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The Myth of Greek Ethnic 'Purity' Macedonia and Greece, John Shea, 1997 pp.77-96 THE GREAT ETHNIC MIX OF GREECE Just as Macedonia and other Balkan states were
invaded by Slavs and other peoples from the north and from within the Balkans
themselves, so were the lands that eventually were to become modern Greece. We
need to examine this issue, since the modern Greeks repeatedly argue that they
are direct ethnic descendants of the ancient Greeks and Macedonians. The fact
is that the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural developments that these invasions
created simply built upon similar movements of peoples into and out of the
Balkans in the ancient past. THE MYTH OF GREEK ETHNIC PURITY Greek writers give a great deal of emphasis to the
idea of Greek racial purity. For instance, in speaking of the movements of
Germanic tribes in the Balkans before the Slavs, the writer of Macedonia
History and Politics says that the Goths were beaten off and the invasions in
the fourth century did not lead to "ethnological adulteration." In
speaking about more modern times the writer says (p. 43), "Greece became
involved in the 'Macedonian disputes,' because of political pressure from the
Bulgarians and Yugoslavs, and because of the sensitivity of the Greeks towards
the historical continuity of their race." Clearly this view about racial
purity amongst the Greeks, presented here in a magazine distributed by the
Greek government in English-speaking countries, is important to the Greeks. Macedonia has been represented as a buffer protecting
Hellenism from the waves of the barbarians throughout the centuries. Thus it
is argued by modern Greeks that the area of the present-day Republic of
Macedonia was affected by these barbarian invasions, but the lands that are
now Greece were largely unaffected.' The Greek insistence on ethnological purity for its
people is not unusual among expressions of nationalism. The American political
scientist Buck explained that the notion of physical kinship implied in the
word "nation" is the most conspicuous element in the popular
conception of nationality. However, it is also the least realistic. Buck
points out that we have only to think of the extent of invasion and
colonization that has occurred in nearly every corner of Europe to realize
that this notion could at best be only approximate. More importantly, from the
viewpoint of historical analysis, it is not possible to demonstrate national
family connections. Recorded descent is at best restricted to a few families
that are notable for some reason or another. All that can be shown
convincingly is linguistic descent, but this is often taken as evidence of
national descent.' Anthony D. Smith points out, specifically in
reference to the modern Greek nation, "Greek demographic continuity was
brutally interrupted in the late sixth to eighth centuries A.D. by massive
influxes of Avar, Slav and later, Albanian immigrants." He adds that
modern Greeks "could hardly count as being of ancient Greek descent, even
if this could never be ruled out.” It seems clear that Greek nationalists do not wish to
examine evidence concerning the present state within Greece that may reflect
on this question about the reality of ethnic purity. The editor of The Times,
long the most prestigious of British newspapers, wrote in August 1993:
"Since 1961, no Greek census has carried details of minorities. This is
because successive Greek governments, ‘a la mode japonaise,' subscribe to a
myth of homogeneity. Today, the historical refusal to acknowledge ethnic or
cultural plurality has transmogrified into a refusal to accept political
dissent in relation to these ethnic or cultural questions." Simon Mcllwaine writes, "Modern Greek identity
is based on an unshakable conviction that the Greek State is ethnically
homogenous. This belief ... has entailed repeated and official denial of the
existence of minorities which are not of 'pure' Hellenic origin. The obsession
with Greek racial identity involves the distortion of the history of the
thousands of years when there was no such thing as a Greek nation state. Many of the views that follow explain that, whether
the Greeks feel comfortable with the idea or not, their peoples are of diverse
ethnic background, a great mix of the peoples of the Balkans, and have been
for the past several thousand years. If all of the peoples of the Balkans were
subjected to mixture of varying degrees with the invaders, as was certainly
the case, then the argument might readily be made that modern-day Greeks are
no more ethnically related to early Greeks than present-day Macedonians are to
ancient Macedonians. Ancient Greeks. A common assumption is that ancient
peoples were ethnically homogenous. As has already been noted with regard to
the peoples of Macedonia, the kingdom was undoubtedly a great mix of people,
and the diversity increased with the expansion of the Macedonian Empire. There
was probably a comparable mix of peoples in various Greek city-states. While
the Greeks who came into the Balkan peninsula became the dominant people in
that area, strong influences from the earlier inhabitants remained. "For
certain areas of the Greek mainland and many of the islands, the names of some
fifteen preGreek peoples are preserved in ancient traditions, together with a
number of other references. A widely accepted view is that the Indo-European
language moved into Greece from Anatolia with the spread of agriculture around
7000 B.C.6 Thus a dialect of Indo-European would have been the language of the
neolithic cultures of Greece and the Balkans in the fifth and fourth
millennia. There were also infiltrations or invasions from the north by
Indo-European speakers sometime during the fourth or third millennium B.C. Bernal suggests an explanation of ancient Greek
development in terms of what he calls "the ancient model."
Classical, Hellenistic, and later, pagan Greeks from the fifth century B.C. to
the fifth century A.D. believed their ancestors had been civilized by Egyptian
and Phoenician colonization and the later influence of Greek study in Egypt.
