Historical Perspectives and Future Decisions

Hello everyone and welcome to the History of Byzantium. Episode three hundred and fifty three How did Romans become Greeks with Anthony Calelles This is one of the fundamental questions of Byzantine history Why are there no Romans today? Why and how? Did the Romans stop identifying with that name and start calling themselves Greeks instead I naturally turned to Professor Antony Calelles to see if he had an answer. And what follows is a long discussion of the topic in which he points out that no one has yet written a book on it and much of the scholarship which does exist is woefully inadequate You can find lots of information. Byzantines and lots on the modern Greek state, but there is a yawning gulf between the two This conversation is not a definitive answer to the question Nor is it a history of the Greek Revolution But hopefully it is a way towards a greater understanding of the topic for all of us And as Professic C Dallis reveals He is already working on a potential book I'm Pfessor Delles, welcome back once more to the History of Byzantium llo Robin. It's a pleure be This is an interview that whose genesis is a long time ago because When I came to answer the question of what is a Byzantine? Why do we call them Byzantines? aboutbout forty episodes into the show? peopleeople are asking that It was your book on Hellenism in Byzantium that was the most helpful and to some extent the only book I could find in the British liibrary that really delved into these questions and Yes, we met very briefly shortly after that and then so began a a long journey of interviews. And so here we are finally to actually talk about Roman identity on it as a single topic. and how the Romans became Greek, as it were came the modern Greek nation So this should be a wide ranging discussion to get to that answer. Let's just start with the absolute basics. just in case anyone listening is not sure in fourteen fifty two The people living in the Roman Empire thought they were Romans, right They did. though that even that's not going far enough, I think it's just far more accurate to simply say they were Romans. Um It's a strange expression. though very kind of entrenched in the scholarship to use this weird evvasive circumlocution. they thought they were. I mean, you would not say that about any other people whose identity you were in doubt um of and And when you see that expression in print They call themselves Romans or they thought they were Romans. It signals a kind of skepticism on the part of the author that they really were. Where there's no such skepticism in the actual sources which are quite casually, you know use this term without any kind of problem. So I think that we should be caautious with those kinds of expressions and be very deliberate about our choices here Now, I should say, Robin, actually. so you've had on the podcast many guests who have written books. I don't know if so far your podcast has actually given rise to a book Maybe you want to do the book version of that. But since you contacted me a month ago about this particular episode, which because of the nature of the question that you just posed, will take us into the history of the Ottoman Epire I, as a result of thinking about how to prepare For our discussion, I actually jump startarted a book project that I've been working on an aw for since twenty seventeen, I think which is precisely this question about what Who are these Romans in the Ottoman Empire? And like eventually, how do some of them kind of switch and become Greek or Hellen U And so just in the past three weeks, I've just been working on that intensively. So ye I've made starts to the book in the past, but They always kind of fizzled or I got distracted, but this time I think it's for real. so we have you to thank there you go. I'm giving you more and more work to do as time goes on U Yeah, so this is a continuation of a problem that one can start posing even in The early Roman Empire, but certainly in late antiquity where the majority of at a certain point all the subjects of the empire are Roman in one way or another. And you know, it kind of matters what way So just a kind of broad legal definition, kind of citizenship is a different sort of thing much than a more ethnic definition, like one among many other peoples So these are things that are debated in the scholarship, but There's no question that the subjects of this empire or the majority of them at any time were Roman and therefore consider themselves to be Roman would because that's what they were h yeah. by the way This is the unanimous testimony of all of the sources produced by this society. This is not something that anyone can you know really dispute or fuss over Um, It is only in Western sources that one finds the alternative classification of Greek, which is a political decision It's not it's not a neutral one That is because Western societies after a certain point decided that they were the true heirs of Rome and not those pesky Greeks over there in the east And so they pretty consistently, not exclusively, but consistently deployed the term Greek. very, very often is a derogatory term, Be in the medieval West and early modern West, this was not a a valorized term as it is in Like modernity was Phil Hellenism and all of this, right? The Greek was associated with being shifting, devious and duplicitous and feminate and sexually queer and all of those things. And so it was a convenient term for Western societies