4: First Steps

4 First Steps

1833–1862

It was one of those winter days that in Greek are called ‘halcyon’. The sun was warm, the sea calm and intensely blue. Three thousand troops, mercenaries recruited from the German states, had already landed. More than seventy ships, of several nations, rode at anchor off Nafplio, their rigging decked out with flags. Cannonade after cannonade saluted the arrival of the young king-to-be. White smoke drifting from the guns obscured the distant view. The entire populace had come out to greet the new arrivals where they came ashore, near the prehistoric walls of Tiryns, and escort them into town. It was a scene of brilliant colour and noisy rejoicing, a triumphant end to twelve years of war. Tall and slim in his sky-blue uniform, escorted by mounted hussars, and followed by the three Bavarian regents who would hold power until he came of age, the seventeen-year-old Otto rode at the head of the procession.

All the political and military leaders of the Revolution were there to honour the occasion. Kolokotronis, in his flamboyant helmet, seemed to be looking away. Mavrokordatos, in top hat and thick spectacles, and Kolettis, in his red fez, had both half-turned to cast a look of quizzical awe upon the sovereign they would from now on be required to serve. These men, who had so recently shaped the future in this part of the world, had already begun to move on, yielding their places to the new men of destiny, while on the edge of the scene camels waited patiently to be loaded with their burdens. So, at any rate, the moment came to be depicted, very shortly afterwards, on a canvas more than four metres long and two high that hangs today in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich. The artist, Peter von Hess, had been one of the arriving party.

George Finlay, another eyewitness, devotes to the scene a rare lyrical passage in his History of the Greek Revolution. ‘The uniforms of many armies and navies, and the sounds of many languages, testified that most civilised nations had sent deputies to inaugurate the festival of the regeneration of Greece,’ he wrote almost thirty years afterwards. Finlay went on to recall, from that time, the ‘hope that a third Greece was emerging into life, which would again occupy a brilliant position in the world’s annals’. Writing in Greek, only a year after the event, and so without the benefit of hindsight, the young, European-educated Panagiotis Soutsos included his own evocation of the scene in the first novel to be published in the independent kingdom. His fictional hero then goes on to this passionate avowal:

O King of Greece! old Greece bequeathed the lights of learning to Germany; through you Germany has undertaken to repay the gift with interest, and will be grateful to you, seeing in you the one to resurrect the firstborn people of the earth.¹

The language of Europe’s indebtedness to Greece, which had begun with the European travellers of the previous century, had well and truly entered the modern Greek consciousness. It was there to stay. So was the idea that the future of Europe and the future of Greece were already intertwined. It was no more than a logical consequence of the way in which independence had been won. So too was the theme of ‘regeneration’ or ‘resurrection’ that dominates both these accounts.

Those Greek leaders who had ridden the tiger of revolution and survived had pulled off an extraordinary coup: to persuade three of the most conservative regimes in modern times that theirs was not a liberal, national revolution at all (which of course it was), but rather the restoration of an ancient status quo. It had worked. In the climate of ‘Restoration’ throughout Europe, the birth of an all-new Greek state could be made to look like the ultimate restoration – of something even older than any state that existed.

It was no such thing. With recognition of Greek independence in 1830, a new dynamic entered European geopolitics: that of the nation state. A year later would come recognition of the continent’s second, Belgium under King Leopold. The far-reaching effects of this change would not begin to become apparent until 1848, the year of revolutions across the continent. Only with the successful ‘unifications’ of Italy and Germany, during the 1860s, would the nation state begin to emerge as the new model, which would go on to sweep away the multi-national empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – and would still be proving its tenacity during the first decades of the twenty-first century.

Greece was the pioneer.

At the time, though, in the political climate of the early 1830s, the success of the entire project depended on playing this down. Indeed, so effective and so pervasive has been the official narrative that took root at this time, that historians of nation-building in Europe have yet to give the achievement of Greek independence in 1830 its proper due. They have not been helped by Greek historians, who until the late twentieth century would almost always prefer to present their country as a special case, uniquely ancient and therefore like no other. It was during the first twenty years of the life of the new kingdom that enduring concepts of the Greek state, and of the wider, harder-to-define Greek nation, would be hammered out. And they are still with us today.

UNDER WESTERN EYES

The choice of Otto of Bavaria to be the first king of Greece had been dictated largely, if not entirely, by considerations of Realpolitik. Chance played a part, too. The second son of Ludwig I happened to be available. The Bavarian royal house of Wittelsbach was free of close ties to any of the three rival powers that had undertaken to act as guarantors for the new kingdom. The choice could therefore be acceptable to all. No one seems to have given much thought to the personal qualities of the individual chosen. Otto has been described as ‘vainglorious, stubborn and frivolous’ in his youth, latterly as suffering from ‘incurable irresoluteness’.² Any other monarch appointed in these circumstances would have had no choice but to learn on the job, just as Otto would have to do. It remains an open question how far the political direction of the country he ruled for nearly thirty years was shaped by the character of its king. For all his faults, Otto fared a great deal better than Kapodistrias had done before him. There is no doubting the deep affection that he developed for his adopted country, whose national costume he would continue to wear, even in exile back in his native Bavaria, to the end of his life.

When the offer came, in 1832, there was one particularly compelling reason for the young prince to accept it – or, rather, for his father to accept on his behalf. Bavaria had been the only state in the world during the previous decade where philhellenism went right to the top of government and informed many aspects of state policy. The word itself meant originally ‘a love of anything Hellenic’. Before the Revolution it had been applied to those inspired by the ideas of Winckelmann. Philhellenism in Germany meant most of all an admiration for the achievements of classical Greece. And nowhere were those achievements more conspicuously admired than in the Bavarian capital, Munich – as is still apparent today, in many of the city’s monuments that date from the first half of the nineteenth century.

Ludwig took a personal interest in Otto’s kingdom. He it was who appointed the three regents (all Bavarians, naturally). Ludwig even intervened in practical decisions, such as the site for the royal palace in Athens. It was his decision that his son would rule without the benefit of a parliament or constitution. The terms of the 1832 treaty did not specify any limits to the monarch’s powers. Given the state of lawlessness and the impasse into which the political process had degenerated, Ludwig ensured that Otto would be adequately supported. Hence the three thousand German troops who paved the way for his arrival and would remain for several years afterwards. Hence a smaller army, too, of qualified advisers brought in to help set the country on its feet.

For most of its first decade the Greek kingdom would be governed more like a colony than the sovereign independent state described in the treaties. This aspect has been much discussed by historians, and indeed has left its mark in popular memory, which labels the period, more ruefully than affectionately, as the ‘Bavarocracy’. But the significance of these arrangements is more than just political. If it is in the nature of colonial rulers to impose something of their own upon the ruled, in this case that something was the German philhellenism that prevailed at Ludwig’s court in Munich. The first steps of the infant Greek nation state were taken under the care of a highly protective nanny, one who had modelled her own life on an idea of what her young charge ought to grow up to become. And of course, as the saying goes, ‘nanny knows best’.