Up to the eighteenth century A.D., Egypt was seen as the fount of all
"Gentile" philosophy and learning, including that of the Greeks, and
it was believed that the Greeks had managed to preserve only a part of this
wisdom. Bernal suggests that the sense of loss that this created, and the
quest to recover the lost wisdom, were major motives in the development of
science in the seventeenth century. Bernal argues that the ancient model was accepted by
historians from antiquity till the nineteenth century, and was rejected then
only for anti-Semitic and racist reasons. He sees the Egyptian and Phoenician
influence on ancient Greeks as beginning in the first half of the second
millennium B.C. He concludes that Greek civilization is the result of the
cultural mixtures created by these colonizations and later borrowings from
across the eastern Mediterranean. These borrowings from Egypt and the Levant
occurred in the second millennium B.C. or in the thousand years from 2100 to
1100 B.C., which Bernal suggests is the period during which Greek culture was
formed! "The Ancient Greeks, though proud of themselves and their recent
accomplishments, did not see their political institutions, science, philosophy
or religion as original. Instead they derived them - through the early
colonization and later study by Greeks abroad - from the east in general and
Egypt in particular." "Pelasgians" is the name generally given by
ancient writers to the peoples before the Hellenes. According to both
Herodotus and Thucyclides, Pelasgians formed the largest element of the early
population of Greece and the Aegean, and most of them were gradually
assimilated by the Hellenes. Herodotus saw this transformation as following
the invasion by Danaos (the Egyptian), which he took to be around the middle
of the second millennium B.C. Herodotus stated that the Egyptian Danaids
taught the Pelasgians (not the Hellenes) the worship of the gods." The
idea that the Pelasgians were the native population, converted to something
more "Greek" by the invading Egyptians, also occurs in the plays of
Aischylos and Euripides, written around the same time as Herodotus' Histories. The Ionians were one of the two great tribes of
Greece, the other being the Dorians. In classical times the Ionians lived in a
band across the Aegean from Attica to "Ionia on the Anatolian shore ...
Herodotus linked the Pelasgians to the lonians." Tiberius Claudius wrote about the movements of some
Greek tribes into the Balkan peninsula: “Among these Celts, if the word is to have any
significance, (are included) even the Achaen Greeks, who had established
themselves for some time in the Upper Danube Valley before pushing southward
into Greece. Yes, the Greeks are comparative newcomers to Greece. They
displaced the native Pelasgians ... This happened not long before the Trojan
War; the Dorian Greeks came still later -eighty years after the Trojan War.
Other Celts of the same race invaded France and Italy at about the same
time." With regard to what is now called the Dorian
Invasion, Bernal notes that in ancient times this was much more frequently
called "the return of the Heraklids." The Dorians came from the
northwestern fringes of Greece, which had been less affected by the Middle
Eastern culture of the Mycenaean palaces which they destroyed. Their use of
the name Heraklids was a claim not only to divine descent from Herakles, but
also to Egyptian and Phoenician royal ancestors. This is not simply a modern
theory. Ancient sources show that the descendants of these conquerors, the
Dorian kings of classical and Hellenistic times, believed themselves to be
descended from Egyptians and Phoenicians." Bernal argues that the explanation of Greek
development in terms of Egyptian and Phoenician influences was overthrown for
external reasons, not because of major internal deficiencies or weaknesses in
the original explanation, but because eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Romantics and racists could not tolerate the idea that the crown jewel of
European civilization owed its beginnings to a racial mix of cultures. For
such reasons the ancient model had to be discarded and replaced by something
more acceptable to the political and academic views of the time. The Aryan model. The Aryan model, an alternative theory about
the development of the ancient Greeks, first appeared in the first half of the
nineteenth century. It denied any influence of Egyptian settlements and
expressed doubt about a role for the Phoenicians. An extreme version of this
model was propounded during the height of anti-Semitism in Europe in the
1890s, and then in the 1920s and 1930s; this particular explanation denied
even the Phoenician cultural influence." According to the Aryan model,
there had been an invasion from the north, an invasion not described by
ancient writers, which had overcome the existing pre-Hellenic culture. Greek
civilization was seen as the result of the mixture of the Indo-European
speaking Hellenes and the older peoples over whom they ruled. Bernal argues that four forces explain the overthrow
of the ancient model as a description of the beginnings of Greek culture:
Christian reaction to the threat of Egyptian ideas, the rise of the concept of
"progress," the growth of racism, and Romantic Hellenism .16 In
particular, a tidal wave of ethnicity and racialism swept over northern Europe
at the end of the eighteenth century. The view was established that humankind
was made up of races that were intrinsically unequal in physical and mental
endowment. Racial mixing could lead to degradation of the better human
qualities. To be creative, a civilization needed to be "racially
pure." It became accepted that only people who lived in temperate
climates - that is, Europeans - could really think. Thus the idea that
"Greece, which was seen not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as
its pure childhood, [could be] the result of the mixture of native Europeans
and colonizing Africans and Semites" could not be tolerated. 17 By the
turn of the eighteenth century, the so-called "European" Greeks were
considered to have been more sensitive and artistic than the Egyptians and
were seen as the better philosophers, even the founders of philosophy. By the
end of the nineteenth century, some popular German writers had come to see the
Dorians as pure-blooded Aryans from the north, possibly even from Germany. The
Dorians were certainly seen as very close to the Germans in their Aryan blood
and character. Significant British historians of the time also were
enthusiastic about the supposedly pure northern, and possibly Germanic, blood
of the Dorians. These ideas were developing in Europe in the same
period as the Greek War of Independence, which united all Europeans against
the traditional Islamic enemies from Asia and Africa. This war and the
philhellenic movement throughout Europe and North America, which supported the
struggle for independence, helped refine the existing image of Greece as the
epitome of Europe. Paradoxically, the more the nineteenth century admired the
ancient Greeks, the less it respected their writing of their own history. Linguistic evidence and the ancient model.
Bernal provides evidence in support of his view that Egyptian and Phoenician
elements were powerful in the development of ancient Greek culture. He notes
that it is generally agreed that the Greek language was formed during the
seventeenth and sixteenth centuries B.C. Its Indo-European structure and basic
lexicon are combined with a non-Indo-European vocabulary of sophistication. He
argues that since the earlier population spoke a related Indo-European
language, it left little trace in Greek; thus the presence of that population
does not explain the many non-Indo-European elements in the later language.
