Who are the Greeks? What shared experiences, collective memories, aspirations and achievements have shaped a worldwide population of some fifteen million people today? Most of these live in the southeast corner of Europe in two member states of the European Union, Greece and Cyprus, while communities can also be found in all the earth’s inhabited continents and are known as the ‘Greek diaspora’.
There have been many books asking the question, who were the Greeks? That is a question that has preoccupied western European thinkers ever since the Renaissance, when scholars and travellers began to rediscover the literary, philosophical, political and scientific achievements of the civilization that had flourished in the same corner of Europe between three thousand and two thousand years ago. It is an important question, because just about everything that defines ‘European’ or ‘Western’ culture today, in the arts, sciences, social sciences and politics, has been built upon foundations laid down by the makers of that ancient civilization, whom we also know as ‘Greeks’.
Those long-dead Greeks play a part in this story too, but it is not their story. This book begins and ends with the Greek people of today. It explores the ways in which today’s Greeks have become who they are, the dilemmas they and generations before them have faced, and the choices that have shaped them subsequently. Above all, this book is about the evolving process of collective identity. In the case of Greeks over the last two centuries, it makes sense to call that identity a national one, since this has been the period that witnessed the creation and consolidation of the Greek nation state. So let us begin with the nation.
Opinions are divided on just what constitutes a nation. Since the late twentieth century an influential trend in historical thinking has redefined the nation as by definition a modern phenomenon, a product of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. According to this view, you cannot have a nation without modern ideas of the self-governing state in which most of its citizens voluntarily participate. Others have revived the older counter-argument: that communities based upon more or less ‘ethnic’ lines have always existed in human society – in which case, why should not these, too, be called nations?
The case of the Greek nation polarizes opinion even more than most. According to the first definition, the Greek nation as we know it today, based upon a geographical homeland, shared institutions and participatory democracy, was brought into being by a revolution against the rule of the Ottoman Turks in the 1820s. On the other hand, the Greek language enjoys a continuous recorded history that can be traced back in the geographical area of today’s Greece for more than three thousand years. Is not the story of the Greek nation, then, every bit as old?
Either perspective is valid. But the story I have set out to tell in this book is the story of Greece as a modern nation. I have chosen, therefore, to understand the term in its narrower, more rigorous sense, and so to begin the narrative with the century that led up to that nation’s birth.
Another choice has been to imagine this modern nation as though it were a living person, the subject of a biography. The life of a nation and the lives of individuals present fascinating, perhaps even illuminating, analogies – notably the ideas that bind a nation together are more often than not themselves based on organic metaphors. Let us then suspend disbelief and concede – hypothetically, experimentally – that the Greek nation ‘born’ out of revolution in the 1820s shares some of the characteristics of a human subject. We can trace the history of that subject just as a biography teases out the life and career of an individual.
A nation, just like an individual, has distant ancestors and a more immediately traceable genealogy, or family tree. In the life of nations, Greece, born in this sense in the early nineteenth century, must be considered still a youngster. And there is one characteristic of biography, as a genre, that in this case we can happily escape. A nation in the fullness of time may evolve into something else, but there is no reason to expect the story to end in death. All will surely agree on this in the case of Greece. No obituary is to be expected. The biographer is spared the dubious benefit of looking back on a life complete and ended. Think of this book, in this respect at least, as more like a ‘celebrity’ biography that leaves its subject still in the prime of life and fame. The story does not end with the end of the book.
But first, we need to begin at the beginning, with ancestors, and the complex inheritance that issues from them.
None of us knows who our most distant ancestors were. If all modern humans are descended from groups that began to migrate out of Africa more than fifty thousand years ago, then the Greeks must be no exception. Future advances in genetics may reveal to what extent those who speak the Greek language today share genetic material with the builders of the ‘classical’ civilization of antiquity. In terms of understanding the history of the Greeks in modern times, it really doesn’t matter. History on the scale of a few millennia is shaped by such things as environment, actions, events and ideas, not evolutionary biology. What is at stake here is not the literal, biological ancestry of the individuals who make up a population – even if those are the terms in which it is most often expressed – but rather the ‘ancestry’, in a partly metaphorical sense, of a nation, a state or that complex phenomenon that we call a culture. It is doubtful whether ancient Greek civilization can properly be called a nation, and it certainly was never a state. Nevertheless, Greeks experience a sense of kinship with those they call ‘our ancient ancestors’. The phrase has become something of a cliché in recent decades, and is widely acknowledged as such. Even so, it sums up a great deal of what continues to define the Greek nation in the modern world.
