Balkan

Published by The National Herald, March 18, 2005

The Roots of Balkan Nationalism: Secret Societies and the Role of Culture

A critical factor which contributed to the rise of revolutionary movements in the Balkans was the onset of imperial decay dogging the House of Osman (the Ottoman ruling family) in the early 19th Century decay.

The symptoms of Ottoman degeneration also inspired other wealthy Greek Orthodox, not just the Phanariotes, to contemplate liberation from the Ottomans and the creation of some kind of state for the Orthodox subjects of the sultan. The musings of these quasi-revolutionaries and nascent nationalist intellectuals revolved around two organizations that were set up at the turn of that century.

Men who believed education was the precursor to a struggle for liberation founded the Philomuse Society at Athens in 1812. Many of the leaders of the Greek independence movement were trained in Europe, thanks to the funds raised by the Society. Greek merchants in Russia established the second hub of revolutionary activity in Odessa in 1814. The Philiki Hetairia (Societies of Friends) attempted to shroud itself in secrecy and adopted loose Masonic rituals of covet signals and a hierarchy of membership. The very layers of mystery surrounding their activities masked its paucity of influential adherents and lack of political support or contact with any of the Great Powers.

In the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, the prevailing wisdom among Greek and other Balkan radicals and intellectuals was that the Ottoman Empire was on the brink of the abyss, while the rise of imperial Russia was destined to become the agent of Ottoman demise. The leaders of the Philiki Hetairia exploited such armchair political hypotheses and were able to convince a great number of people in the Balkans that behind the veils of secrecy, the patron of the society was the Russian Tsar, Alexander I.

Through this ruse, the Hetairia hinted that it enjoyed the unequivocal support of Russia, and that it was only a matter of time before the Tsarist armies would sweep away the degenerate forces of the sultan and thus restore Byzantium. This careful slight of hand enabled the relatively small and obscure group of merchants to raise considerable funds and expand the tentacles of the Hetairia by planting agents in every major Ottoman urban center.

Yet in matters of national affiliation, the Hetairia’s founders in 1814 were simply not able, or even willing, to discern between Orthodoxy and 19th Century nationalism. George Finlay, a major historian of the Greek War of Independence and the early years of the new Greek state (History of the Greek Revolution, and the Reign of King Otho, Vol. 1, pg. 99), scornfully writes "that the traders who framed its organization called the popular class of initiated brethren of the Hetairia by the barbarous appellation of Vlamides, from the Albanian word ‘vlameria,’ signifying brotherhood." In effect, Vlamides was used to define the lowest rank in the society essentially reserved for simple and illiterate members. It may have been out of social and intellectual snobbery that the leaders of the society assigned an Albanian appellation to separate their more modest colleagues.

Modern Greek historians explain the Hetairia as an organization committed to Greek independence, but also equally determined to support insurrections in Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia. Greek and Serbian merchants, Romanian boiers, Phanariots, klept capetani, doctors, lawyers and other professionals found political space within the credulity of the Hetairia’s broad ideological spectrum.

But the difficulty with the professionals, Christian nobles, as well as intellectuals, was that they were cut off from the realities faced by lesser Orthodox notables in the provinces. These lesser officials were dependent upon the regional susceptibilities of the rural communities, as well as the military arm provided by the bandits, who turned freedom fighters after the insurrections broke out.

The Western-educated professionals and merchants, unlike the notables of Constantinople, saw little merit in replacing the stagnant Ottoman system with an equally repressive Byzantine autocracy. Such imperial notions also held little weight with the Greek Diaspora in Western Europe, whose fortunes and political influence were critical to the success of the 1821 rebellion. Adamantios Korais, a representative of that school of thought, believed that education was the recipe for liberating the Greeks from Ottoman domination, as well as from the dead hand of their Orthodox Byzantine heritage.

Conventional Balkan historiography offers the cohesion and survival of the Orthodox establishment as the means which preserved language, culture and identity during the Ottoman period. The difficulty with this historical anachronism (to cite two examples) is that the higher clergy communicated in archaic Greek, while their Serbian counterparts relied on a variation of medieval Church Slavonic. Therefore, only a small minority of educated Christians could understand the elementals of Church culture. The village priests, too often poorly educated, confined their activities to weddings, baptisms, funerals and conducting liturgy which, more often than not, remained incomprehensible to them, as well as to their flock.

There are always exceptions with respect to the role of the clergy in the wars of independence and their contribution to preserving ethnic identity, and a great number of people have always believed that the Church was key to cultural and national survival.

Exceptions aside, it still begs the question, how did any of the Balkan communities maintain their language, culture, and history and ultimately form their respective national identities?

