The Albanian Oars of the Greek Revolution: Hydra, Spetses, and the Fleet

The Greek War of Independence was won, to the extent it was won at sea, from a handful of small islands off the eastern Peloponnese — and the language spoken in the homes of those islands was Albanian. This is not a revisionist provocation; it is a plain statement found in the standard academic histories of modern Greece, written by Greek scholars of unimpeachable standing. Hydra and Spetses, the naval powerhouses whose merchant brigs were converted into the revolutionary fleet, were Albanian-speaking communities, part of the Arvanite settlement of southern Greece that reached back centuries. The fact sits awkwardly beside the ethnic version of the national narrative, which is precisely why it repays attention. It does not diminish the Revolution; it clarifies what kind of event the Revolution was, and what kind of community fought it.

What the standard history says

John Koliopoulos and Thanos Veremis, in their history of modern Greece since 1821 — a work situated squarely in the mainstream of Greek academic historiography — address the place of the Albanians and the Vlachs in the founding of the state without hedging. Of these two peoples they write that

“both had generously contributed in the making of the Greek nation-state in the southern Greek peninsula, the Vlachs in the Greek Enlightenment and the Albanians in helping win the war against the Turks”

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

The division of labour in that sentence is worth pausing over. The Vlachs — the Latin-speaking pastoralists and merchants of the Pindus — are credited with a formative role in the Greek Enlightenment, the intellectual movement that made the Revolution thinkable. The Albanians are credited with something even more direct: helping win the war itself. And the Albanian-speaking communities of southern Greece included, as the same historians note, the naval islands of Hydra and Spetses that supplied the revolutionary fleet. When Ottoman supply lines were cut, when fireships stalked the Kapudan Pasha’s squadrons through the Aegean, the crews doing the work were largely men whose mother tongue was Arvanitika. The oars of the Revolution, quite literally, were Albanian.

‘Albanian’ as a profession — and as a language

To understand why this seemed unremarkable at the time, one must recover a feature of the pre-national Balkans that the later ethnic narratives flattened: ethnonyms frequently mapped onto occupations rather than bloodlines. Peter Mackridge has documented the pattern in detail. In Macedonia, well into the twentieth century, “Greek” and “Bulgarian” denoted professions — Greek-speaking was associated with commerce and vice versa — and the same logic extended to the trade of arms. In the Danubian provinces,

“Greeks, Bulgarians, and Serbs who were professional soldiers were known as Arvanitai or Arnaoútides”

— Peter Mackridge, Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976, p. 57

That is: “Albanian” named the warrior profession of the Balkans the way “Greek” named commerce. A Serb who soldiered for pay was an Arvanitis; an Albanian-speaker who prospered in trade moved, socially, toward Greekness. These were categories of function within a shared Orthodox world, not mutually exclusive national camps.

Now consider what a revolution needs. It needs money and it needs fighters — merchants and “Albanians,” in the period’s own vocabulary. And when the uprising of 1821 came, it drew on men who were Albanians in both of the word’s senses at once: the professional sense and the linguistic one. The klephts and armatoloi of the mainland, the Souliot warrior clans of Epirus, and the Hydriot seamen who carried the war onto the water were largely drawn from exactly this world — fighting men by trade, Albanian-speaking by hearth. The Revolution’s military instrument was, to a remarkable degree, the Balkan warrior class operating under a new banner, and that class spoke Albanian both as a métier and, very often, as a mother tongue.

Why the fact matters — and what it does not mean

It would falsify the record in the opposite direction to paint the Arvanite islanders and Souliot captains as anything other than devoted to the cause they fought for. The same standard history is clear that the Albanian-speakers of southern Greece were, after centuries of cohabitation, comfortably Hellenized in most respects and identified with Greek national aims. They were Orthodox; they belonged to the same religious community — the decisive community of the age — as their Greek-speaking neighbours; many were bilingual; and they earned their place in the new nation by the most respected argument the revolutionary decades recognised, which was fighting for it. Nothing here supports a counter-myth of a “really Albanian” revolution hiding beneath a Greek one. The men of Hydra and Spetses were not secret agents of a nation that did not yet exist anywhere, Albania included.

What the fact does dissolve is the ethnic reading of 1821 — the retrospective picture of a racially continuous Hellenic people rising as one to reclaim its patrimony. The community that rose was Orthodox, commercial, and martial; its fighters were recruited from a warrior stratum called “Albanian” in the language of the day; its fleet sailed from islands where Greek was the learned second language. If Greekness in 1821 had meant descent, the Revolution’s own navy would have stood outside the nation it created. It did not stand outside, because Greekness did not mean that. Membership was constituted by faith, culture, and above all participation — which is why the Albanian-speaking islanders could be, without paradox, among the first and greatest of the new Greeks.

The Albanian oars of the Revolution, then, are not a skeleton in the national closet. They are a key to the closet’s actual architecture. The nation that emerged in 1830 was built by Orthodox merchants, Enlightenment Vlachs, and Albanian-speaking fighters and sailors, welded together by religion, commerce, and war — and the standard Greek historiography, read attentively, has never really said otherwise. It is only the popular ethnic narrative, constructed later for other purposes, that requires these men to have been something they were not. The historical record is more generous: it lets Hydra and Spetses be exactly what they were, and counts them founders all the same.