Mark Mazover. The Greek Revolution. 1821 and the formation of modern Europe

A few observations about an extremely interesting volume, so far even the book of the year, at least for me. I wanted to say that, in my opinion, this is mandatory reading in schools and faculties, and not only in history, but also in political science or civic education, but I quickly remembered that in our country books are no longer read in schools and at the faculties. I think that there are many teachers who no longer read, in any case, not books of such complexity, frescoes of the era, and if they read, then only to pull out a few quotes to confirm some banal cliché, and not for , to understand big ideas.

We have here the story of the transition in the Balkans from the Ottoman world, a pre-capitalist tangle of local interests, intra-confessional administration, unwritten traditions, shifting loyalties and mercenaries as a current way of life, to a modern, post-confessional world. A Napoleonic nation-state based on language, education and citizenship. About the transformation of Roma into Hellenes. This is the story of how, from mistake to mistake, from heroism to heroism and from betrayal to betrayal, this “Greek” society of local oligarchs from the Peloponnese, Orthodox peasants oppressed by their exes, predatory ship owners from the islands, bandits from the highway are later heroized , millennial revolutionaries from Etheria, self-radicalized through Odesa, and educated intellectuals eventually got their own country. They killed each other along with the Muslims in modern Greece – and very often killed each other in a series of vendettas that foreshadowed the civil wars that were to follow – and rather accidentally managed to create the modern Greek state after external armed intervention. which came late and in which no one believed, after a series of predictable military disasters. You walk around Greece today and you see statues of the founding fathers of Kapodistria, Karaiskakis, Kolokotronis, Mavromichalis, etc., but it’s like the parable of the sausage: you don’t want to know the details of who these people were and what they did at different times, because you lose appetite for food.

The figure of Oleksii Mavrocordatus, from the corresponding family of the Phanariots, the grandson of Voda Caragei, who spent his youth in Bucharest at the court of his uncle, until they all found refuge in Tuscany, is impressive. Educated and Europeanized, an etherist, he was a visionary leader from the diaspora who fought against his countrymen who were very Ottoman in spirit and mostly illiterate, provincial, proud and violent, who wanted independence from the Gates but did not and changed the feudal realities in The clan-based Morea therefore opposed the construction of a modern state with a rational bureaucracy, civil services and a centralized tax system. Mavrocordatus was among those who also understood the value of propaganda through the mass media that had begun to appear in the West, which he knew how to bring to the aid of diplomacy, stimulating the emergence of Philo-Hellenic clubs in Germany, France and Italy and achieving incredible success. to take a large government loan on the financial market in London, at the expense of the Greek state, which actually did not yet exist and at that time had little chance of existing.

Furthermore, among so many armatols and regional beys who pursued their small but perfectly legitimate interests in the transactional Ottoman world with unwavering loyalty, there are striking cases of true Etherian patriots who risked their lives and sacrificed great personal fortunes in the struggle for independence. Greece, after which they died poor and forgotten in the newly built European country. This is a nice counterpoint, because someone who reads only Tudor Dean’s book about the Greek Revolution of 1821 in Moldavia and Wallachia (ie an early episode of the long war of independence), otherwise excellent and unmissable, might be left with the impression that the Aetherists were just a bunch weak and slightly drunk bastards who failed from one end to the other in what they set out to do, which is not true.

There are a million parallels and lessons for us Romanians in how we moved from Ottomanism, with its good and bad, to modernity in our region, in many social, economic and military aspects that could not have been very different at the time. In fact, the big picture is how nations were actually built in the Balkans in the 19th century, a story that illuminates many areas that our textbooks have silently mentioned and are still enshrined in the romantic vulgate. By the way, water Ioan Karagea, that Phanariot of ill repute, connected with the plague of 1813, died peacefully as a simple citizen and patron of culture in Athens, although wealthy after the plundering rule of Wallachia, after donating to the Athenian municipality many lands on which later public buildings were built. The era was complicated, as were the people. – Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro