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had a fixation with the event. They declared theirdictatorship to be a “national-salvationist revolu-tion” (ethnosotirios epanastasis) that would com-plete the work of its predecessor. In 1971, the 150thanniversary of the uprising, more than 300 bookswere published on the subject – an astonishingnumber dwarfing that of any year before or since.The nation’s classrooms rang with the exhortation:“Long live the revolution of 25 March 1821! Long livethe revolution of 21 April 1967!” It was ironic towatch an authoritarian military Junta heroizing abunch of unruly and quarrelsome chieftains whohad been united by few things stronger than theirloathing for the idea of a regular army. But the pre-dictable result of turning 1821 into fascist kitsch wasthat by the time the colonels fell from power in 1974,everyone was fed up with the subject.

This explains why, amid the truly remarkableresurgence in historical studies in Greece that tookplace with the restoration of democracy, the subjectof its independence struggle was initially neglected.An exception was the scholarly journal Mnimon,which consistently published high-calibre researchon the subject. Just three years ago, it published notone but two important volumes of essays on theGreek revolution. These signalled an end to theneglect of the recent past and showcased a youngergeneration of historians that was finding new rea-sons for returning to 1821.

One of these volumes is a collective tribute to thelate historian Despoina Themeli-Katifori, who hadcontributed to the journal from the start. She hadproduced a pathbreaking dissertation in the midstof the Junta in which she examined the eradicationof piracy in the Aegean in late 1820s. It was not thekind of subject the Junta liked to dwell on, not leastbecause it used the wonderfully rich papers of themaritime courts to highlight the more mercenarystruggles that often powered the revolution. Herwork highlighted the importance of the economicsof the war more generally, a crucial dimensionwhich earlier generations had almost entirelyignored, as well as the realities of the independencestruggle at sea.

Continuing Themeli-Katifori’s maritime focus,Gelina Harlaftis at the Institute for MediterraneanStudies in Crete has directed two astonishingly richcollective research projects. The first, dating backto 2004, deployed an international team of scholarswho scoured shipping manifests, trade statistics andother archival data in some sixteen cities aroundEurope to build up a picture of unprecedentedscope and detail, not just about the Greeks and theirships but about the entire eighteenth-century Medi-terranean world from which they sprang: a vastonline database ensures their work will inspiremore research in future. A second volume, out thisyear, focuses on 1821 and the interconnectionsbetween commerce and fighting during the conflict.Cumulatively, this work changes our understandingof the relationship between Mediterranean com-merce, empire and nationalism at a crucial phasein world history. Since Fernand Braudel, the Medi-terranean has generally been relegated to the statusof a secondary seaway after the discovery of theAmericas. In fact it was at the heart of Europe’sgrowth, with Greek ships in particular not onlycarrying the Russian grain trade and driving theTsarist expansion into the Black Sea, but linking theLevant to Montevideo, Bombay and Calcutta. Theeighteenth-century Ottoman empire too was nobystander: in reality it fostered this trade in all kindsof ways in the decades preceding the struggle. Evenafter the fighting started, amid scenes of great vio-lence at sea as well as on land, Greek ships con-tinued sailing in and out of Ottoman ports, blurringthe line between combatant and non-combatantsoften to the point of non-existence in a struggle inwhich legally there was actually no Greek navy butrather a set of occasionally contracted vessels thatremained privately owned by shipowners based inthe islands.

The larger economics of the struggle that beganin 1821 is another area where new scholarship is ©

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Mark Mazower is Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University. His new book, The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the making of modern Europe, will be published later this year

THE UPRISING IN OTTOMAN EUROPE whichculminated in the independence of Greecewas launched exactly 200 years ago. In a

matter of months, a Christian peasant insurgencyousted the Ottomans from most of the Peloponnesein a conflict of immense ferocity, while Greek shipschallenged the Sultan’s hold over the eastern Medi-terranean. The contest could scarcely have beenmore uneven; Europe’s Great Powers could nothave been less supportive. Yet the Greeks persisted,plunging the Ottoman Empire into crisis, mobilizingthe sympathies of the European public and event-ually forcing the Powers to intervene to bring thefighting to an end by backing the establishment ofan independent Greek state. Covid is unlikely tostop the exhibitions, lectures, conferences and fes-tivities that have been planned; online you canalready buy bicentennial backpacks, mugs, pensand commemorative coins. Nor does the annivers-ary merit less: the Greek war of independence wasperhaps the earliest triumph of nationalism –famously defined by Lord Acton as the idea that“nations would not be governed by foreigners”.It was in this sense a forerunner of the politicalstruggles that transformed the map of Europe andcreated the world we inhabit today.