For example, the Ottomans indirectly facilitated the spread of the Greek language and culture throughout the Balkans. Did speaking Greek as a primary, secondary and professional language, or using the Greek alphabet to write Turkish, also mean that the user identified himself as a Greek?

During the 1922 population exchanges between Greece and Turkey, almost 400,000 Greek-speaking Karamanli Turks were expelled to Greece, while a number of Greek Muslims from Crete were forced to relocate in Turkey. However, the yardstick of nationality was not language, but religion. The Turkish Karamanli were Orthodox, and the expelled Cretans had converted to Islam centuries earlier.

Undoubtedly, this field of research is barely explored and may one day offer some fascinating political and sociological insights. A tentative explanation is that popular culture survived through folk music, stories, epic poems and oral tradition. In effect, a type of cultural memory, in whole or in part, was passed on from generation to generation.

The Ottomans, without realizing it, made their own contribution to sustaining the distinctiveness of the Balkan communities by simply applying laws which reminded Christians they were conquered peoples and inferior to Muslims.

Every rule which forced Christians to wear certain clothing, to refrain from keeping weapons, to pay special taxes, was a constant reminder and reinforcement of their distinctive identity and inferior status. This policy of exclusion was perhaps the single most contributing factor in sustaining the sultan’s Orthodox subjects. Balkan Christians may not have understood the finer points of Orthodox dogma, but for centuries, Ottoman practices served to persuade them that, by default and as victims of persecution, they were members of a distinct Orthodox community.

Violence also played a determining factor in promoting segregation and distinctiveness. Most of Balkan folklore revolves around the theme of death, through sacrifice or at the instigation of enemies. Killing and destroying opponents, massacres, torture and mutilation are at the core of their folklore, along with the actual methods used to achieve these ends. In the preserved litany of catalogued horrors, Christians are impaled, roasted, flayed, drowned, decapitated and burned individually or en masse. Women are raped, forced into the harems of pashas, sold with their children into slavery and demeaned in one form or another.

The objectives of war, as understood then (and it seems to be the same pattern as exemplified by the recent atrocities in the former Yugoslav republics), were intended to humiliate, degrade and finally exterminate the enemy, whether by mass killing or expulsion.

Karl von Clausewitz’s maxim that war is an extension of politics by other means has little meaning in the context of total war. The penultimate characteristic of all Balkan conflicts, and what makes some European and North American journalists uncomfortable and occasionally hysterical, is the application of total war. Accordingly, more apropos to the Balkan context is Sun Tsu’s dictum, "all wars are won by deception" and, one can add, for the past to suit the present.

The sum total of these characteristics shaped, at least in part, the evolution of modern Balkan nationalism. The finishing touches to Balkan identity were introduced by the post-revolutionary governments of each new Balkan country in the form of state culture. In matters of language, literature, music, dance, folklore and history, these regimes attempted, with varying degrees of success, to instill their interpretation of identity, which was often a caricature of antiquity predating the Ottoman conquest. It may have been the long shadow of Orthodox tradition that popular culture was sacrificed in order to revive some vestiges of the encapsulated Byzantine legacy. Post-revolutionary governments strove to centralize and create an official culture diachronic with the past.

The chaos following the outbreak of the wars of independence and the Ottoman retribution reduced most Balkan communities into economic, social and cultural wastelands. The only avenue available to the post-revolutionary governments was to centralize cultural institutions and impose a systematic program of national standards across a landscape distorted by regional disparities and identities inscrutable to the political establishments in the capitals.

In the process of cultural regeneration, only those elements of literature, language and history judged authentic were enshrined as pillars of heritage; the rest were consigned to the dustbin as alien appendages.

Korais strove to eliminate Turkish and other foreign words from the Greek language, and by combining elements of classical, Byzantine and demotic Greek, he created the katharevousa (purest), an artificial language which looked, and presumably sounded, like ancient Greek. Despite subsequent work by scholars and popular writers, who proved that the simple spoken Greek and the written demotic version represented the natural evolution of the Greek language from antiquity, the state preferred to err on the side of archaisms.

Ironically, the written form of the demotic language found a welcome home in the court of Ali Pasha. Under the Pasha’s protection, the proponents of demotic Greek had the freedom to use the language without fear of retribution from either the Patriarchate in Constantinople, or from the intellectual tyranny of neo-classicists. In this case, only an Albanian Muslim tyrant could truly appreciate the work of Greek language revolutionaries.

Dr. Gerolymatos is chair of Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia and author of "Red Acropolis and Black Terror: The Greek Civil War and the Origins of Soviet-American Rivalry (Basic Books 2004)."



Volume 7 Number 12 - Tuesday, March 22nd, 2005	A Publication of the ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN LAITY