To many today this sounds exaggerated, to others idealistic, and to some full of imagination, but for Victor Hugo, inspired by the passion of the Greek national movement, the world was an expanding Greece. The epic of the Greek revolution, which in our day comes to life thanks to dedicated narratives, should not be treated with prejudice, but with the necessary historical sympathy. To prove that we can stand for some time outside our modern everyday life, that we are able to empathize with different experiences and listen to the spirit of another era. To prove that we can finally understand the “how” and “why” that have decisively determined the lives of some other people.

In essence, this is the principle of experience, which begins with the emotional and cognitive ability of a person to distance himself from his era and perceive the experience of other eras. In other words, to approach the historical past through the ideas and imperatives that define it, completely divorced from the present. Thus, historical empathy is achieved, a situation that essentially determines the process of thinking and, consequently, the meaning of the historical past. While this seems like an interesting situation, and indeed it is, historical empathy requires a complex confluence of things to achieve. It requires a cognitive historical background and, at the same time, the ability to use this background to interpret situations and actions. Therefore, the events of the Greek revolution, what preceded and what followed before the establishment of the independent national state of the Greeks, should be approached and analyzed in this way.

Of course, emotional identification with actors from another era is not an easy task. The world of those personalities is unrecognizably compared with the modern one, looking for similarities and differences. For this reason, many have already rushed to assert that there is absolutely no resemblance between a modern Greek and a hero of the Battle of Alamana, for example. They were seduced by emotional and logical disorientation, based on a completely misguided presentism, to finally come to a modern political reality. The Greek Movement was a national-political movement, not only aimed at the liberation of the Greek nation and the creation of the first independent Greek state, but at the same time aimed at creating a privileged state. Thus, to all these protagonists, 19th-century French Romanticism can enthusiastically proclaim through its great spokesman that “The world is an expanding Greece.”

*Konstantina Dmitrievna Karakosta – Associate Professor, Department of Modern History of Greece.