to use. But Western societies include Slavic societies, which picked that term up from their Western you know, interlocutors. in this respect, Slavic societies are very much closer to Western medieval societies as Christian Raffensberger has argued in many other ways as well too Um You can also see it in the way they pronounce the word Gk G from Latin. it's not from Greek. Anyway Um, yeah It's a very straightforward. Now ye you can start arguing about the nuances of what you know exactly is Roman on a local level, on an imperial level, on the ideologies and so forth In general, and even in the fifteent century, there's not much ambiguity to be found in the sources here Yeah, one of the, um more emotive examples of this you gave in in your history was u Roman communities under Latin colonial rule, so in Cyprus or Crete or wherever, when they were given the opportunity, they changed Greek to Roman in texts. where they had some relationship with the authorities. So Or when they're making treaties, the Latin version says Greek, the Greek version says Rome, Rom just to be clear though, what would the term Greek which I assume is not the term the Romans used, would have meant to them. while the Roman state was still in existence Right. So here we have to make a distinction because there are two words for Greek in Greek as it were. Um There's G which is the cognate term for Western Greek And there is Elen. Hellines or Hellenic some People pronounce it Hellenic, but that's I think rather esoteric C So those are two different words. and they were used in different senses Primarily so for people who are speaking or writing in the language that we call Greek I Grekos usually just meant a Greek speaker U it wasn't looaded term particularly And so you would use this term, for example, when you were distinguishing between the Latin rightite churches of the Catholic church versus the Greek rightite churches of what we call the Orthodox Church, right? So Catholic and Orthodox is another mostly modern distinction. So in the Middle Ages, they don't distinguish themselves that way because both churches are officially both Catholic and Orthodox in their like full titles And the way they distinguished themselves during the Middle Ages was either as the Eastern church and the Western church or as the Greek church and the Latin church from their liturgical languages. But this wasn't a a name of identity as it were. It was just a way of distinguishing churches based on language, or speakers just, you know, so and so spoke Greek with the Greek speaking regions versus the Latin speaking regions, that sort of thing So it was a particularly loaded term and could be used you know, without much sort of hand wringing U the other term Hellen aliness, which is today the national name of the Greek Today, right in Greece, they are ellist, they're not Gki. Um, This is the term from antiquity that designates the ancient Greeks and ancient Greek writing Hellenens, where we get Helleneic and so forth. I And in In the Christian society of the Middle Ages in the East, this primarily meant pagan The ancient pagan Why? Well, because the ancient Greeks were pagans, they were in fact a the pagan. When you think of paganism or, um You think of the ancient gods, you think of the Greeks, so you know U this led to some pretty paradoxical U usages of Helene in East Roman Orthodox writing. So for example, since it means pagan, it means that Zoroastrian Persians and the Chinese were all pagans, right? So they were Hellens. so it was really bizarre where the Persians are now the Hellenes um and that kind it requires that youor your reorient your thinking there. Um But that also meant that it was very unlikely for an Orthodox Roman agreed to being classified as a Hellen because it meant pagan there was another terminology U another avalence behind this terminology, which was A Helen is like an educated classically educated person in Greek, right U And this was kind of like a minority sense and it was used somet timees. so you know, some writers like you state yourself to Selonik, major Homer scholar, right in the twelfth century He could use the term in that way without crossing into the territory of being a pagan or something like that And in the very late centuries Um, so like thirteenth to fifteenth, you very occasionally find some wrriters, scholars philosopher Plethon and Mistras and so forth, who will say that our people, and they mean the Romans today, are descended from the ancient Greek. they don't quite turn that into a full theory of identity. like they don't explain then, okay, so why you calling yourselves Romans, which they do how these two things correlated This seems to be largely a reaction to the Western presence, Western colonialism where Many Roman lands were occupied by Latin Catholic forces who were claiming like, no, the Roman tradition is ours and you're not Romans, you're Greeks And it was a kind of way of ameliorating quote accusation of being Greek by saying, no yeah, yes, sort yes. but look, that's the Hellenens. there were like all of the the leaders in education and philosophy and thought and the Latins took everything from them, therefore, you know, the kind of repositioning your cultural genealogy that way These were, you know really no more than Three. For maybe tops. And they don't seem to have had any kind of impact in the way that society operated or saw itself. Th very isolated Um, you know, intellectuals, onene of whom, Plethon, I mentioned earlier, went