-western frontier
of India, would make brigandage no such easy calling. 133

Here the idea has quite the contrary effect to that of the previous commentators:
it recognises the legitimacy of Greek state power and compares it with England’s
regulatory role in the British empire. The dichotomy suggests that in this British
discourse the Greek state was an apprentice of Britain and had to follow the spirit
and the letter of the English/European code of law. When Greece failed to keep
up to British aspirations, then the apprentice would became a British Oriental
colony. 134
Greek commentators such as Gennadios did not miss the opportunity to
provoke in this instance. The ‘cruel’ British reaction to the Dilessi Murders was
read as a threat to Greek sovereignty and as a stigma on British civilisation. For
Gennadios, British civilisation dictated brutality, duplicity and betrayal of the very

130 The Times, 6 May 1870.

131 Hoppen, Victorian Generation, pp. 194-197.
132 Sir G. Campbell, A Handy Book on the Eastern Question Being a Very Recent View of Turkey

(London, 1876), pp. 32-35, 137. In 1857, during the Indian Mutiny, Campbell was secretary of the
government of northwest provinces in India. Later he pursued a political career. He used to send
letters to The Times, commenting on the Indian affairs.
133 The Times, 8 May 1872.
134 See for example The Times of 23 March 1871, in which it becomes clear that Greece is regarded

as an Oriental country, a ‘disgrace to European civilisation’ which has to be dealt with.

61
principles of human progress. This inconsistency would one day bring about
Britain’s ruin.

Such transparent inconsistency will not necessarily wait exposure at the hands of
the New Zealander, who, it is prophesied, centuries hence, resting on the broken
arch of London Bridge, will moralise upon the fall of the great country. A future
and not very remote Macaulay may justly stigmatise the present generation of his
countrymen as one which with one hand distributes Bibles, but with the other sows
misery amongst the poor and weak nations; which deputes missionaries to preach
African heathens, but which commissions officers to guide the arms of the infidel
against his Christian victims; which sends umbrellas and night-caps to Australian
savages, but which sends Snifer rifles and Armstrong guns into the hands of the
Mohammedan butchers; which establishes societies for the prevention of cruelty to
animals, but which organises committees for rendering national honours to the
greatest slaveholder in the world […] 135

Such is British action: it goes against the rhetoric of progress. The quote speaks
for itself and needs no commentary.

Conclusion
The analysis of Ireland and Greece closed with a comment on the role Ireland
played in British self-narration as a form of ‘internalised othering’. To fully grasp
the importance of the conception of ‘internalised otherness’ for the hermeneutic
conclusion of this chapter we have to examine the role of Irish and Greek
identities in the geopolitical map of Europe. First of all, the way that the
peripheral position of Greece in Europe was discussed in the Dilessi episode
resembles the place of the Balkans in the nineteenth-century European
imagination. In her recent work Maria Todorova 136 explained that the marginal
geographical position of the Balkans and their subjection to the ‘Oriental’
Ottoman empire was of primary importance in the dominant Western discourse.
The power relationship between Balkan peoples and nations and Western
European countries found its symbolic counterpart in the presentation of the
former as the European ‘other’: irrational, backward and contaminated by
Oriental vices. It is suggestive that the British press stressed that Greek
brigandage and irredentism ‘disturbed’ Europe. The implicit argument of this
comment was that modern Greece was not to be considered a fully European
country.
It was not a coincidence that Ireland, another peripheral country, stepped
into the same discourse. There had been a long-tradition of depicting Irish
identity as non-European, ‘black’. 137 This is not a minor point, indeed. Race
studies have shown that the idea of race and racial oppression can only be
explained in terms of a substantive, ‘operative element’, since ‘the distinction
between racial and national oppression turns on the composition of the group
that represents the ruling elite’. 138 Put simply, it is common practice for the
‘oppressor’ to recruit part of the dominant elements of the subjected native
populations and incorporate them into the ruling apparatus; most of the time, this

135 Gennadios, Notes, pp. 173-174.

136 M. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
137 L. P. Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (New York: Smithsonian

Institution Press, 1971).

138 T. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, vol. I: Racial Oppression and Social Control (London and

New York: Verson 1994), pp. 28, 35-36.

62
ends in integration of the recruited into the recruiting element. The rest of the
oppressed population remains a different ‘race’. Seen under this light, ‘colour’ is a
sociogenic rather than a physical category. This idea is supported by the fact that
when colour differences are absent, the dominant group justifies its (colonial)
authority over peoples or communities by stressing instead of their wrong
‘phenotype’ their ‘uncivilised behaviour’. 139 Although the Irish were not
represented as ‘black’ in the Dilessi discourse, they were named ‘uncivilised’ and
they were almost identified with a half-Oriental, half-European nation: the
modern Greeks.
Evidently the British press managed to kill two birds with the same stone:
by talking about Greece, journalists expressed their concern about Irish
behaviour, which was classified as dangerous and non-European. The importance
of ‘colouring’ the discourse on Greek and Irish disorder was great, because both
the Greeks and the Irish were white and Christian. 140 This manoeuvre was very
clever although the subtleties of the British argument make it confusing. The
rationale became more obvious when the Anglo-Greek dialogue changed focus
and examined the relationship between Scottish and English outlaws and Greek
brigands, a subject which will be examined in the next part of the thesis.
However, if we look at the second half of the chapter, then we realise that
representations of modern Greece as ‘black’ were not absent from the British
discourse. British associations between Greece and non-European peoples
(Abyssinian, Indian, Mexican, Maoris) compensated for the lack of colouring Irish
identity in the discourse. Therefore we should see the two halves of this chapter
as two aspects of the same discourse in which Ireland, Greece and colonial
nations occupied a position of inferiority vis-à-vis Britain.
In general, although the British mobilised colonial discourses of technology,
Orientalism and civilisation to chastise the Greeks for their disorder, they were
themselves unsure about their efficacy. They were also unsure about the position
they had to adopt towards the Greek state. The Greeks were aware of these
shortcomings and did not hesitate to take advantage. The roles of the civiliser and
the civilised, the dominant and the subaltern, were often contested in British and
Greek reflections on disorder - especially following Dilessi. This imagined
‘dialogue’ (or rather contest) enabled the British to reflect on their current status
and problems, but it also gave the Greeks the chance to defend themselves
against British accusations. But since the most interesting aspect of the Greek
apologia is yet to be investigated, I now wish to close this chapter and move on to
a different debate. This debate was primarily concerned with Greek self-reflection
but it also served as a starting-point for British reflections on the state of Greek
nationhood, society and politics.

139 Ibid., pp. 31-34.

140 The same association between the Irish and the Greeks can be found in a different context:
that of the relationship between the Ionians and their British colonial administrators. The British
also named the Ionian Greeks ‘Mediterranean Irish’ who could be treated as savages, thus
justifying British rule. Though in the case of the Ionian Islands we deal with actual colonisation, it
is significant that we find the very same argument in a slightly different context. For an analysis of
the argument one can consult Thomas Gallant’s forthcoming book Experiencing Dominion: Culture,
Identity and Power in the British Mediterranean (The University of Notre Dame Press, March 2002). I
am grateful to Tom Gallant for giving me the permission to use his unpublished work in the
thesis.

63
 iv. H(a)unted by the Enemy Within, I:
Brigandage, Vlachian/Albanian Greekness,
Turkish ‘Contamination’ and Narratives of Greek
Nationhood
Jacques Derrida used the notion of ‘anthropological war’ to describe what
happens in cultural encounters. For Derrida such ‘wars’ are often the result of
colonial or military oppression which, devastating though it can be, can also open
channels of communication between the coloniser and the colonised. The writing
produced by such confrontations is always under the spell of a ‘violation of the
letter’ which one culture tries to impose on the other. What the one cultural
observer classifies as A, his/her rival labels B, and this game goes on until both of
them manage to create powerful, though not always compatible, systems of
appellations, divisions and restrictions, continuities and discontinuities. What this
system of labelling excludes, what it refuses to point out, or what it names and
renames, is as important as the things it embraces and classifies from the very first
moment. The ultimate aim is symbolic justification of the actual domination of
the ‘other’ and the means employed are often of secondary importance. 141
Derrida’s point is insightful, but his claim that this process is a characteristic only
of colonial relationships can be misleading. All cultures have their own
classificatory devices which exist whether they are colonised (or colonisers) or
not. Rearrangement of this device when they come in contact with alien cultures
is often the prerequisite for any kind of ‘relationship.’ To be sure, Derrida is right
in one thing: self-explanatory processes can become a (re)source of resistance in
adversarial or oppressive relationships.
In the previous chapters we explored British attempts to find for Greek
‘disorder’ a place in the imperial cultural apparatus. But the Greeks had a voice of
their own and in this chapter it is their categorisation we will examine together
with British (and Greek) resistance/reception. For this purpose I will concentrate
on the Dilessi affair, because it served as a nodal point for the development of an
Anglo-Greek encounter. However, as the analysis proceeds, I will also refer to the
status of the primary sources before and after the Dilessi Murders. The Greek
reflections I will analyse pre-existed and outlived the Dilessi conflict but in the
Dilessi affair they were mobilised and transformed into a defensive mechanism.
Greek narratives concerning the phenomenon of brigandage were addressed to
many different audiences: an internal (Greek), a European and an English (during
the Dilessi affair). The latter is what interests me most.
The diaries of Sir Thomas Wyse open this chapter because the date of
publication suggests that they were addressed to an English audience that was
familiar with the Dilessi case. The fact that Winifred Wyse dedicated her long
introduction to the question of brigandage in Greece is also suggestive in this
respect. Wyse’s Impressions were in fact produced during his travels through the
greater part of liberated Greece at the end of the 1850s. The travels aimed at the
production of reports which would cover all aspects of the economic and social
condition of Greece, and which would be used by the commission the three
Great Powers constituted to look into the state of Greek affairs after the end of
the Crimean War (1857).

141 J. Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, 1976), pp. 107-108.

64
 Wyse was a peculiar hybrid of the British empire. He was an Irish Catholic
who had managed to enter Trinity College at Dublin because the penal law that
excluded Catholics from the College had been repealed by the Irish Parliament in
1793. He was married to Laeticia, the eldest daughter of Lucien Bonaparte by his
second wife, and thus he had strong links to the French imperial royal house. In
the struggle for Irish emancipation he co-operated with and indeed ranked close
to Daniel O’Connell. He voted for the Reform Bill in 1832, the abolition of
slavery, the repeal of the Corn Laws and the extension of popular education in
Ireland. However, the views he expressed in his published diaries as the British
Minister at Athens at that time do not always differ from those of members of the
British colonial machine.
Whether one chooses to see in Wyse a representative of the colonial mind or
not, he was a sharp and insightful observer. In one of his excursions in Attica, he
had come across an encampment of Vlachs: ‘a wild, savage-looking race, but
courteous enough when talked to.’ ‘Our Theban friend,’ continued Sir Thomas,
‘looked on them with less indulgence, saying that they were of those who
protected and harboured Davéli and Karabelíki and other brigands, and by their
aid and sympathy kept up that state of things in the country.’ 142
Such fleeting impressions were part of the Greek cultural landscape. One of
the things independence brought to the surface was the diversity of cultures and
customs in the Greek peninsula that the system of communities had preserved
throughout Ottoman rule. Constant migration of populations to mountainous
areas, inaccessible to the Turks, had transformed the human geography of the
Greek space. Thereafter, the demographic legacy of the Ottoman period had been
handed down to the Greek state; social fragmentation was never eliminated
partially due to the existence of mountain peoples who spoke languages other
than Greek and who lived separately from the main body of the Greek
population of the metropolis and the lately formed towns of Attica and the
Peloponnese. 143
Among all these ethnic groups within the Greek Kingdom the Vlachs and the
Sarakatsans were the ones most strongly linked to economic activities such as
stock rearing that forced them to live in the countryside. In some territories of
European Turkey the largest of these groups who considered themselves Greek
was the Albanian, but there were also instances in which their ethnic designation
was confused with that of the Vlachs. In so far as the Vlachs in Eastern Thrace
and Western Macedonia were of Albanian origin, there is a historical basis for this
association. However a series of further associations then plunged the origin of
these groups into obscurity. The Vlachs and the Sarakatsans were constantly
confused in Bulgarian records while in those of the early modern Ottoman
empire it was the Greeks and the merchant Vlachs of the Balkans that became
terminologically interchangeable. According to Tom Winnifrith, within the
framework of modern Greek identity, this blurring formed a historical
problematic, because there was a direct correspondence between the eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century Albanian activities at a time when the Ottoman empire
was losing its authority, and the collapse of the Byzantine authority during the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which led to movements by both Vlachs and
Albanians into the Greek peninsula. 144 Apart from the hint we have that the

142 Wyse, Impressions, p. 70.

143 McGrew, Land and Revolution, pp. 17-18.
144
For more details one can consult Tom Winnifrith’s work, The Vlachs: The History of a Balkan
People (London, 1987).

65
Albanians were of Illyrian origin 145 and that the Vlachs spoke a Latin language, it
would be difficult to trace back the racial links of all those groups; the Greek state
had serious difficulties as well. In 1836 the government of King Otho had
identified at least four such groups of ‘tent-dwellers’, in whose eyes the Greek
state was only an intruder and the Greeks remained a shadowy urban people,
scarcely know in their communities.
But the purpose of this study is not to restore some primal truth concerning
the origin of the Vlachs and the Albanians of Greece -contra the truth of the
nineteenth-century Greek state. The ‘real’ of the origins of the Vlachs/Albanians
itself has no place in this analysis, which will focus on what truly mattered for the
spokesmen of the Greek imagined community: symbolisation of identity. In any
case, erudite and specialised researchers found it difficult to arrive at definite
conclusions, or they had recourse to further classification of regional identities 146
– a venture that cannot be pursued here. The research could be placed within the
historiographical debate initiated by Romilly Jenkins (in the Dilessi Murders) and
John Koliopoulos (in Brigands with a Cause and Listés), although the aim of it is not
to examine the phenomenon of brigandage per se but the implication of brigand
crime in the question of nineteenth-century Greek identity.
The bitter comment of Wyse’s interlocutor that the Vlachs harboured
brigandage has to be examined. There was a grain of truth in that verdict. The
Vlach shepherds, being geographically cut off and socially marginal, passed their
lives close to brigand hideouts; hence, extortion as well as recruitment of them by
brigands was a very common phenomenon. In 1869 Andréas Moskonísios, a
Greek second lieutenant, published a treatise under the title The Mirror of
Brigandage in Greece (To Kátoptron tis Listías en Elládi), in which he argued that two
thirds of a brigand band usually consisted of Vlach shepherds and only a third of
peasants or deserters. 147
But identifying particular social circumstances that encourage or force a group
to have recourse to crime is not the same as suggesting its complete identification
with that crime. Long before Moskonísios, the question of brigandage as an
‘endemic national malady’ had been laid before and discussed in the Greek
parliament (1856). As John Koliopoulos has explained, over the same period the
outcome of this on-going debate led to the appointment of a commission to
examine the problem. Interestingly, the reports of the commission repeated the
narrative Wyse had recorded in his travel journals: The Vlach shepherds, these
‘“illiterate” and “uncouth”’ 148 tribes were certainly to be blamed for this ‘scourge’.
As for the rest of the Greek nation, well, it was innocent.
It becomes apparent that the internal debate concerning the relationship of
tribes in Greece with brigandage dates back to the Othonian period. There were,
however, objections to this argument. For the purpose of this study one example
will be presented in which the chosen voice appears to negotiate rather than reach
conclusions regarding the story’s credibility. The poignant protest against this
national myth is unwoven in Thános Vlékas, Pávlos Kallighás’s novel on Greek
brigandage which was published in the mid 1850s. 149 The reason for choosing
145 T. Winnifrith, Perspectives of Albania (London, 1992).
146 Consult for example A Dhima, ‘Ethnical Anthropology of Albania,’ Homo 45 (2), 1994: pp.
127-158.
147 A. Moskonísios, The Mirror of Brigandage in Greece (Ermúpolis, 1869).
148 J.S. Koliopoulos, Brigands with a Cause: Brigandage and Irredentism in Modern Greece 1821-1912

(Oxford, 1987), p. 173; see also p. 172 cf.

149 Kallighás was a jurist, Professor of Law at the University of Athens, MP and Minister of Justice

in 1854 [M. Vitti, Ideological Function of Greek Ethography (Athens, 1991), p. 29].

66
this example has to do with Kallighás’s involvement in politics and public affairs
during the Crimean War. In this novel the Greek brigand Tásos, who is pursued
by Greek troops, escapes, crosses the border, and together with some Albanians
first works for the Turks, and then resigns his ‘job’ and devastates Greek
villages. 150 The audience for Kallighás’s deconstruction of the Greek ‘ethnic truth’
was the Greeks and not the British. It is not surprising therefore that his ‘anti-
Greek’ narrative did not find an imitator within the community of the Greek
literati and sank into oblivion: no Greek was prepared to accept that brigandage
was a Greek problem.
Hence, the argument that ‘exorcised’ the evil was ready at hand when the
Dilessi episode erupted. It was not therefore a big surprise that it was mobilised
during the Dilessi crisis, when the Greek state had to re-address and solve the
question of brigandage to the satisfaction both of the Greeks and of a British
government in which extreme voices that echoed Palmerston demanded an
occupation of Greece. 151 In addition, the Greek nation had to restore Greek
honour in the eyes of a broader, European audience that in the Greek imaginary
demanded nothing less than the political and social regeneration of ancient Hellas.
It must have been evident to the defenders of Greek national honour that the
Arvanitákis did not exactly represent a modern Aristotle abroad.
After the Dilessi murders, the Greek Ministry of the Interior sent Aión, a pro-
government newspaper of the day, a report which included the names of the dead
and captured brigands. Aión was probably one of the first Greek newspapers to
contribute to the official crystallization of what Romilly Jenkins rightly termed
‘ethnic truth.’ For Aión did not just publish the report; it also enhanced it with the
argument that most of the brigands ‘belonged to the tribe of Vlachopoimènes’, or
Vlach-shepherds. 152 According to Palingenesía, another Greek (nationalist)
newspaper, the Greek nation always denounced such crimes.

This phenomenon would not have been regarded as something disgraceful if we

had approached it from the standpoint of those nomads […] but it is a fact that the
Greek nation does not consist of this small race, which lives a primitive and
savage life. 153

It is necessary to add here that the title of the article was ‘The English Press’ and
that it was a response to the bellicose language of the English journalists, who
harped on a profound association of brigandage and Greek politics and showed
no respect for ‘the natural rights of the nations (such as the Greek)…
consolidated by treaties.’ 154 This rhetorical practice had a double aim: on the one
hand the Greek journalists tried to discipline their European interlocutors, by
reminding them of the holy cause of the Greek Revolution and the subsequent
treaties of liberation. On the other hand, they generated a discourse in which
brigandage was placed within the category of savagery which, in its turn, was
associated with Vlach identity. The geometry of the discourse was predicated
upon the binary opposition Vlach tribes-savagery-brigandage vs. Greek society-
civilization-order.

150 Kallighás, Vlékas, pp. 43-47.

151 To these voices we could add some members of the Conservative Opposition to which Lord
Carvarvon, relative of one of the Dilessi victims (Herbert), belonged.
152 Aión, 9 April 1870.
153 Palingenesía, 15 May 1870.
154 Ibid.

67
 The same argument was repeated in a more challenging fashion some weeks
later. The question of the origin of brigandage was investigated after the Dilessi
murders by the director of the French school at Athens, Émile Burnouf, in a
treatise published in the Revue des Deux Mondes, a journal, initially associated with
the Orleanist regime, which had come by 1870 to occupy a generally open-
minded position and display an attachment to middle-class French culture. The
Revue des Deux Mondes was a widely circulated journal and the thesis that Burnouf
presented hit the mark: For the Greeks this ‘voice’ came to (conveniently)
represent French opinion. In addition, Burnouf was considered an ‘up-to-date’
observer, who knew Greek affairs. There are therefore two reasons for using
Burnouf here: first, his treatise supported the Greek journalistic argument, and
thus made it appear more reliable in Britain; and second, Greek newspapers anxious
to attack those British commentators who found the Greek argument concerning
the Vlachs unconvincing, were able to present his reflections as the voice of
‘France’, another civilising protector of Greece. Moreover, Burnouf’s comments
somehow counterbalanced the French ‘satirisation’ of Greek brigandage by
Edmond About, a French novelist whose ‘anti-Greek’ work sold more than any
other novel in the Europe of the 1850s and infuriated the Greek readership. I will
explore About’s work in another chapter, and therefore I will abstain from more
comments on that.
For Burnouf the brigands in Greece were not Greeks ‘properly speaking’ but
‘Albanians or Vlachopoiménes-Vlachs.’ 155 His comments were translated and
published by the English radical newspaper The Pall Mall Gazette, which found his
views plausible. Not surprisingly, Palingenesía also translated Burnouf’s work and
added:

Mr. Burnouf admits and believes, like any man of integrity, that the Greek nation
is not guilty of those crimes, but a victim of villains. Another very wise foreigner,
who has been a resident in Greece for a number of years, was also forced to draw
the same conclusion, but he took the childish initiative at the same time to argue
that since we accept in our nation the good and virtuous Vlachs, it is fair to be
charged with the crimes of the vicious ones as well! 156

The ‘wise foreigner’ who was ‘forced’ to submit to the Greek discourse was the
long-standing philhellene George Finlay. Passionate though it was, the statement
that Finlay was persuaded to accept the Greek version of truth was inaccurate. In
The Times of 3 June 1870 Finlay had produced a detailed analysis of the ways the
Greek authorities and King Otho had himself occasionally co-operated with
‘brigand Vlachs’ for their own interests. It was unfortunate for the Greeks that
Finlay was in a position to illustrate his point by reference to the example of
Tákos Arvanitákis. Tákos, one of the brigand chiefs of the Dilessi band, although
a Vlach, had participated in the revolution which King Otho instigated in
Thessaly and Epirus during the Crimean War; thereafter, he was employed by the
Government to pursue brigands. Albeit his biographical note touched the Greeks
on the raw, it was the second part of Finlay’s skilful analysis that thrust the knife
into the heart of the question of national identity. If, Finlay argued, one examined
the processes that take place in the melting pot of Greek society after the
Revolution, Greekness appears as an arbitrary category, inclusive rather than
exclusive.

155 The Pall Mall Gazette, 20 June 1870.

156 Palingenesía, 15 June 1870. See also Aión, 13/25 June 1870.

68
 It must be observed that many of the benefactors who enriched the Greek
Kingdom and the city of Athens by their donations of money, by founding
charitable and scientific societies, and by erecting some of the principal buildings
that adorn Athens had been of Vallach and not of Greek nationality. This non-
Hellenic race furnished Greece with one of its most eminent statesmen in Colettes
and one of its best judges in Clonares; and if I am not mistaken the first Greek
press in Turkey out of Constantinople was established, not by men of Greek race,
but by these Vallachs at Moschopoli. 157

The argument was not new in the British circuitry of ideas, and it certainly did not
apply to the Vlachs only. A similar comment appeared in the 1850s in one of the
volumes of a popular and influential series by an anonymous writer who signed
his books as ‘The Roving Englishman’. The popularity of his travel diaries
increased when Lord Palmerston himself took him up as an authority upon
Eastern Affairs. In the second edition of his volume on Turkey, originally written
before the Crimean War, the author praised the ‘self-denying race of Epirus’
(Albanian-Vlachs) for its contribution to the foundation of the Greek Kingdom,
and its excellence in the civil service and the Chambers of Greece. 158 Finlay was at
the very least informed of this passage, since this volume is in his personal library,
stored today in the British School at Athens. The interesting part of the story was
that in Finlay’s erudite essay the Vlachs, like the Roving Englishman’s Albanian-
Vlachs, were presented as Greeks, but categorized as ‘non-Hellenic’. The careful
choice between the term ‘Greek’ and the term ‘Hellene’ is suggestive in this
instance. Greek from Graecus was the word the Romans used to designate the
Hellenes as imperial subjects – an effective twist which divested the latter of any
claims on a glorious and admired past, their cultural heritage, which was
appropriated by their masters. Amongst Greeks, Grecós was an ambiguous
designation that signified the heterochthone Greek, but also the ‘slave’ of Turkish
values. It is more likely that Finlay’s comment is a reference to the pre-hellenic
historical background of the Vlachs – a comment that should be borne in mind.
The way the Greeks used Finlay’s commentary is exemplified by the
responses to his article in the Greek press. It was translated and published in Clió
(30/11 July 1870), whereas the more aggressive Palingenesía attacked Finlay
relentlessly because in it he dishonoured the names of Klonáris and Koléttis.
‘Even if we presume that they were born Vlachs - something yet to be verified -
one should not dismiss the fact that they were born in the bosom of Greek
[Έλληνική] society, they were fed by its milk […] while the brigands are born and
nurtured as nomads and receive nothing from our society,’ 159 was the response.
Evidently Palingenesía suggested that the nomadic way of living characterised one
category of Vlachs. These Greek Vlachs were the ‘savages’ of the Greek narrative
on the Dilessi affair.
Under such adverse circumstances the nation needed desperately an object on
to which to project its defects; it needed a plot and a setting. Consequently, Greek
imagination transformed the Vlach/Albanian brigands of the Greek Kingdom
into brigand invaders from the Ottoman empire. Fragments of this suggestion
appeared in three pamphlets published after the Dilessi murders. They appeared

157 The Times, 3 June 1870, emphasis added.

158 The Roving Englishman, Turkey being Sketches from Life, reprinted in part from Household Words with
numerous additions (London and New York, 1877), pp. 215-216
159 Palingenesía, 15 June 1870.

69
first in Thoughts on the Suppression of Brigandage, 160 a pamphlet that circulated in
Athens ‘anonymously’ and was praised by Aión in its issue of 13 May 1870.
Notwithstanding his supposed anonymity, the author was well known in
Athenian circles as Antónios Rikákis, a lawyer and public prosecutor. Suspicions
are in order concerning Rikákis’s performance, not only because he ‘failed’ to
remain anonymous but also because the circulation of his pamphlet almost
coincided with his Association’s sending a protest to Zaímis in response to
rumours that Athenian lawyers acted as solicitors for the Arvanitákis band. 161
Rikákis’s pamphlet invited the ‘nation’ (a term used interchangeably in his
narrative with ‘Greek authorities’) to reflect on the situation so as to avoid
humiliations similar to that at Dilessi in the future. The rhetorical patterns he
employed in his work are interesting: although he explicitly addressed himself to a
Greek audience, the opening and concluding paragraphs reminded his readers
that the Greek Kingdom was under British and indeed European surveillance. 162
Major Dimítris Antonópoulos, the second and more critical observer,
proposed a series of remedies for Greek ‘disorder’ in his pamphlet Reflections on a
Successful Persecution and Elimination of our Country’s Catastrophe, Brigandage.
Nevertheless, he started his pamphlet with the verdict that ‘the brigands have this
facility to escape to Turkish territories, in which not only are they not pursued,
but they are also harboured’. 163 Although the Vlachs did not figure in his work,
his analysis was symptomatic of the Greek cast of mind. The identity of the
brigands became a secondary issue, thus giving way in his discourse to the
connection of the Greek brigands with the historical enemy of the ‘nation’:
Turkey. Unlike Rikákis, Antonópoulos did not mention the Dilessi Murders in his
pamphlet; his analysis was explicitly concerned with potential changes in the
Greek legal system and with the efficiency of the Greek state machine in matters
concerning the pursuit of brigands. Aión, nevertheless, placed the pamphlet
within the framework of the impact the massacre had on Anglo-Greek
relations. 164 Antonópoulos’s study itself intended to revisit the question of the
official measures that ought to be taken against brigand bands and to rekindle an
internal dialogue.
Bits and pieces of the question of the Vlachs and the Albanians can be spotted in
other sources. Colonel Pános Koronéos proceeded to show that the name
Arvanitákis derives from Arvanitóvlachi 165 ‘that is, nomads’ 166 and exulting over the
supposedly defeated English commentators, he concluded:

Is it the opposition’s or the nation’s fault if General Arvanitákis transferred his

camp from Turkey, where he prepared his campaign, and marching into Greek
territories reached Pikérmi? 167

In Koronéos’s argument, the Vlachs and the Albanians were merged (Arvanítes-
Vláchi) and then associated with Turkish anti-Greek propaganda. Thus the fear of

160 R(ikákis) I. A(ntónios), Thoughts on the Suppression of Brigandage (Athens, 1870).

161 Aión, 4 May 1870.
162 Rikákis, Thoughts, pp. 3-4 and 28.
163 D. Antonópoulos, Reflections on a Successful Persecution and Elimination of our Country’s Catastrophe,

Brigandage (Athens, 1870), p. 1.

164 Aión, 11 June 1870.
165 The accurate translation of the term into English would be ‘Albanian’ (Arvanites or Αρβανίτες)

‘Vlachs’ (Βλάχοι).
166 Koronéos, Addressed, p. 8.
167 ibid., p. 11.

70
internal threat (coming from a tribe that lives in Greece) was externalised (like
other Arvanitóvlachi the Arvanitákis take refuge in or come from Turkey).
Koronéos’s work was explicitly addressed to an English audience, as the title of
his pamphlet shows.
Central to the Greek response to the Dilessi affair was the work of John
Gennadios Notes on the Recent Murders by Brigands in Greece, which was published
some months after the episode. Gennadios was the son of the great Greek
scholar Geórghios Ghennádios and of Άrtemis Benizélou of a famous Athenian
family. At the time of the crisis he was a clerk in the commercial enterprise of the
Rhállis Brothers in London, but after the publication of his diatribe he had to
resign his job. However, there is evidence not only that he received financial help
from his Greek boss 168 but also that he was in touch with the Greek government
for the translation of his book into Greek (a task that was left unfinished in 1871
and can be consulted today in the Ghennádion in Athens). In his diaries Gennadios
listed the names of several individuals who belonged to the intellectual and ruling
elites of Greece and England, all of whom received a free copy of his work. 169
The London Hellenic Society contributed to publication expenses, but some
unanswered questions still remain: Where did Gennadios find the rest of the
capital for publication? How did he become Secretary of the Greek Embassy at
Constantinople? 170 Did he act independently, or as an agent of the Greek
intelligence services?
Putting aside the gossip concerning the web of political contacts which
Gennadios might have established, his rhetorical skills remain impressive. Despite
the fact that his argumentation was not intrinsically original, his ability to absorb
and classify information from the English and the Greek press enabled him to
reconstruct the frame of the Greek discourse concerning the social and ethnic
identity of the Vlachs and the Albanians in Greece and their relationship with the
essential qualities of the Greek ‘nation’. 171 Evidently, his argument was addressed
to an English audience – which is why he published his work in English. His
statement that the Albanian-Vlach-brigands were Turkish agents who wanted to
damage Greece’s reputation abroad was based on a brilliant combination of
argumentative fragments. The first and most important of these (which will be
examined much latter) was that because the accomplices of the Arvanitákis and
the mysterious instigators of the crime had committed high treason, they no
longer belonged to the Greek imagined community. 172 The second was that the
Arvanitákis band consisted of Vlachs. The third was that the Ottoman empire
repeatedly refused to co-operate with Greek authorities in the suppression of
border crimes. The alchemic outcome of this mixture was the golden theory of
the immaculate nation: the murders had not been committed by Greek brigands,
but by Vlach/Albanian brigands in Greece.

168
Rhállis bought many copies of the Notes for £100.
169 The names are in the archive of cuttings. See L. Tricha, Diplomacy and Politics. Kharílaos Trikúpis-
Ioánnis Gennádios, Correspondence (Athens, 1991), p. 17.
170 Gennadios attracted the attention of the American ambassador at Athens, Charles Tuckerman,

who suggested to the Greek Prime Minister, Deligiórgis, that he exploits his talents. That is
probably why he was first proposed as a second secretary in the Greek embassy at the United
States (Tricha, Diplomacy, p. 19).
171 Jenkins (Dilessi, p. 113) attributed the paternity of the argument to Gennadios, but a careful

research in the years prior to the Dilessi incident prove his theory wrong. The argument can be
traced in the Greek press before the publication of the Notes.
172 Méllon, 21 April 1870; Aión 9 April 1870.

71
 It is important to follow the logic of this argument, because it provides us
with an insight into nineteenth-century Greek self-definition predicated upon
history. Gennadios’s point of departure was similar to that of Aión: that is, the list
of the names of the Arvanitákis band.

Only Nos. 8, 12, and 18 are natives of Greece and Greek subjects; the rest are all
from Turkey, and belong to a class of nomadic shepherds [footnote: these are the
“Wallach Shepherds” whom Mr. Lloyd mentions in his diary (No. 5, p. 4)] who
exist both in Greece and Turkey, and who form a nationality of themselves. They
are known by the name of Koutzo-Vallachs, a tribe who immigrated from the
borders of Danube into Greece during the twelfth century. They have a dialect of
their own, but most speak Greek. The brigand bands that infest Greece and Turkey
are composed and are recruited almost exclusively from this tribe. […] That these
men were not of Greek but of Slav origin it would be evident to all who have
glanced at the ghastly photograph of the heads of the seven brigands shot during
the engagement […] Their names are also sure indications of their nationality.
“Arvanitaki” means “little Albanian,” and is not a surname, properly so
called, but a kind of distinct epithet, such as most of these men are known by, so
as to contradistinguish them from others of the same Christian name. 173

Gennadios cited Lloyd, one of the victims in the Dilessi episode, because he
wanted to make his argument plausible in the eyes of an English readership. In
his discourse, none the less, the Arvanitákis were Albanian-Vlachs and most of
the members of the band of Dilessi belonged to the Vlach communities of
shepherds. What is interesting in Gennadios’s argument is the ambiguity
concerning the identity of the brigands that infest Greece: (a) the vast majority of
the members of the Dilessi band is of Slav origin – yet another statement that has to
be borne in mind (b) brigands in Greece often come from Turkey; and (c) sometimes
they speak Greek. What is left outside Gennadios’s argument is also important:
not only is he not concerned with his Albanians/Vlachs’ self-designation, but also
he avoids the question.
Gennadios went as far as to condemn Finlay for his article, thereby following
Palingenesía’s policy. ‘The Times correspondent’, he declared, ‘has evidently
confounded the Greeks of Epirus, who have undoubtedly shown themselves the
greatest benefactors of our common fatherland, with these Vallach nomads, who,
far from having ever produced anything but good soldiers, are proverbial for their
inaptitude to intellectual culture and civilization’. 174 At some point he even
claimed that the brigands appealed for amnesty both in Greece and in Turkey,
because they were ‘Turks-Albanians’ (Turkalvaní). Gennadios followed the
journalistic argument: ‘civilisation and intellectual culture’ become intrinsic Greek
qualities that the Vlach tribes of Greece (not to mention those of Turkey) do not
possess.
Gennadios offered a fascinating narrative of Greek identity by using the
principle of negation, that is, by defining what was not Greek. Later, Greek
politicians embraced his argument and used it to defend Greece against British

173 Gennadios, Notes, pp. 117-119, emphasis added. Edward Lloyd was an English lawyer resident
at Athens; he and his family joined the Muncaster party to Dilessi that was kidnapped by the
brigands. His family was released together with Muncaster, but Lloyd was detained and murdered.
The widow demanded compensation from the Greek government, which she eventually received.
174 ibid., p. 118

72
criticisms. 175 With hindsight, it could be said that the whole argument was unfair.
Romilly Jenkin’s melancholy reflection that the Vlachs-Albanians, whom all these
commentators wanted to expel from the Greek nation, were, if not Greek-
speaking, at least Orthodox Christians, ‘who formed a part of exactly that
persecuted population which Greece was claiming the right to “free” from
Ottoman “oppression” and annex to herself’ 176 is accurate. Some of those Vlachs
could claim a share in the Greek struggle for independence – perhaps the lion’s
share, if matters were examined carefully! But this hardly mattered. It is not
because the Greeks ignored the truth; it is rather that, in general, truth should not
be thought as being in a consistent or identical relationship with the ‘real’
world. 177 Different societies have different regimes of truth, or what Foucault
called ‘general politics of truth, the types of discourse which they accept and make
function as true.’ 178 However, contra Michel Foucault one of the things that must
be investigated here is not only how, but also why this particular ‘truthful’ discourse had
come to have such a hold on Greek thought.
In the second half of the 1860s, there was in Greece an anxious repetition of
this association between Vlach shepherds and brigandage. This is not surprising,
given that the Greek nation had to respond to the needs and demands of the
Cretan Insurrection (1866-1869) against the Turks, which was seen as the point of
realization of the Great Idea and which was secretly supported by the Greek
governments. As it was mentioned in previous chapters, Greek governments used
brigand bands for the Cretan revolution, a measure that was deemed by the Great
Powers of Europe to be unacceptable. The unstable political situation during the
Interregnum period of 1862-1863 had allowed crime to flourish and led many
political fugitives to join brigand bands. In order to sever the attachment of
political fugitives to brigand bands, the Koumoundoúros government of 1866
was left with no choice other than to grant an amnesty to them. In the debates in
Greece on brigandage, certain Greek newspapers examined together lack of
Turkish co-operation in suppressing brigandage and the role of the Vlachs. In
articles published in 1864, 1866 and 1867, Palingenesía presented this situation to
the Greek readership as a ‘miasma’. 179 The notion of ‘miasma’ was predicated
upon a series of argumentative combinations. These combinations represented
the brigands in Greece (a) as Albanians originally from Turkey; (b) as Vlachs from
Turkey; (c) as ‘uncivilised’ Vlachs and Albanians resident in Greece; and (d) as
Albanian-Vlachs of Slav origin. The attempt to implicate Turkey and the
suggestion of a Slavic element figured in most of these articles. Interestingly,
Palingenesía’s narrative of 1867 was recorded by the Reverend Bagdon in The
Brigands of the Morea 180 and thereby disseminated to the English-speaking

175 See for example the speeches of Milísis, MP for Hermionís (Two Speeches, p. 20) and D.
Chadjískos MP for Phthiotis (Speech Delivered by D. Chadjískos, MP for Phthiotis, in the Meeting of 8th
January 1871, p. 11).
176 Jenkins, Dilessi, p. 125.
177 S. Žižek, For they Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (New York, London,

1991),
pp. 234-244.
178 M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed by Colin Gordon (New York, Brighton, Sussex, 1980), p. 131;

T.A. Van Dijk, ‘Analysing Racism Through Discourse Analysis. Some Methodological
Reflections’, in JH Stanfield and MD Rutledge, Race and Ethnicity in Research Methods (London and
New Delhi, 1993), p. 96.
179 Palingenesía, 1 June 1864; 11 June 1866; 22 July 1866; 26 June 1867. See also 30 April 1881 for a

repetition of the narrative much later.

180 Bagdon, Brigands of the Morea, vol. I, pp. 9-10. The article was published in Palingenesìa in 26

January 1867.

73
readership. After the Dilessi Murders British journalists made references to
Bagdon’s work, but did not explicitly mention this passage.
Perhaps we should examine these narratives together with another source,
published over the same period for educational purposes. In 1867, when the
Greek nation was still looking for some help from the European Powers for the
Cretan Insurrection, an anonymous Greek author commented on the
‘obscurantism’ of the Turks, as opposed to the love of knowledge that
characterized the Greek nation. For ‘Anonymous’ Turkish lack of civilisation
transformed brigandage in Turkey into an ‘industry’. His observations included all
the essential pieces that Gennadios and other Greek commentators put together
three years later:

Brigandage in Turkey is a normal state of things […] and because it devastates the
country, the state [i.e. the Turkish state] organizes attacks across the Greek borders
[...]
One of the worse, probably the worst, accusations ignorant foreigners address to
Greece, is that it is a brigand country and that it harbours brigandage […]
If only all these ‘prosecutors’ knew that Greece’s social situation is better
[than the Turkish]… the constitution and the laws of the country [i.e. Greece] are
grounded upon liberal and civilized principles […] This is a concrete proof that
brigandage can neither be generated nor be sheltered in Greece; brigandage in the
frontier areas of Fthiotis and Acarnania is the result of intrusions of lestric bands
from Turkey […] If in the interior of Greece we come across lestric bands of
Vlachopiménes who live a semi-civilized nomadic life we should never forget that
the appearance of brigand bands is not an unusual phenomenon even in powerful
European countries, in which isolated cases of robbery take place quite often. 181

What constitutes civilization for Anonymous is a set of technologies of power

and governance designed to survey Greek subjects and make them useful citizens.
Those elements that do not comply with the rules of the power apparatus stay
beyond the pale of civilization which is identified with the Greek state. Note
though that again the binary coupling of Greek civilisation becomes Turkey; the
Vlachs simply appear as accomplices or agents. ‘Anonymous’s’ mourning has a
‘performative’ element: his addressee is the ‘nation’, but his ultimate desire is to
communicate his thoughts to an imaginary European interlocutor, who is civilised but
still has to deal with internal disorder and anarchy.
Of course this does not explain why Greek anxiety is directed against the
Vlachs and the Albanians. This chain of interchangeable terms (Albanian, Turk,
Vlach, Slav, brigand, nomad) would often be followed by the fear that
brigandage/disorder was a ‘pest’, a ‘scourge’ on Greece, a sin that had to be swept
away. Martin Blinkhorn noted that the language of dirt constituted a pattern in
Greek and English discourses on brigandage during the nineteenth century. 182 In
the Greek Kingdom the argument went like this: the ‘miasma’ was imported from
Turkey, and like flu epidemic attacked the body of the Hellenic Kingdom.
Greek hysteria concerning contamination was acted out in a suggestive way
within the context of nineteenth-century debate on brigandage. The Greek
language of separation/exclusion that accompanied it was that of the edicts issued
by the Holy Synod for the excommunication of brigands from the Greek body
social. As Koliopoulos has shown in his study of Greek brigandage, the Holy

181 Anonymous, Turkey and the Christians under her rule (Athens, 1867), pp. 16-19.
182 Blinkhorn, ‘Liability,’ p. 343.

74
Synod had taken similar action on the question of fraternization -- a very
common ‘heathen’ practice in the brigand communities. 183 In 1855 an encyclical
directed Greek priests to preach against brigandage so as to unite the faithful
against brigands and their collaborators. Koliopoulos notes that in this instance
the priests had to ‘explain’ to their audience that brigandage was ‘both a “sin” and
a “betrayal” of one’s neighbour’. 184 If one bears in mind that Greek Orthodoxy
imposed a series of practices that enabled the operation of Greek communal life,
then one realizes how drastic the step was. On a symbolic level, these edicts might
have been designed under a logic which would stress the importance of religion as
a purifying power. The edict issued after the Marathon Murders was along these
lines, because it denied the brigands and their accomplices the right to belong to
the Orthodox (i.e. Greek) community. 185 The measure was the outcome of
British threats against the Greek government that, unless it managed to root out
brigandage, Britain would have to take over in the Greek Kingdom. Additional
threats concerning the future of Greek sovereignty (a temporary British
occupation of Greece) but also the general European ‘outcry’ caused the
preconditions for Greek self-reflection.
One must not disregard the profound connection between dirt and social
disorder in Greek discourse. If we are to believe Mary Douglas, any structure, any
‘order’, is extremely vulnerable at its margins, when identity definition falters and
confines present cracks. Dirt is a by-product of systematic ordering and
classification, which the Greeks had to present to their European interlocutors in
order to be recognized as part of the civilized/ordered European world. To
achieve this, they decided to take some precaution against those who had no fixed
place in the ordered Greek social system – and those were the Vlach/Albanian
nomads of Greece. Since the crimes of outlaws were likely not only to go
unpunished but also to disgrace Greece abroad, the Greeks called in ‘pollution
beliefs to supplement the lack of other sanctions’. 186 This is the reason why
correlation of marginalisation and crime was used extensively by the Greek state
after Dilessi. State propaganda addressed to the British readership was nicely
reflected in the Greek press, which advertised massive arrests of Vlachs and the
introduction of restrictions in their roving movements. 187 Finally, it cannot be a
coincidence that shortly after the episode, there took place a parliamentary debate
on laws to deal with the question. 188
It is suggestive that, although the Slav origin of those Vlachian/Albanian
tribes in Greece was mentioned in the Dilessi sources, the main target of the
Greek discourse was Ottoman. While the Vlachs and the Albanians of Greece
were by no means considered foreigners in the Greek Kingdom, their inferior
social status was none the less indisputable. Michael Herzfeld notes that in
official discourse at least the term Vláckhos signified the Koutsovlach-speaking
shepherd whose identity was Greek but whose primary mark of difference was
language, or dialect. As opposed to state discourse, in everyday parlance ‘the term

183 Koliopoulos, Brigands, p. 224.

184 Koliopoulos, Irredentism, p. 173.
185 Aión, 2 and 4 May 1870.
186 M. Douglas, Purity and Danger, An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1993), p.

132.
187 Aión, 13 May 1870; Palingenesía, 26 May 1870. The same measures had been taken in 1867

(Palingenesía,
12 January 1867).
188 Kofos, ‘Retrenchment,’ pp. 308-309.

75
[became] one of moral exclusion’. 189 Even nowadays Vláckhos signifies in Greek
the illiterate or the unintelligent, one who lacks civilised manners. But it also has
to be borne in mind that the state did not manage to stabilise the meaning of
Greek identity until the beginning of the twentieth century. To compensate for
this frailty, the Greeks defined their identity by social analogy and relativity: those
who were designated as outsiders ‘were the people [the Greeks] “knew less” – a
clear relationship between social distance and knowledge’. 190
The relationship between social exclusion and knowledge was a common topos
in Greek commentary on Dilessi also, but with a significant difference. In Greek
observations during and before the Dilessi crisis, a third pair of opposites, namely
Greece versus Turkey, accompanied the binarisms between civilisation and lack
of civilisation, Greek society and Vlachs/Albanians. Here we observe an initial
internalisation and eventual exorcism of a Western discourse of Greek identity. In
this discourse Neohellenic culture had appeared to be infected by ‘Oriental
barbarism’ after the conquest of Byzantium by the Turks. Greek ‘regeneration’
was concomitant with the restoration of order, which in the modern state
vocabulary signified public security and competent administration. When the
Greek state was accused of uncivilised contact, brigandage, the defect recognised
by British politicians and journalists, was presented as ‘foreign’. 191 Consequently,
the Vlach and Albanian shepherds who had been linked to it also became
‘foreigners’.
Another foreign element of secondary importance that featured in the
Vlachian and Albanian identities was the Slav. This is no minor point. In Greece
reflections on the role of the Vlachs and the Albanians in Greek national identity
were the offshoot of the discussion concerning the Hellenic identity of the
modern Greeks. This debate was instigated by the obscure Tyrolean historian
Jacob Fallmerayer (1790-1861) — the figure who embodied mishellenism or hatred
toward the Greeks in post-independence Greek culture. Although Fallmerayer
was a classicist by education, his main interest became the continuity of Hellenic
civilization in the Byzantine era. His work, a product of its age, signified the
moment the Greeks decided to poison themselves with the evolutionist
controversy. Fallmerayer’s reading of Byzantine sources led him to the conclusion
that the modern Greeks were a Slavonic race, which emerged during the fifth and
the sixth centuries out of a racial intermixing of the Slavs who settled in the

189 M. Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe
(Cambridge, 1987), p. 132.
190 Ibid., p. 154.
191 The analogous, though not identical, of the nineteenth-century discourse can be witnessed in

Greece nowadays. Recently, the idea of ‘leaking (Greek-Albanian) borders’ was reintroduced in
the Greek media, after the massive migration of Albanians and Epirote Greeks to Greece. These
populations formed part of the Greek imagined community as long as they stood outside the
Greek borderland, and during the nineteenth and the first quarter of the twentieth centuries were
part of the unredeemed Greek populations. The collapse of the old regime in Albania, and the
massive migration to Greece woke up the old uncontrolled fear of boundary transgression.
Nowadays, those who cross the border to Greece, be they Albanians or Greek Epirotes, are
presented in the journalistic discourse as dirty, criminal and uncivilized aliens. For more
information see N. Seremetakis ‘In Search for Barbarians: Borders in Pain,’ American Anthropologist,
vol. 98, no. 3 (September, 1996): pp. 488-491 and G. Lazaridis and E. Wickens ‘ “Us” and the
“Others.” Ethnic Minorities in Greece’, Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 26, no. 3 (1999): pp. 632-
655.

76
Greek-Byzantine peninsula and its Greek inhabitants. 192 Needless to say,
Fallmerayer, who was seen by the Bulgarians as the agent of Panslavism, was not
interested in producing anti-Greek propaganda. His theory was the result of a
terror of degeneration that the Panslavic elements – stubbornly backed up by
Russia — might have introduced in Germanic/European culture. 193 Indisputably,
his whole argument rested on a confusion of ‘continuity and origin, of race and
culture.’ 194 But the unhappy coincidence of his theory with the institutionalisation
of modern Greece in the 1830s, thrust upon him the status of a ‘Satanic figure’ 195
bent on destroying the ‘nation’. It was ironic that such a controversy, which
dictated to the Greeks the absolute necessity of consigning this ‘impostor’ to the
fires of hell, made Fallmerayer a first rate star in Europe.
Now it is easier to understand why both the Albanians and the Vlachs were
represented at the same time as an Ur-hellenic and an Oriental element in the
Dilessi affair. The Greek narrative which presented brigandage as an epidemic
phenomenon during the Dilessi episode, led to the re-contextualisation and
repetition of a pre-existing idea. The discourse that the Greeks directed to Britain
and to themselves after Dilessi succeeded in correlating the Vlachs and the
Albanians of Greece, an ‘internal limit’, with an ‘external border’, the
Turkish/Slav evil ‘others’, thus transforming them into ‘a surplus’ of Greek
identity. According to Etienne Balibar, internal limits ‘[refer] to a problematic of
purity, or better, of purification, which is to say that it indicates the uncertainty of
the identity, the way in which the “inside” can be penetrated or adulterated by its
relation with the “outside”, [that is] the foreign.’ 196 Not only were the
Vlach/Albanian brigands symbolised as foreigners (Slavs), but they also became
accomplices or agents of the main external national enemy, the Turks. In this way
political ‘disorder’, the Greek Kingdom’s defect, would cease to be regarded as a
domestic problem. The narrative had two functions to fulfil in Greek reflections
on Dilessi: to enable the Greek ‘nation’ to recognize itself as a pure unity, and to
seek for recognition from its admired protectors, Britain and the rest of Europe.
The phenomenon of border crime in both Greece and Turkey continued to
be discussed by British officialdom long after the Dilessi Murders. In a
Parliamentary Report of 1874 the Queen’s Secretary of Legation in Athens, Malet,
records a passage from a dispatch of the British Consul at Thessaloniki to Sir
Henry Elliot, the British Ambassador at Constantinople. Although the dispatch
refers to the flourishing of brigandage on the Turkish-Greek border, the sender
‘very much apprehends’ that ‘brigandage will revive at not distant date on the
border of Greece and Albania, especially if all these surrendered brigands are kept
on parole in localities where they have so many confederates and harbourers.’ 197
The geographically marginal location and the terror of contamination, which is
communicated to the reader through the repeated use of the concept of ‘scourge’
in the report reminds us of the vocabulary the Greek newspapers used after the
Dilessi Murders.

192 A further association could be made here between Fallmerayer’s theory that Athens became an
Albanian city at the end of antiquity, and the Neohellenic persistence that brigands in Greece are
Albanians; but this opens a major historiographical question, which cannot be pursued here.
193 E. Skopetea, Fallmerayer: Tricks of the Rival Awe (Athens, 1999), p. 100.
194 S. Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonisation and the Institution of Modern Greece

(Stanford and California, 1996), p. 144.

195 Ibid.
196 E. Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy before and after Marx translated by

James Swenson (London and New York, 1994), p. 63.

197 The Times, 6 July 1875.

77
 Other British visitors to Greece quoted this report later. James Young, an
Oxford student, used it as a compass during his tour to the Greek Kingdom.
Young’s diary also included a letter from ‘a British resident in Athens’, who may
have been George Finlay. ‘At present,’ wrote Young’s friend, ‘this country is free
from this scourge, partly in consequence of the severely repressive measures
taken by the Government after the Dilessi massacre, and partly from the cordial
understanding […] between the Hellenic and Ottoman authorities […] although
the race of Albanian Wallachs (or Vlacks), amongst whom these bands are raised,
still exist to the number of about 30,000 in Greece’ 198 The letter contains George
Finlay’s estimations and illustrates the climate of Greek debates. Young himself
was convinced that the Vlachs he had come across conformed to the description
of ‘banditti,’ 199 but he did not explicitly comment on the truthfulness of the
Greek argument that these Vlachs, because they brought shame upon Greece, were
no longer considered part of the Greek imagined community.
The anxiety about Vlach/Albanian brigand threat was intensified towards the
end of the 1870s, when the idea of establishment of an independent Albanian
state began to openly find support in other countries. Because the Albanian
nationalists’ self-designation was different from that of the Albanian-Greeks of
the Greek Kingdom, one should not dismiss the political setting: Albanian
nationalism was recognised as an issue after the Berlin Conference in 1878. In
1879, when the Austrians and the Germans set the basis for the Drang nach Osten
Germanic policy, Italy tried to create her own sphere of influence in the Balkans.
When part of the Albanian elite proposed to King George of the Hellenes a plan
for an Albanian-Greek Federation in Epirus (which Greece claimed for herself),
Italy incited Albanian nationalism in the region and cancelled further negotiations.
Not surprisingly, at the beginning of the 1880s Greek hatred towards the
Albanians was expressed more open in Greek newspapers. In that conjunction of
circumstances, the Albanian irredentists were once again associated with Turkish
anti-Greek propaganda, but they were also termed Vlachs, and ‘Turkalbanian
brigands’! 200 The nationalist subtext of this definition is clear: those
‘Vlachs/Albanians’ wanted to plunder and de-hellenise territories that belonged
to the Neohellenes and were non-Greek ‘brigands’. (The Greeks themselves
continued to use brigand bands as irredentist forces to claim European territories
of Turkey). The initial logic of the Greek ‘ethnic truth’ of Dilessi was still present,
but interpreted in a different way. For, in the dawn of the 1880s a non-Greek
(Vlach/Albanian) national enemy was represented as a brigand and not the brigand
as a Neohellenic national enemy. 201
As was mentioned above, after the unfortunate Anglo-Greek diplomatic
episode of Dilessi the Greeks were anxious to convince Europe, and Britain in
particular, that their version of truth was the correct one; Burnouf had served as
an intermediary for this purpose. However there were other, more important,
authorities whose statements were appropriated so as to support the Greek
discourse of Oriental contamination. I refer here to the US Minister at Athens,
Charles Tuckerman, who, despite his incisive comments on Greek culture,
initially found the Greek suggestion that brigands in Greece were Turks-
Albanians convincing. Tuckerman’s work on brigandage, which first appeared

198 J.F. Young, Five Weeks in Greece (London, 1876), ix.

199 ibid., pp. 225-226.
200 See Aión, 10 and 14 July 1880; Palingenesía, 3 April 1881.
201 See also The Times, 14 August and 7 September 1876 for a similar argument concerning

Circassian raids in European Turkey in the letters of an anonymous Greek reader.

78
after the Dilessi Murders in the form of a report, was republished in his travel
diaries two years later and enjoyed immense popularity in Britain. 202 The Greek
translation of his travel book, which followed five years later re-imported the
narrative in Greece and bestowed upon it the legitimacy that was lacking.
Tuckerman had no illusions about the enthusiasm for his report in Greece and he
did not miss the chance to record it in his travel diary. It was unfortunate that his
British readership was given the chance to read his reflections. I translate from
the Greek instead because it is more colourful:

My diatribe caused great sensation in the East, a reaction that was initially irrational
for me. I later managed to explain that: my work explored an issue not much
reflected upon [by Greeks]. I bore witness to almost a dozen of translations and
reprints of that report and the Greek newspapers reproduced it with thousands of
praises. But I was not so blind as not see that the main reason of so much gratitude
had to do with those passages in which I put the whole blame for the existence of
brigandage in Greece on Turkey. 203

Tuckerman’s comment nevertheless did not daunt his Greek translator who
ignored this insinuation and praised Tuckerman once again. Equally, nobody in
Greece thought that in 1872 many Britons and Americans who had purchased the
book read his reflections. The fact that Tuckerman had supported the Greek
official thesis made them think that in the final analysis, the foreigners were
coerced into acknowledging the ‘truth’.
Behind the label of ‘truth’ can be found another form of political truth.
Narrations of identity incorporate defence mechanisms to attack centrifugal
powers developed in the imagined community and to prevent the components of
the nation from acknowledging that there is in fact no centre, no core of the
‘nation’. It is the ritual of defence and constant re-selection of the nation’s
components that makes the nation ‘real’ – or rather, brings the nation into life. In
the modern world of the nineteenth century, the interests of the Greeks were
represented by the Greek state – a not yet fully formed power apparatus, which
was looking for ways to consolidate itself and achieve recognition from the
Greeks and its European protectors. The immediate problem the state had to
overcome was the diversity and richness of cultural experience (the Greeks of
Diaspora, the unredeemed Greeks, the liberated Greeks). Even within the
Kingdom, there were different scales of experience (the local, the social). And
then, there was a series of problems that accompanied the very process of state-
emergence. Brigandage was the by-product of this process, but also a ‘slur’ on
national honour abroad. In a sense, the Dilessi Murders realised the worse of
Greek nightmares: in a period in which the Greeks were seeking for ways to
define themselves as a ‘civilised European nation’, they became the object of
derision abroad. In the expression of anti-Greek sentiments Britain, one of the
leading Great Powers and a ‘civilised protector’ of the ‘small Greece’, had a
leading role. When in the British journalistic discourse of Dilessi, Greece became
an uncivilised country, the ‘nation’s’ spokesmen tried to find a way to redefine
Greek national qualities. It was obvious that the defects the foreign, and especially

202 C. Tuckerman, The Greeks of Today (London, 1872). On the Vlachs and the Albanians see the
Greek version: The Greeks of Today, translated into Greek by Antonios Zyghomalas, official of the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Athens, 1877), especially p. 203.
203 Ibid., p. 206.

79
British, observers, identified in the Greek nation had to be excluded from it —
they had, in other words, to be identified as alien.
The defect named brigandage was transferred (in Freudian terms) to the Vlach
nomads and the Albanians brigands who were in a marginal social position in the
Greek Kingdom. These ethnic groups were symbolised as aliens although they were in
fact populations that often regarded themselves as Greek and that the Greek state
wanted to claim as part of the Greek imagined community. But in the imagined
life trajectory of the Greek ‘nation’ their social difference became a threat, which
had to be obliterated at all costs. Subsequently, in the Greek national imaginary
the ‘scourge of brigandage’ despised abroad became a non-Greek quality that
defined the ‘Arvanitóvlachi’. The allegedly Slav historical origin of the Albanians
– or Albanian-Vlachs - of the Greek Kingdom was an additional characteristic the
Greek commentators on Dilessi took into account. For the nineteenth-century
Greeks, to act out the fear of contamination from alien elements became
equivalent to what Žižek called ‘the future’s primacy’ 204 : repetition of this ritual of
re-selection of ‘national qualities’ testified to their collective engagement in the
preservation of their identity. A historical past haunted this discourse on Greek
identity. To identify this past I would ask my readers to reconsider what was said
in the introduction to this part of the thesis about the role of brigandage in the
pre-revolutionary period. This phenomenon was a form of ethnic resistance in
the close ‘Oriental past’ of the Greeks but after the institution of the Greek state
it became a despised defect that was projected on to the ‘enemy’ against which it
had been used: Turkey. Thus official discourse on Dilessi became a discourse of
separation and purification (in Mary Douglas’s terms) from the filthy Ottoman
elements that adulterated Neohellenic culture. The attempt fell wide of the mark:
for the British there was simply too much history in this practice – a history they
would not let the Greeks disavow. It is to this history that I shall now turn my
attention.

204S. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology (London and New York, 1999),
p. 18.

80
 PART II
History’s Omnipresence: An Essay on the
Dead, the Living, and the Resurrected
I will speak of a novelist, Charles Dickens, who flourished in
a period somewhere between the seventeenth and twentieth
centuries of our earth. The titles of his works have been
retrieved but only one text survives, alas, in an incomplete
form. Seven pages have been removed, and the author’s
name partially defaced, for reasons unknown to me. Most of
the narrative remains, however, and it provides a unique
opportunity to examine the nature of Mouldwarp
imagination. The novel is entitled On the Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection by Charles D--. The rest of the name
has been gouged out by some crude tool, and the phrase
‘Vile stuff!’ written in a dry-based substance. Clearly the
reader did not approve of the fiction […] By observing bees,
and pigeons, and various other creatures around him, [the
author] manages to create an entire world of such complexity
that eventually he believes it to be real. This is reminiscent of
another fiction we have recovered, Don Quixote, in which the
protagonist is similarly deluded. The quixotic hero of The
Origin however, is portrayed as being obsessed by ‘struggle’,
‘competition’, and death by natural selection’ […] ‘The
Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life,’
refers to the Mouldwrap delusion that all human beings
could be classified in terms of ‘race,’ ‘gender,’ or ‘class’. We
find interesting evidence of this in the anecdotes of a
comedian, Brother Marx, of whom I will speak at a later
date…

Peter Ackroyd, The Plato Papers (London, 2000) pp. 5-

6.

