Mark Mazower has written three books that deal with modern Greek history: Inside Hitler’s Greece: the Experience of Occupation 1941-44; Salonica, City of Ghosts; and, most recently, The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe.
The first is a compelling study of the Nazi subjugation of Greece and its impact on ordinary Greeks; the second a more controversial account of the Muslim and Jewish communities that thrived in Thessaloniki during the Ottoman occupation – the controversy stemming from Mazower’s apparent nostalgia for ‘cosmopolitan’ Thessaloniki and sadness at its demise, when, of course, to Greeks and Greek nationalists the Ottoman occupation of this historic Greek city was a disaster and its liberation in 1912 and its re-Hellenisation remains one of the paramount achievements of modern Greece.
Mazower’s work on 1821 is a narrative account of Greeks’ grim and remorseless determination to end Turkish rule, which shows that when Greeks said Freedom or Death they meant it and when they said No Turk in the Morea, No Turk in the World, they meant that too.
As with his work on the Nazi occupation of Greece, Mazower is keen to avoid regurgitating the mythical exploits of those from the pantheon of revolutionary heroes, heroines, political and military leaders and, instead, wants to record the experiences of those, perhaps, previously neglected in the genre – women, children, non-combatant villagers.
Indeed, Mazower’s case is that it was the grotesque abuses suffered by civilians – particularly the Muslim practice of enslavement and forced Islamisation – that decisively turned European public opinion in Greek favour and convinced the continent’s leading powers – Great Britain, France and Russia – to intervene, even if they did this not so much because they wanted to establish Greek independence but to end Ottoman and Egyptian atrocities.
(Mazower claims that the final straw for the three European powers was the concern that the Egyptian commander Ibrahim Pasha would overrun the Peloponnese, exterminate the Greek population there and replace it with Arabs. This caused consternation in London, St Petersburg and Paris not only because it was intolerable to countenance such a slaughter of Christians by Muslims but also because it would represent a dangerous resurgence of Islam on European soil).
A grievance is that Mazower’s book – like Roderick Beaton’s recent Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation – tends to equate the violence suffered by the Greeks at the hands of Turks, Bosniaks, Albanians and Egyptians with that inflicted by Greeks when ridding their country of the Ottoman presence. (This anti-Muslim violence often shocked philhellenes who came to Greece with their heads full of ideas about noble Greeks and universal human dignity, seemingly oblivious to just how dehumanising Turkish rule was and how this seeped into Greek attitudes and morés).
However, not only was Ottoman violence far more widespread than its Greek equivalent but it also often took place where Greeks had not risen to overthrow Ottoman rule – Constantinople, Asia Minor, Cyprus – and amounted to grotesque reminders to Greeks of their subordination. Indeed, religious discrimination and persecution were ingrained in the Ottoman system. Order was maintained through terror and repression and peace dependent on the whims of the sultan or his pashas or beys who, at any moment, could decide that their Christian subjects, their culture, shrines and very lives, were an affront to Muslim ascendancy and should be suppressed or eradicated.
Thus, while it’s true that the Revolution turned decisively in the Greeks’ favour with external intervention – Mazower’s argument is, in fact, that the original revolutionaries of the Philiki Eteiria always knew that, for the Revolution to be successful, help from outside, specifically from Russia, would be required; it’s also right to attribute Greek existence and victory to Greek refusal to submit to the genocidal logic of the Ottoman state and the religious malice that underpinned it.
In terms of religion, Mazower is good at distancing the Greek revolution from the Enlightenment-inspired revolts in France and America by stressing that most Greeks involved in the Revolution had no interest in the Rights of Man or Reason (certainly marginalising the church and its dogma was a minority preoccupation) but were guided by a popular millenarianist tradition entrenched in Orthodoxy that spoke of the illegitimate and sacrilegious authority of the Muslim sultan in Constantinople and how it would inevitably come to an end with the restoration of a Christian ruler in the City.
Ethnic hatred, religious zeal, a sense that a previous state of affairs had existed in which freedom and justice reigned and would come again, were felt more widely among Greeks than Western ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity held by the more ‘educated’ strata.
If the uprising was not the child of the American War of Independence or the French Revolution, then perhaps it was more akin to the Haitian revolution (and subsequent revolutions aimed at overthrowing colonial regimes). Both the Greek and Haitian revolutions start with mythical religious convocations – the Bois Caiman ceremony in Haiti and the Agia Lavra doxology in Greece; are reactions to regimes of tyrannical abomination; and proceed to be characterised by mind-boggling acts of violence and brutality.
In explaining the violence of the colonised oppressed, it might be useful to refer to Frantz Fanon and his classic anti-colonial diatribe The Wretched of the Earth (1961), in which he justifies (if not demands) the use of violence to overthrow colonial tyranny.
‘Decolonisation is always violent,’ Fanon says. ‘National liberation, national reawakening, restoration of the nation to the people or Commonwealth, whatever the name used, whatever the latest expression, decolonization is always a violent event. At whatever level we study it – individual encounters, a change of name for a sports club, the guest list at a cocktail party, members of a police force or the board of directors of a state or private bank – decolonization is quite simply the substitution of one “species” of mankind by another.’
On the individual level, Fanon goes on, violence is a process of cleansing, which ‘rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence’.
In vanquishing injustice, in raising their heads again – to use General Makriyiannis’ terms in describing the Greek Revolution – Greek revolutionary violence was a necessary act of decolonisation. It purified individual souls and the soul of the country after 400 years of humiliation and repression, restored dignity and self-respect and allowed future generations of Greeks to live with the knowledge that the depredations endured by their ancestors didn’t go unpunished.
