Modern Greece and the Macedonian Heritage – Part 4 - Why Greece and not Arvanitovlachia?

Risto Stefov
January 25, 2009
"This unique nation-state [Greece] would represent the ultimate achievement of the Hellenic ideal and, as such, would lead all Europe to the highest levels of culture yet known." (Michael Herzfeld)

In parts 2 and 3 of this series we established that prior to and during the creation of the Greek state in the early 1800´s the majority of the population living on Greek lands was predominantly immigrant, mostly of Albanian, Vlach and Slav origins, which had settled in Greece to fill the void created by the disappearance of the so-called ancient Greeks. This leads us to the question "Why was this region not called ´Arvanitovlachia´ which would have correctly represented the land´s demography? Why Greece, a Latin name, and not Arvanitovlachia an appropriate name to represent the two distinct ethnic identities which lived on those lands at that time?"

Although a difficult question to answer, in view of the Modern Greeks who have for the last 200 years tried to bury all evidence of their true past, the best response would be to say that ´the people living in Greece at the time of their independence were not given a choice to self identify´. When Greece was first created in the early 1800´s the population was neither asked nor involved in any kind of self-identification. Unlike the Macedonian people who in 1991 participated in a free referendum which enabled them to self identify and gain independence, the people of Greece were not given that choice! In essence the decision to call the newly created state "Greece" solely rested with foreigners and academics who, instead of calling the new state by its true representative demographic, opted for calling it "Greece" so that they could connect it with a world and culture that had died more than 2,000 years before.

In this article we are going to discover the reasons why Greece was named Greece and not Arvanitovlachia or some other name that would have appropriately connected the land with the current people.

We so readily use the word "Ancient Greece" and "Ancient Greeks" to refer to a place and a people in the classical period (about 600 BC to 300 BC) without realizing that the terms "Greece" and "Greeks" are of Latin origin which probably came into use sometime after the 1st century BC and were popularized during the 19th century.

The reason I mention this is because today Greece, without any justification, objects to the Macedonian peoples´ use of the name Macedonia to refer to their country on the grounds that the name "Macedonia", for historic reasons, belongs to the Greeks. To which Greeks does the name "Macedonia" belong? Is it to the so-called Ancient Greeks whose very name is not only of non-Greek origin but given to those people by the Latins after they disappeared from the face of this earth? Or does the name "Macedonia" belong to the Arvanitovlachs, the immigrants who over the centuries came to live on those lands? Or does the name "Macedonia" belong to the modern imposters who go by the name of "Greeks"?

Why Greece and not Arvanitovlachia? To find the answers to this questions we will first look at segments of William St. Clair´s book, "That Greece Might Still Be Free" which appeared in my series of articles called "William St. Clair on 19th century Greece and the Modern Greeks", at;

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/82531 and http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/82785)

According to St. Clair "To be Greek was to be a drunkard, a lecher, and, especially, a cheat."

But later by the seventeenth century, as more information was uncovered about a people who once lived on those lands, a new picture began to emerge. In time Europeans, without ever having been to Greece, came to believe that the Ancient and Modern Greeks were one and the same. As more information came out, especially after Lord Byron visited Greece in 1809 and 1810, and, on his return, published the first two cantos of Childe Harold´s Pilgrimage, the legend of a place called "Ancient Greece" and a people called "Ancient Greeks" began to grow and spread like wildfire. Besides experiencing Greece for himself, Byron had also read and drew on the many travel books in the works of dozens of earlier writers in prose and in verse which helped him compose some of his best work described as best-sellers. At least twelve editions of his poem were printed between 1812 and 1821 and it was translated into several European languages.

Byron´s work prompted more travelers to visit "Greece" but very few were equipped to make more than superficial observations. That, however, did not stop them from making generalizations and expanding the myth surrounding these so-called "Greeks". As the idea of a "Greece" and "Greeks" grew it was romanticized by more and more writers. Many without ever having visited "Greece" shamelessly drew on the work of others and raised this mythical "Greece" into legendary status.

By 1770 the legend became so real that the few writers who questioned it were dismissed as cranks.

Again according to St. Clair, "With the advent of Byron, literary philhellenism became a widespread European movement. Hosts of imitators copied his rhetorical verses, and travelers who visited Greece after the appearance of Childe Harold in 1812 were even more enthusiastic than their predecessors.

By the time of the Greek Revolution in 1821 the educated public in Europe had been deeply immersed in three attractive ideas;

1. that Ancient Greece had been a paradise inhabited by supermen;

2. that the Modern Greeks were the true descendants of the Ancient Greeks; and

3. that a war against the Turks could somehow ´regenerate´ the Modern Greeks and restore the former glories."

So even before the so-called "Modern Greeks" had a chance to discover who they truly were and to decide what to call themselves and their little country, the outside world had made that decision for them. They were going to be called "Greeks", the embodiment of the "Ancient Greeks" and their little country was going to be called "Greece".

Not everyone however believed in these ideas but in Western Europe where philhellenism flourished the deed was done. But as St. Clair tells us, "The responsibility for turning philhellenism into a political programme belongs to the Greeks themselves.

The impetus came from the Greeks overseas."

By late eighteenth century colonies of people who came from the region that later became known as "Greece" and settled in Europe had become largely integrated into Western European culture. It was these people who naturally embraced the literary tradition of philhellenism and later built on it.