81
 1. NECRANASTASIS (RESURRECTION)
i. Clio’s necrophilia and the writing of Greek
histories

In this chapter I will try to shed light on the nineteenth-century study and making
of Greek history by Britons and Greeks. My intention is to look at interpretations
of a Greek past and the bearing this past had upon modern Greek identity. I will
therefore include in my analysis British and Greek reflections on ancient,
Ottoman, revolutionary and post-revolutionary Greece; I will also try to
reconstruct the ways such reflections were arranged into a conceptual schema of
continuities and discontinuities. This analysis will be used later for the
understanding of British and Greek hegemonic conceptions of Greek history as a
whole. Not all the works that appear here are academic. It must be stressed that the
purpose of this chapter is to examine the development of historical thinking
within and without academia, and to capture the multiplicity of opinions and
ideas that contributed to the understanding of the modern Greek character. I
tried to focus on the most influential works of the period, but, when it was
necessary, I included in the analysis newspaper articles and political commentary.
The question of legacies in Greek culture is an on-going debate nowadays. Maria
Todorova devoted a chapter in her recent book Imagining the Balkans to explore
the ways the Ottoman and Byzantine bequests to the Balkan peoples were used
by Western European observers in their construction of a discourse on Balkan
identities. I will re-pose the question, but in a more specific context: How many
such legacies emerged in British and Greek reflections on Greek history, and why
these particular legacies and not other? Is it not that ‘legacy’ is a powerful metaphor,
which masks the significant role some historical forces play in the making of
one’s present? 205 Michel De Certeau argued that the historical ‘real’, the actual
historical past, is not simply what we know (what the historian studies) but also
what determines the scientific operation (the problématique of the text as an aspect
of the present society that preoccupies the historian). ‘On the one hand, the real is
the result of analysis, while on the other, it is its postulate.’ 206 This means in our
case that the Greek legacies that appeared in British and Greek narrations were
singled out, chosen to reconstruct the history of the Greek nation. At the same
time, their selection and arrangement was presented as the only reliable way to
understand Greek identity over the centuries.
This exercise appears in Sir Thomas Wyse’s comments on the melancholy
condition of Chaeronea in Greece. It is true that his diaries are chronologically
situated in the 1850s, long before the beginning of the period of study. The
reason they are used in the chapter is because not only do they capture the spirit
of later British narratives, but they also influenced these narratives. The third
reason is that Wyse’s reflections are far from being detached from what
constitutes nineteenth-century Greece:

205 S. Federici, ‘The God that Never Failed: The Origins and Crises of Western Civilisation,’ in S.
Federici (ed), Enduring Western Civilisation The Concept of Western Civilisation and its Others (London
and Connecticut, 1995),
p. 76.
206 M. De Certeau, The Writing of History (New York, 1988), p. 35.

82
 And then, came up, one after the other, all the succeeding histories born in this
fatal field, stalking over the congenial scene, like so many Moirai and Destinies,
and disappearing before or absorbed by their successor. Byzantine fiscal
absolutism; Frank, many-headed feudal tyranny; Ottoman, sloth-oppressing and
sloth-creating lethargy; each leaving worse what they have found bad, and at
length surrendering the exhausted residuum to the Nemesis of the Revolution.
There are many scenes in Greece which stir and teach, - none better and more
profound than this. It is the end, as Marathon was the frontispiece of the great
volume. Out of the nude sword, and out of the sword’s rule, nothing of life and
freethinking can come to a country. After this, Greece lived only a galvanic or
borrowed life. Alexander conquered barbarians with barbarians. Hellenism was
brought in to adorn his conquest. Hellas, however, had a small share either in the
victory, or in enjoyment. The whole of her after-history, even its best deeds, are
only efforts how to die decorously. On this field, τέλος– the end, - is written
visibly. The inscription remains to this day. 207

Wyse’s ‘end of history’ (τέλος) is the end of a Greek history. Because Wyse started
his narration with the glory of the Hellenic fifth century, the ideal of nineteenth-
century Europe, he constructed a schema of Greek decline. 208 This decline leads
to the death of the Hellenic spirit; implicitly, its Neohellenic counterpart is
presented as its impoverished version. Wyse explained the mechanism of decline:
the legacies (Alexandrian, Byzantine, Frank, Ottoman) do not necessarily die but
are absorbed in the succeeding stages of Greek history. Interestingly, the ‘curse’
of the Moírai (Fates) is a metaphor that represents decline as inevitable. Wyse
played the game of historical necessity/contingency in this instance. The elements
of Greek history that he saw as important/necessary for ‘the end’ were
represented as inevitable. Through this process of selection, Greek history was
narrated by Wyse as a series of disruptions or legacies. The ultimate and most
important of those was the episode of the Greek Revolution, which many other
observers saw as the beginning of modern Greek history. In fact, Wyse’s narrative
served as a point of reference for another travel diary that was published much
later. Examining the past and present social state of Navarino (Pylos) and having
Wyse’s diaries and Finlay’s works as guides, an Oxford student, James Foster
Young, performed a similar analysis. Young also began his narrative from the
ancient Hellenic era and ended with the famous sea-battle of Navarino in 1827.
He saw the freedom of Greece, which was gained with the help of the Great
Powers, as the beginning of modern Greek history. The way this narration was
constantly reproduced in the English scholarly network is also remarkable, and
Young provides valuable information about this:

It is perhaps needless to say that, like Thackeray’s celebrated answer, which was
utterly to annihilate his opponent in an argument, I did not recall all these
associations till afterwards (and then with the help of Messrs. Thucydides and

207 Wyse, Impressions, p. 155. See also W. Cochran, Pen and Pencil in Asia Minor or Notes from the
Levant (London, 1887), pp. 134-135; Bagdon, Brigands, vol. I, p. 28.
208 See J. Derrida, Spectres of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work mourning, and the New International

(New York and London, 1994), especially his critique of Fukuyama’s The End of the History and the
Last Man.

83
 Finlay), too late to be of any use! However, it is a pious fraud, and I believe a
writer’s licence, to pretend one did recall it all on the spot! 209

This is the game of ‘retroactive performativity’, which determines the writing of

history: Young did not articulate his observations on the spot, but retroactively.
The way he arrived at his conclusion through a dense referential network, enables
the historian to identify the strategic formation of the discourse. 210 Also, one cannot
avoid noticing that Young saw in Navarino the history of British contribution to
the creation of modern Greece.
The way this narrative circulated in the Anglo-Saxon (British and American)
world is another aspect that has to be investigated. I will use the reflections of
Cornelius Felton, director of Harvard University, because they reappear in British
and Greek pamphlets. 211 In the second volume of Felton’s lectures, the editor
claimed that although Felton’s course was ‘within the conventional scope of
ancient history’ the writer preferred to give it the title ‘Modern Greece’. This
peculiar note begins to make sense when one realises that Felton divided Greek
history into four periods: the Periclean, the Alexandrian, the Ottoman and the
post-revolutionary. 212 This second volume is, by and large, an overview of
modern Greek history –the contemporary phase ‘of degeneration’ in Felton’s own
words, a comment that British commentators found plausible. 213
Discontinuities in Greek history were discussed and represented by Britons
primarily as past conquests of Greek regions. The debate often led to a confusion
of inner (Greek) and outer (non-Greek) agents in Greek history. This confusion
was more evident in the discussion of the two Oriental legacies in Greek culture,
namely the Turkish and the Byzantine. Both the Turks and the Byzantines were
presented as conquerors of Greece, although the first were foreigners and the
latter represented a past that came to have a strong hold on modern Greek
thought. Unquestionably, these two were the legacies that left the indelible stigma
of reayah on modern Greek culture. Accusations that ‘all these centuries of
subjection and oppression have demoralised and debased the nation’ 214 were
constant in British reflections. In Greek history, Byzantine and Ottoman ages
were not strictly segregated but were examined together as a single phenomenon
that led to Greek decline. There were, of course, less pessimistic observations that
supported the opposite view. For example, Richard Claverhouse Jebb, Professor
of Greek at the University of Glasgow observed in the end of the 1870s the
following:

209 Young, Five Weeks, p. 181; for similar comments see E. Postlethwaite, A Tour in Crete (London,
1868),
p. 77.
210 Said, Orientalism, p. 20.
211 I offer as examples from the British side the Anonymous of Some Notes on Turkey and from the

Greek side the Anonymous of East and West (1868); both of them refer to Felton’s lectures.
212 C. Felton, Greece, Ancient and Modern, Lectures Delivered before the Lowell Institute, vol.II (Boston,

1867),
pp. 248, 523.
213 See Some Notes, p. 50; E. Cazalet, The Berlin Congress (London, 1878), pp. 17-18.
214 Poole, People of Turkey, p. 36. For the same see J.L. Farley, Turks and Christians: A Solution of the

Eastern Question (London, 1876), pp. 8, 23, M.A. Walker, Through Macedonia to the Albanian Lakes
(London, 1864), pp. 37-42. See also Gladstone’s preface in E.M. Mackenzie and A.P. Irby, Travels
in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe, vol. I (London, 1877), viii.

84
 In 1453, the third and last chapter of Greek subjection opens. Under Turkish
domination the Greek race was brought to the lowest condition, which the long
record of its existence can show. No other race, probably, having once fallen so
deep, has again risen to freedom and civilisation. Those who would read this dark
chapter aright must carefully distinguish between national unhappiness and
national degradation. The crowing proof of that domination is intellectual and
moral death to its subjects is when those subjects have been brought to feel
contented with a mere animal existence, and have ceased to resent – even to feel-
the privation of everything which imparts a higher dignity and value to human
life. 215

But even for Jebb Turkish domination was only a continuity of the Byzantine
‘dark ages’. 216 In this discourse the backward ‘Byzantine Christianity’ was deemed
to have shaped modern Greek character and to have become the point of
departure from ancient Greek modes of thought. Interestingly, the narrative,
though assembled by British observers, was fundamentally nationalistic: it
presented the Greek nation as a perennial body in history (which pre-existed the
War of Independence), but at the same time it acknowledged a series of
disruptions in this history that contested its eternalness. The former placed the
Greek nation above history; the latter presented it as the outcome of history in
retrospect.
Identification of discontinuities in history often coincided with the
appropriation of history so as to serve contemporary British needs. In this case, it
was the history of the other, the Greeks, which the British used to understand
themselves. 217 Martin Bernal’s Black Athena was the first serious account of this
political project and its consequences. The absolute necessity of European
colonisers to legitimise the violence that they inflicted upon the colonised nations
found its theoretical complement in the notion of superiority of the European
Hellenocentric civilisation. European historians created in this way a myth about
ancient Europe, in which African and Asian origins and innovations were ‘written
out’ of history. 218 The practices of colonisation were easily identified in ancient
Greek culture. This ‘reading’ of Hellenic history placed in play ‘a constellation of
values and practices, which included occupying the land, cultivating the earth, the
affirmation of origins and ancestors, and the transmission of inherited values to
new generations’. 219 British classicism operated within this framework to bring
back the ancient Greeks and use them to endorse British civilising - that is
colonising - mission. But the ‘resurrection’ of the Greek nation in 1821 made this
project problematic: who was the real heir of ancient Greek civilisation now? For
the British the Periclean Greeks had long vanished, leaving behind a race of
degenerate beggars and brigands who could not join the European community of

215 R.C. Jebb, Modern Greece Two Lectures Delivered before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh
(London, 1880),
p. 35.
216 Ibid.
217 See M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London, 1997), esp. chapter V ‘The Historical a

priori and the Archive’ (pp. 126-131).

218 The thesis is developed in M. Bernal’s work, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical

Civilisation, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, vol. I (London, 1991). For the question of
Eurocentrism in historiography see J.M. Blatt, The Colonizer’s Model of the World (New York and
London, 1993), esp. Ch. II, ‘The Myth of the European Miracle.’
219 E. Shohat and R. Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism. Multiculturalism and the Media (London and New

York, 1994), p. 15. Note also the root of the word colonisation from colo - that is cultivate (past
participle cultus and future participle culturus).

85
nations. Introduction of discontinuity in Greek history mirrored this new
problématique that related not only to European origins, but also to heritage – the
Hellenic heritage that the Europeans claimed for themselves. This may explain
why in British writings, although the language of Hellenic regeneration persisted,
the modern Greek nation was simultaneously seen by Britons as a recent
construct that emerged from a long history of subjection.
The discussion concerning legacies in Greek culture unveiled a British
uneasiness that history had buried the Hellenes forever, and that they could not
be resurrected. But the idea of bringing back the ‘archactors’ of European
civilisation, the ancient Greeks, was part of the project the British shared with
other Western Europeans. It is therefore important for the purposes of this study
to re-consider it from the British standpoint alone. In this context, undoubtedly,
classicism became a means of British self-reflection but also self-construction.
The very idea of British modernity was predicated upon the Periclean age.
Mahaffy explains what the significance of the classicist project was:

Let us invert the whole case, and the result would be very analogous. If one of us
were transported to Periclean Athens, provided he were a man of high culture, he
would find life and manners strangely modern, as he might term it. The thoughts
and feelings of modern life would be there without the appliances, and the high
standard of general culture would more than counterbalance sundry wants in
material comfort. 220

The ancient Greeks were for Mahaffy ‘thoroughly modern, more modern even
than the epochs quite approximate to our own. Because they have worked out
social and moral problems like ourselves; they have expressed them in such
language as we should desire to use.’ 221 Mahaffy’s thesis was symptomatic of
British processes modernisation: British academic and extra-academic discourses
of Hellenic revival were part of the debate upon modernity and national
modernisation in so far as British academia itself was a modern national
institution. In fact the British wanted to see the modern Greeks becoming
ancient, because British classicism regarded the ‘forefathers’ of the Neohellenes as
fully modern subjects. This projection of Greek modernity into the remote,
fabricated past of Europe had unexpected consequences, as we will see in the last
part of the thesis.
The paradox in the Hellenocentric discourse Martin Bernal investigated was
that historical change had no place: it was more an analogy or homology between
European colonial projects and appropriated Hellenic civilisation that supported
the European argument. This static, structural relationship between ancient
Hellenic and modern European civilisations led British academics in particular to
logical insistencies when they analysed the relationship between ancient and
modern Greek character. For example, to justify the Hellenocentric project some
British academics had recourse to western Aristotelian ideas. Through a specific
reading of Aristotle they wrote accounts in which natural forms and human
qualities became almost synonymous. Ancient Greekness could thus be
deconstructed and explained through the analysis of the natural environments in
which the ancient Hellenes lived. Note how Henry F. Tozer, tutor of Exeter

220 Rev. J.P. Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece form Homer to Menander, fourth edition (London, 1879), p.
3.
221 Ibid., p. 1.

86
College, Oxford University, found in the combination of two natural elements,
sea and mountain, the core of ancient Greek spirit.

This was what was wanting in Egypt and in Hindostan, in both of which countries
the predominance of one great element of nature had a debasing effect on
civilisation. At the same time, the aspect of so many varied objects by sea and
land, and the ever-changing phases that they presented, could not fail to foster the
versatility of temperament, which has been the characteristic of the Greeks of all
ages. 222

There was a paradox in Tozer’s argument. Although his lectures concerned a long
vanished Hellenic civilisation, his analysis of Greek natural environments, which
remain unchanged, supported the continuity of Greek character from the ancient
ages. It is necessary to explain what Tozer does here. Risking anachronism, we
might imagine a student of the Mediterranean, who, focusing on Braudel’s
observations on geography and its role in social life, disregards the fact that what
he is supposed to study is not natural environments, but the way the people
mobilised and utilised natural resources. And yet Tozer’s naturalisation of Greek
qualities predicates the conclusion that Afroasian civilisations were inferior to the
Hellenic because they ‘were born’ in different environments. 223
The aforementioned British reflections were part of the narrative in which
powerful European countries presented the Greeks with two conflicting historical
narratives: one that asked who the Neohellenes are (the product of a history of
subjections), and another that asked whom the Neohellenes are same as (their
ancestors). 224 Inevitably, Greek commentators responded to such appropriations
of Greek history by combining these historical possibilities and their practical
realisation in their own polemical discourse. 225 That is why the Greek Revolution
appeared as a discontinuity in Greek reflections – although a discontinuity that
introduced European intervention in Greek history. At least this is what Odysséas
Iálemos, a famous Greek political commentator of the period, argued:

The Great Event of the Greek Revolution resulted in the taming of the East. The
right of intervention of the European Powers in the East dates back to 1821; that
right would have had brilliant consequences if the governments of the civilised
states were inspired not by egotism and petty jealousy against each other, but a
sincere concern for the Christian rayahs. 226

Not only does Iálemos write about a watershed in Greek history, but he also uses
it to make an anti-Western political comment. A combination of foreign legacy
and anti-European polemic is what underlies the narrative of the author of East
and West too. His work is a series of troubling images of Occidental intrusion into

222 Rev. H.F. Tozer, Lectures on the Geography of Greece (London, 1873), p. 180; Tozer quotes the
geographer Dean Stanley to add authority to his argument.
223 See also Felton, Lectures, p. 297.
224 Herzfeld, Anthropology, p. 192.
225 P. Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, New

Jersey, 1993),
p. 41.
226 Iálemos, Rights and Duties, p. 16. Iálemos participated in the revolution (1862) for the

dethronement of Otho, first King of the Greeks and he was plenipotentiary later in the committee
for the election of a new King. Some of his articles were diatribes on Greek politics and Greek
social and intellectual life, and were published in newspapers in Constantinople/Istanbul. The
book from which I quote is a collection of such works.

87
the history of the Greek Mediterranean region: Roman conquest, the crusades,
Venetian colonisation of the Peloponnese and some Greek islands, Napoleonian
conquest of Egypt, the Crimean war and the Anglo-French occupation of Piraeus,
and finally, the Suez Question. ‘Anonymous’ argues that Hellenic colonisation of
Italy was the equivalent of what modern European nations did in weak countries
such as Greece. 227 It is obvious that for him Greek history is placed in the wider
context of eastern Mediterranean and European history. ‘Anonymous’ also argued
that Great Power manipulation of the Eastern Question, which was initiated by
the Greek Revolution, was a defining moment in Greek history. 228
But for the Greeks such discontinuities did not entail an intrinsic change in
Greek character. This argument was equivalent to that which British academics
such as Tozer constructed, in which Hellenic qualities were linked to Greek
nature and landscape. The difference was that Greek commentators saw a
continuity of Greek character in deeds and in culture – two notions that were
naturalised. Patriotism and love for freedom, for example, were deemed by them to
be perennial characteristics of Greek identity. Clió’s series of historical essays on
the ‘Usefulness of History’, in 1864, endorsed and disseminated this idea. Greek
patriotism and freedom were represented as the ‘offspring of Greek history’, a
metaphor for the long-term effect that Oriental conquest and European
patronage had in Greek history. 229 The celebration of the national day in Greece
(25 March), a ritual of commemoration of the nation’s birth, invited similar
reflections by Palingenesía which was concerned with the natural continuity of
Greek character:

Holy freedom is Greek heritage. It was inspired in the Greeks by divine authority
and they worshipped it alone. The 25th of March bears testimony to the fact that
the same blood circulates in Themistocles and Miltiades’ veins and in ours. In
338 BC freedom was wounded by Phillip in Cheronea and (it) died in Coritnh in
146. Finally, on Tuesday May 29th 1453 freedom was buried in Constantinople by
the Turks. But on 25 March 1821 it resurrected in the hearts of the Greeks “as
gallant as before.” 230

This may sound like the usual nonsense which school students are forced to listen
in every such anniversary; it is interesting nonsense nevertheless. The journalist
fabricated his periodology by selecting a single important event (25 March 1821),
which could arrange Greek historical experience. But the narration was not
constructed separately from contemporary concerns. It was precisely the ‘freedom
and unity of the Greek nation’ which, at the time of narration, appeared to be at
stake and negotiable in the journalist’s imagination. Because the Greek journalist
wanted to appropriate history to Greek needs, he transformed it into panoptic
time, that is, he examined legacies of conquest that took place in different periods
and regions at the same time. 231
Greek commentators appropriated other Hellenic symbols to assert Greek
historical continuity. Hellenic language, the language par excellence of antiquity,
served to this end. In this instance the journalists called upon British researchers

227 Anonymous, East and West (Ermoupolis, 1866), pp. 6-11.

228 Ibid. pp. 14-19; See also I Ch. B., The Revolutionary Voice of Greece (Athens, 1877), p. 48-49.
229 Clio, 10/22 July, 1864. The articles were by someone who signed as ‘Th. A.’
230 Palingenesía, 28 March 1867. The last quote in the newspaper makes a reference to the Greek

national anthem.
231 I draw here on Foucault’s reflections in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London,

1991), esp. the chapter on Panopticism, pp. 195-231.

88
of repute, such as Martin Leake, to support their argument. The works of Leake
on Greece, which became the bible of British academia, were presented by
Palingenesía as the politically correct example of writing on Greek historical claims
during the Cretan Insurrection:

Our country stretches from Tainairon to upper Macedonia, including all the islands
and the coasts of the Archipelago. The wise Colonel Martin Leake, who visited
this country, claims that it is inhabited by the Greek race and that no other race
has changed so little in such a long period as the Greeks. Leake observes that we
use in our writing the ancient alphabet, that we use the ancient language and that
we retain all the ancient names […]. This wise man, who did not write fables but
true narratives of Greek history, and who because of that was used by the British
government as an adviser in its relations with us, supports the idea that the modern
Greek race is defined by analogous qualities to those of ancient Greek thought. 232

Two ideas coexist in this passage: (a) language becomes the vehicle of historical
continuity in Greek character (b) the relationship between modern and ancient
Greeks is predicated upon analogy and not continuity. These two ideas are not
identical: The first is equivalent to the European discourse of Greek degeneration
which presented the Neohellenic nation as the outcome of history. The second is
another European discourse which sought for similarities or dissimilarities
between ancient and modern Greeks. Moreover, the Greek journalist conflated
the notions of Greek race and character.
This discourse that confused racial and cultural continuity was also entangled
with the debate on Byzantine legacy. As it was explained in the last part of the
thesis, the two debates coincided in the writings of Jacob Fallmerayer. 233 In this
chapter priority will be given to the uses of Fallmerayer in Greek and British
narratives. The centrality of Fallmerayer’s theory per se in Anglo-Greek exchange
can be contested, but the ways it was mobilised by both sides will shed light on
British and Greek preoccupations with it.
I will begin with a passage from East and West by Stefanos Xenos, a Greek
entrepreneur and writer. In Xenos’s work the hatred towards Fallmerayer
becomes a criticism of British colonial policy in the Ionian Islands. An account of
the legacies in Greek precedes the quoted passage which left no traces in Greek
culture according to Xenos, because the Greeks have the power to assimilate their
conquerors culturally. There are past and present conquerors of Greece; among
the latter, the most important are the British. It must be borne in mind that,
though Xenos was giving an historical account, he was interested in contesting
the ‘anti-Greek’ attitude of Austen Henry Layard. 234 He thus examined
Fallmerayer’s and Layard’s intellectual endeavours together:

232 Palingenesía, 4 July 1867.

233 For more information on Fallmerayer, see ‘Haunted by the enemy within, I’.
234 Sir Henry Austen Layard (1817-1894) was one of the leading British archaeologists of the

nineteenth century, but he did not restrict his intellectual activities to archaeology: he was also a
distinguished diplomat, a politician, an art connoisseur and a man of letters. Described as an
excavator of Nineveh and a politician, he entered the legal profession in 1836. On July 1839 he
and his travelling companion, Edward Mitford, set off on the long journey later described in detail
in Layard’s Nineveh and its Remains (1849). In Late 1845 Layard began his expedition of the
excavation at Nimrud, near Mosul in Iraq, where he discovered the Assyrian regal monuments and
cuneiform inscriptions. Layard interpreted the latter as the visible remains of Nineveh, the great
Assyrian capital. In 1851 Layard decided to enter the political arena: he gained a seat in Parliament
as member from Aylesbury for the Liberal Party. He was under Secretary of Foreign Affairs from
1861 till 1866, and in the late 1870s he was British ambassador in Constantinople.

89
 The reign of the Turks has been longer and more terrible than that of any other,
but is that our fault? Civilised Europe wished it so, and yet civilised Europe is
indebted to us for the seeds of civilisation, and unquestionably for a great portion
of the political freedom she now enjoys; because, had we not held those
barbarians, at that time the terror of Europe, in check at home, had not our
Armatolis and our Palikaris kept them at bay, by a constant guerrilla warfare,
Heaven only knows where their conquests would have stopped.
And yet, spite of [sic] all the support given by Christian Powers to the Turks, the
latter are rapidly approaching the termination of their career. The very remedies by
which Western Europe hoped to save Turkey, have proved a poison to her, and
Mr. Layard, spite of [sic] his sneers, may live long enough to be convinced that
there was nothing monstrous in the hope of planting the standard of the cross
above the dome of St. Sofia. He will then learn, but too late, that “the
distinguished German writer,” who is no other than the impious Folmereich [sic],
a man whom modern Greece already classes with Erostratus, was one of the worst
persons in conjunction with whom the explorer of Nineveh could have chosen to
parade his name. 235

Fallmerayer’s name is misspelled, but the message is clear: no conqueror, be he

Turk, Slav or British, has a place in Greek history. Greek patriotism, which saved
Europe from moral death, emphasizes continuity and issues a reminder of the
debt the British must pay to modern Greece for its past sacrifices. Fallmerayer
stands in the background though, he mocks, and the Greek commentators cannot
put up with his assertions. His theory makes the Greeks vulnerable and may even
deprive them of the valuable help of the Great Powers. Iálemos knows that in
order to gain Britain’s aid, the Greeks constantly have to remind her of those
aspects of their identity that survived over the centuries.

And if we do not want to justify Fallmerayer’s historical perversion, we should

never forget that the Persian who tried to invade Greece had to retreat with empty
hands, although he had on his side numerous tribes; that our ancestors were
Nicephóroi Fokádes, Tzimiskídes, Basil Bulgaroktónoi. In ages of conspiracy and
alliances of the Persians, the Turkomans and the Arabs, […] these men saved
Hellenism and Europe. 236

Here the modern, Byzantine and ancient Greek eras become part of a single
narrative on Greek identity that contests the argument of discontinuity. Of
course, if it is examined carefully, the idea of a supra-historical Hellenic nation is
contradicted by the very historical facts. But as in all nationalist discourses,
Iálemos’s is selective: it utilises only those aspects of the past that present the
‘nation’ as an always-already existing body in history. So deeply wounded was
Greek pride by Fallmerayer’s theory, that his name became a proverbial offence
in Greek political circles. 237 Cornelius Felton also informs us that the repudiation
of Fallmerayer’s theory was an everyday practice in the University of Athens. For
example Felton recorded that in his lectures, Aristotéles Manúses, an eminent

235 S. Xenos, East and West. The Annexation of the Ionian Islands to the Kingdom of Greece (London,
1865), p. 60.
236 Iálemos, Rights and Duties, p. 76. Nicephóros Focás, Ioánnis Tzimiskís and Basil Bulgaroktónos

(Bulgar-slaughter) were Byzantine emperors.

237 See J. Typaldos-Iakovatos, Speeches in the Second National Assembly and the Parliament of Athens

(Athens, 1902), p. 35 and Kallighás, Vlékas, 178.

90
Greek Professor of History at Athens, repudiated and derided Fallmerayer,
thereby causing ‘a profound sensation’ in the audience. 238
Fallmerayer’s legendary status in Greek imagination was destined to fill the
Greeks with an unceasing fear that nobody loves their nation any more. The
cordon mishellenism put around Greek history compelled a journalist of Clió to
claim in 1869 that the loving object of Europe were the ‘dead and not the living
Greeks’. It is telling that 1869 was the year that the failure of the Cretan
Insurrection was sealed in Paris. The unhelpful attitude of the Great Powers
during the Insurrection definitely disappointed the Neohellenes. It is also
interesting that in this conjunction of events the journalist’s hatred expanded
across the span of Greek history, to embrace Roman, Byzantine, and post-
Byzantine mishellenic writers. 239 A year later, another journalist of Clió used the
writings of Britons to back up an argument against Fallmerayer. The authority of
George Finlay was particularly invoked to speak on behalf of the Greeks after the
Dilessi crisis. Finlay’s theory that the Ottoman ‘yoke’ strengthened, rather than
weakened, the feeling of Greek unity was appropriated by the Greek journalist in
his attempt to refute the theory of the great Tyrolean ‘heresiarch’. 240 If the Greeks
survived four centuries of Ottoman rule, then why should they not have survived
the raids of a few Slavonic beggars in the sixth century, when the Byzantine
empire was so powerful?
The anti-Fallmerayer propaganda was central in Greek writings of the second
half of the nineteenth-century. In fact, one of the outcomes of the panic that the
Tyrolean historian caused was the work of the first Greek national historian,
Constantine Paparrighópoulos. Paparrighópoulos began his career as
Fallmerayer’s opponent and soon became famous. His voice was influential in
Greek letters, and newspapers welcomed his contribution. His History of the Greek
Nation is a much-discussed work nowadays, and some Universities in Greece
recommend it as a ‘politically correct’ reading. Rather than discuss this lengthy
piece, since it is a study in itself, I would like to examine instead a series of articles
which Paparrighópoulos published in Clió in 1875 under the title ‘The Feeling of
National Unity’. Once again, needless to say, modern Greek concerns were
projected onto the past for the sake of the argument: the Greek nation thus
worked as a superego voice, which legitimised itself even before coming into
being. A quotation from one of these articles will help to clarify the point. In this
passage Paparrighópoulos presented the causes and the content of past wars in
the Hellenic and Balkan peninsulas and represented them as the equivalent of the
Greek Revolution of 1821.

In the thirteenth century Michael Angelos Comnenus raised the standard of

revolution in Epirus against the Franks, and then founded a state that extended to
Thessaly, Acarnanía Aitolía; that great rebel called himself despot of Greece. And
the last emperor Constantine Palaeologos heartened his warriors with his last
speech a day before the fall and made them fight - as the sons not only of the
Romans but also of the Greeks - for the City which he used to call ‘hope and
happiness’ of all the Greeks. 241

238 Felton, Lectures, vol.II, pp. 314-315.

239 Clió, 29/10 April, 1869.
240 Clió, 6/18 June 1870.
241 Clió, 6/18 September 1875.

91
Paparrighópoulos quotes Herodotus on the question of Greek national unity as if
it existed before the birth of the Greek nation. Paparrighópoulos’s intention was
not just to define Greek identity through the centuries, but also to defy arguments
against internal contradictions in it - what his contemporary political analysts
would call ‘national discord’. Here Britain served as an example to be avoided.
‘For example’, Paparrighópoulos said in his next article, ‘all this [the value of
unity] is known and common in Great Britain and the North American
Federation, but was not enough to prevent the separation of those two groups
and their repeated conflict. Contrariwise, the unity of the Greek tribes became
evident from the Homeric ages, although neither the country nor the nation were
called Greece and Greeks respectively.’ 242 The debate upon the unity of the Greek
nation thus became a discourse on Anglo-Saxon political and cultural
fragmentation. Paparrighópoulos projected Greek fears for fragmentation and
discord back to their source: the unfulfilled Greek nation, which was split
between liberated and non-liberated components, saw itself in the Anglo-
American conflict and division.
Evidently, Fallmerayer constructed a myth which the Greeks inevitably used
in their national self-narration. Michel De Certeau was right to insist that the
disciple of history is anxious to diagnose the ‘false’, or ‘error’ in past narratives.
For De Certeau this shows that historians do not pursue the true/truth – on the
contrary, they are concerned with fables. 243 Although the historian’s concern to
reconstruct a historical reality is a fallacy in itself (because he is always left with
fragments of the past), his writing of history opens up historical possibilities
which can transform historical reality. That was what Fallmerayer did to the
Greeks: he forced them to re-narrate their history. 244 The repetition of this
narration helped the Neohellenes to shape national history in their imagination.
This repetition of a myth on ‘Hellenic primordial origins’ was mobilised by Greek
historical discourse to explore past and present Greek identity. 245 Greek responses
to Fallmerayer thus became the symptom of the return of a repressed ancestry. 246 As
Stathis Gourgouris noted in Dream Nation, 247 since the birth of the classic-mania
the Greeks have to repeat their denunciation of Fallmerayer’s theory and prove
their linear descent from their admired ancestors, while at the same time, they are
striving to constitute their modern identity.
Greek historians, such as Elli Skopetea, conducted a thorough research on
Greek responses to Fallmerayer, but they barely looked at British reactions to his
theory. It is true that despite some sporadic reflections on his writings in
academic and journalistic discourse, the British did not take his suggestions on
board. Although they themselves reflected on the possibility of Greek
degeneration, for them the argument that Hellenic culture had perished because
of the Slavs was not as important as the Turkish legacy they easily identified in
modern Greek character. It is worth examining, nevertheless, one of the very few
British comments we have on Falmerayer’s writings. It comes from Henry Tozer
who considered the logical error that underlined the theory of the Tyrolean
historian:

242 Clió, 23/4 September 1875.

243 M. De Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Manchester, 1986), p. 200.
244 S. Freud, Moses and Monotheism (New York, 1967), pp. 125-167.
245 See chapter III, ‘William Wordsworth and Sigmund Freud: The Search for the Self

Historicised’ in P.H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover and London, 1993).
246 Žižek, Ticklish Subject, p. 20.
247 Gourgouris, Dream Nation, pp. 141-154.

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 Professor Fallmerayer broadened the theory that [the Greeks] were not related to
the old Greeks, but [are] of Slavonic origin, the descendants of those hordes who
had passed over the country in successive waves of immigration during the middle
ages. The controversy that followed took the same course, and passed through the
same stages, as many similar controversies. At first the suggestion was ridiculed
by some as a paradox, and decried as striking at the root of all Phil-hellenism,
while others were enlisted in its favour by the attraction of novelty […] None can
doubt that the physical element in the Greek race is very largely derived from
Slavonic and other extraneous sources; but at the same time the Hellenic blood
appears to have retained through the lapses of ages that same power of
assimilation, by which in ancient times it amalgamated with itself the large
Pelasgic population of the country. In this way, though physically the modern
Greeks may have but a slight […] claim to call the ancient Greeks their
forefathers, yet in all that really constitutes a people, their characters, their
feelings, and ideas, they are their linear descendants. The conclusion is now pretty
generally received, and is approved, among others, by Mr. Finlay, whose severe
impartiality adds weight to his authority. 248

Tozer spelled out the confusion of race and culture that predicated Fallmerayer’s
theory and he used the authority of Finlay to support his argument. In fact, Finlay
and Tozer were not the only ones who disclaimed the importance of the Slavic
legacy in modern Greek culture. Richard Jebb examined in detail Fallmerayer in
his lectures and, unlike Tozer, he followed Fallmerayer’s confusion of race and
culture. However, Jebb’s conviction was that, although Slavic intrusion in the
Hellenic peninsula left behind names of places, ‘the Greeks, being superior in
civilisation to the Sclavonians, gradually absorbed them’. 249 Even Mahaffy was
not convinced by Fallmerayer and concluded that the Tyrolean’s theory was
feeble. 250 This unanimous rejection may have been associated with British
academic and political preoccupations which prioritised the Orientalist discourse.
In this discourse the Turkish legacy fitted better than the Slavic and served
multiple purposes as we will see in one of the following chapters.

Another chapter could be written on the Anglo-Greek examination of

history after the Greek revolution, but it goes beyond the problematic of this part
of the thesis. A glimpse at the debate will suffice for the analysis of modern
Greek identity. In studies on the post-revolutionary era some Greeks regarded
Neohellenic identity as the direct product of a dialogue with British
constitutionalists. This argument seemed to complement the Greek discourse, in
which the Greek revolution marked the beginning of British intervention in
Greek affairs but, it lacked the strong anti-British element of the former narrative.
Some political analysts, such as Pános Koronéos, regarded British political
intervention in Greece as the driving force of post-independence Greek history.
For Koronéos, ‘the history of Greece from Kapodístrias to the fall of Otho
proves in the best possible way that the position of England is powerful and that
only a blow of the proud Albion could demolish this little kingdom.’ 251 Anti-

248 Tozer, Researches, vol. II, pp. 304-306. See also Jebb (Lectures, pp. 51-52), who follows the same
line of argumentation. For the American view see Felton, Lectures, vol.I, p. 311.
249 Jebb, Lectures, p. 52; see also 51 cf.
250 Mahaffy, Rambles, pp. 10-11.
251 Koronéos, Addressed, p. 8.

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colonial propaganda was prominent in Koronéos’s writing but it was nullified
every time the author aligned with British argumentation. In fact, other Greek
commentators saw in the Othonian regime a form of retrogression to the
Oriental-Turkish legacy. The argument itself was based on British denunciation
of Othonian policy. 252
Some British observers and writers accordingly supported this argument for
Othonian retrogressiveness. The constitutional revolution of 1843 was another
moment of Othonian history that was viewed as a watershed in Greek history,
because Britain was directly involved in Greek politics of the Othonian period. At
the same, the vices and virtues of Greek reaction to constitutional changes
presented Greek identity as the product of a linear history with no disruptions. 253
In this instance the British reckoned the change of the royal dynasty in Greece
and the cession of the Ionian Islands to Greece as the beginning of a new
historical period 254 – a comment that supports the chronology of the thesis. It is
worth noting that at this crossroads British and Greek history making took
different routes. For Greek commentators the constitutional change following the
dethronement of King Otho within the Kingdom was as important as the cession
of the Ionian Islands, because both episodes allowed Greece to ‘enter’ the realm
of European civilisation. 255 In British writings this discourse coexisted with the
one on British rule and continuity in Greek Ionian character. 256 In such
reflections British observers questioned the changes British colonisation
introduced in the Ionian mode of thought that remained essentially Hellenic. The
hegemonic narrative that examined constitutional ‘progress’ in the Greek
Kingdom – a narrative shared by Greeks and Britons - worked under the
Enlightenment principles of human progress. The ultimate vision in
Enlightenment discourse was a united humanity under the shield of Western
European modes of thought; national identities that want to be unique were an
obstacle to this process. 257 In the case of Greece, Enlightenment progress was
signified by constitutional changes and foreign protection/guidance. For some
British commentators this change in modern Greek history deserved to be
recorded. Greece was thus incorporated into the dialogue of Britain with
herself. 258
The operational principles of British and Greek history writing converged on
three points: (a) either the Neohellenes were regarded as the product of long-term
processes but the agents in these processes had not always been the Greeks
themselves, (b) or they were simply compared to their supposed forefathers. In the
first argument, before the Greek revolution the agents were the Byzantines and
the Ottomans, but after liberation those were replaced by Europeans. In short,
modern Greek identity was seen by both Greeks and British as the product of
colonisation by and patronage of various foreigners. It was ironic then that the

252 Xenos, East and West, p. 94; see also Gennadios, Notes, p. 29; Wyse, Impressions, p. 12.
253 Young, Five Weeks, pp. 78-79.
254 D. T. Ansted, The Ionian Islands in the Year 1863 (London, 1863), iii.
255 It is interesting that this discourse predominates in Xenos’s (East and West) and Gennadios’

thought, because both of them lived in Britain for a long time. See also Paparrighopoulos’ treatise
in Clio, 13/25 September 1875.
256 Ibid., pp. 35-37; V. Kirkwall (ed), Four Years in the Ionian Islands. Their Political and Social Condition,

With a History of the British Protectorate, vol. I (London, 1864), vii.

257 Ibid., p. 114.
258 I recall here Elli Skopetea’s analysis of the dialogue between Greece and the Great Powers in

her first book [The ‘Model Kingdom’ and the Great Idea. Aspects of the National Problem in Greece (1830 -
1880) (Athens, 1988)], which is further developed in her second book [The East Sets in the West].

94
debate upon ancient Greek character had a role that was auxiliary to the European
colonial project and to European modernity, an idea the British repeated in their
writings. It did not escape the Neohellenes that these historical discourses could
become a useful tool that could further their nationalist aims. Their dead
‘ancestors’ were long dead and unable to respond to the British or European
challenge; they were alive and could respond. To those living Greeks who became
the object of British observation and to their responses I now turn my attention.

95
 ii. The Gaze upon the modern Greeks: Anglo-
Greek Anthropological Encounters

John Murray’s Guide for Travellers is a repository of tips and arrangements a Briton
ought to consider before departing on his tour to Greece: portable beds, veils for
protection against bloodthirsty Oriental mosquitoes, ‘beware-of-the-treacherous-
Danaos’ notes. The encounter, not with the lifeless statues of the Parthenon, but
with the living Greeks, was a matter that loomed large upon arrival in Greece. In
the very presence of Muses nine British academics and philhellenes wrote praises
for a Greece they knew well, but the Neohellenes whom they met during their
travel required different treatment.
And yet, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Grand Tour to the
classical lands had become a substantial part of the British pedagogical project
concerning the acquisition of immediate knowledge of classical history. Although
in the eighteenth century the main destination had been Italy and Sicily, after the
Greek Revolution the influx of travellers to the liberated Peloponnese and Attica,
but also to Ottoman territories regarded as ‘Greek,’ increased. Sightseeing was a
very important aspect of the Tour, but given its pedagogical character all things
observed had a ‘useful’ story to tell. To be precise, perhaps the ‘tour’ to the Greek
lands should not be seen as part of the Grand Tour at all. In the second half of the
nineteenth century the term Grand Tour would be used less and less to describe
British travel-related scholarly endeavours in Greece. Concepts such as
‘observation’, ‘travel’, or geographical references gradually replaced it.
It is not entirely clear if we can call the British traveller a ‘tourist,’ because
tourism as a leisure activity presupposes a clear-cut demarcation of organised
work and holiday, 259 and nineteenth-century travellers would often go to Greece
with a certain project in their mind: to observe and often publish an account of
their observations. On the other hand, present-day tourism and nineteenth-
century travelling share the practice of reading alien cultures for pre-established
notions/signs. 260 The travel diary was about the reading of pre-established signs
as much as about collection and classification of experience for a foreign
readership. In this respect travel diaries comprised practices we nowadays term
‘anthropological’, even if their creators were not members of an academic
discipline. What is not acknowledged in travel accounts is the biases that determine
(British) reading methods, that is, the unconscious of the observer. In the
following pages I try to explore these questions mainly within the framework of
Anglo-Greek exchange and understand the impact they had on the Anglo-Greek
relationship and the development of Greek folklore. For this purpose I
concentrate mainly, but not only, on British travel accounts. Materials other than
travel diaries were also included, whenever it was necessary to further cast light
on the processes I shall investigate.

Anthropological Observations in Greece

If an ancient Greek spirit is still alive, then it has to make its presence visible. The
Greeks must look like their supposed ancestors, whose physiognomy is retrieved
with the help of the cold marble effigies time spared for the European spectator.

259 J. Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London and New Delhi,
1990), pp. 2-3.
260 Ibid., p. 12.

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The whiteness of these marbles, which supports the myth of Arian Hellenic
origins, was often praised in British accounts. British travel diaries contain
comments on the Neohellenic appearance in various forms, sophisticated and not.
The true Greek type, which Wyse found in Thisbe, was a man with the familiar
‘broad, low forehead, regularly enchased eyes, straight nose and peculiar upper lip,
with his mouth turned slightly downwards at the corners, which gives so much
boldness and melancholy to the old Hellenic face.’ 261 Mahaffy regarded male
classical handsomeness as superior to Greek female beauty. 262 Often, the
explanation for the physical deterioration of women was explained on the
grounds of racial intermixing or miscegenation with the Turks or the Slavs 263 - a
comment, which would have made even Byron repudiate his ideas about Greek
female beauty. 264 For other British observers, female beauty is elusive and soon
disappears because the manners of life, hard fare, and exposure to the sun ‘nip it
in its bud.’ 265
Cultural theorists identify in the body of the observed one of the primary
objects of examination in colonial discourse. For the observer/coloniser, who
constructs the observed as a natural species, the body is the only cultural property
of the observed. The observed lives in his/her body, and in natural space, ‘but
[neither] in a body politic worthy of the name, nor in meaningful historical time
[…] colonialist interest, as in the case of landscape description proceeds from the
visual to various kinds of valorisation.’ 266 Although British scrutiny of the Greek
body shares this practice with colonial discourse, the genealogy the British try to
establish of Greek physis/appearance present it as the product of history.
Such accounts allow the expression of a suppressed homoerotic 267 element.
This element is a type of desire developed into the pursuit of understanding the
Form of beauty, as Socrates explained in Plato’s Symposium. The British observer
‘reads’ and ‘transcendentalises’ Greek male ‘beauty’ with the help of his handbook
and his marble sketches. It is apparent that the classical type exerted a fascination
on the observer. But this preference also had its practical aspects. The observer
found it difficult to carry out his study of the Greek female type freely. Greek
men guard their women zealously, and do not allow them to engage in interaction
with the ‘Lords.’ 268 Thus, they remain out of reach, hidden behind their overdone
dress, shut in their houses.

I am lightly shod and I do not make much noise, nor am I a very fearful
apparition; for I have too much to do to take care of myself to meditate harm to
others; but I have no sooner entered the street than a change comes over it. When I
first turned the corner, young women were gossiping and laughing together in the
doorways, and from the windows: now I hear the click of many doors closing
stealthily; and the lattices are shut everywhere. A Frank is a rare sight in this

261 Wyse, Impressions, p. 84.

262 Mahaffy, Rambles, p. 19; Kirkwall, Four Years, vol. II, p. 19.
263 Tozer, Researches, p. 118.
264 See, for example, R. R. Farrer, A Tour In Greece (Edinburgh and London, 1882), p. 54.
265 J. Murray, A Handbook for Travellers in Greece, fourth edition revised and enlarged (London, 1872), p.

47.
266 Spurr, Rhetoric of the Empire, p. 22.
267 Homoerotic from homoú (ομού, together, similarly) and éros (έρως, attraction) signifies the

invincible platonic hélxis or attraction one’s soul feels for one’s alike. We should not confuse that
with the homosexual, which alludes to the purely physical aspect of the relationship established
between the sexually alike.
268 Ansted, Ionian Islands, p. 58.

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 obscure quarter, and the women are wild as young fawns. They are watching me
from all sorts of places; but if I stayed there for hours, not one would come out till
I was gone. I know why the Greek girls are as shy as young fawns, and it pains me
to think of it: a thousand tales are fresh in my memory of harmless young women
who, by chance, caught the eye of some terrible Turk, and soon after disappeared
mysteriously. 269

The curiosity these women display for the British ‘Lord,’ mirrors the observer’s
gaze upon them. Their withdrawal blocks the observer’s gaze, while permitting
them to assume the duties of a privileged observer: to see without being seen. The
British observer’s desire 270 to possess the appearance of the observed is not
necessarily physical, but symbolic: it is more about knowing and recording the
hidden object. The narrator of this passage wants to intrude into the world of
Greek women and examine them.
This trading of roles was a more general problem for British travellers. The
demand of the rural Greeks to examine the ‘stranger’ was often imposed on the
weary British traveller. Occasionally Greek ‘intrusiveness’ 271 provoked irritation.
Like desire, the gaze rebounded and transformed the anthropological subject into
an anthropological object. The British traveller could not understand that his
presence and his anthropological labours introduced suspicion, but also curiosity,
in his encounter with the Greeks. The fact that the classical Greek ‘type’ ‘did not
like to be inspected’ 272 but wanted to inspect the stranger is commonsensical: the
traveller was, after all, the real intruder. Like all intruders, he disrupted the mode
of everyday life. The Greek also felt that (s)he had to know what the British
intruder was recording. The Panopticon of the traveller’s diary is scrutinized with
great interest:

Our dinner was laid inside the khan, and we fondly thought we should be allowed
to eat in private; but we little knew the Greek character. In they trooped and stood
around us, always respectful but intensely curious. No proceeding on our part
could escape their wondering eyes; every movement we made was watched, and
every word we spoke was listened to with breathless attention […] After eating
our dinner to our own satisfaction, and apparently to theirs, we tried to write our
diaries; but as this was made the signal for an immediate raid upon us, to discover
what we were doing and to examine our diary-books, we gave it up as hopeless. 273

The peasants, who arrange themselves into a circle, resemble the Greek women
who hide so as better to observe the frustrated observer. The circular
arrangement of space in the encounter traps the foreigner. The irony concealed in
this passage is the complete inversion of roles: it is now the ‘prisoners’ that survey
the panoptic ‘warden’/ anthropologist.
What did these British travellers want to record? One of the most interesting
aspects and part of the physical/natural property of the Greeks was their national
costume. British men found the complicated toilet of women to be a sign of

269 Roving Englishman, Turkey, p. 235-236.

270 It is intriguing nevertheless that, although in the writings of some women travellers the
description of the classical type persists, the Greek women’s fear is absent. See Poole, People of
Turkey, vol I, p. 50.
271 Farrer, Tour, pp. 85-86; see also p. 67.
272 Ansted, Ionian Islands, pp. 64-65.
273 Young, Five Weeks, p. 146.

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vanity, so common among ‘ignorant races’ such as the Greek. 274 The coins tied
around their forehead (their dowry) were read as an unnecessary Oriental
exhibition of wealth. 275 Interestingly, comments on Greek women’s toiletry were
less negative when the narrator/observer was a woman. Women travellers, such
as Mary Walker, gave detailed accounts of the Greek female national costume,
and praised Greek women for their charms and their cleanness. 276 The aversion
male British observers expressed might point to an ambivalence of feelings and
brings into play Victorian puritanism that dictated suppression of desire. But
these blocked feelings find their way out in descriptions of the Albanian costume
of Greek men that was adopted after the War of Independence:

The kirtle is of white linen in multitudinous folds, gathered about the middle, and
stiffly projecting in a circle above the knees, giving the Albanian a comical
appearance to the stranger. He, himself, however, is supremely unconscious of his
comical appearance. He carries himself with a free dignified bearing which it
would be plainly dangerous to provoke . 277

Here the ‘comical’ coincides with the grotesque - a notion that encloses both the
attractive and the bizarre/monstrous. The Greek in the Albanian kilt appears as
an androgynous creature, though the masquerade does not take away his brusque,
manly manners. Apparently something disturbs the narrator. To illustrate the
point I will offer another example. Another traveller, Richard Farrer, recording
his visit to Corfu and his observations on the local carnival proceedings, recalled
his wandering among ‘this motley throng walked blue-breeched contadini and
white-kilted Albanians – splendid savages, untamed and untameable.’ 278 Again
the description mobilises two conflicting discourses. For Farrer the Albanian
dress at the same time ‘disguises’ masculinity and transforms the one who wears it
into a ‘transvestite.’ To analyse this ambiguity I will use two different theories of
stereotyping.
Homi Bhabha described the stereotype as a form of identification/knowledge
that vacillates between what is already in place and known and ‘something that
must be anxiously repeated.’ 279 Bhabha claims that identity is constructed in the
interstices of enjoyment and anxiety, lack and pleasure (the Albanian Greek is not
a real man, because something is missing from his appearance, which makes the
observer more masculine). But Bhabha’s connection of stereotyping and fetishism
does not draw on the actual historical origins of these two concepts. I will
therefore move on to Anne McClintock’s genealogy of the relationship between
fetish and stereotype, which is more convincing. For McClintock Enlightenment
thinkers used fetishism (the Albanian dress in our case) to highlight errors of logic
and analytical reasoning, as well as aesthetic value in the observed culture. This means
that fetishism was primarily ‘a discourse about cultural conflicts in value’. 280
Because alien values did not fit into the observer’s thought he would regard them
as deviant and ascribe them the role of negative principles. A combination of the

274 Roving Englishman, Turkey, p. 170-171.

275 Rev.H.J. Van Lennep, Travels in Little Known Parts of Asia Minor, vol. I (London, 1870), pp. 237-
239.
276 Poole, People of Turkey, vol. I, pp. 40-41; Walker, Through Macedonia, p. 257.
277 A. Colbeck, A Summer’s Cruise in the Waters of Greece, Turkey, and Russia (London, 1887), p. 92.
278 Farrer, Tour, p. 8.
279 H.K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York, 1994), p. 66.
280 A. McClintock, Imperial Leather, Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York,

1995).p. 187.

99
notions of stereotyping and fetishism explain the rationale of the British
observer’s comments: he denies the Albanian-Greek’s masculinity and criticises
his over-manly manners because he sees in him a form of primordial masculinity
that challenges him. But this version of masculinity can be rejected because it
does not agree with British cultural norms.
Alongside this discourse there was developed another which undermined the
observer’s negative comments on Greek tradition. The Albanian dress and its
owner were transformed into a symbol of pure/primordial Greekness when the
traveller felt gratified to see how strong patriotic pride still preserved many of [the
Greeks] from exchanging the superb national costume of modern Greece for the
stiff and artificial fashions of Paris. ‘With all respect for the flowing robes or the
warrior’s armour of the Periclean age, […] the Albanian costume adopted by the
Greeks before the Revolution […] is the finest dress ever worn by any people’. 281
For Young, the national Greek dress, which makes ‘the peasant look like a
nobleman, and gives height as well as dignity to the wearer’ also ‘seems to give
him, though unconsciously, a jaunty, self-satisfied air as he mixes with the rest as
if he were a better sort of animal altogether.’ 282 The conception is purely
romantic, but the peasant’s human nature is questioned. 283 These commentators
establish a firm archaeology of the Greek national dress – in short, they generate a
discourse on origins.
Most British observers ignored the fact that for the Greeks the Greek Geist’s
uniqueness entailed that all manifestations of its character were unique. This
means that in the Neohellenic imaginary the Greek costume is national, not
nationalised. To explain what I mean I will use the analysis of Charles Tuckerman
and the Greek response. The fact that there are no comparable British writings
might be significant, but no underlying reasons were identified for this silence. In
his famous travel book The Greeks of To-day, Tuckerman referred to the
Arvanitákis band of Dilessi as ‘rascally outlaws, clad in a filthy foustanelli, and
issuing [their] decrees in illiterate Greek from [their] inaccessible mountain
throne.’ 284 The reader must be reminded here that the Dilessi brigands were not
Greeks according to the Greek official discourse, but Albanian/Vlachs from
Turkey. That is probably why Tuckerman’s Greek translator added a footnote to
the American’s comment:

The foustanella is Greek, the most Greek thing one can think of, and the Albanians
wear it because they are brothers of the same blood and of Pelasgian origin. 285

Here Albanian identity regains its Greekness and the costume becomes a symbol
of Greek character that is essentially different from the European.
Greek exotic manners and the appearance of the peasant (for the two are
always inseparable) provided the observer with the opportunity to draw on his
own historical experience. Thus, the Albanian-Greek character was compared
with that of the Scottish Highlander. This comment was nicely articulated in Van
Lennep’s Oriental Album. Van Lennep was not a British, but an anglicised (by
education) Briton; however, his Oriental Album was quoted many times in the

281 Benjamin, The Turk and the Greek, p. 208.

282 Young, Five Weeks, p. 47.
283 See also Tozer for Cretan national dress [The Islands of the Aegean (Oxford, 1890), pp. 76-77] and

Jebb (Lectures, pp. 85-87) for his description of Greek peasantry.

284 Tuckerman, The Greeks of Today (1872), p. 256.
285 Tuckerman, The Greeks of Today (1877), pp. 213-214.

100
British textual network, and is worth mentioning for its scrupulousness. Van
Lennep believed not only that the Albanians were an Ur-hellenic 286 element, but
also that their costume might have been the first garment of humanity. One of his
illustrations was accompanied by the following commentary:

[The Albanian dress] is a favourite dress for boys amongst the wealthiest, as the
Highland costume is with the English. 287

In this statement Van Lennep managed to explain why some Britons insisted in
seeing in the Albanian-Greek dress a process of nationalisation, or cultural
borrowing: it was their own experience that made them do so. John Mackenzie
drew attention to the British enthralment with Scottish Highland civilisation,
which in British imagination ‘stood for wilderness, if a civilised, tamed and
controlled wilderness.’ 288 In other words, for Britons, the Highlander designated
both the other and the same. The British observers who watched this process
whereby nationalisation of the Albanian costume was nationalised, activated
anthropological time: they watched a process that took place in their
Scottish/British culture a long time ago. This feeling that history was written twice
before the observer, was demonstrated by the fact that Highland landscapes were
also likened to Greek regions, which, though were not yet part of the Greek
Kingdom, were considered Greek. Crete, which was struggling for unification
over that period, was repeatedly selected for this purpose: For example, the
Cretans resemble the Highland warriors for two British observers, Skinner 289 and
Spratt. 290
This nostalgia for a pre-modern paradise strengthened the feeling of British
superiority. Colonial thought was re-infused into the British anthropological gaze
and the Greek peasant, though noble and admirable, was compared by the
traveller with the subjected races of the great European empires or non-European
peoples. Sir George Campbell, a colonial administrator himself, made this clear:

I liked what I saw of the rural Greeks. They seemed a pleasant good sort of
people, with considerable capacity for self-government, and their villages were
like Indian villages of a good class plus a church. There does not seem to be any
aristocracy among them, only the usual loaders of the village-communes. 291

Here the Greeks are like Indian villagers, plus Christianity; they are like ‘us’, but
not quite the same. Sir George’s ideas reappeared in the writings of other
travellers, who had little to do with colonial administration; in such reflections the
(exotic) Greek villager was credited superiority in relation to the Greek upper
classes.

286 Rev.H.J. Van Lennep, The Oriental Album: Twenty Illustrations in Oil Colors of the People and Scenery of
Turkey with an Explanatory ad Descriptive Text (New York, 1862), p. 57.
287 Van Lennep, Oriental Album, p. 31.
288 J. Mackenzie, Empires of Natures and the Nature of Empires: Imperialism, Scotland and the Environment

(East Linton, 1997), p. 70; see also G. Cafentzis, ‘On the Scottish Origin of “Civilisation”,’ in S.
Federici (ed), Enduring Western Civilisation The Concept of Western Civilisation and its Others (London
and Connecticut, 1995).
289 I.E.I. Skinner, Hardships in Crete during 1867 (Athens, 1868), p. 70.
290 T.A.B. Spratt, Travels and Researches in Crete, vol. I (London, 1865), pp. 53-54.
291 Campbell, Handy Book, p. 70.

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 It is the same wherever strangers are concerned; and after a three weeks’
experience we came to the conclusion that a natural simplicity and freshness of
mind, which can be amused and entertained with small things, so long as it does
not become blasé by contact with townsmen, is the most striking characteristic of
the peasant Greeks, both in the Peloponnese and in the North, but more especially
in the North. By simplicity I do not mean innocence or freedom from evil passions
(of which the Greeks of all classes have their full share), but merely a childlike
curiosity and interest, worth[y] of the Sandwich Islands, which they show in the
smallest things that happen to be strange to them. 292

It is obvious that Young represented the Greek peasant as a noble savage in his
diary. It is should not escape attention that he refers to the peasants ‘of the
North’, possibly by analogy to the ‘Highlanders of the North’. But the image of
the ‘noble savage’ could easily be replaced by a less flattering one. On such
occasions Greek urban populations were criticised less ruthlessly for their mores.
In comparisons between urban and rural modes of thought, the latter figure as
less progressive. In Rhodes and Mytilene, C.T. Newton exclaimed that ‘there is a
feeling of mutual satisfaction when you part with the peasant [but] of mutual
disappointment when you take leave of the bourgeois.’ 293 Within the Greek
Kingdom, there existed a hierarchy even for the peasantry itself: the peasant of
some rural regions was deemed to be superior to that of other parts of Greece,
according to Tozer and Wyse. 294 Often, however, the observer felt ill at ease with
the urban population of Greece, because of the Athenians’ attempts at imitating
Frankish styles of dressing and living. 295 The observer was convinced that
underneath this modern costume, the ‘species’ remained the same: ignorant,
intellectually pretentious, pompous in its social life, and therefore fake. 296 The
discourse on authenticity is prominent here: the Greeks were valuable scientific
objects only if they corresponded to vanishing ways of living. The discourse is in
fact a branch of a greater discourse related to the guarding of ‘cultural frontiers’
and demarcation of the Occidental cultural realm. Van Lennep, whose analysis
covered all the ‘races’ of the Ottoman empire, warned the reader in his
introduction to the Oriental Album that

No representative will be found in these pages of that mongrel being, the

Europeanized, or Occidentalized, Oriental. From political motives, a desire of
distinction, or an unreasoned and misplaced admiration of the outward garb of
European civilisation, many Orientals, principally on the seaboard, and most of the
craft officials of Turkey, have adopted a costume which resembles the European
as a Gorilla resembles a Negro. The Oriental man, however, remains unchanged
under his masquerade. We have not stopped on this neutral ground of the
civilization of the West and that of the East, but have gone at once into the
latter. 297

Van Lennep’s ‘ground’ was far from neutral. If we return to the debate upon
urban Greek life, to claim that the Europeanised subject, which has become the

292 Young, Five Weeks, p. 58.

293 C. T. Newton, Travels and Discoveries in the Levant, vol. I (London, 1865), pp. 209-210.
294 Tozer, Lectures, p. 185; Tozer cites Wyse in this instance (see also Wyse, Impressions, p. 88)
295 Young, Five Weeks, p. 48-49; see also Rev. J. O. Bagdon, A Brief Comparison of the Fundamental

Doctrines of the Anglican and Greek Churches, (London 1869), comparing pp. 7 and 47.
296 See for example Farrer, Tour, p. 48; Young, Five Weeks, p. 86-87.
297 Van Lennep, Oriental Album, p. 7.

