The Fallmerayer Affair and Its Deepest Irony

Every national narrative has a founding crisis, and for the modern Greek narrative that crisis has a name: Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer. In 1830, in the very year that the ambassadors of the Great Powers signed the small kingdom into existence, the Tyrolean historian published his notorious thesis that the ancient Hellenes had left no demographic descendants in the Greek lands — that centuries of Slavic and Albanian settlement had replaced them. To a state whose entire claim on Europe’s sympathy rested on being the resurrection of classical Hellas, this was not an academic quibble. It was an attack on the foundation. The reaction it provoked did more to shape the official Greek account of the past than any other single controversy of the nineteenth century — and the reaction, examined closely, concedes more than it defends.

A rebuttal that surrendered the premise

The task of answering Fallmerayer fell above all to Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, professor of history at Athens and the architect of the national narrative in its mature form. What is remarkable — and what the popular memory of the affair has entirely suppressed — is the ground on which he chose to fight. He did not, because he could not, assert that the Greeks were an ethnically pure people descended in blood from Pericles. The standard academic history of modern Greece, by John Koliopoulos and Thanos Veremis, records the concession at the very source of the tradition:

“neither the Greeks or any other European nation, had ever been ethnically pure in history”

— John S. Koliopoulos & Thanos M. Veremis, Modern Greece: A History since 1821, pp. 2–3

The defense mounted instead was cultural. Continuity would be located not in bloodlines but in language, religion, and civilization — a Hellenism transmitted like a faith rather than inherited like a chromosome:

“It took Paparrigopoulos thousands of pages to refute Fallmerayer’s theory by asserting the cultural, rather than racial, continuity of the Greeks”

— John S. Koliopoulos & Thanos M. Veremis, Modern Greece: A History since 1821, pp. 2–3

This is worth pausing over, because it inverts the usual picture of the affair. The national historian of Greece, in the act of refuting the nation’s great slanderer, formally abandoned the racial claim. What later generations of schoolbooks would harden into an ethnic pedigree was, in its founding text, a theory of culture. The shift was general across Greek Romantic historiography. As Socrates Petmezas observes of the period’s nationalism, “Language or culture is, in most cases, seen as the single most objective evidence of a person’s national identity” — a criterion adopted precisely because, after Fallmerayer, a criterion of descent was indefensible in the mixed and migratory Balkans.

The strange generosity of the enemy

The deeper irony of the affair, however, lies not in what Paparrigopoulos conceded but in what Fallmerayer proposed — and in what his Greek opponents could never bring themselves to notice about it. Fallmerayer had emphasized the Albanian-speaking presence in Greece, the Arvanites, as evidence against Hellenic survival. But his account of who the Arvanites were cut in a direction no polemicist on either side wished to follow. He treated them as offspring of the ancient Illyrians, and through the Illyrians of the Pelasgians — the people Greek tradition itself placed in the Aegean before the Hellenes. Stathis Gourgouris, in his study of the intellectual institution of modern Greece, draws out the consequence: Fallmerayer effectively attributed to these contemporary inhabitants — to the “Greeks — under the signifying framework ‘Arvanites’ — an Ur-Hellenic character,” as Gourgouris puts it in Dream Nation (p. 145). An origin, that is, older than classical Hellas itself.

The arch-”anti-Hellene” of the national demonology had thus made the Albanian-speakers of Greece the truest and most ancient Hellenes of all. And the Greek polemics against him passed over this in silence — necessarily so. To seize the argument would have been to credit the nation’s cherished antiquity to precisely the population whose language the new state was working to efface, and whose presence in the heartlands of the Revolution — Hydra, Spetses, Attica, the Argolid — was an unassimilated embarrassment to the story of eternal Hellenism. The refutation had to proceed as if this half of Fallmerayer’s argument did not exist.

Absorbing the Arvanites instead

What could not be admitted from the enemy’s pen was, in time, quietly adapted for domestic use. Paparrigopoulos himself performed the maneuver. Peter Mackridge documents how the national historian handled the awkward fact that so many heroes of the War of Independence spoke Albanian: he declared the Albanians descendants of the ancient Illyrians, kin to the oldest stratum of the Greek world, and asserted that “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.” As Mackridge summarizes, “Paparrigopoulos variously incorporated these groups of incomers into the Greek nation by way of religion, descent, language, and culture” (Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976, p. 189). The Illyrian–Pelasgian genealogy that was unspeakable when Fallmerayer deployed it became serviceable when it could be turned to absorption — the Arvanites recast not as a refutation of continuity but as its most venerable proof, destined for imminent and natural assimilation.

The affair, then, produced the continuity thesis in the only form it could survive scrutiny: as a cultural argument wearing, for public purposes, an ethnic costume. The scholarship that answered Fallmerayer conceded mixture; the schooling that followed taught purity. And the population that stood at the center of the whole dispute — the Albanian-speakers whom the “slanderer of the Greeks” had crowned with an origin older than Hellas — was written into the national epic only on condition that its distinctness be written out.

None of this diminishes the achievement of the people who built modern Greece, nor does it vindicate Fallmerayer’s demographic conclusions, which stand or fall on their own evidence. What it exposes is the architecture of a narrative. The continuity thesis was not an ancient inheritance serenely handed down; it was a defensive construction, assembled under polemical fire in the 1830s–1850s, whose own author disclaimed the racial reading that popular nationalism later made of it. The deepest irony of the Fallmerayer affair is that both its combatants agreed, in effect, that Greekness was something other than blood — and that the only party never consulted about the outcome was the Albanian-speaking peasantry whose ancestry both sides were busy assigning to their purposes.