way, way out into the actual pagan side of things into pagan neoplatonism in his thinking Yeah, all right So that's the terrain of these terms, even in the fifteenth century overwhelmingly Roman Um, occasionally, Gos would be sort of acceptable, but it's not an identity label for anyone really in the East Um, and Helen is this very contested term that can either be the worst that you can be or or the best that you can be But it's really only for a few people either way. And I mean, we're not really going to talk about this in detail. Obviously, in your work, you've categorized the ways in which The Latin use of the word Greek and the denial of Roman identity has this effect at a high level of politics and presumably lots of Romans found that offensive and so on. Just in passing, if you were just in the field in Se Crete under Venetian occupation. I mean, ignoring, obviously your awareness of Venetian rule in other ways, would you have A againgain, you can't really answer this question. I'm just thinking aloud When so I call you, Robin calls Anthony Greek today, even though that's not the word that you would use. Do you think someone Under colonial occupation being called a Greek would just say, well that's just the Latin word for Rome. I'm not going to take that as a slur on a daily mundane level, or do you think the slur was understood always No, I think it's the former. In other words, and it depends on how late into the Venetian period we're talking. Um So Venetian Crete, so just to explain to the audience Venice controlled, governed, occupied Crete from twelve oh five to the later seventeenth century. There's a long war that Ottoman Turks eventually take Crete as well. Umin sixteen sixty nine, I believe something. I could be getting that wrong. So that's over Foreside. That's You know, four and a half centuries. It's a very long time. And During that time Obviously a kind of society was that was mixed. It wasn't strictly stratified along Let's say racial colonial or religious lines after a certain point, it was originally And you have many, let's say, Greek speakers or slash Romans slash Orthodox who were very, very integrated into the, um, no know, sort of more Italian speaking, Venetian society on Crete with cont contacts in Venice itself After a certain point, yes, and not only in Venetian Crete, but also in Italy itself, where you start to get many expat Let's say Greek communities This is the only label under which they are or can be recognized by an Italian society. And so they just kind of go with that U and eventually it becomes naturalized. So if you're looking at those the centuries of like what we call the Ottoman period U and you ask Hey Where do we find people who are called Greek and who in many contexts, if not all contexts do call themselves Greek, It would be those who are living under Latin rule or in Italian cities or in the West becausecause it's the only label under which they could even be seen would never be seen as Romans if you go to, you know, Barcelona or England or, you know, whatever, it wouldn't make any sense to anybody. So yeah, you just have to adapt like immigrants do everywhere. They just have to You know They come to the US and they realize that wait, I'm like Asian now. What? When did that happen, right? Or I'm Hispanic. What does that even mean? But yeah, no, that's just the way that this society will process and be able to see you and, okay I guess I'm that thing now. So Um Yes The Greeks during that whole period are overwhelmingly Greek speakers are like Former Bomet who are living in Western societies and that's just the term they go. And they internalize it, absolutely I and the flip side is that the Persians and then the Arabs and now the Turks in our story justust take the Romans at face value and call them Romans. And so the Solette of Rom is on Roman land, so your Romans Yes. So that's in part because Muslim societies, the Arabs, then the Seljuks, then the Ottomans, They don't have a particular stake in cllaiming the ancient Roman legacy or the imperial tradition, they have their own traditions. And so they're perfectly happy to allow these people to call themselves what they want, to call them what they are U Which is why Rom is the term that you find. It just means Roman in those languages for the people that I call Romans in the Eastern context so we've now reached fourteen fifty three. and The Ottomans take over what's left of the Roman Empire, they now have many millions of Roman subjects or ethnically Roman subjects How do we move the story forward from here? What happens to their identity under Ottoman rule Do they get called Romans Or did things start to change Right, Well, this is a story that's not been told. So we need to start from that You're audience whether they are Let's say lay people you know, educated, intelligent people or actual scholars are, I think, not going to be able to find any work of scholarship that tells them the truth on this point Everything is either evasive, or outright deceptive board is not interested in the question Um or will U Let's say in good faith, but I think erroneously Just simply translate Roman from any source as Greek and just move on And this creates a great deal of confusion tremendous confusion which is compounded by u some certain false theories about how Ottoman society work that have been now pretty much flushed from all of the expert scholarship, but that continue to they're like these zombie ideas that are shambling around. And that' it justs