102
standard-bearer of Western culture, is an Oriental in disguise is to deny him
access to ‘civilisation’. The principle of negation (he is not a European) that
underscores the discourse is coupled with the certainty that the other is playing
theatre for us. 298 In our case, like the colonised, the observed upper class Greek
begins to question his own humanity, especially in front of the foreign spectator:

We were now on our way to Haliartus, across the plain to the north-west, Col.
Theagenis still with us. Our conversation turned a good deal on recent events, as
we rode on. […] He speaks more in sorrow than in anger, though his personal
provocations have been grave and continuous, and views these evils in a more
comprehensive European sense, than most Greeks. The moral was that the whole
heart and head is sick, and not to treated by nostrums, or such doctors and regime
as have been applied for years. He finds the country deteriorated as to morale as
well as to physique, and a “progenies vitiosor” in the present youth compared
with the simple barbarism of their fathers. 299

It is ironic that these Greeks who were more open to Western European ideas
were denied access to European civilisation and recognition. Even Theagenis, the
‘least incomprehensible’ Greek, was not an interlocutor, but the mirror in which
Wyse viewed the British image. There were voices even within Greece that
rejected the introduction of French styles in Greek dressing and behavioural
codes. We can’t be sure if that was an internalisation of European criticism or a
Greek conservatism that dictated the return to pure Greek values, but it is worth
recording an example. In a series of cartoons published in 1874 there is a picture
(illustration 1) under the title ‘The New Generation Espouses Western
Civilisation’. which depicts the clumsiness of the Greeks who try to imitate a
thoroughly foreign ritual (Western dancing). Similar criticisms are traced in ‘The
Greek-French Monstrosity’ (illustration 2), which could be linked to Van
Lennep’s commentary: Greek women in French fashion are transformed into a
clown.
We must bear in mind that the rural world came to occupy a special place in
the British imagination during the nineteenth century. The Romantic movement
expressed a nostalgia for the rapidly disappearing country life, 300 and triggered
positive attitudes toward the ‘folk.’ In Britain, which had been peculiar among
industrialised nations in having both a flourishing intellectual culture and an
underdeveloped university system, the anthropological gaze found its scholarly
expression in the experience of travel. Because the British folklore movement
grew out of an antiquarian tradition, the amateur anthropologist was obsessed
with traces of the past that survived in the present lives of the uneducated. But
romanticism in its Herderian version, questioned this linear time, in which
everything could fit into the same hierarchy. 301 The Volksgeist was to be seen not
as part of a uniform human experience but as a unique entity with its own role to
perform and its own mission to fulfil in the human drama. This double history, in
which a single linear time and a multiple time coexist, is what the British observer
experienced in his study of Neohellenic culture. The Greek in his national
costume could be gallant and degenerate, comic and noble at the same time
298 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London, 1970), p. 103.
299 Wyse, Impressions, p. 301; Colonel Theagénis was a respected Greek with friends among the
philhellenes that lived in Greece; later he was involved in the Dilessi case and he because the
target for British newspapers, because of his mismanagement of the affair.
300 G.W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, (New York, 1987).
301 Todorova, Balkans, p. 129.

103
because the British traveller made a compromise between enlightenment and
romantic ideas. For the British traveller the observed rural Greek culture was not
moving in progressive time (because its values are not compatible with British
values) but in a time parallel with the time of the traveller. Contrariwise, urban
Greek culture entered the anthropological time of the British observers we
examined, but utterly failed to keep up with its pace.
The Occidentalised Greek was rejected as an object of study also because the
peasantry could better serve the British cause. British social psychopathologies
found their safety valve in observations of Greek rural life. The Greek peasant,
who carelessly enjoyed his retsina, was scrutinised suspiciously by the British
traveller. Alcoholism, a well-known social problem of industrialised Britain,
haunted the British observer whenever he stopped outside Greek wine shops:

And yet these poor Greeks, whose morality we distrust and whose intellects we
despise, absolutely shine in point of sobriety by contrast with our own besotted
lower orders. 302

Indeed, the verdict that ‘drunkenness is an unknown evil’ 303 in Greece exposed an
inclination to project British social problems into the Greek body social. British
class attitudes can also be traced in observations on Turko-Greek relations when
British travellers translated rivalry between Greeks and Turks into conflict
between classes - those of ruled and rulers. 304 Other times, the absence of class
distinctions in Greece was regarded as a unique phenomenon that had to be
recorded. 305 There are British observers such as Bagdon who conceptualised
segregation between upper and lower Greek culture in an British way. In The
Brigands of the Morea Bagdon invented dialogues between Sotirópoulos, whom he
presented as a member of the Greek elite, and his captors, whom he identified
with a lower, uneducated, ‘degenerate’ order. Bagdon believed that Sotirópoulos
was in need of a porter every time the band was on move:
I must say that it is not usual for a person of my social rank to carry even the
smallest burdens; and he who does so is in danger of lowering himself in the
esteem of his fellow citizens, and losing that respect which his inferiors ought to
feel towards him. 306

Or to change his clothes every morning:

I, who had been accustomed to cleanliness and decency, often suffered as much
from the disgusting filthiness and indelicacy of my companions, as from the actual
dangers and privations to which I was necessarily exposed. 307

Greek upper-class habits could not be perceived outside a typically European set
of values such as cleanliness. It is important to remember that at the beginning of

302 Young, Five Weeks, p. 43. It must be noted that as opposed to the English working class, the
English peasantry occupies an honourable place in British imagination; therefore, Skinner’s
comparison between the Cretan peasant refugees in 1867, and the English peasants (Hardships, p.
124) show the other side of the coin.
303 Poole, People of Turkey, vol. 26-27; Murray, Handbook, p. 44; Colbeck, Cruise, p. 93.
304 Benjamin, The Turk and the Greek, p. 34.
305 See for example Wyse, Impressions, p. 38.
306 Bagdon, The Brigands of the Morea, vol. I, p.251
307 ibid., pp.261-262.

104
the nineteenth century a convergence of issues of economics, morality, politics
and class in the discussion of the notion of British civilisation resulted in a
thorough transformation of the notion itself. What this concept came to mean
after this transformation was strongly conditioned by what was going on in
British society – especially with regards to the lower, poor classes. 308 This process
almost coincided with the discovery of the oppressed nationalities in the East,
making thus English working-class, and Balkan ethnic problems interchangeable
terms. As Elli Skopetea notes ‘the East offered easy possibilities of translating in
simple terms the complex issues that the English colonial metropolis was facing
at the time.’ 309
Needless to say, such concerns secure the foundations of the British scientific
Panopticon. If industrialisation ever reached the Hellenic peninsula, the Greek
peasantry was condemned to extinction or corruption; the British traveller thus
assigned himself the mission to immortalise in his writings the primitive
Neohellenic way of thinking. It is unfortunate that the presence of the ‘Lords’ in
Greece was enough to change everything. Ansted was convinced for example that
the Greek peasant who expected from the British traveller a bakshish, or ‘payment
for annoyance,’ illustrated the adverse effects of tourism on the mind of the
peasant:

It must be acknowledged that our country people have brought this upon
themselves. Nothing of this kind is observable in country villages out of the way
of tourists and picnic parties; nor do the people in the other islands make the same
demand. Experience has taught the natives of the frequented spots what they may
expect as the reward of clamour. 310

British observers were convinced that they should hurry to capture ‘spontaneous’
cultural phenomena condemned to annihilation. Nevertheless, fieldwork itself
challenged the validity of the task. The question the anthropological gaze poses, is
the question modern ethnology/ethnography asks itself: what is authentic, and
what is performative? How much of what we see is made up for us? The feedback
the nineteenth-century amateur anthropologists received included their own way
of imagining things. Moreover, as in theatres, they had to pay to gain access to
their own imagination. In some places, they were denied access to social events,
such as weddings, without a generous ‘contribution’ of money. But access to the
festivity was enough to destroy its spontaneity. The alien element the observers
introduced, their civilised manners, their obsession with cleanliness, would
discipline the observed. A traveller who washed his hands before lunch was
surprised by the consequences of his action:

‘Look how they are being civilised’ said Vivier, as he pointed out to one
turbulent and moustached Greek, who, seized with the fever of imitation, was
turning his piece of soap in a glass of water. ‘Already their habits are
softening.’ 311

308 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, pp. 30-36. Ansted (Ionian Islands, p. 57) also compares the
Ionian Greeks with Irish beggars.
309 Skopetea, The East Sets in the West, pp. 91, 136; Todorova, Balkans, p. 100.
310 Ansted, Ionian Islands, p. 57; see also Walker, Through Macedonia, p. 230.
311 Leech, Letters, p. 19.

105
The picturesque dirt of the peasant, 312 his mere identification with his land and
his animals, 313 were being wiped away by this civilising process. The same
happens with dancing, which was established as performance for the observer,
who was so preoccupied with his usual comparisons between what he saw and his
own experience that he did not realise how his intervention led to a
reorganization of the Greek symbolic order. Thomas Wyse’s initiation to such
Greek practices at Achmetaga in Euboia is noteworthy. His participation in a
local festival, in which the Greeks danced something that reminded him of the
‘Irish jig or Scotch reel, but without movement of the upper part of the body, and
with a customary marvellous solemnity’ 314 was followed by a symbolic Greek
(re)action, whose significance he missed:

On the dance relaxing, I went up with a dollar to the clarionet-player, which he

accepted with a dignified air, and then struck up the old tune with renewed
energy, placing the dollar on his fez over his forehead, for he was dressed in the
usual foustanella style. The clarionet did its outmost, and I soon perceived not
without result. 315

As Achmetaga was the property of the Noël family, an English family whose son
was involved in the Dilessi Murders, 316 we cannot be sure how long back the
staged event can be traced and whether its performance had to do with the
practices of the Noëls. But the same practice of remuneration for the observer’s
pleasure can be traced in other accounts. For example, Newton’s discovery of
some links between Greek Rhodian dance performance and classical rituals 317
could have been based on his presence on the spot. It must, nevertheless, be
emphasised that the consequence of the observer’s ‘intrusion’ was not corruption,
but rearrangement of the Greek social/symbolic universe. Dancing and social events which
till then fulfilled the needs of the Greek community now assumed a twin value.
On the one hand they established a channel of communication with the (British)
other: their ‘staged authenticity’ 318 was nothing but their plausible appropriation
to the needs of a foreign audience/readership of signs (‘the Lords want to learn
about our culture’). On the other hand, they helped the rural Greeks to select
experiences for concentrated attention – experiences, whose ritualistic aspect
enlivened memory and linked the present with the relevant past, but at same time
modified it. 319
Now we might be privileged with the chance to establish a genealogy of
Neohellenic tradition, by pointing out that from the moment it lost its
spontaneous/natural element, not only was it incorporated into national culture,
but also became part of institutionalised knowledge: the discipline of folklore.

312 J. Brown, Eastern Christianity and the War. The Idolatry, Superstition and Corruption of the Christians of
Turkey, Greece, and Russia, Exposed and Considered with the Present War and the Prospects of a Reformation
(London, 1877), pp. 44-45; Kirkwall, Five Years, vol. II, p. 90.
313 Ansted, Ionian Islands, pp. 54.
314 Wyse, Impressions, p. 219. The reference to similarities between Greek and Scottish or Irish

dances can also be traced in Farrer, Tour, p. 24. Unfortunately, there was no space here for further
analysis of the phenomenon.
315 Ibid., p. 220. See also p. 88.
316 Frank Noël was sent to negotiate the release of the captives, but the attempt failed.
317 Newton, Travels, vol I, pp. 186-187.
318 It is helpful here to follow John Urry’s explication that the non-authentic of setting does not

necessarily question the authenticity of the observed. ‘All cultures are inauthentic, converted,
remade’ (Urry, Tourist Gaze, p. 9), because they must be made comprehensible to the ‘other.’
319 Douglas, Purity and Danger, pp. 63-64.

106
Kyriakidou-Nestoros rightly connected the institution of New Folklore in ‘Eastern
Europe’ with industrialisation and the divide between urban and rural culture, 320
but she missed the fact that long before Eastern European industrialisation,
interaction with the ‘civilised foreigners’ had made Eastern Europeans conscious
of what tradition is – or, rather how it is to be performed. Reflections upon these
processes by Greek academics were crucial in the development of folklore into an
autonomous discipline.
But the British travellers were not always in a position to understand the
change they brought in with their remuneration practice. For, once this pattern of
communication was established, it was difficult to stop the peasant from taking
advantage of it. It was then that the British began to complain that the Greeks are
‘untrustworthy,’ 321 ‘thieves’ 322 and ‘unable to observe the principle of truth.’ 323
Greek reception of this symbolic exchange was read as ‘treachery’ and
‘cunningness’, and the contempt which the foreigner expressed for the peasant,
became a general reference to the Greek ‘race.’ Some observers attributed these
vices to a need for self-protection against the cruel Turkish ruler, 324 inventing thus
their genealogy. 325 This allusion to Greek deception was recorded by some
historians. Angelomatis-Tsougarakis passes it in silence, 326 and Elli Skopetea
connected it to the notorious Oriental silence, which allowed the honest
Occidental observer to speak on behalf of the Orient. 327 Oriental silence and
incapability of accuracy - which some Britons traced in the Greek character 328 -
may easily have been connected with lying and deception.
This debate should not be seen separately from some British and Greek
commentators’ discourse on the ‘Greek entrepreneurial spirit,’ its ‘Odyssean
mercantile essence’ 329 and its ‘versatility.’ 330 The double image of the Greeks that
figures in these descriptions was based on the two-fold reading of a ‘commercial
character’ that the British and the Greeks shared. It was just that those Britons
who were involved in this discourse and criticised Greek manners felt
uncomfortable with what they called ‘entrepreneurial deception’. Let us not forget
that lying/deception affects the distribution of power; that lies add to the power
of the liar, and diminish that of the deceived, altering the choices of the deceived
at different levels. 331 The ‘crafty’ Greeks continuously undermined the British

320 The ‘New Folklore’ is concerned with all these phenomena that ceased to be spontaneous and
are nowadays taught and performed as part of what we call ‘national tradition’ [See A. Kyriakidou-
Nestoros, ‘Greek Folklore in its Cotemporary Dimension,’ Folklore Studies (Athens, 1975), pp. 92-
93]
321 Roving Englishman, Turkey, p. 355; Young, Five Weeks, p. 65; see also E.M. Mackenzie and A.P.

Irby, Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe (London, 1877), p. 69.

322 Farrer, Tour, p. 128.
323 Letters of Mr. Frank Noël Respecting the Murder by Brigands of the Captives of Marathon and the

Prosecution by the Greek Government (With an Introduction by his Father) (Edinburgh, 1871), p. 87.
324 Poole, People of Turkey, vol. I, p. 58-59.
325 Van Lennep (Oriental Album, p. 73) links explicitly ‘Oriental dishonesty’ and trade.
326 H. Angelomatis-Tsougarakis, The Eve of the Greek Revival British Travellers’ ´Perceptions of Greece

(London and New York, 1990), p. 103.

327 Skopetea, The East Sets in the West, p. 95.
328 Tozer, Researches, vol. I, pp. 7-8, 72.
329 There are many Greek and British references, and only a selection is offered here: Tozer,

Researches, vol. I, p. 17; Campbell, Handy Book, p. 41; Rescued Works of the Greek Philological Society in
Constantinople, December 1865 to May 1870, vol. IV (Constantinople, 1870), p. 144; E. Strickland,
Greece: Its Conditions, Prospects and Resources (London 1863), p. 7; (Winifred) Wyse, Impressions, p. 15.
330 Tozer, Researches, vol. I, pp. 115, 153 and vol. II, p. 257; Young, Five Weeks, p. 116; Mahaffy,

Rambles, p. 21; Iálemos, Rights and Duties, p. 17.

331 S. Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (Sussex, 1978), pp. 19-28.

107
scientific Panopticon by distorting all the important information the British
observer aspired to collect. Young for example linked Greek deception with
actual stage performance; in his opinion, the Greeks are ‘born actors.’

Self-consciousness, which brings with it the usual train of mannerisms and

affectations, is said to be the curse of the English stage, if not of English society.
On the stage and off the stage it is apparently unknown to the Greeks, who,
bumptious and boastful though they often are, do not look conscious or self-
absorbed; never seem, when in public, to trouble themselves the least in the world
whether or no people are looking at them, admiring them, or criticising them, and,
consequently, never appear nervous or ill-at-ease among themselves, as is the case
with so many of our countrymen. Their habit of gesticulation, which we may call
forced and exaggerated, is in reality as much part of their nature, as it is part of an
Englishman’s nature to carry an umbrella! 332

Note that the initial demarcation of rural and urban Greekness is now dropped.
Greek mannerisms linked to performance are almost ‘instinctual;’ 333 they
comprise a set of inculcated rules that cannot be renounced or replaced. 334 But
this passage also provides the historian with some observations on English ethno-
methodology. Levi-Strauss insisted that ethnology prefers to organise its data in
relation to the unconscious conditions of social life. 335 Michel De Certeau claimed
that history does the opposite: it is concerned with finding ways to accredit to its
documents a recognisable ‘consciousness.’ As Herzfeld argued, gesticulation, the
bodily language of the ‘savage’, had been dropped by the British who were
perhaps ‘poorer in gesture’, but ‘more civilised’ in manners. This discourse, which
was articulated by Tylor (a significant thinker we will discuss later) automatically
placed Greek inculcated values (theatricality) in the lower stages of civilisation. 336
The passage beautifully demonstrates how ethnology assembles its tools in British
travel writing, by selecting precisely those things that might have been ignored in
historical discourse: gestures, posture and mannerisms – Neohellenic habitus in one
word.
At the same time, historical legacies overdetermine modern Greek character. I
will quote from Mahaffy’s observations on Greek ‘jealousy’ - an ill-defined term
that should not be examined outside the discourse on Greek performance.

It is idle to deny that this is a prominent feature in the Greek character, and that it
has constantly brought them into disagreeable contact with foreigners nationally;
so that, while travellers uniformly attest the hospitality and kindliness of the
individual Greeks whom they meet, they constantly make reflections upon the
general jealousy, which the nation displays towards foreign interference. 337

In contrast to Mahaffy, Wyse presented envy as competition within Greek society

that results in discord: ‘envy is at the bottom of all things Greek.’ 338 This series of
Greek virtues, skills and ‘vices’ (entrepreneurial spirit, lying to foreigners,
performance and jealousy), are part of the same apparatus that some British

332 Young, p. 201.

333 Farley, Turks and Christians, ix.
334 P. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, 1999).
335 C. Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York, 1967), p. 25.
336 Herzfeld, Anthropology, p. 137.
337 Mahaffy, Rambles, xii.
338 Wyse, Impressions, p. 149. Wyse also makes comments on Greek hospitality (p. 88).

108
travellers/observers constructed in order to understand their relationship with the
Greeks they encountered. And by arranging these qualities/vices sequentially, one
discovers a pattern of Anglo-Greek interaction:

Jealousy: a desire for what the rival/other has.

Entrepreneurial spirit:
Performance of mannerisms:
Greek lying:
English self-consciousness:
acting on this desire.
the means for acquisition of what is
desired.
the deceived other’s feeling of
exploitation/ privation.
because covetous Greeks lack this `they
might succeed in deceiving the English.

Behind this pattern is hidden an epistemological question. Greeks coerced British

observers into acknowledging that they had no control over information they
were given about the Greek character. For this reason they mobilised self-
perceptions so as to understand Greek character through comparison (i.e. both
Greeks and English are commercial people) and contrast (i.e. English self-
consciousness vs. Greek natural performance). The discourse is predicated upon
the notion of ‘lack’ of Greek self-consciousness, which makes Greek mannerisms
‘natural properties.’ As natural properties, however, they are not easily
recognisable and make the Greeks powerful deceivers.
Hospitality was also presented by travellers, such as Young, as a constituent
of the Greek character. 339 Disinterested Greek hospitality became almost
definitional in British and Greek discourse, though it was not clear if it was part
of Greek history or the tourist legacy of the nineteenth century. When the Dilessi
murders placed in question Greece’s image as an idyllic tourist country, John
Gennadios was the first to stress that frequent British accusations of Neohellenic
profit making and disgust of foreigners clashed with the essence of the Greek
character.

But there is a sadder and still more solemn duty incumbent upon us – a duty
dictated by a heartfelt sorrow and by a humiliating misfortune. Amongst us from
the remotest times, there is an institution more sacred than that of hospitality. That
this should now be sullied fills us with grief unutterable. No national calamity, no
invasion of our country by an enemy, no loss of a great battle, no devastation of
our towns, no ruin of our homes, could have called forth a louder wail of grief and
anguish than this most awful tragedy has evolved. From the king to the lowest
peasant, the Greek nation has given loud and unmistakable expression to a general
and sincere contrition. 340

This heart-rending apologia, which historicises Greek character, is identical to

some British observers’ inclination to formulate ethnographic discourse through
history. It was what the amateur anthropologist read in Herodotus about Greek
jealousy and hospitality that he saw in Neohellenic character. To bridge the chasm
between modern Greek envy, politeness and hospitality, and an historical
definition of them, was difficult, and presented both the British and the Greeks
with a logical pandemonium. What won out of this conflation was neither history nor
anthropology, but historical anthropology. In historical anthropology the Neohellenic

339 Young, Five Weeks, p. 192.

340 Gennadios, Notes, pp. 175-176.

109
imaginary was read in a symbolic fashion through history. This practice extended
to other modern Greek habits, among them smoking and the traditional Greek
coffee break:

There is a café close to this temple [Zeus Olympius], and small tables and straw-
bottomed chairs are scattered about under this shadow of the columns. Here on a
summer’s evening the modern Athenians sit, drink, smoke their cigarettes and
chatter; and it then requires a very strong imagination to people the ruins with the
ancient worshippers of Zeus, and to realise with Byron “the latent grandeur of
his dwelling-place!” Who could fancy an ancient Athenian – Socrates or
Demosthenes for instance – with a cigarette in his mouth? But to fancy a modern
Athenian without one is to fancy a very exceptional thing. 341

In such ethnographic work, which is carried out with historical tools, the primary
question was that of (dis)continuity in Greek character. This time, however, the
Athenian population was under inspection, and not the rural Greeks. This provides a
good occasion to reflect on the aesthetic disturbance caused by modern Greek
Francophilia: what was at stake was the continuity of the Greek character as it
figured in rural Neohellenic life. Indeed, the project of British ethnography was
antiquarian, in so far as it traced the past in the present. This is one of the reasons
why Greek ballads and popular myths, religious beliefs and ‘superstitions’
received so much attention from some British observers/travellers. British
commentators whose stay in Greece fulfilled purposes other than travelling also
displayed an interest in Greek character and beliefs. For example, newspaper
political commentary of the 1860s and the 1870s was ‘flavoured’ by observations
on Greek regional character. In 1868, the Morning Post correspondent in Crete
sent a series of letters for publication in the newspaper, in which, alongside
political developments, he recorded Cretan Greek customs and beliefs to
entertain his readership. 342 The same practice was applied in editorials during the
Eastern Question crisis in 1878. 343
Some British travellers and researchers even managed to devise areas of
anthropological research. Religious ceremonies such as weddings, funerals and
baptism, 344 social contracts such as dowry arrangements, 345 popular beliefs in
Nereids and vampires, 346 and traditions for the siege and re-conquest of
Constantinople, 347 were treated as a shortcut to observations on Greek history.
The question is, why the amateur anthropologist struggled to discover ancient
Greek civilisation in modern Greek thought. The mania for collection was
gratifying for the ethnographer, because it brought together colonial and
ethnographical thought. Considering that some of the works which engaged in

341 Ibid., p. 28; Farrer (Tour, p. 52) returns to this question.

342 See for example The Morning Post, 24 September and 11 November 1868.
343 The Morning Post, 29 July 1878.
344 (MRS) William Grey, Journal of a Visit to Egypt, Constantinople, the Crimea, Greece &c. in the Suite of

the Prince and Princess of Wales, second ed. (London, 1870); p. 197; Colbeck, Cruise, p. 57; Newton,
Travels and Discoveries, vol. I, p. 66; Brown, Eastern Christianity, p. 23; Ansted, Ionian Islands, p. 58;
Bagdon, Brigands, vol. I, pp. 180-183.
345 Roving Englishman, Turkey, p. 233; Newton, Travels, vol. II, p. 9; Kirkwall, Four Years, vol. II, p.

109; Spratt, Travels, vol. I, pp. 170-171.

346 Newton, Travels, vol. I, pp. 211-212; Spratt, Travels, vol. I, p. 364; Brown, Eastern Christianity, pp.

33-34; M. Walker, Old Tracks and New Landmarks (London, 1897), p. 230 (the diary includes notes
from travels made much earlier); Walker, Through Macedonia, pp. 227, 231.
347 Benjamin, The Turk and the Greek, p. 7; D. Campbell, Turks and Greeks, Notes on a Recent Excursion

(London, 1877), p. 29; Tozer, Armenia, p. 459; Van Lennep, Oriental Album, p. 9.

110
the debate upon the origins of Greek culture were produced in the 1860’s, place
British anthropological interests should be placed in a wider framework.
The doctrine of ‘survivals’ as a guide to the development of major areas of
spiritual culture was used extensively by E.B. Tylor in his Primitive Culture in 1871.
Tylor argued that things which seemed arbitrary or meaningless to the civilised
might have had a practical function centuries ago, but their survival in the less
‘progressive’ sects of modern societies made them useless and incomprehensible
to the observer. According to this theory, the European peasantry became a
crucial link between modern civilisation and primitive savage man. According to
British observers, anthropological time in Greek culture has two different
motions: an urban and a rural. The urban emulated Western progressive time
unsuccessfully, whereas the rural was almost static. But Greek rural time was
significantly different from the rural time of rural communities in other European
countries. This happened because Greek rural culture was overdetermined by a
famous past, which was preserved unconsciously in popular beliefs. Contrariwise,
there was a violent historical disruption in urban modes of thought. British
observers’ merging of Enlightenment evolutionism and Romantic notions of
culture, suggest that the separation of Enlightenment and Romantic thought is a
very recent discursive game in historiography. The truth is that we are caught
between evolutionist history and romantic ethnography, between Greek historical
degeneration and national Geist, in the interstices of Greek ethno-history.
British anthropological principles negotiated the task of preservation and
dictated immediate measures: Greek tradition/history had to cease to be
unconsciously preserved (and therefore in danger of extinction) and become
institutionalised. 348 The Greeks themselves internalised this ‘urgency’ and took
over. In the late 1860s there were already Greek bodies inside and outside the
Greek Kingdom dedicated to the collection of ‘survivals’ of ancient Greek
civilisation in Neohellenic culture. The Greek Philological Society of
Constantinople, an important body for Neohellenic studies that lost most of its
collections during the fire in Pera (Istanbul) in 1870, was recognised as one of the
leading Greek institutions in this area.349 Inside Greece, the Philological Society of
Parnassus, an Athenian Society for Greek letters, set up a journal in 1870 in
whose first issue we read the following:

It goes without saying that history itself is not enough to shed light on the life of a
nation; it is necessary to understand fully its character and its actions and learn
something about its way of living, its intellectual state and its language […].
For all these reasons the investigation of our customs and ethics that constitute
modern Greek life, and which illuminate ancient Greek ones, since they preserve
many of their traces, attracted the attention of both Greek and Western scholars.
The difficult task of collecting popular ballads, myths, proverbs and riddles, which
reflect the intellectual life of the people and make good examples of the demotic
[…] is equally important, because the evolution of the demotic resembles the
destiny of our history, which has to be comprehended as continuous from the
ancient. 350

348 De Certeau, Heterologies, pp. 78-79, 216.

349 Palingenesía, 20 September 1878.
350 Selected Neohellenic Passages Published Periodically by the Philological Society ‘Parnassos,’ vol. I, Pamphlet

1 (April, 1870), p. 4.

111
In this passage European anthropology becomes Greek folklore: the gaze upon
the other becomes the gaze upon the internalised other, the rural ‘people,’ to
recall Lévi-Strauss. This watershed in Greek thought is detected in extra-academic
circles, especially in debates of the literati circles of the country. It is not just that
Greek ballads, which are considered representative of the Neohellenic Volksgeist,
are collected and classified in different typological systems, but also that they are
reproduced. This latter practice, which signifies an awareness of the importance
these findings had as oral history, configured repeated Greek attempts at
stimulating British philhellenic feelings during international crises. The Greek
press hosted a series of such recorded ballads, entitled ‘products of the popular
Muse’, which were in fact written by contemporary Greek poets in a ‘traditional
fashion’. An inspired ‘traditional’ polemic against European intervention, which
reads as a klephtic ballad, appeared in one of the issues of Palingenesía during the
Cretan Insurrection. 351 A second example can be found, again in Palingenesía, in
1881: it is a ‘folk song’ written by an obscure Marietta Bitsu and dedicated to ‘the
famous philhellene and British Prime Minister Mr. Gladstone’. 352 Further
influence of the European Gaze is traced at the end of the 1870s in a new genre
of description of local Greek ‘types’. 353 In principle, such case studies imitated
foreign descriptions of the Neohellenic character on a microlevel; in Lévi-
Straussian terms, the observer was now part of the social structure he/she
observed. This exercise presents impressive similarities with the famous local
history monographs on Greek regions 354 that throve over the same period. As
opposed to national totality, represented by the Paparrighópoulos miracle, Greek
ethnohistory or historical ethnography somehow favoured the specific/local.
Because Greek folklorists were constantly in search for Hellenic ‘survivals’ in
Neohellenic life, the understanding of local backgrounds became essential.
These remarks rely too much upon historical hindsight, and become
tantamount to what Foucault called the ‘archaeology of knowledge’. Although the
debate upon ‘survivals’ appears in the 1830s as an offshoot of the Fallmerayer
controversy, the institutionalisation of this scientific interest is detected in the
1880s. The Greek Historical and Ethnological Society, a national body for the
development of folklore studies, was founded only in 1882, and it was not until
1884 that Nikólaos Polítis, the first famous Greek folklorist, gave the first
institutional definition of Greek folklore. 355 In his definition one realises,
according to Kyriakidou-Nestoros, that the institution of Greek folklore
(λαογραφία) 356 was marked by a combination of the totality and synchronicity of
anthropology with the specificity and diachronicity of history. This process was
adumbrated in the nineteenth century Anglo-Greek anthropological encounters,
although neither the outcome and nor the input were exclusively the result of
Anglo-Greek interaction. The case study that follows – and which tries to
enhance and ameliorate the argument of the thesis - concentrates on a specific
(ethno-historical) discourse in whose formation some British observers, because of
their own preoccupations and interests, played a more significant role.

351 Palingenesía, 3 April 1867.

352 Palingenesía, 16 March 1881.
353 M.S. Gregorópoulos Traversing Greece or Description of the most Famous Cities of the Greek Kingdom

(including the Epirus-Thessaly’s Arta, Larissa, Trikala, Turnavos, and Volos) from a Geographical, Historical
and Statistical Point of View (Athens, 1882), p. 133.
354 See Gourgouris, Dream Nation, chapter 7.
355 See A. Kyriakidou-Nestoros, Neohellenic Studies (Athens, 1976).
356 A. Kyriakidou-Nestoros, ‘Popular Culture’ in Greece: History and Civilisation (Athens, 1981), p.

277.

112
 Illustrations 1 and 2
Top right (2): The Greek-French Parody.
Bottom left (3): The New Generation Embraces Greek Civilisation.
Source: Th. A., Cartoon Album (Athens 1874).

113
iii. Crimes of Ethnohistory: A Manual for ‘Killing’
and Embalming Greek Brigands

Greek brigandage was incorporated into the language of political aphorism for a
number of reasons. In Part I, I examined how some types of political crime that
‘infested’ Britain and Greece provided British and Greek commentators with
primary material for the production of political discourses. Here I move on to a
different aspect of the same dialogue and I try to capture different discursive
subtleties. The argument this section puts forward is that the discourse on
‘disorder’ and brigandage could also acquire the status of a transcendental idea in
Greek and British narratives. I claim that in the Anglo-Greek dialogue on Greek
brigandage both sides employed methodological approaches that we find much
later in the theoretical apparatuses of ethnology and history. As the reader will
notice, the Greeks and the British analysed the phenomenon on two different
temporal levels, the synchronic (as a ‘picturesque,’ anthropologically interesting,
phenomenon) and the diachronic (as part of their history).

History-ethnology
One of the most intriguing characteristics of this exercise was the association of
Greek brigandage with ‘historical’ phenomena, such as Scottish and English
outlawry, that had a direct relevance to the process of British identity formation.
The fourth edition of John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Greece provides a
good starting point. In his section on Greek history Murray claimed that being a
Klepht under the Turkish regime was similar to being ‘an outlaw in the time of
Robin Hood, or a ‘gentleman-cateran’ in the Highlands of Scotland a hundred
and seventy years ago.’ According to Murray, the Greek Klephts were worshipped
by the Greeks with ballads as much as the Robin Hood-style outlaws by English
peasants, because ‘these robbers of Greece were no vulgar plunderers,’ but
defenders of their country. Murray enhanced his argument with a colourful
example in the form of a fairy-tale. In this story, a Greek Klepht who captures a
Turk, asks his ‘holy oak’ to decide on his hostage’s fate.

If the captive were a Mussulman, the answer of the oracle was decisive: “Hang
the unbeliever to my sacred branches, and confiscate all that he hath to the service
of the true Church and her faithful children.” 357

Murray’s genealogy seeks to establish a complex history of brigandage/klephtism.

The story is formulated around a crude reference to the body of classical
literature, which is appealing and plausible to Murray’s readership. In this
discourse, two different national narratives converge, that of Robin Hood ‘who
stole from the rich to give to the poor’ and that of the Greek klepht, who fought
for Greek independence. In the next page of the Guide the reader is informed that
the armatoles, who were the brigands employed by the Ottomans to persecute
other brigands, and the Black Watch of Scotland, were similarly called Palicars
(παλληκάρια) ‘or common soldiers.’ Consecutively, Murray claims that the Irish
‘boys’ 358 can also be classified into the same category as the Klephts and the Black

357Murray, Handbook, p. 27.

358Ibid., p. 28. It is true though that the word παλληκάρι (or παλικάρι) had no stable meaning. It
often signified in Greek culture the brave, young, handsome man and intrepid warrior. One could

114
Watch. Intriguingly, this reference to an Irish past is not negatively coloured like
the debate on Fenianism.
These references open up a generalised narrative of Greek brigandage, which
has to be deconstructed. It must be noted that the narrative appeared in many
different forms, but the rationale remained the same. I offer therefore a second
example of a traveller who describes the way Greek ‘rogues’ (brigands) preserve
in their mannerisms the behavioural patterns of the ‘ancient outlaw.’ In this
version of the narrative the pallikari is ‘an adventurer, a bully, who can swell
around like a turkey-cock, rob his neighbour, shoot his brother’ 359 and not the
noble Klepht of Murray’s Handbook. The methodology of both commentators
encompasses synchronic observation of past phenomena that survive in the
present, for the tracing of the primordial form of those phenomena. This is what
was called genealogy in the first instance and in a Foucaultian fashion.
The next question that arises is why this narrative became so popular among
Britons. An explanation will be offered by analysing the writings of Hilary
Skinner. Skinner, The Daily News correspondent and a philhellene who joined the
Cretan rebels in 1867, also saw in the Greek warriors of the island the ‘ancient
chieftains of Scotland’.

And the Englishman, wearing his red tunic, in all the places he went […] brought
the lights of a civilisation superior from the one he found there, while the Turks
and the Arabs neither construct roads, not disseminate letters, one the contrary,
they devastate and destroy. 360

In all these passages, there is an indirect classification of phenomena through

analogy tautology and opposition, on a single scale. Contemporary Greek
brigands-Klephts are identified with past Scottish or medieval English outcasts. But
then, the civilised ‘Englishman’ is positively compared with the Scottish semi-
civilised chieftains, who replace the Greek brigand-Klepht in the classificatory
system. Finally, the Arabs and the Turks are compared with the English. Thus,
the discourse works through substitution of one or both of the terms of the
binary couples. The whole system operates on the notion of evolutionist
anthropological time, a scientific artefact based on the assumption that the
observer belongs to a higher stage in the cultural ladder when (s)he analyses
phenomena that for him/her may belong to history, but are identified with, and
are believed to constitute the present of the observed. The standpoint of the
British observer is always higher, so that (s)he can supervise Greek culture. Also,
it is noteworthy that three of the commentators that were quoted are of Scottish
origin, and the third an American with strong English loyalties. Hilary Skinner
and George Finlay are the most striking examples, because they assume a positive
attitude toward an English civilising process of Scotland, and, furthermore, they
regard themselves as proper Englishmen. We should bear this in mind and reserve
it for further reflection.
The use of anthropological time was deeply embedded in British ethno-
historical thought. George Finlay’s conceptualisation of the role of klephtism-

probably find a Greek synonym in the ancient Greek word αγαθός, often used to describe both the
handsome and brave man in antiquity – but this is my attempt at inventing an arbitrary genealogy
of concepts.
359 Benjamin, The Turk and the Greek, pp. 160, 166.
360 Skinner, Hardships, p. 4. For more information on Skinner see Palingenesía, 15 June 1867.

115
brigandage (as a single phenomenon) is the same as that of Scottish outlawry’s in
Anglo-Scottish relations:

The threatened war with Turkey was a pretext for several bands of Hellenic
volunteers crossing the frontier, and the Turkish authorities now see with pleasure
every event that embarrasses the Hellenic Government, and seek revenge for the
injuries they received by protecting those who inflict similar injuries on Greece.
The difficulty of maintaining order along the frontier of Greece and Turkey is not
unlike that which prevented England and Scotland from tranquillising their border
districts in the 16th century. A prudent Government at Athens could do much to
allay the feelings that perpetuate disorder. 361

Finlay’s comment ties together political disorder and cultural ordering in a single
thread, and shows that the comments of the previous commentators have
political content. The Dilessi crisis provided him with the opportunity to expand
the spectrum of his study. In one of his articles he elaborated on Greek inability
to meet the terms of and prerequisites for (European) order:

Our own history in the last century, not only in the Highlands but in the
neighbourhood of London, may convince us of the possibility of an honest nation
tolerating a system of organised robbery, and we might refer for a parallel with the
state of Greece to the earlier annals of England and of Germany, showing honest
and laborious burghers and peasants oppressed and harried by robbers claiming to
be heroes. 362

In his analyses on brigandage, Finlay built up a system of labelling by comparing

the career of the Dilessi brigands with that of Scottish cattle-dealers and outcasts
of the eighteenth century. 363 But his study simply uncovered his preoccupation
with comparisons. We should not dismiss the fact that despite his Scottish origin,
Finlay saw English and Scottish history as a unity and repressed past Scottish
struggles against England. The past is romanticised and internal British conflicts
are written out of his history. More generally, his inclination to analyse the
romantic aspects of Greek brigandage is traced in his earlier works, such as the
History of the Greek Revolution and is related to the Klepht of the pre-revolutionary
period. A quite striking reference is found in the first volume of this historical
work:

The spirits of oppressed peoples were always attracted by independent life, even
when it was lawless. The Greeks heroicised their chieftains and transformed them
into a sort of ‘Robin Hood’. They exaggerated their deeds and extended their
life span as myths in ancient years. The patriotic Klephts in demotic poetry though
are recent artefacts. 364

Greek myth making of brigandage is a recent phenomenon for Finlay, a kind of

enchantment in a disenchanted, ‘rationalised’ world, to remember Weber. But this
is also the function of Scottish outlawry in the British imagination, according to
Finlay. This discursive logic permeated British journalism of Dilessi through and
through, and provided the basis for analysis and assessment of the mythistorical,

361 The Times, 19 April 1869.

362The Times, 6 May 1870.
363 The Times, 3 June 1870.
364 G. Finlay, History of the Greek Revolution, vol. I (Athens, 1973), p. 37; translation mine.

116
mythical and historical aspects of Greek brigandage: all at the same time. Robin
Hood and Rob Roy, the most important legendary outlaws, were constantly
exhumed from the storeroom of British experience and used in the metonymic or
metaphoric processes to illustrate the ‘graces’ of the Greek brigand:

The character of the robber chief, notwithstanding the cold-blooded cruelties of

which it is capable, is regarded with the leniency, not to say admiration, which has
in England been extended to outlaws of a very different class:

A famous man was Robin Hood

The English ballad singers’ joy;
But Scotland has a thief as good,
365
She has, she has her brave Rob Roy.

What was identified in the brigand of Greece was ‘a personage whom time has
left to his generation, to remind us, amid the strange mutations of our day, of
Robin Hood and his merry men.’

A historic personage worthy to mention in the chronicles of the time, a link

between our own and former ages. To trace his origin we must look back twelve
hundred years to the rise of Mahomet, the camel driver of the desert. 366

A triptych is created – a triptych, which gives the contours of a ‘dialogue’ and an

exchange between Occidental and Oriental civilisations. In the discourse of
survivals, which haunts British thought, the Orient, contemporary Greek crime
and past British forms of outlawry are placed into the same conceptual category.
It must be stressed again that both Rob Roy and Robin Hood were
mythistorical constructs, mythical narratives of historical events. Although Robin
Hood had been remodelled through the centuries, one important single element
engraved on the British recollection was his supposed struggle against Norman
invaders. 367 Rob Roy’s story was more ambiguous, but equally interesting. He
owed his fame in England to his resemblance to Robin Hood. He was a cattle
dealer for a period and later on, as an outlaw, he had his own protector, the Duke
of Argyll. Admittedly, the mythistorical description of Rob Roy, and his dealings
with sources of legitimate power may have played a role in the construction of
discourse. 368 Such a discourse expands geometrically: the triptych Rob Roy-
Dilessi brigands-Robin Hood is a substitute for the three-faced nature Greek
brigandage possesses, the gallant/romantic aura, political networking and national
resistance (Schema 1). However, if we combine spatial representation with the
presence of evolutionist time then we should go even further, and ask why Greek
brigandage was seen through the lens of a British past (Schema 2). The way the
phenomenon of brigandage is opened up is nothing more than the common
historical practice of introduction of a series of continuities and discontinuities in

365 The Pall Mall Gazette, 16 May 1870; The Daily News, 26 April and 16 May 1870.
366 Benjamin, The Turk and the Greek, p. 222.
367 J.C. Holt's work Robin Hood (London, 1989), pp. 7-13 gives some information on the various

versions of the myth; for the Anglo-Norman conflicts and the legend there are some useful
comments in Ch. VII, esp. pp. 183-184.
368 For the literary version of Rob Roy and the story as it was handed down to the nineteenth-

century British, one should consult Walter Scott’s Rob Roy (London, 1890), and especially the
Introduction (vol. I).

117
 history’s ‘linear sequence.’ 369 We should not underestimate what the British
observers did: by introducing this or that event as a rupture or an important
moment in the history of outlawry (Rob Roy and Robin Hood’s stories), they are in
a position to make history. And the history they make is impregnated by what truly
matters for them. It is the nineteenth-century British observer’s history that unfolds in such
comments.

GREEK BRIGANDAGE

ROMANTICISATION
DOMESTIC POLITICS
NATIONAL RESISTANCE

Robin Hood Rob Roy

SCHEMA 1

369See Foucault, Archaeology, p. 127. I also draw on Johannes Fabian’s two excellent works on time
and evolutionism [Time and the Work of Anthropology Critical Essays (Chur, 1991) and Time and the
Other. How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York, 1983)].

118
 SCHEMA 2

CIVILIZATION

O
R
D
E
R
BRITISH
PRESENT

BRITISH PAST D GREEK PRESENT

I
S
O
ROB ROY R
D
E
R GREEK
BRIGANDAGE

ROBIN HOOD

119
 This is the fascinating world of academic ‘disciplines’ as it evolved mainly in a
non--academic environment. Such disciplinary processes reveal the most
intriguing aspects of Western European psychopathology: the alienation of the
subject, the fear of identity loss. Max Weber first pointed out that capitalist
modes of action are followed by a conceptual rearrangement of the known world,
which reaches its sad ‘perfection’ in the rationalisation of human experience. To
rationalise means to bid farewell to a ‘pre-capitalist paradise’ of imagination; myth
as a practice has no place in one’s scientific universe. And yet, modern thought
seems to harbour its worst enemy in the disciplinary idealisation of the Other:
although it makes myth its object of research, it raises its traits to the level of lost
values, and thus mars its own discourse from within. ‘Idealisation may thus be
said to provide a compensation on the symbolic level for the political and economic
processes that have destroyed the traditional fabric of non-Western societies’. 370
The driving force behind British interest in the history of klephtism is a British
need to idealise Scottish outlawry. Reflecting back to comparisons between Greek
brigandage and Irish Fenianism, we could also regard this need for idealisation as
a resistance mechanism to the discourse on Irish-Greek disorder. The argument here
is that these two conflicting narratives are symptomatic of British modernity. In other words,
for the modern British observer what in the present is homologous to Greek
brigandage (Irish Fenianism) has to be rationalised and loathed; but its past
equivalent (Robin Hood, Rob Roy) is romanticised and praised.
The synchronicity-diachronicity of British thought is evident in other cases
too. Edmond About’s The King of the Mountains, a French satire on modern Greek
brigandage, was discussed in the British press together with Miguel Cervantes’
Don Quixote, which provided an ironic illustration of the old Spain of knights. 371 It
is said that it was About’s disappointment at Greek political behaviour that gave
birth in his fertile mind to the personality of Chadji-Stavros, the Greek brigand
with the peculiar Turkish name, the bank accounts in England and the various
protégés in the Greek National Assembly. 372 The novel tells the story of abduction
of two English ladies and the botanist Schultz by the Greek brigand chief Chadji-
Stavros. It is a witty French satire of the nineteenth-century Greek cast of mind
presented through the eyes of Schultz - About’ fictional alter ego. This arbitrary
association is crucial because there are indeed, some ways in which the
picturesque noble transgressor of Don Quixote resembles the crude and uncivilised
Greek Chadjii-Stavros. The practice matters more than the content: first,
Cervantes (and his narrative) belongs to history, while Chadjii-Stavros represents
the present; and second, Cervantes mocks the social/symbolic of the old Spain,
while About reprimands the modern Greek social/symbolic. This game conceals
the compromise between ethnographic/synchronic and historical tensions. What
we have here resembles the Freudian critical reversal of ‘the figure, which
organises the practices of a society.’ 373 The Greek brigand becomes a starting-
point for a ruthless criticism of Greek society by the British, but through Robin
Hood’s myth it becomes self-reflection. The fact that the British press used a
French and a Spanish satire to reflect on the British past could be explained by

370 Spurr, Rhetoric of Empire, p. 132.

371 The Pall Mall Gazette, 28 May 1870.
372 T. Vurnas, ‘The Domination of Brigandage,’ a treatise on brigandage in E. About, The King of

the Mountains (Athens, 1990). p. 30; see also pp. 46-47; Jenkins, Dilessi, p. 11.
373 De Certeau, Heterologies, p. 24.

120
the lack of British literary sources. But there could be more to this: both novels
satirised Mediterranean societies in which order was missing.
It is thought-provoking that on this occasion the Greek counter-attack works
within British discourse, but modifies it. Stefanos Xenos, who wrote in English,
was quite happy to accept the evolutionist model, but with some corrections.
Brigandage in Greece, Xénos argued, was never the offspring of moral depravity;
it was rather the outcome of ‘political feeling’ and ‘misunderstood patriotism.’
In fact the Greek words Klephti and Palicari have been mistranslated into English
“brigand”; in the original they signify “hero”. The first Klephtis were those
proud-spirited Greeks who, disdaining the Turkish yoke, fled to the mountains
[…] An Englishman who wishes to form a correct idea of a Greek Klephtis, must
look back to that period in the history of his own country […] the spirit of
resistance, evoked by the Norman invasion… 374

This is a stunning piece of analysis, in which the (missing) British interlocutor is

addressed, and indeed comes to life, through the romantic narrative of Norman
invasion. The same practice appears in the diaries of Sotirópoulos and Bagdon.
One of the strangest passages in Sotirópoulos’ diary concerned an incident
involving his captors’ irresolution on the question of his release. The days were
passing by, the government was delaying the delivery of the ransom, and the
brigands began to wonder whether it would be better to put an end to the cause
by putting an end to the MP’s life, according to their custom. No, Sotirópoulos
had exclaimed; there was an alternative. In his diary, he recorded a story which he
fabricated in order to convince his captors to release him without asking for
ransom. Interestingly, the tale’s protagonists were an English brigand band, the
background was eighteenth-century England, and the argument was that ‘there
were brigands even there.’ 375 This passage was plausible enough to be translated
by Bagdon verbatim.
John Gennadios, the author of the Notes on the Recent Murders By Brigands in
Greece (1870), engaged in the same symbolic practice. Using the famous popular
ballads of Robin Hood and Rob Roy to reflect on the past state of British affairs,
he added:

Rob Roy was a hero, and there existed a noble spirit of competition between
England and its Northern neighbour in the way of outlawry, as we learn from the
popular ballad […] In all these [English] ruffians [however], there is nothing of
that patriotic feeling which excused formerly the Greek klepht, and absolutely no
redeeming trait as may be found in the more degenerate [Greek] brigands of
today… 376

Here Gennadios replaces British discourse with a Greek one: that in the
production of the history of Klephtism. Rob Roy is compared not with the 1870
brigands but with his nobler Greek equivalent, the Klepht of Greek Independence.
That breaks the cipher of British evolutionist historical approach, since Rob Roy,
a mythical and historical persona, is used as the raw material for the transformation of
a historical persona, the Klepht, into a myth. Also, Gennadios sees some similarities
between Scottish and Greek resistance to English rule. Unlike in the work of

374 Xenos, East and West, p. 104

375 Sotirópoulos, Thirty-six Days, pp. 116-118.
376 Gennadios, Notes, p. 132.

121
British commentators, the English-Scottish split in British identity is noticeable.
Finally, this recurring Greek practice tells us something about the nineteenth-
century Greek mind. Romanticisation of brigandage shows that Greek thought is
neither pre-capitalist, nor backward according to the British standards. To talk
about your heroes with a tinge of nostalgia shows that you have already fallen
prey to the claws of modernisation.
Charles Tuckerman, the American Minister at Athens, was another
contemporary authority that promoted this narrative in his treatise Brigandage in
Greece which was destined to become one of the most influential works on Greek
politics in the Greek and the English-speaking world. Tuckerman supported the
idea that brigandage in Greece was an exceptional phenomenon, because it was
not the child of today.

It was born in the Turkish oppression, when restless men fled to the mountains to
secure the only independence vouchsafed them. Although the outlaw who now
takes advantage of impenetrable defiles of the mountains to evade pursuit is
without that nobility of character, which the ancient Klepht possessed, he has the
same strategy and cunning, and from the same mountain fastness can defy the
pursuit of any soldiers… 377

Despite his attempt to demystify the Greek brigand, Tuckerman retained a

romantic element in his description. This was stressed even more when he
explored the attraction this ‘reckless and good-natured adventurer’ 378 exercised
over the communities of rural Greece. He could not suspect what the Greeks
would do with his commentary: they would use it to counter-attack British
accusations following Dilessi.
After Foucault, it is rather difficult for someone not to trace in the writing of
history the symptom of power. Those who hold the pen are those who hold the
gun – or those who hold only a pen seek for ways to transform it into a gun. It is
no wonder therefore that the British press considered the whole Greek nation as
‘a race of Klephts’ who represented nothing else than the relics of a glorious past
379
and that journalists searched for specific passages in Edward Gibbon’s Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire, in which the author had quoted a scholar who had
‘proved’ that the Homeric heroes were robbers. 380 Gibbon had been part of the
circle of scholars that reflected on recurring phenomena in history. 381 The Times
and Daily Telegraph journalists evoked him as an explanation of the Dilessi
Murders in 1870, because he helped them to argue that Greek brigandage was an
ancient ‘vice’. The argument of continuity in Greek culture which Gibbon
suggested was useful for the British commentators, who were looking for ways to
attack the Greeks.
So much defamation can only provoke anger. A witty Greek attack for these
accusations was organised some years later by the Greek translator of Tuckerman.
Tuckerman had used Robin Hood in his reflections on the development of

377 C. Tuckerman, ‘Brigandage in Greece. A Paper Addressed by Mr C. Tuckerman, United States

Minister at Athens, to Mr Fish, Reprinted from “Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the
United States”’ (Athens, 1870) in C. Stevens, Ransom and Murder in Greece. Lord Muncaster’s Journal
(1870) (Cambridge, 1989). p. 126.
378 Ibid., p. 127.
379 The Times, 3 May 1870.
380 The Daily Telegraph, 4 June 1870.
381 P. J. Bowler, The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past (Oxford, 1989), pp. 193-195.

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Klephtism into a corrupt political system, in which blackmail, intrigues and murder
prevail. His Greek translator – a bureaucrat of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs –
did not translate the word ‘blackmail’ into Greek, but he added in a footnote to
the text:

This [i.e. blackmail] is part of English and Scottish tradition, because, as you
notice, the proper word for the description of the process can be found in the
vocabulary of those languages; in our language, on the contrary, the term does not
exist, and there is no fear or reason for it to be invented. 382

The ‘blackmail’ the translator refers to was the tribute anciently extracted on the
Scottish border by freebooting chiefs who offered immunity from pillage – a
practice that did not differ from the protection Greek brigands ‘offered’ to
villagers. It is intriguing though that the way the Greek translator posited the
question of ‘blackmail’, helped him create a new scale of civilisation on which
Greece has a privileged place, because she appears to be morally superior to her
British prosecutors. It should not escape attention that Tuckerman’s views, the
views of an American, were ignored; the Greek translator did not attack the
American writer, but Scottish practices, by juxtaposing them to Greek ones.
This imagined ‘dialogue’ with Britain presents all the symptoms of a misfire in
communication for other reasons too: Tuckerman’s starting point was ‘academic.’
To arrive at his conclusions, he first went through the historical survey quoted
above, thus presenting the evolution of brigandage into what he called a corrupt
system. But for the formation of his argument Tuckerman drew on the highly
influential work of Cornelius Felton, whose interest in modern Greek brigandage
was humanist. Though Felton is another American, it is important to shed light
on his ideas, since what the Greek translator read and interpreted was based on
them. In his University course on Greek poetry, Felton investigated the nature of
ancient and modern Greek composition, and he employed the usual vocabulary
of decline and progress. Felton stated that the original modern Greek
compositions were those of the mountaineers and the islanders, but chiefly of the
former.

These tribes are known as Klephts and armatoles – the former truly independent
during the Turkish dominion; the latter partially acknowledging the Turkish
authorities, and having some sort of nominal organisation under them […] These
[the klephts] semi-barbaric heroes, retaining many of the customs, superstitions
and traditions of the ancient times, were the most formidable assailants of the
Turks during the war of the Revolution. […] But the point of significant reference
to them is their strong sensibility to poetry, and their facility in composition […] 383

Greek poetic imagination will occupy some space below. For the moment, it is
important to highlight how Felton develops a methodology of historical
ethnology in his narrative. The discourse of survivals, which we examined in the
previous section, dominates his thought. Lévi-Strauss would be delighted to see
how the ancient and the modern form a continuity here – and all this a century
before the birth of structuralism!
As we saw in previous sections, for the Greeks the relationship between
ancient and contemporary forms of social organisation became a major question.

382 Tuckerman, The Greeks of To-day (1877), pp. 197-198.

383 Felton, Lectures, vol. I, pp. 261-262.

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Albeit they constantly asserted continuity, their relationship with the past could
also be a relationship with the ‘other’. In the discipline of folklore, which places
greater stress on the synchronic element, this attitude is an implicit presupposition
for scientific investigation. As other historians noted, the folklorist occupies a
vantage point, and predicates his scholarly identity upon a division of the nation
into ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures. 384 However, Greek history/folklore presents us with
a somehow peculiar case, nicely reflected in Greek reactions to the Dilessi
murders. After the episode, the Greek Society of Parnassos in Athens organised a
forum, in which its distinguished member Dimítris Pantazís delivered a talk.
Pantazís’s argument was constructed upon the hypothesis that Dilessi and
Oropós present the Greeks with two cases of dangerous historical topoi, which

Where always atrocious and sites of crimes, as it will become obvious from what
we will proceed to say. 385

Pantazís let Herodotus, Thucydides and Strabo speak on behalf of the Greek
nation. The core theme of the talk became the relationship of the inhabitants of
these two sites with the Athenians and with the pirates. Thus brigand ‘inclination’
to murder was historically constructed as a relationship between core and
periphery, capital and ‘country’. In other words, the Arvanitákis brigands became
the ‘other’ of ancient Athenian civilisation, and through it, they became the object
of research for Neohellenic observers. Pantazis realised the pitfalls of his analysis,
since the Arvanitákis were Greek-Vlachian mountaineers, but he was not
disheartened. Instead, he tried to prove that the inhabitants of Oropós (who had
a love-hatred relationship with piracy) moved to the interior of the country in
order to protect themselves from the ancient pirates, ‘the Arvanitákis of the sea’.
This establishes a genealogy of Greek brigandage; in this genealogy, the past’s
otherness successfully stands in metonymically for the otherness of Neohellenic ‘low culture’.
The discourse both the Greeks and the British commentators mobilised to
analyse outlawry/brigandage operated on certain principles. The methods they
used, which was more historical than ethnographical/anthropological, present us
with a striking similarity and a striking difference respectively: Greek and British
methods converged when the category of brigandage was mobilised to interpret
practices employed by Greeks and Britons in different historical periods. Hellenic,
Neohellenic, Scottish and Irish histories and myths, occupied the same discursive
space and intermingled. Foucault called this heterotopias (heteron=other,
topos=place), the result of conscious and intentional misplacement of time-levels,
which enables human actors to re-arrange experience and re-conceptualise
phenomena. 386 The difference in Greek and British methods was more a
difference in intentions: It should not escape our attention that the vast majority
of the authorities in the debate on Highland and Scottish civilisation were Scots.
Their attempts at restructuring their ethnic history as a romantic form of savagery
was therefore the symptom of their desire to affirm their participation in a British
imagined community.

Ethnology-history

384 For comparisons one can draw upon John Dickie’s work (Darkest Italy, pp. 90-92); the high-low
division can be traced back to Robert Redfield’s theorising.
385 Palingenesía, 13 May 1870.
386 See M. Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces,’ Diacritics (1986), pp. 26-27.

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Sometimes British observers preferred to conduct ethnographic work on modern
Greek brigandage, for purposes of further classification. The collection of legends
about the Greek brigand-Klepht placed brigandage in the realm of myth rather
than that of reality, but the process itself was, again, scholarly. In the travel diaries
of two women travellers to Greece edited by Stanley Poole there was an
extraordinary gamut of incidents concerning prejudices related to the Greek
brigands-Klephts. The Greek brigand was presented as a Vrykolakas or vampire in
the region of Olympus, which ‘was believed to be haunted by the restless spirits
of dead Klephts, who roam about in the silence of night, bemoaning their fate,
and crying vengeance on the oppressors of their race.’ 387 The vampire myth,
which had strong anti-Turkish elements, was believed to be originally Romanian;
however, the commentators do not even allude to that. Similarly, the Albanian
brigand appeared in their narratives to possess uncontrolled powers and to
exercise sorcery on Greek women. 388 Again the erotic element of the narrative
was foreclosed. These stories did not seem to be detached from the Greek
discourse on Albanian identity and the Klepht-hero, but perhaps we should also
note that when brigandage was detached from contemporary national problems
of the Greek Kingdom, it became a rural myth worthy of investigation by the
amateur anthropologist. 389 The prevalence of the debate on the rural origins of
brigandage was sometimes tied to the fear that the phenomenon was a ‘scourge’
that could contaminate urban life as well. 390 The backwardness of the ‘low
culture’ that had to be recorded and analysed was deemed to ‘possess’ an evil
power which can contaminate modern life. It was not surprising that British
observers used this discourse of contamination in this context: what defined their
role as ‘observers’ was predicated upon their separation and detachment from what
they observed. If the rules of detachment were violated (if they placed themselves
within what they observed), their role could be questioned.
British ‘contamination’ fears had a fascinating effect on the Greek
imagination. I will juxtapose two narratives in this instance, one from a Greek and
one from a British source. The Greek one is a cartoon (see illustration 3), which
shows a fat shabby butcher holding a knife and the traditional Greek kokoretsi. He
wears a scarf, he seems not to be in a good relationship with water and – given his
beard and his vicious look - to have a rather ambivalent one with the razor. The
subtitle is a pun, difficult to convey in English: ‘Kebab-maker, and occasionally a
brigand.’ The dirt of the butcher’s profession is metaphorically linked to that of
the brigand ‘profession.’ The comment reminds us that in his translation of The
Brigands of the Morea Oscar Bagdon ‘made’ Sotirópoulos complain about the
brigand’s filth, although Sotirópoulos himself included filth in the picturesque
customs of the brigands. To illustrate the point further the following example will
be offered from the diaries of a British traveller to Greece:

Butchers in the market are in a great minority. There are two, or three, looking
like brigands, with a whole magazine of weapons thrust into the leather pouch
attached to their scarf. 391

387 Poole, People of Turkey, vol. I, pp. 222-223. The same motif in Tozer, Researches, vol. II, p. 51.
388 Ibid., vol. I, pp. 230-237. See also pp. 251-254.
389 J. Mill, The Ottomans in Europe; or, Turkey in the Present Crisis (London, 1876), pp. 136-139.
390 The Times, 26 December 1866.
391 Colbeck, Cruise, p. 95.

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 Illustration 3
‘Kebab-Maker (And Occasionally a Brigand)’.
Source: T.A. Cartoon Album. (Athens 1874).