This sense of kinship was articulated in its most nuanced form by the poet George Seferis, in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963: ‘I do not say that we are of the same blood [as the ancient Greeks] – because I have a horror of racial theories – but we still live in the same country and we see the same mountains ending in the sea.’1 Seferis also laid stress on the continuity of language: the words for ‘light of the sun’, he pointed out, are almost unchanged from the equivalent words used by Homer almost three thousand years ago. Like most of his generation, Seferis had experienced the horrors unleashed upon the world by the racist dogma of the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. It is an affinity that he asserts, based upon landscape and the language in which humans have engaged with it over time – an affinity deeply felt, but not a dogma, and not built upon genetic assumptions.
It is not only Greeks who share this perception. How often in the years following the financial crisis that began in 2010 have the cartoonists of the world’s media drawn upon classical stereotypes and images in order to give visual expression to the sorry state of a once-great civilization? Images of ancient temples with their gleaming marble riven with cracks, of a euro coin as a badly thrown discus causing havoc, have gained a place in the popular imagination in countries far removed from Greece, often with an edge that is critical, if not downright hostile. Among Greeks themselves, it is the same sense of affinity that lends such passion to calls for the return of the ‘Elgin Marbles’, or Sculptures of the Parthenon, removed from the Acropolis of Athens by Lord Elgin in the first years of the nineteenth century and since 1817 exhibited in the British Museum in London. These creations by craftsmen of extraordinary skill and imagination who have been dead for two and a half millennia have come to be imagined in their turn, in the memorable words of the film star and popular singer, and later Minister of Culture, Melina Mercouri, as ‘our pride … our aspirations and our name … the essence of Greekness’.2
This is not something that can be denied, or simply wished away. Some have argued that the gene pool of the ancient Greeks cannot possibly have survived successive migrations and invasions over the centuries. Others dismiss an obsession with ancestors as ways of avoiding the facts of history. But this is to miss the point. We are talking about a sense of kinship, a perception, not a set of facts that can be objectively verified. The sense of affinity with the ancients is itself a historical fact, to be understood and explained. How it came to exist at all, and then to exercise such an enduring hold, is an essential part of the story of how Greece became modern, which is the story of this book.
So used are we, today, to thinking of ‘modern Greece’ as an offshoot of ancient Greece, it can be hard to realize that for many of the centuries separating classical antiquity from ourselves no such sense of affinity existed among Greek speakers. The people we call ‘ancient Greeks’ did not call themselves that. The names ‘Greek’ and ‘Greece’ derive from Latin: Graecus and Graecia. It was the Romans, as they conquered most of ‘Graecia’ in the second century BCE, who made these names famous. Ancient Greeks called themselves ‘Hellenes’ – the word is almost identical in English and Greek. The lands where Hellenes lived were collectively called Hellas. The same names, in their modern form, are standard in Greek today: the people are Ellines (with the stress on the first syllable), the country is either Ellas (the older form) or Ellada. So what has changed?
The answer is: a great deal. By the fourth century CE, those populations of the eastern Mediterranean hinterlands that spoke and wrote in Greek had been living for hundreds of years under the rule of Rome. When Christianity was adopted as the official religion of the Roman Empire during that century, the use of the term ‘Hellenes’ in Greek came to be reserved for those Greeks who had died too soon to benefit from the new religion, and could therefore not help being pagans. Before long, and by extension, ‘Hellene’ came to mean just ‘pagan’, that is, anyone who was not a Christian. Throughout the Christian Middle Ages, that remained the primary meaning of the word in Greek. With the spread of secular ideas in the eighteenth century, ‘Hellene’ became predominantly an antiquarian term: the ‘Hellenes’ were the ancient Greeks, whereas living speakers of the Greek language had centuries ago found a different name for themselves. It was a conscious choice, taken during the First National Assembly of the Provisional Greek Government in January 1822, to revive the ancient names: ‘Hellenes’ for the citizens of the new state that was then fighting for its independence, ‘Hellas’ for the state itself.3
In the same way, the drachma, to which it is often supposed that Greece would return if the country were to leave the Eurozone, is often called ‘the world’s oldest currency’. The name is as old as you could wish for – but for approximately seventeen centuries before its re-introduction in 1833, not a single drachma had ever been minted. To take another example, Athens in antiquity had fought its way to pre-eminence among the rival Greek city states; the ruined classical temples on the Acropolis at its centre have for long been iconically synonymous with Greece itself. It is an easy assumption to suppose that Athens has always been the capital city. In fact, it became the capital for the first time on 13 December 1834.