Greece was to become Western, European, modern. But paradoxically, the way to achieve this was by turning backwards, to the remote past: ‘It was the ancients leading the moderns towards modernization.’³ Part of the price of becoming modern was that Greece and Greeks were now expected to live up to the narrative that had served them so well during the Revolution. The rulers and most of the elite among the ruled agreed on this. The new state must be in every possible way ‘Hellenic’. And we must remember that the adoption of this ancient name was itself a very new development, codified for the first time in the Provisional Constitution of 1822. Not only that, the new state must be in every way also ‘national’.

Nationalism as an ideology had become most fully developed and articulated in the German states during the Napoleonic Wars, when German speakers had been living under French rule. Most of the Bavarians who came to Greece in 1833 would have been brought up in this climate, whether or not they shared the aspiration for a united Germany. Here, in Greece, was the perfect opportunity to try out ideas that would have no place at home until three decades later. Once again, the infant Greek state was a pioneer – though the less happy metaphor of a ‘guinea pig’, frequently heard in the wake of the 2010 financial crisis, may also come to mind. If so, it has a long pedigree.

Even before Otto came of age, the Regency had laid the foundations for a national army, and for national administrative, judicial and education systems that reached, at least in theory, into every corner of the kingdom. There was to be a National Bank. A policy was developed for how to deal with the ‘national’ lands, which had formerly belonged to the Ottoman state or Muslim landowners. The national currency, the phoenix, which had been established by Kapodistrias, was renamed after an ancient Greek coin, the drachma.

Many of these initiatives, begun in the early years, would take decades to bring to fruition. Land distribution would not be completed until the early 1870s. It would take as long before the drachma would replace the traditional Ottoman coinage in daily use throughout the kingdom – another reminder that intentions are not the same as results. But the determination was there at the very beginning. And all of these nationalizing programmes would eventually be realized.

Highest priority of all was given to the national army. The purpose of investing so heavily in the military was not to protect the country’s external borders, since these were internationally guaranteed. The enemy was within. Like Kapodistrias before them, the Bavarians were determined to put an end to the local power bases of the warlords and irregular militias loyal only to their own leaders. In creating a national army they set about ensuring a monopoly on the use of force within the kingdom, perhaps the most essential of all the prerequisites for a modern, functioning state. This, too, would take many decades to bring to fruition. But it would not be long before the new national institution grew more powerful even than the Bavarian dynasty itself, and would eventually prove its undoing. Between 1843 and 1974 the army would repeatedly intervene in the political life of Greece. That is another legacy of the Bavarian decade.

Even the Orthodox Church was nationalized. The overwhelming majority of Greek citizens suddenly found themselves cut off from the rest of the ‘Orthodox commonwealth’. But in the eyes of the Bavarians – and of many Greek patriots too, such as Korais in Paris – the leadership of that commonwealth, and especially the Ecumenical Patriarchate with its seat in Constantinople, had become tainted by the loyalty it was obliged to maintain towards the hated Ottoman Empire. The measure would prove controversial. After all, it had been in the name of their religion that most of the fighters in the Revolution had risked their lives and taken part in the massacre and expulsion of Muslims. The formal rift between the ‘Autocephalous Church of Greece’, based in Athens, and the Patriarchate in Constantinople would last only until 1850. But even today the Archbishop of Athens and All Greece holds ecclesiastical authority over those parts of the country that comprised the kingdom in the nineteenth century, while the Patriarch retains jurisdiction over the rest. Church and state have never been fully separated in Greece. The identification between the two goes back to the Revolution. But it became institutionalized under the Bavarian Regency, with the creation of the ‘autocephalous’, national Church in 1833.

In no other sphere was the identity of the new kingdom given such visible and durable form as in the plans to develop Athens as its capital city. The decision to move the capital from Nafplio was taken in 1833. The last Ottoman troops in Athens had held on long enough in the fortified citadel of the Acropolis to surrender to the Bavarians rather than the Greeks, and had just been escorted over the frontier. The inauguration of the new capital took place in December the following year. The main part of the town was even more of a ruin than the ancient temples above it. Athens had been besieged and ransacked twice by Greek forces and once by the Ottomans in the course of the Revolution. To build a modern capital city here would be an extraordinary act of faith.

The new layout of the town plan and the scale of its public buildings were out of all proportion to the size or the resources of the little kingdom. Even though much would be watered down in the process of implementation, it is still impressive how much of that original ambition came through. The cityscape of the new capital would not be fully realized until the turn of the next century. But once again, and often literally, the foundations were laid during the first decade of Otto’s reign. It was not just a question of building. It was also about preservation. The whole rationale behind the choice of Athens as the capital lay in the pre-eminence of its monuments and the city’s role in the history of ancient Greek (and therefore also of all European) civilization. These ruins must become the focal point. Paradoxically, and exactly like the nation itself, Athens was to be at once a perfectly modern city and the reincarnation of its long-lost ancient glory. The preservation and the fullest possible display of everything that remained of that glory were therefore central to the new government’s plans.

To this end, new institutions implanted a newly coined word into the Greek language, and a new concept into the hearts and minds of citizens. The word was ‘archaeology’. Coined from Greek roots, meaning ‘the study of antiquity’, this term had only very recently entered the vocabulary of Western languages. Used in this sense, it was every bit as much a neologism in Greek. An ‘Archaeological Service’ was founded right at the beginning, in 1833. The next year saw the first of a series of ‘archaeological laws’ passed. The Athens Archaeological Society and the Archaeological Journal appeared on the scene in 1837. Archaeology was the new science that would provide the link between planning for the future and uncovering and exhibiting the ancient past. So far so good. But there was a casualty. The logic of a national revival, and of the seamless juxtaposition of the new and the ancient, was that all trace of human activity in the city over the intervening two thousand years must be expunged. Almost more breathtaking even than the programmes for preservation and for new building was the extent of the destruction that followed as a consequence.

It is often said that dozens of beautiful and historic Byzantine churches were levelled in the first years of the Greek state to make way for the new Athens city plan. The extent of the damage has been exaggerated: many ‘gems’, such as the Kapnikarea church in Ermou Street, would be reprieved. It was on the Acropolis itself that the most radical obliteration of ‘all the remnants of barbarism’ took place.⁴ Work began almost immediately after the transfer of the capital. What had been a crowded citadel, with streets, houses and gardens huddled against the ancient buildings, was cleared of everything that dated from later than Roman times. The ground was literally cleared down to the bedrock, on which visitors walk today, and which had probably never been fully exposed at any previous time in more than three millennia of human occupation. In 1843 the small mosque that been built inside the shell of the Parthenon disappeared. The most conspicuous landmark in Athens, the ‘Frankish’ tower built by Florentine dukes in the fourteenth century, lasted until 1874. The programme set in motion by the Bavarian architect Leo von Klenze, and enthusiastically endorsed by the leading Greek intellectuals of the day, had developed a momentum of its own. Photographs dating from the second half of the century show huge heaps of spoil banked against the southern walls of the Acropolis, where it had been cleared from the top and tipped over, to be carted away. Archaeologists today spend much of their lives sifting such evidence. But the legacy of the 1830s was to rid the city of everything that threatened the seamless juxtaposition of the very old with the very new.