Bernal suggests that it has not been possible for scholars working in the
Aryan model over the last 160 years to explain 50 percent of the Greek
vocabulary and 80 per cent of proper names in terms of either Indo-European or
the Anatolian languages supposedly related to "pre-Hellenic." Since
they cannot explain them, they simply call them pre-Hellenic. Bernal suggests to the contrary: that much of the
non-Indo-European element can be plausibly derived from Egyptian and West
Semitic and that this would fit very well with a long period of domination by
Egypto-Semitic conquerors. He claims that up to a quarter of the Greek
vocabulary can be traced to Semitic origins (which for the most part means the
Phoenicians), 40 to 50 percent seems to have been Indo-European, and a further
20 to 25 percent comes from Egyptian, as well as the names for most Greek gods
and many place names. Thus 80 to 90 percent of the vocabulary is accounted
for, as high a proportion as one can hope for in any language. Bernal argues that the Indo-European component of the
Greek lexicon is relatively small. There is a low proportion of word roots
with cognates in any other Indo-European language. Further, the semantic range
in which the IndoEuropean roots appear in Greek is very much the same as that
of Anglo-Saxon roots in English, another culture strongly influenced by
invaders (in this case, the French-speaking Normans). These roots provide most
pronouns and prepositions, most of the basic nouns and verbs of family, and
many terms of subsistence agriculture. By contrast, the vocabulary of urban
life, luxury, religion, administration, political life, commercial agriculture
and abstraction is non-Indo-European. Bernal points out that such a pattern
usually reflects a long-term situation in which speakers of the language which
provides the words of higher culture control the users of the basic lexicon.
For example, he claims that in Greek the words for chariot, sword, bow, march,
armor, and battle are non-Indo-European. Bernal explains that river and
mountain names are the toponyrns that tend to be the most persistent in any
country. In England, for instance, most of these are Celtic, and some even
seem to be pre-Indo-European. The presence of Egyptian or Semitic mountain
names in ancient Greek would therefore indicate a very profound cultural
penetration. Bernal presents many examples of these and notes that the
insignificant number of Indo-European city names in Greece, and the fact that
plausible Egyptian and Semitic derivations can be found for most city names,
suggest an intensity of contact that cannot be explained in terms of trade. Bernal maintains that when all sources, such as
legends, place names, religious cults, language and the distribution of
linguistic and script dialects, are taken into account alongside archaeology,
the ancient model, with some slight variations, is plausible today. He
discusses equations between specific Greek and Egyptian divinities and
rituals, and the general ancient belief that the Egyptian forms preceded the
others, that the Egyptian religion was the original one. He says that this
explains the revival of the purer Egyptian forms in the fifth century
B.C." The classical and Hellenistic Greeks themselves maintained that
their religion came from Egypt, and Herodotus even specified that the names of
the gods were almost all Egyptian. Using linguistic, cultural, and written references,
Bernal presents interesting evidence connecting the first foundation of Thebes
directly or indirectly to eleventh-dynasty Egypt. He argues that both the city
name Athenai and the divine name Athene or Atena derive from Egyptian, and
offers evidence to substantiate this claim. He traces the name of Sparta to
Egyptian sources, as well as detailing relationships between Spartan and
Egyptian mythology. He says that much of the uniquely Spartan political
vocabulary can be plausibly derived from late Egyptian and that early Spartan
art has a strikingly Egyptian appearance. For Bernal, all these ideas link up
with the Spartan kings' belief in their Heraklid - hence Egyptian or Hyksos -
ancestry, and would therefore account for observations such as the building of
a pyramid at Menelaion, the Spartan shrine, and the letter one of the last
Spartan kings wrote to the high priest in Jerusalem, claiming kingship with
him. Bernal claims that there has been a movement, led
mainly by Jewish scholars, to eliminate anti-Semitism in the writing of
ancient history, and to give the Phoenicians due credit for their central role
in the formation of Greek culture. A return to the ancient model is less clear
with regard to Egyptian influence. However, Bernal proposes that the weight of
the Aryan model's own tradition and the effect of academic inertia have been
weakened by startling evidence showing that the Bronze Age civilizations were
much more advanced and cosmopolitan than was once thought, and that in general
the ancient records are more reliable than more recent reconstructions. He
believes the ancient model will be restored at some point in the early
twenty-first century. For our purposes it is sufficient to note that even the
current acknowledgment of the significance of Phoenician influence in the
formation of ancient Greek culture indicates some of the ethnic mix that made
up ancient Greece. INFLUENCES IN THE GREEK ETHNIC MIX Slavery in the ancient world.
While it is difficult to gauge the intermixture that took place between the
older established inhabitants and the infiltrating Greeks wherever they may
have come from, the tradition of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean may have
had an even greater impact on the physical nature of the people. It has been
estimated that in classical times the number of slaves in Attica was roughly
equal to the number of free inhabitants, or around 100,000." In Sparta
there was an even greater proportion of slaves, and most of them, the helots,
were Messenians. While the slaves of Athens were a wide racial mix and
therefore less likely to unite on the basis of a common language, these
Messenian helots of Sparta all spoke Greek, and had a kind of group
self-consciousness. Thus they presented "special problems of security for
their Spartan masters, whose numbers were constantly on the decline." Changes in the ethnic composition of Greek city-states
are illustrated by the comments about the case of Piso. Piso, who had been the
recipient of an unhelpful decision by a vote of the Athenian city assembly, "made a violent speech in which he said that the
latter-day Athenians had no right to identify themselves with the great
Athenians of the days of Pericles, Demosthenes, Aeschylus, and Plato. The
ancient Athenians had been extirpated by repeated wars and massacres and these
were mere mongrels, degenerates, and the descendants of slaves. He said that
any Roman who flattered them as if they were the legitimate heirs of those
ancient heroes was lowering the dignity of the Roman name." Such historical ideas make it clear that even two
thousand years ago the notion of ethnic purity amongst the Greeks was
difficult to sustain. The ethnic mix continued over the next two thousand
years. As Nicol has observed, "The ancient Greeks were, after all, of
very mixed ancestry; and there can be no doubt that the Byzantine Greeks, both
before and after the Slav occupation, were even more heterogenous.” Celtic Influence. In 282-280 B.C., a Celtic army of about
170,000 led by Brennos and Achicorius entered Macedonia and, with Bolgios,
overwhelmed the country. The Celtic army swept into Greece, defeating the
Greeks at Thermopylae, and went on to sack the temple of Delphi, the most
sacred site of the Hellenic world, before withdrawing. The Celtic army
eventually withdrew in an orderly manner, taking their loot with them. No
Greek army was strong enough to attack them. The Celtic invasions had a
lasting effect on Greek consciousness, being commemorated in Greek literature. Though some remained as mercenaries, the bulk of the
Celtic armies moved north again, having found little room to settle in
populated Greece and Macedonia. The Celts remained in Thrace, though they were
Hellenized. The Scordisci had established a prosperous and strong kingdom
around modern Belgrade, and one Celtic tribe settled on the slopes of Haemos.