impossible to kill and, you know Woe for the mind of anyone who stumbles into their path and gets eaten by it because these mind viruses will anyway, they're just so hard to kill and one of the most important ones is the so called Muleette system of the Ottoman Empire, which was a thing that never existed before the nineteenth century. but we can get to that So To start the story, I think the best place is to realize that nothing much changes during the Ottoman period and that you still have more or less the same groups, recognizable groups. We're talking among the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire Lots of developments are taking place within Muslim society in the Ottoman Empire. That's a whole other story, right? But Insofar as we're talking about the Balkans and partly Anatolia The main Christian subjects are the same ones that will be familiar to the audience of your podcast from the thirteteen, fourteenth, fifteenth centuries Right? They are Romans? They are like Albanians, Bulgarians, Serbs U Vlaks are Wallachians And The Latins. so There arere also, of course Armenians and Jews Armenians not a different sort of church confession, they' a separate church hierarchy Um, Many Albanians subsequently convert to Islam. so that's a kind of interesting development in the Balkans. And you have Ramani, I Gypsy people who come in and that's a a slightly complicating factor in some cases Uh, but u yeah, I mean, it's its it' retty straight forward. The complication when it comes to our story is the one that we've already mentioned, that is that Greek speaking Orthodox people living under Latin rule are called Greeks and in the minds of many maybe they were. I mean after a while, as I said, that becomes internalized. But the vast majority of Greek speaking Orthodox people ar Roman, in their own mind, Romeet, in the Ottoman authorities's mind Rom It's only Westerners who call them Greeks R kind of projecting, again, their own sort of colonial view of who these people are onto the rest of them. Um, yeah, and that continues more or less Well, down to the nineteenth century. It's in the nineteenth century that we start to get some different developments, especially that we put under the label nationalism U That's a different development that we can talk about But for most of Ottoman history you go into the actual sources Those written in Greek Overwhelmingly will refer to Rome Um, um, now Part of the catch is so They're not the dominant group anymore. They're not running the empire, right Most of them are pretty poor, provincial, they're you know, subjects, they're second class subjects They don't have that many educational opportunities. They're not necessarily writing for their own native leadership their own, you know elites and so forth. They're often having to deal with powerful interests that are either Muslim on the one hand or Latin, Catholic Christian on the other. So many of them Go to Italy, they study in Italy or they teach in Italy. or they're looking for patronage or employment or U whatever from Western rulers And so you can sometimes see some of them talking to Romee in their own native context, that then they go to the west and they're addressing some king and suddenly they're talking about like either Greki or Hellens or something like that, right So you have to always correct for adjust for like the audience. because Western perceptions kind of create this like sort of distorting U pattern Um I think our emphasis should probably be on the majority of of these Romans in the Ottoman Empire And there we have their own texts. we have Ottoman texts And we have Western texts too, like Western travelers or geographers, Yes, they will keep talking about Greeks, Greeks, Greeks, but many of them at some point will say Kama and by the way, they call themselves Roman and they call their language Roman. But like we call it Greek Yes. Aside from Ecclesiastical texts I assume What other texts survive from Romans living under the Ottoman Empire Oh, well, we have a number of chronicles. They're either local chronicles or they're the patriarchal chronicles, just talking about the U ye the succession of the patriarchs of Constantinople. Um there are poems, there are memoirs, there are these kinds of things, letters. There is a lot. It's not as easy to access as ancient or medieval sources. They haven't been necessarily cataloged or published or edited properly sometimes m the as you can imagine, the volume of them increases. As you get later in time, once you get to the nineteenth century, we're dealing with the nineteenth century. We're not in the age of Constantine and Justinian anymore, right Um So there is yeah You got to be careful and find out who they're addressing and why Right? And they will sometimes switch terminology. Some of these authors even knew Latin, so There is that source of influence as well So D I mean, I might be missing. There also the translations But it depends on the period. You starting in the eighteenth century, you start getting a lot of like enlightenment style works being translated or kind of rewritten into Greek. and that's when you start to get a kind of internal discussion about you know, are we keeping the the Roman, as it were identity and its traditions and what are associated with it, or are we switching to something more Heelenic becausecause that's what's really prized now in the West. But that's an enlightenment development sort of eighteenth century So Is that is there anything before