Wide, straight boulevards were laid out. New buildings began to rise. First and largest was the royal palace. The foundation stone was laid in 1836. Massive, and compared by some to a barracks, Otto’s palace was completed in 1842. (Today the building houses the Greek Parliament.) It was followed in short order by Greece’s first and, for almost a century, only university – and an observatory. The priorities of the new state could not have been more eloquently set out. With the exception of the neo-Byzantine Orthodox cathedral, completed in 1862, all these public buildings would be designed in the classical style – and all, not excluding even the cathedral, by German-trained architects, most of them either German or Danish. Private dwellings followed this principle too, starting with the grandest of them all, built in 1842 across the square from the royal palace, which in due course would become the Grande Bretagne Hotel. On a more modest scale, ‘neoclassical’ dwellings would spring up in the centre of Athens and most provincial towns, to dominate the Greek urban landscape until the zealous march of concrete obliterated most of them between the 1950s and the 1970s.

Whether public or private, the design of these buildings revived the form of classical architecture. But they did so in the spirit of the Romantic-inspired Gothic Revival in other countries at the same time. This was a homage to the past that only superficially looked like the neoclassicism of the previous century in Europe. It was not that Greece lagged behind. The architects were perfectly well aware of the Romantic movement and its appeal to indigenous traditions. But in Greece the indigenous tradition was identified directly with the ancients – again, with nothing intervening allowed to obtrude. So it followed that the palace, the observatory, the Academy, the National Library, the national Parliament (in due course), the Archaeological Museum, the Polytechnic, the Athens Municipal Theatre, the Zappeion Exhibition Hall must all of them look like the temples that had once graced the landscape of ancient Greece.

Even the language of the new state underwent the same treatment. Here the obstacles were more formidable. Languages have a life of their own, in a way that buildings do not. The backlash would come later in the century. But during the first decades of the kingdom, no effort was spared to make the national language, in its written form, look as much as possible like its ancient predecessor, despite the many differences of vocabulary, grammar and syntax. There are also important differences in pronunciation, but these were never considered, because only the written form of the language was affected. There was no suggestion of reforming the writing system, which remained (and still remains largely today) the same as for ancient Greek. Just as in the buildings, it was the visual that counted. In this case, except at the very beginning, the architects were not Germans but European-educated Greeks.

The same law that in 1834 established seven years of compulsory schooling also stipulated that children must learn to read and write according to the rules of ancient, not modern, Greek. It quickly became fashionable in all walks of life, not just among the educated, to replace common words for everyday things, and everyday elements of grammar and syntax, with their ancient equivalents. Although it never became official policy in the nineteenth century, this was essentially the programme that had been advocated by Korais from Paris in the first years of the century, to ‘correct’ and ‘powder the face of’ a modern language that over the centuries had lost most of its ancient graces. Both in Korais’s theory and in daily usage, this was as cosmetic a procedure as it sounds – very much the equivalent of the practice of sticking ancient pediments on modern buildings, as the poet George Seferis was caustically to observe a century later.

By the 1850s, Panagiotis Soutsos, the novelist and poet who had extolled the arrival of Otto and the Bavarians, would go farther and announce the literal ‘resurrection of the ancient Greek language’. ‘The language of the ancient Greeks and ourselves will be one and the same,’ Soutsos proclaimed in a pamphlet of 1853; ‘their Grammar and ours will be one and the same.’⁵ That future tense perfectly captures the spirit of the times: tacitly conceding the opposite of what it seems to promise. Once again, the way to the future is by appearing to resuscitate a vanished past.

But this was to prove a revival too far. Korais himself had accepted that the resurrection of a dead language would be impossible. It was Korais’s piecemeal, cosmetic approach that would carry the day for most of the nineteenth century. Before long this hybrid written form (compared by Seferis to the ‘buildings of the Athens Academy’) would come to be known by the name katharevousa, which means literally a language ‘in the process of being cleaned up’.

All of these radical innovations were top-down. Most of them were started by the Bavarians, who had set out with the preconceptions of European philhellenes about ancient Greece and used them to lay the foundations of a functioning modern state. Those Greeks who supported them and carried them out had been educated in Europe. For them, no less than for the Bavarians, it was natural to see the new Greece as a Western country and to do everything in their power to make it at least look like one. Nation-building was essentially therefore state-building. The Greek nation would be defined by the Greek state.

But not everyone thought this way – or if they did, not all of the time.

EASTERN HORIZONS

The process of state-building initiated by the Bavarians was only ever one side of the coin. The state’s new institutions might be defined as ‘national’, but the nation itself was much harder to pin down. The borders of the state had been fixed, but they were also arbitrary. Until the last minute, before the 1832 settlement, it had been uncertain which Greek populations were to be included within them. Approximately three times as many people who could qualify to be called ‘Hellenes’, in terms of their language, religion, or both, lived outside those borders: in the Ionian islands to the west (still ruled as a protectorate by Great Britain), and in the Ottoman Empire to the north, south and especially to the east. It was inevitable that the establishment of the kingdom would be seen in many quarters as unfinished business. And indeed this view has prevailed in Greece ever since. A popular history of the Revolution written for children and published in 2013 has the subtitle: The Beginning that was Never Completed.⁶

During the Revolution there had been many who thought that the struggle must go on until the whole of the Greek-speaking, Orthodox world had been liberated. The historic capital of that world had for centuries been Constantinople. The name means ‘City of Constantine’, and has traditionally been abbreviated in Greek to ‘City’. Constantinople was (and remains) the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church. In the ‘Orthodox commonwealth’ of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there had only ever been the one ‘City’. Athens, with a pre-Revolution population of around twelve thousand, had never counted as one of its centres. No wonder that when the move of the national capital from Nafplio to Athens was first mooted in 1833, the veteran revolutionary leader Ioannis Kolettis objected on the grounds that the only possible capital for Greece would be Constantinople. For as long as that was not available, Kolettis protested, the state should have no capital at all. On the first occasion that the anniversary of the outbreak of the Revolution was celebrated in Athens, five years later, there were spontaneous cries from the crowd: ‘To the City!’