Names, too – place names and personal names – often seem to imply a closer kinship than historically exists. Look at any map of Greece, and at least half the names of towns and geographical features can also be found in ancient sources. But many of these were deliberately revived, after independence, to replace the customary names that had been in use for centuries, and which still appear on older maps and in travellers’ accounts. On the Gulf of Corinth, for instance, the hard-to-pronounce ‘Aigio’ has replaced ‘Vostitsa’ that Lord Byron visited and where a famous conclave of revolutionary leaders took place in 1821. ‘Troezene’, the birthplace of Theseus in mythology, returned in the 1820s to oust the long-familiar ‘Damala’, where a medieval French barony had once had its seat. Old names have been replaced by ancient ones, replacing one history with another. Or take personal names. For a millennium and a half all children of Greek Orthodox parents had been baptized with the names of saints in the Church calendar. It was not until the 1790s that these names came to be paired, or replaced altogether, with the names of famous pagans from antiquity. A Greek today can be called Odysseus or Socrates or Euclid, Penelope or Calliope, and one might suppose these names had run in families ever since ancient times. Not so. This is something else about ancestors: you can pick and choose.
To acknowledge these facts is not, of course, to diminish the immense significance that these ancestors have come to assume in defining Greek collective identity over the last two centuries. Only when you realize the full extent of the choices made by hundreds and thousands of Greeks during those years does the scale of the achievement become apparent. It was a conscious and, it would seem, a little-contested policy choice, beginning around 1800, to reassert kinship with the lost civilization of classical antiquity. It has also been a highly selective one. Think of all those ancient practices that have been entirely airbrushed out: nudity, pederasty, slavery, submission of women, infanticide, paganism, animal sacrifice.
And, as a policy, it has been overwhelmingly successful – as those cartoons of discus-euros and cracked marble columns sadly testify all too well.
It can be difficult enough to live with one famous ancestor. The Greek nation has not one, but two. The second of these has never enjoyed the prestige of the first, at least in western Europe. On the other hand, it is less remote, both in time and perhaps also in the affections of many Greeks. This is the civilization that has been known since the nineteenth century by the label ‘Byzantine’ – yet another problematic term, since the ‘Byzantines’ never called themselves that, and among English speakers there is not even agreement on how the word should be pronounced. The Byzantine Empire is usually said to have begun when the Roman emperor Constantine renamed the city of Byzantium, on the European side of the Bosphorus facing Asia, after himself: Constantinople (today’s Istanbul, the largest city in Turkey). This was in the year 330 and coincides with the adoption of Christianity. For more than a thousand years after that, Constantine’s successors ruled, from the capital city that he had founded, over a Christian empire whose official language and sole medium of education soon became Greek. This is how Greek speakers came to lose their attachment to the old name of ‘Hellenes’, preferring instead to define themselves simply as ‘Romans’ (Romaioi, later Romioi, pronounced Romyí) – because politically the empire to which they belonged was the continuation of the Roman Empire in the east. They kept this name even after their empire came to an end in 1453 and Constantinople became, instead, the capital of the Ottoman Turks. For the same reason the modern Greek language was until the early nineteenth century known not as ‘Greek’ but as ‘Romaic’. For a millennium and a half, those whom westerners called ‘Greeks’ were accustomed to define themselves as ‘Romans’.