The narrative of the ‘bloodthirsty butcher’ was common in British diaries, and it
was strongly linked to British love of animals. On the other hand, when Greek
butchers were associated with non-European indigenous populations, 392 the
narrative would become suggestive. Interestingly, even Bagdon and Sotirópoulos
mentioned several times that brigand culture was a meat culture. The implicit

392 For another example see Young, Five Weeks, p. 158.

126
suggestion there is that of (brigand) cannibalism – a discourse that underscored
European historiography ever since Montaigne’s famous essay on the exotic
‘other’. If we read between the lines of this narrative, then in addition to inner
low-high Greek (or British) culture divisions, Greek brigandage becomes the other of
European civilisation. This idea is, again, underlined by Tylor’s theory, through a
number of associations: (a) the brigands belong to the rural world (b) rural life vis-
à-vis urban is backward (c) brigands are the ‘other’ of ordered, modern societies.
The British romantic approach to brigandage was closely related to the way
Klephtism-brigandage was also perceived in Greek rural communities. While
discussing with Alexander, Dudley Campbell, a British traveller in Greece, had
noticed that one of the hindrances to the extirpation of brigandage was that the
‘lower classes’ saw in the brigand the epigone of the Greek Revolution. 393 He was
not the only one to make the point. Klephtic ballads created by the popular Muse
often became the object of study and comment. For example, John Murray’s
description of rural customs was accompanied by references to Claude Fauriel’s
collection 394 Chants Populaires de la Grèce, which was the first attempt at gathering
and classifying Greek popular songs. Modern Greek folklorists can nowadays
argue that Fauriel fabricated ballads, or bastardised them. Fauriel’s collection of
ballads was the first serious work on Greek popular culture, and the only one to
embody ‘scientific’ approach until the emergence of Greek folklore as a social
science in the 1880s. It is evident that his attempt had a certain impact on Murray,
although British comments on the production of Klephtic ballads were
overwhelmingly negative. The songs composed about Kítsos and Davélis, two of
the infamous Greek brigands of the 1850s, were harshly criticised by Finlay and
Wyse and were considered harmful because they led to the ‘sanctification of the
Klepht.’ 395
The way British commentators perceived the function of Klephtic songs in
Greek traditional society is intriguing: they retained their privilege to romanticise
them, but denied it to the Greeks. Even more captivating was the effect this had
on members of the Greek ruling classes. Antonópoulos, in his pamphlet gave a
direct advice on this issue to the Greek state:

As regards social education and the generation of repulsion against brigandage,

schoolteachers ought to try the following practice on their little students. […] The
so-called Klephtic songs, in which any listis is praised like a hero, have to be
banned from the syllabus. 396

Beyond any shadow of doubt, such ballads had found their way in the Greek
educational system, thus reproducing ideas and ideologies, and preserving a
particular mentalité. There is need for care here: it was after the Dilessi crisis that
Antonópoulos published his pamphlet and his work has to be contextualised. The
verdict of the foreign press that Greek brigandage was a ‘scandal’ for ‘European
civilisation’ had so great an impact in Greece that in some works produced after
1870 the Greeks were coerced to express their disgust for their ‘heroes’. 397 Under

393 Campbell, Turks and Greeks, p. 96. Campbell’s travel book was the outcome of two lectures he
delivered at the College for Working Men and Women in Queen’s Square. Journalists expressed a
special interest in Campbell’s observations. Alexander was the guide of the Muncaster party that
was kidnapped in Dilessi.
394 Murray, Handbook, p. 27.
395 Wyse, Impressions, pp. 18-19 and 74-75; The Times, 19 April 1869 and 29 April 1870.
396 Antonópoulos, Reflections, pp. 12-13.
397 (Dudley) Campbell and Young record various episodes.

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such circumstances, Antonópoulos’ work should be seen as an official’s attempt
to suggest methods that would change public opinion on popular customs and
brigandage. It was to public sentiment that the deputy for Ermionis, Milísis,
addressed a speech in 1871, concerning the compensation for Mrs Lloyd, widow
of one of the Dilessi brigands. Milísis also attacked the interest displayed by
academic circles in the ‘demotic philology of crime,’ and by novelists of crime. 398
None the less, British interest in Greek ballad collection did not subside. But
it is a fact that British (and perhaps European) unfavourable comments,
combined with Greek desire for westernisation, led to a rejection of the klephtic
tradition and presented the anthropologist with insurmountable difficulties. The
keen traveller/observer would often be frustrated at being unable to gain access
to the klephtic world. Farrer stated that his attempt to extract some Klephtic ballads
failed utterly because the ‘honest Greek fellows’ repudiated with scorn any
knowledge of ‘what might connect them with the rovers of the hill; so we have to
be content with spontaneous ebullitions which take the form of a Tupper-like
Proverbial Philosophy – as for instance, “When Zeus rains from heaven, ’tis well
to have an umbrella for the head;” and other equally incontrovertible, and under
the circumstances, impressive myths.’ 399 Tozer was interested in the tradition that
embellished the image of the ‘romanticised Cleft [sic]’ albeit he stressed that the
‘pathetic brigand songs’ were inferior to those for the ‘noble’ klephts, which are
imaginative. 400 Tozer’s examples were based on Fauriel’s work, and not on
fieldwork. But the absence of fieldwork could be due to Greek reluctance to
provide any information.

Textual museums
Visual representation of the brigand-Klepht served similar ends, but added an
important dimension to the ethno-historical project. It is worth beginning with
The Brigands of the Morea, a work with ambiguous aims. One of Bagdon’s principal
concerns may have been to acquaint British audience with the Greek brigand
code of law. The first volume of this work was more a description of rural and
brigand customs, than a political analysis – although the latter was not absent.
When Bagdon invited his reader to speculate on Klephtism as a survival of a heroic
age, he drew a line between it and brigandage. In addition, the frontispiece of his
book (illustration 4) suggested a romantic preconception of the phenomenon.
The man in the picture is a Klepht-brigand with a dreamy look; he is very
impressive indeed, in his Albanian costume which is terribly clean for a
Leroménos. 401 There are also some European elements in his dressing code, such as
his shoes. The landscape is rather obscure. The ambiguity of the figure could be
attributed to the ambiguity of aims: on the one hand, The Brigands of the Morea
served as an anthropological account; on the other hand, it was a romantic novel,
or even a good advertisement for day-dreamers, for daring travellers, or for those
who travelled in their imagination.

398 Milísis, Two Speeches, pp. 7-8.

399 Farrer, Tour, p. 105.
400 Tozer, Researches, vol. II, P. 54.
401 Λερωμένος or dirty, was a nickname for the professional brigand. Sotirópoulos and Bagdon

inform us that the brigands had to wear dirty foustanélas or kilts, because the snowy colour could
betray them in their night marches. The dirtier a brigand was, the more experienced he seemed to
be.

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 Illustration 4
A Noble Brigand.
Source: Reverend J.O. Bagdon The Brigands of Morea. (London 1868)

129
 Van Lennep’s Oriental Album, the ‘visual’ account of Oriental civilisation, which
the British found so authentic, cultivated the same ambivalence. Van Lennep
painted in one of his drawings (illustration 5) an imaginative ‘gentleman.’ Like
Bagdon’s, this ‘species’ looked rather harmless, but retained all the characteristics
of the ‘idyllic country life.’ All the same, in Van Lennep’s narrative on bandits,
Greek bands were presented as ‘ferocious and religiously fanatical’. 402 Moreover,
more emphasis was given to the depiction of country life in the background than
to the ‘bandit’ figure itself. Here we deal with the two-fold notion of
naturalisation, as it was defined in literary theory and in structural anthropology.
Levi-Strauss argued that naturalisation as a process is the reverse of totemism: if
the latter interprets nature according to the social/institutional language, the
former translates social into natural phenomena 403 – which is what Bagdon and
Van Lennep do in their images. But naturalisation in semiotics is the outcome of
mythology, of a ‘stolen and restored’ speech, according to Roland Barthes. It is
what the myth does to concepts: it alienates them from their content, and uses
their ‘form’ as it pleases – it transforms concepts into words. 404 Both
commentators seem to de- and re-historicise ‘banditry’ so as to make it serve their
own aims and objectives.

Illustration 5
Romantic Representation of a Brigand Chief.
SourceReverend H. J. Van Lennep The Oriental Album. (New York 1862 [1962]).

402 Van Lennep, Oriental Album, p. 81.

403 C. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind ((London, 1962).
404 R. Barthes, Mythologies (London, 1993). Lévi-Strauss (Totemism, transl. by Rodney Needham

(London, 1964), pp. 26-27) rightly argues that myth displays the convolution of metaphor.

130
 Even more evocative are the photos in William Cochran’s travel book. The
Ziebec (illustration 6), who is struggling to retain a masculine posture, armed to
the teeth, is also placed in an uncertain, but civilised environment (probably the
corridor of a house). Captain Andrea, who is described as a fearful rogue by
Cochran, happily displays his masculinity in the photo (illustration 7). The
‘brigand in Albanian Holiday Costume’ – which the Greeks adopted as a national
costume after 1821 – resembles more a true gentleman than a villain who robs
and kills. (illustration 8) The background seems to be natural, but one cannot be
sure. These photos cannot and should not be seen separately from the text, in
which Cochran provided his reader with the background of both the phenomena
of Greek and the Turkish brigandage, the tactics of the bands, and many
fascinating stories of kidnapping. 405 The following passage is from a discussion he
had with Turkish officials who collect brigand photos.

To the student of physiognomy [the album] must be fraught with melancholy

interest. On the occasion of the writer’s first visit to him [the Turkish Procurator
General] at the konak, the former [Cochran] was courteously asked to choose any
one of the specimens of rascaldom displayed in the ponderous tome of criminal
faces; accordingly, that of Captain Andrea was selected. 406

Cochran describes the Greek brigand Andréas as a ‘specimen’, a sample of an

invisible whole that the reader has to imagine. Andréas himself seemed to have
taken his role seriously, as the photo suggests.

Illustration 6
A Ziebec.
Source: W. Cochran Pen and Pencil in Asia Minor. (London 1887).

405 Cochran, Pen and Pencil, pp. 347-357.

406Ibid., pp. 355-356.

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 Illustration 7
Captain Andrea, a Greek Brigand, and his ‘Lieutenant’.
Source: W. Cochran Pen and Pencil in Asia Minor. (London 1887).

132
Illustration 8
Brigand in Albanian Holiday Costume.
Source: G.M.M. MacKenzie and A.P. Irby Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of
Turkey in-Europe. (London 1877).

Illustration 9
Serbian Border Guard.
Source: G. Muir MacGuire and A.P. Irby, Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey
in-Europe. (London 1877).

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 In the case of the Dilessi brigands we are luckier, since we have not only a
photo similar to that of Captain Andrea, but also posthumous ‘immortalisation’
of the decapitated brigands. This appalling photo comes from Lord Muncaster’s
Diaries of 1870 which Muncaster never published. The first version of his
account was printed for private circulation, however, Muncaster never published
it because he was discouraged by his friends and his family. 407 It is worth stressing
that the photo became a souvenir the Dilessi audience, Greek and British, rushed
to buy. The advertisement, a sample of (Greek entrepreneurial) black humour,
was published in Palingenesía, Méllon and Aión:

Because the recent terrible drama kindled everybody’s curiosity, the

photographer Mr. X. Vathis informs everybody that in his studio the following
photos are available:
The ones of the murdered Herbert and of Lloyd with his wife (sold) for 4
drachmas.
Photos of the 3 wounded brigands for 2 drachmas.
The ‘seven heads of the executed brigands’ for 2 drachmas.
Those who are interested in obtaining them, but live in the provinces, can send the
money equivalent in stamps or in promissory notes addressed to Mr, Vathis […] 408

Amusing perhaps, but also thought provoking - especially if one knows that the
Greek and the British press, that did not publish any pictures, repeatedly
‘portrayed’ verbally the captured brigands. Comments such as ‘his look betrayed
audacity and savage confidence’ 409 were frequent, and add the last piece in the
puzzle of visual representation. It is apparent that the Dilessi brigands joined a
tourist market, which demanded new and exciting material to stimulate its
anthropological imagination. 410 This explains why The Illustrated London News
copied the famous photograph of the three brigands: this provided the British
readership with a cheaper version of the ‘obnoxious’, yet ‘scientifically
interesting’, spectacle. Another sketch, which depicted Colonel Theagenis’
testimony in the court, also included the captured brigands of Dilessi. What was
missing from the Greek market was also suggestive of the circumstances. This
certain ‘Mr Vathis’ did not include in his offers the photos of Frederic Vyner, the
youngest Dilessi victim whose loss was mourned equally by Britons and Greeks.
Even Lord Muncaster, the sorrow-stricken sole survivor of Dilessi, had both
Vyner mementoes and the photos of the Dilessi brigands in his collections!
It becomes apparent that in such British ‘narratives’ the brigand was not a
human being, but a ‘species’. The way our brigands posed for the photographer
shows willingness and an inclination to emulate the civilised, but at the same time

407 Stevens, Ransom and Murder, pp. 32-33. After many attacks on Muncaster, the British Minster at
Athens and the Greek government by the press, Muncaster felt tempted to publish his diary.
However, because he also felt guilt and grief for his young friend, Vyner, and eventually decided
not to publish the account from fear that the relatives of the deceased might be offended by his
version of events.
408 Aión, 18 April 1870; Mellon, 21 April 1870.
409 Aión, Palingenesía and The Morning Post of mid-May (15 May 1870) have the most intriguing

descriptions of this sort.

410 For the role of photography in tourism, see Urry, Tourist Gaze, pp. 136-139.

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ferocious and intrepid, warrior-gentleman. 411 The result was submission to the
distorting lens of the ‘artist’ and their transformation into an object of inspection
and scrutiny, a ‘relic of the past’. The severed heads of the Marathon brigands, the
head of Captain Andrea, are treated as Darwinian fossils; they are transformed
into objects of science. This idea is reinforced in other ways. It is not for example
only the heads of the brigands, but their whole being severed from the environment
in which they live and act. The uncertainty of the landscape-background is
nothing other than an erasure of their social identity, a process of ‘embalming’
that enables the ‘civilised’ observer to perform his own role, in his/her own
terms, and not in the wild headquarters of the observed. When Winifrede Wyse
noted ‘how much fitter’ the heads of powerful brigand leaders, such as Krieziòtis
and Theòdoros Grìvas, ‘would have been in Madam Tussaud’s Chamber of
Horrors than in the halls of a royal palace,’ 412 she effectively conveyed the same
idea of de-contextualisation and re-contextualisation of the brigand ‘species’. We
should think of this ‘scientific’ re-ordering of ideas that transforms brigandage
into a form of ‘othering’ as part of a very creative process, which gave an impulse
to scientific knowledge.
The consequences of this process for Greek scientific imagination can be seen
in Gennadios’s analysis of the Dilessi case. In his argumentation concerning the
amnesty and the reasons why the brigands rejected the proposal of ‘safe
expatriation’ to Malta, he included the following.

This is explicable to all those who know anything of the character and habits of
these men. Like all the lower orders of creation, they are not easily acclimatized to
a foreign land. In their native fastness they flourish, and in their primitive mode of
life they thrive, but being transported to a foreign country, nay, even by adopting
in their native land a more civilised diet and a more sedentary life, they have been
known to literally fade away and die in a few months. This [the Arvanitakis]
knew, and they instinctively felt […]. 413

The comment had in fact a subtext that escapes analysis if it were not juxtaposed
to British practices of photography and museum making. The interest British
observers displayed in visual collections related to brigandage shows that their
mind operated according to the principle of representativeness rather than that of the
rarity of the brigand ‘class’. Winifred Wyse captured the spirit of representation
and suggested the design of a sample of the brigand species for the internationally
famous museum of Tussaud. We do indeed deal with the need for fabrication of a
compensatory totality in the face of the fragmented experience the British
observer has on brigandage. There is no doubt that the Dilessi photos/sketches
were initially addressed to the curiosity of the observer. But their presence could
serve in British imagination as an example of a wider (Greek) whole, which
retained, if not bore witness to, an essential difference vis-à-vis the humanity of the
observer. In Foucaultian terms, the observer/subject of knowledge achieved
humanity through its relationship with the observed/object, the Other of
civilisation. Gennadios, who was well acquainted with British thought, said that

411 The notion of appropriation finds its best application in this case; for a Foucaultian approach
to photographic practices see C. Crawshaw and J. Urry, ‘Tourism and the Photographic Gaze,’ in
J. Urry and C. Rojek, Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory (London and New York,
1997), pp. 176-195.
412 Wyse, Impressions, p. 22.
413 Genadios, Notes, p. 61.

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the Arvanitakis species needed its environment to survive, alluding thus to the
evolutionist project. This evolutionist pattern of thought points at processes of
British self-discipline: the subject/observer relates himself/herself to the
observed as a being in ‘incessant need of progressive development.’ 414

The borrowed voice of the embalmed

From all these accounts the missing voice is that of the brigands, which perished
and disappeared forever in the humus of official documentation. To cover this
void, the world of the educated ‘imagined’, or invented, a voice. One of the
leading works in the analysis of Greek popular beliefs concerning brigandage was
Edmond About’s The King of the Mountains, which we encountered before. In
England the novel was considered a tour de force and the Europe of the 1850s
loved it. The Marathon Murders, however, made it look less fictional and more
real. The Greeks detested About for the shame he brought upon them and sought
for ways to defame him. This hatred ran so deep in Greek society, that there are
many recorded cases of public defamation of About. Gennadios accused him of
having sexually harassed a Greek lady, 415 and the records of the 1883 Athenian
literary competition include two satires, whose main object of derision is the
French novelist. 416
The British travellers used About extensively and often indiscriminately in
their accounts. 417 His novel was not exceptional, however, since it presented
similar structural characteristics to those of Thános Vlékas. Notwithstanding the
difference between Kallighás’s austere analysis and About’s light style, both
touched upon the acute problem of how the Klepht-brigand was perceived in
Greek rural communities. About’s sharp remark that the peasant ‘can be robbed
like a woman who is being beaten by her husband but is very proud of him,
because he knows, indeed, how to beat her’ 418 is matched by Kallighás’s implicit
critique of peasant mentality. In Thános Vlékas, when Varvára, the mother of
brigand Tásos, finds out that the shepherds composed a ballad about her son, she
is moved to tears. Kallighás’s intention is not to praise this custom, but to
undermine it: his sarcastic description of Varvára’s state of mind and his remark
that such a song could be dedicated only to a brave warrior of the Revolution like
her husband, and not to a swindler like her son, 419 proclaim his opinion clearly.
A few words have to be said about the socio-political framework in which the
fictional voice of the brigand was born. Greek Romanticism presented all the
characteristics of a peculiar combination of French revolutionary and German
Völkische ideas. Repetition, pessimism and resignation served as ideological
compensations for a harsh political reality in which Greece remained a small and
weak country. 420 It is not strange therefore that the literature on brigandage
displayed symptoms of this disappointment. Thus, in the second half of the
nineteenth century most of what might be termed second-rank works on
brigandage follow the same narrative model. The Son of the Executioner by

414 T. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London and New York, 1995), p. 46.
415 J. Gennadios, Notes on the Recent Murders by Brigands in Greece (London, 1870), extracts from
Muncaster’s Journal, in C. Stevens, Ransom and Murder in Greece. Lord Muncaster’s Journal (1870)
(Cambridge, 1989), p. 173.
416 M. Vitti (ed.), The Military Life in Greece (Athens, 1990), xi.
417 Some references were already made. For more, see Wyse, Reflections, p. 23, Benjamin, The Turk

and the Greek, p. 223 and The Times editorial of 8 February 1868.
418 About, The King, p. 68.
419 Kallighás, Vlékas, pp. 36-37.
420 M. Vitti, Ideological Function of Greek Ethography (Athens, 1991), pp. 16-18.

136
Alexander Kantakouzinós (1857) and the Insane Hermit by Lámbros Enyális (1868)
are the stories of young men, who, being frustrated by ‘society’s inequalities and
evilness’, decide to become outlaws in the Robin Hood fashion, or to join Greek
irregular forces against an imaginary Turkish invader. Interestingly, the core of the
plot is usually an illicit or forbidden love affair or some abstract perception of
social unfairness, and not crime itself. 421 As John Koliopoulos notes, periods of
high tension between Greece and Turkey (Crimean War, Cretan Insurrection,
Balkan crisis) would revive the Greek irredentist dream and Greek aspirations
would be reflected in literary works. 422 It was not a coincidence that that the
production of all these novels coincided with problems in Greek-Ottoman
relations. Even Kallighás did not manage to escape from this crude scenario, for
in his novel the rich aristocrat Iapetós, who desires Thános’ sweetheart Ephrosíni,
tries to ruin Thános with the help of his malicious brother, the brigand Tásos.
This rudimentary polarisation of good and evil was also present in the Greek
theatre of the period. The British traveller James Foster Young was surprised by
the plot of a relatively new play he had the chance to watch at Patra:

The piece was rather thrilling, and consisted of six acts. There was a villain, of
course, who but for a limp in his walk, which made him a peculiar and altogether
characteristic villain, would have been of the very ordinary type. He compelled his
brother, the virtuous man of the piece, to turn brigand, thereby setting their father
against him; next he murdered the father, and then tried to force his brother’s
fiancée to marry him - in fact, was ready for any amount of fresh enormities, when
we left him (and the theatre) in the full swing of his amiable career, and as yet
unpunished. What the punishment was when it did reach him - which was sure to
do in the correct order of stage events - we were too sleepy to wait and see.
One of the scenes represented an ‘at home’ of brigands; and, if one might
judge from the clapping and cheering which ensued, it would seem as if the
sympathies of the audience were not altogether with the Government against
brigandage 423

Even for a foreigner, such as Young, the plot, as well as audience reactions, could
leave some latitude for political speculation. Again, we see roughly the same
attempt at transforming brigandage into a piece of picaresque writing, in which
evilness appears personified, but retains some abstract characteristics.
The most impressive sources of this type were the by-product of the greatest
crisis thus far in Anglo-Greek relations: that which followed the Marathon
Murders. Predominant among them was a play written by the Kephallonian P.E.
Iatrìdis, under the title The Oropos Captivity and the Dilessi Massacre of Four Ramblers,
which structurally followed Gennádios’ narrative. The plot is cleverly constructed
on two levels of action. The first is concerned with Kharílaos, a poor pater familias
with a seriously ill child, who is accused of a crime he never committed and is
consequently forced to take to the hills. The culprit is Baron Robert, a malicious
man who desires Kharílaos’ wife, Euridíke; when his obscene proposals are
rejected, Robert commits a crime and puts the blame on Kharílaos in order to
avenge Euridìke. The second level consists of the Muncaster party’s arrival, their
visit at Marathon and their kidnapping by the Arvanitákis band.

421 Vournas, ‘Brigandage,’ pp. 28-29; Koliopoulos, Brigands, pp. 173-175.

422 Koliopoulos, Brigands with a Cause, p. 210.
423 Young, Five Weeks, p. 199.

137
 The way these two levels of action are connected is clever: Kharílaos, who
became an outlaw, has to join a band in order to survive. He chooses the
Arvanitákis band. While the three Englishmen are detained by Arvanitákis, a
terrible truth is uncovered: the one who had organised the abduction is the Baron
himself, who is not a real Baron but a hair-raising Turkish brigand! In the end,
Kharílaos’ reputation is restored and the Turk is imprisoned, even though,
according to the custom, a series of deaths has to seal the story: Kharílaos kills
one of the prisoners, Kharílaos’ child dies from fever and a Greek army officer
closes the curtain mourning Greece’s fate.
The idea that brigandage is a Turkish evil transplanted to Greece by those
who hate the ‘nation’ is still present in narrative of Iatrídis. Baron Robert has two
identities in the plot, one Western European and the other Turkish, just like the
‘accusers of the nation,’ the foreign journalists-politicians and the Turks. But the
passages that contain the greatest interest for the present analysis are those of
Tákos Arvanitákis’s monologue, in which he repents the murders he committed
as a Klepht and as a brigand. 424 To understand their importance it is necessary to
know that Tákos was the only brigand chief who escaped the collision at Dilessi;
he then crossed the border and formed a new band inside the Ottoman empire. 425
This elusiveness makes Tákos a figure who can easily be appropriated - just like
his photographed colleagues.
The story of Kharílaos gives rise to a fascinating narrative, based on the
pattern already examined. The true, underlying, socio-political reasons which
generated brigandage are replaced by what Kharílaos calls ‘the envy, the malice
and the atrocity of some infernal members of society.’ 426 We should not be
surprised by this repetition. This model of narrative is based on an intersubjective
construction of the brigand’s identity. 427 We find it in trial records, in which the
brigands present themselves as ‘the victims of society’. 428 The same tale was told
by one of the captured Dilessi brigands when he was asked if he repented having
killed innocent people. 429 We also find it in dialogues between Sotirópoulos and
his captors:

“It is a pity”, I said to Laphazánis, “ that you should be a brigand, because

your physiognomy and eloquence clearly mark you out for a gentle man and, I
suspect, one who has some knowledge of letters”. “I once was a quiet, peace-
loving man. But as for that rascal, who first led me into crime, drove me to

424 P.E. Iatrìdis, The Oropos Captivity and the Dilessi Massacre of Four Ramblers, A Historical Drama in
three Actions (Kefallonia, 1870), p. 87.
425 Aión, 11 May and 8 June 1870; Méllon, 19 May 1870. His escape stirred up comments in the

Greek press concerning the Government’s incompetence. These political developments are
implied in the play we examine (p. 82).
426 Iatrìdis, Dilessi, p. 10.
427 Intersubjectivity works with the internalisation of generalised cultural narratives on identity and

status. In our case, the brigands ‘succumb’ to dominant narratives on what they are and how they
ended up being what they are. One has to admit that there is a big difference between post-
modern thought (which was repeatedly exploited in this chapter) and dialogics. It is true that the
dialogic and the post-modern subjects are equally malleable, as they shape and re-shape
themselves through contact with the addressee/other. But on the other hand, the post-modern
subject suffers by what Lynne Pearce calls ‘irrevocable fragmentation’ [Reading Dialogics (London,
1994), p. 9] which the dialogic subject overcomes, because it can reconstitute itself through
interaction with the others. For Derrida, subject and object, self and other, are always ‘alienated’,
while for Bakhtin they are perpetually related through dialogue.
428 Koliopoulos presents a few cases in chapter IV of Brigands.
429 Palingenesía, 21 May 1870.

138
 despair, and finally compelled me to become a brigand, may he bear the
punishment on his soul! In the village where I dwelt, there was that old cuckold,
Batachliás, who cast upon me the blame for every evil which was committed in
the neighbourhood, and several times he caused me to be put into prison
unjustly.” 430

In such texts the objectified brigand becomes the ‘metanarrator’ of the story of
his own development. 431 As in the photographs of the British, the brigand is
trapped within the Greek literary imaginary and his voice becomes one with that
of his romantic Greek observer. This absolute appropriation of the brigand, his
total subjection to a literary genre, a camera, a pen and a brush, divest him of life
but resurrect him as a species. If there is something to be concluded here this is
that brigands could be executed in many different ways. Those of the ‘species’
who escaped the garrotter and the troops and fled to the mountains, died in the
realm of human sciences, mass tourist consumption and literary imagination. This
bloodshed was part of what we nowadays call ‘human disciplines’ – not as an
institution, but as a practice of subjection of what had to be regarded as dangerous,
and therefore alien, to social ORDER.

430 Sotirópoulos, Thirty-Six Days, p. 24.

431 Bennett, Museum, p. 44.

139
 Illustration 10
Albanian Horseman: A Romantic Image of Albanian Countrylife.
Source: H.A. Brown, A Winter in Albania (London 1888).

140
 Illustration 11
Albanians in Mountains above Scodra.
Source: G. Muir MacGuire and A.P. Irby, Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey
in-Europe. (London 1877).

Illustration 12 and 13
Oriental Species: Classifications and Hierarchies.
Source: G.M.M. MacKenzie and A.P. Irby Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of
Turkey in-Europe. (London 1877).

141
 2. EXHUMATION
iv. Greek culture in ruins: British and Greek
reflections on landscape and heritage

The archaeological site in Aristotle Square at Thessaloniki was transformed into

a battlefield some decades ago, between those archaeologists who wanted to
restore the Roman theatre (that is, rebuild it, using the old fragments they found
in the excavation) and those who opposed this proposal as an act of vandalism. It
should not escape attention that for the first group of archaeologists the ‘ruins’’
significance was not their retrieval per se, but their contribution to the dialectics
of Greek identity. Like literary fragments, the ruins were regarded as part of an
invisible spatial whole, thus representing the site of recovery and immanent
completion of a historical project. 432 For the second group the ruins were
important as fragments that belonged to a past that should only be imagined and
not re-narrated. This debate nicely illuminates two aspects of Neohellenic identity
that will be investigated in this chapter.
The chapter also follows one of the tracks of a passionate dialogue on British
and Greek attitudes to classical heritage. It begins in an unorthodox way by
exploring the relationship British observers developed with Greek nature (physis)
and landscape (human inscriptions of culture on nature). Because this relationship
was, by and large, predicated upon the study of classical texts it is argued that the
British debate on Hellenic heritage should be examined together with the
transformation of Greek physical places to literary sites, and vice versa. This way,
we will be allowed to question the role of heritage itself, and to connect it with
political issues concerning British aspirations to colonisation of classical heritage
and Greek identity.

Landscape and classicism

If we are asked to describe our homeland, the first thing that comes to mind is a
patchwork of images and a mixture of sounds and scents. Nothing is stranger
than being deprived of this little universe; for, when it is internalised, not only
does it become part of our identity, but also a constant point of reference, an
imaginary site we cite in our everyday exchange. It is small mystery why British
observers sought ways to appropriate Greek nature to their own visual
experience. Whichever Greek regions they traversed, there would always be
something that awakened the memory of their distant home. The Vice Consul of
Mytilene and keeper of the Greek and Roman antiquities in the British Museum,
C.T. Newton, found himself surrounded by smells and verdure which recalled the
tender spring of England; he tasted milk which reminded him of Devonshire
cream; and he felt homesick. 433 The deep-soiled valleys of Argos reminded
Richard Farrer, another traveller, of the limestone hills of England. 434 The Greek-
Byzantine landscape of Trebizond was erased from Tozer’s horizon when he
entered the region of the Sumelas monastery. The monks talked to him in Greek,
but he indulged in drawing and followed the tracks of his imagination, until ‘at the

432 A. Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Oxford, 1990), p. 7.
433 Newton, Travels, vol II, pp. 98-99.
434 Farrer, Tour, p. 151.

142
bottom of the valley he reaches the stream, which resembles a clear Devonshire
brook, falling from rock to rock in steep rapids’. 435 It was, indeed, as if he had
never left home.
Tozer’s case is interesting for one thing especially: five years after this visit to
Sumelas, in his lectures on the geography of Greece, he was to argue that ancient
Greek character lacked the ‘picturesque’ element:

At starting it may be well to understand clearly what we mean by the

picturesque, for that term in its proper acceptation means the mode of
viewing nature, which we get from looking at pictures, and of this there are
no traces before the Alexandrian period. […] But it seems more likely that
the engrossing character of city life, the fullness of enjoyment furnished by
literature and the games, and the way in which man was regarded as the
436
centre of all things, left no room for the admiration of scenery.

Tozer’s discourse is based on a mixture of modern experiences. There is a

profound (con)fusion of literary and natural topoi, natural images and literature,
and their place in ancient Greek imagination. However, it is possible to see in
Tozer’s recourse to Greek city life an indirect reference to contemporary British
environmental anxieties generated by industrialisation and urbanisation. It is just
that these anxieties are projected onto the body of classical literature. Tozer’s
daydreaming in Sumelas displayed an anxiety to move away from this
contemporary ‘ugliness’ and to seek for shelter to a romantic, ideal, world. Tozer
also claims that what the ‘ancients’ did not manage to do the moderns achieved:
to use landscape as a form of reflection on their way of living.
Greek landscape became thus a form of self-narration for British observers.
The modern Greek landscape was effaced from the British imagination, and what
remained was the literary topos of antiquity. The way British imagination
connected natural sites and citation of classical texts reappeared in Thomas Wyse
and Dean Stanley’s reflections, when they reached a vantage point from which
they could see Beotia:

The evening was now fast shutting in, closing almost without the admonitory
twilight, and Citheron’s woody folds darkening on right and left at every
step. We began to fear the promised noble view of Boetia, from the height
over Platea, could hardly be realised to Dr. Stanley. We had been more
fortunate. Still sufficient light remained, when reached this eminence […] To
point out details, or to particularise other than the bearing of localities, was
impossible. Yet even this had a short of charm, a mystic faith in a scene of
which there was much seen, but more believed, and pieced out from
recollection rather than observation – shadowy and grant, but yet true. 437

In his description of Cheronea, Wyse lamented the negligence of the villages, the
melancholy churches, the absence of labour. ‘There was no crowd, no mirth, so

435 Rev. H. F. Tozer, Turkish Armenia and Eastern Asia Minor (London, 1881), pp. 436-437.
436 Tozer, Lectures, pp. 172-173. Interestingly, in the same lecture he refers to the lake of Pheneus
as the Greek ‘Derwentwater’ (p. 108). Undoubtedly the association of Derwentwater with Greek
nature refers back to the romanticised Lake District landscape, which inspired the nineteenth-
century British poets.
437 Wyse, Impressions, p. 295. A similar dream experienced a ‘sentimental traveller’ (Harewood) in

Corfu in 1869 [see H. Harewood, Letters of a Sentimental Idler, from Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Nubia, and
the Holy Land (New York, 1869), p. 9].

143
shout, no laugh. All was still, and everything seemed done and borne with
reluctance, an antithesis to the joyous harvest-home of a free industrious people,
like our own, or to the traditional exuberant revel of Naples and Rome during last
days of their vintage.’ 438 His mourning was genuine, but Wyse was reluctant to see
beyond British domestic reality; instead, he displayed a desire to domesticate the
Other. 439 Nature became for Wyse an expedient for the insertion of British
history; the observed culture was undervalued, downgraded, and finally erased,
leaving thus a gap which Western civilisation could fill. Of course there were
voices that contested this practice, such as that of Farrer, whose encounter with
Corfiote culture generated ambivalent feelings. ‘Looking across the great central
plain to Pelleka, the sight grows almost weary with the endless masses of
cultivation, broken only by distant glimpses of the Adriatic. At last the cause
suggest itself: there is not a fence or enclosure of any kind’. And the Englishman,
accustomed to ‘associate fertility with fields and hedgerows, experiences a sense
of strangeness that at length gives place to one of perfect satisfaction’. 440
These comments can be both provoking and moving. These Britons want to
reach and occupy a vantage point to indulge in dreaming - one which activates
panoptic time. 441 Panoptic time manages to incorporate a different set of
experiences, British and Greek, into the same narrative. Although the purpose of
these travellers is to visit the classical past, they inevitably use their ramblings for
observations on contemporary life, Greek and British. Even when they
concentrate their narration on ancient sites the desire itself to visit the land of
Greece serves as a form of autobiography:

In the sunny days of my youth I had read of this land, and for hours reclining on
my native hills, I used to follow with thrilling interest the track of their heroes. I
little thought then that the feet of a village lad would ever tread the soil of
Attica, or that his eyes would be permitted to survey these magnificent temple-
ruins in the capital of Greece! 442

By and large the pole of attraction is Greece proper, and it is fair to state that the
romantic element is not absent from British reflections. The observer is so much
driven by his classicist passion that he forgets that it is neither the natural setting
nor the pile of ancient stones that make the scene magnificent: it is more the
power of recollection. Because of this power, Greek landscape helps a tinge of
nostalgia to creep back to the text:

Nothing can be lovelier than this mountain scenery softened by the rays of the
departing sun. Sometimes in England, in the late afternoon of a hot summer’s
day, a bluish haze is discernible about the masses of foliage for which her parks
and richest landscapes have become renowned, not a mist, but a soft haze,
toning and blending the leafy masses, and spreading itself above them, and
giving a distinct charm to the picture […] In Greece, this haze may be seen to
perfection. It is not only blue and purple, but almost every other colour, and

438 Wyse, Impressions, p 154.

439 Spurr, Phetoric of Empire, p. 7.
440 Farrer, Tour, pp. 14-15.
441 This is another common pattern in British travel writing, which is followed by the desire to re-

populate the empty land with Socrateses and St. Pauls (See Rev. J. Cuthbertson, Sacred and Historic
Lands, Being a Record of Travels in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Greece, Constantinople, & e. (London, 1885), p.
203].
442 Cuthbertson, Historical Lands, p. 209.

144
 sometimes many other colours together shading off into each other, which, with
the pellucid atmosphere, and the unflecked azure of the sky, invest the
landscape with a splendour unknown in most Western skies. 443

For Colbeck Greek scenery is ‘perfect’ like in ‘the classical texts’.

Autobiographical insertions’, like that of Colbeck, were frequent, but they were
often followed by references to the classical body of literature through which the
British observers viewed Greece. The habit of erasing the present and harbouring
an ideal world, in which history shapes nature and nature is seen only through
history, appears in many forms in British writings: whenever human beings get in
the way, history returns to wipe them out and replace them with mythical
figures. 444 Sometimes it is as if ancient edifices are designed so as to fit Athenian
landscape, this umbilical cord of European culture. 445 Acropolis, the treasure of
humanity, is totally devoid of life as well, even when the observer directs his
discourse to the past; thus Dudley Campbell saw in the Parthenon ruins only ‘a
succession of structures so admirably calculated to excite the enthusiasm of
combined religion and patriotism’, 446 without making any further reference to the
human beings that may have inhabited that place. ‘Help-books’ for travellers
reproduced the same narrative which sublimated landscape, and forgot to
mention the people who surrounded it. 447 Even more blunt was the comment of
another traveller that ‘all admiration is lavished on the buildings themselves;
which, even in their ruins, appear almost too solid and massive to be the work of
men’s hands; but seem, as it were, part and parcel of the soil itself, as imperishable
and as enduring’. 448
The fact that the British ‘Greece’ is often an empty land, devoid of human
life, pieced out of recollection, is suggestive. Freud saw in the substitution of an
image for an idea the key to the method of the classical mnemonist. Freud called
such substitutions ‘screen memories,’ and claimed that they should be seen as part
of the linguistic apparatus of human experience. Their role is to foreclose
traumatic experiences, which we prefer to keep at bay because we cannot bear
their burden. 449 What allows us to trace the source of the original trauma is that
its content always gives way to a topos, a ‘surface’ under which the original trauma
is hidden. If we are to take Freud seriously, then we should see in British
attachment to landscape a resistance to understanding and accepting historical
changes in Greece, even though ancient Greek history would often be the starting
point of British narration. This de-historicisation was a defensive action towards
modern Greek reality which British observers found so disturbing: to deal with
the landscape was not simply to despise, but to deny a certain reality, from which they felt
threatened.
The Greek elites were intrigued by the attention the classical ruins attracted.
But their interest in classical heritage was not the outcome of British observations
exclusively: there were many travellers and observers from other European
countries and the United States who visited or wrote about Greece during the
nineteenth century. This disjunction should not prevent us from briefly exploring

443 Colbeck, Cruise, p. 31.

444 Ansted, Ionian Islands, pp. 36-37.
445 Newton, Travels, vol. I, p. 15.
446 Campbell, Turks and Greeks, p. 100.
447 See for example Rev. J. Burns, Help-book for Travellers to the East; including Egypt, Palestine, Turkey,

Greece and Italy, with Tourist Arrangements by Thomas Cook (London, 1870), p. 141.
448 Young, Five Weeks, p. 32.
449 S. Freud, The Pychopathology of Everyday Life (New York, 1965), pp. 42-45.

145
the institutionalised study of classical heritage by Greeks before we move on to
Greek responses specifically addressed to Britons. Certainly, the development of
European interest in classical heritage would not go unnoticed by the
Neohellenes. In one of the speeches delivered in the meetings of the Greek
Philological Society of Constantinople, a speaker explored the habit of the
foreigners to ‘surrender to contemplations of the past and […] observe the beauty
of humanity engraved on to the marbles, which shine under the silver bows of the
afternoon sun’. 450 Again in this passage, life is replaced by ‘structures’. This
comment at least shows that what the British travellers and academics did, was
examined in Greek scholarly circles. Even more alarming is the following quote
from a speech delivered in 1869 by another member of the same society. In this
passage, Karapános read European interest in Hellenic ruins as a practice that
originated in analogous Hellenic practices. For him the ancient Greeks were
intellectually equipped to admire works that had already been ‘ancient’ in their
age. And ‘if those incomplete and mutilated fragments of the ancient statues and
of other objects are much superior to those of modern art, then what about those
excellent samples of art which the ancients admired, but time did not spare for
us?’ 451 Thus European perversion compelled Greek historical/progressive time to
move backwards, to a primordial ancestry that was, nevertheless equally modern
with nineteenth-century Europe. It becomes evident that European investigation
of the ancient Greek past had the effects of psychoanalysis upon Neohellenic
imagination: the more the Greeks found out about ‘their past’, the more they felt coerced to re-
imagine it.
Places of the country, which were attached to European historical memory,
were almost mythologised by Greeks. Towards the end of the 1870s the genre of
topology, which dominated Greeks letters, provided Greek researchers with the
opportunity to restructure the Hellenic past. For example, narrations of the
foundation of Athens in mythical times would not be separated from Athen’s
contemporary history. 452 Such mythistories, narrated again and again, provided
Neohellenism with a topographical and geopolitical identity. Marathon was
definitely another place that haunted Greek recollection. The persistence of
European travellers and scholars in associating Neohellenic character with the
battle of Marathon was inevitably internalised. The popular Muse embraced this
narrative in hard times, especially when the Greek state was involved in the
Balkan crisis of the late 1870s. The following is an example drawn from a poem
dedicated to ‘The Heroic Army of Greece’ in 1877. In it, we witness the
development of a relationship of analogy between Hellenic, Byzantine and
contemporary Greek character – a character which is then associated with
historical sites:

I dedicate this poem to the children of the Hellenes,

Who want to resurrect the throne of Constantine,
Because they are inspired by heroism and bravery,
- A sign that they were born in Sparta,
And that they want to gain more trophies for our modern history,
453
Which they will place again in Marathon.

450 Surviving Materials of the Hellenic Philological Society of Constantinople, From December 1865 to May
1870, vol. IX (Constantinople, 1871), p. 185.
451 Ibid., p. 148.
452 Gregorópoulos, Traversing Greece, pp. 8-9.
453 I Ch.B, The Raising Voice, p. 1.

146
There is also a sorry tale to be told for Marathon after the Dilessi massacre which
the British press presented as modern Greek sacrilege committed against a
celebrated ancestry. The governmental Greek press retorted in a thought-
provoking way that ‘the noble name of Marathon’ should never be misused,
especially since the murders took place far away from that spot. 454 Greek pride
was mortally wounded by British comparisons between the ‘degenerate’
Neohellenes of 1870 and the Marathon Hellenes of the past. 455 When the
Kephalonian artist Iatrídis wrote his play Oropos Captivity, he made sure that he
would restore Greek honour in his foreword, by addressing his work to the dead
captives:

To You, friends of Greek antiquity, whose thoughts were drifting back to the
magnanimous battle of the Hellenes, and whose interest was attracted by the plain
of Marathon, when bloodthirsty brigands sacrificed Your life. Ah, yes, Your life
became a holocaust, a sacrifice to Your historical studies. To You I dedicate this
work. 456

The passage creates an imaginary Greek topography (Marathon), but it also

alludes to the British/European origin (‘your historical studies’) of this
topography. From documents contemporary to the massacre we know that the
Muncaster party never went to Marathon for sightseeing; but in the Greek
imagination, so accustomed to this repetition of Hellenic history, those who
visited Marathon had to be pilgrims.

Archaeological ventures
The European pilgrimage to ancient sites could easily result in a cultural crusade –
and it is well known that such crusades are justified on the basis of heritage and
emotional attachment to the claimed land. Here we are already faced with a series
of vital questions: Whose heritage were these worshipped Greek sites? Who should
inherit them and on what terms? Recently, Artemis Leontis defined classical
inheritance in terms of ‘physical depth and expanse of Neohellenism’s cultural
terrain’. 457 Her analysis of Hellenic topographies was grounded on the concept of
geoethnicity which suggests that the attachment of a unified, though richly
layered, historical identity to a continuous territory, is the core doctrine of
nationalist ideologies. 458 Political geographers indeed suggest that imaginative
geography, or geopolitical visions are constituted by ‘any idea concerning the
relation between one’s own and other places, involving feelings of (in)security or
(dis)advantage (and/or) invoking ideas about a collective mission or foreign
policy strategy.’ 459 According to this definition, the ways national territory is
imagined can constitute the incentive for an actual political project. 460 The
political project I move on now to investigate is nowadays called archaeology. It is
in my intentions to explore the ways in which the topology (the logos=reason,

454 Aión, 18 April 1870.

455 See The Illustrated London News of 14 May 1870. In it there was a sketch of the plain of
Marathon accompanied by comments.
456 Iatrìdis, Dilessi, p. 5.
457 A. Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland (Ithaca and London, 1995), p. 7.
458 Ibid., p. 8.
459 G. Dijkink, National Identities and Geopolitical Visions: Maps of Pride and Pain (London, 1996), p. 11.
460 Leontis, Topographies, p. 24.

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thinking of a topos=site) of Greek and British narratives can be linked to
archaeology, the reconstruction of monuments and the unburying of stones.
Here I am more concerned with the ritual of bringing to light the primal
ancestry of the Greeks. Therefore, my thematic is focused on three interrelated
questions: (1) British engagement in a ‘dialogue’ with classical antiquity, which
created an imaginary site the British claimed from the Greeks, (2) The way this
site became a question of heritage/inheritance for the Neohellenes, and (3) how
the Neohellenes reacted to British claims. This adumbrates, if anything, a cultural
war on imagined loci attached to physical places, which resurfaces nowadays in the
form of the Elgin question. The problematic this section (pro)poses is that this
cultural war contributed to the articulation of Greek and British identities.
Once unfolded, the question of heritage challenges the historian with its two-
fold, and often equivocal, nature. Its propagation and reinforcement, on the one
hand, is left to the state, which activates technologies of power to transform
citizens into useful national subjects. But, on the other hand, its demonstration is
traced in the attitude the national subject adopts towards these apparatuses. We
will work backwards here, and first see how the British narrative on ancient
Greek inheritance was received and interpreted by the Greeks, proceeding
subsequently to investigate the cultural war in the labyrinths of the (Greek and
British) academia, one of the most powerful state institutions.
The reason why I follow this order is because British travellers and scientists
came in direct contact with the Greeks in their rambles and their researches. On
that level, we do not work with imaginary, but with actual interlocutors. The
British ‘Lords’ who considered that it was their mission to rescue the remains of
ancient Greek civilisation would depart on long-term projects of excavation. C.T.
Newton had already acquired the reputation of the ‘madman who digs holes’ in
Mytilene, when he came across a Hellenistic discovery in Eresos. His
arrangements with the local authorities were successful, but the inscription he
wanted to remove was deemed to be property of the village, and the proprietor of
the area resisted the ‘theft’:

She was a lady of forty, with very regular features modelled after the classical type.
At the sight of our sacrilegious party she became animated with the fury of an
ancient Pythoness. She bowed down to the ground before the stone at least twelve
times, kissing it, and crossing herself each time; then she lit a fire and burnt incense,
to purify the place of our presence, and with great horror flung out of the sacred
precinct some chicken-bones, the remains of our yesterday’s luncheon. 461

Newton also explained that the woman reacted violently because the stone
belonged to an old chapel, and was therefore deemed to be sacred. We deal here
with two different systems of values, which come in conflict because the
interlocutors miss each other. The British intruder became a thief, because he
wanted to steal something to which the local community attached a certain value.
There were instances in which Greek reactions to British classical endeavours
were not negative. On such occasions the Neohellenes would work as ‘observers’
of British classical interests and explore entrepreneurial possibilities. These
Neohellenes were willing to sell pieces of what British travellers would ‘recognise’
as classical art. The authenticity of these items could be questioned, and deceit
was a very frequent practice in Greece. But treachery was already part of the
symbolic order of such Anglo-Greek encounters: these ‘entrepreneurial Greeks’
461 Newton, Travels, vol. I, p. 97.

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bargained archaeological findings or forgeries because they knew that the
travellers attached value to them. British travellers were aware of their
vulnerability and reproached the Neohellenes for not being interested in their
heritage. Marathon figures in the following transaction that leaves the narrator in
disgust:

So low may a country be brought, that its most precious spots will lie uncared for,
even violated without rebuke, nay worse, sold for a paltry sum, as the entire plain
of Marathon, with its tumulus, where, once inured, reposed the ashes of the
Grecian heroes, was actually offered to Lord Byron for about 900 pounds. Any
one else might have bought it. Well might the poet sadly breathe forth his pathetic
patriotism for his adopted country. 462

The discourse of forgery or selling of antiquities, which would break the British
travellers’ heart and empty his pocket, was also linked to the fear of vandalism.
The Cheronean lion, a sepulchre of the Beotians who died in the battle with
Philip, mutilated by ‘the Greeks of the War of Independence,’ as Young
emphatically mentioned, was transformed into the standard of the battle for
civilisation. ‘It seems a curious freak of history and human nature that modern
Greeks, fighting for their freedom from a foreign yoke, should have been the
ones of all others to destroy, wittingly or unwittingly, a monument raised to the
last freemen of ancient Greece’, Young adds. 463 For Young, who could not think
outside the logic of conservation, the Neohellenes did not deserve to be the
custodians of the Hellenic past, because they did not know how to cherish it.
The project of rescuing antiquities would also develop into a crusade against a
corrupt and indifferent Greek state. In this instance we can read the words the
British Minister at Athens uttered upon arrival in the ruined Minyan site of
Orchomenós:

Looking out on this waste, magnificent in its past, and with unexhausted wealth
still beneath its surface for the future, what indignation rises, - not against war or
devastation, for that is their mission, - but against the self-complacent panegyrics
and ignorant apathy of modern proprietorship. A Government, which can abdicate
or so suspend its functions, does not get rid of its responsibilities. Feudalism and
Islamism may be pardoned, not so the civilisers, who seize the inheritance by the
divine right of superior wealth and knowledge, and leave it in barbarian waste,
Bavarian, or otherwise. They are to be treated without mercy. They have nothing
to plead in defence or mitigation. Property here is usurpation, until better
administered. 464

Of course, if the inheritors are not suitable to carry out their mission, they have to
be replaced by an external force, that of the British coloniser/administrator. It is
interesting that Wyse’s companion to this excursion, a Greek Demarche,
endorsed these ideas. To be sure, Wyse’s reservations were genuine: like many of
his compatriots, he ‘preferred seeing the treasure still left in the darkness of the
earth than scattered in the hands of ignorance and mere material love of gain’.
465
Of course, Wyse’s reflections are chronologically situated in the Othonian age.

462 Colbeck, Cruise, p. 64. See also Farrer, Tour, p. 71.

463 Young, Five Weeks, pp. 244-245.
464 Wyse, Impressions, p. 174.
465 Ibid., p. 291.

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However, later British demands and rhetoric did not change, on the contrary, they
became firmer. In the 1860s and 1870s, the academic Mahaffy articulated these
demands in a clear and crude way:

One more reflection, and that a bold one, here suggests itself. If England, instead
of being content with Malta and the Ionian Islands, had, in the days of her naval
greatness and general reputation, obtained Sicily and Southern Greece, what
precious results might have been gained for these countries themselves, and for
Europe at large! While our invalids and sybarites would have spread wealth
through the beautiful islands of Sicily, our route to India would have lain through
Greece, and years ago every curious traveller might have gone by rail to Athens,
as he now goes to Brindisi. Greek art and antiquities would have become the
household property of good society, instead of being seen only by a few privileged
people, to the great disgust of their envious neighbours. 466

Here the colonial mind is ready to conquer both the land and the topos of Greece,
and to justify this violence in the name of a civilising mission. Mahaffy’s discourse
is activated with the help of an appeal to a lost order, which the British masters
are in a position to restore. This happens because the coloniser merges heritage
and inheritance into one mould.
One thing suggests here itself: The Elgin question, which was based on the
logic of rescuing antiquities from the ‘barbarian’ Neohellenes. As early as the
nineteenth century the Elgin affair became a discourse on a necessary colonisation of
Greek heritage: ‘civilised’ Britons had to replace the ‘barbarous’ custodians of
Hellenic civilisation. Historians, mainly because of the pre-exiting political ideas
that supported this discourse, explored the debate exhaustingly. There is no
doubt, nevertheless, that Britons were also haunted by the phantom of justice.
The feeling of guilt would occasionally appear in British observations, and a
different sort of ‘justice’ would be examined. Though the rhetoric of
‘conservation’ was not absent, reflections, such as the following, showed that
British observers knew that an accusation burdened them:

Of course, Englishmen have the vandalism of Lord Elgin cast in their teeth, and
are asked if they are not ashamed of retaining in the fogs of Bloomsbury that,
which is the rightful property of a rising and patriotic people. But Greece’s
treatment of such antiquities as she still possesses is scarcely so enlightened as
to induce civilised nations to surrender priceless treasures to her tender mercies.
Lord Elgin’s spoliation, pace Lord Byron, though rudely and unskilfully
carried out, has yet been the means of preserving that little which has escaped
the ravages of gunpowder […] of Turkish engineers and Hellenic patriots; and
even if those remnants see slightly incongruous in their smoky London
domicile, they are at any rate accessible to lovers of art as they could never have
been in their original home. The ruined, time-stained temple loses nothing by
their absence, and it is absurd to speak of their removal as though they had been
torn freshly coloured from the perfect shrine. 467

The battle between a heavy conscience, which the phantom of Byron kept alive,
and the colonial rationale is implicit in the passage. The same story was told by
Young, who tried to foreclose imaginary philhellenic accusations directed against

466 Mahaffy, Rambles, pp. 17-18.

467 Farrer, Tour, p. 37.

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Britain ‘but, anyhow, when on the spot, and with those vacant spaces staring on
in the face, one can well understand something of what the poet felt, when, in
those noble, impassionate lines of “Childe Harold,” he wrote (as an eye-witness)
his scathing denunciation of the whole [Elgin] proceedings’. 468 The removal of the
Elgin marbles becomes in Young’s narrative the cause of a ‘dislocation’. In other
words, here we are faced with suspicions that British intervention in Greek
culture introduced a ‘gap’ in Neohellenic identity. The heritage Elgin himself left
to the Greeks of Livadiá – ‘a clock striking in a rather abnormal manner’ –
although it is used for the communication of a derisive comment, uncovers the
same fear:

It hangs in a small tower, close to the Eparch’s house, rudely dialled, but to be
seen and heard in all parts of Livadia. Lord Elgin had a sort of stern, perhaps
Scotch, fancy that way: he thought that Greeks, as all other Orientals, only knew
time by its loss. 469

There is a very profound truth in what Wyse said: the Greeks were to
acknowledge the missing element from their heritage only after its ‘usurpation’.
This ‘usurpation’ became a constant Greek accusation against Britain. We will not
elaborate more on this point; instead, we will focus on a specific work, which
captured the idea of ‘loss’ in Greek culture. As other Greek commentators, John
Gennadios had already condemned Elgin’s act in his Notes (1870), 470 but at the
end of his long diplomatic career he published a work on Elgin. This work, which
covered the ‘long’ and eventful nineteenth century, was based on some
manuscripts that belonged to his great-grandfather, the scholar Ioánnis Benizélos.
Gennadios also drew on a wide range of travel books, documents and statements
of British and Greek individuals and societies. The book was published with the
generous contribution of the Greek Archaeological Society in the 1930s.
Gennadios, using his skill to collect, classify and amalgamate scattered statements,
managed to produce a history of the Elgin question. We will shed light on one of
the most intriguing passages from his book in which nineteenth-century popular
beliefs and the institutionalisation of knowledge are happily married.

The following narrative issues a firm and undeniable disclaimer against the
assumption that the locals, especially the Greeks, did not care about the destiny
of those antiquities [i.e. Caryatides]. The moving popular tradition, that after the
capture of the Caryatid, every evening you could hear the cries and lamentation
of her sisters in Acropolis, is an excellent sample of the poetic imagination and
the historical conscience of the Greek people. 471

Gennadios drew on reflections that appeared in the travel literature of the second
half of the nineteenth-century in order to support this story. Legend mattered
here as much as history, since Gennadios and his predecessors worked as
ethnographers; their interest in Greek tradition alludes to the principles of a
powerful national discipline we nowadays call ‘folklore’. Balibar is right to argue
that one of the ways imaginary communities become real, is when they learn to

468 Young, Five Weeks, p. 34.

469 Wyse, Impressions, pp. 309-310.
470 Gennadios, Notes, 173.
471 J. Gennadios, Lord Elgin and his Archaeological Raids in Greece, and Especially in Athens: A Historical

and Archaeological Treatise (Athens, 1930), p. 18.

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produce themselves. 472 This production can also be achieved with the help of
those who coerce them to re-imagine themselves. In other words, one of the
unexpected benefits of the Elgin venture in Greece was that it provided the
Greeks with a narrative of a ‘gap’ that united the nation and made it real.
Historians have the privilege to acknowledge that the scars the Elgian affair
left in Anglo-Greek relations were long lasting, if not permanent. The ‘Lords’
were by no means to be entrusted with excavations in Greece. Despite their
engagement in ethical questions concerning the Elgin affair, the British could not
escape their mentalité. In 1873 an article to The Times on the portion of the Elgin
marbles that was cast away by the notorious shipwreck on the shore of Cerigo
was accompanied by the comment that ‘the British have to remember the
existence of their forsaken goods’. 473 This persistence to hold to their civilising
mission compelled the British to survey all archaeological developments in
Greece with great zeal. Of course, another underlying reason for this attitude was
the feeling that their academic rivals, the Germans, were considerably more
privileged.

Englishmen have […] always shown a keen instinct in the appreciation of the fine
qualities of Greek literature. The names of Bentley and Porson, […] Jebb, among
moderns, are enough to establish such a claim. […] [But] we have no Chairs of
Archaeology in our Universities (though it is probable that they may be looked for
before long). […] In this respect, we are far left behind by Germany, where every
small University provides a course of instruction, at the hands of teachers carefully
trained. 474

The Schliemann plans for an excavation in Olympia became the object of envy
and speculation in the British press, even though it is closer to the truth to say
that the Greeks were equally suspicious about German motives and conduct.
When Schliemann suggested that he would build a national museum in Mycenae
and Olympia provided that the Greek Parliament allowed him to commence
excavations at these places, the Government declined to sanction his proposal. 475
Soon after this disagreement, the new weekly magazine New Greece, reported the
intrigues between Schliemann and Greek academics, who declared that his
discoveries ‘were nothing but fancies.’ 476 The motives hidden behind this
ambivalent behaviour are traced back to Fallmerayer’s theory, which the Germans
themselves never forgot. The interest they developed in Slavonic archaeological
traces, and their excavations in the Peloponnese, 477 rekindled Greek suspicions.
This did not bar Greek-German archaeological co-operation, but it certainly
complicated things. The Greek state was determined not to share the fame and
the excitement of any such enterprises with foreigners, an attitude that the British
were quicker to understand. When the temple of Asclepius was discovered, the
new Times correspondent (who had replaced Finlay) was forced to admit with
some disappointment that Greeks and not Britons ‘will have the glory of

472 E. Balibar, ‘The Nation Form: History and Ideology,’ Review: Fernard Braudel Center, 13 (Summer
1990),
p. 346.
473 The Times, 31 October 1873.
474 The Levant Herald, 11 March 1880. The article refers to Mahaffy and Newton as pioneers in the

field of archaeology.
475 The Times, 6 April 1874.
476 The Times, 18 April 1874.
477 Palingenesía, 18 April 1878.

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unravelling the topographical mysteries of their city’. 478 The Western mission of
Hellenic resurrection was very close to becoming Hellenised. The British might
have seen in these monuments a treasure too precious to see the light of the day
without their contribution, but in the meantime, in this circuitry of ancient
catacombs the Greeks had managed to find their already-always ancestors.

Conclusion
This chapter tried to cover a rather wide range of British and Greek experiences,
and a conclusion has to be drawn for the reader’s convenience. It is evident that
for British observers the experience of sightseeing in Greece encompassed a
reading of archaeological traces that was predetermined by their knowledge of
classical literature. That helped them to re-invent the actual sites they visited. This
re-invention was based on the Hellenic past and ignored the present. Whenever
contemporary, Neohellenic, life intruded into this vision, it would either be
repressed, or be criticised for its defects and shortcomings. Auxiliary to these
criticisms were British notions of homeland that were compared and contrasted
to Neohellenic modes of living. The ultimate aim of Britons was to claim Hellenic
heritage for themselves, and the argument put forward was that the Greeks were
simply too uncivilised to act as the guardians of the traces of what came to be
regarded as the European past.
The Greeks, on the other hand, had to fight on many different fronts: for
them the ‘usurper’ was not just Britain but ‘Europe’. Rural Greeks and the Greek
elites fought against ‘European intruders’ by using different weapons: denial of
access to archaeological sites, treachery, institutionalisation of archaeology (which
would allow them to compete the foreigners). Only the fact that the Neohellenes
reacted shows that the European narratives of the Hellenic past had been
internalised and had created the preconditions for the re-invention of modern
Greek identity. This Neohellenic response to the European challenge adumbrated
an adversarial relationship with ‘Europe’. It was strange that the ‘custodians’ of
the European past, the Neohellenes, had to compete with this geopolitical entity
from the moment European nations, such as Britain, considered the Greek
‘forefathers’ their cultural progenitors. Judging by British reactions one begins to
suspect that ‘modern Greece’ was not regarded as part of ‘Europe’. If that was the
case, then were did Greece belong and why? This is the question the next chapter
attempts to answer.

478 The Times, 10 July 1876.

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 v. Can this Greece be Europe? Perceptions of
Greek Spatial/Cultural Identity
In the previous chapter I tried to show that in the debate on Hellenic heritage
physical and imaginary loci coexisted. For practical purposes I focused mainly on
these Greek loci that embodied the classical past. However, such sites belonged to
‘Greece’, a geopolitical totality that was coming into being at the time of the
debate I examined. Inevitably, I was confronted with two new questions: How
did the nineteenth-century Greeks and Britons think of Greece as a geopolitical
referent? Did ‘Greece’ as space, and ‘Greece’ as time-history, form part of the same
debate in their narratives? There is a drama the reader encounters in these
narratives – the drama of a Greece, whose physical location rendered her identity
ambiguous: being at the margins of Europe, right next to the Asiatic peninsula,
she seemed like a hollow space between the two continents.
Greece’s European identity was a major issue in nineteenth-century British
and Greek narratives. In Part I, I explored British discourses in which Greece was
represented as a disorderly country. Interestingly, even in those representations
there was a tension similar to the one I investigate here: Ireland, which was used
by some British commentators in their discourse on Greek disorder, was a ‘white’
country, whereas Abyssinia, Mexico and the Indian colonies were not. Thus
British discourse represented the Greek Kingdom as European and non-
European at the same time. In the four preceding chapters of this Part the debate
upon Neohellenic ability to join European civilisation again was the underlying
idea. Here I would like to focus on another British hegemonic discourse, in which
Greece’s geographical position and historical legacies were linked. I draw mainly
on travel accounts, in which such reflections were more prominent. But then I
preferred to include other works, especially from the Greek side to highlight the
complexity of the debate. The narratives I used presented some the characteristics
we find in the discipline of historical geography today. But I do not aspire to
establish a genealogy of this discipline. My main interest is how and why these
disciplinary practices were utilised by some British observers when they discussed
Greece’s place in the conceptual map of cultures and continents; what made
Greece less European and more Oriental; and what the implications of this
classification were for Greece’s place in the political and cultural geography of the
European world.