The long-term aspiration to win Constantinople goes back before the start of the Revolution in 1821. From as early as 1824 the rapidly expanding press in Greece would take up the cause.⁷ After 1833, those who were most discontented with the Westernizing rule of the Bavarians were the leaders of the so-called ‘Russian’ party, also known as ‘Napists’. Grouped around the veteran warlord Theodoros Kolokotronis and his son Gennaios, these were the inheritors of the ideal of self-sufficiency extolled in the songs of those mountain brigands and later guerrilla fighters, the klefts. This was the faction that most consistently looked to the east, both for protection by Russia and to expand the gains of the kingdom at the expense of the Ottoman Empire.

Right at the beginning, the new government determined to make an example of these dissidents. Kolokotronis and some of his associates were arrested just seven months after the arrival of the Bavarians. In 1834 they were subjected to a show trial and condemned to death. This was a risky procedure, as the condemned men were among the most widely revered heroes of the Revolution. Probably it had always been part of the plan that Otto would show clemency, as indeed he did after they had served a year in prison. At the same time, severe curbs were placed on what had initially been a free press. But beneath the show trial and the magnanimity of the pardon, which was in reality a show of strength, lay the fault line that had first opened up during the civil wars of ten years earlier. Kolokotronis and his associates had plotted treason against the dynasty. They had sought to mobilize a popular appeal to Russia to have Otto and the regents removed. They had stirred up brigandage in the countryside. This was a threat that the Bavarians had to face down, if they were to survive. But Kolokotronis had remained loyal to an idea of the nation that was defined primarily by the Orthodox religion and far transcended the bounds of the Greek state.

The arrest, trial and imprisonment of Kolokotronis showed up the fault line in its starkest form. But by no means all who shared these wider aspirations were opposed to the Bavarians or their state-building enterprise. In the same novel by Panagiotis Soutsos that includes the enthusiastic description of Otto’s arrival, a peasant states his simple faith in the powers of the new king: ‘the reach of his hand can stir into action the entire Hellenic race, from the Bosphorus to Crete, the nod of his head a signal for general revolution’. It was in this spirit, rather than one of antagonism, that the crowd celebrating the anniversary of the 1821 Revolution chanted the slogan, ‘To the City’. The next year, when Sultan Mahmud died, even Otto himself entertained a notion of taking ship for Constantinople to claim the throne as his successor – or so one account by a contemporary would have us believe.⁸

It was not long before an opportunity arose to test the possibilities for this way of thinking in the world of international politics. In 1839, Mahmud’s successor, Sultan Abdulmejid, faced a challenge from the Viceroy of Egypt, the same Ibrahim who had ravaged the Peloponnese and helped to subdue Missolonghi. For a time, Great Power diplomacy was in disarray. In Athens, secret societies sprang up, modelled on the Friendly Society that had helped trigger the Revolution. One of these was the work of ‘Napists’, who believed in closer ties to Russia and a more belligerent attitude towards the Ottoman Empire. Kolokotronis’s son Gennaios was among its leaders. The Philorthodox Society would quickly be discredited as being no more than another conspiracy to oust King Otto. Much about it remains mired in accusation and counter-accusation to this day. But there seems little doubt that the main purpose of the Philorthodox Society was to organize clandestine warfare in neighbouring Ottoman provinces, with a view to annexing them to Greece.

Soon afterwards, revolts broke out in Thessaly and in Crete. The Athens press showed a rare unity and despite severe curbs on its freedom agitated for war. For a short time in 1840 and 1841 it looked as if conditions might be right for Crete, at least, to be united with Greece. While the Great Powers disagreed among themselves, and the future of the Ottoman Empire remained in doubt, there might be room for even larger gains for Greece. Otto himself, caught wrong-footed at first, became an enthusiastic convert to the cause. Indeed this was one of the few occasions in his reign when the Bavarian monarch made himself genuinely popular among his subjects – at least if we may trust the evidence of a press whose circulation was tiny outside elite circles in the capital.

What happened next should have been a warning to Otto and his advisers. The crisis would be resolved, once again, far away in the capitals of Europe. By 1841 the Great Powers had lined up once more behind their old policy of maintaining the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. Otto was caught between two fires. The powers felt he had let them down by putting his own country’s interests ahead of the ‘Concert of Europe’. But at home, this was exactly what public opinion expected of him, and he had failed to deliver. It was time for a reckoning. Otto’s days as an absolute ruler, unfettered by a constitution or parliament, were numbered. The semi-colonial ‘Bavarocracy’ was about to give way to something more like home rule. And it was the instinctive pull of the young kingdom towards the east – towards the mother, if one may risk stretching the biographical parallel so far – that provoked the change.

It began as a financial crisis. With the settlement of 1832 had come a dowry, in the form of a new loan of sixty thousand francs, underwritten by the Great Powers. Service payments on the debt had been one of the largest items in the state budget ever since. Every year the state had been obliged to ask for an additional loan to meet them. In 1843, in the wake of the recent international crisis, the powers turned tough. Instead of agreeing a further loan to meet the shortfall, as they had done before, they reconvened the London conference that had guaranteed Greek independence in the first place. In desperation, Otto imposed austerity measures that were instantly and deeply resented. But the measures were still nowhere near enough. In the summer of 1843 the king was forced to agree to humiliating terms. Part of the country’s future tax revenue was to be appropriated by the creditors, to be paid directly to their agents in Athens. Further austerity to the tune of 3.5 million francs was to be imposed as well. Both the circumstances and the conditions are uncannily similar to those of the so-called ‘third bailout’ in July 2015 – when once again a Greek government would be obliged to surrender its fiscal autonomy to its European creditors.

In 1843 it was a way of showing that the Great Powers’ guarantee was for the kingdom, not for any particular king, if he failed to toe the line. It was now the turn of Otto’s internal enemies to strike. On the evening of 14 September, Dimitrios Kallergis, captain of the cavalry unit stationed in Athens, attended a performance of the recently premiered opera by Gaetano Donizetti, Lucrezia Borgia. (That was how ‘civilized’ Athens had become in the ten years since the arrival of the Bavarians.) Afterwards, the captain went to his barracks. ‘After a few moments of uncertainty, he stammered a few incoherent words, raised his sword, then shouted, “Long live the constitution.”’⁹ Cavalry and infantry marched together on the palace. Through a window they handed a set of demands to the king. It was a bloodless revolution. The demands had come from the politicians, who had been sidelined by Otto’s autocratic rule. But it was the military, the very force that the Bavarians had created as the instrument of their new order, that carried it out and ensured its success. Otto would keep his throne, for now. But it was the army and the politicians who dictated the terms. The decade of autocracy was at an end. Greece would have its first constitution since winning independence. According to some, the day after the coup (3 September in the calendar of the time) marked the true end of the Revolution. One of the main streets in central Athens still bears this date as its name. The open space in front of the palace, which until then had been known, rather charmingly, as the ‘Garden of the Muses’, would be renamed Syntagma, or Constitution, Square.