Throughout much of that time Constantinople was the largest and most prosperous city in Europe, if not the entire world. At its greatest extent the empire reached from North Africa and Italy in the west to the borders of Persia in the east. With the brief exception of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE, no Greek speaker had ever ruled over such wide dominions or so many subjects, or would again. Byzantine civilization is often portrayed as intensely spiritual, even ascetic. It is true that its surviving literature, architecture and art are overwhelmingly religious in purpose. But the Byzantines, or at least their elite, enjoyed high standards of literacy and secular education. They were meticulous scholars and sophisticated readers of ancient Greek drama, poetry, philosophy and history. Indeed, it was thanks to Byzantine librarians, copyists and men (and some women) of learning that all of the literature and much of the science of Greek antiquity that we know today came to be preserved, and in due course transmitted to western Europe from the fourteenth century onwards. The Byzantines gloried in the possession of wealth and power such as few who spoke Greek had ever possessed before or have since.
These were all good reasons for Byzantium to exert a strong pull of attraction for the Greek imagination during the centuries after the empire’s final destruction in 1453. Another is the institutional continuity of the Orthodox Church, which continued to function without a break through the centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule that followed. By contrast, no institution that began in classical times has a similarly continuous existence. The modern supreme court perpetuates the name of the court of justice in ancient Athens, the Areopagus – but only since 1844. Drama, one of the greatest cultural legacies of the ancient Greeks, has never been more alive than it is today, and revivals of Greek tragedies and comedies thrill audiences in London and other major cities. But there is no continuous history of performance, neither in Greece nor anywhere else.
When national institutions were being set up, beginning in the 1820s and 1830s, the models could perfectly well have been drawn from the eastern Roman Empire, and backed by a religious tradition shared by most Greek speakers at the time. Instead, it was only later that Byzantium began to emerge as a role model for the modern nation state to emulate. That was another choice that had defining consequences. Byzantium had to wait until the second half of the nineteenth century to come into its own, as the second most illustrious ancestor after the ancients.
For at least a century and a half these two illustrious ancestors, the ancient and the Byzantine, have jostled uneasily together in the national imagining. There have been various attempts made at a precarious synthesis, sometimes called ‘Helleno-Christian civilization’. But that terminology was hijacked by the military junta of the late 1960s and early 1970s and ever since has been tarnished beyond use. Ancient Greece and Byzantium were two civilizations so different from one another that it is hard even to think of them at the same time.
The consequence of looking back simultaneously towards two such different ancestors has been a remarkable doubling, or perhaps better a splitting, of identity. The modern language has not one but two words to describe a person as ‘Greek’: ‘Hellene’ and ‘Romios’ (Romioi in the plural). When it comes to translation, both have the same meaning. But they are not interchangeable. ‘Hellene’ (Ellinas) is the standard term. Ever since 1822 it has been used in all official contexts. Indeed the official name for the Greek state in English is the ‘Hellenic Republic’. ‘Romios’, on the other hand, appears on no passport or official document. Increasingly, since the early nineteenth century, it has become the unofficial, more intimate way for Greeks to refer to themselves – and, more often than not, among themselves too. ‘Hellene’ is the outward-facing term, it defines the Greek for the outsider. ‘Romios’ carries an emotional weight. The poet Kostis Palamas, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, detected in the very word ‘something poetically and musically charged’, ‘something soaring, that fills us with youthful vigour, something ethereal even’.4 This is an understanding tacitly shared and appreciated by insiders. It is nobody else’s business. When Melina Mercouri, in the days before she became Minister of Culture in a socialist government, was stripped of her Greek citizenship by the military junta, she recorded in song her scorn for the petty bureaucrats who had dared to make out ‘that I’m no longer a Romia’. The point of the song-lyric is that citizenship may be conferred or taken away, but one’s identity as a Romia or Romios is inalienable. It exists beyond a threshold where officialdom has any right to interfere or can even reach.
