I started work on this book in August 2015. Only a month before, Greece had for the third time narrowly avoided a chaotic exit from the Eurozone, with potentially incalculable knock-on effects elsewhere. By the time I had finished it, my own country had embarked on its own exit from the European Union. ‘Grexit’ had been all but forgotten, while during 2016 ‘Brexit’ was reported to have become the most frequently used new word in British English. But ‘Grexit’ came first. The Greeks had been the first to face that existential choice. And they had come through to the other side. Greeks in modern times have often been the pioneers – that is one of the arguments of this book.
Writing it, I was always conscious of doing so at a particular historical moment – little more than the blink of an eye between a ‘Grexit’ that didn’t happen and a ‘Brexit’ whose consequences remain to be seen. That moment is the ‘now’, or ‘today’, that often features in the pages that follow. But the genesis and the real heart of this book go back much further.
I have been engaging with Greece and the Greek-speaking world all my adult life – from student days in the shadow of military dictatorship, running the gauntlet of tanks and rooftop snipers in the streets of Athens in the 1970s, all the way to the lecture halls and seminar rooms of King’s College London, where I served as Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature for exactly three decades until the summer of 2018. As a teacher no less than as a student, I have constantly been learning – from peers, colleagues, and particularly from cohorts of students, many of them Greeks themselves. From them I have learned to appreciate a multitude of different perspectives that have contributed to my own changing and deepening understanding of Greece, and of what it means to be Greek in the modern world.
What has fascinated me so deeply and for so long is not so much the story of the Greek state – dramatic and sometimes heart-rending as that story can be – but rather the interplay between the solid historical facts of state-building and the more nebulous complex of ideas, attitudes and aspirations that go to make up the shared consciousness of a nation. In order to discover what makes a nation, we have to look farther than to the headline facts of history, beyond the actions and words of leaders, or the graphs and statistics that can capture human activity across groups and populations. The story of a nation must also be the story of how people have thought about themselves, and the world, and their place in it.
This is why I have chosen to call the story told in this book a ‘biography’ rather than a ‘history’. A biography requires long and deep acquaintance with the subject, but also a certain distance. Usually, you don’t write the biography of someone you are close to, or a member of your own family. I have no family connection to Greece or Greeks. I write as an outsider, and the distance that that implies has helped to shape this particular way of telling the story. But I do not claim to write dispassionately. I believe – indeed with passion – that Greece and the modern history of the Greek nation matter, far beyond the bounds of the worldwide Greek community. If I have done my work at all adequately, by the time you have finished this book you will understand why, and will decide for yourself whether I am right.