by zan » Sun Sep 07, 2008 10:34 pm
Origins of the Megale Idea
Greek nationalism has the "Megale Idea," the counterpart of Serbia's "Nacertanije." Literally translated as the "great idea" or "grand idea," the Megale Idea implies the goal of reestablishing a Greek state as a homeland for all the Greeks of the Mediterranean and Balkan world. Such a Greece would be territorially larger than the Greek state of today, but would be smaller than the Greek world of classical times, which extended west to the coast of Sicily, northeast into the Black Sea, and south to Egypt. Alexander the Great -- a figure of classical Greek history and legend exploited by competing modern-day politicians -- spread the influence of Hellenism even wider, into Africa and Asia. The Eastern half of the Roman Empire became solidly Greek as Byzantium, and sustained Greek culture in the Balkans and Asia Minor.
One of the unsettled aspects of the Megale Idea and the goals of Greek nationalism has been uncertainty about what is properly considered Greek, and why. In the nineteenth century, religious affiliation with the Greek Orthodox church was often confused with ethnic affiliation: the Bulgarians, for example, worked for many years to secure a separate Bulgarian Exarchate Church for this reason. Extreme Greek territorial claims resulted when the geography of classical Greece was applied to modern maps. The result has been conflict with Albania over Epirus, with Serbia and Bulgaria over Macedonia, and with Turkey over Istanbul (Constantinople), the western coast of Anatolia and islands from the Aegean to Cyprus.
While the fall of Constantinople in 1453 put an end to Greek political power in the Balkans, the Ottoman millet system ensured that Greek influence would remain strong through the agency of the Orthodox Church. As indicated in Lecture 6, the power of the Patriarch and his hierarchy opened important doors for Greeks, and this helped to keep alive visions of a revived Greek state among the Greeks of the Ottoman empire.
Intellectual currents outside the Ottoman Empire also contributed to a consciousness of things Greek. Some educated Greeks fled to Italy after the fall of Constantinople: their writings promoted interest in antiquity during the Renaissance. Western European interest in ancient Greece led to Phil-Hellenism. The British ruling class, in particular, gained an interest in Greece from their education in the classics, and this led to British support for the Greek revolution in the 1820s.
Rhigas Pheraios published a manifesto in 1797, one year before his arrest and execution for anti-Turkish plotting. His work offers insight into Greek thought about a revived Greece, on the eve of the modern revolutionary era. Rhigas envisaged a large country occupying both the Balkans and Anatolia, sheltering all the ethnic groups found there but ruled according to Greek ideas. Rhigas was advanced enough in his thinking to abandon religion as a criterion for national identity but he was not farsighted enough to see the ways in which modern ethnic nationalism, with its emphasis on shared language and culture, would make such an idea impossible. He influenced the planners of the Revolution of 1821: we can see echoes of his thinking in the plans for a three-fold uprising, to take place in Istanbul and the Romanian provinces, as well as in the Greek Peloponessus. And we have seen how this idea broke down in the face of incipient Romanian nationalism, so that the uprising in Romania failed because Romanians resented their Greek Phanariot hospodars.