It has sometimes been suggested that each of these overlapping but distinct identities, as ‘Hellene’ and ‘Romios’, can be mapped onto cultural traits or patterns of behaviour. So when Greeks think of themselves as ‘Hellenes’, they are apt to have in mind elites and official culture, to identify with Western Europe in their politics and cultural preferences (admiring classical music, for example), to embrace a secular outlook and rational ways of thinking. When they think of themselves as ‘Romioi’, on the other hand, they do so in order to emphasize intimacy and informality, to identify with traditional forms of culture linked more immediately to the Balkans and the Middle East (admiring rebetika, for example, a musical style with its roots in the traditions of the Levant), to embrace a religious outlook, spontaneity and emotional ways of thinking.5
It is not that individuals can be pigeon-holed as belonging to one category or the other. Rather, both identities are experienced by the same individual, perhaps in different but rarely in fixed proportions. It is no accident that Melina Mercouri has been mentioned twice in this Introduction: once as the charismatic champion of the return of the ‘Elgin Marbles’ to Greece, a quintessentially ‘Hellenic’ choice, and once as the gutsy proponent of a ‘Romaic’ identity that contemptuously defies the bureaucratic categories of the Western mindset.
As these examples have already begun to show, the duality between ancient and Byzantine ancestors encourages, or reflects, a far deeper duality of thought and perception. Does Greece (do Greeks) belong to the East or to the West? The actual geographical space in which the two ancestor civilizations flourished was not so very different. But in geopolitical terms we always think of ancient Greece as belonging to the West. No doubt this is because of its influence on Rome and then, much later, on the Renaissance. Byzantium, on the other hand, was always the eastern half of the Roman Empire. Constantinople was (and is) the pre-eminent centre of the eastern Orthodox Church, from which the western Catholic Church split off in 1054. To identify with Byzantium is to identify with an Orthodox tradition that today is shared predominantly with Russia, with most but not all of the Balkan states, as well as with Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia.
Samuel Huntington, in his influential book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, published in 1996, noted the paradox: ‘Greece is not part of Western civilization, but it was the home of Classical civilization which was an important source of Western civilization.’6 In fact, Greece is part of Western civilization, for the very simple reason that over the last two hundred years Greeks have determined that it should be. But as the double inheritance from its ancestors shows, Greece does not belong only to the West. It belongs also to the East. This is part of the same duality and is not reducible to a single proposition. It is not ‘either/or’, but ‘both/and’.
It is quite true, as the author of an insightful introduction to the subject summed it up in 2015, partly in response to Huntington, that in its two-hundred-year history as a nation state, ‘Greece never seriously considered abandoning the West’.7 Every lasting political decision, just about every official action and every democratic choice made since the 1820s, has affirmed the westward alignment of Greece – and in the fullness of time also of the Republic of Cyprus. But we should not overlook the cost of this repeated affirmation. More often than not, the argument has been won only after internal conflict and by the narrowest of margins. During the 1820s and again in the 1940s, Greeks killed one another in civil wars that were fundamentally about this issue. Scars such as that are not easily healed.
During the Balkan wars of the 1990s, when the former Yugoslavia fragmented along the lines of its pre-communist religious divisions, Greek public opinion sided overwhelmingly with the Orthodox Serbs. Sometimes official government policy did too, in a rare break from solidarity with the West. Then as recently as the spring and early summer of 2015 the government of the Coalition of the Radical Left (known in Greek as SYRIZA), led by Alexis Tsipras, seriously considered an alternative alignment with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, if Greece had been unable to remain within the Eurozone. If the nation has always ended up aligned (more or less) with the West, it has never done so unanimously or without tremendous cost, as these instances illustrate. The story of the ancestors reveals why this should be. When circumstances have forced a binary choice, either answer is bound to ride roughshod over a sizeable portion of the nation’s deepest allegiances.
Given this history, it would be unwise to assume that the decision must always go the same way in the future.
Distant ancestors are important as role models, points of reference against which to measure up. In addition, a nation, just like an individual, can trace its origin back through the equivalent of a family tree. There is a genealogy that can be reconstructed through the ‘hidden centuries’, as one recent historian has called them, separating the collapse of the Byzantine Empire from the first stirrings that would lead to the formation of the Greek nation state.8
Continuity through those centuries was provided by the Greek language, both in speech and as a medium of education, and by the Orthodox Church. Those two essential ingredients of a modern nation were already in place, with a long tradition behind them, before the eighteenth century. But what about the political and cultural systems under which Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians lived during those centuries? There were several different ones, and the part played by Greek speakers in each of them was different.