However, most went further north and east, some even settling in Asia Minor,
in Galatia. Greeks as Slavs. In recent historical time other Europeans
have held the view that the people of modern Greece have little ethnic
connection with the ancient Greeks. Robert Browning, 32 a writer who is
sympathetic to the Greeks, discusses the writings of the Bavarian Johann
Philipp Fallmerayer, who in 1830 proposed that the Slav invasions and
settlements of the late sixth and seventh centuries resulted in the
"expulsion or extirpation of the original population of peninsula Greece.
Consequently the medieval and modern Greeks ... are not the descendants of the
Greeks of antiquity, and their Hellenism is artificial." Fallmerayer's
view that not a drop of pure Greek blood is to be found in the modern Greek is
often held to be extreme. A more moderate version of essentially the same idea
was presented more recently by R.H. Jenkins. Browning concedes that the Slavic impact was
considerable in the Balkan peninsula, and that there was great intermixture of
races in Balkan Greek lands. He says Fallnierayer wits right in drawing
attention to the extensive Slav invasion and settlement in continental Greece.
Despite the great attention given by the Greek government to renaming towns,
villages, rivers and other geographic locations, there remain large numbers of
place names of Slavonic origin. Even so, Browning suggests, the majority of
the Greek-speaking people lived in Constantinople and Asia Minor, and in these
more distant locations were not so strongly affected by the Slavs. He says
also that the original population was not extirpated or expelled, since many
remained in coastal regions, cities, and inaccessible areas. Nicholas Cheetham is uncompromising in the language
he uses to describe the Slav influence. He says that between the fifth and
seventh centuries "a sharp and brutal revolution altered the whole
character of Hellas... It also involved a steep decline of civilized life and
an almost total rejection of former values... The most striking change
affected the ethnic composition of the people and resulted from the mass
migration of Slavs into the Balkans which began in the sixth Century.” Cheetham explains that the eastern emperor held back
the Slavs for decades. For instance, the emperor Constans Il (642-68)
successfully forced back the "Macedonian Slavs" (as Cheetham calls
them) who were threatening Thessalonika. Later Constans' grandson, Justinian
II, undertook a major campaign against the Slavs and settled many in Asia. But
in the end there was a continuous infiltration followed by settlement. It
seems that earthquakes and the bubonic plague had thinned the population on
the eve of the Slav invasion. After the great plague of 744-747,
Constantinople was repopulated with Greeks from the Balkan peninsula and the
islands, and this may have made even more room for the newcomers. The land was
repeopled, Cheetham says. The Slavs occupied the fertile plains and river
valleys, while the original peoples were forced into the numerous mountain
ranges. The Slavs remained rural dwellers, so the cities may have suffered
less from their arrival. The Slav settlements extended the length and breadth
of the Balkan peninsula. They overran the "whole of Greece," and
more, Cheetham says. Their influence extended across the Balkans from the
Danube to Cape Tainaron. In the process, Roman authority was submerged, and
the remnants of classical culture and the Christian religion were
extinguished. There were few areas remaining where the Greeks predominated,
though at least in those early times Thessalonika was one of them. In the
eighth century Strabonos Epithomatus wrote, "And now, in that way almost
all of Epirus, Hellada, the Peloponnese and Macedonia have also been settled
by the Skiti-Slavs." In general, the lands that had been Greek in ancient
times were commonly regarded by foreigners as a Slav preserve. In 805 the Slavs came under imperial control. They
learned the ways of Roman citizens and were probably being attracted to
Christianity. Eventually, peasant farmers from Asia minor were brought in to
recolonize coastal plains and river valleys of "Hellas." Those Slavs
who did not assimilate were gradually pushed back into the more rugged and
inhospitable regions of the interior. The distinction between Romans and assimilated Slavs
became blurred. As early as 766 Niketas, a (Macedonian) Slav, became patriarch
of the Constantinople patriarchate. Nicholas Cheetham claims that the Orthodox church
made intense efforts to convert the Slavs in Greece, and that this took effect
more or less in the period from A.D. 800 to 1000, only when the Greek language
had ousted Slavonic. Again, this effect was stronger in the southern part of
the peninsula than further to the north, since the Christianization of the
Slavs as a whole was made possible only when some Slav monks from Thessalonika
created a suitable script in their own language as the vehicle for this task.