Greece and danger: being between two worlds

There were very few routes by which one could approach the Greek peninsula by
sea. The easiest was to circumnavigate the Peloponnese and sail towards Syra, the
commercial centre of the Greek Kingdom. From Gibraltar to Malta, the
landscape seemed to be familiar to British observers, although the feeling that
they entered the Mediterranean world, a world outside their own hinterland, was
prominent in their account of the journey. As the ship approached the
Peloponnese, anxiety would overwhelm them: sailing across the two
Peloponnesian capes was not a welcome experience. As Malea or St. Angelos,
appeared on the horizon, the uneasiness that the traveller expressed in the text
would become more evident:

Its former name, Cape Malea, is a sufficient indication of its dangerous character.
It was considered the most critical part of the coast in the circumnavigation of

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 Greece. Sailors might dismiss anxiety from their minds after clearing Cape Malea,
but so difficult was it to clear, and so numerous were the disasters in attempting
that the Greeks had a proverb “When rounding Malea forget your home”, or
bid good-buy to your home. 479

Alfred Colbeck was not the only traveller who began his narrative with this
comment, which had become a conventional reference to Greek natural dangers.
In his description of a tour to the Aegean Islands in 1875, Henry Tozer also
speculated that ‘from former experience’, he knew ‘what to expect on the other
side of Malea, the headland so justly dreaded by ancient sailors, as the epitaphs in
Ancient Greek Anthology can testify’. 480 The dangers of Malea remain unchanged
from ancient times. Cochran, a British artist, claimed in his diary that to be in
Malea was like forgetting who you are, but not where you are; for Malea ‘is the
most southerly point of Greece and of Europe.’ 481
In these passages history is a spectre that haunts modern space, the Greek
space called Malea. It is the same location that contemporary Greek poets dread
in their art even nowadays. To be in Malea was for them like being in the
Bermuda triangle: the hostile forces that dwelled there deprive one of any notion
of ‘homeland.’ Apparently, for the foreigner Malea was also a fearsome margin:
the end of Europe. In such passages, the historian discovers the travellers’
personal itinerary that helps them to redefine their identity through the ‘tour.’ De
Certeau is probably right to insist that voyages simultaneously ‘create and destroy
the paths they take. Or, more exactly, they take their own course, but wish to lose
the landscape and the way. Mysticism operates as a process whereby the objects
of meaning vanish’. 482 Malea activates a kind of ‘death drive’ in the British
observer, when the physical referent ‘Malea’ is cited in the text. For the observer
the experience of danger during his sailing coincides with the time of production
of his text, because it is precisely through writing that he travels. It is also through
writing that Malea comes into being as an object of history to challenge the
traveller’s identity and put him ‘in danger’. So great is the impression this locus
made upon the British that in his lectures on the geography of Greece Tozer
inverted the discourse. In the Odyssey, he said, ‘as soon as the poet [Homer]
passes Cape Malea, he enters on the realm of fiction, which the west long
continued to be to the people of the east’. 483 In this passage it is the ancient
Greek poet who becomes the observer and constructs his occidental discourse – a
discourse that automatically places Greek identity in the category of the East.
We ought to remember Edward Said at this point, and his controversial thesis
that the Orient was more a topos than a place for the Europeans. 484 In this
instance, history as past, and the emergence of historical geography as a discipline
in travelogues, can be both enemies and allies for the Greeks. Consider what John
Pentland Mahaffy, the celebrated scholar at Trinity College, said about Greece.
For him, the available equivalent for her spatial identity was Italy:

The student of history cannot look upon these two peninsulas [Greek and Italian]
without being struck by the fact that they are, historically speaking, turned back to

479 Colbeck, Cruise, p. 36.

480 Tozer, Islands, pp. 1-2.
481 Cochran, Pen and Pencil, p. 32.
482 De Certeau, Heterologies, p. 37.
483 Tozer, Lectures, pp. 19-20.
484 Said, Orientalism, pp. 152-158.

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 back; that while the face of Italy looks towards France and Spain, the face of
Greece looks eastward, towards Asia Minor and towards Egypt. Every great city in
Italy except Venice approaches or borders the Western Sea - Genoa, Pisa,
Florence, Rome, Naples. […] Contrariwise, in Greece, the whole weight and
dignity of its history gravitate toward the eastern coast. All its great Cities -
Athens, Thebes, Corinth, Argos, Sparta - are on that side. Their nearest neighbours
were the coast cities of Asia Minor and of the Cyclades, but the Western coasts
were to them harbourless and strange. If you pass Cape Malea, they said, then
forget your home […].
When the ship has left the coasts of Calabria, and steers into the open sea, you feel
that you have at last left the west of Europe, and you are setting sail for the
Eastern Seas. And I may anticipate for a moment here, and say that even now the
face of Athens is turned, as of old, to the East. Her trade and her communications
are through the Levant. Her intercourse is with Constantinople and Smyrna, and
Syra, and Alexandria, to which a man may sail almost any day in the week. 485

It is even more striking that for Mahaffy the classic headland of Tainairon
(Peloponnese) ‘is almost the southern point of Europe’. 486 The same principle of
taxonomy returned in travelogues, which operated outside a stricto sensu academic
discourse. Let us take for example a traveller’s conclusive observations, which
appeared in his diary under the title ‘Means of Reaching and Seeing Greece’. The
remark that the Italian and the Hellenic peninsulas stand back to back was old,
Richard Farrer stated. ‘To the west of the one lie its natural gateways; just as in
the case of the other they lie to the east. History and legend attest roughly the
truth of the observation’. 487
History may have the last word, but geography is important for its
understanding. John Murray complemented the above comments, when he
argued that the great Kingdoms of Europe had never been so severed by their
natural boundaries as the provinces of Greece, and that consequently no one
could pretend to understand Greek history until he had acquired an accurate idea
of Greek geography. The geographer Dean Stanley’s authority consolidated
Murray’s vision:

If the study of Greek topography tends to fix in our minds the nature of the limits
of Greece, it also tends more powerfully than anything else to prevent our
transferring to Greek history the notions derived from the vast dominion and
colossal power of modern or even Roman times. The impression of the small size
of Greeks states to anyone who measures human affairs by a standard not of
physical but of moral grandeur, will be the very opposite of a feeling of
contempt. 488

This was taken as a basis for Murray’s conclusion that there had been a singular
physical correspondence between Greece as compared with other countries, and
Europe, as compared with other continents. ‘And if Greece is a miniature of
Europe, the Peloponnesus is a miniature of Greece.’ 489 A similar comment
reappeared in Tozer’s series of lectures on the geography of Greece; this time,

485 Mahaffy, Rambles, pp. 1-2.

486 Ibid., p. 8.
487 Farrer,, Tour, p. 213. Tozer (Lectures, pp. 12-13) makes the same comment.
488 Murray, Handbook, p. 20.
489 Ibid.

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ancient Greek space was compared with that of Europe, because both were the
cradles of human intellectual life. 490
In those passages, there is a constant reference to a ‘Greece proper’ – to use
the commentators’ terminology – which is the Kingdom of Greece. However, the
discourse on ‘Greece Proper’, the location of ancient Greek civilisation, does not
cover the whole of modern Greek space. To be ‘proper’, is to be appropriated
through ‘nominalization,’ Barthes argues. 491 From the moment you name things,
you can claim them. Nominalization grants them an ontological status, which
detaches them from the process of appropriation – its political implications in
short. In our case, ‘Greece Proper’, the appropriated Greece, which strives to be
seen as part of Europe, introduces a split within Greek identity: somewhere there
is a non-proper, that is, non-appropriated Greece. This is the principle on which
Richard Jebb based his theory that history presents us with two different types of
Greekness: an Asiatic and a European one.

The Greek of Europe - dwelling chiefly in Greece Proper and the Islands - still
claimed pure Hellenic blood, and retained in some measure the nobler qualities of
the ancient race. The Greek of Asia was usually of mixed blood, and in him the
quick Greek intelligence passed over into a more decidedly, Asiatic type of
versatility and cunning. 492

Jebb’s schema of ‘development’ is telling: while after Roman conquest the Asiatic
Greek dominated, the fall of Constantinople signified the return of the European
Greek. 493 It is as if Greekness has the ability to jump from one category into
another. Civilisation itself seemed to follow the same route, according to Van
Lennep. I quote at length from his travel diary:

The most cursory reader of history cannot have failed to notice that there has been,
even at an early period, a notable difference between Occidental and Oriental
civilisation […] We may, indeed, safely assert that it is chiefly this unceasing ebb
and flow between the two continents which has prevented the stagnation of mind
that has prevailed in the rest of the world, securing for these peoples the highest
position in the intellectual and practical advance of the human race. The wave of
civilisation originally set outward from the cradle of mankind in the East; but it
soon returned under Grecian and Roman influences. 494

The reference to ‘Grecian and Roman influences’ is a reference to ancient Greek

civilisation that was appropriated by the Roman masters of Greece. Modern
Greek spatial identity remains as obscure as ever; the traveller and the scientist
constantly exclaimed that modern Greece, including its subjected counterpart,
was an ‘unknown country.’ This opposes the aforementioned verdict that Greece
and Europe are homologous categories. Intriguingly, the same contradictory
principle applied to the Balkans in general. 495 The Balkan Raum was for the British
observer a shadowy space, which was waiting to be ‘discovered’. This recurring
pattern has recently led Maria Todorova to argue that the Balkans’ place in
Europe is that of an incomplete ‘othering’; their transitional character suggested

490 Tozer, Lectures, pp. 196-197

491 R. Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (New York, 1979).
492 Jebb, Lectures, p. 2.
493 Ibid., pp. 5-19, 50.
494 Van Lennep, Travels, vol. I, p. 3.
495 Campbell, Handy Book, p. 2.

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that they played the role of the lower-most, the despised alter-ego, in European
imagination over the centuries. 496 The interesting aspect of Todorova’s argument
is that it places Greece in the category of the Balkans, putting thus aside the
implications of a durable philhellenism and of the changing borders of Greece
over the centuries.
This is not to say that one should reject Todorova’s incisive point that religion
and race were important 497 for the way in which the British saw the Balkans and
Greece as the dark side of Europe instead of an Oriental miscarriage. This idea
appeared in some nineteenth-century travel accounts. But Todorova’s conviction
that Orientalism and Balkanism – a term, which is probably invented by her – are
homologous 498 signifies her shift to a mythological reconstruction of the Balkans.
Putting aside any inaccuracies in her argument, I would like to remind my reader
that ‘Greece’ was not as fixed a notion in the nineteenth century as Todorova
suggests. Which Greece, after all?: the liberated one (part of which is ‘proper’),
the subjected to the Ottoman empire or the imaginary one of the Greeks (that of
the Great Idea)?
One cannot avoid thinking of ‘Greece’ as a volatile concept. Although it is
presented as a geopolitical category, often in relation to a totality (‘Greece is a
miniature of Europe’), it never has a fixed meaning. In his anthropological work
on Marcel Mauss Lévi-Strauss speculated on the nature of notions that represent
‘an indeterminate value of signification, in itself devoid of meaning and thus
susceptible of receiving any meaning at all; their role function is to fill a gap
between the signifier and the signified’. Such words become ‘floating signifiers,’ ‘a
semantic function whose role is to enable symbolic thinking to operate, despite
the contradictions inherent in it’. 499 ‘Greece’ operates in the British and Greek
imagination as a floating signifier, because it can be ‘East,’ it can be ‘Europe,’ it
can be the marginal relative of ‘Europe,’ a bridge of civilisations, ‘Proper’ or not.
It is a word empty of meaning although it can simultaneously stand in for an
entire system of values that exist over and above what it designates. The British
observers’ impotence to stabilise the meaning of ‘Greece’ as a notion, is
beautifully reflected in the writings of the British Minister at Athens, Sir Thomas
Wyse. For Wyse Greece was a ‘sort of back settlement of Europe…in which want
of old and permanent content is universal.’ 500
For a more holistic approach to the question, we have to briefly mention
what happens to Greek territories outside the Greek Kingdom. Some British
observers insisted that Macedonia was not Hellenic and Thessaly was semi-
hellenic 501 - blasphemous claims for the Greeks. Constantinople was not a Greek-
minded city for other nineteenth-century observers, 502 but the power Byzantine
myths exercised over the Neohellenic mind made it Greek for others. 503 The
Ionian Islands were more British or Venetian than Greek for the British because
they were for a few decades under British rule. Obviously, nineteenth-century
British discourse on Greek spatial identity ramified all the time. To illustrate my
point, I will offer two examples. The one comes from the diaries of the Vice

496 Todorova, Balkans, p. 18.

497 But see also Van Lennep (Travels, p. 4), who claims that family and army structures differentiate
Oriental from Occidental civilisation.
498 Todorova, Balkans, p. 11.
499 C. Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss (London, 1987), p. 63.
500 Wyse, Impressions, pp. 276-277
501 Tozer, Lectures, p. 200.
502 See Benjamin’s diary, The Turk and the Greek, esp. chapter on Istanbul.
503 Campbell, Turks and Greeks, p. 29.

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Consul of Mytilene C.T. Newton. Mytilene’s physical proximity to the coastal part
of Turkey led Newton to write the following:

Turning from [its] scenery to its present inhabitants, I experienced a painful shock.
Nothing can be less in harmony than Nature and man in this favoured island. A
faint tradition of European civilisation is preserved in the few Smyrniote families
who have settled here […] but even in this society the interest in subjects such as
talk of in Europe is but small. 504

Mytilene, although under Turkish rule, was Greek for Newton - but it is Oriental
Greece.
The second comment comes from the diaries of a famous woman traveller,
Mary Walker. The inhabitants of Crete, still under Ottoman rule then, were for
Walker a mixture of Orientals and Europeans. The intrusion of Mehmet Ali and
the foundation of a small Egyptian colony in Crete made the country look like an
‘Africa Minor’. 505 Crete, another marginal Greek regions, is half-Oriental.
The Greek Archipelago was regarded as semi-European, 506 since the various
Greek islands, regardless of whether they are under Ottoman rule, were often
seen as Oriental. See, for example, what Colbeck said about Syra:

The appearance of the town is almost entirely Asiatic; in occupation and manner
of life the people are half-asiatic; the port, and the only important port lying
between the borderlands of Europe and Asia, partakes of the peculiarities of both
continents, and reflects the life of the East and the West. 507

Professor Ansted’s book on the ‘physical geography and geology’ of the Ionian
Islands, describes the latter in a very similar way:

That a people with so many good qualities as these islanders, should possess at the
same time a share of the weaknesses and vices so common on the shores of the
Levant, is not surprising. But their good qualities exist, and should not be
forgotten. 508

To be a borderland, is not necessarily a vice in these passages. In his speech on

the divine mission of Hellenism, the Metropolitan of Chios, Gregory, took
recourse to Western Aristotelianism to prove that Greece’s geographical location
makes her fit to perform the role of the civiliser. The analogies Gregory found
between ancient Greek spirit as exhibited in its institutions, and the Greek
Church, seemed to have formed the raw material for the speech the famous
philhellene Gladstone delivered at the University of Edinburgh some years later.
Both works were based on the conviction that the communal spirit of the warm
eastern cultural zones was at war with social egotism of the ‘Westerners’. Greece,
which was between the East and the West, was able to combine the qualities of
the two continents and produce a higher civilisation. 509

504 Newton, Travels, vol. I, p. 55.

505 Walker, Old Tracks, p. 211.
506 Newton, Travels, vol. I, p. 211
507 Colbeck, Summer’s Cruise, p. 96.
508 Ansted, Ionian Islands, v.
509 Gregory Metropolitan of Chios, called Gregorios Byzantios, The Hellenic Spirit and the Divine

Mission of Hellenism, An address, transl. by George Williams (Cambridge, 1868).

159
 Here one should stop and reflect upon the concepts one uses. The first thing
to be highlighted is that the very notion of the ‘West’ is highly problematic, since,
despite the impression it gives as an innocent geographical location, it maps the
world in such a way that entire regions and cultures are left in limbo. Constant
use of this term, whose genealogy is traced back to European military and
ideological feuds, without any explication of its content, involves the adoption of
what Sylvia Federici called ‘a view of the world as constituted by opposite blocks
[…] an adversarial self-definition’. 510 The political implications behind the
connection of the ‘West’ with Europe date back to the emergence of
‘Europeanism’ as a synonym first for Christianity, 511 and then for Enlightenment
progress. 512 There were splits even within the notion of Europe, which introduced
a whole set of polarities, such as western, eastern, central, etc. And if ‘we imagine
this system[s] of […] divisions as a kind of geometrical model for a central
tradition of nineteenth-century thought, we can also see it as a dynamic model set
in motion by certain basic principles. There is, for example, the principle of
slippage or substitution, by which one term of a binary pair trades places with its
counterpart from another pair:’

ORIENT VS. EUROPE

INSTINCTUAL VS. CIVILISED
NATURE VS. CULTURE/TECHNOLOGY 513

The nineteenth-century Greeks themselves were part of this game. The equivalent
of Western Eurocentrism can be found in the concept η καθ’ ημας Ανατολή, or ‘the
East according to us’ which Richard Clogg rightly defined as the Greek-inhabited
areas of the vast Orthodox commonwealth, ‘a word disintegrated along with the
Great Idea […] in 1924.’ 514 Greek appropriation of territory was reflected in the
translation of Edward Stanford’s ethnographical work into Greek. The gravity of
the work was displayed in Stanford’s conclusion that ‘the unchanging East
(according to the Greeks)’ – a phrase that is given in English – is Greek, because
‘the archaic Greek element forms the vast majority in all these provinces that had
always been Greek’. 515
Consequently, British uneasiness with Greek space should not be dismissed;
Greek-minded territories, this intermediate sphere between East and West was
seen by the British observers as a passage to another world – a passage that could
put their identity in peril. It is worth re-visiting Todorova’s reflections and
explore the role of Greece in British thought. In fact, Todorova made her choice
among three anthropological concepts: lower most, liminality (‘a state, which
presupposes significant changes in the dominant self-image’) and marginality
(‘which defines qualities on the same plane as the dominant ego-image’). 516
These concepts emerged from the study of various rituals that take place
within a community (or society), every time an individual or a group that belongs

510 Federici, ‘The God that Never Failed’, p. 65.

511 See M. Wintle, ‘Europe’s Image: Visual Representations of Europe from the Earliest Times to
the Twentieth Century’ in M. Wintle (ed), Culture and Identity in Europe. Perceptions of Divergence and
Unity in Past and Presence (Aldershot, 1998).
512 D. Hay, Europe: the Emergence of an Idea, (Edinburgh, 1968), p. 123.
513 Spurr, Rhetoric of Empire, p. 160.
514 R. Clogg, ‘The Greek Diaspora: The Historical Context,’ in Richard Clogg (ed), The Greek

Diaspora in the Twentieth Century (London and New York, 1999), p. 8.

515 E. Stanford, An Ethnological Map of European Turkey and Greece (Athens, 1877), p. 13.
516 Todorova, Balkans, p. 18.

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to this community changes status or identity. Arnold Van Gennep (1909) argued
that such rituals (rites de passage) include three phases, the intermediate of which
involves a total loss of any kind of identity. 517 Some decades later Victor Turner 518
developed Van Gennep’s thesis, claiming not only that this intermediate phase is
undefined by the community itself, but it is also seen as form of transgression of
the agreed norms of behaviour that define the structure of the community. This
stage of the rites of passage is called liminal, when the initiated group loses for the
community any sense of identity. Thus, liminality is a form of ‘revolt’ against the
dominant ‘self-image’ of a community. However, the fact that the community
cannot ‘label’ the liminal, does not mean that the liminal group/individual cannot
define itself: the feeling of comradeship and unity that develops within the liminal
group, and which provides it with a new self-definition, is called communitas. On
the contrary, a group is seen as ‘marginal’, when the community can still find
possible definitions for it along the lines of the structured self-image. What must
be added though, is that the whole ritual that envelops the concepts of
marginality and liminality is only a step towards a strengthening of self-definition.
Eric Hobsbawm elaborated on a similar project, which he termed rituals of revolt,
that is, rituals that overturn the status quo temporarily, only to reinforce it in the
end. 519
The concept of liminality appeals to both physical and symbolic forces that
dwell in Greek space, according to the British observer, and therefore it must be
examined. I would like to insert here the point Richard Schechner made about the
difference between ecological and religious performances. Schechner’s point is
that the object of the former is not the big Other (God), but an-other social
group. 520 When one acts out a performance to establish a certain relationship with
another group, one rethinks/re-establishes one’s relationship with oneself. In our
case, it is rather that the British observer performs a kind of narcissistic ritual,
which enables him to transform symbolic (historical) dangers into real
(primordial). The pleasure generated from this game, lies precisely in this conflation of symbolic
and actual. In other words, although the Briton is the one who wants to put his
identity in danger, 521 he externalises this death drive by projecting it into Greek
Nature/culture.
The ‘legacy-debate,’ which embodied the obscure and unaccepted sides of
Greek character for the British played a significant role in this process. The
Ottoman legacy was definitely the most long lasting and powerful in Greek
history, and it was deemed that it made the Greeks half-Oriental – that is neither
Europeans, nor Easterners. Almost all the sources of the period, Greek and
British, present the Ottoman period of Greek history in negative terms. Yoke,
oppression, thraldom, degradation, are part of the common language both Greek
and British commentators used as a byword for the Ottoman conquest of Greece.
Vices, which supposedly embodied Oriental character, such as dishonesty or
theft, were read in Greek mannerisms and habits. In this context the question of
Greek ‘regeneration,’ which involved Greece’s re-acquisition of her European

517 A. Van Gennep, Rites of Passage (Chicago, 1966), pp. 188-194.

518 This theory was developed in his work The Ritual Process. Structure and anti-Structure (New York,
1969), in which he investigated various forms of liminality.
519 N. Scouteri-Didaskalou, ‘Annales, Past and Present, Review: Three Polemical Periodicals of

Historiography,’ in Ho Politis (The Citizen) 52 (1982).

520 R. Schechner, Performance Theory (London and New York, 1994), p. 109, pp. 118-119.
521 I follow Dennis Porter’s Haunted Journeys. Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing

(Princeton, New Jersey 1991).

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identity, 522 became of primary concern. These invisible aspects of evilness were
coupled with visible ones, which betrayed a degradation of modern Greek
character.
The discourse of degeneration seemed to contradict the language of regeneration,
but in the final analysis it complemented it. ‘Degeneration’ was a word always
associated with the stagnant, dirty, filthy, and ‘unwholesome’ aspects of the
Greek character, which originated in every-day Greek contact with the Turks.
The idea of contamination was implicit in such observations. Young, an Oxford
student and keen traveller, wandering in the bazaars of Rhodes, an island under
Ottoman rule with a considerable Greek population, complained that

Every step reminded us that sordid Turko-Greek life prevailed, with its moral and
material filth, and not the medieval chivalry we mounted the city walls and saw
some of the old cannon and the old stone balls. 523

The very same logic governed Newton’s imaginary dialogue with an English
audience:

People in England wonder how it is that, after a long residence in the East, the
Europeans become so suspicious, jealous, and generally cantankerous; but they
forget than an Englishmen in the Levant is doomed to pass his life surrounded by
people who may be described by the ever-recurring phrase applied by Darius to
his enemies in the Bestium inscription “and he was a liar.” The very air we
breathe in Turkey is impregnated by lies. 524

In both passages history is omnipresent. The Greeks were dirty, just because they
were close to the ‘Orient’; because they shared with the Turks the same ‘anarchy’
and ‘idleness.’ 525 In their financial transactions, according to the father of Frank
Noël, an Englishman resident in Euboia, they were miserable and Turkish, ‘from
fear of want and penury.’ 526 Their fatalism was Oriental. 527 Their very existence
had become Oriental. It is worth mentioning that the marginal/liminal danger of
the Greeks was not unique in the Eastern part of the Mediterranean region. Elli
Skopetea called attention to feelings of abjection the ‘Europeans’ experienced in
their contacts with the shadowy Levantines – a commercial people born from a
miscegenation of Europeans and Orientals: ‘No mercy was exhibited in the
description of its character – and yet, its contribution to the mysterious charm of
the commercial centres of Asia Minor would always be acknowledged.’ 528
This profound confusion of the inside (symbolic, historical) and the outside
(dirt, nature) is suggestive. If we are to believe Mary Douglas, there is nothing

522 The idea also permeated Greek political commentary, as we saw in Part I of the thesis. See for
example Xenos’ work of political propaganda The Demure Kumoundoúros, namely the Nation, the Army
and the Artillery of Greece (Athens, 1881). The results of this long-term anti-government campaign
can be seen in the re-organisation of the army in 1880 (The Government Gazette, 12 November 1880)
as well as the resignation of Koumoundoúros (ditto, 12 March 1880). A more anti-Western
account is given by A. Pekios in his book on the Intellectual condition of Greece, but the language of
regeneration is used extensively.
523 Young, Five Weeks, p. 11.
524 Newton, Travels, vol. II, p. 17.
525 Benjamin, The Turk and the Greek, p.30. See also Angelomatis-Tsougarakis’ comments [Greek

Revival, p. 103] for the durability of this stereotype in British discourse.

526 Wyse, Impressions, p. 228.
527 ibid., p. 129.
528 Skopetea, The East Sets in the West, pp. 27-28, translation mine.

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unusual in such British attitudes to modern Greek culture. It is just that things
that do not comply with our ‘own’ (British) classificatory system are seen as
‘dangerous’, because they can confuse us. When some contemporary British and
Greek commentators 529 describe the modern Greeks as morally and physically
‘degenerate’, they only try to give voice to their greatest fears that Greek culture
has been ‘polluted’ by its close contact with the Orient; and that, perhaps,
Greece’s geographical and cultural in-betweeness has the power to contaminate
them as well. 530 Of course, by using the language of the body to refer to Greek
culture, they are reducing culture to physis, (nature) and ‘essentialising’ it.
We have had an overview of the ways the British discourse works and some
conclusion has to be drawn now. We can try to re-member for a while Hayden
White’s comments on the relationship between travel experience, space and
cultural predisposition. White noted that the expansion of knowledge into those
parts of the world that had been traditionally regarded as places of savagery for
European imagination led to a progressive de-spatialisation of the concept of
wilderness, with a compensatory process of physical deterioration. 531 How can we
escape the Freudian verdict here that the savage lives within? The savage
colonises our being physically, because (s)he favours and therefore releases the
dark side of what we are. 532 Examining British travel accounts from this angle, it
is easy to understand that only British desire to enjoy a liminal adventure makes the
modern Greeks dangerous. History/legacy comes back to perform the role of the
accomplice in this game of ‘omnipotence of thought’: it persecutes Greek space,
by introducing jouissance in British textual, rather than actual, travelling.
Intriguingly, the truly liminal Greece is that of the islands. 533 The ancient
Greeks mythologised first the sea’s changing and uncertain nature – its protean
character, which challenges natural stability and order. More recent anthropological
studies presented seaside resorts as liminal space, in which sexual liberation and
otherwise socially intolerable behaviour are welcome. In liminal areas roles are
inverted or conflated and the powerful feel defenceless. And although the notion
of the seaside resort is connected to practices of modern tourism, 534 it is evident
in the examined passages that British exploration of natural forces and indulgence
in their dangers coexisted.
It is also thought provoking that in the British mind the principle of self-
regulation (with the introduction of the idea of danger) and the development of a
disciplinary discourse co-existed too. But the pleasure the British exacted from

529 Wyse, Impressions, p. 301; Iálemos, Rights and Duties, p. 25.

530 Social studies on the stigma suggest a similar pattern. What Erving Goffman called the ‘normal
deviant’ draws attention on the fact that the role of the normal and that of the stigmatised are
parts of the same complex, which is linked to given identity norms. The notion of the stigma is
often used to strengthen the lines of division between ‘normals’ and ‘abnormals’. Usually, those
who are close to the stigmatised are treated like them. See E. Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the
Management of Spoiled Identity (London, 1990).
531 H. White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978).
532 Let us not forget that Douglas draws on Freud’s comment that holiness and uncleanness, inner

and outer world are merged with the help of the defence mechanism of projection [S. Freud,
Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics (New York and
Toronto, 1948), p. 88]. Freud’s analysis of persecutory paranoia (ibid.,p. 68) also figures in
Douglas’ thesis.
533 One could also consider Northern Greek territories as Greek, but this is a much later

phenomenon. A similar discourse on civilisation appealed to the Italians; see G. Gribaudi, ‘Images
of the South: The Mezziogiorno as seen by Insiders and Outsiders,’ in R. Lumley and J. Morris, The
New History of the Italian South (Exeter, 1997), p. 87.
534 See introduction to Urry, Tourist Gaze.

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their travel adventures was improper and had to be suppressed. The Victorian
logic, which coerced them to carry in their journeys together with their equipment
their moral attitudes, never abandoned them. The study of Greek
geography/history rationalised their need for travelling and acquaintance with the
unknown by transforming it into evil, dirt and hazard and projecting it into the
‘unknown world’: Greece. There is no doubt that the peculiarities of modern
Greek history contributed to that. The modern Greeks had lived too long under
Oriental rule, and were not deemed to be ready for readmission to Europe. In this
respect, their ‘rite of passage’ was for them to be despised and thought of by the
British as dirty and perilous, before being accepted as their equals. This is
precisely what the idea of liminality comprises and entails in anthropological
terms.
This identification of Oriental aspects in the Neohellenic character was also
affiliated to British colonial predispositions. If Greece was the ‘Orient of Europe’
then the British could support their demand to control Greek political life and to
partake in (if not ‘usurp’) the project of preservation of the Greek classical
heritage. We should not therefore see the discourse of ‘contamination’ separately
from the overall British political project in Greece. The fact that in the examined
passages ‘Greece Proper’ was a region that coincided with the places in which
classical heritage was ‘buried’ should not be ignored: Whereas the lifeless culture
of this proper Greece was European, its inhabitants were not quite.
Of course, if one were to push things further, then one should ask why the
Greeks themselves did not question their protectors’ European identity: Russia, a
so-called European power, was not part of the European continent. The British
found it difficult for religious, political and constitutional reasons to accept her in
their European cultural realm. 535 Now and then, the historian comes across
British comments on the ‘Oriental and distrustful’ 536 Russian character. The
British themselves were geographically cut-off from the continent; their European
identity could be disputed because they always stayed intellectually idiosyncratic
and unfriendly towards the continental way of thinking. Geographically, they were
too Western to be European.
To explore this point is difficult, because it needs extensive commentary. I
will however offer a few examples because Greek commentary on British
European identity reveals the hidden aspects of the British mode of thought. I will
begin with Odysséas Iálemos and his writings on European history. Iálemos
explored the question of the new European order established in 1815 after the
Napoleonian Wars, claiming that England’s place in this new order was vital.
Within the framework of this new order he investigated the Anglo-French
occupation of Greece during the Crimean War as the symptom of British power.
But then he noted that in the second half of the nineteenth century the world
witnessed a ‘withdrawal of England from European politics’. ‘And England,
dismissing Europe, removed from the harmony of the European peoples her
significant power; this absence had catastrophic consequences’. 537 English attitude
towards the Cretan Insurrection also signified a ‘withdrawal’ from Eastern
Affairs. 538

535 Todorova, Balkans, p. 83.

536 Campbell, Handy Book, p. 171.
537 Iálemos, Rights and Duties, pp. 80-81.
538 Ibid., p. 99.

164
 If England’s absence from the European horizon destroyed international order
– for, since the emergence of Europe, as we know it, England was a protagonist
in all the decisions that shaped the relations between states […] and settled the
geographical borders of Europe – if, we say, England’s absence is an
anomalous event, then European harmony will be affected considerably […]. 539

For Iálemos Europe cannot be conceived of without England. This Europe is the
Europe of warfare and politics – not of travelling and jouissance. Of course, we
have the case of more radical Greek thinkers, such as John Gennadios, whose
understanding of the notion of Europe was underlined by the verdict that Britain
was not Europe, because her ‘code of law is not continental’. 540 Gennadios and
Iálemos have different opinions about the place of England in the European
‘order,’ but both (a) referred to England’s European identity and (b) both thought
about the concept of England in terms of civilisation.
Perhaps though, we should think on the ways the process of production of
European exoticism struck back. Did the Greeks think for example that
European intrusion to the ‘Orient’ was responsible for Oriental degeneration?
Did they believe that their European identity won over the Oriental of the Turk,
accelerating thus his degeneration? Stefanos Xenos’ description of Greek-
Christian intrusion into the Ottoman empire worked as a kind of Occidentalist 541
saga:

The Christians in [the Turks’] dominions are becoming rich and advancing in
civilisation. The Christian becomes rich, because pursuing his commerce or
industry, with the same activity as heretofore, he can now do so without fear of
being plundered, and he is advancing in civilisation, because no sooner does a
Christian realise a little wealth, that he sends his sons to the University or
gymnasium at Athens, and afterwards sends them to Paris, Vienna […] On the
other hand, a strange feeling of submissiveness has stolen over the once ferocious
Mussulman. […] Where are his military games? Where is his dzirit, or the tzalims
of his sword that in his heroic days proclaimed him the strongest? 542

The history of Occidentalism comes back, this time to haunt the European
present, in a influential pamphlet published by an anonymous Greek in English:

The Ottoman element, which exists in the East as an intruder, was drawn to the
East and conquered it, in consequence of the crusaders who devastated every
region they traversed, and also on account of the religious animosity and
ignorance which then prevailed in the East, and the spirit of conquest which at that
time animated the Ottoman race. 543

Although we will have the chance to examine this genealogy of European debt to
Greek culture after the crusades in the next part of the thesis, it is compelling to
see here that for the anonymous Greek the European Christians were the ones
who opened the gates of Europe to the Orient. The East of the Anonymous

539 Ibid., p. 83.

540 Gennadios, Notes, p. 113.
541 J. Mackenzie, ‘Occidentalism: Counterpoint and Counter-polemic’ in Journal of Historical

Geography, 19, 3 (1993), pp. 339-344.

542 Xenos, East and West, pp. 44-45.
543 An Oriental Rayah, East and West (1868), pp. 4-5.

165
Greek is the ‘East according to the Greeks’, the East that Greece must re-conquer
to realise the imaginary Greek topos; it is an intellectual crossroads between East
and West, neither liminal, nor European, but Europe’s umbilical cord itself: the
new Byzantium. To reach that point of realisation, the Greeks had to convince
their protectors that they are equally capable with their Hellenic forefathers. The
liberated Greece and the Greece of the Ottoman empire were the weak part of
Anglo-Greek relations; their recognition from the powerful British Empire as
European was of primary concern. Until that day, they would have to fight hard
to win a place in such an exclusive European universe.

166
 PART III
British Imperialism, Greek Irredentism and the
Great Idea
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an Angel looking as though he is
about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are
staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the
angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of
events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon
wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken or
dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from
Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence and the angel can no
longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his
back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This is what we
call progress.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London, 1992), p. 249.
To love “not wisely, but too well,” is a dangerous quality. It is best to wait for
reciprocity before pouring out one’s whole heart to strangers. Mr. Gladstone,
who had come out such a warm Philhellene, departed thoroughly disgusted with
the Greeks in general, and with the Ionians in particular. He would persist in
believing that the comparatively few and timid friends of the Protectorate were
the chief causes of a failure, which was due entirely to the fact, that to understand
a people thoroughly even a great genius must live some time amongst them,
speak their language, and see them at unguarded social moments.
Viscount Kirkwall (ed), Four years in the Ionian Islands (London, 1864), p. 243.

The safeguarding role of Byzantium was invaluable. Even those who contested
the Byzantine contribution to the shaping of Western European civilisation in the
past, agreed on one thing: that the empire worked as a fortress (of Christianity).
[…] Because, as an English historian [Steven Runciman] correctly argued, if Islam
had used the Balkans as military base, it could have invaded Central Europe
earlier than the Turks. Moreover, without Byzantium, the Arabs of Africa could
have reached and devastated the coastal part of Italy…
Ioánnis Karayannópoulos, The Byzantine State (Thessaloniki, 1993), p. 469.
I truly admire your patience to narrate me the calumnies the Frankish race writes
against us, thinking that you will make me, an old man, member of a Frankish
party. You know very well, my dear nephew, that I would never ridicule my
patrida […] by becoming a Moschovite or a Frank or an English so as to fill my
stomach. […] Every day you remind us of the philanthropic Navarino – damn the
moment it took place (for it cannot be paid back)!! As for me, I find it difficult to
forget the things those well-wished Franks did in Argos in the days of Ibrahim,
when they were butchering pregnant women and taking out of their belly their
babies […] Who do you think was the one who maligned us with his writings to
the Christian world and fought against us with more hatred than the Turk […]?
Anonymous, Collection of Cretan Correspondence (Athens, 1878), pp. 25-26.

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1.WHICH GREAT IDEA? DISAGREEMENTS ON
FLOATING SIGNIFIERS

i. Many ‘great ideas’: Official archaeologies of a

concept
The Victorians were proud that they were masters of the world. Their empire was
not a giant with feet of clay, like the Ottoman; it was built on the ground of
economic prosperity. Industrialisation of parts of Britain during the eighteenth
century provided impetus for the creation of British commercial centres that
would feed a growing metropolis with wealth. Then the wealth had to be used
wisely, to help the country grow into a great power. 544 If we look at the story from
this angle, we could argue that the British empire was partially constructed in the
search for new markets and that it was nothing more than a chain of strategic
points stretching from Gibraltar to Aden and the Indies – the spheres of informal
influence excluded.
Of course, such developments had an impact on the way the British reflected
on the world and themselves. The optimism that abundance brought was coupled
with a sense of superiority vis-à-vis the colonised, and gave birth to the idea of a
civilising mission. The rationale of this mission was that if the British were able to
produce wealth, then they could become agents in the improvement of the
human condition. 545 In the first half of the nineteenth century, when the prospect
of war and social revolutions threatened the very existence of other European
countries, Britain had remained almost immune. This was regarded as a godly
sign. ‘Amidst the ruins of the old order, Britain was felt to be specially preserved
by God’ 546 and to have a central role in the fulfilment of purposes now hastening
to their climax.
This vision permeated Britain’s relationship with other countries that were
not British colonies. In Greece’s case, those ideals found their best application
with the outbreak of the revolution in 1821. Even well before the war, English
travellers would visit Greece to wander among the ruins of a past that came to
have a special place in their own culture. The classical education, which was à la
mode in Britain for decades, had created a current of philhellenism. It is also
commonly held that philhellenism emanated from the feeling that those who
would contribute to the improvement of the intellectual and political condition of
the modern Greeks, would simultaneously assist in the revival of ancient
Hellenism. 547 Often the contrast between classical ideals and modern reality
caused disappointment. 548 But many Britons continued to regard a trip to Greece
as an adventure: she was remote enough to be exotic and close enough to be
accessible. Under the spell of Byron’s Grecian poems, some British philhellenes

544R. Robinson and J. Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (New York,
1967),
p. 3.
545ibid., pp. 1-2.
546 J. Wolffe, God and Greater Britain Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland 1843-1945

(London and New York, 1994), pp. 42-43.

547Jenkyns, Ancient Greece, pp. 3-13.
548A. Dimaras, ‘The Other British Philhellenes,’ in R. Clogg, The Struggle for Greek Independence

(London, 1973), pp. 202-203.

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stayed in the rebel areas to fight battles and die for a dream; others were eager to
spend fortunes for the Greek cause. Whether the Victorians wanted to admit it or
not, the idea of ‘Greece’ was very special to them; she provided them with a
mission; she was vital to their prestige as agents of civilisation. 549
Unfortunately, the ‘dead Greeks’ Britons wanted to resurrect, remained after
the end of the Greek Revolution in every sense dead; to their disgust, they also
found that these ancient corpses reverently worshipped in British culture for
decades had been replaced by some living Greeks, who called themselves
Νεοέλληνες, or ‘modern Hellenes.’ This new ‘debased race’ could not philosophise
like Aristotle or orate like Demosthenes, but definitely could produce first-class
brigands and the best political agitators in Europe. This, together with empirical
‘research’ conducted in Greece, convinced British observers that the ‘Muses have
fled from Greece’ to hyperborean countries, where they could fulfil their
educational mission; the gap left in Greek culture from this loss had been filled by
the filth and the prejudice of the Byzantines and the Osmanlees. Greek
irredentism, which sought the acquisition of territories from the Ottoman empire,
was regarded as a ‘nuisance’ that the uncivilised childish ‘Greeks’ caused in
Europe when they should be content with what they had. Historians have the
luxury to analyse British frustration in retrospect, but they often disregard the
implications of this constant philhellenic accusation for the formation of the
modern Greek cast of mind. The ‘Great Idea,’ the infamous Greek irredentist
plan, which occupied so much space not only in Anglo-Greek relations, but also
in Greek-European relations in general, was regarded as another issue in Greek
history that philhellenism never affected.
It has been some time since historians of modern Greece invented a
chronology and a history of the ‘Great Idea’. The story stretches back to the years
of the first constitutional change, during Otho’s regime. It was after this change in
1844 that the question of the Greek nation’s unity was brought before the
National Assembly disguised as an issue concerning Greek citizenship. A group
of plenipotentiary MPs wanted to consolidate by law the distinction between
Greek natives (autóchthones), that is, Greeks from the liberated regions, and aliens
(heteróchthones). 550 Ioánnis Koléttis, one of the most able politicians of liberated
Greece, delivered a speech (14 January 1844) in which he defended the right of
every Greek to be a Greek regardless of his/her place of birth. Koléttis carried his
audience along with a vista of not so bygone events when all Greeks, regardless of
their status and origin, fought for the creation of a great state. It is not fully
recorded what he said or what he actually meant, but his reference to a unified
state and to national concord was embodied in the abstract term Megháli Idèa
(Great Idea).
For Koléttis the speech was useful only in the furtherance of his political aims
and not in solving ideological riddles. Nevertheless, the way it was received
should make us suspect that we are before a watershed in which a collective body
that calls itself ‘nation’ ‘utilises historical material in a way that can serve the needs
of its conscience.’ 551 Unity, emancipation from foreign control and the Great Idea

549D. Dakin British and American Philhellenes During the War of Independence 1821-1833 (Thessaloniki,
1955),
pp. 5-6.
550D.A. Zakythinos., The Making of Modern Greece: From Byzantium to Independence (Oxford, 1976), p.

193.
551 Skopetea, ‘Model Kingdom,’ pp. 257-264; K. Dimaras, ‘Past Legacies, New Realities, New Needs,’

in History of the Greek Nation, vol. XIII (Athens, 1980), pp. 467-469.

169
were merged into a single vision that infatuated the ‘nation’. The secret chord that
it struck had to do with the decision of the Great Powers to create a tiny state at
the edge of the Greek peninsula. As opposed to that, a ‘Great Idea’ would permit
all the Greeks to live united under the shield of a single state. But then, the
powers of imaginary Greek mapping intervened and transformed the ‘Great Idea’
chart into a new Byzantine empire.
Historians said that this transformation was inevitable, since the intellectual
life of the ‘nation’ under the Turkish rule was grounded on the tradition handed
down from the last Byzantine centuries. On the political level this so-called
‘national philosophy’ dictated a strategy of disturbing the Ottoman empire, which
was the main obstacle to the accomplishment of this imperial ‘dream.’ Moreover,
this plan for the revival of the Byzantine empire could cover the absolute need
for liberated Greece to present a political program to a subjected ‘Hellenism’, that
is, those populations that were still under Ottoman rule and that the Greek state
considered Greek. Ominously, on the intellectual level the ‘dream’ was destined
to create the first dichotomy between reviving nationalism and neo-Byzantine
universalism ‘as the mind of the nation was split between the two illustrious
centres of Greek tradition, Athens and Constantinople.’ 552 Even worse, Greek
historians concluded, the second trend of universal ideals and the adoption of the
Byzantine empire as a model appealed to the aspiration of the Greeks to re-create
a multiracial state with a none the less profoundly Greek character. The
underlying idea of the plan was not just a desire for territorial expansion, but also
the Greeks’ longing to become the intellectual beacon of the East, just like their
medieval ancestors.
It is obvious nevertheless that by coupling together expansionism and
romantic ‘acculturation’, the Greek irredentist plan was purified from any ‘evil’
nationalist elements. This gave the impression that the Greeks wanted simply to
deliver the Eastern world from ignorance and into the Greek-European loving
arms; they wanted to educate and civilise. Therefore, to examine what it meant
for the liberated Greeks to be the ‘beacon of the East,’ we have to pull together
this ‘purifying’ narrative and the more entrepreneurial, down-to-earth aspects of
Greek irredentism. This does not necessarily reduce Greek hegemonic plans to a
Realpolitik vision, but it certainly sheds light on the symbolic and intersubjective
aspects of this vision, bringing into play the role of British or indeed European
philhellenic narratives and their long-term effect on Greek thought. The
stubbornly guarded segregation of nationalism and œcumenical, neo-Byzantine
thought in most twentieth-century historical accounts of the ‘Great Idea,’ is
confusing. Why should we not see them as part of the same Greek mapping
process?
But the aim of this part of the thesis is to examine the notion of Great Idea in
relation to philhellenism and Eastern affairs. For this purpose we have to answer
a number of different questions at the same time: What was British philhellenism
for the late nineteenth-century Greeks? How was it mobilised by them and their
British interlocutors? Was it a uniform or a perpetually changing ideology – if an
ideology at all? How did it change with time? How far did nineteenth-century
accusations of the late British philhellenes contribute to the shaping of the modern
Greek self-image? If the Greeks retorted to philhellenic accusations, did they
address themselves to the British philhellenes in particular? Was philhellenism
implicated in definitions of the Greek ‘Great Idea’? How did Greek irredentism
552Zakythinos, Greece, pp. 194-195. See also Finlay, Greek Revolution, vol. I, pp. 16-20 and vol. II,
pp. 278-279.

170
implicate in Eastern politics? And, finally, if we know what we mean by the term
‘Great Idea’, do we truly know what the nineteenth-century Greeks and Britons
meant when they used this term?

171
 ii. Setting out the project of civilisation
We must first consider the possibility that when British and Greek commentators
talked about ‘Great Ideas’, they may have understood it in ways other than those
that we do. In the previous part of the thesis (II) I discussed how the question of
Greek regeneration became in British narratives a call for Greek modernisation. To
elucidate this point in relation to the ‘Great Idea’, I will begin again with British
academic narratives and then present other examples with a similar content. The
sequence here is reversed – that is, first I set out to explore some British and
Greek reflections, which provided starting points for definitions of the Greek
‘Great Idea’: rivalry among Balkan nations and between Greece and Turkey,
categorisations of nationalism and, finally, the Greek educational mission. These
reflections have to be presented before we try to define the Great Idea, because
they were the raw material and underlying ideas that filled up the gap of the
‘Great Idea’, a term without content at the beginning of its long history. In other
words, my argument is that the theoretical justification of the Greek irredentist
plan consisted of nothing specific until ideas were thrown into the mould of the
‘Great Idea’ and were re-worked. This will become more obvious in later
chapters.
In his Researches in the Highlands of Turkey, Henry Tozer suggested the
unification of the ‘two strong elements in the south-east of Europe,’ the Greeks
and the Slavs. 553 Tozer’s ‘Slavs’ are the Bulgarians, who made their dynamic début
in the European political scene of the 1860s by claiming independence from the
Turks and religious autonomy from the Greek Patriarchate. If we bear in mind
that in 1869 the schism of the Bulgarian Church from the Constantinopolitan
Patriarchate had not yet taken place, 554 we can justify Tozer’s optimism. His
vision, however, presents the Greeks and the Bulgarians as equal contenders for
the control of the Southeastern corner of Europe.
On the contrary, in 1876 the philhellene academic Mahaffy was bewildered by
the Bulgarians, whom he considered agents of Russian Panslavism. Mahaffy
argued that it would be ‘monstrous if the obvious’ and ‘justified’ claims of the
Greeks ‘to hold Constantinople and the Islands of the Levant should be
overlooked.’ For him

A Greek empire should become, like the Athenian hegemony of old, a great
stretch of coasts and islands round the Levant, and now too, as it formerly was,
attexta barbariae - a fringe round barbarism. Thus an intelligent and neutral power
would hold the Bosporus, and save Europe from the impotence of its present, or
the ambition of its expectant masters. 555

Mahaffy envisaged a Greece that would resemble the modern British imperial
self-image and he assigned the Greeks a civilising mission. The suggestion
reappeared with significant modifications in the writings of the Professor of
Greek at the University of Glasgow, Richard Jebb. Jebb argued in one of his
553 Tozer, Researches, vol. I, p. 395.
554 E. Kofos, ‘The Greek-Bulgarian Question,’ in History of the Greek Nation, vol. XIII (Athens,
1980),
pp. 301 -304.
555 Mahaffy, Rambles, x, xviii.

172
lectures on Modern Greece in 1878 that it was a mistake of the Great Powers to
‘make the Greek kingdom so small’ and to give it a frontier that left out important
centres of commercial and intellectual Greek life, because the ‘intelligent’ modern
Greeks had made a considerable progress since the Revolution. 556 For Jebb,
when it came to Greek expansion, it was more important to look at modern
Greek progress separately from the ancient Greek past.
It appears that all three of these British academics believed that the Greeks
ought to participate in the construction of a large state, but that their
philhellenism exhibited differences. In the political world, too, philhellenic views
on the ‘Great Idea’ and the role of the Greeks in the East varied. The analysis
proceeds with William Ewart Gladstone and one of his interlocutors. Gladstone
promoted the Greek cause in his two widely circulated pamphlets Bulgarian
Horrors and The Greek Element in the Eastern Question, 557 which were translated into
Greek as a sign of respect and gratitude towards ‘the great philhellene.’ Although
Gladstone also found Greek claims just, he believed in peaceful expansion rather
than irredentist wars. His ideas were influential, as we are informed in George
Campbell’s Handy Book on the Eastern Question. Nevertheless, Campbell, a Liberal
MP himself, expressed more ambivalent feelings on the Greek role in the solution
of the Eastern Question. His suspicion was that although the Greeks cannot be
excluded from the sharing out of the European Turkish territories, they were not
prepared to risk for their country’s good. 558 The advice he gave to the Greeks,
who were shunted aside in the Turko-Bulgarian arrangements of the 1870s, was
to ‘wait to succeed the Turks in the chief place, rather than to let the inheritance
be divided now.’ 559
It should not escape attention that in the 1870s no one ignored the Bulgarian
factor in territorial arrangements. Moreover, a Greek-Bulgarian division of the
European Turkey was a solution that enjoyed some plausibility among British
observers. This could be linked to British apprehensions that Russian Panslavism
was taking the lead in Eastern affairs and that Britain would remain in the
background, unable to control political developments in the Balkans. Such
anxieties were often expressed through a reinforcement of belief in Greek
‘regeneration’ that could prevent Russian expansion. In a speech delivered in 1876
by Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff (1829-1906), a British statesman and
politician, ‘legitimate’ Greek claims in the East were warmly supported.
Nevertheless, it is interesting that the speaker envisaged the establishment of a
system of double political surveillance in the Balkans:

Then, again, why is it that the statesmen of Europe have always turned a deaf ear
to the desire of the Greeks for some extension of territory over the Greek-speaking
districts on their northern frontier? It is partly because the Greeks have ruled so
badly what they have got, that nothing was to be gained by adding to their
territory […] However, you could put alongside of them, instead of the decaying
despotism of Turkey, a fresh, vigorous, powerful administration such as I see my

556 Jebb, Lectures, p. 103.

557 W.E. Gladstone, Bulgarian Horrors and the Eastern Question, translated into Greek by Petros
Xanthakis (Athens, 1876), p. 10; Gladstone’s Diatribe ‘The Greek Element in the Eastern Question,’
Privately Printed as a Proof of National Gratitude and as a Means for Collection for the National Fleet,
(December, 1876), pp. 14-15.
558 Campbell, Handy Book, p. 182.
559 Ibid, xvi.

173
 way to establishing under the new English emperor and Russian Empress, might
they not be tried with some extension of territory. 560

The ‘golden mean’ Grant Duff suggests betrays a luck of trust in Greek policy,
but also the firm belief that Britain has to regain control in Eastern affairs. In his
speech he acknowledged the Greek expansionist vision as a nationalist project
that had to be kept under supervision. But Grant Duff, who was mainly
concerned with the Bulgarian territorial vision that was backed up by Russia,
implicitly associated the Bulgarian and Greek nationalist projects. The same
suggestion can be found in another account in which the Risorgimento, Panslavism
and the Great Idea become versions of the same plan of union of ‘different
branches of a race into one powerful and coherent mass […] a phenomenon
peculiar to this period of the world’s progress.’ 561
Such comments make an explicit reference to political aspects of nation-
formation and to nationalism as parts of a modern and rationalised European life.
Nevertheless, this was only one of the perceptions of the Great Idea, which
coexisted in the late 1860s with the view that the nature of Greek expansionist
policy and of Turko-Greek quarrels was religious. Behind this British narrative
might be traced the Church of England’s interest in Orthodoxy. During the
seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century there had been a serious
exchange between the Church of England and the Greek Church, and some
Protestant theologians were eager to acquire information, and perhaps to form an
alliance with the Orthodox Church against the Roman Catholic Church. 562 Oscar
Bagdon was one of those who tried in the late 1860s to rekindle the dialogue.
Bagdon saw the ‘Great Idea’ both as an expression of the Greek patriotic spirit
and as a struggle against Mohammedanism. 563 This was relevant in that despite
the Western schism, the English Church always sought confirmation of her
legitimacy in the Apostolic spirit of Orthodoxy. Unfortunately negotiations for a
reunion never succeeded, 564 and co-operation between the two nations was
pursued only on a political level. Remnants of this half-abandoned plan can also
be traced in the two pamphlets anonymously published by ‘A Former Rayah’
under the title The East and the West, which were examined in previous chapters.
Notwithstanding its survival over the centuries, during the nineteenth century
this narrative of ‘Mohammedanism versus Orthodoxy’ was integrated into a new
narrative concerning education and progress. Mahaffy for example was convinced
that the Greeks were ‘progressing’ very fast in terms of education, and therefore
have to be ‘rewarded’. Similarly, Charles Tuckerman, to present the American
side, praised Greek versatility and interest in knowledge as opposed to Turkish
ignorance. 565 Even when British assessment of Greek ‘progress’ is governed by
hostility and bitterness, the interchangeability of the notion of education with
progress is apparent. To present only one of the many examples, which nicely
illustrates how some British also reflect on themselves when they talk about

560 M.E. Grant Duff, The Eastern Question, A Lecture Delivered…on 14th November 1876 by Mountstruart

E. Grant Duff Member for the Elgin District of Burghs (Edinburgh, 1876), pp. 31-32.
561 Benjamin, The Turk and the Greek, pp. 230-231.
562 Angelomatis-Tsougarakis, Greek Revival, p. 83.
563 Rev.J.O. Bagdon, A Brief Comparison of the Fundamental Doctrines of the Anglican and Greek Churches,

(London, 1869), p. 8.
564 Wolffe, God and Greater Britain, pp. 160-163.
565 Tuckerman, Greeks of Today (1872), p. 122.

174
Greek ‘progress’, I cite from an editorial in The Times concerning Greek
involvement in the Cretan Revolution:

Our sympathies as a Christian and civilised nation ought to be enlisted on behalf

of a believing and suffering race [i.e. The Cretan Greeks][…] We are told
indeed, the conflict in the East is not that of a Sovereign against his people; it is
a war of race against race; it is the protest of struggling civilisation against
oppressing barbarism. Mr. LAYARD, however, assures us that both Greek and
Turk are equally barbarous, and that the Turkish atrocities are not a whit worse
than have been perpetrated by the Greek. Still, between Christians and
Mohammedans, on a mere abstract principle, our choice will not be doubtful;
and were there any immediate prospect of driving the Ottoman from Europe and
establishing one or more Christian nations on the ruin of his Empire, we should
look upon the achievement as a gain to the cause of human progress. 566

The editorial plays upon the concepts of Eastern Christianity and Greek
progress/education, only to examine British achievements and interests. The
binarisms he constructs can also be traced in British travel literature. 567 In Greek
sources the reference to progress is more directly linked to the question of
education. There is also an occasional reference to unequal gender education,
which I mention briefly here and I will examine later: some Greek commentators
juxtaposed treatment of women in Turkish Islamic culture 568 with Greek
education that allegedly made women good mothers and equips them to raise a
morally superior generation of European masters in the East.
The anti-Turkish argument, in which religion and education/progress, the
pre- and post-rationalisation facets of European social life, meet, prevails in some
Greek political analyses. We find it for example in a diatribe published by a Greek
pedagogue in 1867. ‘Anonymous’ tried to prove that Ottoman rule over the
Greek Christian nation threatened Greek European civilisation, because the Turk
was an ‘obscurantist.’ He constructed a Greek self-image along the lines of the
Western contrast between barbarism and civilisation. He reminded his readers
that what made Greece a suitable enlightener for the Eastern nations was her
rapid progress from illiteracy and ignorance to Westernisation. He then drew the
reader’s attention to the Cretan Insurrection, which he presented as a Greek
struggle against the barbarous Turk, and to Britain’s accusation that Greece is
unfit to govern Crete because she misruled the Ionian Islands. 569 His image of
Greece was that of a ‘model’ Kingdom, which, despite British reservations, is the
fittest for ruling the East and re-civilising Crete. In his analysis there is a passage
that needs to be examined carefully:

We admit, for the sake of the turkophile politicians of England that the Ionian
Islands truly prospered under her protection; that English rule over foreign peoples
might contribute to their affluence and that things got worse when Greece took
over; but we ask, is comparison between England and Greece the aim in the case

566 The Times, 18 February 1867. See also The Daily Telegraph, 25 April 1870. Layard was out of
office in 1867, but in the early 1860s he was member of the British government.
567 For a striking example see Poole, People of Turkey, vol. I, xviii.
568 D. Ainián, On the Eastern Question (Athens, 1876), p. 8; Xenos, East and West, p. 88.
569 Anonymous, Turkey, p. 44.

175
 of the Cretan Question? NO! Parallels should be drawn between Greece and
Turkey because the Cretans will have to choose between those two. 570

Perhaps we should question what drives the anonymous Greek here to avoid
comparisons between Greece and England: is it simply that the Cretans have to
choose between Greeks and Turks, or is he conscious of an asymmetry in the
suggested comparison between Greece and England? It is likely that the latter is
more the case.
It must have been noticed by now that in British reflections on Greek
expansionist policy the abstract idea of education predominates; contrariwise,
British self-definitions employ the term ‘civilisation’. British civilisation is a very
exclusive category; certainly, Greece is not admitted to it, for reasons examined in
the first part of the thesis. The relationship between Greece and Britain was, no
doubt, a relationship between protégé and patron. Because the anonymous Greek
of the above passage is aware of that, he tries to keep the Greek ‘civilising war’
within the confines of the East which is considered to be a political and cultural
category distinct from, or inferior to, that of the West to which Britain belongs.
Struggling within this category for control is much easier for Greece. When the
‘West’ (Britain, in ‘Anonymous’s case) is implicated in Greece’s irredentist plans,
Greek civilisation transforms itself into Kultur, and is presented as education or
religion instead of technological or political advancement. Kultur is a specific
historical construct, 571 and cannot be assessed along the lines of the single-
civilisation theory which was more favoured in British thought. This logic
preoccupied other Greek commentators so much that it often led them to an
indirect justification of European colonialism, while they were trying to
demonstrate their own educational mission.
The trajectory of this analysis has to be presented. Historians such as
Chatterjee argue that anticolonial nationalism organises its resistance against an
imperial power by dividing the world into two different domains, the spiritual and
the material. In the material world of Western civilisation, the anticolonial
movement has almost no chance to win the war. For Chatterjee, when
nationalism becomes an anticolonial struggle it ceases to be a purely political
issue. The domain of anticolonial nationalism becomes the spiritual, to which the
coloniser is denied access; in the nationalist’s spiritual realm, the coloniser is
impotent. 572 Chatterjee’s point is incisive, but it may not be restricted to colonial
relationships stricto sensu. 573 In any oppressive relationship, whether it be colonial
or not, the nationalist can behave both as oppressor (of other social groups or
nations) and oppressed. 574 Under these circumstances, his oppressor’s civilising
mission can serve as a repository of possibilities that the nationalist can mobilise

570 Ibid., 48.

571 The modern Greeks still use two words to describe the notion of culture: πολιτιστικός and
πολιτισμικός. Both of them are translated as ‘cultural,’ but the first one refers to the products of a
culture, that is, the German technical word Zivilisation, while the second includes in it the notions
of space and time, that is, the cradle of a culture and its life span, its Kultur, its history.
572 Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, pp. 5-7.
573 P. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, A Derivative Discourse? (Minneapolis,

1986),
pp. 41-42.
574 See for example Eugene O’Brien’s interesting approach to the argument in ‘ “What Ish my

Nation?” Towards A negative Definition of Identity,’ Minerva-An International Journal of Philosophy,

vol. 2 (November 1998) (page numbers missing) <http//:www.ul.ie/~philos/vol2/negation.html (26
June 2001).