Elected representatives from all over the kingdom began arriving in Athens in November 1843. The work of drafting the constitution was completed by the end of March 1844. Of more lasting influence even than the changes to the way the country was governed was a single phrase, which came to be uttered during the course of these deliberations, and from then on would come to enshrine all the inchoate hopes, longings and aspirations that had been the flipside of state-building from the beginning: the ‘Grand Idea’.

The immediate context was a proposal to restrict full political rights to those who had been born within the kingdom. This would have been a further nationalization, along the lines of what had already happened to the Orthodox Church. Its effect would have been to narrow the definition of the nation even further within the limits of the state. Presiding over the Assembly was the now seventy-year-old Kolettis, who still wore the kilt of his native Epirot mountains, a region that remained under Ottoman rule. Along with his rival Mavrokordatos, who had been born in Constantinople, and many other prominent members, the Assembly’s president risked being excluded under this proposal. Kolettis was credited by contemporaries with an unerring instinct for the popular mood, and the skill to turn it to political advantage. During the Revolution he had been the principal architect of victory for the modernizers in the civil wars of 1824. He was still a formidable force, twenty years on.

In a speech delivered to the Assembly in January 1844, Kolettis began by invoking the oath that he and many others, no longer living, had sworn in the early days of the Revolution, ‘the oath in support of liberty for the fatherland, by which we swore to make every sacrifice, even of our very lives, for the liberty of Hellas’. He went on to define the place of the fatherland in the world of his day:

Through her geographical position Greece [Hellas] is the centre of Europe; standing with the East to her right, and to her left the West, she is destined to enlighten, through her decline and fall, the West, but through her regeneration the East. The first of these missions was accomplished by our forefathers, the second is now assigned to us.

This was a reassertion of the international dimension of the Greek struggle. Far from being alone in the world, Greece was its very centre. Kolettis continued:

… in the spirit of this oath and of this grand idea, I have been observing the plenipotentiaries of the nation come together to decide no longer just the fate of Hellas but of the Hellenic race.¹⁰

Far from defining the nation by the borders of the state, Kolettis was drawing upon the nationalist language of the day, to lay claim to an ethnic, race-based identity. That much is clear. What is less clear is how, exactly, this identity connects with the phrase, left oddly hanging in the air, ‘this grand idea’.

The same words occur again a few lines later, this time to deplore ‘how far we have diverged from that grand idea of the fatherland, which we saw first expressed in the song of Rigas’. This was a reference to the ‘Battle Hymn’, the only part of Rigas’s doomed political programme that had been widely disseminated. Today we know a good deal more about the content of that programme than Kolettis or his contemporaries could have done. The ‘Hymn’ does not in fact set out any clear ‘idea of the fatherland’ at all. But it is addressed to all the diverse populations of the Ottoman Empire. The geographical reach of Rigas’s ‘Hymn’ goes all the way from Belgrade to Egypt. Rigas had of course not been promoting the cause of any one ethnic or racial group, quite the reverse. But in the new world of the 1840s this could easily be ignored. After all, Rigas had apparently been calling for the liberation of the entire empire ruled from Constantinople. This, too, would become attached to the meaning of the ‘grand idea’.

Within a very short time the ‘Grand Idea’, now usually embellished with capital letters, would come to stand for a whole new mission: not merely to ‘civilize’ the East but to extend the borders of the state to encompass all the members of the nation, wherever they might be found. By the end of the 1840s so powerful had this sense of mission become that a new political line-up began to emerge. The declining and never institutionalized ‘English’, ‘French’ and ‘Russian’ parties were being subsumed into a new binary opposition: not between those for and against the Grand Idea itself, but rather between competing policies for achieving it. Mavrokordatos would become the first of a series of leaders over the next eight decades to advocate a ‘softly-softly’ approach, consolidating gains already made and working through diplomatic means to expand the kingdom in the long term. Kolettis, who served as the first prime minister to be elected under the Constitution of 1844, would come to be identified with a more gung-ho attitude, though his speech to the Assembly had been carefully couched.

From the death of Kolettis in 1847 until the early 1920s the ‘Grand Idea’ would be shorthand for a programme of national expansion. Horizons were opening up towards the East. Why should not the young Greek kingdom grow up to become an empire like its ancestor the Byzantine, an eastern Christian power with its capital at Constantinople?

A NEW NARRATIVE FOR THE NATION

By the early 1850s, the Western-oriented Greek state was becoming harder than ever to reconcile with a more widely diffused Greek nation, most of it still subject to the Ottomans, and whose heartland belonged to the East. The state had been built on a narrative of revival that brushed aside more than two thousand years of intervening history. The nation had not yet established a clear narrative or a political programme at all.

The project started by the Bavarians had already come under attack – ironically enough, from within Bavaria itself. In 1830, the year when Greek independence was first guaranteed by the powers, and well before a Bavarian had been named as the country’s first king, a young Austrian schoolteacher named Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer published in Munich the first volume of a study entitled History of the Morea Peninsula during the Middle Ages. Volume 2 would complete the story six years later. This was forensic history, written with a political agenda. Fallmerayer’s target was not directly Greece itself, which barely existed in the 1820s when he had embarked on his work. What had aroused his ire was the climate of philhellenism that prevailed everywhere in his adopted country of Bavaria. Philhellenism, Fallmerayer set out to prove, was based on a false premise. Every trace of the spirit of ancient Greece, every drop of blood of the ancient Greeks, had been wiped out by successive conquerors of the Peloponnese over the centuries: Romans, Goths, Slavs, Albanians. A revival or resurrection was therefore a logical impossibility, because there was nothing left to revive.

Fallmerayer’s thesis is unprovable and in any case irrelevant, since nobody nowadays thinks that culture is determined by race. But his broadside did highlight a vulnerable spot in the national narrative. It was all very well to celebrate the ‘revival’, ‘regeneration’ or ‘resurrection’ of the long-lost civilization of the ancients, even to design a capital city as its visual representation. But sooner or later those with a historical cast of mind were bound to ask: yes, but what happened in between? After all, according to most histories published during the first half of the nineteenth century, including Greek ones, the glorious era of classical civilization had ended when Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, defeated an alliance of the Greek city states at the battle of Chaeronea in Boeotia. This had been back in 338 BCE. The gap from there to the outbreak of the Greek Revolution in 1821 was a long one. It would need some explaining.

Other historians found less contentious ways to tell the story.¹¹ But the gap once opened up could not be closed again – even if the building and landscaping programme for Athens, or plans for language reform, carried on blithely oblivious. By the start of the 1850s, the new nation and the new state were in need of a national history of their own. It was not just the ‘missing’ centuries that had to be bridged, but the ever more apparent lack of fit between the two components of national identity: nation and state. The gap was not just historical, it was geographical and conceptual: between 338 BCE and 1821 CE, between Athens and Constantinople, between two different ways of thinking about what it meant to be Greek.