Yet the central point, that the ethnic mix was profound, is quite clear. Another historian, Tom Winnifrith, says that the Slav
conquest of the Balkans was rapid, eliminating the Latin heritage. He says the
Slavs "spread throughout Greece." However, it was not just the Slavs
who created ethnic change at this time. Winnifrith says there were many
Latin-speaking refugees from cities in the thickly populated areas of the
Danube frontier and Illyricum who are likely to have gravitated to Salonika
and Constantinople and exchanged their Latin for Greek. These refugees added
another element to the constantly changing ethnic equation in the Balkans. The extent of the Slavic inroad is evident on maps
showing mediaeval population distribution. The map titled "Slavs in the
Balkans" shows that by about the eighth century A.D., Slavs were settled
along the whole length of the Balkan peninsula right to the tip of the
Peloponnese and were especially strong along the western coast. Pockets of
Greek inhabitants remained along the east coast. The Byzantine emperor Constantine Porphyrgenitus
openly says that the whole of Hellas had been Slavicized. The Slavonic tribes
of the Ezerites and the Milingi were independent in the Peloponnese in the
seventh and eighth centuries and did not pay tribute to Byzantium. Even today
in the Peloponnese, one cannot go three miles in any direction without
encountering a Slavonic place-name." Arnold Toynbee compares the Slavic invasion with the
early Greek invasions, noting that "on the mainland itself, the Slav
occupation was more nearly complete than the North-West-Greek occupation had
been." He explains that Attica was not occupied in either historical
invasion, but in the Peloponnese, "Arcadia, which had escaped occupation
in the twelfth century B.C. was now overrun." For more than two hundred
years, till the reconquest of the Peloponnese by the East Roman government
around A.D. 850, the Slavs controlled almost all of it. "As late as the
year A.D. 1204, the French invaders of the Peloponnese found that, after more
than three centuries of East Roman rule, there were still two independent Slav
peoples, the Ezeritai and the Melingoi, in the fastness of Mount Taygetos." There is much agreement among historians about the
dramatic and overpowering influx of Slavic peoples to Greece. These people
often intermarried and were assimilated in the "Roman" culture. Some
writers tend to downplay the importance of the racial intermixture for
Hellenization, suggesting that being a Hellene does not require particular
racial antecedents. This is a point that modern Greeks appear unwilling to
believe. Their preference seems to be simply to deny that "ethnological
adulteration" ever took place. For example, in Macedonia, History and Politics (a
publication sponsored by the Greek government and distributed throughout the
English-speaking world) it is acknowledged (p. 10) that after Basil 11 there
was a "solid Slav element" in Yugoslav and Bulgarian Macedonia, but
it claims there was no impact at all in Greek Macedonia, or in Greece itself.
The analyses from other sources lead us inevitably to a rejection of these
claims. The Slavic influence in what is now Greece is clear. However, there
were other important influences also. Greeks as Albanians.
Slavs were not the only groups to move into the southern part of the Balkan
peninsula. Many Albanians came in also. Albanians settled in Athens, Corinth,
Mani, Thessaly and even in the Aegean islands. In the early nineteenth
century, the population of Athens was 24 percent Albanian, 32 percent Turkish,
and only 44 percent Greek. The village of Marathon, scene of the great victory
in 490 B.C., was, early in the nineteenth century, almost entirely
Albanian." Nicholas Hammond a historian who is sympathetic to
the Greek view that the ancient Macedonians were a Greek tribe and who has had
several works published in Athens, is unable to support the Greek view on this
matter. He says that by the middle of the fourteenth and early fifteenth
century the majority of people in the Peloponnese were Albanian speakers. The
fascinating point is that the people with whom they were competing for land
were overwhelmingly not the original Greek-speaking Roman citizens, but the
new breed of Greek-speaking Slavs. As Hammond says, many Greek-speaking people
at that point in time were probably ethnic Slavs. The continuing impact of this new ethnic and cultural
force is indicated in Hammond's comments that the Albanian incursions into
Greece continued under the Turkish system and went on right into the
eighteenth century, and that the descendants of these Albanian people were
still speaking Albanian when he was in Greece in the 1930s. This is not a
reflection on the national consciousness of these Greek citizens, for as
Hammond explains, they thought of themselves as Greek. Indeed Hammond points
out that the Albanian role in the resistance to the Turks, and in the
formation of the Greek nation, was significant. Like the Slavs, the Albanians
became attached to their new lands, learned the new language, and began to
think of themselves as one with the other peoples living there. Greeks as Vlachs. Also quite numerous during the eighteenth
century in Greek lands and in territories that were to become Greek were the
Vlachs. Hammond says that the Vlachs came in with the Albanians and provided
leadership. He suggests that the Vlach peoples probably originated in Dacia,
an area that is now part of Romania. Hammond says that the Vlachs managed to
acquire possession of the great Pindus area. In general, they stayed in
northern Greece and were never assimilated in terms of language the way that
other ethnic groups were, though some groups ended the nomadic life and
settled in Macedonia and in Thessaly. According to Tom Winnifrith, some Greek writers have
claimed the Vlachs as ethnic Greeks. He is skeptical about this idea, claiming
that these Greek historians have "been at unfair pains to eliminate
almost completely the Latin element in Vlach language and history."
Winnifrith comments that one of these Greek writers, M. Chrysochoos, the first
to suggest that the Vlachs living in the passes crossing the Pindus mountains
were the linear descendants of Roman soldiers, is inspired by misplaced
patriotism to insist that these Romans were really some kind of Greeks. The Vlachs seem to have left Dacia as part of a wave
of migration that spread throughout the Balkans from Greece, where they are
known as Kutzo Vlachs, Tzintzars, or Aromani, through Bulgaria and Yugoslavia
to the Trieste region . Many of them are still in these areas today. They all
speak varieties of Romanian, but represent the remnants of originally Dacian-,
Illyrian-, Thracian- and even Scythian- speaking tribes. Vlachs settled in
Thessaly, Rourneli, the Ionian islands and the Aegean islands. The Romanian Balkan history professor Motiu has said
that the Vlachs comprised 7 to 8 percent of the population of Greece,
numbering seven to eight hundred thousand. There have been no population
statistics regarding the Vlach minority since the Greek census of 1951. The
census of 1935 and 1951 recorded 19,703 and 39,855 Vlachs respectively. Greece
does not recognize the presence of a Vlach minority. Greeks as Turks. A recent issue that has engaged the vigorous
attention of Greek politicians is the position and status of Cyprus. It is an
area of conflict with Turkey, and one in which Greece has attempted to
influence world opinion in its direction by fostering the theory of Greek
ethnic purity. In 1964 German archaeologist Franz Maier argued that the
Turkish Cypriots were a "people" and not a minority, and that Greek
Cypriots and Greeks were not really racially Greek but a mixture. Similarly
the Cypriot sociologist Andreas Panayiotou has been quoted as saying that
Cypriots were not Greek, but were a synthesis of Greek, Turkish and other
elements. He advocated that the Cypriot dialect should become the island's
official language. Some external observers (perhaps with their own case
to make) have come to similar conclusions: "Greece, while denying the
presence of ethnic and religious minorities within its borders, tries to
convince the world that the Orthodox people living in its neighboring
countries are ethnic Greeks. But this is not true. In Cyprus, the Southern
Cypriot Orthodox whom Greece presents to the world as Greek Cypriots, are not
ethnic Greeks.” This material demonstrates that the Greek attitude
towards ethnic purity in Greece, and all that follows from it, can be seen in
various spheres of political interest, not only in the case of the ethnic
Macedonians of Aegean Macedonia and in behaviors towards the new Republic of
Macedonia. It is a mainstay of the Greek nationalist position. The Cyprus position is something of a special case;
nevertheless, it reminds us of the 400-year occupation of Greek lands by the
Turks and the inevitable ethnic impact. It has already been noted that in the
early part of the nineteenth century the population of Athens was about
one-third Turk. "Auberon Waugh ... wrote in The Daily Telegraph that the
Greeks of today, with hairy popos, flat noses and bushy eyebrows, are clearly
a race of Turkish descent and have nothing to do with the Greeks of antiquity
sculpted on the Elgin marbles." The Greek independence movement.