As Michael Herzfeld in his book "Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the making of Modern Greece" on pages 4 and 5 tells us: "By the nineteenth century, Classical scholars had come to pride themselves on a remarkable degree of academic perfectionism, but their views were clearly as much a matter of intellectual fashion as ever. A frankly critical American observer of nineteenth-century European scholarship decried not only the English scholars' ´limp Grecism,´ as evidenced in the excessively ´scented, wholesale sweetness of the modern aesthetic school in England,´ but also the Germans' use of Greek' ´as a stalking-horse for Teutonic psychology´ and their grave concern with minutiae. Scholars of the two nations resembled each other, he thought, ´in but a single trait–the conviction that they understand Greece´ (Chapman 1915: 12-13). Nor was this acid commentator entirely free of any such conviction about himself, to judge from the tone of these remarks. And so, presumably, it will go on. New truths will yield to still newer truths about the same basic idea, the vision of Classical Greece–the source, in a commonly held view, of the very practice of historical writing itself.

Such changes in perception are of interest here for two reasons. First, they show that through all the divergent interpretations there runs a common theme: the idea of Hellas as the cultural exemplar of Europe. And, second, these same contrasts mark the progressive enhancement of that exemplar's authority, not its dissolution (as we might expect) in the bickering of the ages. Whatever Greece is or was, the idea of Greece–like any symbol–could carry a wide range of possible meanings, and so it survived triumphantly. Similarly, the concept of European culture, so stable at the level of mere generality, has undergone many transformations through the centuries. ´Europe,´ like ´Hellas,´ was a generalized ideal, a symbol of cultural superiority which could and did survive innumerable changes in the moral and political order. It was to this European ideal, moreover, that Hellas was considered ancestral. Such is the malleable material of which ideologies are made."

What the Europeans saw in Greece they saw in themselves and as David Holden puts it "philhellenism is a love affair with a dream which envisions ´Greece´ and the ´Greeks´ not as an actual place or real people but as a symbol of some imagined perfection." Whatever Greece is or was, the idea of Greece–like any symbol–could carry a wide range of possible meanings, ´Europe,´ like ´Hellas,´ was a generalized ideal, a symbol of cultural superiority. Europe needed a genuine noble European past, a source for its enlightenment and it found it in a mythical Greece, a Greece of its own creation.

On page 5 of his book Michael Herzfeld goes on to say: "It is as an ideological phenomenon that we shall treat the twin concepts of Hellas and Europe here. They provided the motivating rationale for one of the most explosive political adventures of the nineteenth century, an adventure which claimed thousands of lives and brought many more under the control of a nation-state that had never before existed as a sovereign entity. This adventure was the Greek struggle for independence of 1821 to 1833. Its eventual success was by no means certain in the early stages. The Great Powers were reluctant to commit themselves to the Greek cause until, forced by public opinion at home, by the Greeks' own successes, and by the fear of each other's intentions, they began to take a more active part in bringing the Greek State into existence. That the Greeks did eventually prevail, despite the enormous Turkish armies with which they had to contend as well as their destructive internal squabbles, is some measure of the evocative power of the name of Hellas among their European supporters. To be a European was, in ideological terms, to be a Hellene.

Yet the Hellas which European intellectuals wished to reconstitute on Greek soil was very different from the Greek culture which they actually encountered there, despite all the western-educated Greek intellectuals' efforts to bridge the gap."

If I interpret Herzfeld correctly, not only did Europeans invent and mold the concept of a "Greece" and "Hellenism" but by their instigation of the so-called "Greek Struggle for Independence", with assistance from the Great Powers, they created a country where one never existed before! Yes you read it right! The Europeans instigated the so-called "Greek Struggle for Independence" in order to bring back the mythical "Ancient Greeks"! Further, they helped create a country based on a myth and shaped the character of its population on a culture that had died more than 2,000 years ago. And all this at the expense of the real, living and vibrant cultures that lived and coexisted on those lands for centuries. This reminds me of what the Greeks did in Macedonia nine decades later when they invaded, occupied, annexed Macedonia, destroyed its living and vibrant culture and turned the Macedonian people into mythical Greeks!

Why Greece and not Arvanitovlachia? Because the Europeans, aliens to the so-called Greek lands, took it upon themselves to reshape the new country and its people into something artificial to suit their own desires. Which begs the question "Why did the Europeans need a Greece and how did the birth of Greece shape Europe?" a subject for my next article.

Why give "Greece" a Latin name? The obvious answer is because the "concept" of a Greece was invented by the Modern Latins even before the "country" Greece came into existence. Since the Latins invented Greece it was appropriate that they give it a Latin name?

For those who are still not convinced that the Modern Greek identity is an artificial creation, please continue to read this series of articles.

Author´s note:

Dear Macedonians, one way to defend ourselves from the Greek onslaught and gain back our identity and dignity is to fight back to the level to which the Greeks have reduced us; that is to attack their identity as they have attacked ours. We need prove nothing to them except to expose them as the artificial identity they truly are and to uncover their design to wipe us out in order to usurp our Macedonian heritage.

To be Continued.

Many thanks to TrueMacedonian from www.maknews.com for his contribution to this article.

You can contact the author at rstefov@hotmail.com