The challenge was taken up by two men of intellect who came from opposite ends of the old ‘Orthodox commonwealth’. Spyridon Zambelios was an aristocrat from Lefkada in the Ionian islands. Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos had been born in Constantinople. Those of his family who had survived the Ottoman reprisals of 1821 had found refuge in Russia and wound up in Athens after independence. Born in the same year, 1815, both men had studied and travelled in western Europe in their youth. Zambelios, with the advantages of his class, would establish himself in the mid-1840s as amateur philosopher, historian, folklorist and novelist in Corfu, still the capital of the British protectorate of the Ionian islands. Paparrigopoulos had to earn his living, first as a schoolteacher and then, from 1851 until his death forty years later, as Professor of History at the University of Athens.

The new history emerged, without warning, almost fully formed. It was Zambelios who took the decisive step. His purpose, he declared in a book of over seven hundred pages published in Corfu in 1852, was ‘to touch upon that obscure and unexplored period, during which civilization’s most chosen race mysteriously passes from its ancient to its modern stage of liberty’. This was, for the first time, to tackle the ‘missing’ centuries head on. There were two ways to do it. Zambelios’s book has as its main title Folk Songs of Greece. The oral traditions of the common people, largely overlooked by Greeks until now but already the subject of much scholarly activity elsewhere in Europe, would provide one avenue. A collection of songs transcribed from the oral tradition makes up the book’s final part. The other avenue, which takes up proportionately far more space, announces itself as a ‘Historical Study concerning Medieval Hellenism’. Together, the unofficial, popular record preserved in the oral tradition of the songs and the recorded history of the Byzantine centuries would fill the gap.¹²

Greek historical thinking had all of a sudden moved on. The established narrative of the sudden rebirth of ‘Hellas’ was beginning to be overlaid by the longue durée of what Zambelios termed ‘Hellenism’. This is another of those words, like ‘archaeology’, that look ancient but were actually new at this time, at least with the meanings they have since acquired. Hellenismus had recently begun to appear in German history-writing. Zambelios was the first to apply the term systematically to an overarching concept of identity based on the continuity of the Greek language. Today, in Greek, ‘Hellenism’ is defined as ‘the totality of Greeks living throughout the world, the Greek nation’ or ‘Greek civilization and the totality of Greeks as bearers of that civilization’.¹³ Zambelios was the first to divide the history of newly named Hellenism into three periods: ancient, medieval and modern. Christianity, he declared, had ‘become a component of Hellenism’. The ‘medieval Hellenism’ that had resulted was as much a constituent part of the identity of the modern Greek as his ancient birthright: ‘We, like it or not, are children of the Middle Ages … [W]e cannot lay down that eastern character that links us with the Byzantine Middle Ages’.¹⁴ It was the beginning of a far-reaching synthesis.

Paparrigopoulos, the professional historian, had published history books already – the first of them, indeed, a response to Fallmerayer. But it was only after reading Zambelios’s book that his own ideas changed radically. The very next year Paparrigopoulos brought out a much slimmer volume, disarmingly entitled History of the Greek Nation, from the Most Ancient Times until Today, for the Instruction of Children. Essentially, the story that Paparrigopoulos now told for the first time, and in only two hundred and thirty pages of large type, followed the lines that Zambelios had set out more elaborately the year before. The difference was that Paparrigopoulos took the proposition to its logical conclusion: he told the story from beginning to end (and left out the folklore – he was a professional, after all). Avoiding, for the time being, the more abstract-sounding ‘Hellenism’, Paparrigopoulos told the story of the Greek nation. And he defined his subject too, succinctly, on the very first page: ‘The Greek nation is the name for all those people who speak the Greek language as their own tongue.’¹⁵

This was the narrative that would later be elaborated into a five-volume work with the same title, which would appear between 1860 and 1874. No longer a children’s book, this was still accessible, narrative history addressed to the widest possible readership, uncluttered by information on sources or abstruse points of academic debate. The five volumes consolidate and carry forward the new thinking that had emerged in the early 1850s. Paparrigopoulos was the first Greek historian to mobilize another new concept that had developed in German history-writing in recent decades. ‘Historicism’ defines history as process. The theory of evolution had not yet been born, but German historicism intellectually belongs to the same stable: everything that happens in history is part of a continuously evolving pattern of change. It was Paparrigopoulos’s unique achievement to tell the story of the Greek ‘nation’ as the continuous narrative of a continuous process of historical development. His History is a systematic application of the new horizons of historicism to the historical record preserved in the Greek language over three millennia. Deservedly, it has been hailed by one modern historian of ideas as ‘the most important intellectual achievement of nineteenth-century Greece’.¹⁶

In the new scheme of things, ‘revival’ was replaced by ‘continuity’. The newly reclaimed centuries, and particularly the millennium that had been dominated by the Greek-speaking emperors of Byzantium, far from an embarrassing lacuna to be glossed over, now became the formative stages of a centuries-long process that had finally been vindicated by the Revolution of 1821 and the establishment of the new kingdom.

Everything else followed from that simple definition on the first page of Paparrigopoulos’s book for children in 1853. If language is indeed the sole defining condition for the nation, then it must follow that the Greek nation is as old as the language. And so was born the compelling and durable narrative of a long-lived nation struggling to achieve its ordained purpose through the flux of historical change, sometimes triumphant as in the classical period and the Revolution of the 1820s, more often a victim of others’ triumphs, but always holding on to a fundamental ‘national character’ that would be progressively refined in the crucible of history. It was a bold and moving concept. It chimed with the way in which national histories were being written in other parts of Europe. And by the time the main part of the work was finished in 1874, it would have turned into the necessary intellectual underpinning for the Grand Idea. The state was no longer at odds with the claims of the nation: it existed to serve them. The Greek state was finding its place in a historical scheme of things that was infinitely older, and had a far wider geographical reach. It was acquiring a destiny beyond its current borders, which would encompass all the Greek-speaking populations of the Ottoman Empire.

By that time, there would be a new dynasty on the throne and the history of the young kingdom would have embarked on its next phase. But first we must return to the 1850s, to see how that story ended.

REALITY CHECK

The Protocol of London, back in 1830, had promised the Greek state nothing less than ‘complete independence’. Its first decade, under the tutelage of the Bavarians, had not felt much like that. Bavarian influence had ended with the putsch of 1843. With the exception of the king himself, his immediate family and a few close associates, the remaining Bavarians had been sent home. But if nanny had been sacked, the parents – that is to say, the Great Powers – became more watchful than ever. Events of the early 1840s should have been a warning to Otto and his ministers. Worse lay in store for them.

Before another opportunity could arise to test the limits of the Grand Idea in practice, Otto’s nationalism collided with that of another famous and much more powerful advocate of the doctrine, the British Foreign Secretary, Viscount Palmerston. The inventor of ‘gunboat diplomacy’, and the determined enforcer of the rights and freedoms of British subjects around the world, Palmerston was more than a match for the little kingdom. Otto and the British Minister in Athens cordially loathed one another. Individual Britons, including the Minister himself, had been cavalierly treated. By 1850 several complainants had gained the attention of the Foreign Office in London. One of those was George Finlay, the historian, part of whose land had been expropriated without compensation to make way for the new Royal Garden (now the National Garden), next to the palace.