just as interesting as the ethnic diversity of Greece is the idea that the new
peoples in the southern Balkan peninsula learned Greek, became good Roman
citizens, and identified a community of interest with other peoples living in
their land. Writing nearly one hundred and fifty years ago, just a few years
after the success of the Greek revolution, George Finlay49 noted that the
local energies and local patriotism of all the Christian municipalities in the
Ottoman empire were able to readily unite in opposition to "Othoman
oppressions" whenever some kind of communication or administrative
structure to centralize their efforts could be created. In these local
institutions, Finlay suggested, a foundation was laid for a union of all the
Christian Orthodox races in European Turkey. This comment was made, of course,
a generation before Bulgaria achieved its autonomy from the Turks, and long
before a Macedonian state became possible. Greece was then still a very small
state at the bottom of the Balkan peninsula. Finlay recognized " the
vigorous Albanians of Hydra, the warlike Albanians of Suli, the persevering
Bulgarians of Macedonia, and the laborious Vallachians on the banks of the
Aspropotamos" who embarked together on a struggle for Greek independence,
"as heartily as the posterity of the ancient inhabitants of the soil of
Hellas. Nicholas Hammond tells us that in the Greek War of Independence the
Albanians, above all, drove the Turks out. The heroism and determination of the Greek
revolutionaries alone probably would not have been enough to overcome the
Turks and their allies. The armed intervention of the European powers made a
difference at crucial times. With the beginning of the Greek War of
Independence in 1821, the Turkish sultan gave Mohammed Ali (an Albanian
general of the Turkish forces in Egypt who had seized power in 1808) the
provincial governorships of Crete and the Peloponnese with a commission to
exterminate the Greek rebels. The Greek fleet kept them out till 1825, when
the fleet mutinied over a lack of pay. A battle at Missolonghi, where Greek
patriots were being besieged by the Turks, was swayed in Turkish favor by the
arrival of the Egyptians. The heroic defense and the appearance of an Egyptian
threat moved the governments of Europe to support the Greek cause. In 1827
squadrons of British, French and Russian navies destroyed the Turkish and
Egyptian fleets at Navarin, and Greek independence was made certain. According to anthropologist Roger Just, most of the
nineteenth-century "Greeks," who had so recently won their
independence from the Turks, not only did not call themselves Hellenes (they
learned this label later from the intellectual nationalists); they did not
even speak Greek by preference, but rather Albanian, Slavonic, or Vlach
dialects." He held that their culture was similarly remote from the
culture of the ancient Greeks. Their "customs and habits might seem to
bear as much if not more relation to those of the other peoples of the Balkans
and indeed of Anatolian as they did to what were fondly imagined to be those
of Pericline Athens." Maintaining the myth.
Other Europeans have become irritated with the Greek myth of ethnic purity.
For instance, in an editorial in The Sunday Telegraph, London, March 27,1994,
the Greek attitude is taken to task: What is the word for this obsessive Greek
pseudo-relationship with their country's past (they even have a magazine,
Ellenismos, devoted to the subject)? It is not quite pretentiousness. There is
too much passion for that. No, the Greeks, the ancient ones, had a word for
the modern Greek condition: paranoia. We must accept that Mr Andreas
Papandreou (Greek prime minister) and the current EC presidency are the sole
legitimate heirs of Pericles, Demosthenes and Aristide the Just. The world
must nod dumbly at the proposition that in the veins of the modern Greek ...