In 1822, a French philhellene called ClaudeRaffenel, based at the consulate in Smyrna, pub-lished the first volume of his Histoire des Événemens[sic] de la Grèce. He was conscious of living in excep-tional times. “There are famous epochs which seemmarked out by Providence”, he begins. “Such werethe centuries of Sésostris, Priam, Alexander, Caesar,Mohammed and Louis XIV, and such, too, is ourown.” Two more volumes appeared, along with aseparate history of the modern Greeks, before theauthor was killed in the struggle for Athens fiveyears later. Raffenel was probably the uprising’s firsthistorian but others quickly followed in Europe andNorth America. Inside Ottoman Greece, the printing

press had been unknown; when it arrived after inde-pendence, veterans and their proxies began settlingold wartime scores on the page. Their battles werenot for the faint-hearted; anyone perturbed by thequality of public discourse in the age of Twittershould read the critical abuse endemic in Athensin the nineteenth century. The former chieftainMakriyannis taught himself to write at the age ofthirty-two and produced famously invective-filledmemoirs, a classic of modern Greek letters. Thepolitician Spiridon Trikoupis’s politely thoughtfulthree volumes – hailed in London as the work of a“second Polybius” – were contemptuously dis-missed in Greece as “a speculative enterprise” bya Peloponnesian grandee whose own wartime recol-lections contained insults of such range and lengththat his family sat on them for a century. Memoirselicited Confutations, then Confutations of the Confu-tations. Chroniclers published mammoth documentcollections to defend the honour and reputation ofclans, islands and entire regions.

The Greek state embraced the veterans and theirmemories but cared little about wartime records,mouldering in ministry basements when not thrownaway. It was left to a young researcher-collectorcalled Giannis Vlachoyiannis to mount his own sal-vage operations in the capital’s second-hand book-shops, tavernas and scrap-merchants. In 1901, helisted some of his finds: “The Samos archive wasfound in a builder’s yard at 100 Odos Athinas; thecollection of texts from the siege of Messolonghi wasfound in the same yard; ... another valuable collec-tion was found in the garbage of the paperworks inFaleron”. In 1915, Vlachoyiannis was appointed firsthead of the state archives; but on the eve of theSecond World War, he was still bemoaning the“grievous signs” of indifference that had shroudedthe subject for nearly a century.

That all changed in the Cold War, when indiffer-ence was replaced by ideological combat and themeaning of 1821 became an interpretative battle-field. The stridently anti-communist colonels whoseized power in Athens in a military coup in 1967

Revolutionary reckonings Greek independence, 1821 and the historians

“Greek pirates defending a bay against Britons”, by Carl von Heydeck, 1836

MARK MAZOWER

C O M M E N T A R Y

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“transforming our understanding. With a handful ofexceptions, mostly now extremely dated, moneywas too sordid a subject to sully the memory of theheroic struggle. Yet the truth is that when theGreeks took on the Ottomans, they faced animmense disparity in fiscal reach. The Sultan hada centuries-old empire at his disposal that was setup to extract taxes and possessed abundant man-power and many of the resources needed for war.If it was in the throes of a decades’ long budgetarycrisis and yawning deficits, that still placed the Otto-man state far ahead of the Greeks, who had nobureaucracy, no taxation system, few weapons andlimited manpower.

M oney may not have bothered earlier histori-ans but it certainly bothered the protago-nists. Soldiers haggled over their wages;

traders ran blockades to provision all sides. Asuperb new study by Antonis Diakakis of the townof Messolonghi, perched between mountains andlagoon, brings the material conditions of wartimelife sharply into focus. At sea, Greek crews bar-gained hard for pay and prizes. Eftychia Liata’s newanalysis of the all-important Hydriot fleet drillsdown into the expenses of a single ship, the frigateTimoleon. Piracy, privateering and plunder werehardwired into the war economy from the start,thanks to the investments of Greek leaders like Pet-ros Mavromichalis, the so-called Bey of the Mani.But the struggle not only created a demand for theisland ships; it also enabled a new means of financ-ing them, and it is not coincidental that one of theearliest administrative acts of the first provisionalgovernment was to assert its fiscal prerogatives overthe islands of the Aegean. It was thus the poor farm-ers and traders of Naxos, Santorini and other similartourist destinations in our own times who becamepart of the great experiment of establishing a cen-tralized state in the middle of the conflict.

