Lighting the fuse

Greek national awakening and the path to Revolution

Part 2 – Εurope before 1821

ακολουθεί κείμενο στα ελληνικά

The Nobel laureate Greek poet Odysseas Elytis once said that "if you take Greece apart, in the end, what remains is an olive tree, a vineyard, and a ship. Which means, with just these elements, you can rebuild it."

The olive tree of the Acropolis. atlasobscura.com

Many have tried to decipher the identity of the modern Greek state and to find its connection to the past. Some do so driven by confirmation bias, seeking only information that reinforces their existing prejudices—whether positive or negative—while others seek to find their own identity in a multifaceted and dynamic present. However, as is often the case, history does not forgive Manichaean views; just as in life itself, almost nothing is black and white. In the same way, Greece, like most modern states, consists of many colors and it is extremely precarious to attempt to understand it separate from the complex geopolitical environment of its formative phase.

That is why, when I started writing about the assassination of Kapodistrias, the first and ultimately last Governor of Greece in 1831, I realized that the motives that armed his assassins could not be understood without also following the prequel: A description of how the rayads Romioi acquired Greek national consciousness, which resulted in them uprising dozens of times before finally revolting in 1821, and how the prominent diplomat Ioannis Kapodistrias went from Russian Foreign Minister to Governor of the revolutionary Greek state, only to be assassinated by the hand of the very person who had warmly welcomed him upon his arrival in Greece a few years earlier (true story).

In the first article of the series, the sufferings of the rayads-subjects under the Ottoman Empire were described, and how, despite all difficulties, by the late 18th century the Greeks—taking advantage of Byzantine tradition, their mercantile ingenuity, and their interaction with the major intellectual movements of Western Europe—held a distinct position in the administration and economy of the Ottoman state, compared to their co-religionist fellow rayads.

Stanislas-Henri-Benoit Darondeau, Greek Women at the Slave Market (1830). Tomas Gallant, Modern Greece: From the War of Independence to the Present

Especially after the Orlov Revolt, the large-scale uprising instigated by the Russians in 1770, harsh persecutions by the Turks and Albanians, as well as the fiscal and other incentives provided by Catherine the Great of Russia, led tens of thousands of Greeks by the late 18th century to migrate initially to cities in Crimea and subsequently to Odessa in present-day Ukraine, which emerged as the most important city of the Greek-Russians. By 1816, the Russian government estimated that over one-third of Odessa’s population was Greek. Catherine the Great harbored philhellenic tendencies, had studied ancient Greece, and had an ambitious dream: to re-establish the Orthodox Byzantine Empire with a member of the Russian royal family on its throne and, naturally, Constantinople—the City of cities—as its capital.

By the early 19th century, Greeks in Russia had founded banks and maritime insurance companies, while the trading houses they established handled a large percentage of the import-export trade of southern Russia, connecting it with major markets in the Ottoman Empire, Western Europe, the Middle East, and even the United States. Thus, very quickly, a commercial elite of the Greek diaspora emerged, not only in Russia but also in Liverpool, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Livorno, Trieste, Vienna, Berlin, and elsewhere, such as in the Indies. The Greeks had gained control of maritime trade in the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean, operating shipping routes under the Russian flag by leveraging conditions established by the Russo-Turkish Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, which ended the war with Russia victorious and self-proclaimed protector of the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire. Greek merchants also controlled trade with ships flying the Ottoman flag.

Remarkably, the Greeks’ presence was so influential that