there courses the blood of Achilles. And their paranoid nationalism is
heightened by the tenuousness of that claim. The Editor of The Sunday Telegraph argues that Greece
has been ruthless in erasing traces of ethnic diversity, and suggests that the
desperation of its actions, including the Greek claim to a monopoly of the
classical past (in which all peoples of European origins have a share) can be
explained by the fact that the Greeks today are a mixture of Slavs, Turks,
Greeks, Bulgars, Albanians, Vlachs, Jews and Gypsies. One modern Greek intellectual who now lives outside
of that country has reflected on the forces within Greece that foster and
sustain the theory of Greek ethnic purity: In retrospect it is clear to me that my 12 years of
Greek schooling, mainly in the 1970s, conspired to instill in me precisely one
attitude: an almost unshakable belief in the purity and unity of the Greek
people, language and culture ... Belief in the continuity of Greece against
all odds was enabled also by the method of withholding information and sealing
off interpretive paths. We had, as children, neither the capacity nor the
inclination to explore disunities and "impurities.” Modern Greek citizens who try to assert their ethnic
identity are not treated tolerantly in Greece even today. One of these
recently said, "There are a million Macedonian speakers [in Greece]. We
are entitled to rights, to associations, schools, churches, traditions ... I
have a Macedonian ethnic consciousness ... I belong to an ethnic minority
which isn't recognized by my State." As a consequence of this statement
and others like it, Christos Sideropoulos and another Greek Macedonian,
Anastasios (or Tasos) Boulis, repeatedly faced the Greek courts. They were
charged with spreading false rumors about the non-Greekness of Macedonia and
the existence of a Macedonian minority on Greek territory which is not
officially recognized, and with instigating conflict among Greek citizens by
differentiating between the speakers of a Slavic language and Greeks. If
convicted they faced possible terms of several years' imprisonment and heavy
fines .14 More will be said about charges of human rights abuses against
Greece in a later chapter. At this point it is enough to recognize the
continuing vigor with which Greece asserts an ethnic purity that cannot be
substantiated by historical analysis. Of particular interest are the population changes
that have occurred in Aegean Macedonia during the twentieth century. The Greek
position is that the Greek citizens of Aegean Macedonia have a genuine claim
to historic connection with Macedonia and that the Slavs do not. It is implied
that they have this connection since they are Greek and the ancient
Macedonians are claimed to have been Greek. However, it is not commonly known,
even among Greeks, that a majority of the "Greek" population of
Aegean Macedonia can trace its immediate ancestors not to Macedonia, but to
Anatolia, western Turkey, since they came from Turkey as refugees in the 1920s
during one of the Greek-Turkish wars. The population of western Turkey at the
time had been subject to many of the same forces that affected the populations
of the southern Balkans, though for various reasons, including the tendency of
the Byzantine Empire to move troublesome peoples to this area and the strong
presence of peoples of Turkic origin, the mix was even more complex. If the
connection of Balkan Greek speakers to the ancient Greeks and thence to the
ancient Macedonians is tenuous, the links with the Turkish Greek speakers who
came into Aegean Macedonia are even more dubious. This issue will be explained
further in another chapter. Nineteenth-century European attitudes toward Greece.
In 1821, after the Greek War of Independence broke out, western Europe was
swept by Philhellenism." The Germans were the nationality most quickly
and deeply involved. Over 300 Germans went to fight in Greece, but throughout
Europe tens of thousands of students and academics were involved in support
movements. Many Britons, French, and Italians went to Greece to fight, and
there was a strong support movement in the U.S. Though only sixteen North
Americans reached Greece, the widespread philhellenic feelings arising from
the war provided a big boost for the "Hellenic"- Greek letter
-fraternities in the US. Shelley wrote: We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our
religion, our arts all have their roots in Greece. But for Greece ... we might
still have been savages and idolaters ... The human form and the human mind
attained to a perfection in Greece which has impressed its images on those
faultless productions whose very fragments are the despair of modern art, and
has propagated impulses which can never cease, through a thousand channels of
manifest or imperceptible operation, to enable and delight mankind until the
extinction of the race. Throughout western Europe, the Greek War of
Independence was seen as a struggle between European youthful vigor and
Asiatic and African decadence, corruption and cruelty. The Greek fight for independence had attracted
European sympathy because of European distrust of the Moslem Turks, sympathy
with the Christian Greeks, a great respect for classical Greek scholarship,
and views developing in Europe that the ancient Greeks were "northern
Europeans" and the originators of philosophy and science. Despite this
favorable view of the ancients, closer inspection of modern Greeks had left
many western Europeans disappointed with their heroic, but superstitious,
Christian and dirty, "descendants," whom some regarded as "Byzantinized
Slavs.” These views were not isolated. Mark Twain, for instance, "had
thought modern Greeks a libel on the ancients."" The English poet
Byron was shocked when he came to Greece expecting to find the tall, blond,
blue-eyed heroes of antiquity. Cheetham10 says that the new Greeks were regarded
with vague suspicion in academic circles, since their association with ancient
Greece was not considered to be genuine. They were, in Robert Byron’s words,
"discounted as the unmoral refuse of medieval Slav migrations, sullying
the land of their birth with the fury of their politics and the malformation
of their small brown bodies." Cheetham says that the classical master at
his school commiserated with him on the prospect of his having to consort on
his holidays with what he called "those nasty little Slavs." It may be that European racist contempt for the Greek
revolutionaries of the nineteenth century goes some way toward explaining the
persisting determination of the Greeks to create an alternative racial model
for themselves. If we juxtapose the nineteenth-century view of the ancient
Greeks as Aryans with attitudes towards the ethnic characteristics of the
Greek revolutionaries, we can see the enormous burden that the Greeks carried
in their dealings with Europe. While it has been a characteristic of new
nation-states during the last century and a half to manufacture a suitable
cultural, linguistic and ethnic pedigree for themselves, the Greeks have
carried this process through to an extent that is unparalleled in Europe. Even
today, Greece clings to a European connection via its rather tumultuous
relationship with the European community. It is ironic that a part of the
continuing European mistrust of the Greeks, as is evident from influential
editorial comments such as those cited above, has developed because of the
very myths that the Greeks propagate in order to purify their image. Greek
myth-making today can be seen as inspired by the wider European racism of the
nineteenth and early twentieth century, and even a continuation of that
racism. The United States State Department and international human rights
organizations have claimed that Greek suppression of ethnic minorities has
come out of such policies. These claims will be elaborated in a later chapter. THE CONTINUATION OF GREEK CULTURE? Arnold Toynbee discusses the evolution of the meaning
