Heroes Who Spoke Albanian: The Awkward Fact the National Histories Buried

National histories are written after the battles, and they are written for purposes the fighters never knew. Among the purposes of Greek national historiography in the nineteenth century was the solution of a delicate problem: a striking number of the Revolution’s heroes — the seamen of the islands, the Souliot captains, the warrior clans of the south — spoke Albanian. In a nation newly defined as the unbroken continuation of the ancient Hellenes, this was an awkward inheritance. The men could not be disowned; they were the founders. Their language could not be celebrated; it contradicted the story. What followed was neither denial nor honesty but something more inventive — a historiographical absorption so thorough that within two generations the fact had effectively vanished from national memory, even as the descendants of those heroes still spoke Albanian in villages an afternoon’s ride from Athens.

Too numerous to exclude, too heroic to admit

The starting condition of the problem is stated candidly in the standard academic history of modern Greece. Koliopoulos and Veremis describe the Albanians and Vlachs of southern and central Greece as populations that, after centuries of cohabitation with Greek-speakers,

“had been comfortably Hellenized in most respects and, in some cases, in speech as well”

— John S. Koliopoulos & Thanos M. Veremis, Modern Greece: A History since 1821, pp. 3–4

and who, crucially, “identified with Greek national aims and future irredentist objectives.” These were not reluctant subjects of a foreign project; they were among its most committed builders. And the same historians add the demographic point that settled the matter in practice: these populations were far too numerous to be discriminated against. Exclusion was never an option. A nation-state that had been carried to independence on Arvanite ships and Souliot musketry, whose Albanian-speaking citizens were woven through the Morea, Attica, Boeotia, and the islands, could not define them out without defining out its own founding generation.

So the national narrative faced a fork: revise the theory of the nation to fit the founders, or revise the founders to fit the theory. It chose the second.

Paparrigopoulos’s genealogical alchemy

The instrument of revision was the same instrument that built the continuity thesis itself: the historiography of Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos. Peter Mackridge has traced how the national historian handled the Albanian-speakers, and the method is a masterclass in absorptive argument. Rather than confront the fact of a non-Greek-speaking heroic class, Paparrigopoulos re-derived the Albanians themselves from the deepest available antiquity — descendants of the ancient Illyrians, kin to the Pelasgians, their language built upon “most ancient Greek.” Mackridge summarises the operation:

“Paparrigopoulos variously incorporated these groups of incomers into the Greek nation by way of religion, descent, language, and culture”

— Peter Mackridge, Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976, p. 189

Every available channel at once: where religion served, religion; where a descent argument could be constructed, descent; where language and culture could be invoked, those too. And the conclusion was drawn explicitly. In Paparrigopoulos’s telling,

“those Albanians who were not forced later by the Turks to espouse Islam always thought of themselves as being omogeneís [members of the same race or nation] with the Greeks”

— Peter Mackridge, Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976, p. 189

Omogeneís — co-nationals, members of the same stock. The word performs the entire manoeuvre in four syllables. The Christian Albanians were not being admitted to the nation as honoured allies of another tongue; they were declared to have always already been Greeks, their Albanian speech reduced to a surface accident awaiting the assimilation Paparrigopoulos confidently predicted. The heroes were saved for the narrative by dissolving the very fact that made them awkward. It was genealogical alchemy: base Albanian transmuted into Hellenic gold, with religion, descent, language, and culture as the reagents — whichever combination the particular case required.

One should be fair to the alchemist. Paparrigopoulos was, by his own lights, being generous — extending the nation’s embrace rather than drawing exclusionary lines, in an age when other historiographies were doing far worse. But generosity in the service of erasure is still erasure. What the national history could not do was let the Albanian-speaking heroes remain what they were: Orthodox Arvanites who had earned their Greekness by fighting for it, without any need for a Pelasgian pedigree.

What a traveller could still see in 1910

The measure of the burial is that the buried fact remained in plain sight for nearly a century afterwards. Z. Duckett Ferriman, an English writer sympathetic to Greece, published his Home Life in Hellas in 1910 — three generations after independence, deep into the era of national schooling and the official narrative — and simply reported what any observant traveller could verify:

“But there are two non-Hellenic peoples in Greece of whose presence there can be no doubt, since they have in part preserved their language, the Albanians and the Vlachs.”

— Z. Duckett Ferriman, Home Life in Hellas: Greece and the Greeks, p. 205

No doubt — because the languages were still being spoken. Ferriman noted that the Albanians had been scattered all over the Morea by the fifteenth century, an old and deeply rooted presence rather than a recent intrusion, and his geography was concrete: “The northern half of Andros is Albanian,” he recorded, and resisting assimilation at that. This is testimony from a friendly witness with no revisionist axe to grind, writing while the grandchildren of the Revolution’s sailors still used Arvanitika at home. The national histories had settled the question on paper; the villages had not read the histories.

The story of the Albanian-speaking heroes is thus really two stories. The first is about them: Orthodox warriors and seamen who threw themselves into the Greek cause, identified with its aims, and became founders of the state — an entirely honourable record needing no embellishment. The second is about the narrative: a historiography that, unable to celebrate their language and unable to exclude their persons, rewrote their ancestry until the awkwardness disappeared. The first story is history; the second is history-writing, and the distinction is the whole discipline of historiography in miniature. Recovering the heroes’ actual voices — including the language those voices spoke — takes nothing from Greece. It merely returns to the founders a truth the founders themselves never thought to hide.