176
and use to realise his own project. In fact, in the passages that were quoted
before, the British observers themselves used terminology similar to that of the
Greeks to describe Greek ‘progress’. This might explain why Greek
commentators were disposed to support European colonialism abroad, while they
opposed British comparisons with Greek Kultur.
It also has to be explained how Greek commentators supported British
imperialism and what the implications of this attitude were for the narrative on
Greek progress. To pick up the thread of ‘Anonymous’s’ thought, I should add
that despite his decision not to assess Greece according to British standards of
progress, he proceeds to add that she should be seen as the best supporter of the
Western civilising mission and be allowed to form an empire. Thereafter, he
invites France and England to colonise Africa, India and the Middle East, so that
they will disseminate knowledge to those barbarous places. 575 He is not the only
one who promotes European imperialism. Dimítris Ainián, one of the most
eloquent analysts of the Eastern Question, also sees in European hegemony a
noble project of civilisation:

Would it not be useful and philanthropic if Russia civilised all the barbarian
peoples of Asia? […] If England secured the road via Suez to Indies, the passage
of which she would keep open to all peoples? Would France not be benefited by
expanding her conquests towards Africa, which is in need for civilisation? 576

Ainián’s case is not unique. The ‘Oriental Rayah,’ who adds that Britain should
endorse the construction of a Greek empire because it would contribute to
human mobility and to the improvement of the living standards in other empires,
such Britain’s own, makes similar remarks in his pamphlet. 577 It seems, therefore,
that while these Greek analysts endorse and adopt British, and indeed European,
colonial practices, they present Greek expansionism as a mission of
‘acculturation’, unique and significant, like their nation. This tension within their
discourse opens anew the question of Westernisation explored by Elli Skopetea.
Skopetea argues that the invincible ‘Eastern’ attraction to Western ideas was
based on the desire to beat Western civilisation from within. There is nothing
intrinsically Greek in this obsession, if we bear in mind Kemal Ataturk’s famous
counter-response to Islamic conservatism: ‘Only if we become Europe will we
beat Europe.’ 578 This obsession could explain what is that compels Ainián and the
‘Former Oriental Rayah’ to follow the ‘Western’ formula for prosperity and
power: colonialism.
Skopetea’s remark does not take into account the binarism Ottoman
obscurantism/Greek educational mission, which plays an equally important role
in the imaginary mapping of an imperium Hellenicum. It is necessary to historicize
this discourse in order to value its significance. According to Maria Todorova, the
‘resurgent’ Balkan nationalisms, which destroyed the imagined community of
Orthodox Christianity, managed to preserve a uniform image of the Muslim
community. Consequently, whereas the ‘resurrected’ Balkan nations used among
themselves the language of nationalism, their reference to the Turkish-Muslim

575 Anonymous, Turkey, p. 72.

576 Ainián, Eastern Question, p. 21.
577 An Oriental Rayah, East and West, pp. 55-56.
578 Skopetea, The East Sets in the West, pp. 111-113.

177
‘other’ was constructed upon the ossified language of the religious-community
discourse. 579
Todorova does not touch upon the implication of the European observer in
the preservation of this discourse. Clearly, the Greek position in relation to
‘Europe’ was very ambiguous: despite their hegemonic intentions, the Greeks
were economically in a subordinate position. This meant that they were unable to
assemble a discourse on technological and political advancement. The Greeks
also knew that the primary European demand was Greek modernisation, which
was always delayed owing to internal Greek ‘disorder’. This impotence may have
introduced into Greek hegemonic narratives the Western rhetoric of a ‘civilising
mission’, which would help Greece to escape the charges of her inability to ‘keep
up’ with Western modes of ‘development’. Despite intentions to protect
themselves, the Greek commentators’ obsession with an educational mission
helped them to articulate one of the nodal points of their identity. 580 This anxiety
might have incorporated the ‘Great Idea’ into an exchange of ideas with Britain,
as well as with other Great Powers. But the ‘dialogue’ was doomed to lead to
deadlocks for two reasons, explored in the next two chapters: first because Britain
would try to use a thoroughly colonial language to chastise the Greeks for their
arrogant quests; and second, because the Greeks would invert the practice of
British discourse in which Britain denied Greece full access to their Western
civilisation and defy translatability of their hegemonic project.

Todorova, Balkans, pp. 177-178.

579

E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (New
580

York and London, 1985), p. 112.]

178
 iii. Experiments on puerile nations, or the
impossibility of surpassing your Father
The linguist and cultural theorist Ernest Gellner was quick to point out the
nationalist’s nonsensical claim that nations are perennial entities, but at the same
time they retain the magical power to be ‘born’ like any living organism in
history. 581 This comment could be linked to the way the anthropologist Johannes
Fabian read the notorious evolutionist project. According to Fabian, evolutionists
furnished humanist epistemes with their repudiation of the chronicle time and the
adoption of linear, chronological time. That implied a projection of the axis of
time onto the axis of space, which enabled Enlightenment theorists to ‘map’ time
and create a ‘hierarchy’ of species. 582
Among the ‘species’ subjected to this enterprise, were nations. Those nations
who could be modernised - that is, comply with the western paradigm of political
and social progress – were awarded – by an imaginary collective, but actually non-
uniform, fictional entity called ‘the West’ – a ‘bonus’. This bonus was nothing
other than the successful nation’s promotion to a higher level in the hierarchy of
civilisation. Inversely, those nations that presented signs of anomalous or belated
development remained in the lower stages. Political disorder, social unrest and
public insecurity were all signs of anomaly instead of being regarded as inherent
in the process of modernisation – or, for the sake of political correctness, they
were ‘the other side of modernity’. In this conjunction of circumstances, it was
easier for the powerful and progressive powers of the West to justify their
patronising attitude towards such ‘backward’ nations and ethnicities.
The Great Powers followed a similar policy in Greece because Greek
belligerent policy in the East was a nuisance for them. Additional inter-alliance
rivalries aggravated the situation. Britain in particular was anxious to retain the
current political order in the East, and especially in the Ottoman empire, whose
presence kept Russian imperialist plans under control. In the course of the 1860s
and the 1870s, the rhetorical counterpart of the means that Britain employed to
chastise Greek irredentism was to maintain that Greece was simply too young to
follow such serious ventures as the ‘Great Idea’. For the Greek however this
project had important pedagogical extensions. In their own opinion, those
Ottoman provinces that would be annexed to the Greek Kingdom would be
automatically civilised under the guidance of the Greek metropolis, the revived
Hellenic centre of European civilisation. 583 Their Greece was a powerful
pedagogue, destined to nourish the Greeks of the East and the rest of the world.
It is the logic of these rhetorical patterns I want to examine as the symptom of
the nature of Greece’s relations with Britain and Europe, and as an internal
national dialogue.
British allegations that Greece was unable and unsuitable to partake in the
Western civilising mission at that stage were frequent during the Turko-Cretan
war of 1866-1869. Even the late British philhellenes retained ambivalent feelings
toward the Greek governments’ secret provision of aid to Crete. In 1867, when
the insurrection was at a turning point, a letter signed by a ‘Philhellene’ in The
Times analysed the situation in European Turkey. The ‘Philhellene’, began his
581 E. Gellner, Nationalism, (London, 1998).
582 See Fabian, Time and the Other, ch. III ‘Time and the Writing about the Other,’ pp. 71-104.
583 Skopetea, “Model Kingdom.”

179
analysis by drawing attention to the superficial gloss of Mohammedan civilisation,
under which one could still find all the ancient vices of the Turkish race: religious
persecution, polygamy, domestic slavery, unequal and oppressive treatment of
conquered nations. These references were coupled with comments on the ability
of Greek Christianity to make the future of the East happier. And the
‘Philhellene’ carried on by saying that the new Kingdom of Greece needed the
Greek provinces of Thessaly and Epirus, then under Ottoman rule, as much as
Crete, to regain self-respect. For,

Independence and self-respect are necessary conditions of national existence. A

plaything kingdom, without resources either for internal improvement or external
defence, without any feeling of responsibility, a mere spoilt child of the protecting
Powers, Greece has never seriously applied herself to the work of her own
regeneration. 584

For the ‘Philhellene’, Greece is too ‘young’ and weak to help herself. Some
months later, a journalist of The Times returned to the subject of Greece’s
suitability for expansion, and reminded his readers that only Britain had the right
to supervise, advise and ‘preach Greece’, 585 since only Britain had helped Greece
to expand, by granting her the Ionian Islands in 1864. The pro-Turkish Morning
Post also used this trope to describe the relationship between Greece and
England, or Greece and Turkey. 586
British vocabulary became progressively more patronising from the beginning
of the 1870s. After the Dilessi kidnapping, the British press repeatedly used for
the Greek Kingdom the metaphor of ‘the offspring of the sympathy of Christian
powers’, which now ‘disgraces her creators.’ 587 This comment found its
counterpart in the verdict that Greece had a ‘perverse and forward childhood.’ 588
The fear this verdict unveiled was two-fold. The first way we can consider it is
relevant to Victorian psychopathologies concerning the untimely death of nations
that are morally degraded – that is, downgraded on the ladder of civilisation. 589
The second way we could read this comment is through its Greek visual
counterpart, a cartoon published by an anonymous Greek in the 1870s (see
illustration 14). This cartoon depicts a child, who is engaged in a graffiti
entreprise: the ‘design’ of a ‘Great Idea’ of Turko-Greek battles on the wall of a
house. In semiotic terms this may signify ‘untimely’ Greek aspirations; perhaps,
pushed a little bit further, the way Greece functions as a pest and disturbance for
her neighbours (symbolised by the wall, the foreign property the cartoon boy
damages). Alternatively, one can scrutinise similar reflections in Palingenesía 590
during the Balkan crisis in 1878, in which, again, the question of whether Greece
was an experiment that ‘failed’ loomed large. In this instance one can see a
ruthless Greek self-criticism that, though it is not directly linked to British
speculations, it nevertheless presents interesting similarities with them.

584 The Times, 1 January 1867.

585 The Times, 8 April 1867.
586 The Morning Post, 8 February 1869.
587 The Morning Post, 28 April 1870.
588 The Times, 26 April 1870.
589 Bowler, Invention of Progress, p. 9; E. Chamberlin and S.L Gilman (eds), Degeneration: The Dark

Side of Progress, (New York, 1985), pp. 290-291.

590 19 January 1878.

180
 Illustration 14
The Great Idea!
Source: T.A. Cartoon Album. (Athens 1874).

Even more suggestive was the language of another journalist of Dilessi, who was
speculating on the abuse of constitutional principles, when the Greek
Government denied granting an amnesty to the brigands of Dilessi and thus
blocked any further negotiations with the captors. According to the journalist,

This is a lamentable state of things to find in a country, which has been petted and
Protected by almost all the great Powers of Europe for the last forty years. Perhaps
the fault of the failure has lain all along with the Protectors themselves, who said
“Let Greece arise; let us create a kingdom “after our likeness,” in a land
which, however patriotic in guerrilla warfare against the Turks, did not posses
even the first elements of a municipality. It was very much as though three rich
uncles were to say “Here is our nephew, a child only five years old, it is true, but
for all that, we will make him a man, and he shall be a man at once […] It was
worth trying the experiment, perhaps, just to prove that a Constitution cannot be
fitted to a country like a coat to a man’s back! 591

The concept of protection appears twice in relation to the abuse of constitutional

principles by the Greeks, and it is accompanied by the religious phrase ‘after our

591The Times, 16 May 1870.

181
likeness’. This religious vocabulary already represented Britain as a benevolent
creator, and Greece as a sinner who tasted all the forbidden fruits of freedom.
The tale of the uncle and his nephew, who never became ‘a man’, was narrated
throughout the 1860s and 1870s in many different versions and it is the secular
counterpart of the language of patronage.
The idea of Greek regeneration or degeneration haunted some Greek
interlocutors too. One of the Greeks who used the British rhetoric was the author
of the theatrical play The Oropos Captivity and the Dilessi Drama, published in
Cephallonia after the Dilessi Murders. In the play there is a scene in which the
day before the kidnapping the British captives discuss Greece’s progress. In this
scene Greek culture is called ‘an infant’ that has to ‘be taken care of’ by the Great
Powers. Nevertheless, the author, Iatrídis, was convinced that the poor Greek
nation that ‘only yesterday was liberated from the barbarous four-century
[Ottoman] bonds […] will eventually present signs of progress analogous to those
of ancient European nations.’ 592 For Iatrídis, the image of Greece as a child had a
double meaning. On the one hand it was the allegory of historical discontinuity in
Greek culture – a discontinuity introduced into Greek history after the conquest
of Byzantium by the Ottomans. On the other hand, it implied acceptance on his
part of the idea of a collaborative European control in Greece. This double
function would elsewhere underscore the discourse on progress – a progress that
could be achieved only with the help of England, and whose end was Greece’s
growth and integration to the ‘family of nations.’ 593
Moreover, on some occasions some Greeks employed unwisely the British
masculine self-image that was in frequent use in colonial relationships. 594
Arístarchos Bey, a Greek appointed by the Ottoman government as a brigadier, 595
and an ardent supporter of the Greek Great Idea, produced a massive collection
of speeches, articles, Church edicts and parliamentary debates concerning the
Bulgarian Question, which he published in the 1870s. In 1876, when he finished
the fourth volume of his work, the revolution in Bosnia and Herzegovina raged,
the Serbians had declared war against the Ottoman empire and the Bulgarians
were organising an anti-Greek campaign in the Balkans. In this climate of general
instability, Britain still tried to secure her passage to India via Suez. Among the
numerous speeches in Arístarchos’s collection there were two by Lord Salisbury
and Lord Derby on British policy on Suez. Arístarchos adopted an enthusiastic
attitude towards this ‘anti-Turkish’ British policy, which he expressed in the
following way:
I congratulate wholeheartedly and respectfully the late Cabinet of Great Britain for
the masculine roads it opened and I hope that it will not change its course. 596

The enduring tradition of depicting the British empire as masculine played a

significant role in the building of such imageries, in which the ‘colonised’ is seen

592 Iatrídis, Oropos, p. 19.

593 Palingenesía, 27 August 1876. See also N. Psychas, Revolutionary Images of Crete (Athens, 1870), pp.
9-10.
594 The feminine image of Britain (Britannia) is discussed later.
595 Dimítrios Arístarchos (Aristárchis) Bey was a nationalist activist; he made a career as a diplomat

and mainly because he was assigned duties and posts at crucial moments in the Eastern Question.
In 1873, four years after the last Cretan Insurrection, Arístarchos was given the long-vacant post
of Christian Councillor at Chania (Crete). Consult The Levant Herald, 6 February 1873.
596 D. Arístarchos Bey, The Bulgarian Question and the New Schemes of Panslavism in the East, vol. IV

(Athens, 1876), 121n.

182
as effeminate, degenerate or childish. This is nothing other than the well-known
rhetoric of colonisation. The victory of the coloniser would often be hedged with
the rhetoric of protection, in which the threat of distrust or violence remained
inherent, but was covered up by the mellow language of the restoration of a
harmonious order; ‘not that of aboriginal conservatism, but of a more benign one,
at once natural and civilised,’ like the love between father and child. 597 And if we
consider that the image of a British benevolent mother, which was popular in
Britain over the same period (the famous ‘Britannia’), was not used in Anglo-
Greek political commentary, then the intersection of gendered language and
colonialism becomes more apparent. 598 In fact, the use of the family trope in
Anglo-Greek reflections was not unique. The British administrators and
colonisers used it also to describe their relationship with India; soon anglicised
Indian subjects began to use the family vocabulary to describe their country’s
relationship with a ‘benevolent’ Britain. 599 In a series of articles published in the
Revue des Deux Mondes between 1846 and 1852, French authors also used similar
patriarchal or feminine imageries to describe their relationship with the Oriental
Algeria. 600 Inevitably, one begins to suspect that the language was symptomatic of
a particular kind of political relationship. Although Greece is not a British colony
the language employed mainly by Britons unveils a British fantasy in which the
Greek Kingdom is already colonised.
Truly in British reflections the immediate substitute of this rhetoric was the
ruthless language of colonisation. 601 Usually, the scientific vocabulary of
‘experimentation’ would accompany British preaching. This vocabulary, which
introduces us to the evolutionist world by the back door, was in fact quite
common in British dealings with the Turks as well. The following part from a
speech on the Eastern Question and the imminent collapse of the Ottoman
empire provides a good example:

The Sick Man is assuredly dying; and our duty towards Turkey is a double one –
to endeavour to act the part of the family physician and of the family solicitor. We
are bound by treaty to do all that we can to preserve a health which is daily
sinking; but failing that, we should take such means as are in our power to secure
the Sick Man’s rich inheritance to his natural heirs, the Christian populations
subject to his rule. 602

597 Spurr, Rhetoric of Empire, p. 34. See also Gibaudi (‘Images,’ p. 95) for the divide between the
Italian South and North. It was common for Italian commentators to attribute all the stereotypical
feminine qualities to the South. This of course is a question of a very different nature (since it
refers to national divides rather than colonial relationships).
598 Unfortunately, I am not in a position to make a proper reference to Kristi Bohata’s PhD thesis

(University of Wales) on representations of ‘Britannia’ in nineteenth-century Anglo-Welsh cultural

exchange. Kristi Bohata is currently working on gendered imageries of Britain and Wales, and her
research, thus far, shows that Britain is assigned an exclusively mothering role in Anglo-Welsh
relations.
599 See ‘Is India Fit for Home Rule?’ [The Empire Review, vol. 39, no. 280 (May 1924), pp. 488-

496] - a very interesting article that presents a variation of this language.

600 S. Gemie, ‘France, Orientalism and Algeria: 54 Articles from the Revue des Deux Mondes, 1846-

1852,’ The Journal of Algerian Studies, vol. 3 (1998), pp. 58-62.

601 See for example The Daily News, 18 May 1870.
602 Grant Duff, The Eastern Question, p. 8. For similar examples see John Mill, The Ottomans in

Europe; or, Turkey in the Present Crisis, (London, 1876), p. 6; Farley, Turks and Christians, p. 29; The
Morning Post, 10 December 1868.

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In this passage the British journalist expresses the aspiration for Britain to
become the fair arbitrator of someone else’s property, but he glorifies his
intentions with a vocabulary that describes Britain’s task as a ‘family duty’.
Even more provocative is that Greeks employed the very same language, even
though they did not address it only to Britain. A very striking case is that of a
diatribe on Bulgarian nationalism of the 1870s and the increasing interest of the
Great Powers in supporting Bulgarian claims in the Balkans. After accusing some
of the Greeks of Constantinople of high treason, because they did not actively
oppose the foundation of the Bulgarian Exarchate in 1870, the author proceeded
to explore why the Greek nation was so weak at such a crucial moment. At that
point, he claimed that nations are like children, which need guidance by a good
pedagogue. However, the pedagogues of the Greek nation, the Great Powers,
tried to poison Greece, since they, ‘against the laws of nature, gave to the child
indigestible and poisoned food’.

That is why as long there is time left, let us try to fight against the causes of
weakness and degeneration of our society. And those are, except for the
inclination we might have had, the lack of scientific light and warmth: spiritual
progress and the moulding of a strong soul. Finally, let us adopt a healthier life-
style, so that we will not relapse into the same illness… 603

Clinical language could be seen as an insidious sign of subjection to a harsh

Western omniscient, who, nevertheless cares for the patient, like a good parent.
Its equivalent in Greek popular culture can be found in the story of the ignorant
peasants who thought that their new ‘Frankish’ dentist’s collection of dentures
consisted of teeth abstracted from the dead to be magically fitted into the mouth
of the living. Clinical language is based on the logic that the European Protector
holds a secret the Greek has to uncover. Nevertheless, the scientific gaze of the
Protector could also be the product of the Greek commentator’s desire to be
treated as a patient. 604 To invoke Žižek’s argument, ‘the mystery […] is to be
sought not beyond its appearance but in the very appearance of mystery’. 605 In other
words, the Greek commentator believes that the protectors of Greece are the
keepers of a secret that can treat Greek maladies. Europe plays the role of the
‘other’, which becomes a compassionate Father in Greek imagination – a Father
who can help the Greek child to avoid the dangers of youth.
The child/nephew of the Great Powers has to be mischievous. If he is a good
boy, then his parents/uncles cannot discipline him. This partially explains why
British commentators are upset every time someone brings to the fore the
oppressive aspect of their rhetoric of protection, in which British economic
interests and not Greek incompetence primarily dictate a negative attitude
towards the Greek Great Idea. An amusing incident of such a nature, took place
when Charles Tuckerman published his influential travel diary The Greeks of To-day.
In his witty chapter on the Great Idea, Tuckerman described the chasm between
Greece’s actual condition and the Greek nation’s ‘sweet belief’ in its uniqueness,
when his smooth language changed with the following comment:

603 T. Asklipiádis, Changes in the East owing to Bulgarian Conduct, (Athens, 1872), p. 79.
604 J. Lacan, ‘Sign, Symbol, Imaginary,’ in M. Blonsky (ed), On Signs: A Semiotic Reader, (Oxford,
1985),
p. 207.
605 Žižek, For they Know Not, p. 107.

184
 Attenuated, poverty-stricken, a political pauper at the close of the revolution, yet
possessing a certain shrewdness and wit which commanded the respect of those
who had come forward in the character of “national guardian”, Greece, who
without their timely aid, would have sunk back into barbarism and obscurity,
boldly demanded larger share of territory for which she had sacrificed so much.
Dissatisfied with the spoonful of political broth, the Oliver Twist of nations had
the unblushing temerity “to ask for more”. 606

The sarcastic presentation of the Oliver Twist metaphor emphasized the ignoble
side of British intervention in Greek affairs in particular and proved to be too
much for George Finlay, who counter-attacked immediately:

Mr. Tuckerman, the late Minister resident of the United States at Athens, has
published a book with the title The Greeks of To-day, in which he expresses his
decided disapprobation of British policy towards the Hellenic Kingdom. He is a
profound diplomatist in “ifs” and, as he declares himself a staunch friend of the
Greeks, a few of his observations on the political characteristics of Athenian
society deserve to be cited […] In the height of his philhellenic enthusiasm Mr.
Tuckerman calls Greece “the Oliver Twist of nations, asking Europe for more
gifts and benefits than diplomacy will concede”. Other Philhellenes who have
directed the attention of the Greeks to practical measures or reform in less
epigrammatic phrases have been accused in Greek newspapers of being
“calumniators of Hellenism”. 607

Admittedly, Tuckerman was vitriolic in his comments on British policy. In

another section of his work, Greece was presented as the lame who, since she has
only one leg (the Greek Kingdom), which she cannot use, she should not regret
the loss of the other (Greek-speaking parts of the Ottoman empire), because she
‘would not know how to use it’. 608 Interestingly, the imaginary adviser in
Tuckerman’s story is Britain. Putting aside the fact that other newspapers stressed
that Tuckerman’s narrative had not been intended ‘for an English audience’ 609 the
twofold metaphor of ‘patronage’ and parental loss in the Twist narrative seemed
to have travelled to the other side of the Atlantic.
Unlike Finlay’s immediate response, the Greek translator of Tuckerman
neither censured nor commented on that passage. It is also telling that other
Greek commentators did not repudiate this vocabulary, but they modified it. In
their case, Greece’s image as a child was replaced by the mother metaphor. Given
that Greece’s treatment in the Don Pacifico affair (1850), the Crimean War (1854-
1856) and the Dilessi Murders (1870) was of a kind that the British would reserve
for an unclaimed colony, this rhetoric could be examined with the help of
postcolonial studies. In The Location of Culture Homi Bhabha, following Frantz
Fanon’s writings claimed that the language of the colonizer re-merges both as
mimicry and mockery once it is adopted by the colonized. As other readers of
Fanon pointed out, 610 Bhabha identifies in mimicry the double effect of

606 Tuckerman, Greeks of To-day, (1872), p. 125.

607 The Times, 31 March 1873.
608 Tuckerman, Greeks of To-day (1872), p. 126.
609 The Levant Herald, 22 March 1873. The Levant Herald journalist did not attack Tuckerman for his

views, though the fact that for him Tuckerman expressed the ‘American view’ shows an attempt
to differentiate English and American opinions on Greek affairs.
610 D. Fuss, ‘Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification,’ Diacritics, 2/3

(1994),

185
imitation/parody, subordination/resistance. This ever-present possibility of
slippage discredits the coloniser’s version of colonised otherness. The two
notions of mimesis interact and cross continually, producing confusion and
subverting roles in colonial discourse. It could be claimed, however, that mimicry
is not always the result of colonial oppression, but of any kind of political
oppression. On the other hand, the Greek rhetoric had more nuances that post-
colonial theory cannot explain. I will proceed now to explore the political
significance and the nuances this forked language acquired in Anglo-Greek
relations and in Greek domestic affairs, when the Greeks simultaneously
readdressed it to both their British protectors and the unredeemed Greeks of the
Ottoman empire.
In 1865, a year after the cession of the Ionian Islands to Greece, the Greek
entrepreneur Stefanos Xenos published in London his historical study East and
West, in which he examined the trajectory of Anglo-Greek contacts in relation to
the question of the Ionian Islands. Xenos was opposed to the demolition of
fortresses in the Ionian Islands when England handed them to the Greek
Kingdom; criticising unfavourable British comments - which he saw as signs of ‘a
despotic attitude’ - on the riotous behaviour of the Ionian Greeks, he added:

The conduct and dispositions of the Ionians are perfectly intelligible. Let us
suppose the case of a respectable mother with her children falling into slavery, and
reduced by averse circumstances to extreme want; but one child escapes, and has
the good fortune to meet a wealthy patron, who adopts him, for whom he provides
every comfort, and who gives him every advantage becoming his new position.
But, at length, the mother, with one or two of her other children, after a hard
struggle, succeeds in raising her head again in the world and becoming free. She
has not been able to recover from her early position – far from it; but she enjoys
an independent, though humble, existence. Now, what may we suppose would,
under such circumstances, be the natural feelings of the son whom a powerful
patron has placed in a position so much superior to that of the rest of his family?
Would not his first impulse be a desire to return to his mother, and afford her that
aid which the education he had received, and the wealth he had acquired, rendered
him so competent to afford her to free his own brothers still in slavery? But should
the patron refuse his consent, existence becomes a torture to the protégé, who can
think of nothing but his mother’s position, and can listen only to the voice of
nature. 611

This captivating image - a mother with her lost sons - is based on the principle of
substitution or slippage: Greece, the mother of Europe, becomes a ‘poor mother’
who has lost her freedom. The comment on slavery, is nicely inserted: this
mother is a woman who, having lost her freedom, is not respected anymore, like
the slaves of the Oriental harems whose status was reduced to that of a
concubine. The son-version of Greece is transferred to the Ionian Islands that are
still represented as young and subordinate. Britain is the only persona in the story
whose status and role remains unchanged. Playing the role of a symbolic Father,
Britain is always ready to impose the Law on the Ionian protégé.
The whole metaphor is also suggestive for other reasons that can be explained
by an analysis of the internal function and the role of female imagery in Greek
culture. Michael Herzfeld explained that in Greek culture to copulate the

p. 24.
611 Xenos, East and West, p. 28.

186
kinswomen of one’s enemies is to equate sexual rivalry with social difference.
This happens because the ‘rape’ of a woman is symbolically a violation and
penetration of ‘the domestic hearth’. 612 In this instance, ‘woman’ and ‘home’ are
woven together as metonyms. If we have a second look at the passage it is easy to
realise that for Xenos the symbolic ‘rape’ of Greece is not in fact conducted by
Britain but by Turkey. Therefore, his metaphor – a, no doubt, appealing one to an
English audience – is at the same time a metaphor of British patronage and the
narrative of Greek culture’s adulteration by the Turkish uncivilised character.
There was more nevertheless to the Greek rhetoric, since the audience for the
Greek metropolis was split into Britons, other European nations and the
subjected Greeks. When addressed to the British, the Greek discourse would
present the mother figure as a weak degraded creature. When addressed to the
non-native Greeks of the Ottoman Empire, the very same maternal image would
become the patron whom all the unredeemed Greeks ought to love and respect.
This pattern should not necessarily be regarded as a mimesis of the British one.
This twin metaphor can be traced in a letter sent to a Greek nationalist
newspaper, Palingenesía, by a Constantinopolitan Greek in 1868. This letter was
concerned with British persistence in keeping Turkey ‘alive’ by sabotaging the
Cretan struggle. For the anonymous Greek, the imminent threat for Turkey is the
Great Idea of the Panhellenes, which contributes to the ‘conception and birth of
the East.’ Greece is fit to play a leading role in the East, because she has proved
that

She has such great aspirations that she could raise gales in the East, if not in
Europe as well. She should, like a loving mother, declare that she will never let
down and deny her persecuted, hurt and blood stained daughter, challenging thus
Europe to dare, if she can, to abstract forcibly the East from her mother; she
should, even following Turkey’s example, protest every now and then against
violation of human rights in Crete. She should prove that she has intellectual
skills, which will allow her to succeed Turkey who is still alive only because – to
cite Europe - there are no able successors. Finally she should prove that Greece is
independent and not a European feud. 613

Though addressed to abstract ‘Europeans’, the actual addressees are Britain and a
Greek readership. The ‘conception’ of the East and the reclaimed ‘daughter’
belong to the realm of the very same rhetoric examined above. The image of the
‘loving mother,’ central to this passage, retains its ambiguity: on the one hand this
mother is a dynamic matron. On the other hand, this reference to ‘shoulds’ and
feudalism open a small fissure within the Greek discourse. Through this fissure
one can see the Greek Kingdom’s gendered identity as an unexpressed fear of a
subordination that has already taken place.
The same pattern is encountered in an article on the dinner organised in
Manchester for the Cretan struggle, only this time it is addressed solely to a Greek
audience. Markos Renieris, representative of the Cretan Assembly and the Central
Committee for the Cretan Insurrection in Athens, claimed in his speech that God
himself asked for the union of Crete with Greece because families cannot be
separated. 614 Some months later, the Clió journalists came back to the issue of
what will happen to Greece if Crete capitulates.

612 Herzfeld, Anthropology, p. 173.

613 Palingenesía, 4 July 1868. Note that ‘Europe’ stands for ‘Britain’ here.
614 Clió, 24/5 April 1867.

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 Internally, Greece will go through a period of insurmountable anomaly, which the
wounded honour will magnify […] In external affairs, Greece’s position will be
insufferable; the enslaved Greeks will never dare to raise their head again, since
they will be taught that Greece might perform the loving mother up to a point,
[…] but she would never be disposed to run high risks in crucial moments. Let us
not delude ourselves. Greece should not only support the struggles of the
subordinate children, but also sympathise and suffer with them. Otherwise, what
kind of loving mother would she be for the revolting brothers, if, when she senses
danger, she transforms herself into an inconsiderate stepmother? 615

The same language was used by the Central Committee for the Cretan refugees at
Athens, an organisation that worked as a mediator between the rebels and the
Greek government. 616 It is obvious that the trope had a certain function to fulfil
in the Greek imaginary but also in the state discourse. I would like to highlight the
social extensions of this gendered language first. If one puts the image of female
Greece adjacent to that of Britain-patron, then one has the usual apologetic
account on gender inequality. But the examined rhetoric assumes a different
dimension when it is examined alongside the conservative Greek discourse on
education. For the Greeks, women in their culture were destined to play a role
that would keep them in a position of social subordination. 617 Women might have
been presented as the first pedagogues of young Greek generations, but their
contribution to the Greek nationalist project had to be performed within the
domestic confines and far away from the light of publicity. 618 Their role would
often be ambiguous, as they appeared both as ‘subordinates and masters,
privileged and restricted, acted upon and acting’ . 619
The transposition of the language of kinship onto the plain of Greek politics
is however a question of a different order. This language was complicit to that of
Greek nation building since it can be related to the debate upon Greek
citizenship. The autochthone Greeks (or Greek natives of the Kingdom) had been
initially privileged over the heterochthones (or alien, non-indigenous Greeks) in this
respect. The debate upon naturalisation of heterochthone Greeks had coincided with
the first use of the term ‘Great Idea’ in the Greek Parliament in the 1840s. 620 In
the second half of the nineteenth century naturalisation of the non-indigenous
Greeks was deemed a prerequisite for the nation’s self-fulfilment. However, the
privileged position of the metropolitan Greeks as architects of this process,
continued to be asserted. One has to bear in mind what the process of
naturalisation comprises to understand the significance of this debate. The State
makes non-indigenous peoples naturalised citizens -that is, it makes them ‘people
whose subjectivity conforms to the nature of the society that grants then
citizenship, a nature that allows for their subjectivity to be nationalized.’ 621 Naturalisation,
the German Naturalisierung finds its Greek equivalent in πολιτογράφησις, the

615 Clió, 15/27 September 1867.

616 Aión, 28 March 1868.
617 Ainián, Eastern Question, p. 88.
618 McClintock, Imperial Leather, p. 355.
619Ibid., 6; See also relevant introductory chapter by C. Gittings (pp. 1-8) in C. Gittings (ed),

Imperialism and Gender: Constructions of Masculinity, (New Lambton, 1996). Although the Greek case
does not provide us with a colonial example, the ambiguity of gender imagery remains the same.
620 Zakythinos, Modern Greece, p. 193.
621 Gourgouris, Dream Nation, p. 33.

188
inscription upon one of the mark of the citizen (from polis and grafō, engrave).
This process naturalises the notion of national subjectivity, because it makes the
subject’s nationality look inherent. 622 This along with the insistence of the native
Greeks to be privileged subjects, found its analogue in the language of
natural/social family bonds 623 : the very language that the Greeks of the Greek
Kingdom used to describe Anglo-Greek relations. The family vocabulary nicely
covered up internal cultural, social and political fragmentation, and made the
Greek nation (in the eyes of a Greek readership) look naturally uniform: like a
loving family.
Territorial heritage and natural rights go together in the Greek hegemonic
trope of kinship, something that could explain why modern historians established
a genealogy of the Great Idea on the episode of the speech by Koléttis. To
illustrate my point, I will draw on the narrative of ‘An Athenian,’ who sent a letter
to The Times in 1876, the year national revolution broke out in Balkans. The
‘Athenian’ worried because the Ottoman Porte had embarked upon a plan for
colonisation of the European provinces of Turkey – which the Greeks claimed
for themselves – by Circassians. He condemned the Turkish government, which
endangered the life of the Greek populations of Turkey. It is at this point that he
turns to the question of Greek citizenship:

The accusation that Greek consuls granted the Hellenic Naturalisation by simply
giving passports to the Rayahs cannot be confined to the consular agents of
Greece. All European consuls in Turkey from time immemorial practiced this sort
of national baptism […] In the case of Greek consuls it might appear more
glaring, partly because they and the Greeks who were claiming Hellenic
citizenship, owing to their constant relations with Greece, were more numerous. 624

The passport ritual, to which the ‘Athenian’ of The Times refers, is the political
sealing of naturalisation, which allows the new citizen to cross borders. 625 Seen
under this light, the narrative that the modern historians adopted on the Great
Idea is the narrative of Greek naturalised nationhood – a narrative subverted by the
community language, which tramples on that of the institutionalised
nationhood, 626 as we will see later.
What escaped analysis, thus far, is that other Greeks commentators presented
Greece as the dishonoured mother of Europe to the British. 627 As we saw in
previous chapters, the idea of ‘Greece’ as the cradle of European civilisation was
nothing new in the 1860s and the 1870s. The mythologisation of Hellenic
civilisation in the European imaginary started with the development of the
German Altertumswissenschaft into a serious academic multi-discipline, which
comprised the study of ancient Greek, archaeology and Hellenic history. The
‘regeneration’ or ‘resurrection’ of Greece as a modern Kingdom was also the
outcome of philehellenic enthusiasm, which had its roots in such disciplinary

622 Balibar, ‘Nation Form,’ p. 349.

623 See P. Gilroy, ‘It’s a family Affair: Black Culture and the Trope of Kinship’, in P. Gilroy (ed),
Small Acts: Thoughts on the politics of black cultures, (London, 1993); Barthes, Mythologies; Lévi-Strauss,
Totemism , transl. by Rodney Needham (London, 1964), pp. 26-27.
624 The Times, 7 September 1876. Emphasis added.
625 Interesting is also the article in Clió of 24/7 March 1868, in which we meet the same narrative

on the heterochthones’ Greekness, addressed to the British.

626 Chatterjee, Nation and its Fragments, pp. 234-239.
627 See for example N. Psychás, Revolutionary Images of Crete (Athens, 1870), p. 7. Psychás addressed

his narrative to a British audience, since he referred specifically to the Dilessi Murders.

189
practices. The philehellenes aspired to resurrect their own past – that is, the
Hellenic past they had previously appropriated - in the Greek peninsula. Their
need to see modern Greece ‘evolving’ into a country ‘after their likeness’ was their
yearning to see their intellectual/political philehellenic project in the flesh.
This dream was an open secret, and it certainly influenced Neohellenic self-
perceptions. Inevitably, the modern Greeks began to recognise in themselves a
superior ‘race’ - the descendants of Plato and Aristotle. The question was how to
achieve recognition from Britain and thus fulfil their civilising mission in the East
by re-conquering all the lost Greek provinces. It is here that we find Neohellenic
mimicry at work. The paradox in Anglo-Greek reflections of the 1860s and the
1870s was that in the Greek discourse the British observer would find himself
being at once child and father - or, more precisely, the-name-of the-father, the
absolute authority that regulates the subject, to re-member Lacan 628 - while
Greece performed at once the mother and the child. This discourse is
homologous to the Oedipal complex, and the reversal of Greek and British or
European roles alludes to a repression/prohibition of ‘incest.’ 629 It is probably
this prohibition the Greeks uncovered to chastise the British or other European
nations for their ‘ungrateful’ behaviour towards the ‘mother’ of Europe. In short,
the Neohellenes tried to present Modern Greece as the resurrected
progenitor/parent of European culture, which had to be helped to become a
great nation. By invoking the ghostly Hellenic past that haunted the British
present, the Greek commentators hoped to attain what their British patrons had
failed to achieve with them: British docility and respect.
From this brief analysis it becomes evident that the trope of family and
kinship performed a multiple function in British and Greek narratives. In British
discourse it valorised the British imperial self-image and presented Greece as a
weak British protégé, the isomorphic part of a colony. In Greek political
commentary it undermined British colonial self-perceptions, but also it presented
the Greek Kingdom as the centre of a Greater Hellenism, which was seeking its
self-accomplishment by means of territorial expansion. Allocation of roles on a
symbolic level was reciprocal, although the Greeks utilized British or European
masculine imageries to construct their own language of resistance. In this rhetoric
of protection one parent was constantly missing from the structure: the British
were good fathers without a ‘wife’ and the Greeks were good mothers without a
‘husband.’ The Greek children who appeared in the British rhetoric half-orphans
were mothers in the Greek language of protection. This was a ‘messy’ family
business, for it involved a lot of ‘violence’. Of course, the ‘missing parent’ logic
that underpinned both the Greek and the British discourses might have been a
subtle sign of self-contentment for both sides – or inversely, a theatrical
representation of interdependent roles.

628Lacan is more interested in Freud’s ‘father’ as it appears in Totem and taboo (1912-13); this is the
‘dead father’, whose death leads to the prohibition of incest, because his ghostly authority is
stronger than ever:

If this murder of the father is the faithful moment of the debt through which the subject binds himself for life to the
Law…the symbolic father, in so far as he signifies this Law, is certainly the dead Father.

[From J Lacan, Écrits : A selection, transl. by A. Sheridan (London and New York, 1989), pp. 72-76;
quoted and analysed in E. Grosz, Jacques Lacan, A Feminist Introduction, (London and New York,
1990), p. 68].
629 But see also L. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, 1974), for a different approach of

the incest in colonial relations; I did not find this argument as persuasive, but many feminist
historians, such as McClintock, do.

190
 But it also goes without saying that despite their evolutionist conception, both
Greek and British imageries operated under purely structural principles – that is,
they were static. In the 1860s, thirty years had gone by since the birth of the
Greek Kingdom, but Greece was still a child. More than thirty years had passed
since Britain had assumed the parental role for Greece, but it still remained a
vigorous parent. It would have been naïve for historians to conflate here the
process of Anglo-Greek symbolisation of the real world, with reality itself: neither
Greece nor Britain was actual living organisms to be subjected to the principles of
physical evolution. Gendered imageries operated only on the symbolic plain and
for specific political reasons. This is what is called in Lacanian terms ‘the
symbolisation of the real,’ a prerequisite for the establishment of intersubjective
identities. 630
Yet, there is a remark to be made for such time-resistant imageries:
Neohellenic regeneration, which was always projected into the future, had its
negative equivalent, degeneration, which was an undesirable state of things for
Britain. The clinical or family language used in British reflections was, therefore,
the ‘symptom’ of this British fear. It is, in fact, useful to examine the discourse of
degeneration and regeneration together, to understand what was foreclosed from
the Anglo-Greek symbolic structure. That was nothing other than British decline,
a nightmare that visited the British in their sleep ever since Darwinism and
Gibbon’s cyclical historic evolution intruded into their imagination. 631 In this
respect, the British rhetoric of protection served to repress not the past, but sad
reflections on a hideous future. A static conceptualisation of the Anglo-Greek
relationship would secure a frozen British imperial self-image, and would conceal
British anxiety. The British were trapped into an eternal present – a kind of
‘Nemesis’ for their imperialist desire as the Greek nationalists might have argued.

630 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, pp. 53-64; but see also R. Kuhns, ‘The Psychoanalytic Mind:
From Freud to Philosophy,’ The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 92, no.7 (July 1995): pp. 394-395.
631 Bowler, Invention of Progress, pp. 193-195.

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 2. NATION-BUILDING, HEGEMONY AND
THE LIMITS OF ‘DIALOGUE’

iv. Literature and theoretical framework

When philhellenism was registered in the European vocabulary the modern
Greek state did not exist, though the aspiration for its foundation did in
progressive ‘European’ minds. I connect the creation of Greece with
philhellenism because I am planning to re-examine the traditional narrative some
historians of philhellenism adopted. The narrative that presented philhellenism as
a trend of ideas reinforced by classicist passion and imbued by the support of
Greek nationalist plans became plausible partially because historians investigated
the phenomenon in the conjunction of the War of Independence. But beyond
that happy coincidence nothing could be taken for granted about its nature;
philhellenic studies stayed thus for a long time trapped in the revolutionary sphere
of the early nineteenth century. The post-independence period was never carefully
examined and the question of ‘what happened to all those philhellenes after
liberation’ was closed in a vault-like oblivion.
The question was reopened thanks to the uproar Said’s book caused in
Orientalist academic circles. The very same work inspired Martin Bernal his Black
Athena, in which he explored how the classicistic passion in European countries,
such as Britain and Germany, performed ‘the key political function of fostering
the notion of Europe as a category superior over all other continents.’ 632 I used
Bernal’s work in previous chapters to analyse the impact of this ideology on
British and Greek history writing. However, Bernal’s controversial point that his
generation of historians was nurtured with the idea that Greek civilisation owed
nothing to non-European cultures is much more intriguing. The argument
certainly mythologised the purity of the European heirs of Hellenic culture;
moreover, it discharged the European nations from their socio-political and
intellectual debts to non-European cultures. I feel that the most important issue
pending from Bernal’s analysis was abandoned. This is the very nature of debt,
and not in ancient Greek, but in modern European and in Greek imagination. I
suspected that in the Anglo-Greek relationships, the idea that each side was a
debtor to the other may cast light on an important aspect of the contribution of
philihellenism and anglophilia into the construction of a Greek hegemonic ideology
– the Great Idea.
Cursor in my study became the work of Stathis Gourgouris Dream Nation.
Gourgouris had a similar starting point to mine: Said’s Orientalism. According to
Gourgouris, ‘Greece was envisaged from an exotic position by the Europeans;
but, unlike Oriental countries, she was the site of the birth for European
civilisation.’ This dream ‘Greece’ was not like her modern counterpart, the object
of contempt for Europe. Gourgouris used Castoriadis’ notion of the national
imaginary to capture the way this ‘Greece’ was constructed by German, French
and British philhellenic-hegemonic groups before the War of Independence, or by

632For a summary of his views see M. Bernal, ‘Greece: Aryan or Mediterranean? Two Contending
Historiographical Models,’ in S. Federici (ed), Enduring Western Civilisation The Concept of Western
Civilisation and its Others (London and Connecticut, 1995), pp. 3-11.

192
Greek textual authorities after and before the War. This ‘Greece’ was a dialectical
amalgam of ideas and ideologies that belonged to the European colonial realm in
which modern Greece was born.
Though a truly excellent analysis, Dream Nation commits the same mistake as
the post-colonial gaze: it interprets everything from its standpoint. Gourgouris
uses a few European and Greek Enlightenment texts to analyse, not only modern
Greek historiography, but also the process of Greek nation building. Tradition, in
its initial meaning of transmission of ideology from generation to generation, does
not occupy much space in his analysis. The ways philhellenic doctrines were
integrated into pre-existing modes of Greek thought are examined carefully, but
historical change and interpretation of those European philhellenisms is not fully
explored. Moreover, like Saidian Orientalism, Gourgouris’s philhellenism is single
and not multiple.
Possibly because of the astonishing span of his work Gourgouris did not
touch upon the question of the ‘Great Idea’. 633 The latter was presented as an
internal, imaginary function of nationalism, despite its implication in international
politics. For Gourgouris, to be God’s elected – an important aspect of the Great
Idea - means for the nation to be able to constantly select its participants. 634 But
one has to bear in mind that no culture can make itself understood unless it
succeeds to translate itself. This means that the audience is always split between
external and internal interlocutors, imagined or actual. It also means that if the
vehicles of a culture do not make attempts to interpret it, then something is
wrong. Gourgouris’s defence of the imaginary (internal) monologue goes against
the idea that Greek hegemonic tropes owed much to European observers and
interlocutors, and that, indeed, the former were the ultimate ‘judges’ of their
implementation. Though valid in its own right, Gourgouris’s brief theorisation of
the ‘chosen people’ dismisses the fact that imaginary constructs have important
symbolic functions to perform in political relationships. Ultimately, Gourgouris’s
structuralism contested his own hypothesis concerning the relationship between
contingency and necessity in the historical formation of the Greek nation. 635
I will not spend more time on meaningless attacks upon Gourgouris’s, by all
means praiseworthy work; besides that, I borrowed and modified some of the
very important points he makes. My main deviation form his hypothesis,
however, has to be highlighted. Both of us seek for the constitutive elements of
the imaginary nucleus of modern Greek culture. We both agree that this ‘kernel’
cannot be reduced to its explicit functions – its political, economic and cultural
institutions; the ‘kernel’ regulates and is regulated by them. Where we disagree is

633 A. P. Spanakos, ‘Stathis Gourgouris: Dream Nation. Enlightenment, Colonization, and the
Institution of Modern Greece,’ Ethnos (Nation), vol. 6 (1-2), 1998.
634 Gourgouris, Dream Nation, p. 18. The thesis is valid for me, but for questions relevant to chIII

of Part I and the next chapter of the thesis.

635 For some approaches to contingency see C. Lévi -Strauss, ‘Race and History,’ trans. by Manolis

Voutiras in Dimitris Maronitis (ed), The Fear of Freedom (Athens, 1971), p. 190; Laclau and Mouffe,
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 48-54, 128; S. Žižek, ‘The Object as a Limit of Discourse:
Approaches to the Lacanian Real,’ Prose Studies, vol. 11, no. 3(December 1988), p. 112; S. Leclaire,
A Child is Being Killed: On Primary Narcissism and the Death Drive, trans. by Marie-Claude Hays
(Stanford, 1998), esp. the chapter ‘Sygne, or Transference Love,’ pp. 57-70. Contingency is
derivative of the verb contingo [from the Latin cum (together, with) and tingō (tinge): to partake
of, to touch upon, to affect, to reach, to befall]. Contingency betrays a proximity that gives shape
to the structure not accidentally, but through togetherness. See also F.M. Dolan, ‘Political Action
and the Unconscious: Arendt and Lacan on Decentering the Subject,’ [published in Political Theory
23:2 (1995)], http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~fmdolan/DOLAN_AL.HTML (29 June 2000, 12:14
PM), p 6.

193
on the qualities of modern Greek culture. Gourgouris believes that it is a system
of simultaneous symbols that he can approach through structuralist analysis. His
investigation into European Enlightenment and Greek cultural borrowings is
believed to be applicable across the life span of the Greek imagined community
and its relationship with ‘Europe.’
I, on the other hand, focus on a particular, much later than his, period, and on
Greece’s dialogue mainly with a particular Great Power of Europe. The imagined
‘European interlocutor’ of my Greek commentators is not (and cannot be)
dismissed; I do thus justice to Gourgouris for his own reductionist principles,
because he shares them with the nineteenth-century Greeks. But, unlike him, I
believe that images and national signifiers are always interpreted in history. As the
hermeneutic argument goes ‘it is always through this process of interpretation’
that cultures ‘are kept alive.’ 636 For these reasons, I argue that the ‘Great Idea’,
which Gourgouris almost passed in silence embodies the most interesting aspect
of the dialectics of Greek identity; that the philhellenic ideology is its core; that in
the Anglo-Greek relationship the ‘Great Idea’ is based on an intersubjective, Anglo-
Greek construction and interpretation of ‘cultural debts;’ that the ways in which
Greeks imagined ‘Britain’ as an addressee often coincided with those in which
they imagined ‘Europe’; and, finally, that this process of imagining became for my
nineteenth-century Greek commentators not only a means to resist British
patronage, but also a way to interpret themselves. In the first chapter of this Part,
I explained how the Great Idea became a symbol of education. But one,
examining the charge temporelle of such symbols, cannot necessarily capture the
surplus of their meaning. This ‘surplus,’ which allows ‘the continuing production
of new statements’ 637 creates historical possibilities for the interpreter. Hence,
Greeks might have used the notion of education in many different ways. It is this
change and interpretation I will also proceed to analyse.

636 Kearney, Dialogues, p. 38.

637 Bleicher, Hermeneutics, p. 225.

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 v. Unpaid Debts and Duties: Philhellenism,
Anglophilia and the Greek ‘Other’
Thus far, I have not provided definitions of philhellenism and anglophilia, because
I am more concerned with the way the nineteenth-century Greeks and British
thought about them. It is provocative, but true that there were many, and some
intrinsically different versions of them. Complex theorisations at this stage would be
interesting, but dangerous. I therefore begin with the most simple of definitions,
that of philia or love. By that I allude to the idea of mutual recognition and
respect, which in the nineteenth-century context was manifested in the ideologies
of philhellenism and anglophilia. By British philhellenism I mean the love of a
Hellenic past, as opposed to romiophilia, the love for the Romious, or modern
Greeks – as Frederick William Smythe, eighth Viscount Strangford, one of the
most accomplished philologists and ethnologists argued. 638 By anglophilia I do not
mean the formation of Greek political factions that supported British interference
in Greek affairs – although this did take place in the post-revolution era, for
reasons I will not explore here. Though this can be seen as the result, the actual
rationale of anglophilia lies precisely in reciprocation of the British romiophilia, a
philia that the Greeks never received. To be fair, the term anglophilia figures from
time to time but not always in Greek and British sources; I therefore state in
advance that some times I use it to capture what I explained above.
What was philhellenism then? Maria Todorova points out that in the
surviving list of philhellenes, Balkan and German names predominate. 639 Usually,
the modern researcher is imprisoned in the nineteenth-century discourse in which
philhellenism was presented as an exclusively Western European current. This logic
does not differ in fact so much from that of the nineteenth-century ‘British
observer,’ who was convinced that the Greeks owed him eternal gratitude for the
aid he provided them during their Revolution. The philo-Byronian societies that
operated in Greece further misled British travellers, who were convinced that the
Kingdom was full of romantic anglophiles. 640 However, one should stress that the
constant reference to the help Britain had offered the Greeks, was often a
reminder that the British Empire was policing the small Kingdom, which was
therefore obligated to please her by showing good behaviour. Palmerston’s (1784-
1865) ghost was, for example, a vigilant observer during the insurrection in Crete
to shake off Turkish rule:

Forty years ago Greece was believed by the rulers of England, France and Russia
to offer a lever for moving the East, and they jostled one another hard to lay hold
of it alone. Even a practical statesman like Lord Palmerston considered the
Kingdom of Greece, 30 years ago, as a centre from which order, moral
improvement, and material progress would be rapidly disseminated over the
eastern shores of the Mediterranean. The Greeks asserted that Providence had
selected their nation to solve the Eastern Question, and for a quarter of a century
they were generally supposed to speak from inspiration. 641

638 Strangford was Secretary at the British embassy in Constantinople in the 1850s, and he
propagated the anti-philhellenic idea in political analyses he published in The Pall Mall Gazette and
the Saturday Review. According to Strangford the modern Greeks needed sympathy and not
chastisement for their current national problems (Todorova, Balkans, p. 99)
639 ibid., pp. 70-71.
640 See, for example Young, Five Weeks, pp. 193-194; Campbell, Turks and Greeks, pp. 107-108.
641 The Times, 23 October 1869.

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The feeling that the Greek state was trapped into a European Panopticon was
intensified during the Dilessi crisis, which gave an impetus to the production of
some historically interesting poetry. I record the case of Paráschos, a Greek poeta
minor who sent to Athenian newspapers his last creation in the aftermath of the
massacre. The poem is a ‘survey’ from the Greek struggle for emancipation to the
Dilessi massacre. A feeling of guilt towards the veterans of 1821 becomes more
prominent when references come to the battle of Psará and the massacre of
Chíos; even more poignant are the memories from the recent sacrifice of the
Cretans. Then Paráschos supplicates British philhellenes and foreign officials to
support Greece in this ‘Week of Passion’. He juxtaposes Christ’s passion and the
Greek ‘nation’s’ sufferings, calling upon God and asking Him to ‘save the pride of
Hellas.’ 642 However, the pride of Hellas is mortified because of an alien
interference, which is not recorded in the poem. An ‘evil eye’ is cast upon Greece.
Note for example how causality and panopticism are linked in the following
passage from a letter written by a Greek of Diaspora after the massacre:

The sufferings of our Saviour and of Hellas have concurred to make the Holy
Week sorrowful. While in England the reception given to our Archbishop
conferred the highest degree of honour upon the Hellenic Church, and name, a
drama was acted at Athens, which sunk the whole nation in disgrace. What evil
643
eye envied the momentarily smiling fortune of Hellas?

The ‘observer’ in this passage possesses metaphysical powers: it is an evil eye,

which bewitches Greece and brings about her ruin. However, one should also pay
attention to the similes constructed round the theme of the Week of Passion. In
both sources the nation is reflected in the image of Christ and endures his
sufferings. The idea of ‘sacrifice’ seems to be a common topos in other cultural
contexts, such as the Polish and the Irish. Gilley Sheridan’s 644 study of Irish
culture reveals that the Greek case is not unique: the identification of the Irish
people with Jesus as the suffering Christ of the nations martyred by the British
ran deep into nineteenth-century Irish Catholic culture. However, there is a deep-
seated difference in the Greek narrative: unlike the Irish, who see in this image
salvation by means of shedding blood, the Greeks see their nation suffering
without reason, because of an exotic evil source. One should be careful here,
because the secret of mourning lies only partially with the observer: the
performance is not just for the observer, a British or European philhellene who
questions Greece’s suitability for autonomy as I will proceed to explain.

642Aión and Palingenesía published the poem on 15 April 1870.

643The Times, 20 May 1870; emphasis mine. A reader mentions that Clió produced a still more
remarkable wail on the wounded national honour. Interesting is also the article in Clió of 30/11
July 1870. I quote a passage:

While this Good Friday the mourning veils Greece, and nobody feels joy for the resurrection of our Saviour from the
dead, why does the English press shout with fury and anger and suggest that the conqueror of Magdala should sail to
Greece and discipline the untamed Greeks? Where from and why in Greece there are tears and bereavement, and in
England and Europe vehemence, hurtful threats, calumnies and sarcasm against the whole nation?

Even the ‘ancient forefathers’ mourned for this loss and asked from Britain to show compassion.
See for example, Chadjískos, Speech, pp. 10-11.
644 G. Sheridan, ‘Pearse’s Sacrifice: Christ and Cuchulain crucified and risen in Easter Rising 1916,’

in Jim Obelkevich et.al. (eds), Disciplines of Faith. Studies in Religion, Politics and Patriarchy (London
and New York, 1987).

196
 The crucified Greece can also be turned into a philhellenic martyr. To offer
an example, a passage is quoted from a work by an anonymous Greek. The Greek
responds to British patronising behaviour by appropriating the shade of the pro-
Hellenic Byron, the commodity and soul of philhellenism, to chastise his fellow
Britons:

Oh, Great Briton, the lament on your unfairness echoes in the fifth sky. Hebrew of
the sea, who buys and sells nations as if they were flocks. You have many sins to
repent […] you behaved to your noblest poet Byron worse than the Hebrews
treated Jesus; because Byron’s love for Greece was strong. Is there something
good for humanity you did not fight against? 645

Byron, a signifier of philhellenism, takes the place of the nation in the crucifix.
His love for ‘Greece’ is so powerful that, like the Platonic ideas, attracts him and
makes him one with ‘Greece.’ Nevertheless, if we invert this process, it is the
Greek ‘nation’ that is identified with the philhellenic Byron. 646 The mutual
transference that takes place is informative: the Greek of the passage sees his love
for British philhellenes in them, and asks them to love his nation. If they do not,
they cannot be loved. The anglophilia of the anonymous Greek depends on
reciprocity.
Could the British be ‘loved’ by the Greeks? Gradually, in British culture the
battle of Navarino - the finest expression of European philhellenism – became
incorporated in an imperialist rhetoric whose role was to feed the Greek guilt-
mechanism every time Greece allegedly disturbed the peace of Europe. It is
intriguing that the Navarino episode was exhumed during the Dilessi Murders.
British journalists, trying to emotionally blackmail the Greek government,
concluded that Britain should regret her past philhellenic kindness. 647 The Greek
response was immediate and unanticipated: ‘Navarino ... justified many of our
activities in the East.’ 648
It is important for the reader to know that philhellenism was accommodated in
British imperial logic as a ‘debt’ that bankrupt Greek culture cannot pay. 649 But
Greek commentators appropriate it in other ways. Whenever the British Empire
was opposing Greek expansionism, the Greek commentator counter-blasted by
offering a reminder of the revenge history takes when the powerful attack the
weak. Note for example how the ex-anglophile commentator, Odysséas Iálemos,
attacks the Disraelian anti-Greek policy, when Bulgarian nationalism threatens
the Greek imperial dream:

No matter what form this European anomaly takes […] it does not have the right
to […] extend its hallucination to the space of modern Greek history. The stones
[Europe] tried to throw recently at this blood-covered place, in which rest the
bones of laureate men that contributed to human purification, in which the last five
decades brother souls rest together […][souls] that from the mist of the Western
sky to the clear horizon of our Mediterranean region […] managed to destroy the
grave of liberty and […] [with the Greek Revolution] to give the life of hope and
happiness to the consumed Lazarus of [Greece]. 650

645 P, Fantasy and Truth, p. 17.

646 Jebb, Lectures, 144.
647 The Times, 26 April 1870; The Daily Telegraph, 25 April 1870.
648Aión, 27 April 1870.
649 The Morning Post, 8 March 1869.
650 Article published in the Journal des Débats, 5/17 November 1876.

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It is intriguing that Iálemos addresses his message to ‘Europe’ when he examines
British policy. A collective interlocutor or observer, ‘Europe’, makes more sense
to the Greek reader than ‘Britain’ in particular. The biblical language of
resurrection that Iálemos uses is the vocabulary of nationalism, according to
Ernest Gellner. Resurrection marks off the end of the nation’s supposedly
dormant condition and presents it as a perennial entity in the sphere of history. 651
One must bear in mind that all Greek territorial claims are grounded on historical
heritage, which transforms expansionism into an inherited moral right. For
another commentator, ‘natural rights impose no law prohibiting a brother from
sympathising with his oppressed brethren.’ 652 This idea coexists with that of
naturalisation, which occupied some space in one of the previous chapters. One
could also examine it together with chapter IV of the previous part, which
investigated forms of cultural heritage. I will avoid an in-depth analysis of those
comments, because I am interested in more direct implications of ‘heritage’ in the
articulation of the ‘Great Idea.’
The second association of heritage and inheritance is beautifully demonstrated
by a speech by Aristotle Valaoritis, the Ionian scholar who stood as MP for
Leukas in 1867. The Cretan Revolution, which had brought the question of the
future of the Great Idea before the Greek National Assembly in the form of
discussion on the development of Greek land forces, inspired Valaoritis’s speech.
I quote at length:

Receive, at last, my Lords [he addresses himself to the Ministers] from that
tormented nation all the means, but… act. I am convinced that this is the only way
this Cabinet can gain the nation’s trust. Let us throw into the national fire and
reshape […] the sweat of our race, the blood of the nation, public wealth, hearts,
intellects, the ruins of Parthenon, the bones of our ancestors. […] Let us start
anew, as long as from this holocaust a new life is to be born; the future comes.
Yes, the future! Enough with the past! We lived for a long time with the dead,
gentlemen, and the lullaby of the monuments sunk us into deep sleep… See what
happens in Crete […]. Bloodthirsty hands want to […] cut the roots of the tree of
the reborn Hellenism…(Great sensation) 653

The quote, which loses much of its richness in this translation, presents a
different aspect of heritage-inheritance. Even though Valaoritis repudiates the
past, he opens wide its door through the re-working of Hellenic symbols, such as
the Parthenon. This is how philhellenism is incorporated in the Greek political
commentary: through the European Parthenon and the bones of the ‘ancestors’.
Valaoritis invites the cabinet and the ‘nation’ to put together the surviving
fragments of the past to create something new. For Valaoritis heritage is the
Greeks’ right to make the future from a past that was so much ‘loved’ by the
philhellenes.
Nevertheless philhellenism not only becomes, but is also seen as pure Greek
property-heritage. This is the third and last version of inheritance-heritage, which
manifests itself in a speech by the academic and great Greek Enlightenment
figure, Stéfanos Kumanúdis. For Kumanúdis the modern European lovers of

651 Gellner, Nationalism, pp. 5-9.

652 An Oriental Rayah, East and West, p. 24.
653 Palingenesía, 19 January 1867.

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Greek letters and arts are not true philhellenes, but admirers of Hellenic
civilisation. 654 Philhellenism proper is Greek heritage, because the first
philhellenes were the Greeks themselves.