the kind of eighteenth And the nineteenth century. about rebranding from Roman to Greek as Oh there always is Okay Um For example, I mean I wrote a whole book on the historian Bionicos Calcoonvilis, who was a student of Plthon. I mentioned Plthon earlier as a person who U To some degree invested in Hellenism, certainly the philosophy side and the cult side There's just one passage where he talks about us being Greeks, one, and there are plenty of others where he talks about us being Romans. and it's not clear how we're supposed to correlate these things if at all That one passage, however, has just become very, very notorious cited and recycled and recited all the time in the scholarship And that's for a particular ideological reasons And his student Laonicos has a whole like his whole preface is like Oh, these people were not the people we call Byzantines who were Romans. Oh, they weren't Romans. They were Greeks all along and they were descended from Hercules and whatever. And Laonicos has a whole like he has a whole ideology about Hellenism in this way and the Greeks being a people who have survived all the time. They just had the wrong name for a while And of course that is a passage that like modern Greek national scholars, right who have that national narrative of Hellenic continuity from like the Bronze Age to today Theyd latch onto that and quote it again and again and again and again. But Diichlus is an outlier. He's fascinating and very interesting one, But like he was talking into the void. There was no one who picked that up at the time, apart from a few esoteric philosophers possibly. But anyway, Salaunikos is a case starting in the eighteenth century, there are many more. They're just kind of beginning to inch over sideways into a more sort of hellenic rebranding for purposes that we'll discuss Right? But I think it's important to give your audience a sense of why it's so difficult to get clarity and truth on this matter. That is what are all of the interests that have created this incredible amount of distortion um, in in in, um in this area. So There's a myth of the Millleette, which I'll talk about later on. But We first have to again recognize the existence of a massive distorting Western paradigm on this. that is if you believe that Romanness is a Western thing and it's linked to Latin and Western political institutions and western law and that no one else has a real claim to being authentically Roman. if they're not enmeshed in those kinds of institutions and languages Then you're perpetuating this this distortion. And that has been like standard in the Westn I don't know around eighteen eight hundred AD U And it continues to this day. So the single most important distorting factor is Westerners reluctance to admit that their Eastern Romanness exists at all. So that's a huge problem And that affects scholarship on Byzantium as much as it does the Ottoman Empire by extension. But then There's modern Greek, I don't want to call it nationalism. I mean, that's kind of a sort of it's a virulent term, but sort of national thinking about history Where you do have many and by no means all, and I don't even know if it's the majority right now, but there are many Greek historians who from the nineteenth century have insisted on this paradigm of Hellenic continuity prevent equity and that involves tracing the history of the single Greek people, you know, throughout all of its phases, you know it's classical and quote Byzantine or under Ottoman occupation, and then the modern rebirth of the Greek state and so forth And for if you're thinking along those lines, it's just really awkward to have You know, what is essentially about seventeen hundred years, which is the single largest block of time in this history of Hellenic continuity, where your people are not calling themselves Hellenes And that's just a bit off and you you have a lot of Cgnitive dissonance in those circumstances That is where they they're talking, you know, they say Roman and you just you just see and write Greek Even when they're arguing that by like they're essentially making an argument that they're not Hllenens But noope, noope, no, dad,rere're hellings. O just bad faith arguments. where for example, you will say, I'm just going see how often they call themselves this or that and you look at sources that are written solely for the benefit of Western audiences. And yeah, of course you're going to find more Greeks there because we discussed U But there are also very many like modern Greek national citizens or you know modern Greeks who look at this impartially and they are perfectly happy to conclude that no, in fact, Roman is by far the dominant term that they used And this is just an issue that we're going to have to study and explore historically like mature scholars without having fits about it, which Some do. You find they say extraordinary things Anyway, so that is a problem. So modern Greek national thought is a problem. Another problem is U Well, you've probably dealt with this because you've covered a very long history and you've seen that that history is in terms of it studied by experts is chopped up into bits, like periods And the people who work on different periods don't often communicate well with each other And so this happens in the Ottoman period. In fact, it happens for in Ottoman studies generally. You know Ottomans Attan studies isn't one thing It's a loose coalition of fields that sometimes talk to each other and not sometimes not Um And so for