of the word "Hellene" in Greek literary usage, noting that it was
originally given to a very specific group of northwest Greek-speaking people
who lived in the interior of Epirus, but later came to be used to describe the
association of twelve peoples in central and northeastern continental Greece
that formed the Delphi-Anthela amphictyony. This was primarily a religious
communality. Other Greek citystates joined this association and the name
Hellene was applied to all who participated in this civilization. Toynbee
points out that the principal distinctive feature of this new Hellenic
civilization, a characteristic that distinguished it from the earlier
Mycenaean civilization, was the city-state. This feature was more important
even than language, as is evidenced by the admission of the Luvian-speaking
city-states of Lycia and Caria. Toynbee notes that Herodotus, writing in 479 B.C.,
put common race and language first in his definition of Hellenism, but
acknowledged a role for a common culture. However, Isocrates, nearly 100 years
later (380 B.C.), made the point that the Athenians "have given the name
'Hellenes' a spiritual connotation instead of its former racial one. People
who share in our Athenian culture are now felt to have a stronger title to the
name 'Hellenes' than people who share with us merely a common physical
make-up. Robert Browning dismisses the significance of the
Slavic influence in Greece by taking up this idea, arguing that being Hellene
was not a matter of genetics or tribal membership, but of education. Thus
Browning suggests that if you speak Greek and live like a Greek, you are
Greek. Cheetharn takes a similar tack, claiming that the "original"
citizens of the Balkan peninsula were intensely proud of their Hellenic
culture but adding that questions about racial origins would have appeared
pointless to educated persons of the high Byzantine age, since they tended to
indifference towards such matters. They had become quite accustomed to the
enormous ethnic mixture that had characterized the empire since late Roman
times. Both of these explanations, though intended to be sympathetic to the
Greeks, are diametrically opposed to the present Greek government position. Like Robert Browning, Cheetharn makes the point that
there was at least some continuity of culture in early medieval times, since
the mixture of peoples was held together by the combined power of "Greek
civilization, Roman law and the Christian religion." Cheetham argues that
the Slav immigrants were progressively intermingled with the Greeks so that an
eventual fusion took place. Browning also notes that over time the Slavs were
acculturated and were often converted to Christianity. A process of "re-hellenization"
took place, led by the Greek Orthodox Church, using the vehicle of the Greek
language. To use the words of Nicholas Cheetham, (in the south) "religion
and Hellenization marched hand in hand." The Slavs and Albanians, in
particular, converted to Christianity and learned to speak Greek. The nature of this re-hellenization must be
questioned, since even its advocates recognize that Roman law and the
Christian religion were in no sense contiguous with classical culture yet made
up a large part of the character of this "new hellenic culture." If
we strip away the religion of classical Greece and the unifying force of
common shrines and rituals of the Delphi-Anthela arnphictyony; eliminate the
political structure of the city-state; and replace Greek law and
administrative procedures with those of Rome, it seems unreasonable to assert
that the remaining elements constitute a culture essentially the same as
classical Greece. It is simply not plausible to suggest that the bulk of
Greekspeaking Roman citizens in the Middle Ages, let alone the former Turkish
subjects of nineteenth-century Greece, "lived like" ancient Greeks. Making a case about the difficulty classical writers
faced in distinguishing between dialects of Greek, Arnold Toynbee 61 offers an
analogy. He suggests that a speaker of High German from Frankfurt am Main, or
a speaker of Low German from Flanders or Holland, might find it difficult to
believe that the language spoken by people in some rural district in
Luxembourg, Alsace, or one of the forest cantons of Switzerland is a dialect
of his own language. Perhaps the most interesting point about this example is
how it demonstrates that although people may speak dialects of the same
language, they can enjoy very different lifestyles and cultures. If we compare
the Dutch seaman of the sixteenth century and a Swiss-German farmer of the
same period, we might wonder whether the two would see any affinities between
themselves except for a remote language similarity. We might also contemplate
the absurdity of the idea of a Swiss-German of the present day saying to
himself, "My (Dutch) ancestors were among the greatest of sea
navigators." It would be an anachronism. Eric Hobsbawn reminds us: The most usual ideological abuse of history is
based on anachronism rather than lies. Greek nationalism refused Macedonia
even the right to its name on the grounds that all Macedonia is essentially
Greek and part of a Greek nation-State, presumably ever since the father of
Alexander the Great, king of Macedonia, became ruler of the Greek lands on the
Balkan peninsula ... it takes a lot of courage for a Greek intellectual to say
that, historically speaking, it is nonsense. There was no Greek nation-State
or any other single political entity for the Greeks in the fourth century
B.C.; the Macedonian empire was nothing like the Greek or any other modern
nation-state, and in any case it is highly probable that the ancient Greeks
regarded the Macedonian rulers, as they did their later Roman rulers, as
barbarians and not as Greeks, though they were doubtless too polite or
cautious to say so. In the same way that it would be questionable for a
modern Swiss-German to claim descendence from sixteenth century Dutch
seafarers, it is questionable for modern Greeks to claim family affinity with
the ancient Macedonians, even if the ethnological purity which such a claim
requires could be established. An appeal to continuity of Hellenism through the
Greek language is similarly dubious. We have already seen Roger Just's comment
that by the nineteenth-century most of the newly independent
"Greeks" did not call themselves Hellenes, and did not even speak
Greek by preference. Furthermore, the use of a form of the Slavic language was
still widespread, perhaps dominant, in the territories that were not taken
into the Greek nation until later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It has been claimed that the Greek language of the
nineteenth century was a corrupted ecclesiastical version of classical Greek
that the ancients might have had some trouble comprehending. George Finlay was
extremely critical of this language and the role of the church hierarchy based
in Constantinople in reducing it to the level apparent in the mid-nineteenth
century. If we consider the standard applied by Herodotus that
ancestry, language and culture were the basis for Greek community, or even if
we prefer the evolved definition of Isocrates that gives primary emphasis to
culture, it is not an unreasonable conclusion that nineteenth-century Greeks
failed to meet these criteria. After the establishment of independence, Greek
intellectuals made a great effort to return their country to its Hellenic
past. Classical place names were revived, and Turkish, Venetian and even
Byzantine buildings were removed to reveal ancient ruins. The language was
standardized in the nineteenth century as part of a concerted effort to create
a new Greece. This brought some stability to the culture of the diverse
"new Hellenic" peoples who could be recognized at that time. Since
1988 and the renaming of northern Greece as Macedonia, a whole new focus has
been given to the Greek effort to identify with the classical and Hellenic
past.
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