From all those words similar to ‘Philhellene’ that were in use, only that of
Philathenian has the same meaning, because Athens was the benefactor of
humanity. […] It is another matter if some times the ancient Greeks abused, or
rather, overindulged in the truly world-widely beneficent action of philhellenism,
by naming some peoples ‘philhellenes’ even if they were not in fact.
Catachresis is a common practice and it would not be odd if the conceited
Athenians […] imagined that there were philhellenes everywhere […] Therefore,
modern philhellenism is only a survival of past practices… 655

Here Kumanúdis refers to the duty of the ancient Athenian allies to ‘invest’
money (pay tax to) the Athenian League. This ‘duty’ is intertwined with the
practice of modern Europeans to contribute to the Greek cause. Koumanoúdis
justified this ancient-modern practice on the grounds of an Athenian-Greek
civilising mission. For him heritage was handed down to the Neohellenes by the
ancient Athenians. It is a practice that was ‘in the blood’ of the Athenian Greeks;
the modern European nations were simply initiated in it.
These three Greek perceptions of heritage-inheritance are entwined with
Greek perceptions of the philhellenic doctrine of ‘love’. 656 But mutual ‘love’
works only when both sides want it; for, philia is, above all, to reciprocate. When
one of the sides withdraws or refuses to participate, the consequences are
calamitous. Refusal might invoke the wrath of the disillusioned party, but is
predicated on missing terms and preconditions in the ‘relationship.’ The British in
particular were very practical people: to support the Greek Great Idea of
expansion ‘by inexplicable dumb and show noise,’ to remember Finlay’s ironic
comment, 657 would mean to compromise their political and economic interests. 658
The Greeks themselves did not help to improve their position: their constant
incursions in Turkey served to strengthen British anxieties. Add to this the
unfulfilled philhellenic desire to see Greece ‘in the British or European image’ and
you have an explosive mixture; it is only a matter of time before you hear the
‘boom’.
When The Roving Englishman, an intelligent observer of the Greek affairs
wrote his account, he noted that the Christians in Turkey had suffered so many
wrongs, ‘that they began to have something of the pride of sorrow: they were not
averse to displaying their woes as a sort of marketable commodity: they had a
very good assortment, and they sold very well’. 659 The statement bears some
significance for the way the Greeks are considered to have behaved towards the
British philhellenes. A suspicion is also expressed in an editorial to The Times in
1867, that the Cretan Insurrection is sustained by a wider shadowy organisation
that will assail the Turkish government and force the Great Powers of Europe to

654 Palingenesía, 18 April 1866.

655 Palingenesía, 11 April, 1866.
656 Žižek, ‘The Object as a Limit of Discourse,’ 114.
657 The Times, 6 August 1864.
658 See for example, Bagdon, Brief Comparison, p. 48; Wyse, Impressions, pp. 8, 15; E. Strickland,

Greece: Its Conditions, Prospects and Resources, reprinted with additions from the London Review
(London, 1863), pp. 3-4, 6.
659 Roving Englishman, Turkey, 367.

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accept a territorial re-arrangement in the East. The journalist focuses on the
Cretan question and its Greek instigators in Greece, who

Remembering the history of Greek Independence, they rely on the repugnance

which the Christendom feels on hearing that a Christian people, seeking their
freedom, are perishing by the sword of the Turk. 660

The journalist is convinced that the Greek state tries to take advantage of
philhellenic Christian sentiments. In spite of their practical ‘spirit,’ many British
observers found hurtful Greek attempts at taking advantage of philhellenic
resources. More specifically, the question of the British philhellenic loans became
central in the aversion they expressed towards Greek behaviour. To show the
extent to which Greek attitudes offended some British politicians, I will narrate
an episode that took place in the autumn of 1868. In September of that year, the
Greek government voted a Bill for appropriating a million drachmas annually
towards payment of the interest on the loans of 1824-1825. By doing so, it used
the money British philhellenes contributed to bring the Greek Revolution to a
happy end on equality with the loan of the Protecting Powers to the Bavarian
dynasty. British disapproval of Othonian policy was well known in Greece. There
were rumours in the 1860s, when King Otho was dethroned, that the British had
an active involvement in the bloodless Greek constitutional ‘revolution’ that led
to the change of dynasty. Moreover, to use philhellenic money for any purpose
other than the holy resurrection of Hellas was deemed by the British government
to be so abusive, that they immediately instructed the British Minister at the
Court of Athens to deliver a note of protest, which compelled the Greeks to
withdraw the Bill. 661
Such reactions were the rule, rather than the exception. When in the
aftermath of the Dilessi Murders Sir Henry Bulwer (Lord Dalling) delivered a
speech, asking the Gladstone cabinet to restore Britain’s honour with an
occupation of Greece, the Greek politician Deliyannis sent him a letter in which
he asked him to apologize. Bulwer replied in the same tone that he employed in
his speech accusing the Greek government of dishonesty in its dealings with
Britain. The following quote shows where Bulwer’s bitterness originated:

I, myself, in early years, carried out and gave into the hands of those who, by
universal assent, then represented the Greek people the first instalment of a loan
confided to Greek honour, and without which it would have been impossible for
the Greek nation to maintain the struggle for its independence; and when I am told
that national independence has produced such great results for the national
resources, and know that not one farthing of the loan which so opportunely aided
the achievement of such independence has been paid, I can only, I am sorry to say,
feel confirmed in my conviction of the injustice and the incapacity of the
successive Administrations which have paid so little attention to so sacred an
obligation. 662

The quote’s rationale can be explained by Michael De Certeau’s analysis of the

behavioural patterns of belief. De Certeau argues that the idea of credit and credo
are implicated. Credo’s function could be included amongst economic obligations;

660 The Times, 8 April 1867.

661 The Times, 16 September 1868.
662 The Times, 30 June 1870. Emphasis mine.

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in credo there is a sequence linking a donation to remuneration. This means that
the one who credits abandons a present advantage in his/her relationship with the
debtor, because only thus is (s)he in a position to credit the receiver. Belief in the
‘honesty’ of the receiver fills up the gap left by the loan. To quote De Certaeu, the
believer ‘hollows out a void in himself relative to the time of the other, and, in the
interests he calculates, he creates a deficit whereby a future is introduced into the
present.’ 663 All we have to do is to see how credo in Greek honesty and payment of
the credit granted to the Greek nation fail to come to an agreement. The cause of
Bulwer’s disillusionment is that British investment in Greek credo bore no fruits in
the past; the Greek government’s inability to prevent the catastrophe at Dilessi
only justified his opinion.
We are also provided with the opportunity to elaborate on the interactive
dimension of this point. George Finlay repeated Bulwer’s argument in an article
to The Times over the same period. Because of that Gennadios claimed that Finlay
and all those who utter such calumnies are motivated by anti-philhellenic
sentiments.

Let them [the journalists and the politicians] tell us honestly – Our policy and
our interests in the East are such as to make it imperative for us to uphold Turkey
at all costs […] We do not wish a progressive people who would soon mark out
their own destiny and would break loose from our tutelage. We want a people who
are indolent and extravagant in their barbarous habits. We want them to take off
our hands all the Manchester goods and Birmingham ware for which we can find
no market elsewhere, at the price and on the conditions we see fit to impose. We
want them to contract periodically, and at usurious rates, loans, the major part of
which will remain in our hands, in return for material and moral support. We want
them to give employment to our dockyards and to our gun factories. […] We were
once feeble enough to allow ourselves to be carried away partly by the entreaties
of some really generous and noble men, and partly by a jealousy of other powers,
and to aid you in your endeavours for liberty; but we have since deplored the
event. 664

The MP for Ermionís, Milísis, repeated this argument in his speech in 1871 on
the compensation of Lloyd’s widow. 665 Milísis in particular reminded his audience
of the Greek debts, and that any compensation from the Greek state to a British
subject is not philanthropy, because it is imposed by Britain as a ‘debt’. 666
Evidently, for Gennadios and Milísis the British government directed accusations
against Greece, because they wanted to keep her in a subordinate position; the
loans they constantly invoke are a means to this end.
Of course, there are also different opinions . As early as 1864, the fear is
expressed that the British do not want to lend to Greece any more. When the
Ionian Islands were ceded to the Greek Kingdom, a Greek journalist
acknowledged the gratitude Greece must feel toward England. 667 ‘The one who
does not recognise his debts is called χρεωκόπος, a man with bad faith,

663 M. De Certeau, ‘What We Do When We Believe,’ in M. Blonsky (ed), On Signs: A Semiotic

Reader (Oxford, 1985), p. 193.
664 Gennadios, Notes, pp. 160, 172-173, emphasis added.
665 Edward Lloyd’s widow demanded compensation from the Greek government, which she

eventually received.
666 Milésis, Speech, p. 71.
667 Palingenesía, 25 April 1864.

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commercially speaking, untrustworthy’, 668 claimed another journalist of the same
newspaper. In such confessions, there are also references to the moral debt of the
Greek Revolution, which modern Greece has to pay back. Iálemos reflects on
that:

Let us not forget that England had good reasons to keep bad feelings for the Greek
nation because of Greece’s negligence to respond to the demands of the English
government; the Greek nation owes to the homeland of Byron and Canning, to that
great Island on which the first philhellenic organisations were born… 669

And yet, Greek habits did not change. Throughout this period, British travellers
notice an inclination the Greeks have to try to make converts to philhellenic
views. 670 ‘They are particularly prone to “try it on” with Englishmen, whose
influence on the affairs of Europe, they, as a commercial people, are disposed to
overrate,’ 671 says a British traveller. Attempts at proselytism tested the limits of
British patience. Knowledge that the Greeks were endeavouring to gain the ear of
Europe ‘by a constant repetition of boasts about themselves and their
achievements, addressed to men who are prepared by education to sympathise
with the name of Greece’ 672 began to annoy some Britons. ‘The Protecting
Powers are urged to employ the money of their subjects to deliver Crete, and
Philhellenes are invited to pour out their blood and die gloriously [so] that the
Greek Government may annex the island,’ stated Finlay. 673 British suspicion that
the Greeks were taking advantage of philhellenic sentiments in the Cretan venture
did not prevent Greek journalists from using the past as a means of exploitation.
In August 1866, the Athenian press invented a scenario of a battle in Crete, in
which unspeakable Turkish atrocities took place. ‘It would require an Epimenides,
one of themselves, even a prophet of their own, to separate the truth from the
falsehood’ exclaimed Finlay and proceeded to explain that,

This horrid massacre occurred in the year 1822, and a description of it, with an
engraving from a sketch of the grotto, will be found in Pashley’s Travels in
Crete. Greek writers, talkers, and politicians, not repudiating their character in St.
Paul’s Epistle to Titus, appear to consider the massacre of 1822 a means of
rousing the sympathy of Europe against the Sultan’s government as effectual in
1866 as they were in 1822. 674

To believe you are cheated is one thing; to act upon that is another thing. How
did British commentators retort to Greek challenge? It is important to examine
the backlash, because it presents us with the full accusation directed at Greek
offenders. I will therefore offer an example. In 1867, a year after the outbreak of
the Cretan Revolution, The Morning Post raged over Greek ‘imperialist greed.’ The
668 Palingenesía, 21 March 1864. The newspaper kept recording developments concerning the loans
of 1824-1825 (see for example the issue of 14 October 1878).
669 Iálemos, Rights and Duties, p. 51.
670 See for example an article addressed to ‘Britain’ and the British government in 1876 by

Palingenesía (3 December), in which Canning’s policy is invoked. See also Aión, 14 March 1866.
671 Farrer, Tour, p. 52. See also Campbell’s discussion with a Greek judge, ‘a very keen politician,’

who tries to convince him that England should provide help to the Greek cause (Campbell, Turks
and Greeks,
pp. 124-126).
672 Anonymous, Some Notes, p. 5.
673 The Times, 6 October 1866.
674 The Times, 20 October 1866.

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Navarino was cursed, once again, and the modern Greeks were confronted with
the following allegations:
Well, the harsh fact, since it must be written, is that for several centuries the
countries which were inhabited in ancient times by the Hellenic race have
produced no person whatever of more than average ability. The old excuse that
they were kept down by Turkey, and not allowed to educate themselves, is no
longer valid […] Day and night in newspaper and lecture-rooms, all day, and
every day, and everywhere, the sympathies and the subscription of the Christian
world are begged for. We are not modestly entreated for moderate aid and
countenance towards a people with a grievance. Our hearts, our arms, our money
are confidently and persistently demanded on a very different plea. We are told in
language so arrogant so as to be almost disdainful, that it is a scandal and a shame
for Europe to stand by and see a people to whom we owe alike the birth and
perfection of poetry and art, whose language was the only one through which the
Word of GOD itself, in the New Testament, could be transmitted to us, to be
down-trodden and outraged by savages and heathens. This is eloquent oration
compiled out of some of the finest speeches of Mr. CANNING and some of the
most beautiful poetry of Lord BYRON, to which we have been obliged by
tradition or politeness to listen ever since the great orator and the greater poet
suffered their brighter fancies to mislead them. […] It is well known to a very
large class of logical reasoners that the modern Greeks are not descendants of the
contemporaries of SOCRATES and HOMER […]. 675

One, looking at these accusations, wonders how it was possible for the Greeks to
ask for the aid of the Great Powers for the realisation of their Great Idea, when
their investors thought that the only Greek great idea ought to have been good
roads and competent administration. British investors in particular, had begun to
develop a bitter language, in which modern Greece was always found
administratively and morally deficient. Seen this way, the Greek ‘debtors’ had no
choice, but to pay the loan interest and be docile. Except if they could claim that
the British or even the European creditors had similar ‘debts’ to Greece, which
they had forgotten to clear.
The counter-argument had to be put forward in a persuasive way – for, what
kind of debt could the Neohellenes claim from the British? And yet, there was
something to be said. This passage by a Greek teacher articulates it eloquently.
Note that it is addressed to the ‘Europeans’ in general:

Despite her weakness [Greece] released herself from the heavy shackles, shattered
her tyrant, beat him in thousands of battles, gathered many tokens of victory and
managed with her heroic and noble polity to gain the love of the civilised world
and to transform the ex inimical towards her policy of the liberal Great Powers
into beneficent friends […] this new Israel, the black sheep of the European
family, which […] is […] weary due to its long and painful struggles for
regeneration, is now accepted in the Christian world’s arms and declared […]as
the filling-in of the gap which was left behind by the absence of its ancestor, this
glorious and civilised Hellenic antiquity. 676

The Morning Post, 11 November 1867. Emphasis added

675
676Anonymous, Turkey, p. 41; for another striking example one can read the Palingenesía of 5 April
1875, in which there is a speech delivered for the political society Koraís by the juror Aristídes
Oeconómu.

203
This is a shocking statement, which cannot be understood if one does not know
what the filling-in of the ancient gap meant for the Greek author of the quote: the
‘completion’ of the Great Idea, which British politics so stubbornly opposed. We
should not dismiss the fact that the commentator addresses his argument to the
‘European’ judges in general. However, even when the addressee was ‘Britain’,
history in the form of long-standing heritage would demand retribution on behalf
of the Greeks. It is history-heritage, the ultimate juror of nations, that returns in
the Notes of Gennadios to defend the Greeks towards Britain in particular. For
Gennadios, Greece, that ‘unfortunate land, that Prometheus of nations […] (who)
benefited so nobly all the peoples of Europe,’ can look ‘upon its ugly shores’ and
say to the British ‘nation’ without fear:

There is not one of you who may take up a stone and throw it at us. You began
from worse, you are thoroughly sickly and immoral now; it is only your rich attire
that hides your gaping wounds, and the vantage ground you occupy that lends
respectability to your hypocrisy. We, therefore, who are no worse, but whose sin is
poverty and weakness, will not despair, for, with the help of our God, we will
accomplish our great task. 677

This is the ‘symptom’ of British accusations: the modern Greeks are chosen by
God to perform the role of the civiliser once again. The ‘task’ Greece had to
accomplish, was the nodal point of the Greek ‘Great Idea’ dream, the Hellenic
civilising mission in the East. The strong influence of Herder’s teaching,
according to which every nation had its own, unique Geist and its special
mission, 678 had intruded into Neohellenic imagination that was so strongly
affected by German romanticism. 679 The main components of the Greek civilising
mission that were analysed before, religion, education and ancient Greek spirit
appear in one form or another entangled in Greek writings on the Great Idea.
But the archaeology of this rationale may point at abyssal waters.
Universalism in Byzantium was only another version of ancient Greek
cosmopolitanism, which wanted the Greek to be the πολίτης of the κόσμος, the
citizen of the world, since his culture was the culture of the (known) world. In
other words, if one wanted to be civilised, one had to speak Greek and live like a
Greek. Soon in the atmosphere of Byzantine humanism of the ninth century,
Greek language ceased to be as important as Greek Christian spirit. 680 Cyril’s
admission to the Slavonic tribes by Patriarch Photios in 861 was arranged for
their conversion to Christianity, but was deemed to be a civilising mission,
described by contemporary authors as ‘dissemination of the good word.’ This idea
of dissemination of the Greek Christian spirit 681 reappeared in nineteenth-century

677 Gennadios, Notes, p. 145. See also The Morning Post, 15 September 1866.
678 C. Bhatt, ‘Primordial Being: Enlightenment, Schopenhauer and the Indian Subject of
Postcolonial Theory,’ Radical Philosophy, 100 (March-April 2000): p. 30.
679K. Dimaras, Greek Romanticism (Athens, 1993), pp. 419-425
680 See, for example the review the Greek newspaper Μέριμνα published for Arístarchos’s work

(Bulgarian Question, IV, 154); also F.M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority Essays in Victorian
Intellectual Life (Cambridge, 1993), p. 10.
681 This should be seen in relation to Herderic teaching of language as well. To protect German

from French accents of contempt and Winkelmann’s Greek, Herder developed an interest in
other, until then scorned languages, raising thus the question of translatability of other cultures.
Herder’s anthropological enterprise was translation that is, the translatability of cultures. [T. De
Zengotita, ‘Speakers of Being: Romantic Refusion and Cultural Anthropology,’ in G.W. Jr.
Stocking, Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility, History of Anthropology, vol. 6

204
Greek sources and was initially addressed to Balkan peoples that the Greeks
wanted to incorporate in their new empire; not accidentally, all Balkan
transgressors, were called by the Greeks ‘unfaithful children’ who wanted to stab
their ‘mother’ in her back. This ‘mother’ was, as I explained in one of the
previous chapters, by no means imbued by nationalism: she was just helping her
‘children’ to grow up and become ‘good Greeks,’ that is, participate in Greek
culture. 682 Again, this practice was deeply embedded in classical education. To
invoke the famous ancient Greek saying of Isocrates ‘a Hellene is the one who
participates in Greek παιδεία (culture and education).’ Those who did not were
barbarians. 683
In the nineteenth-century Herderian context language was the form of the
nation’s Geist or spirit. According to that the Greek ‘nation’ had to speak one
language to be uniform. Unfortunately, Neohellenic society was fragmented: its
members were bilingual and trilingual, and the numerous dialects represented
local traditions that the Ottoman administrative system of millets and Greek
κοινότητες or communities preserved almost intact. This patchwork of local
experience was re-embroidered on the Greek Kingdom’s blank body. Within the
Greek Kingdom three different idioms had declared war on each other: the
καθαρεύουσα or purified Greek language (which became the Greek state’s
language), ancient Greek and the δημοτική or demotic. It must be stated that the
infallible criterion of Greek nationhood was for the Greek state national
consciousness and that language was more a concern of the educated elites. And
yet some nineteenth-century commentators claimed that the ancient Greek
language could be seen as the vehicle of the ‘new Israel’s’ spirit. This is what the
Anonymous Greek of Diaspora states:

There is no other language in this world to convey the beautiful truths of the bible,
of art and science, with such accuracy, as the Greek one. And the logos is in the
flesh and the Logos of God is engraved on the soul through hearing and sight
etc…, and Christian doctrine cannot exist, Christian society cannot exist without
the contribution of Greek.[…] This was perceived by the wisest German scholar
Schwarzerd. This great theologian hellenised his name because of his love for the
Greek language. This was understood by most of the missionaries of Europe and
America nowadays. Wherever they go, either to the savage Papua or […]to the
dry-hearted Chinese, before they go they will have to study the bible in Greek. 684

The ancient Greek language is that the ‘Byzantine Greeks’ preserved and
disseminated to the Western world – the contribution of Byzantium to European
civilisation. This is argued in the following article on Byzantine Renaissance in the
West:

(Wisconsin and London 1989), 86-89]. This is how nineteenth-century Greeks saw the admission
of Cyril and the translation of the bible into Slavonic languages.
682 Asklipiádis, Changes, pp. 9, 13.
683 Much work was done on this subject by Vasiliki Papoulia, Emeritus Professor of Balkan

History at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. For the speeches addressed to Phillip the
Macedon by Isocrates see Ioannis Kalleris, The Question of Origin of the Macedonians (date and place
missing), pp. 143-146. For cosmopolitanism and the admission of Cyril and Methodius to the
Slavonic tribes see Papoulia, The Work of Cyril and Methodius as an Expression of Christian Humanism,
(date and place missing), pp. 49-53.
684 P, Fantasy and Truth, p. 6.

205
 With this regeneration the Greek race recovered its ancient and real centre and
simultaneously established its colonies in the best commercial centres of Europe
and Asia, opened to scientific research the theatre of Greek civilisation and
participated in important European developments. However, what interests not
only the nation but also humanity in general, is that this regeneration offers the
world a tool, which civilisation inevitably needs, that is, the dialect [sic.] that
possesses all qualities and meets all the conditions to become the universal
language […]. This is the language of Homer and Hesiod, Herodotus and
Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle, Hippocrates and Theophrastus […] The Logos of
the Bible, of Saint Paul and the Fathers of the Church […] the language of letters,
theology and legal codes of Byzantine era. 685

The terms Logos and logos have to be clarified, because they are also implicit in the
second passage and in the support of ancient Greek as an Esperanto. In
Aristotelian Greek vocabulary, λόγος is reason articulated in the act of speaking. 686
In Christian Orthodox vocabulary, Λόγος with capital lamda is God, the demiurge
or creator of the world. Despite its Aristotelian pretensions, the passage is also
profoundly Platonic in that it identifies the Greek logos with the sacred Logos, as if
the first was reflection (the Platonic είδωλον or εικόνα) of its Idea (Ιδέα). We saw a
similar identification at the beginning of the chapter with regards to the crucified
Byron, the ‘Idea’ of philhellenism. Neohellenic thought bore the stamp of
Aristotelianism, because the idea of a Greek civilising mission alluded to a teleology
that underscored Aristotle’s metaphysics. Like all ‘things,’ the Greek nation
carried within it a telos, a purpose and an end, which was its very essence (the
Aristotelian ουσία) that justified its existence. 687 It was this unexpected meeting of
Herderic mission and Aristotle’s teleology that triggered Greek hegemonic thought.
For Herder, only community language had made men human – a conviction we
find in Aristotle’s notion of human as ζώον πολιτικόν (political animal, social being).
Herder’s argument was that each community had its own language and every
language was the manifestation of unique values and ideas. From this argument
derived that every community was unique, hence, there was no measure for
comparison among communities. 688 That cultural incompatibility was destined to
become a highly influential element in the way Greek identity was presented to
Britain and other European imaginary observers. 689
Platonism and its Christian counterpart, Neoplatonism, also deserve a word
here. In Platonist thought there was a rigid segregation of the world into Ideas,
the absolute and unchangeable entities, and reflections, their idols. There was only
one mediator between the two levels of being and thinking, called human psyche.
Psyche lived among idols, but she herself was not an idol; her essence was similar
to that of the Ideas. Her temporary entrapment into the world of reflections had
one purpose: it was through them that she would begin to remember the Ideas
they represented; hence, for Plato, psyche’s knowledge is inherent. The attraction
(Έρως) the psyche feels for her alike, the Ideas, through reflections recalls
memories (αναμνήσεις); and through anamnesis she manages to join her long
forgotten alike. 690 In the Neoplatonist Christian context, psyche’s enforced stay into

685 Clió, 31/12 August 1864.

686 Aristotle, Politics, Book A, ch. II (Oxford, 1946).
687 See Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book B, ch. 8, 198b-199b (Oxford, 1924).
688 But note also Todorova’s comment (Balkans, p. 129).
689 See for example the speech of Gregorios Byzantios, The Hellenic Spirit, pp. 14-17.
690 The existence of two different levels of being and thinking was inscribed in the humanist

anthropocentric vocabulary. For the notion of ‘human,’ ‘man,’ there are two words: the one is

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the earthly world was explained on the basis of the original sin. 691 Interestingly,
the post-Byzantine narrative 692 for the empire’s fall was explained on the basis of
the sinful iconoclastic conflict, which began from a heated debate on idols and
God’s representation. 693 The narrative survived throughout the centuries of
Turkish rule and was handed down to the Neohellenes. To complete the picture
of the modern Greek mind, it has to be added that the Greeks under the
Ottoman ‘yoke’ believed that they were God’s elected. Ioannis Chasiotis and
Nikolaos Politis stressed the consoling role of the legend of ‘the chosen’ in Greek
psychology during the period of Ottoman rule. 694 They argued that to imagine
themselves as God’s elected was for the Greeks the only way to escape from the
harsh reality of everyday life, in which Constantinople was Istanbul, Byzantium
Ottoman provinces, the Greeks rayahs, and the last Emperor Constantine a
distant memory of tragic resistance to the inevitable. 695
To historicize the nineteenth-century narrative in which the Greeks were
presented as the new ‘chosen people,’ it is suggested that we see it in this context.
For, what the modern Greeks seemed to believe was that they were the new
mediators between earth and heaven (see schema 3). But we have to clarify that
in the Neohellenic symbolic domain the Greek nation was never chosen by God;
it was the philhellenes who had chosen it to perform a civilising mission
retroactively. Thus, in the Neohellenic mind, the British who did not want to
contribute to this mission, were not philhellenes, but mishellenes, Greek-haters.
They were, as we saw in passages above, like the old Hebrews, traitors and sinners
against humanity. Such a reception of Jewishness reveals a logical inconsistency:
whereas the English-Jew was seen as a blasphemer — the alter ego of the Greek, to
follow Jean-Paul Sartre — the Greek-chosen was deemed to be the vehicle of
God’s will on earth, the absolute Autre.
The two-folded notion of the chosen is often attached to the contradictory
image of Jewishness. See for example what the Greek analyst of Fantasy and Truth
says about British bulgarophilia:

Hellenism could be shattered and but not deceived, because it has many advocates
both in the earth and in the sky. Briton, if you do not repent and espouse for
Greece the politics of Byron Divine Retribution will shatter you. Do you not see

άνθρωπος (from άνω=up and θρώσκω=stare at), which denotes the being that aspires to reach the
upper level of ‘truth,’ and the other is βροτός (βιβρώσκομαι=being consumed, perish), which
denotes the perishable, malleable side of human nature.
691 This shift from Platonism and Neoplatonism was what escaped analysis in many good works

on modern Greek culture. I refer for example to Jenkin’s work (Dilessi, p. 117), in which the
implications of the Neoplatonism for modern Greek thought are not discussed.
692 Mango elaborated on the Byzantine Neoplatonic narrative. Mango argued that the Byzantines

believed that the political hierarchy of their empire was a replica of the hierarchy in heaven, with
an emperor like a godly ruler and his court resembling the numerous saints the angels; or,
inversely, God resembling the Byzantine emperor, and the angels the Byzantine officials [C.
Mango, Byzantium. The Empire of the New Rome (London, 1998), pp. 151-155].
693 Iconoclasm and iconomachy, was the infamous mid-Byzantine rivalry on the way Christian icons

should be used in practices of worship: should the believers worship the image of God or God
himself? This debate led to bloodshed in Byzantium, because the empire was divided into
iconomachs or icon-defenders, and iconoclasts, or icon-destroyers.
694 I. Chasiótis ‘The European Powers and the Question of Greek Independence from the Mid-

Fifteenth to the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century,’ in Greece: History and Culture, vol. V
(Thessaloniki, 1981),
pp. 63-65. See also Herzfeld, Anthropology, p. 37.
695 The idea of slave morality as a morality of the slaves is applicable here. See F. Nietzsche, On

the Genealogy of Morals (Oxford, 1996), pp. 4-5, 111.

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 what happened to the Jewish Tyre? Where is the seafaring Venice? Where is she?
Like her you will become a province of a state smaller and more insignificant that
you are. America will beat you. China and Russia will divide your Indies! 696

Putting aside the fact that Tyre was Phoenician and not Jewish, three
characteristics I examined appear in the quote: the two faces of Jewishness, God’s
punishment inflicted upon the transgressors, and Byron’s omnipresence.
To understand this inconsistent language, one has to put under the
microscope the idea of the Greek nation as God’s elected. Texts reveal that for
the nineteenth-century Greeks there were only two chosen people on earth. The
first was the Jews, who were once chosen by God to carry out a religious mission,
but betrayed Him and lost His protection. The second people was the Greeks,
not only as representatives of the only ‘true religion’, but also as that which was
destined to become the intellectual beacon of humanity. The Greeks had already
‘suffered’ as much as the Jews, because of the sinful iconoclastic rivalry and
because they were abandoned by the ‘West’ to the hands of the infidel Muslims in
1453 and saw all their scholars migrate to Italy. Thus, the four centuries of
Ottoman rule gained a special place in the Greek symbolic as signifiers of (a)
atonement of the Greeks for their sins so that God would restore them to their
supremacy (b) repentance by the West of the indifference she had shown during
Constantinople’s siege. Consequently, the Greek nation became a new Jesus,
sacrificed in order to wash away someone else’s sins, and the Greek Revolution
the new resurrection, which would allow the new chosen to fulfil its mission on
earth:

God, after having ordered the creation of the world, being kind-hearted, he
crowned his creation with the man and thus he introduced the great drama called
humanity, to which he gave two assistants. Two peoples were predestined to
emerge and help the man escape from dimness and become the real lord of this
world. The first one, after having gone through the tortures of prejudice and
barbarity, had to preserve for the man the pole-star of his energy, the faith of
humanity to the only true God. The second one, being the faithful guardian of the
Great Idea, was going to prepare everything, disseminate the light (of knowledge)
so as to help disoriented humanity to break away from unawareness. […] The
first, faithful disciple of Sabaoth, is Israel, the second was named Hellene,
Hellenism. 697

The British are represented as the old and the Greeks as the new chosen. The old
chosen’s image in the face of the British becomes a serious obstacle in the
regeneration of the East through the new chosen, the Greeks. This is where we
can detect the appropriation of ‘debt’ in Greek culture: the British, as Westerners,
bear the stigma of the sinner, because their ancestors did not help Constantinople
to survive the siege in 1453. 698 The importance of the role of Byzantine culture in
civilisation is the response to philhellenic accusations of Neohellenic bankruptcy.

When the prosperous populations of Europe that the Muslim peril never reached
[…] were developing their moral and material power and had plenty of time to

696 P., Fantasy and Truth, p. 18.

697 A. Pekios, A Spiritual View of Greece under the Turkish Rule, that is, a Sketch of the Intellectual condition
of the Greek race under the Ottoman Yoke (Constantinople, 1880), pp. 18-19. See esp. pp. 18-44, in
which he explores the idea of Greek mission.
698 Palingenesía, 9 and 31 March 1878.

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 study the lessons of our own ancestors to construct their own legislature and their
own literature; when these populations had as a starting point of their regeneration
and as an impulse for their technological advance the emigration of all the Greek
[Byzantine] scholars [to the West], […] the Ottomans who conquered the
Byzantine empire found the Greeks residing only in Thessaly and Epirus. From
these provinces all the regenerators of and the creators of Europe had exiled
themselves to Europe. There was concentrated the whole medieval civilisation of
the East, which for ten centuries was the only representative civilisation of the
living and acting humanity. Eastern civilisation, despite its many drawbacks –
which could be explained because of the total absence of any competition with
other more or equally developed civilisations – had managed to combine in a
splendid material and intellectual superiority ancient Greek life-style and
sublimity and power emanating from the new religion of Jerusalem. 699

Undoubtedly, we deal with a diachronic system of values, idées fixes, which pre-
existed the establishment of any Anglo-Greek contacts. The way they were re-
inscribed on the palimpsest of Anglo-Greek violence becomes even clearer in the
response a Greek Clió journalist gives to the author of a British article on the
Eastern Question. For the English author of the article Greek ‘policy of
revolution and plundering’ that disgraces Britain should be attributed to
influences from the Turkish and the Byzantine periods. The Clió journalist retorts:

When [did the name of the Greek become the object of European derisive
laughter] Mr. Journalist? Perhaps, when after the conquest of Constantinople, the
Greeks spread Greek letters and Byzantine civilisation to the uneducated peoples
of Europe? 700

The investigation of the process by which this narrative of the chosen re-emerged
is useful only in so far as it shed light on its history. 701 But the reasons of its re-
emergence are still obscure. What was the logic of Greek behaviour? To put it
bluntly, why did the Greeks defy the risk of losing their British and other
European investors when they needed them? Why what the British observers
identified as ‘deceit’ continued to be performed by Greeks? I will proceed to
explain that this ‘uncanny’ behaviour had a very simple rationale; and that this
rationale was predicated upon Greek self-perceptions as ‘the chosen’.
My transition here from history to metaphysics and then back may offend
historians, but it is necessary. It is not just that I want to speculate on an amazing
isomorphism between nineteenth-century Greek thought and post-structuralist
metaphysics. It is more that I have to elucidate a nineteenth-century Greek
reasoning process that was constitutive of the imagery of the Greek new chosen
people. This can only be done if we consider for a while the ethical extensions of
the idea of the chosen and how these are intertwined with the political and the
religious connotations of the concept. Inevitably, this introduces in my analysis
the question of metaphysics.
The idea of the chosen has exerted a great fascination over cultural theorists
and philosophers of alterity. 702 I would like to move a step forward, speculating

699 Article by Iálemos in Journal des Débats, 5/17 November 1876. The same narrative in Oriental
Rayah, East and West, pp. 18-20; Pekios, Spiritual View, 16-17; Anonymous, East and West (1866), p.
4; Palingenesía, 15 July 1867.
700 Clió, 1/13 June 1868.
701 Kearney, Dialogues, p. 20.
702 A neologism, alterity means in philosophical terminology, radical otherness.

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upon post-modern thinkers’ anxiety to find ways to talk about the otherness of
the Other without reducing it to a version of the Same. Emmanuel Levinas,
among other theorists of the post-war intellectual tradition, has suggested that
alterity presupposes the establishment of an ethical relationship between the
subject and the other, which comes before knowledge. Levinassian alterity
exposes the subject’s limits to the Other; it opens the subject to the Other. 703 The
Other himself/herself, remains in the darkness, whereas the subject exposes
herself. The idea that the (Greek) Other should not reveal its Face to the
subject/observer (the British or European observer, in our case) is interesting and
instructive. If we are to take seriously Levinassian reflections on the metaphor of
illumination, 704 the British but also Greek need to see in the Neohellenes the
‘torch-bearers of humanity’ and the ‘light of the East’ has a crucial role in Greek
alterity: when the ‘torch-bearer’ directs the ‘light’ towards you, you become blind.
But (s)he can see everything.
Levinassian Otherness is identified with God, whose essence cannot be
revealed to the believer, because faith is based on believing without questioning.
But as it was recently argued, why does the otherness of the Other have to be
good? Moreover, does not believing without questioning do a great disservice to
relationships? Is it not that everybody is an ‘other’ for someone else? 705 Is not
presenting oneself as an ‘other’ a clever strategy to avoid questioning and critique?
I believe that to reach the very core of the Greek logic, one has to see the idea of
the chosen as a symbolic, if not strategic action. The conception of the chosen is
the narrative of philhellenism on ancient Greece’s cultural uniqueness,
internalised and transformed into modern Greek radical difference. Such an
alterity could present those who opposed Greek imperialism as sinners against
humanity’s good; for, if the Greeks were God’s chosen, their choices and their
plans were also part of the ineffable and should remain unchallenged. Ultimately,
Greek counter-conspiracy with heaven allowed the Greeks to restructure themselves as a
form of ‘Othering’ in their relationship with Britain, a performative action, with a
strong pedagogical element in it: a civilising mission.
When Ioánnis Pantazídis, Professor in the School of Philosophy at Athens,
delivered a speech in 1876 on Hellas’ ‘national mission’ that should be rendered
‘historically necessary’ 706 he echoed British academia’s belief in ancient Greece’s
contribution to the making of European civilisation. 707 When, however, the
703 On the notion of alterity see Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: an Essay on Exteriority
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). Levinas’ alterity has four significant characteristics:
(1) It is a form of externality. It is what surprises the subject, because it is out of he subject’s
experience.
(2) It is an excess, something that exposes the limits of the subject.
(3) It is an infinity, it exists beyond the subject’s will.
(4) It is an activity. It introduces actions and approaches that demand a response from the subject,
which, however, remains passive.
For a different analysis see J. Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on Exteriority,’ in
Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (London, 1997), p. 112.
704 Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 91-92.
705 See M. Yar, ‘Community and Recognition,’ unpublished PhD Thesis (Department of

Sociology, University of Lancaster, September 1999), esp. chapter VI ‘Community contra

Deconstruction: Ontology, Metaphysics, and “the social.”’
706 I. Pantazídis, Entrance Speech Delivered on 27 February 1876 (Athens, 1876), pp. 26-27.
707 The liminality of the nation, this spit between a pedagogical mission and performativity is

Homi Bhabha’s contribution to cultural theory. See Location of Culture. Note that almost two years
ago, when the Greek state was shaken by anti-war demonstrations and sent material aid to the
Serbian Orthodox ‘brothers’, the Greek government reminded Europe of Greece’s ‘pacifying and
humanitarian role’ in the region. It would have been naïve to consider this statement pure political

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historian and pedagogue Dimítris Ainián suggested that the new Byzantium
should ‘become the centre of all political meetings and …[Constantinople] the
holy and inviolable base’ 708 of Europe he was, in effect, giving voice to the more
mundane aspect of the Great Idea that Greek and British commentators shared.
The Greek Kingdom’s defenders knew that national fulfilment was impossible
without the Great Powers’ consent. Unfortunately, by presenting themselves as
the chosen who should be preserved in mystery, they fell into the trap of cutting-
off the lines of communication between themselves and the British Empire or
even with Europe in general: a dialogue is impossible with someone marked out
by divine exteriority.
The ‘inexplicable’ nature of Greek thought was discussed very little in British
politics. The two major Anglo-Saxon analysts of the Greek hegemonic project,
Tuckerman and Finlay, were occasionally confused by Greek statements and
preferred to discuss more down-to-earth aspects of Greek irredentism.
Tuckerman was quicker in his speculations than Finlay and a passage in his essay
on the Great Idea brought him very close to the cause of Greek arrogance:

The tendency of the modern Greek mind to conserve and propagate Hellenic ideas,
makes the people never forgetful of those salient points in ancient history, which
indicate the character and originality of the race whom they delight to designate as
their “forefathers”. Whenever, therefore, any opportunity presents itself for
embodying these ideas in visible form, it is eagerly seized upon, not only to prove
to the world that the people of to-day are the legitimate descendants of
Themistocles and Pericles, but because there is in the modern Greek, a natural or
acquired taste for many of those occupations and amusements which were
engrossing pursuits in the best epochs of ancient Greece. 709

Tuckerman is also enticed to explore the Greek ‘Great Idea’ in relation to

colonialism. This is interesting in itself, because Greek irredentism is translated
into an imperial project.

Other nations have Great Ideas, and rather pride themselves upon the fact.
England, the chief adviser of Greece, had an Idea of commercial supremacy; and
by force of her maritime position, strong armies, and the cold-compelled industry
of her dense population, has been pretty successful in giving it practical

rhetoric with no actual recipient. Nowadays, many Greek University students delve into the work
of John Karayannopoulos, who explored the ‘safeguarding role’ of Byzantine Hellenism. In one of
his books, in which Byzantium is presented as the educator of the West, we come upon the same
narrative on a cultural debt the ‘foreigners’ never paid back:

The safeguarding role of Byzantium was invaluable. Even those who contested the
Byzantine contribution to the shaping of Western European civilisation in the past,
agreed on one thing: that the empire worked as a fortress (of Christianity).
…Because, as an English historian [Steven Runciman] correctly argued, if Islam had
used the Balkans as a military base, it could have invaded Central Europe earlier than
the Turks. Moreover, without Byzantium, the Arabs of Africa could have reached and
devastated the coastal part of Italy…

[John Karayannopoulos, The Byzantine State (Thessaloniki, 1993; new edition), p. 469].
708 Ainián, Eastern Question, pp. 19-20.
709 Tuckerman, Greeks of To-day (1872), p. 167.

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 illustration…French, Italian and Russian examples follow, not to mention the
American one. 710

George Finlay’s conclusion in the History of the Greek Revolution is not dissimilar.
For Finlay, the Greek War of Independence had succeeded in many points, but
failed in its most important aim: the establishment of a Greater Greece. ‘To be
sure, not even a Themistocles would have been able to build a big state from such
a small society. And yet, things were not that difficult. [The Greeks] should have
followed the United States example and the British colonial empire model.’ 711
Finlay continued to chastise the Greek elite for not having used the promising
potential of their nation represented by the rural communities.
Abroad, the Greeks are represented by the Byzantine caste, but the future prospect
of the nation politically depends on the progress of the rural population. This fixed
population bore the brunt of the war that made Greece an independent State, while
the nomadic Byzantine element was making money and setting employment at
Constantinople and Odessa, or cowering under the shield of England in the Ionian
Islands. The educated and official classes fall into the Byzantine caste, which
possesses a whole circle of fixed ideas that inspires it with the hope of becoming
dominant in the East by the revival of the Byzantine Empire. The presumption
nursing this great idea is the cause of the dislike of the Greeks, which is daily
growing stronger, among the Bulgarians, Roumans, and Sclavonians. To rule and
to get possession of the supremacy now held by the Turks in the Ottoman Empire
are the great objects of their exertions and their schemes. 712

Finlay described the Great Idea as a Gramscian process of hegemony which was
taking place outside the Greek Kingdom. For him the ‘nomadic Byzantine
element’ worked as a pest on Greek progress. He had also missed the importance
of Byzantine religious tradition for the Greek irredentist plan.
The quotes with which this part of the thesis opened were not chosen
randomly. And at last, we are in a position to explain what the ‘condemnation’ of
Navarino meant for the anonymous Greek of one of these quotes. Michael
Herzfeld notes that for the philhellenes Greek self-interest was the ‘very hallmark
of their otherness’, a characteristic that came in a striking contrast to the patriotic
self-sacrifice of the philhellenes. However, Greek self-interestedness originated in
European accusations of uncivilised behaviour. ‘The very ideology that
condemned [the Greeks] for their un-European behaviour create[d] the
conditions under which they [were] most likely to go on exhibiting it’. 713 To be
precise, although the British are the focus of this study, this Greek performance I
analysed was not directed only to the British. Even when they addressed
themselves to Britain, the Greek commentators’ actual recipient was ‘Europe’.
The consequences of this performance were frustrating and the result rather
poignant. It was not a coincidence that the Greeks used a religious vocabulary to
assert their ‘otherness’. It was not just that this recourse to metaphysics would
assert their uniqueness; it was mainly that this godly uniqueness had to be
respected by Cristian Europe. We have to remember De Certeau’s distinction
between religious and secular trust/belief to understand what happened. De
Certeau was right to point out that the Mediterranean believed object was cut-off

710 Ibid., 126.

711 Finlay, History, vol. II, p. 356.
712 The Times, 15 May 1869.
713 Herzfeld, Anthropology, p. 161.

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from the action that posited it, becoming thus the other of knowledge (faith). In
contrast, the Anglo-Saxon tradition is closely ‘linked to the philosophical rigour of
individualism. 714 Individualism ‘distinguishes the act from its object’, and as a
consequence belief appears as ‘the positive formality of an act of uttering related to
a (willing) to do of the subject and to a contract [action] entered into between the
social and/or symbolic partners.’ 715 Putting aside the British capitalist’s demand to
receive back his money (an aspect, which is entwined with the notion of belief-
debt) the philhellenic British observers wanted to see action from the Greeks;
action (for the improvement of the Kingdom’s socio-economic condition) other
than irredentism was the only way the Greeks could express their appreciation of
Navarino. The Greeks expected that the British would be faithful believers; when
they found out that they were not, they tried to make them believe, by presenting
themselves as the other of knowledge. This constant misfire was a constitutive element
of the Anglo-Greek symbolic order and indeed of the relationship between
Greece and Europe. If there was something one should deplore in this story, it
was that both sides wasted time with their hands in their empty ‘pockets’. Their
readiness to pay back their ‘debts’ was dishonest, since they would always refrain
and wait for the ‘other’ side to pull out the treasures of gratitude.

God’s Heavenly God’s Heavenly

Ideas Kingdom Kingdom

Psyche Emperor/Court Greeks, the Chosen

Reflections The people(s) of Humanity:

the empire philhellenes vs.
mishellenes

SCHEMA 3

714 Ian Chambers made a connection between individualism, empiricism and imperialism in his
essay ‘Narratives of Nationalism, Being British,’ in J. Carter et.al. (eds), Space and Place Theories of
Identity and Location, (London, 1993).
715 De Certeau, ‘What We Do,’ p. 198.

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 vi. Haunted by enemies, II: Conspiracy Theory,
Greek Constitutionalism and the Russian Threat
The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the role of conspiracy theory and
fantastic enemies in Greek and British political commentary. Although priority is
given to narratives that had a function in Anglo-Greek relations, the Greek side
remains the main focus of the chapter, because thus the analysis complements
that of the previous chapter. More specifically, the main questions I try to answer
here are how Britain is used in such narratives, when British governments are
considered important anti-Greek agents and when the image of Britain gives way
to that of a collective, European ‘conspirator’ against Greece. As will become
evident later, British presence in Greek narration is symptomatic of other
processes of nation building and self-definition. To support this hypothesis I
draw also on Greek and British commentary on episodes in which Britain does
not participate. Initially, to understand the function of these narratives I used, as
in the first part of the thesis (Ch. I.iv), Etienne Balibar’s analysis. But because the
British government or any foreign ‘conspirator’ against the Greek nation is an
external, real and European rather than Oriental enemy, Balibar’s thesis was not
sufficient to interpret the nuances I encountered in the primary sources. Another
aspect of the same problématique is how the question of trust and deception
between Greece and Britain figured in British and Greek accounts.
Contrariwise, the few British narratives I examine towards the end of the
chapter are concerned not with British domestic politics but with the Eastern
Question and Russia’s role in Greek politics. My research on this aspect of Anglo-
Greek relations provides some insight in the ways British commentators
restructured Greece’s involvement in the Anglo-Russian contest in Eastern
affairs.

Greek enemies: the debate on constitutionalism, national fulfilment and patriotism

Clió’s translations of British articles are accompanied by sharp comments that
give the impression that we are watching an argument taking place. One such
episode happened in the summer of 1867, when Clió published, undated, an
article from The Times. In this article it was argued that Greece owed a debt to
Britain for her generosity in giving back to Greece the Ionian Islands. Clió
responded furiously to this suggestion: ‘Tell us, Mr. Journalist, what Greek lack of
appreciation consists of? Is it not enough for you that Greece was ridiculed on
the election of Alfred?’ 716 It is strange that British rejection of Prince Alfred’s
election to become the King of the Hellenes was seen as an attempt by the British
government to ridicule the Greeks. But these comments were the rule rather than
the exception in Greek reflections. Take for example the following passage from

716 Clió, 23/5 July 1867. See also Xenos, East and West, p. 1. Prince Alfred was the second son of

Queen Victoria of Great Britain. In the late 1850s, when Britain considered the session of the
Ionian Islands to Greece, a group of Ionian anglophiles suggested the foundation of an Ionian state,
which would include the Ionian Islands, Epirus and Thessaly, and which would be ruled by Prince
Alfred. The plan appealed to British anxiety that Russia would establish a system of control in the
Eastern Mediterranean region: the foundation of an Ionian Federation would cancel such Russian
plans. However, it did not escape the British government that the plan itself was also a new
version of the Great Idea. On that ground the proposal was rejected. Later, when King Otho was
dethroned, some Greeks also suggested that Alfred become King of Greece – a plan that was
rejected by Britain, because Alfred belonged to the royal house of one of the Protecting Powers of
Greece (Moschonas, ‘The Greek State,’ pp. 216, 222).

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Palingenesía, written just before the first election of Ionian plenipotentiaries for
the Greek National Assembly:

These elections have to be carried out in the Ionian Islands with calmness and
order, with prudence and thoughtfulness so that the enemies of Greece will not
speak or write from inspiration. And we feel no particular need to examine what
the mishellenes [the haters of the Neohellenes] will say about Greece. The same
principle applies to those who mourn because of the unification of Eptanisos [the
Ionian Islands] with Greece. If it is up to us to keep the mouth of our enemies shut
we should simply do it. 717

It would have been easy to identify the ‘enemies’ alluded in the passage with the
Turks, had it not been that the journalist referred to British reactions to the
cession of the Ionian Islands to Greece. This is a hidden reference to Henry
Austen Layard, who constantly criticised Greece for its shortcomings during King
Otho’s reign and in the early 1860s, when he was under Secretary for Foreign
Affairs.
The fear of an attack on, or maltreatment of, the Greek ‘nation’ was an
integral – though symptomatic - part of the ‘constitutional debate,’ which
strengthened the lines of division between those Greeks who supported British
intervention and help, and those who opposed it. In the Dilessi crisis the Greek
government’s refusal to grant an amnesty to the Arvanitákis band was
transformed into a question concerning the importance of constitutional
principles in the Greek Kingdom and their abuse by political factions. Koronéos’s
reflections on this issue were provocative. Koronéos blamed England for
Greece’s misery and degradation, because British governments interfered in
Greek politics and did not let Greece ‘grow.’ 718 The Greek Kingdom was for
Koronéos a puppet which would always have to follow British instructions, and
which would never have the chance to realise its national programme. With his
analysis, Koronéos questioned the function of the constitution and Greek
sovereignty. Naturally, there was no Greek newspaper that did not take a position
on his article.
Inspired by Koronéos, Iméra (Day) and Paratiritís (Observer), two Greek-
language newspapers of Trieste, 719 suggested that British interference could
improve Greek political life. Iméra did not hesitate to advertise it in the article
‘Greece or Constitution?’ in which British suggestions for temporary suspension
of the Greek constitution were presented as the only choice left for the
‘regeneration’ of Greece after the Dilessi Murders. The bitter impressions
generated by Imera’s article were expressed in a mass meeting in Omónoia Square.
In this meeting, after some passionate speeches against the ‘traitors’, the mob
burned issues of Iméra at the stake. The Athenian press condemned the riot, but
the article itself opened Pandora’s box: not out of curiosity, but without
consideration of the consequences, the press stoked this debate further. Nobody
considered Imera’s suggestion a political manoeuvre for the benefit of the country.
What was read between the lines of Iméra’s diatribe was that traitors wanted to
deprive the ‘nation’ of its political freedom and its national independence, by

717 Palingenesía, 25 April 1864.

718 Koronéos, Addressed, p. 19; see also pp. 11-13.
719 Trieste was a commercial centre with a Greek community. For more information about its

significance for the Greek press network consult the relevant part of introduction which deals
with source analysis.

215
furthering foreign plans. 720 Significantly, the same constitutional change was
proposed by Greece’s protectors only a year before the Dilessi episode, at a time
when the Greeks had to withdraw their forces from Crete and comply with the
terms of the Paris Conference. In this context, Iméra’s imprudence appeared as
simply an extension of the plans in London for an organised ‘assault against
Greek freedom’. 721 For others, the belief that a telegram had been sent to Vienna
a day before the publication of the Iméra issue inspired new suspicions about an
Austrian conspiracy against the political freedom of Hellenism. 722 Calls for
‘national concord’ 723 were again in the background:

Those who want the retention of the constitution, those who understand the
meaning of national independence, the benefits of freedom, should wake up from
the deep sleep of partiality […] the perpetuation of the present situation will end
up with authoritarianism and perhaps with a foreign intervention. 724

The danger the journalists —and indeed the Athenian mob — identified in this
episode is one of the complex aspects of Greek nationalism that has to be
analysed. For this purpose it is helpful recall Mary Douglas’s anthropological
research on four prime types of pollution: ‘The first is danger pressing on external
boundaries; the second, danger from transgressing the internal lines of the system;
the third, danger in the margins of the lines. The fourth is danger from internal
contradiction, when some of the basic postulates are denied by other basic
postulates, so that at certain points the system seems to be at war with itself.’ 725
The first and the second types are interrelated in our case: Koronéos presents the
enemy as an outsider; but then Iméra is presented by the Greek press as a national
traitor, an internal enemy backed up by an external enemy (Britain or Austria-
Hungary). It is important to explain the degree of significance for the Greeks
between these external and internal forms of threat. As Balibar explains, external
borders (those between Britain or Austria, and Greece) can be ‘broken, crossed
and destroyed. The true fortifications in a war are rather internal: what has to be
secured is unity’. 726 Hence the most important enemy in the episode is not Austria
or Britain, but the Greeks who support their intervention. For this reason the
rage of the mob and the press was directed primarily against them and not
Austria-Hungary or Britain.
This obsessive fear about the Greek constitution nevertheless existed even
when Britain did not figure in such imaginary conspiracies. We should therefore
consider the idea of ‘the enemy’ itself as constitutive of Greek nationalist thought
and as only symptomatic in Anglo-Greek encounters. In the following example
‘the enemies’ of Greece are not defined at all, but they still find a collaborator in
the Kingdom to actualise their anti-Greek plot. The article quoted below comes
from Clió and illustrates the point. For conservative Clió, no constitution was
suitable for the Greeks because of their internal political rivalries. The statement
was supported by concrete examples of internal political discord, and by the very

720 Aión, 11 May 1870. In Il Cittadino, another newspaper of Trieste, the Greek journalists P.
Koutoumás deplored the behaviour of Iméra's editor; the same did Ethnicón Pneúma; both articles in
Palingenesía, 16 May 1870.
721Méllon, 26 May 1870.
722Aión, 11 May 1870.
723 Palingenesía, 20 January 1881.
724Méllon, 12 May 1870. Also see Aión, 8 February 1868 for a similar example.
725 Douglas, Purity and Danger, pp. 125-126.
726 Balibar, Masses, p. 76.

216
absence of a Greek Cavour in politics. The policy of Búlgaris’s authoritarian
government, which introduced censorship of Opposition newspapers, was
regarded as a strategy for diverting Greek public opinion away from the Cretan
Question:

We know what the enemies of Greece want to subvert; they want to eliminate
[Greek] national consciousness […] They want to push Greece to the verge of
[internal political] unhappiness so that she will not think of Crete any more […]
And the enemies of the nation found in the Athenian politicians the best
collaborator! Discord is the original sin of the Greeks, but facing danger, discord
would always give way to negotiation and unity; even love for power […] is
sacrificed to the holy altar of homeland, when danger approaches.
The greatest enemy of Greece lives in Greece; let us not delude ourselves. As long
as those who govern Greece do not come to their senses […] we can hope for no
improvement. The diplomats of Turkey cannot find a better ally from the
politicians in Athens […] the philhellenes are disappointed and desperate; the
turkophiles enjoy, and […] with taunting scorn talk about the “model” of the
East. Come on, politicians of Greece, at least imitate the barbarians’ concord
[…] and the modesty of the public men of Europe in questions of governing. 727

The important part of the passage is that the imagined enemy does not necessarily
have any particular goal to achieve save the destruction of the ‘nation’. 728
Obviously, Britain is not part of the debate. We also see in this article something
worth highlighting: the writer addresses himself emphatically to the Greek
political world, and advices politicians to follow the example of ‘civilised’
European politics.
It is also a common practice for Greek commentators to link national
calamities to the obstacles that the Ottoman empire puts in Greece’s path to self-
fulfilment and to the European support the Turks receive. To explicate this point,
I will draw on the familiar by now treatise by Gennadios Notes on the Recent
Murders. For Gennadios, Britain’s love for Greece has always been insincere
because of British turkophilia. The Turkish race, ‘these cowardly villains, who, if
they are not butchers, are nothing, will record their national life on the page of
history by [a] big, black [stain] of blood and infamy; and England’s name will be
known as that of their protector.’ 729 England’s willingness to ‘protect’ Greece’s
historical enemy is not explained by Gennadios on the basis of British political
interests. On the contrary, Gennadios believes that motivation should be traced in
an incomprehensible pleasure that the British government takes in opposing
Greek self-fulfilment.
Other Greek texts are haunted by an evil European and Turkish presence that
looks for opportunities to destroy the ‘nation.’ For example, this feeling figures in
Fantasy and Truth, a pamphlet which explores the Great Idea. The author of this
pamphlet gives an account of the most important political actors in the Eastern
Question, who will decide on the fate of the Ottoman empire. For ‘Anonymous’,
‘John Bull’ will play an important role as an arbitrator among Turkey, the
European Powers and Greece. ‘Anonymous’ believes that Britain will not support
Greece because she has committed herself to the preservation of the European

727 Clió, 8/20 June 1868.

728 J. Laplanche, interviewed by John Fletcher and Peter Osborne, ‘The Other Within: Rethinking
Psychoanalysis,’ Radical Philosophy, 102 (July-August 2000): p. 40.
729 Gennadios, Notes, pp. 160-161.

217
order of 1815. Her participation in a plot against Greece is a fact for
‘Anonymous’; as he explains ‘in this struggle with so many and so important
enemies the isolated Hellenism of the East could have the same fate as Poland
[…] If Hellenism adopts the right policy we will be saved, and the time will come
when we will reign in the City of Byzantium’. 730 ‘John Bull’, among other
‘enemies’, assumes the role of an offender, who wants to prevent the Greek
Kingdom from expanding. This ‘robbing’ of Greek national unity is imagined by
‘Anonymous, and it is presented by him as an irrational pleasure. But national
‘mutilation’ becomes the focal point for ‘Anonymous’ because it is precisely the
unity of Hellenism — a Hellenism, which is already fragmented— that is at stake
in the Greek imagination.
In this Greek-Turkish contest, there was no space for those who were not
prepared to give their life for Greece. The example that follows was chosen
because it records Greek behaviour towards Greek citizens that are something
less than ‘patriots’, but also the reflections of a British philhellene. In January
1867, the Greek Kingdom received back some volunteers from Crete. These
volunteers decided to return home after a series of defeats of the Greek and
Cretan irregular forces. They were transported on French and Turkish ships to
Athens, an action that bewildered the Athenian ‘patriotic’ crowd. Thanks to
Finlay, we are able to read about the episode that took place in the port upon
their arrival at Greece:

In Athens [the Greek mob] was trying to find how the degenerate volunteers from
Athens, who declined to suffer death by starvation for the glory of Greece, were to
be treated in order to save the honour of the country […]At an early hour on
Monday democracy set off to walk from Athens to the Piraeus, which occupied a
good hour. A few of the volunteers on board the French ship, who were informed
that their families were ready to receive them, landed early and walked home
quietly. But, when the general disembarkation commenced, the populace of
Athens and Piraeus was already assembled on the quay, and the Volunteers were
received, when they trod the soil of their native land with what a Greek newspaper
calls a hailstorm of paving stones and a shower of cudgels. Some jumped into
boats, others were knocked into the sea; but the French ships were at hand and
they were all saved […] For some hours the rabble had the upper hand, and a
Ministerial paper describes what it calls ‘the magnanimity of the Greek
people’. It says that incessant shouts were raised of ‘Death to the traitors;
strike down the deserters; throw the blasphemers of Hellenic glory into the sea;
murder the wretches who have saved their lives on board of Turkish ships.’ The
bells of the churches kept ringing, the drums of the National Guard were beating,
and the citizens were firmly resolved to murder every man who had returned from
Crete. 731

Finlay’s irony is justified if we juxtapose his article with the two ‘patriotic
accounts’ in Palingensía. 732 One notices that the Athenian patriots found their
identity in this partial fixity of the notion of patriotism: in other words, they
identified themselves as Greeks in relation to the ‘deserters’, those who allegedly
collaborated with the opposite camp. The episode is not incited by conspiracy
theories, but it sheds light on a mechanism of exclusion from the Greek imagined

730 P., Fantasy and Truth, p. 12

731 The Times, 2 February 1867.
732 Palingenesía, 10 and 13 January 1867.

218
community. In this mechanism, those who refuse to participate in the collective
worshipping of the national honour become enemies, that is, the ‘surplus’ that the
Athenians excluded from the notion of Greekness in order to recognise
themselves as a pure unity. 733 . The Athenian mob regarded the ‘deserters’ as
something ‘less than Greeks’ 734 vis-à-vis the idea(l) of Greek patriotism.
The analysis did not concentrate exclusively on Britain, because it had to be
explained that (1) Britain was not the most important, or the only, enemy in the
Greek imagination, and that (2) whenever Britain appears in Greek narratives, she
is linked to another, more important form of threat for the Greek ‘nation’ that
lives within it (the dissidents or pro-British Greeks).

British and Greek perceptions of conspiracy: questions of mutual trust and deception
Britons and Greeks perceived external and internal agency in anti-Greek plots in
different ways. It is also interesting that lack of Greek reflexivity on the anxiety to
uncover national enemies is often read by British observers as ‘performance’ or
‘attempt at deception’. For the purposes of the present chapter two examples will
be analysed. The first incident is traced in Clió in an article on Cretan affairs. The
writer begins his narrative by presenting the dethronement of Otho in 1862 as the
result of a British conspiracy against Greek interests. According to Clió,
Palmerston had his own intelligence agents in the East whose mission was to
uncover anti-Turkish plots. These agents found out that an agreement had been
signed between Garibaldi, Greece and Serbia at the beginning of the 1860s,
according to which the three parties would divide the European part of the
Ottoman empire into three shares.