The issue that finally provoked the British government to action was the attack on the house of a Jewish merchant during the Easter celebrations in 1847. Don Pacifico had been born in Gibraltar and so was entitled to the protection of the British Crown. After claims for compensation had been ignored for more than two years, Palmerston ordered the Royal Navy into action. In January 1850 the port of Piraeus was blockaded. When Greek captains refused to abide by the blockade, several ships were seized by force. The standoff lasted for four months, until French mediation brought about a settlement.

The ‘Don Pacifico affair’, as it has been known ever since, was the sharpest humiliation yet for the Greek kingdom. Otto and his ministers had relied once again on the competing interests of the Great Powers to work to their country’s advantage. But this was a new situation, when one of the powers was prepared to act unilaterally to defend what it saw as its own interests. The affair set an ugly precedent. No less ugly was the element of latent anti-semitism that the attack on Pacifico’s house had brought to the surface, giving the lie to the generalization sometimes heard that there is no anti-semitic tradition in Greece. There would be repercussions in Britain, too. Called to account by Parliament, Palmerston would give his most eloquent and fullest defence of the principles that had informed his action. Not everyone at home was impressed. The British satirical magazine Punch carried cartoons showing Greece as the underdog, one of them with the caption, ‘Why don’t you hit one of your size?’¹⁷ The Don Pacifico affair took place midway between the two ‘opium wars’ against China in the 1830s and the 1850s. It could be that Greece got off relatively lightly – saved by its small size from a fate even worse.

Memories of this episode were still fresh three years later when a new international crisis erupted in the Levant. This one began as a dispute between Russia and France over the guardianship of the holy places in Jerusalem. Since Jerusalem was part of the Ottoman Empire, it was the Ottoman government that had to adjudicate. When the Sultan came down on the side of France, the signal was given for yet another in the long-running series of wars between the two empires, the Russian and the Ottoman. War was declared in October 1853. For Otto, and for many in the Greek government and the press, this was the ideal opportunity. The last time these rivals had gone to war, Greece had benefited greatly from the terms of peace. That had been in 1829. Now independent, what could be more natural than for Greece to pledge its support for Russia against their common enemy? Once again, there ought to be rewards if the right side won.

By the end of 1853, Greek irregular bands had crossed into Ottoman-controlled territory north of the frontier. In a re-run of what had happened during the crisis of the early 1840s, revolts broke out in Epiros to the north and Crete to the south, in both cases backed by Athens. But this was to reckon without the other two guarantor powers. France was by this time well launched into its ‘Second Empire’, under Napoleon III. In Great Britain, Palmerston’s party, the Whigs, were still in power. Britain and France together determined that Russia must not be allowed to dismember the Ottoman Empire – now for the first time dubbed ‘the sick man of Europe’. Back in the 1820s, Mavrokordatos had tried to persuade a British Foreign Secretary that a strong and independent Greece would be the best solution to the ‘Eastern Question’, standing between a crumbling Ottoman Empire and Russian expansionist ambitions. In 1829 the Duke of Wellington had come close to wishing that solution into being. But times had changed. The preferred solution to the ‘Eastern Question’ was once again what it had been all along: to keep the ‘sick man’ alive. It was the only way to preserve peace in Europe – even when, in this case, it meant going to war with another European power to preserve it.

Britain and France joined the war on the Ottoman side in the spring of 1854, and shortly afterwards sent troops to land in the Crimea. This was where most of the fighting would take place. In Greece, the diplomatic representatives of the two powers had already demanded that Otto declare neutrality and withdraw all Greek irregulars from Ottoman territory. When Otto refused, a joint British and French naval squadron was despatched to Piraeus, to protect the Ottomans’ flank. Once again the chief port of Greece was blockaded. This time the port itself was occupied too. Otto was left with no choice but to back down. In the aftermath, it fell to the hapless Mavrokordatos, the most moderate and diplomatically able of the political leaders available, to form a government and enforce a deeply resented neutrality.

This time the humiliation was complete. There were no saving graces. To compound matters, the occupiers justified their actions under the terms of the 1832 treaty of guarantee. This authorized the guarantor powers to intervene to ensure the annual service payments and secure the capital of the loan of sixty thousand francs that had come with the guarantee. The threat to sequester part of the revenues of the Greek state in 1843 had never been implemented. Now it was – to justify what would otherwise have been, in legal terms, an act of aggression. The financial state of the kingdom had not improved in the meantime. The measures had the effect of rubbing the offending youngster’s nose in the consequences of its own precocity: how could a state that had never yet balanced its books possibly be allowed to raise an army or fight to extend its borders?

The Crimean War ended in exhaustion in March 1856. Russia was marginally the loser. The Treaty of Paris affirmed the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire. For Greeks, it looked as though the Grand Idea was off the agenda for the foreseeable future. Britain and France kept up their blockade and occupation of Piraeus for a full further year, until a Control Commission had been put in place to oversee the latest rescheduling of Greece’s debt. By the time the blockade was lifted, Otto’s reputation in the eyes of his subjects was in tatters.

It was not Otto’s fault. It is difficult to see what any Greek government could have done, caught between a groundswell of public opinion at home and the exercise of force majeure by two of the guarantor powers – whose own policies in the Crimean War have not stood up well to the judgement of history either. There were many reasons for what happened next. This was only one of them.

Otto had married Amalia of Oldenburg on a trip back to Germany in 1836. Twenty years later it was evident that the couple would have no children. There would be no successors to ‘Otto I’ in a direct line. Then there was religion. Otto was Catholic, his queen Lutheran. Both had willingly embraced many of the habits of their adopted country, including its language and style of dress. But neither of them was prepared to convert to Orthodoxy. The fact that the titular head of the Orthodox Church in Greece belonged to the rival and traditionally distrusted branch of Christianity was a constant source of dissatisfaction in many quarters. It was a particular provocation to the pro-Russian ‘Napists’, the very group that had most to smart about, during the Crimean War and after.

Then, in 1859, came a new threat to the ‘Concert of Europe’, one that would soon prove fatal. It was the turn of another small kingdom in southern Europe to take on the mighty – and this time to prevail. The Kingdom of Sardinia and Piedmont became the spearhead of the long-simmering movement for the unification of Italy into a new nation state. The name for this movement, ‘Risorgimento’, means ‘revival’. This time, it was a different ancient civilization that was to be revived – the empire of Rome. One of the movement’s ideological leaders, Giuseppe Mazzini, had studied and admired the ‘revival’ of Greece in his youth. The Italians were rewarded with French support at a crucial early stage of their struggle, earned through the canny alignment of the Sardinian kingdom during the Crimean War. The Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in Turin, the capital of Piedmont, in 1861. But this was explicitly a provisional solution. The nation’s true capital was declared to be Rome. It would take another ten years before that declaration could become a reality, and Italian unification complete. But already the parallel with the Greek case was glaring for any Greek who had sufficient education to read a newspaper. The Italians, by 1861, had reached much the same point as the Greeks had done back in 1833. The new Kingdom of Italy, just like theirs, had set its sights on an ancient imperial city for its future capital – after all, for a thousand years, had not Constantinople been known as the ‘New Rome’? And no one seemed to be preventing them. Why could not Greece do the same?

