Romantic Nationalism's Fallback: What Replaced Ethnicity When Ethnicity Failed

Arguments, like armies, retreat to defensible ground. The history of Greek Romantic nationalism in the nineteenth century is, among other things, the history of such a retreat — conducted with great skill, and so successfully that most of its heirs no longer remember it happened. The original position, the one the Romantic imagination most desired, was descent: the modern inhabitants of Greece simply were the ancient Hellenes, body and blood. But that position had become untenable. Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer’s notorious theses of the 1830s, whatever their own defects, had made racial continuity a claim that could no longer be asserted without evidence — and the evidence was not there. Even Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, the architect of the national continuity thesis, conceded in his massive rebuttal that neither the Greeks nor any other European nation had ever been ethnically pure; as Koliopoulos and Veremis put it, “It took Paparrigopoulos thousands of pages to refute Fallmerayer’s theory by asserting the cultural, rather than racial, continuity of the Greeks.” The nation’s own chief historian had quietly abandoned blood. What, then, replaced it?

Language as the new proof

The answer, across the Balkans and with particular force in Greece, was language and culture — promoted from attributes of the nation to proof of it. Socrates Petmezas, analysing Greek Romantic historiography in the Beaton–Ricks volume on the making of modern Greece, identifies the move precisely:

“Language or culture is, in most cases, seen as the single most objective evidence of a person’s national identity”

— Socrates D. Petmezas, in Beaton & Ricks (eds.), The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, and the Uses of the Past (1797–1896), p. 125

The word to weigh is “objective.” A criterion is promoted to objectivity when the alternatives have failed; nobody insists that language is the most objective evidence unless something else — descent — has been tried and found indefensible. In the post-Fallmerayer Balkans, this was a matter of forensic necessity. Blood could not be exhibited; speech could. And so the eternal nation was quietly reconstituted, in operational terms, as a linguistic-cultural community — a club whose membership card was Greek speech and Orthodox practice rather than a genealogy no one could produce.

But the fallback position had a vulnerability of its own: the actual language and culture of the countryside were not, on inspection, transparently ancient. They had to be made to testify. Two great nineteenth-century enterprises — folklore and archaeology — took up that work, and both bear the marks of curation rather than discovery.

The folk voice, curated in Paris

The founding monument of Greek folklore studies was not produced in Greece and not produced by a Greek. The collection that introduced Europe to the Greek folk song was, in the words of the Critical Dictionary of the Greek Revolution, “the collection of Greek folk songs that had been compiled, translated, and prefaced by the Frenchman Claude Fauriel.” Fauriel published it in Paris in 1824–25, at the height of philhellenic enthusiasm, and it did enormous service: here, Europe was told, was the authentic voice of the Greek people, audibly continuous with the ancients. Yet Fauriel had never visited Greece and had no firsthand acquaintance with Greek custom. Nor was his corpus quite what the label promised. Michael Herzfeld, examining the collection’s contents, notes that

“Fauriel, far from pretending that these poems were from oral sources, acknowledged and praised their authors’ patriotic sensibility”

— Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece, ch. 2

Authored patriotic poems, candidly included, sat alongside genuine oral material in the anthology that defined “the Greek folk” for a continent. Fauriel was honest about it; the reception was not interested in the distinction. The “voice of the people” thus made its European debut curated, supplemented, and prefaced from a Paris study — a national essence assembled at a distance of two thousand kilometres from the villages it purported to channel.

Ruins as relics: archaeology’s national religion

What folklore did for the ear, archaeology did for the eye — and more ruthlessly, because stone can be demolished. The Acropolis of Athens that the new kingdom inherited was a dense palimpsest: classical temples, yes, but also Byzantine chapels, Frankish fortifications, Ottoman houses and mosques — the accumulated residue of the very centuries the continuity narrative needed to skip. The response of the nineteenth-century restorers was systematic removal. Yannis Hamilakis, the foremost analyst of Greek archaeology’s national imagination, describes the operation in explicitly liturgical terms:

“The destruction of virtually all post-classical buildings was a ritual purification of the site from what were seen as the remnants of ‘barbarism’”

— Yannis Hamilakis, The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece, p. 88

Purification — the same word, it is worth noticing, that governed Korais’s language reform. The medieval and Ottoman Acropolis was not excavated; it was erased, so that the hill could serve as a purely classical stage set for the new nation. And the religious vocabulary is not a scholar’s flourish. Hamilakis shows that antiquities came to function emotionally as relics of ancestors in an almost literal sense — excavation as communion with the dead, marble whiteness read as

“the whiteness of bones which have been exposed to the sun, the sacred bodies of the ancestors.”

— Yannis Hamilakis, The Nation and its Ruins, p. 293

Archaeology, in this dispensation, was a national religion with archaeologists for clergy: its shrines purged of heterodox accretions, its relics venerated, its liturgy the continuity that history could not otherwise supply.

Assembled, the three substitutions form a single system. Language, promoted to “the single most objective evidence” once blood had failed; folklore, curated abroad into an ancestral voice; ruins, purified into ancestral bones. Each replaced the ethnic proof that Romantic nationalism wanted but could not have, and each required active fabrication — grammatical, editorial, architectural — to perform its evidentiary role. To say so is not to mock the achievement; it is to describe a historiographical operation whose own practitioners, from Paparrigopoulos’s concession onward, left the receipts in plain view. The nation did not inherit its evidence. It manufactured it — and the manufacture, honestly examined, is a more interesting story than the myth it was built to protect.