Palmerston was informed about the developments and immediately set his traps;
he first deceived Garibaldi […] then he helped Otho escape from Greece,
supporting the Greek nation’s friendly feelings for Alfred, and the Greek
government participated in that support. However, the day arrived that the network
of alfredomania had to be destroyed; but, at the same time, the dreaming Greeks
had to be given the impression that Britain forwards Greek plans for the realisation
of the Great Idea. Thus [the British government] decided to offer Greece, whose
crown had been trampled upon and ridiculed, the Seven Islands which, ethically
speaking, did not belong to Britain […] Does someone dare claim that England
did not make a fool of Greece and the Greeks, from the moment the Greeks
believed with childish naivety that British politics was favourable and honest? 735

The narrative could be divided into three parts. In the first part Greece enters a
conspiracy with Garibaldi and Serbia. The plot serves national interests and no
justice is done to Palmerston and his agents for having uncovered it. Palmerston’s
policy, which forms the second part of the narrative, is more crucial. Palmerston
is deemed to be the brain of an anti-Greek conspiracy because (a) he participates
in Otho’s dethronement, (b) he conveys the impression that Britain supports the
election of Prince Alfred to the Greek throne, and (c) when the ‘fraud’ is exposed
he grants the Ionian Islands to Greece to alleviate anti-British sentiment. The
third part of the narrative is also very important: the Greek government appears
to commit high treason because it did not warn the ‘nation’ for the fraud.

733 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 136-137.
734 Bhabha, Location of Culture, pp. 52-53. For similar Greek reflections see Tuckerman, The Greeks
of To-day (1877), pp. 106-107.
735 Clió, 1/13 September 1867.

219
 The second example is concerned with the Dilessi Murders and the direct
involvement of a Briton in the episode. In his treatise John Gennadios had
accused one of his friends, the Englishman Frank Noël, of being the ‘godfather’
(the ‘patron’) of the Dilessi brigands. 736 The Greek government took advantage of
the accusation, and some weeks after the publication of the Notes Noël was
prosecuted as the main instigator of the crime. During his brief period of release,
which he spent in his estates at Achmetaga, Noël was ‘visited’ by the Greek army
and the Nomarch of Euboia, who had been ‘informed’ that Takos, the brigand
who had fled after the Dilessi Murders, was about to visit his ‘godfather.’ 737 Noël
was convinced that the whole thing was set up by a Greek government which
wanted to cause a great sensation in Britain. His embitterment is apparent in the
witty introduction to a letter he sent to his father:

ACHMETAGA, July 6th, 1870.

MY DEAR FATHER,

The present state of the Greek mind can be not inaptly illustrated by a common
peasant’s story: -- “ A certain man was caught stealing onions in a hedged
garden. ‘Hallo! What are you doing there?’ cried the owner of the garden.
‘Nothing,’ said he, ‘I was trying to support myself against the wind, and in
catching hold of the onions they came up by the roots.’ ‘But how did they get
into the sack?’ asked the other. ‘That is exactly what I am astonished at
myself,’ answered the man. 738

The joke’s farmer implicitly accuses the intruder of theft. For the thief, though, an
external agency, the wind, committed the crime, and thus the thief is not a thief.
The fraud here resembles the conviction of Clió that someone is trying to make a
fool of someone else. There is, however, an important difference between the two
cases. In the first one, Palmerston succeeded in deceiving the Greeks. This leads
to a re-arrangement of the power distribution, because the initial deceivers (the
Greek conspirators) now become the deceived. In the second case, the thief does
not succeed in deceiving the owner of the garden. It is probably the case that
Noël associates himself, or indeed any intelligent observer of Greek behaviour,
with ‘the garden owner’, and the Greeks with the ‘thief’. Noël believes that the
Greek government acted consciously in organising the fraud, while the Clió
journalist believes the same of Palmerston’s government. 739
In these two cases it is possible to detect a gap between knowledge and
belief, 740 and a negotiation of power. Both episodes play upon the idea of what is
to be believed and on whose/what terms. Because the Palmerstonian conspiracy
is based on Greek belief in British love for Greece, the British government
performs a manipulative action that assumes a symbolic significance for a Greek
audience as it is re-interpreted by the journalist of Clió. The problem arises when
Palmerston becomes cleverer than his Greek manipulators. 741 When the ‘fraud’ at
736 It is possible that the misunderstanding started from a conflict between Erskine, the British
Minister at Athens, and Noël, during the Dilessi negotiations. Even moderate newspapers, such as
The Scotsman (9 May 1870), recorded suspicions directed against Noël. For Frank Noël consult
chapter II.ii.
737 Letters of Mr. Frank Noël, pp. 61-63.
738 Ibid., 52.
739 Dolan, ‘Political Action and the Unconscious,’ pp. 12-13.
740 Žižek, For they know not, pp. 243-244.
741 Ibid, pp. 246-249.

220
the Greeks’ expense is uncovered, the Greek journalist attributes to Palmerston
the underlying desire to harm the Greek Kingdom, even though the Greek
government was the first in the chain of schemers. Homi Bhabha described this
persecutory paranoia as a narcissistic demand which the coloniser develops,
through a ‘double repetition of the otherness of the self’. 742 Bhabha’s analysis is
informative, though there is no reason why it should be described as the
symptom of colonialism exclusively. What in fact happens in the journalist’s
imagination, is described in the following scheme:

I WANT HIM (PALMERSTON) TO TRUST ME.

I CHEAT ON PALMERSTON, FOR I DO NOT TRUST HIM.
(IF I DO NOT, THEN HE DOES NOT TRUST ME)
I HATE HIM (HE DOES NOT TRUST ME BECAUSE I AM NOT TO BE
TRUSTED)

PROJECTION

HE HATES ME.

The different roles of Britain, France and Russia in Greek conspiracy theory
I have already briefly explored the role of (lack of) trust in the political
relationship between Greece and Britain. Although Britain is the focus of the
thesis, it is desirable to know if there is a difference in the way the Greeks think
about their other two protectors. The analysis will begin with France. It has to be
stated in advance that in Greek commentary France’s relationship with Greece is
not always presented as any less adversarial than the Anglo-Greek relationship. 743
French anti-Greek sentiments are usually placed at the conjuncture of the Cretan
Insurrection for reasons that are not entirely clear. When the Paris Conference,
which followed the failure of the Insurrection, began the Búlgaris government
found itself ‘on the hook’: for Búlgaris to abandon the Cretan cause and sign the
treaty that would put an end to the Cretan struggle would have been equal to
political suicide. At that stage, although the Greek government continued to offer
aid to the Cretans, it demonstrated Greece’s inability to fully support the cause by
introducing a plan for reform in the army and navy. British politicians suspected
that this programme aimed to shift the blame for the failure of the Cretan
Revolution on to the Great Powers in Paris. Here is what Finlay had to say about
Greek positions towards France in particular:

The consistency of the British government is at least acknowledged, and it is

remembered that the Ionian Islands were annexed to the Greek Kingdom with the
warning that Her Majesty’s government would see with displeasure the gift of
England made the symbol and precursor for an aggressive policy towards Turkey.
The advice of England has been treated with contempt, and the consequences are
beginning to be felt. France has been systematically calumniated since the
commencement of the Cretan insurrection. It has been repeated over and over
again by the Greek press that France caused the insurrection by inciting the
Cretans to revolt. 744

742 Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 97.

743 See for example T. Rhighópoulos, Memoirs from the Beginning of the Revolution until the Year 1881,
(Athens, 1979), p. 233.
744 The Times, 8 January 1869. Emphasis added.

221
Before this passage is analysed, it has to be remarked that Finlay was accurate in
his reflections: there were constant accusations against France for the reasons he
reveals. But the language he uses to describe Greek public opinion presents the
French as instigators of a national catastrophe and the British as
advisers/arbitrators. The vocabulary a Greek journalist employed for Russian
policy was consistent with this pattern.

As we mentioned before, [Russia] covered up all her manoeuvres against

Hellenism, by pretending to be a friend of the Greeks; moreover, by presenting a
false situation she prompted and incited the bellicose Greek character against the
Turks, thus drawing the Greeks into harmful alliances with her, with which she
wanted to prevent the development of progressive ideas in Greece. […] Thus, she
can make Greece a suspicious tool of foreign plans for expansion and condemn
her to political insignificance, make her worthless of sovereignty […] 745

Although in the 1870s the image of Russia as the mastermind of harmful Greek
insurrections was exaggerated by Greeks, we should not see it as the product of
Greek reactions toward late-nineteenth century Panslavism. Tracing similar
examples in the trajectory of Greek history, we find out that the contemporary
Greeks themselves locate the emergence of this powerful image either in the
Crimean war or the Peloponnesian revolution incited by Orlov in 1869-1870 746 -
not to mention that the very same suggestion has crept into modern Greek
historiography. 747
Late nineteenth-century representations of British policy in Greek culture
present a striking difference that may originate in the actual British policy on the
Eastern Question. It is clear that Britain avoided encouraging Greek irredentism
or signing treaties with Greece. It can be argued that Britain’s role as the ‘guardian
angel’ of Ottoman integrity and of order was not seriously challenged before the
end of the nineteenth century. In the passages examined above, the French and
the Russians clearly appear to incite Greek nationalist movements for their own
interests. Britain, on the other hand, assumes the role of the adviser, who warns
Greek governments about the consequences of their actions. More significantly,
the imagery that the aforementioned Greek commentators constructed for Britain
presented her as an obstinate and inflexible arbitrator between Greeks and Turks.

The uniform image of the Great Powers of Europe: the uses of religious vocabulary in the
European-Greek adversarial relationship
It would have been inaccurate to claim that Greek imageries of the three
protectors of Greece always differ. Alongside the aforementioned differences
there also exists a unifying representation of the Great Powers of Europe as
‘enemies of the nation’. This image partially supports the paradox underscored by
Todorova in the surviving religious discourse of the Balkan religious community
that in the nineteenth century was incorporated into the various Balkan nationalist
discourses. There are three terms used for the evil European-Western Powers in
nineteenth-century Greek narratives: Jew, Jesuit and Frank.

745 Asklipiádis, Changes, pp. 31-32.

746 For similar references see Rhighopoulos, Memoirs, p. 220; Pekios, Spiritual View, pp. 16-17;
Anonymous, Notes, p. 28; Arístarchos, Bulgarian Question, vol. III, pp. 138-139; Palingenesia, 20
September 1868; Wyse, Impressions, p. 8.
747 See for example the analysis of the Marxist historian Nikos Svoronos [A History of Modern Greece

(Athens, 1992), p. 59].

222
 Admittedly amongst British politicians, Benjamin Disraeli, the embodiment of
mishellenism, is represented as an evil Jew. Even anglophiles, such as Odysséas
Iálemos, read into Disraeli’s political activity in the East during the Bosnian
revolution a supposed Jewish cunningness. 748 Another diarist of the period,
Rhighópoulos, offers an interesting example. Recording the untimely Greek
revolution in Macedonia and Thessaly before the Berlin Conference in 1878,
which failed because it had no support from the Great Powers, he condemned
the passivity of the Koumoundoúros government. His comments, however, say
more about the Greek cast of mind than about international politics:

If the Government was ready in October or November, when the Russo-Turkish

war was still raging, and Turkey was busy with it, or if it had let the volunteers
from Greece enter Turkey and incite revolution among the Christians of Thessaly,
Epirus and Macedonia, the result would have been gratifying. But, relying upon
England, it remained neutral and in addition it arrested and tried those who were
ready for an incursion into Thessaly just to please England. The latter, who for her
own interests wanted to save her beloved Turkey from the hungry mouth of the
North [i.e., Russia], trapped Greece with the help of Koumoundoúros […] In the
meantime, the public opinion of Europe was reproaching Greek apathy, and the
English Opposition of the liberals under Lord Gladstone and other philhellenes
[…] were criticising the turkophile policy of their Government, which was led by
the traitor Hebrew Disraeli, now Lord Beaconsfield. Disraeli reached the highest
office, just like our Koumoundoúros and Delighiórghis: by employing insidious
Jewish and Jesuit means. 749

The enemies of the Great Idea, again a Greek and a Briton, an insider and an
outsider, are presented as faithless. In the passage Rhighópoulos does not
distinguish between the Jesuit and the Jew, despite the fact that the two were
declared enemies. This happens because both the images of the Jesuit and the Jew
symbolize the religious foes for Greek Orthodoxy, whose close relationship with
Greek identity made them time-resistant. Even nowadays, the surviving concepts
Οβριός (corrupt Hebrew) and ιησουιτικός/Ιησουίτης (Jesuit) signify meanness,
corruption, lying and subversion. Not surprisingly, Rhighópoulos’s description of
the Disraelian policy reminds us of the comments of the Clió journalist about
Palmerston. Clearly there was a Greek preference for Gladstonian Liberal policy;
it is not a coincidence that the strong language the Greek press used for Disraeli
and Palmerston was never used for the philhellene Gladstone.
The concept of the ‘Frank’ deserves more attention because it was never out
of use. Juxtaposition of Greek and British texts shows that the concept embodies
an assortment of varied historical experiences. During the Cretan struggle,
Palingenesía published a poem on the power that the Greek nation retains to hold
together its components. The Greeks of Diaspora had a special place in the
narrative. Hellenism ‘from Manchester to Calcutta, Liverpool and London’ was
asked to help in the poem the subjugated brothers. The enemies that the ‘nation’
had to confront were named ‘Franks.’

Ah Franks, Franks, dishonest, pseudochristians,

748Article in Journal des Debats, 5/17 November 1876.

749Rhighópoulos, Memoirs, pp. 228-229 (emphasis added); see also his comments on Cyprus and
‘Jewish’ British policy (p. 234). For a similar example see S. Xenos, The ‘Demure’ Koumoundoúros,
namely the Nation, the Army and the Artillery of Greece (Athens, 1881); Palingenesía, 13 October 1875
and 5 August 1876.

223
 How will you apologize to God on the Day of the Judgement?
Now that you let Christianity be murdered
And the Turk torture Greece forever,
- The country that brought up your educators
the birth place of war art, sciences and arts
The country that cleared your blindness […] 750

The religious subtext of the poem could be placed in the ideological context of
the Great Idea, which was examined in the previous chapter. The poem repeats
the main points of the Greek civilising mission and harps on the ‘debt’ that these
‘Franks’ owe to Greece. But there are also other uses of the word ‘Frank’ in
which the religious connotation of the term is not present. An example is the
commentary on the episode of the Isthmus of Corinth published in The Times. In
winter 1869, the National Assembly passed a law which empowered the
Government to grant a concession to a foreign company for cutting a canal
through the Isthmus. Finlay mourned the fact that the Greeks spent thousands of
pounds sterling on the Cretan Cause and now were forced to grant the
concession for the work to foreigners because they could not afford it:

During the discussion when the Bill for granting the concession was before the
Chamber, one of the Deputies of Athens observed that, as the Greeks were dealing
with Franks, it was necessary to define strictly all the obligations of the foreigners,
for the Franks are not to be trusted; and the Deputy furnished the House with
examples of the manner in which Frank subtlety has profited by Greek simplicity.
It is not necessary to warn foreign capitalists that there is danger as long as Greece
holds up the Gorgon’s head of unpaid bonds, and the Greeks pay debts in
inconvertible paper. 751

What remains from the Greek poem’s discourse of Jewishness is the connotation
of treachery. Few foreigners knew that the word ‘Frank’ had a negative meaning.
For the purposes of this analysis it has to be borne in mind that the name of
Frank, ‘a by-word for lewdness and immorality’ 752 according to a missionary in
Turkey, was frequently used to describe Western Europeans, who entered Greece
or Turkey as capitalists.
Frankishness encompasses a series of vices for the Greeks: the Franks are
restructured as enemies, but also as calculative deceivers. In this instance, it is
necessary to consider the modern Greek word κουτόφραγκος (Koutófraghos), or silly
Frank. Nowadays for a Greek to be a ‘silly Frank’ means that (s)he can easily be
deceived by someone else, or that displays a kind of cunning that can be easily
detected. In the web of the nineteenth-century national imaginary, the word
Frank retains its religious origins. This belief is so strong in the Greek popular
culture of the period, that the ‘Frank’ can also become a synonym for the Devil.
The following is an extract from a proclamation written by a Cretan in 1868, and
which was published by Greeks when the Turks were ready for repercussions due
to a great Greek victory in the Apokoróna of Crete. The sense of deception and
the secularised vocabulary in which it is expressed are noteworthy:

Our race is sick because of the “medicines” those “false doctors” of the
land of Franks, who pretended to be our friends, gave us to undo us, just like the

750 Palingenesía, 3 April 1867.

751 The Times, 8 December 1869.
752 Van Lennep, Travels, vol. II, p. 4.

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 worms destroy the roots of the pear tree […]. The Franks are neither your friends
nor ours. 753

A few lines later, the author calls both the Turks and the Franks Antichrists, thus
using a religious vocabulary. 754 The passage belongs to a collection of letters and
proclamations written in Cretan dialect, which various Athenian newspapers
published individually. Strikingly, the proclamation accommodates both secular
and religious language.
The image of the Devil as an envious (φθονερός in ecclesiastical language)
angel who was exiled from heaven because of his arrogance (αλαζονεία) 755 is
incorporated into the representation of the European as a conspirator who is
jealous of Greece. Complementary to this image is the notion of πονηρός that in
Orthodox tradition designates both evil and the Devil, the deceiver of the faithful.
Thus the ‘Frank’ appears as the envious outsider who wants to corrupt the Greek
community’s bonds, someone who ‘is not to be trusted.’ Obviously, the secular
and religious representations of the ‘Frank’ carry the seed of risk and sin
respectively. In her second work on forms of symbolic danger, Mary Douglas
made clear that there is an unmistakable difference between risk and sin/taboo.
Being at risk in modern jargon ‘is not the equivalent but the reciprocal of being
“in sin” or “under taboo”’. Sin belongs to the discourse of religious faith,
according to which the community has to be defended against individual
misbehaviour. Conversely, the modern world, which is dominated by
individualism and regulated by secular modes of thought, is a world of risks. ‘The
neutral vocabulary of risk is all we have for making a bridge between the known
facts of existence and the construction of a moral community.’ 756 In the example
I offered, the religious connotation of the word betrays its Orthodox origins and
alludes to the fact that the bonds which hold the imagined Greek community
together are holy. The invisible liaison woven among the nation’s participants is
based on the moral duty to defend the community they have entered. Finlay’s
story, nevertheless, offers a different version of Frankishness, which perplexes the
reader.
The religious milieu, in which the discourse of Frankish conspiracy was born,
compels one to explore the historicity of the notion of the ‘Frank’. This takes us
back to the age of the crusades. As Denis Hay noted, the crusades may have
stimulated a revival of Greek perceptions of hostility between East and West. For
Hay, ‘the attitude of the crusaders certainly encouraged the Greeks [sic] to regard
them as barbarians, but a continental antithesis as such was not readily developed
in Byzantium, which straddled Asia and Europe. […] The polarity was
occasionally noticed in the West, but it was not regarded as important’. 757
Historians of Medieval Western civilisation stress nevertheless the harmful results
of the crusades for the Western and Byzantine economies, which broadened the
gap between East (Orthodox Byzantium) and West (Catholic countries and

753 Anonymous, Collection of Cretan Correspondence in the Local Dialect or the Mirror of the Morale of the
Christians of Crete (Athens, 1878), p. 11.
754 For another example, which comes from the world of the literati, see P.E. Iatridis, An Episode

from the Cretan Struggle (Cephallonia, 1866), p. 10.

755 C. Stewart, Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture (Princeton, 1991), p.

141.
756 M. Douglas, Risk and Blame, Essays in Cultural Theory, (London, 1992), p. 26; also pp. 27-29.
757 Hay, Europe, p. 54.

225
dominions). The economic dimension of the crusades 758 and the Western, British
in our case, capitalist intrusion in the Greek Kingdom presented an interesting
affinity. Thus, the representation of the nineteenth-century deceitful Frankish
capitalist 759 could be traced back to that of the crusader who overran the
Byzantine dominions and eventually, in 1204, settled in Constantinople for half a
century.
On the other hand, Marcus Bull shows that the notion of the ‘Frank’ did not
have an entirely clear meaning at the time of the first crusade, and that although it
was often used to denote the crusaders en masse it had at the same time retained its
initial Carolingian meaning. This means that because the pre-French groups of
Germanic origins did not have a single identity, the word did not provide the
tools for internal (Germanic) self-designation. This had to do with an overlap
between the concept of Frankishness and the term Gallia, often, but not always
coterminous with the regnum Francorum. This split between the Germanised North
and Southern France, an area which was only partially incorporated into Frankish
myth and history, might have posed serious problems in the Frankish/Germanic
crusaders’ self-identification. Gradually, though, the term Francus became the
vehicle of Christian identity and was used in Western European regions to
designate the agents of the Pan-Christian (that is, Western Christian) mission
against the infidels. 760
It should not be forgotten that in the dawn of the modern era the notion of
Christianity also signified Western civilisation. It is also very likely that the term
‘Frank’ is a survival of the history of hostility between the subjugated Greeks and
the ungrateful Westerner who allowed Byzantine Constantinople to fall. In
addition, the immediate Greek experience of West of the post-Byzantine years
was based partly on Franco-Greek and German-Greek channels of
communication; the concept of the Frank (initially used to describe the pre-
national groups of Germanic populations) may have become in the nineteenth
century a way to designate a group of different national identities. The equivalent
of this term in ‘Western’ thought may be traced in Edward Said’s Orientalism. The
fact that the nineteenth-century Greeks invoked the image of the evil Frank could
be regarded as a kind of Greek Occidentalism: like the nineteenth-century
Occidental observer and researcher, the Greeks had a uniform image of the Great
Powers. Like the ‘Orient,’ the image operated on the principles of reductionism.
There may have been more, nevertheless, to the use of the concept in Greek
dealings with the Europeans, or the British in particular. Michael Herzfeld noted
that the Greeks had conceptualised Europe as the ‘unattainable Eden’ to which
they were denied access, like a ‘fallen’ member, from the moment they were
delivered to the hands of ‘the very negation and Antichrist of Europe’, 761 Turkey.
It may be useful then to view the image of the ‘Hebrew’ and that of the ‘Frank’

758 J. Le Goff, The Civilisation of Medieval West, trans. by Rika Benveniste (Thessaloniki, 1993), pp.
100-101.
759 British subjects who wanted to buy Greek land or to take up public works had to cope with a

ruthless war waged against them not only by local populations, but also by the Greek government.
This is what Wyse and Finlay called xenelasia ( from ξένος and the root of the verb ελαύνω, it means
to persecute foreigners), ‘the disgusting of foreigners’ (The Times, 15 December 1871; Wyse,
Impressions, p. 281).
760 M. Bull, ‘Overlapping and Competing Identities in the Frankish First Crusade,’ La Concile de

Clermont de 1095 et l’ Appel a la Croisade. Actes du Colloque Universitaire International de Clermont (23-25
juin 1995) Organisé et Publié avec le concours du Conseil Régional d’Auvergne (École française de Rome
Palais Farnèse, 1997)
761 Herzfeld, Anthropology, p. 47.

226
together, because both embodied the (D)evil in nineteenth-century Greek
discourse. It must be kept in mind that the same discourse of Western sin and
deception appeared in the Great Idea narrative. We could see, therefore, the
combined image of the ‘Hebrew’ and the ‘Frank’ as an inversion of the Western
discourse. In this inversion ‘Greece’ takes the place of ‘Edenic Europe’ and the
latter becomes the ‘fallen angel’ of humanity. The language of Fall, then, may
have been a language of resistance to European accusations that Greece had
fallen from European grace.

The Russian threat in the British imperial imagination and Greece’s role as an intermediary in
British-Russian relations
The foregoing analysis focused on Greek fears and reservations concerning the
‘West’ and Britain in particular. However, nineteenth-century British
commentators also examined the role of Greece as a conspirator, although the
nature of their reflections was significantly different from the Greek. When in
1864 the British Government decided to demolish the fortresses at Corfu so as to
neutralise the Ionian Islands before handing them to Greece, some philhellenes
reacted. Speeches such as that of the philhellene Gregory, delivered in Parliament
against this act of ‘vandalism’, did nothing to ease the tensions. On the contrary,
they infuriated those members of Parliament who supported the demolition,
because they supposedly contributed to the circulation of libels about British
policy in the East, ‘which could be culled from veracious Philhellenic journals’.
On this occasion it was repeated that the Ionians were better off under Thomas
Maitland’s government 762 than now that the Greeks could freely destroy all the
good things that Britain had done for them. An editorial in The Times avowed that

We can assure Mr. GREGORY that “the caricatures which flaunt in every
window” of Anglomaniacal booksellers abroad, representing England in various
ignominious attitudes, do not disturb our peace of mind in the least. If forbearance
and abstinence from swagger be truckling, we have sometimes truckled to be
strong, but the charge of habitually bullying the weak can never be preferred
against us in earnest. 763

The editor seems to believe that a danger does in fact lie behind this philhellenic
turmoil that might affect Britain’s imperial image, but that will not alter British
policy. 764 For The Times Britain lives in a safe sphere, and her safety cannot be
easily violated by what lies ‘outside’. The very idea of threat is, nevertheless, a
fantasy which the writer of The Times entertains. The fact that it is not Greece
itself but a mediator who is to be blamed, is also worth noting: in this fantastic
world, it is not a weak country, but a powerful opinion-maker (the philhellenes
and those who take advantage of them) that Britain has to deal with.
Anger at the ability of philhellenic elements to damage Britain’s reputation
nevertheless concealed the fear of a much more concrete agency than that
represented by the philhellenes. In an article on Dilessi Finlay explored opinions
in the Athenian press on the philhellenic and anti-Greek attitudes of the Great

762 Sir Thomas Maitland was the first Lord High Commissioner who was appointed (1815) by
Britain in the so-called ‘United States of the Ionian Islands’. He was disliked by the Ionians
because of his ‘oppressive’ administration which repeatedly caused discontent and unrest. Sir
Thomas’s term ended in 1824 with his death. In his place Britain appointed Frederic Adam.
763 The Times, 21 March 1864. Gregory delivered a passionate speech on the demolition.
764 S. Žižek, ‘From Joyce-the-Symptom to the Symptom of Power,’ Lacanian Ink (PLEXUS)

<http://www.plexus.org/lacink/lacink11/zizek.html (27 June 2000, 10:22), p. 7.

227
Powers. He claimed that ‘though the public feeling’s extreme violence is
expressed by Russian-philorthodox organs, and by those who propagate in
Greece the animosity formerly displayed by the Ionian Radicals to the Queen’s
Government, the Parliament, and the people of England’, there is no real danger
for Britain. The enemy that appears in Finlay’s own words, Russian, is a fantastic
mediator who fills the gap which British philhellenism left after Dilessi and whose
target is the British imperial image. Finlay adds that Russia’s defamation of
England is part of the game of impressions in the Eastern Question. Returning to
the Dilessi case, he quotes a passage from the Queen’s speech in which she
reprimands the corrupt Greek political system. With it Finlay juxtaposes an anti-
British article in an Athenian newspaper, inspired by the Queen’s speech and
circulated in Russia and Turkey, and concludes:

In order to give these attacks some additional circulation, they have been printed
in French, as well as in Greek. It is quite fair for the Greek press to criticise,
blame, and ridicule the conduct of England with freedom and severity; but it is
hardly wise to stir up national hostility by repeated insults. Greece has not
forgotten that England was strong enough, four years ago, standing alone, to
prevent Russian intrigues and Greek expeditions from dismembering the Ottoman
empire and annexing Crete to the HELLENIC kingdom, even after the scheme has
obtained the countenance of Napoleon III. But the Russo-Philorthodox party
strives to make the Greeks forget that England annexed the Ionian Islands to the
Hellenic Kingdom. 765

Finlay’s actual concern is that the comments of the Greek Russian party gave the
Russian press the opportunity to criticise British policy. In fact British interest in
Russian attitudes was repeatedly evident in the press following the Dilessi
incident. 766 British political discourse on Russian policy did not make itself
credible by quoting, but rather by interpreting Russian intentions. 767 Of course,
the fact that British commentators ‘imagined’ their Russian rivals means not that
these rivals did not exist but that the British press was very sensitive to their
verdicts. While the British press interpreted Russian actions, it simultaneously
granted its ‘interpretation’ the status of reality.
The feeling that Russia was assessing and gauging the possibilities for political
manoeuvre in the Eastern Question was present in British journalism even
though those expressing it considered their country an invincible imperial power.
When the British government threatened the Greeks with an occupation after the
Dilessi Murders, the Russians declared that if a British expedition to Greece took
place, they would support the small Kingdom. Immediately the British press
responded in a bellicose language, indicating that there were deeper motives
behind ‘philhellenic’ Russian conduct. The impression was that by flirting with
the Greek government Russia was trying to take over Britain’s leading role in the
Greek political arena. This suspicion was masked by the usual imperial rhetoric in
which the British empire appeared valiant and invincible. 768
Such comments usually came from the conservatives adopting a different
position from that of most Gladstonian Liberals: the latter were evidently more

765 The Times, 23 March 1871.

766 The Morning Post, 5 May 1870.
767 M. De Certeau, ‘The Jabbering of Social Life,’ in M. Blonsky (ed), On Signs: A Semiotic Reader

(Oxford, 1985), p. 154.

768 The Morning Post, 5 May 1870.

228
cautious in their statements. 769 As opposed to English newspapers, The Scotsman
claimed that the British empire should not be accused of ‘tyrannical abuse of its
superior strength’. 770 Again, the suggestion that Russia might take advantage of
British misconduct, and that decisions had to be taken with prudence, was
prominent. The feeling that Britain’s use of its power might be represented as an
abuse of Greek national rights constituted a fantasy of control in the writings of
British rulers before 771 but also long after Dilessi. 772 British journalists and
commentators often spoke from the standpoint of the powerful manipulator-
interlocutor 773 but always kept an eye on Russian responses, or simply tried to
guess them in advance. In this Anglo-Russian ‘dialogue’, which was actually a
British monologue, Greece was only a mediator, an intermediary ‘addressee’ who
facilitated Britain’s desire to represent the empire to Russia as ‘omnipotent’. My
argument here originates in the difference between the Lacanian concepts other
and Other: while the first designates the imaginary Rival, the second is the
linguistic relation the subject develops to a symbolic Interlocutor. The other is a
narcissist fantasy, while the Other is the topos of intersubjectivity; it is the second
form of otherness that makes ‘relationships’ possible. I believe that in the British
journalistic imagination Russia’s interest in Greek affairs transformed Russia from
an actual rival into a symbolic enemy in Greek affairs. The ‘game’ reinforced
British self-definition as a powerful country.

Conclusion
This analysis has focused on some nodal points of the period and has passed over
some others; beyond any shadow of doubt, the richness of the subject invites
more research. To sum up the results of the research is difficult, but, we can
begin to see some similarities and differences in the restructuring/creation of
enemies in the Greek and British sources that were analysed.
For Greek commentators, British interference in Greek politics placed at
stake Greek constitution and autonomy. But behind that fear, there was another,
more significant anxiety: that the ‘nation’ was in danger because Greeks
collaborated with Britain. Thus the British appeared to possess a privileged access
to the Greek nation. Alongside the specificity and the subtleties of this fear, the
Greeks had developed a generic image of an external enemy which Western
nations embodied. The genealogy of this image can be traced in time-resistant
imageries of the Jew, the Jesuit and the Frank, which applied equally to the other
Great Protecting Powers of Europe (Russia and France). This invites us to
conclude that ‘Britain’ was not the only, and certainly not the most important,
imagined enemy of Greece.
On the other hand, the British commentators’ actual target was the Russians,
their most significant opponents in Eastern affairs. Unlike in Greek narratives, in
the British commentary examined here the Russian opponents did not have
access to the empire. The Greeks were only an intermediary in such reflections;
their role was of secondary importance.
The different Greek and British experience may shed light on a difference
between Greek and British reasoning practices. British political calculations

769 See for example The Daily News, 22 May 1870.

770 The Scotsman, 3 May 1870.
771 The Morning Post (11 January 1869) also records an interesting episode concerning Russia and

Greece.
772 Campbell, Handy Book, pp. 141-142.
773 (Fuss, ‘Interior Colonies,’ p. 21).

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concerning the Eastern Question aimed at the affirmation of British imperial
practices and international policy. As opposed to that, Western interference in
Greek affairs presented Greece with an immediate threat to the Kingdom’s
sovereignty. The fact that the Greek constitutional enemy appeared together with
the British Russian ‘enemy’ has something to say: whereas the Greeks took
‘external threat’ seriously, British commentators did not feel as vulnerable. The
‘Eastern Question’, was, after all, a distant problem.

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 CONCLUSION
The purpose of this conclusion is to pull together the threads of the three parts of
the thesis, and to explain the modus operandi of British and Greek narratives of
identity. For this purpose I will work simultaneously on three different levels. On
the first level my aim will be to reinforce my conclusion to each chapter, and then
to explain each chapter’s overall contribution to the part of the thesis to which it
belongs. On the second level I will look for recurring themes throughout the
thesis, explain how these themes are tied to the function of stereotyping in Greek
and British narratives, and how they provide the thesis with an overall analytical
argument. On the third level I will discuss the original contribution that the thesis
makes to the field of modern Greek studies as well as to cultural history and
theory in general.

Break-up of the thesis: chapter conclusions and their contribution to scholarly research
The thesis was divided into three parts which explored three important Greek and
British narratives: (1) The question of disorder, with specific reference to a type
of crime, brigandage, and the challenge it posed to central state power (2) The
discursive development of human disciplines in Greek and British narratives, and
(3) The relationship between nationalism and imperialism, not just in the British
and Greek imagination, but in an Anglo-Greek relational context. My intention
was not simply to explore the narratives which revolved around these themes, but
to explain how these narratives developed their organised character – how they
were institutionalised in British and Greek cultures. We should understand
‘institutions’ in their broader sense, as regimes of knowledge and control and not
as bureaucratic machines. The ideological function of these narratives was
concomitant with the establishment of particular institutions, but the institutions
themselves were not my focus. My understanding is that these three ‘institutions’
(or, rather, institutionalised discourses) developed in Greece through a dialogical
process with foreign interlocutors. The assessment and understanding of the
British contribution to these developments became the locus of the thesis.
Part I focused on the importance Britons and Greeks assigned to the role of
brigandage in Greek state-formation, British imperialism and Anglo-Greek
relations. In chapter i I presented a genealogy of brigandage from the birth of
pre-Greek Revolution klephtism to the emergence of listía after the institution of
modern Greece. I explained the double function of listía in the Greek kingdom:
as a political tool in the hands of various factions, and as a resource to which the
Greek state itself had to have recourse in order to realise the nationalist project.
In chapter ii I moved on to explain that the very same phenomenon labelled the
Greek state ‘uncivilised’ in the eyes of the British observers. In fact, British
political commentators and politicians linked brigandage to other malfunctions of
the Greek political life: constitutional violations and political intrigues. Such
observations were used as raw material for the construction of a discourse in
which Britain was represented as a civilised and ordered country and Greece as a
savage country.
This discourse, which I call primary, worked as a matrix onto which British
and Greek observers inscribed stereotypical ideas for each other and for
themselves. Chapter iii explored associations of Greek brigandage with episodes
from British colonial history. In these Greek and British secondary discourses

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Greek brigandage and Irish Fenianism became synechdoches for nationalism. The
logic here is not self-evident: like Irish nationalism, a dangerous, destabilising
force for the British empire, Greek nationalism was a serious threat to the Eastern
order. The two phenomena matched, they were analogous. However, the Irish
experience was not the only one that was mobilised in this secondary discourse:
British politics in, or observations on, contemporary New Zealand, India, Mexico
and Abyssinia were also used by British commentators to further consolidate the
image of Greece as an uncivilised country. Interestingly, such associations
represented Greece simultaneously as a European (like Ireland) and a non-
European (like the Indian, Mexican and Maori case) entity. These analogies
symbolised the relationship of modern Greece with European civilisation: the Neohellenes
were and were not Europeans at the same time.
Another, secondary, discourse (chapter iv), which was predominantly Greek,
conceptualised brigandage in a very similar fashion but in a completely different
context. Following the Dilessi crisis and in order to deflect British accusations of
disorder the Greeks presented brigandage as a phenomenon alien to Neohellenic
culture. To achieve that, they identified this type of crime with the socially
marginal Albanians and Vlachs, while at the same time they represented these
groups as Ottoman or Slav (or as accessories to anti-Greek Ottoman plans). Again
the debate drifted back to the question of the place of modern Greece in Europe:
the Slav legacy in Greek culture was an offshoot of the Fallmerayer debate, which
contested the continuity of Greek culture from ancient times, whereas the
Ottoman legacy was what made the Neohellenes less European and more Oriental.
Although this part of the thesis could be read alongside John Koliopoulos’s
study of Greek brigandage and its role in Greek national politics, it adds a new
dimension to the question. Unlike Koliopoulos, I was not interested in the
internal function of Greek brigandage, but (a) in the ways it was mobilised in the
Anglo-Greek dialogue, and (b) its internal, Greek, discursive manifestations. My
work complements the historical-anthropological study of the Vlachs by Michael
Herzfeld and is directly linked to issues which Thomas Gallant explores in his
forthcoming book. Especially the sub-chapter on Fenianism can be seen as the
counterpart of the colonial discourse that British administrators developed in an
Ionian-Greek context. The importance of chapter iii is great, because a
discursive study of Irish and Greek politics had been completely ignored in
Greece. As a recent Greek study of the nineteenth-century Anglo-Greek dialogue
notes, in British sources ‘comparisons between Ireland and Greece were rare.’ 774
Chapter iv does not explore an original theme in modern Greek studies, but it
approaches it anew by using new material, implementing Lacanian theory to
interpret it and by changing focus (i.e. stressing the way the narrative on
Vlachian/Albanian identity was mobilised in a relational (Anglo-Greek) context).
Part II looked at the emergence of an ethnological-historical discourse in the
British and the Greek imagination, as well as how this discourse was
accommodated into a Greek hegemonic project. Chapter i examined
comparatively Greek and British history-writing. Yet once again Neohellenic
culture was haunted by the classical past: most of the British and Greek writings I
have examined discussed the legacies in Greek history and how they altered or
‘adulterated’ the Hellenic character over the centuries. All these legacies were
foreign and were viewed as a consequence of various forms of colonisation. The
Fallmerayer debate was also examined, especially by Greek commentators.

774 Skopetea, The East Sets in the West, p. 136, fn.13. Emphasis added.

232
Fallmerayer’s confusion of ‘race’ and ‘culture’ gave shape to a Greek nationalist
discourse in which perennial Greek qualities such as patriotism asserted the
continuity of Greek culture. In this discourse the life of the Greek ‘nation’ was
projected into the past.
Chapter ii examined British observations on the contemporary Greek
character. In such observations we are already faced with an evolving
anthropological methodology. Such British writings were consistent with the
Tylorian antiquarian project, which prioritised the identification of survivals in
peasant culture. To be sure, British observers were searching for Hellenic survivals
in modern Greece. However, this quest posed the question of authenticity:
Greeks began to perform customs and rituals for European and British travellers.
Occasionally Britons associated this attitude with deception, but there is no doubt
that this shift of Greek tradition from the unconscious to the conscious plane
gave birth to the discipline of Greek folklore.
The chapter was used as an introduction to chapter iii which analysed the
ethno-historical narrative of brigandage. The narrative was the dialogical product
of European, but primarily British, classification of Greek brigandage. I have
argued that these narratives of brigandage served for the Greeks and the British
as conceptual models of modernity. The uses of the Greek, Irish and Scottish past
in the Anglo-Greek dialogue on brigandage formed discourses in which history,
imperialism and romanticism were woven together. These multileveled and
interdependent discursive associations could be regarded as mechanisms (a) For
British self-definition, especially when they problematised the role of Scottish
identity in British history. (b) For Greek self-definition, because they also alluded
to the ambiguous place of modern Greek identity in Europe and (c) For the
development of British ethnology-history and Greek history-folklore, since the
‘brigand’ became a species suitable for academic study.
These three case studies implement already existing works on the question.
They form a combination of Greek folklore studies (by Alki Kyriakidou-Nestoros
and Nora Skouteri-Didaskalou) and American historical anthropology (Michael
Herzfeld). They also draw on a number of significant works on the methodology
of anthropology (i.e. by George Stocking, Johannes Fabian, Michel De Certeau),
Mediterranean and Balkan history (i.e. by Maria Todorova and John Dickie) and
epistemology (i.e. by Michel Foucault) to organise primary material. The third
chapter in particular presents us with an original ethnological case study of
brigandage, a component within studies of brigandage which nevertheless has
received very little attention. It could be compared to the recent work on Italian
nationalism by John Dickie. Furthermore, like chapter iii of Part I, chapter iii
of Part II has something to contribute to Irish and Scottish studies and studies of
British imperialism. For example, in this part John Mackenzie’s work on British
Orientalism was re-contextualised and examined anew.
If the first three chapters of Part II examined the history of the Greek
character the last two chapters were more concerned with the physical
geography/landscape of Greece and its relationship with history. Chapter iv,
which can be placed within the ambit of Artemis Leontis’s study Topographies of
Hellenism, traced the relationship between Anglo-Greek narratives of cultural
heritage and the development of the discipline of archaeology in Greece. Greek
landscape was read by Britons against classical literature and was appropriated to
contemporary prejudices. The Hellenic ruins, an integral part of the Greek
landscape, were claimed by Britons as part of a European heritage and Greeks
were regarded as unsuitable custodians of them. The implicit presupposition in

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this British accusation was that the modern Greeks were not civilised Europeans.
The Greeks did not direct their response only against Britons but also Europeans
by institutionalising archaeology and denying access to the archaeological sites to
them.
Chapter v further developed the reading of Greek physical geography
through (if not as) history and corrected some of the generalisations that Maria
Todorova made in Imagining the Balkans (i.e. treating the Balkans as a single,
homogenous, entity, and dismissing the importance of classicism and
philhellenism in the case of Greece). In this chapter I have argued that the
European or Oriental identity of parts of the Greek Peninsula and some Aegean
Islands was overdetermined by four factors: (a) The marginal geographical
position of Greece in the map of Europe. (b) The Ottoman legacy. (c) The
subordinate role of modern Greece in Anglo-Greek relations, and (d) personal
Victorian quests for adventure. Needless to add that the discourse repeated the
question we encountered in previous chapters: were the Neohellenes Europeans?
The first two Parts (I and II) make clear to the reader that British interests
were in conflict with the Greek hegemonic project of nationalisation, but they also
claim that British, alongside other, European, narratives were embroidered onto
the Greek imagination. Leaving the area of human disciplines behind, Part III
aspired to examine British imperial and Greek nationalist discourses together in
order to assemble a different theoretical approach to the Great Idea. I will call
the Part III approach revisionist, because: (a) it revises already existing studies of
the Great Idea (by Elli Skopetea and Dionysios Zakythinos); (b) it re-poses the
question of (Greek) otherness, not as alterity that has to be respected by those
who have the power (the British in our case), but as a strategic manoeuvre of the
weak Greece, a self-fashioned response to foreign hegemony. This approach,
which is combined with a dialogical study of identity, attacks postcolonial studies
(for example, Homi Bhabha’s Location of Culture or Edward Said’s monolithic
Orientalist approach). It also adds a new dimension to Stathis Gourgouris’s recent
work on Greece which was criticised in some recent reviews for its negligence to
engage with the Great Idea; and (c) (Last but not least) it employs a blend of
psychoanalysis and political theory (i.e works by Michel De Certeau, Slavoj Žižek
and Etienne Balibar) to understand nationalist thought, and tries to link
conspiracy theories to the Great Idea and British imperialist policy in the East.
Chapter i provided the historical context in which the Great Idea was born,
briefly engaged with the mythologisation of the Great Idea in history-writing and
then proceeded to set a series of questions. Chapter ii explained (a) that the
Greek hegemonic project was interpreted in different ways by different British
observers, and (b) that the two closely related ideas of education and Christian
religion were identified by Greeks and Britons with progress and provided the
Greek hegemonic program with a content. The rhetoric of civilisation-savagery
was often used by Britons and Greeks, though the binary opposites differed from
those we encountered in Part I and II (civilised Britain vs. uncivilised Greece).
This time Greece became the torch-bearer of education and progress and the
Ottoman empire the uncivilised obscurantist. European civilisation worked as a
separate category, (c) on which, however, Greeks modelled themselves. An
attempt was made by some Greek commentators to liken the Greek hegemonic
project to other European imperialist projects thus endorsing them. These three
strands were not entirely unconnected: they would be used by Greeks to
construct their own alterity, as the next chapter proceeded to explain.

234
 Chapter iii drew on the patronising rhetoric that the British employed to
address themselves to Greece, and shed light on Greek resistance to British and
European narratives of Greek Orientalism. In those narratives Greece was
represented as a child and Britain as a loving ‘father’-patron. We could link this
rhetoric to the last chapter of Part II, which draws on the theory of rites of
passage: in such rites, the initiate is always treated as inferior to those who control
the structure. In other words, the geographically and culturally marginal Greece,
was regarded as naturally inferior to Britain, a celebrated member of the
nineteenth-century European community, until its full ‘initiation’ to European
civilisation.
Greeks mimicked but also parodied British family rhetoric because they were
and were not ready to accept British patronising attitudes. However, the fact that
they mobilised the same family vocabulary when they addressed themselves to
Europe, proves that Britain was not their primary interlocutor. The Greek centre
utilised the same family trope independently from Anglo-Greek relations to
endorse Greek hegemonic and irredentist intentions. The static image of Greece
and Britain as child and father respectively may also have covered up a British
fear of degeneration.
Chapter iv paved the way for chapter v, the core hypothesis of Part III. In
this chapter, I examined anglophilia and philhellenism as interdependent
ideologies based on mutual (Anglo-Greek) respect. However, the precondition of
mutuality was missing from the Anglo-Greek relations, as I had explained in
chapter iii. Moreover, the already adversarial Anglo-Greek relationship was
further aggravated when both sides posed each other the question of ‘debt’.
Whereas Britons believed that Greece owed them for their contribution to the
War of Independence, Greeks claimed that British demands were blasphemous.
The idea of ‘sacrilege’ lay at the heart of the Great Idea and its complementary
imagery of the Greek chosen people. In the Greek imagination the Greeks had
been chosen at once by God and the philhellenes to civilised the East. Even
philhellenism was considered by Greeks in retrospect as a pay-back of the holy debt
the whole of Europe owed to the ancient Hellenes and their modern descendants.
Interestingly, (a) The recipient of this narrative was not exclusively Britain, but the
whole of Europe (b) The rhetoric the Greeks used drew on the idea of education
and progress, whereas their vocabulary and the imageries that they constructed
were religious in origin. I must remind the reader here that progress, education
and religion were extensively discussed by Greeks, European and Britons (see
chapter ii, Part III previous page) and were therefore part of an intersubjectively
(Greek-European) constructed narrative of the role of modern Greek identity in
the East. The Great Idea narrative and its core theme of the chosen were
therefore the offshoot of European philhellenism. It must also be stressed here
that in this narrative the Greeks turned the tables in European-Greek relations,
since this time their otherness was not constructed by their patrons as a means of
denigrating Neohellenic culture and presenting it as Oriental. This time
Neohellenic otherness was the product of the Greek imagination and the
outcome of a strategic Neohellenic choice: by becoming God’s elected the
modern Greeks managed to assume the absolute power on earth.
Chapter vi put British philhellenism and Greek nationalism in perspective
and complemented the previous chapter by further analysing the rationale of
suspicion and distrust between Greeks and Britons. It can be safely argued now
that Greek conspiracy theories of the role of Britain in Greek affairs were
concerned with constitutional developments and ultimately with autonomy, if not

235
independence. However, it was also apparent that Britain’s presence in these
narratives was only contingent. It would be more correct to say that conspiracy
theory was an essential component of Greek nationalism and that the ‘culprits’
were non-existent (not ‘real’). It was rather that the very idea of ‘threat’ was
projected on to Britain because specific historical circumstances allowed it.
More important, I believe, was the generic image of the Great Powers as
‘conspirators’ and enemies of the Greek ‘nation’. The stereotypes of the
‘untrustworthy’ Frank, the duplicitous Jew and the treacherous Jesuit could be
seen as complex constructs which projected European prejudices back to their
source. Indeed, if we were to tie this chapter to the Greek argument that the West
committed ‘blasphemy’ against God and the ‘new chosen’, we should break down
the stereotype of the Frank and the Jew/Jesuit into two parts, each deriving from
a different narrative of Neohellenic identity. The first narrative was originally
European and presented the Greeks as distrustful Orientals (now it was the
Europeans who resumed the identity of duplicity). The second narrative was an
intersubjective construct (European and Greek) and presented the Orthodox
Neohellenes as God’s agents. Here we detect the development of a Greek
counter-discourse which once again aimed at reversing the power structure of the
Greek-European relationship.
Greece was also contingently involved in British conspiracy theories. Their
main difference from the Greek ones was that they were concerned with
imperialist and not nationalist policy. British observers harboured a fear that the
philorthodox Russia may replace philhellenic Britain in Greece. In conclusion we can
say that Greece did not represent an actual threat for Britain; synecdochically, we
could say that Greece was not of any immediate interest to the British.

Pulling together the threads: How important were Greece and Britain in British and Greek self-
narrations?
The argument that Greece was not important for British self-narration could be
extended so as to embrace both sides. I am thus given the chance to stress that
the thesis never aspired to claim that Greece or Britain were the only single factors
in the process of Greek or British self-definition. I feel that this point has to be
closely re-examined through the whole of the thesis.
Britons used Greek politics and brigandage to discuss Irish disorder, Scottish
banditry, their colonial history and their social pathologies. This meant that Greek
affairs were of secondary importance and interest to them. ‘Modern Greece’
simply enabled British observers to reflect on themselves and their domestic and
imperial problems. Alternatively, Greek affairs provided them with a platform on
which they could explore Britain’s relationship with other powers, such as Russia
or the United States. In short, representations of ‘Greece’ in British narratives did
not always activate an actual dialogue between Britons and Greeks; on the
contrary, they reproduced a monologue of and on British power. This recurring
mono-logical 775 pattern was a feature of the British discourses on brigandage
(Part I of the thesis) and Greek nationalism/irredentism (Part III). However,
one discourse on Neohellenic identity would always creep into British reflections.
It was the same issue that troubled all Europeans and reflected the fear that after
four centuries of Ottoman rule the Hellenic flame could not revive in
contemporary Greeks.

775Note the Greek meaning of the word monologue from monos (μονός, single, one-sided) - logos
(λόγος, reasoning).

236
 Examining the importance of Britain for Neohellenic self-narration presents
us with a slightly different problematique, simply because Greeks could not ignore
British accusations and criticisms. For them the Anglo-Greek relationship was
definitely a relationship of power. It has to be noted, none the less, that Greek
apologies for the Kingdom’s shortcomings were most of the time addressed to an
imagined European interlocutor and not to ‘Britain’ in particular. In the Greek
imagination Britain belonged to a totality, the European community of nations. To
be more precise, although the Neohellenes did not ignore British criticisms, the
way that they received them shows that in their imagination Britons operated as the
spokesmen of ‘Europe’. Evidently, the East-West opposition that survived in Greek
culture over the centuries overdetermined Greek perceptions of any Western
European country; hence, Britain was to be conceptualised by Greeks through
Europe. Moreover, we must not forget that the institutionalisation of Greece was
the outcome of a collective European decision; three Great Powers, and not Britain
individually, were in charge of Greece’s progress. In addition, what the Greeks
identified as the European challenge — namely to become like their modern
ancestors — was not a question posed to them by Britain exclusively. However,
the question of ‘Ottomanism’ continuously figured in Greek narratives
irrespectively of the addressee’s identity.
It also has to be highlighted that the Greek and British narratives I explored
did not appear to be the product of Anglo-Greek relations (or the Anglo-Greek
relationship). Even changes in Greek narratives of brigandage and the Great Idea
should not be first and foremost attributed to British intervention but to Greek
internal debates and processes. Less space was devoted to these processes,
because the subject of the thesis was representations of Greece and Britain by
Britons and Greeks respectively. Because a historical thesis cannot disregard
change, some space had to be allocated to the ways these narratives evolved with
time. I performed this analysis in an idiosyncratic, but fruitful way: although I did
not always highlight changes in and diversions from the narratives I analysed
within the period of study, I often detected alterations in the narratives of my
period in relation to those of periods prior to 1864. This tension could be
attributed to the theoretical framework of the thesis, which accommodated both
structuralism and hermeneutics. I resolved this tension by shedding light on the
multiplicity of opinions. I did not hide from the reader that the voices of my
historical protagonists, who contributed to the formation of the narratives that I
examined, would often contradict each other; or, alternatively, that narratives
which retained their internal (structural) uniformity would change their function when
they would be addressed at different audiences.

The ‘grand’ European narrative of Neohellenic identity and the Greek ‘alterity’
If we were then to identify a single meta-narrative behind all the narratives that I
explored, we should choose that which presented the Neohellenes as half-
Europeans. In this grand narrative the Neohellenes were caught in between their
‘ancestral holiness’, which they could not re-acquire, and their
Byzantine/Ottoman character, which overdetermined their modern culture, but
which was the site of ‘pollution’ by Oriental vices.
Greek reaction to this Orientalist discourse was telling. As Michael Herzfeld
noted, Greek response to these tensions which the Europeans introduced in
Neohellenic culture was not the claiming of a direct identity with the ancients, but

237
of regeneration, ‘a metaphor for analogy between past and present’. 776 Analogy
would allow them to be different from both the Europeans and the ancient
Hellenes. Perhaps therefore Greek resistance is detected in the simultaneous
assertion of cultural continuity with the Hellenes and ‘difference’ from modern
European admirers.
It was not coincidental that in their counter-hegemonic discourse the
Neohellenes utilised the vocabulary of radical alterity: that of faith. We must
remember that in this conjunction Britain had assumed the double image of
evil/goodness in Greek culture. This image was the radical ‘other’ in the Greek
religious vocabulary. As an evil force Britain was acting invisibly and ‘insidiously’
behind the Greeks’ backs to mar the ‘nation’. The vocabulary the Greeks used to
describe ‘the British’ in this case was the anachronistic religious vocabulary which
they also employed to describe themselves as the ‘chosen nation’. At the same
time, however, they would recognise themselves as Europe’s apprentice, asserting
thus their loyalties to the project of modernisation/Europeanisation. In this
instance, they would use a secular language which matched that of their British or
European interlocutors, whether these were imagined or real. To be recognised as
modern Europeans by British observers, Greeks had to use and provide evidence:
to be docile and to re-establish order in their Kingdom. These two conflicting
imageries showed that although the Greeks were moving towards an
understanding and reception of modernity, they also sought for means which
would allow them to articulate their essential difference, if not uniqueness.
On this sorry tale we can base our understanding of what ‘what went wrong’
in the Anglo-Greek relationship. Because of Greece’s marginal position in
European culture, which was supposedly manifested in Greek disorderly and
‘transgressive’ behaviour, Britons considered the Neohellenes ‘tricksters’.
Dishonesty and fraud were seen in every single aspect of modern Greek life and
interaction on which Britons commented. This happened because in their
transactions with Britons the Neohellenes wanted and did not want to, could and
could not, be and behave like Europeans at the same time. The application of this
unacceptable ‘crooked’ behaviour to Anglo-Greek dealings also coincided with
British descriptions of the Neohellenes as xenilátes (ξενηλάτες), or
‘persecutors/haters of foreigners’, an attitude which originated in the Greeks’
presupposition that foreigners hated or despised them for what they were (see
Part III, chapter vi). This further worsened the British ability to understand that
what appeared as ‘Greek fraud’ reflected a Greek understanding of the rules
posed by the Europeans in their relationship with the Neohellenes. This idea of
‘taking the European cues’ and acting out as an intelligent interlocutor is what I
have called the ‘Neohellenic symbolic’ in Anglo-Greek relations – always bearing
in mind that the same behaviour may have been addressed also to a non-British,
European, audience. At the same time, however, there were British observers
who saw in that aspect of the ‘Greek character’ the potential for progress and
growth. Then the Greeks would be called ‘entrepreneurs,’ quick, versatile, bright
and resourceful.
If I were a nineteenth-century narrator, I would have likened this sort of
communication to a spurious friendship. But here there were more things at stake
than a simple friendship. By acting out the suggested role of an intelligent British
or indeed European ‘interlocutor’, Greeks may have wanted to avow their identity
as quick-witted entrepreneurs. This element of their ‘national character’ had a

776 Herzfeld, Anthropology, p. 110.

238
two-fold importance in Anglo-Greek and indeed European-Greek exchange: (a) it
had been identified by Europeans as something that bore the potential for
Neohellenic progress (b) in the Anglo-Greek relationship it allowed my Greek
protagonists to contest the European authority that the British represented. The
Greek peasants who sold marbles and coins to the ‘Anglous Lords’, the Greek
commentators who reminded ‘Britain’ or ‘Europe’ of their debt to Greece, the
amateur historians or journalists who invoked British or European philehellenic
sentiments and interests by making up Turkish plots against the ‘Greek nation’,
were all acting out what had been suggested to them as ‘efficient’ (e.g. at once
acceptable and effectual) attitudes toward their powerful protectors.
To construct these narratives, the Greeks utilised patterns and imageries that
were constitutive of their kosmotheoría (κοσμοθεωρία, from kósmos=world, and
theoró=stare, speculate), their ‘national outlook’; these imageries are what I have
called the ‘Neohellenic national imaginary’. The Vlachs/Albanians were indeed
seen as an ambiguous element in the identity of the ‘nation’; but to present them
as such to their British and European interlocutors was a good way for Greeks to
wash away the smear of brigandage. Selling coins was indeed profitable, and those
who could cheat on the buyer appeared as clever; but to sell coins to Britons, or,
inversely, to refuse their removal from Greece, was for the Greeks an action of
recognition of the value ‘the Lords’ assigned to these findings. To see themselves
as ‘God’s elected’, was part of their Self-narration; but when they addressed that
argument to ‘Britain’ or to ‘Europe’, what they had in mind was how to convince
British or other philhellenes that they had been elected by them as well. It was
unfortunate that the British observers missed the message and called this attitude
‘fraud’.
To blame the British side for harshness is only too easy, and I am not
interested in writing a polemic against Britain. What we witness here is the most
typical case of deception and self-deception predicated upon the way individuals
are brought up to see the world. The British felt deceived and betrayed when they
were treated like ‘fools’ by Greeks. They thought that Greek performance
mocked at their political generosity. There is no doubt that it aimed at taking
advantage of their role as ‘protectors’ of Greece, but the two are not identical. In
the Neohellenic mind all claims and means that the Greeks used to mobilise
British resources for their cause were legitimate and genuine, because they had
been suggested by relational experience with the Europeans. Their motive was to
become and be regarded as a respected, if ‘young’, member of the European
family, and not as a dubious or degenerate ‘beggar’ who bore the signs of Oriental
blemish. British disciplinary response was hurtful and infuriating. The constant
oscillation between lamentation and chastisement of British behaviour, and
reproduction of British stereotyping, made this performance constitutive of the
Neohellenic character. Regrettably this constant reiteration left the British no
choice but to become more adamant in their own attitude. Once again, they had
to play the part of the cruel patrons.
And yet, conflicts that originated in Greek and British interpretations of
British and Greek behaviour respectively were part of the process of
understanding the ‘other’. This ‘interpretative strife’ maintained an Anglo-Greek
dialogue, imagined or real. Observation and imagining is not what I called the
symbolic, but what activates the symbolic, the intersubjective constitution of
identity. British and Greek stereotypes of Greece and Britain respectively were
destined to be the tools of interpretation, to make the ‘other’s’ message more
comprehensible. But when the two observers are unequal many things can go

239
wrong. Because in cultures mutual interpretation though actual interaction is not
possible in the way that we experience it in everyday life, the whole process can
result in a psychotic game of monologue. In monologues one interprets the
actions of the ‘other’ in one’s own terms.

If only this was history…: an epilogue to a debate on human sciences

In the long days of writing this thesis, some of my interlocutors (historians by
profession) questioned the historicity of my approach. Although many disciplines
contributed to the outcome, I kept insisting that the thesis is historical. I found
out why when I was engaged in an argument with philosophers, who asked me
something which may sound ridiculous to historians, but which constitutes a great
theme in ethics and political philosophy: What about forgiveness? What about extending
justice to those who were harmed?
Only a blind historian would have failed to see that this question carries the
seeds of nationalist ritualism. Is it not, after all, enough in our discipline to
understand and interpret past actions? To answer the question at the time I
contrived a scenario based on a language game. In this scenario the Greek
response to the question of justice would be that what the nineteenth-century
Greeks did was θεμιτόν, which means fair before God. The Greeks’ vocabulary
would have invoked Thémis (Θέμις), the ancient Goddess of Justice. The British
side would have argued that Greek behaviour was impermissible or unacceptable,
using thus their secular(ised) modern vocabulary. If my reader had argued that
these two different modes of response present language and not human beings as
historical actors, I would have responded that language is the product of history,
and that in intercultural communication it can activate actual misfires. The Thémis
of my imagined Greeks represents in my metaphor the need for justice, for
understanding Greek actions in a specific national and cultural context. The
British idea of ‘permission’ is also intertwined with specific cultural practices
which may have been familiar to the Greeks but which contested their identity. It
is easy to conclude that if we had put these two imagined interlocutors together to
converse about justice, they would have needed something more than an
intelligent interpreter. Their cultural reasoning would have written history once
again. My somehow Aesopian conclusion is that this is the kind of history one
should apprehend. 777

777For the students of language (who may find the word ‘apprehend’ distasteful or inappropriate)
I note the following: (1) Apprehend in Victorian English: to fear (see ‘I very much apprehend’), as
in apprehension (modern meaning: fear, anxiety) (2) Apprehend in modern English: to grasp
(something) mentally; to arrest (and take into custody). Both meanings have their place in my
observation.

240
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