This was the opportunity that might just have saved Otto his throne. There was little enough that impoverished Greece could have done to help the Italians – though individual volunteers did take part, just as Italians had done in Greece in the 1820s. But Otto’s family, the Wittelsbachs, had close ties to Austria. And it was against the rule of Austria, imposed over much of northern Italy since 1815, that the battles of the Risorgimento were being won. When the crucial test came, the Greek royal government threw its support behind Austria, when it could once and for all have proclaimed its own revolutionary credentials and a common purpose shared with the architects of a united Italy. The 1860s were to become the decade of the two great ‘unification’ movements that together would mark the turning point between the old Europe of multi-ethnic empires and the post-1918 continent of nation states that we know today. Otto could have led the Greeks to claim their share of ownership in this project, whose day was about to dawn. They had been the pioneers, after all. Of all the mistakes of a troubled reign, this was perhaps the greatest.

As always, there were more immediate flashpoints, too. Even after the constitution had come into force in 1844, Otto had never lost his taste for absolutist government. There was widespread interference and intimidation in the parliamentary elections of 1859. Unrest among students at the University of Athens, that summer, marked the entry into politics of a force that every succeeding generation of Greek politicians would have to reckon with. By the first months of 1861, Otto’s refusal to accept even modest reforms had the effect of bringing together almost the entire governing class against him. In February, a disaffected university student, a fervent supporter of the Grand Idea, narrowly failed to assassinate Queen Amalia.

Early in 1862 rioting broke out in a barracks in Nafplio. The political climate was deteriorating. In the autumn the king and queen set out in their yacht for a tour of the Peloponnese. The aim was to show themselves to their people and take the temperature of public opinion. While they were gone, several provincial garrisons revolted. The coup de grâce came on 22 October. Just as had happened back in 1843, it was the national army, recruited and drilled in discipline by the Bavarians, that rebelled against the Bavarian sovereign. This time, it was not the generals but middle-ranking officers who took the lead. That, too, was to set a precedent for the future. The next day a new ‘revolutionary government’ was proclaimed in Athens. When the king and queen sailed back into Piraeus, they were tactfully intercepted by a British warship. None of the three guarantor powers would support the king’s right to his throne any longer. Otto left Greece as he had arrived, as the guest of the British Royal Navy.

Greece, according to Otto’s British nemesis, Lord Palmerston, had ‘come of age’.¹⁸

Palmerston’s verdict may have been premature. But what had been achieved in almost exactly thirty years? Evidence for attitudes at the time is oddly mixed. Many of the initiatives of the 1830s were still forging ahead at the time of Otto’s expulsion. Centralized political and administrative institutions, many of them still incomplete, would continue to be consolidated over the following decades. But politically, Otto had been an anachronism, just as Kapodistrias had been before him. The role of enlightened despot ruling over a small and not fully independent state, to which German princes had become accustomed during the preceding centuries, had been coming under pressure in the German states, even in 1833. Thirty years later, the descendants of those princes were being rolled up into the new Reich, another nation state in all but name. In Greece, the progressive politics that had been marked out by the first Provisional Constitution of 1822 had effectively been put on hold from the arrival of Kapodistrias in 1828 until now. That would be an important task for the next dynasty to make good.

Change in Greece had been fundamental and irreversible – at least in Athens and the larger towns. But for the great majority, in villages scattered over mountain valleys and islands, life had still probably changed very little. It was, inevitably, the elites that were driving the forces of change, and themselves changing with them.

Among those elites, by the early 1860s, dogged optimism went hand in hand with an almost mystical hope for a better future. The Grand Idea provided a focus for those hopes. But alongside them went an undercurrent of public disillusion, sarcasm and on occasion even self-disgust. Newspaper editorials from the last months of Otto’s reign catch this new mood:

Greece herself, of which the European world had dreamed as the unifying centre between the East and the civilization of the West, has today become so degraded as to be considered a burden by the European world, as an obstacle to the future of the East.

The same newspaper even considered that the nation, in its ‘progress towards civilization’ since the Revolution, had managed to lose ‘a large part of the advantages it had possessed before’. This sort of self-lacerating gloom was not just a passing phenomenon. A full decade later an assessment of yet another ‘crisis’ would starkly sum up the mood, which had still not lifted: ‘Greece since her liberation has achieved nothing worthy of note.’¹⁹

One of the underlying causes of this soul-searching, though it does not emerge explicitly from these diatribes, was that all this time, while the young Greek kingdom had been taking its first steps, its old rival the Ottoman Empire had not stood still. Beginning in 1839, and followed up in 1856, the reforms known collectively as Tanzimat (‘reorganization’) had guaranteed new political and legal rights to non-Muslim subjects of the empire. In its own way the ‘sick man of Europe’ was modernizing too. These reforms had a far more immediate impact on the lives of the three-to-one majority of Orthodox Greek speakers who were still subject to the Ottomans than anything said or done in the kingdom, or in the name of the Grand Idea. By the 1850s the Phanariot class, which had been all but extinguished in the paroxysm of reprisals that took place in 1821, had found its way back to something like its former favour. Orthodox Christians could once again occupy high positions in the reformist Turkey of Sultan Abdulmejid.

The greatest failure of Otto’s Greece, wrote George Finlay shortly before the king’s expulsion, was that the aftermath of the Revolution had ‘not created a growing population and an expanding nation … [N]o stream of Greek emigrants flows from the millions who live enslaved in Turkey, to enjoy liberty by settling in liberated Greece.’²⁰ Instead, citizens of the kingdom would still often leave to seek their fortunes in the modernizing and growing cities of the Ottoman Empire: Constantinople, Smyrna, Salonica. It would not be until the 1870s that the conurbation consisting of Athens and the port city of Piraeus would begin to experience comparable growth.

In October 1862, Greece was once again leaderless. Another breakdown of civil order, like the one that had followed the assassination of Kapodistrias, seemed all too likely. Thanks to a new historical narrative, and the popular appeal of the Grand Idea, the nation was rapidly acquiring a new past. But what about its future? In the race to ‘modernize’ (that is, to become more like western Europe), there was no telling which would get there first: the ageing ‘sick man of Europe’ or the new ‘model kingdom in the East’, as Greece was about to be dubbed by its next king-to-be.²¹