example, there are there's like Um Scholars who work on like Ottoman institutions and the dominant Muslim society and whatever, and a lot of them are Turkish and they just have their own If you're working on Outumomn sources, I' written in Outomn Turkish That is one Um, cluster of fields in itself but they don't always talk to Scholars who are working on their like individual little national traditions, right? So the Ottoman Empire is a prime example of a society that is today carved up but separately by like Greek or Bulgarian or Albanian or whatever scholars who like tryry to find the antecedents or ancestors of their own current nation state in the Ottoman period. and so carve out like, oh, this is our domain. and they's like, o, this is our domain. It's largely by language, right U Or you kind of just follow the ethnic terminology that you find in the Ottoman sources You know, Bulgarian and Serb and, Albanian are kind of easy to track. What happens when you're doing the Greek side of things and all you're finding are these Romans So this poses a little bit of a problem. But the thing is that Um All of those fields don't talk to each other necessarily that well U And so for example Look, I think probably the case that most scholarship on the Ottoman Empire is on the nineteenth century. becausecause it's a period when like some very interesting things happen Not only are you having all the the national revolutions and you know, or discontent or whatever. but It's a period of intense modernization. The Ottoman state tries to modernize. They have all of these new initiatives for how to you know, get out of the, let's say, kind of slumps that they're in it doesn't, you know spoiler it doesn't it doesn't work, you know, and then everything leads up to World War O and the whole thing collapses U But the thing is that nineteenth century mean scholars working on the nineteenth century They're modern historians Like they're trained in modern history For them Anything before that in the seventeenth century or before is a fantasy land. It might as well be full of elves and wizards They do not know anything about like pre modern, you know rhetorical traditions, ethnoymes, histories, whatever As far as they're concerned, history just kind of begins in the late eighteenth century. And before that is like nothing They just literally don't know I've had many discussions. historians of modern Greece Well, they know the story kind of picks up in the late eighteenth century when you have some people starting to talk about revolution and maybe the Russians are getting involved and whatever. and it all looks kind of like a modern kind of realle politique situation For them, Byzantium is like middle earth It's like, you know, maybe they read some book by Mango from nineteen eighty or something and they just kind of leave it at that and it's like, okay, I read the basics and what they find in manango tremendous distortions about you know, Romanness and Orthodoxy and all of this So they don they don't know what's going on And this is reflected in when like literally many of them will say that, oh, these nationalist movements in the nineteenth century came along and like literally wrote a script where there had literally been nothing before And who are these people Who are these Greek speaking subjects of the Ottoman Empire? Well, they' just generic Christians. That's like all they were. And they will say things like this And they're just didn' you know, they were just, they had no identities. they were just peopleeople from that village and that's all they knew. They just you know, I'm from that village. And what are you? I'm just a Christian So The whole past, right? a history that you have told you know, starting in late antiquity or the early Roman emmpire, that goes even further back than that is just not visible at all Right So that's a problem in terms of L period discontinuity. L yeah, if you get someone from the fifteenth century, they know they can actually tell you who these people are and what the sources are, but you're not going to look there. You've got all these archives from whatever, you know okay, Vienna or something. Dum All right Certainly the biggest U failure of communication has been regarding the Moleette system. Okay, Do you know what this is Um vaguely the sense that the patriarch of the Romans is placed in charge of other Christian groups within the Ottoman Empire. Okay I mean, what I have covered on the podcast is the idea that in fourteen fifty four when the patriarch is restored, that this is very much a relationship between the sultan and the individual patriarch and that each individual patriarch has to renegotiate or you know, confirm I'm still allowed to be the patriarch and I have these rights. that there is no sense that this is a guaranteed institutional settlement for Roman people. It's very much a Your deal with this ruler and when he dies Y successor may need to negotiate with the new sultan, just etca. So it's all ad hoc at that stage That's right. But that's not what historians mean by the Mleette system No. So this part is an idea coming later that it's much more institutionalized Yes So what you will find in many, many books and people still talk about this or believe it, or maybe they read it in grad school once U, though it is an idea that has been refuted U I think it's nineteen eighty two with a very simple observation that hey, in fact, there's no evidence for it Put it like that. at least not before the really the