FYROM Genetic Propaganda against Greek Nation – Part 3

Modern and ancient Greeks

Some authors in the West and Turkey [13] have posited that the Greeks of today are not culturally or demographically related to the Greeks of classical antiquity. Notable among them was the 19th century Austrian historian Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer. Fallmerayer, in his work Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea während des Mittelalters, averred that demographic continuity in Greece was interrupted brutally by successive waves of invasion and migration between the 6th and 8th century by Slavs, and later, in the second half of the 14th century by Albanians [14]who occupied and settled mainly in the Peloponnese. [15]According to this narrative, the centre of gravity of the ancient Greek ethnos was shifted outside the boundaries of modern Greece, and so the “demographic evidence is at best tenuous, at worst non-existent”. [15] The traditional view is that the Fallmerayer thesis, rooted in 19th century racialism, [16]provoked an “outraged” Greek response, of which Constantine Paparrigopoulos was the spearhead;[88] however, modern scholarly opinion tends to see both Fallmerayer and Paparrigopoulos as taking positions influenced by and intelligible only within the political and intellectual decline of Western philhellenism. [17]

Fallmerayer’s controversial and racist [16][17] views were later incorporated in Nazi theoretician Alfred Rosenberg’s Der Mythus des 20es Jahrhunderts and found adherents in the Third Reich who echoed them in their writings. [18][19][20] They were also actively promoted by the Axis occupation authorities in Greece who hoped to extinguish any sympathy their troops might feel for the Greeks. [18] Other Western authors say that it is Westerners who are the “true heirs” of Greece, since Greeks today, whom they label “modern Greeks”, are the product of “genetic dissonance” and “mingling with slaves”. [21] While the point of demographic continuity has been contested by several authors in the West and Greece, ideas of race have never been such a prominent feature in the Greek world, either ancient, [22] or later. The medieval Greek mythological hero Digenis Acritas was so named because of his dual, Greek and Syrian, parentage. [23]

The most obvious link between modern and ancient Greeks is their language, which has a documented tradition from at least the 14th century BC to the present day, albeit with a break during the Greek Dark Ages. The Byzantinist Robert Browning, compares its continuity of tradition to Chinese alone.[25] At its inception, Hellenism was a matter of common culture[26] and the national continuity of the Greek world is more certain than its demographic. [15]Even during the Slavic migrations, in Ionia and Constantinople there was a Hellenic revival in language, philosophy and literature and on classical models of thought and scholarship. Such revivals would manifest again in the 10th and 14th century providing a powerful impetus to the sense of cultural affinity with ancient Greece and its classical heritage. [15] The cultural changes undergone by the Greeks are, despite a surviving common sense of ethnicity, undeniable. At the same time the Greeks have retained their language and alphabet, certain values, a sense of religious and cultural difference and exclusion, (the word barbarian was used by 12th century historian Anna Komnene to describe non-Greek speakers), [24] a sense of Greek identity and common sense of ethnicity despite the many political and social changes of the past two millennia.

Sources:

1. [13] Deniz Bolukbasi, Turkey and Greece: The Aegean Disputes, 2004,
2. [14] Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea während des Mittelalters. Teil 2: Morea, durch innere Kriege zwischen Franken und Byzantinern verwüstet und von albanischen Colonisten überschwemmt, wird endlich von den Türken erobert. Von 1250–1500 nach Christus, Stuttgart-Tübingen (1836), supra
3. [15] Smith, Anthony D. (1991). National identity. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 29.
4. [16] Peter Trudgill, Sociolinguistic Variation and Change, 2002, Edinburgh University Press, p.131,
5. [17] Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece, 1996, Stanford University Press, p.142-143,
6. [18] W. R. Loader, “Greeks Ancient and Modern”, in Greece & Rome, Vol. 18, No. 54 (Oct., 1949), p. 121, Published by the Cambridge University Press
7. [19] M. Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: the experience of occupation, 1941-44, 2001, Yale University Press, p. 158,
8. [20] Neni Panourgia, The Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity: An Athenian Anthropography, 1995, University of Wisconsin Press, p. 28,
9. [21] James C. Russell, The Western Contribution to World History, The Occidental Quarterly, 1, 2, Winter 2001
10. [22] Gocha R. Tsetskhladze (ed.), Ancient Greeks West and East, Christopher Tuplin, Greek Racism? Observations on the character and limits of Greek ethnic prejudice, BRILL, p. 47-49,
11. [23] Beaton, Roderick, David Ricks (edd.), Digenes Akrites: New Approaches to Byzantine Heroic Poetry, Aldershot, King’s College London, 1993,
12. [24] Anna Comnena, Alexiad, Bk. 1-15, throughout

Source:  Modern Macedonian history

1. – FYROM Genetic Propaganda against Greek Nation – Part 1 (intro)
2. – FYROM Genetic Propaganda against Greek Nation – Part 2
3. – FYROM Genetic Propaganda against Greek Nation – Part 3
4. – FYROM Genetic Propaganda against Greek Nation – Part 4
5. – FYROM Genetic Propaganda against Greek Nation – Part 5 (Epilogue)