The Greek-Speakers Who Stayed Out: Language Without Nation

There is a simple test for any theory of what bound together the community that rose against the Ottomans in 1821. If Greekness was at bottom a matter of descent, then the descendants should have risen; if it was a matter of language, then the Greek-speakers should have risen. The historical record supplies a clean experiment, because the Greek-speaking world of 1821 was not religiously uniform. There were Greek-speaking Catholics, concentrated in the Cyclades, and there were Greek-speaking Muslims. Both groups shared the language of the revolution completely, and to a large extent its ancestral geography. Neither joined it.

The experiment and its result

Peter Mackridge, in his study of language and national identity in Greece, records the outcome and marks its weight:

“It is significant that the Greek-speaking Catholics of the Cycladic islands, like the Greekspeaking Muslims, did not take part in the Greek revolution against the Ottomans.”

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

Significant is the right word. Here were communities who spoke Greek as their mother tongue — in the Cycladic case, islanders of long local rootedness, exactly the population an ethnic or linguistic nationalism should have counted among its own. Yet when the revolution came, the boundary of participation passed straight through the Greek language and cleanly along the line of religion. Orthodox Christians rose, whatever language they spoke: the fighting strength of the revolution famously included Albanian-speaking communities, and Slav-, Vlach- and Turkish-speaking Orthodox found their way into the national cause. Catholics and Muslims stayed out, though many of them spoke Greek at home.

The conclusion is difficult to evade. The community that made the revolution was not defined by language, and it was certainly not defined by descent. It was defined by Orthodoxy — the confessional identity that the Ottoman millet system had institutionalized for centuries, in which, as Gregory Jusdanis puts it, identity formation “was not national but religious” (Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture, p. 31). The revolution mobilized a religious community through its commercial and military networks; the national vocabulary in which it was later described was a translation after the fact.

What the exceptions prove

It is worth pausing on how strange this pattern should look to anyone holding the standard national narrative. In that narrative, the Greek language is the golden thread of the nation — the living link binding modern Greeks to antiquity, the possession that survived the centuries of foreign rule and made liberation a birthright. But if language carried nationhood, the Catholic islanders of Syros and Tinos were bearers of the birthright in full, and their abstention is inexplicable. Explicable it becomes only when we accept what the sources of the period show everywhere: that the operative community was the Orthodox one, and that “Greek” in the revolutionary context named the Orthodox insurgent cause, not a linguistic or genealogical category.

The same lesson had been taught for generations from the other direction. The eighteenth-century missionary Kosmas the Aetolian, preaching to the Orthodox villagers later canonized as eternal Hellenes, defined them by faith and expressly not by nation: “You are not Hellenes, you are not impious, heretics, atheists; you are pious Orthodox Christians” (Peter Mackridge, Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976, pp. 59–60). The Greek-speakers who stayed out of the revolution and the preacher who told his flock they were not Hellenes are two witnesses to the same fact: in this world, religion was the boundary of the community, and language ran freely across it in both directions.

The republic that never was

There had been, briefly, another vision — one that drew the boundary differently and is all the more revealing for having lost. Rigas Velestinlis, the proto-martyr of Greek revolutionary politics, published in 1797 a constitution for a “Hellenic Republic” that was to replace the Ottoman Empire. Its citizenship clause is a document of astonishing breadth. As Mackridge notes,

“Rigas specifies Vlachs along with ‘Hellenes’, Bulgarians, Albanians, Armenians, and Turks (i.e. Muslims).”

— Peter Mackridge, Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976, p. 58

Rigas’s republic, in other words, was to be multi-ethnic and multi-confessional by design — a polity of all the empire’s peoples, Muslims included, under free institutions. The first great political imagination of the Greek revolutionary tradition was not ethnic at all; it named Vlachs, Bulgarians, Albanians, Armenians, and Turks as citizens alongside Hellenes. Set against what actually happened a generation later — a rising bounded by Orthodoxy, in which Greek-speaking Muslims and Catholics had no part, and a subsequent national narrative that retrofitted the whole affair with an ethnic pedigree — Rigas’s constitution stands as the road not taken, and as proof that even within the revolutionary tradition itself the equation of nation with ethnicity was one choice among others, not a destiny.

Language without nation

The Greek-speakers who stayed out deserve a larger place in the history of 1821 than the footnotes they usually occupy, because they falsify, by their mere existence, the two most popular theories of what the revolution was. It was not the rising of a linguistic nation, for the language’s own speakers divided over it along confessional lines. And it was not the rising of a descent-group, for descent was never the criterion by which anyone, on any side, decided who belonged. It was the rising of a religious community — organized by merchants, fought in large part by professional soldiers of every mother tongue, and only afterwards narrated as the awakening of an eternal ethnic nation.

To say this is not to diminish the revolution or those who made it; communities of faith are as capable of heroism as communities of blood, and the historical Greece that emerged is no less real for having been assembled from religion, commerce, and conviction rather than genealogy. But the construction should be called by its name. When the national narrative claims the Greek language as proof of an unbroken ethnic nation, the Catholics of the Cyclades and the Greek-speaking Muslims stand quietly in the record, speaking the language perfectly and belonging, by the narrative’s own logic, nowhere. They are the control group of Greek nationalism — and the experiment did not go the narrative’s way.