The islands were targeted for a reason: the war-time government found it hard to squeeze anythingout of the mainland peasantry. Too many otherpeople were in the queue ahead of them. First andforemost, there were the traditional landownersand notable clans of the Peloponnese whose grip on“their” villages dated back deep into Ottomantimes. The challenge these great families faced totheir privileges came primarily from the armedfighters they had once employed as bodyguards,men like Theodoros Kolokotronis who rose in thestruggle to become great warlords and heroes and– if they played their cards right – “generals” and“commanders” as well. A revelatory new book bya young historian, Simos Bozikis, trawls through thewartime archives of the provisional administrationto show how weak and impoverished the centraldirection of the Greek revolution really was. Pub-lished at the end of 2020, Elliniki epanastasi kaidimosia oikonomia (Greek Revolution and PublicFinances) fundamentally reshapes our understand-ing of the conflict. It underscores the uneven natureof the contest, the fragile fiscal basis of centralizedpower and the continued privileges afforded byprivate wealth. Above all, it makes one marvel atthe endurance and tenacity of the large mass ofpoor Greeks eking out a living from the rocky soil,while a succession of powerful forces – sometimesclaiming to fight in their name, sometimes in theSultan’s – did their best to take from them what littlethey had.

The Greeks were poor in most things but wealthyin one – their language – and it is hard to think ofa comparable peasant insurgency in which so manyof the participants managed to leave their own testi-monies. The tongue of Orthodox faith, learning andcommerce, Greek was not spoken by all the partici-pants – some of the great heroes of the conflict infact preferred Albanian – but it was surprisinglyaccessible as a means of record-keeping and corre-spondence. A chieftain such as Spiros Milios, fromthe crags of southern Albania, had already learnedhow to write before the war and penned his experi-ences afterwards. Illiterate chieftains had secretar-

ies, often village boys who had attended localschools run by priests. Fotakos was the nom deguerre of one of them: a priest’s son, sent off as ayouth to learn trade in the Black Sea, he returnedto the Morea as a revolutionary and served Koloko-tronis as his adjutant and secretary. His memoirseschew later pieties and present the war as a setof intimate encounters among men who knew oneanother well, Muslims and Christians alike. TheGreek Parliament has marked the bicentennial witha series of publications to highlight the importanceof such accounts. A brilliant set of essays entitled1821 kai apomnimonevmata (1821 and Memoirs),focuses on the autobiography as a form. It not onlyexplores individual memoirs; more fundamentally,it asks how we should read them. They are thebuilding-blocks in the construction of heroic myths;that is clear. But they also embody strange confu-sions of genre and perspective, shifting often fromfirst-person testimony to third-person narrative andback again. The very discipline of history is beingproduced through them, and this thoughtful vol-ume reminds us that the nineteenth century isthe era not only of national war but also of theprofessionalization of disciplines and of criticism,so that event and text are wrapped together in acomplex in which each contributes to the makingof the other.

Along with Fotakos, a number of these literateGreek intellectual-revolutionaries had bandedtogether before 1821 in the Filiki Etaireia (FriendlySociety), the secret conspiratorial organization thathad been formed in Odessa in 1814 and laid thegroundwork for the revolution. It was not the larg-est of the secret societies that alarmed the HolyAlliance in those years but it was certainly the mostsuccessful, for which other could claim to have wonnational independence? Greece’s intellectual histo-rians, for whom modernity was synonymous withthe Enlightenment, once focused on the high-profile, mostly older Greek savants who wrote seri-ous texts and were in close contact with their coun-terparts among the philosophes of Paris, Londonand Göttingen. The new research focuses on theseyounger men in the thick of the fighting, “second-ary” figures (as two scholars describe them) whoserved the revolution as “pen-pushers”, draftingproclamations and acting as the crucial intermedia-ries between the more parochial fighters and theinternational scene. Great ideas give way to thepower of networks as the key to the Greeks’ revolu-tionary success.

One of the best works of this kind is Vasilis Pan-ayiotopoulos’s study in 2019 of a little-knownfigure called Konstantinos Kantiotis. The author,now in his late eighties, belongs to the generationof leftists who reshaped the historical professionin Greece after 1974 and turned the country intowhat it is today – on a per capita basis, surely oneof the world’s leading producers of high-qualityscholarly history. Having overseen the publicationof the archives of Ali Pasha of Jannina, an extraor-dinarily complex undertaking, Panayiotopoulosturned his attention first to a pair of Phanariotprinces, enmeshed in the Etaireia, and then toKantiotis, a kind of Zelig-like figure, shroudedin mystery. How to explain the presence of thisman, aide to Russian foreign minister Capodistrias– supposedly an avowed enemy of the Etaireia – inthe Etaireia itself, and then not just in the Etaireiabut in the mission it sent to the Morea in the sum-mer of 1821 to take charge of the uprising there?The life of the “lesser” Kantiotis is revealed to beof some importance after all as the reader, guidedsensitively by the author, tries to fill in the blanksin the historical record. A similar effect is pro-duced by a younger scholar, Giannis Kokkonas,who recreates the ideological activism of another“lesser” Etairist, Skylitzis Omiridis, whose cease-less journeying and intense revolutionary commit-ment provided Greek islanders with counsel andguidance at key moments.

