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 (642-6
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.
Copyright © 2001-2003 historyofmacedonia.org All rights reserved
Terms of Service Feedback: feedback.DeleteThis@historyofmacedonia.org
FAQ
Profile
Private Messages
Log in