The Byzantine Empire continued to exist until 1453. But its collapse had begun two and a half centuries earlier. The decisive blow that shattered the political unity of the Greek-speaking Christian world of Byzantium came not from the East, or from Islam, but from the Catholic West. In 1204 the knights of the Fourth Crusade, strapped for the cash they needed to reach the Holy Land, turned aside from their objective and ended up attacking Constantinople instead. In the name of a holy war, the richest and most populous city of medieval Christendom was sacked by Christians. In the words of Steven Runciman, author of a classic history of the Crusades, ‘There was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade.’9 Eight hundred years after the event, in June 2004, Pope John Paul II delivered a historic apology for the event to his counterpart, Patriarch Bartholomew of the Orthodox Church.
The Byzantines would regroup and recapture their capital in 1261. But what had been broken could not be mended. From 1204 onwards, Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians had to get used to living in a fragmented world, ruled over by masters who were usually in deadly competition with one another. Some Greek speakers remained the subjects of the Byzantine emperor or his local vassals, who were Orthodox for as long as they lasted. Others came under French or Italian jurisdictions, which were Roman Catholic. More and more of them, as time went on, came to be absorbed by conquest into the ever-expanding Muslim empire of the Ottoman Turks.
In Constantinople and a steadily decreasing amount of its hinterland, from 1261 to 1453, there was the ‘rump’ state of Byzantium itself. Isolated dependencies also existed for different periods of time: to the west the ‘Despotate of Epiros’ (the northwestern part of today’s Greece), to the south the ‘Despotate of the Morea’ (the medieval and later name for the Peloponnese), and to the east the ‘empire of Trebizond’ on the southern shore of the Black Sea, which lasted the longest, until 1461. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries these last Byzantine outposts, including the capital, Constantinople, were no more than city states, and by this time less powerful or wealthy than the great Italian maritime city states of Venice and Genoa with which they had to compete.
Elsewhere, the descendants and successors of the Crusaders ruled. In the Peloponnese, until the Byzantines temporarily recaptured it, an independent state flourished for more than a hundred years in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, under the sway of a colonizing French nobility. Far to the east, the island of Cyprus with its Greek-speaking Orthodox population had come into the possession of Crusaders even before 1204. There the French Lusignan dynasty ruled over the ‘Kingdom of Cyprus and Jerusalem’ down to 1489, when control passed to Venice for almost a century until the Ottoman conquest of 1571. The Venetians also held Crete from 1211 to 1669 and kept control of the Ionian islands, to the west of the Greek mainland, until the end of the Venetian Republic in 1797.
Crete under the Venetians, especially during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, saw an extraordinary flourishing of the arts. A distinctive school of religious painting emerged. Plays and poems were written in the contemporary Cretan dialect of Greek; performances took place in the main towns. In these works the spirit of the Italian Renaissance met the local vernacular tradition – just as was happening in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in England at exactly the same time. Venetian Crete gave the world the painter Dominikos Theotokopoulos, better known in the West as El Greco. Candia (the modern Heraklion), capital of Crete, was as civilized a city as any in Europe in the early seventeenth century. Cretan aristocrats, merchants and artisans identified with their island and with its composite Greek and Italian way of life.
Lastly, there was the Ottoman Empire itself. Ottoman expansion across the Bosphorus into Europe had begun during the 1340s – ironically enough in the form of mercenaries recruited by one side against the other in a Byzantine dynastic war. By 1669 the vast majority of Greek speakers had become a subject people within the Ottoman Empire. As such they were excluded from many privileges allowed only to Muslims and liable to special taxes and prohibitions. But they were not systematically persecuted in the way that ‘heretics’ were in medieval and early modern Europe. The Ottomans never sought to impose uniformity on their subjects. Under the sultans, Orthodox Christians educated in the Greek language rose to become an aristocracy and an elite that would wield considerable power and influence within the Ottoman system – without thereby losing anything of their distinct religious identity.
These, then, are the political and cultural antecedents of the Greek nation state – its genealogy or ‘family tree’. Just like any real family tree, this one includes its ‘black sheep’ – those whom later generations might rather prefer to forget. The legacy of Crusaders from the west, or of an Ottoman civilization imposed by conquest from the east, may not be much prized by most Greeks today, particularly when compared to the more distant glories of ancient Greece or Byzantium. But like it or not, these and other byways of late medieval and early modern history would play at least as large a part in the formation of the modern Greek nation. The story of how that came about begins in the early eighteenth century.