Kokkonas is also the author of a remarkable pieceof historical sleuthing. The Greeks’ capture – and

subsequent sack – of the town of Tripolitsa in theMorea in September 1821 was the first major victoryof the revolution. It had been preceded by tensenegotiations between representatives of the town’sOttoman elite and the Greek revolutionary leaders.Kokkonas has dug up an extraordinary verbatimaccount of their exchange – a record kept at the timeby a conscientious Etairist whom almost everyoneelse has overlooked – to show both the Ottomansand the Greeks struggling to define the politicalstakes of their conflict and to articulate what polit-ical dispensation might follow. Once again it turnsout to have been the humble Greek revolutionaries,as yet lacking any state of their own, who under-stood the power of the written record and give usinsights of astonishing immediacy.

Which leads naturally to the last and perhapsmost important area now opening up before oureyes. Can the Ottoman speak? would be a reason-able question of the generations of historians whosimply ignored the entire imperial dimension ofthe conflict. But Ottoman studies have taken offin Greece and this has begun to change. We nowhave, for instance, the translation of an importantaccount of the revolution written by an Ottomanofficial from the Morea. The impact of seeing theseevents through Ottoman eyes can scarcely be exag-gerated. The publication of the recollections ofYusuf Morawi Bey in particular speaks not only tothe presence of Ottomanists in Greek universities,but to their close interactions with colleagues in thefield in Turkey and elsewhere, and to the GreekNational Research Foundation’s laudable commit-ment to supporting this work.

One might have thought that there was nothingmore to be said about 1821. And yet, this is not howhistory works. The eternal verities of the revolutionand the endless replays of a few familiar scenes havehidden a far more interesting reality, one in whichthe emergence of an independent nation turns outto have been simultaneously a new chapter inthe life of the empire it was trying to escape anda formative moment in the life of the continent itwas seeking to join. It is unlikely that there will beany more appropriate or important tribute to therevolutionaries of 1821 than the devotion of the his-torical profession in Greece today. n

Works cited or mentionedD. Dimitropoulos et al, editors, Opseis tis epanastasistou 1821 (Etaireia meletis neou ellinismou [EMNE],2018)I epanastasi tou 1821: meletes sti mnimi tis DespoinasThemeli-Katifori (EMNE, 2018)A. Diakakis, To Mesolonghi sto 1821: Polemos, oikono-mia, politiki, kathimerini zoi (Asini, 2019)G. Harlaftis and K. Papakonstantinou, editors, Nafti-lia ton Ellinon, 1700–1821: O aionas tis akmis prin apotin epanastasi (Kedros, 2013)G. Harlaftis and K. Galani, editors, O emporikoskai polemikos stolos kata tin elliniki epanastasi(1821–1831) (Panespistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 2021)S. Bozikis, Elliniki epanastasi kai dimosia oikonomia:I synkrotisi tou ellinikou ethnikou kratous, 1821-1832(Asini, 2020)V. Panayiotopoulos, Dyo prinkipes stin elliniki epa-nastasi (Asini,2015)V. Panayiotopoulos, Konstantinos Kantiotis, Kerkyr-aios: Elasson Filikos, agonistis tis ellinikis epanastasis(Ethniko Idryma Erevnon, 2019)G. Kokkonas, O politis Petros Skylitzis Omiridis, 1784-1872 (EMNE, 2003)D. Dimitropoulos et al., editor, 1821 kai apomnimon-evmata: istoriki chrisi kai istoriografiki gnosi (Idrymatis Voulis ton Ellinon, 2020) V. Gounaris, Den’ein’o persinos kairos…. Ellines kleft-armatoloi kai alvanoi stasiastes (1829–1831) (EthnikoIdryma Erevnon, 2019)S. Laiou, M. Sariyannis, Othomanikes afigiseis yia tinelliniki epanastasi: apo ton Yiousouf Bei ston AhmedÇevded Pasha (Ethniko Idryma Erevnon, 2019)E. Liata, Ek tou ysterimatos armatosan … I fregata“Timoleon” stin epanastasi tou 1821 (Ethniko IdrymaErevnon, 2020)