nineteenth century. In some cases, late eighteenth, we can get into that if you want the more granular detail. The Maleette theory is this idea that the Ottoman Empire organize the governance of its Subject people, especially non Muslims via their religious institutions. and that they were all grouped under the authority of their respective religious leaders. in the case of Orthodox people, the patriarch of Constantinople and that this U This is something that starts in like fourteen fifty. Well, they say fourteen fifty three and because you know better, you would say do fourteen fifty four. but that it is a system that operated throughout Ottoman history. And there were like three big main Maletes, the Orthodox, which was called Room Roman the Armenian and the Jewish and Um Under the Rom Millleette, we're grouped all Orthodox people, Bulgarians and Serbs and quote Greeks and whatever Albanians were Christian and Vlocs and so forth Um and some groups in the East sometimes Now that is the easastern provinces of the empire. The Armenians was likeike not just Armenians, but also like of seeing it like non non non Caledonian Christian groups. And the Jews that lumped together all of these Jewish groups, many of whom did not see eye to eye at all and so forth. And the idea is that U essentially for many purposes and not just those regarding religious law. like you know marriages and baptisms and things like this, but also things like inheritances and property disputes, but Also, you're interfacing with the Ottoman authorities regarding taxes and other kinds of fiscal matters, that was all sort of channeled through your religious leadership And that and that this system operated for all of those centuries and And the corollary was that room did not mean a particular Let's say ethnic group but all Orthodox people And you will find books and articles published in this century that we willll just simply assert that and that they will treat Romaic and Rom and Roman, whatever as just meaning orrthodox reggardless of ethnicity, which of course puts them in a bit of a bind when sources will say Like, oh, this village is inhabited by Rum and Bulgarians and Serbs and Vlaks, and they will list how many households in each one And what did they do then Can you guess what they do when they come across a room in that context Call them Greek or Yes. Yeah And so You create these ethnic Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, which is just simply a mistake In order to use Roman as a kind of religious identity, right And this plays into all of the ideologies that I talked about earlier. It's a Western denihilism that there are actual Romans in this empire Greek national history, which needs to have Greeks everywhere and not Romans Um, and U But you know, also the Moleette system has its own ideological entanglement. So Why is the Moleette system so liked by historians, especially historians of of those groups is because The Maleette system implies that these religious groups, which are taken to be the kind of ancestors of The modern nations lived in a kind of quasi autonomy, a kind of bubble that insulated them from the rest of Muslim society, which would be in their eyes a contamination and that you can actually go and identify those religious groups and and write their history almost as if they're not living in the Ottoman Empire, just kind of they have their own little society and their own little rules and their own little laws. And they just carry on huddling, you know in fear of the Ottoman oppressor until such a time as they have a revolution U'm on the one hand On the other hand, U'm it Um Well, It performs a number of functions H So It For example A lot of the scholarship will try to play up the role of the churches in like preserving the kind of kernel of a national tradition that was kind of Smering simimmering, smoldering under the ashes U And so it points to the churches as preservers of national traditions And you can write about them as if they're like quasy little states within a state. Like a Millleette is a kind of quasi independent little state let run by the church the Ottoman Empire Right? It also enables Ottomanists to present the Ottoman Empire as a kind of very tolerant society that has spent, you know, yeah, second class citizenship. yes, but you know, you got your own little thing that, you know, we' leave you alone if you don't bother, you know, that kind of thing So it kind of it's a win win, win win situation. L everybody wins from having this theory except for the fact that it's false. it just never happens. and And there's so many studies that have now completely demolished this Nly that it existed, at least before the nineteenth century T So what didn't exist? Well We're not concerned here with the history of the word Maleet. The word Millleet is a very generic noun in like Ottoman Turkish, it means just a group of people. It could be a tribe, it could be ethnicity, it could be people from a region, it could be a religion, it could be and later they were using it for the nations like the modern, the Mleette France, for example, it's just a modern nation, whatever. It's a very general term. It can mean anything And we're not concerned about the history of the word. We're concerned about the actual organization that did this exist And mean of course it didn't exist for never mentioned as a system that existed U For example, the patriarch of Constantinople was not in charge of all Orthodox churches that happened very, very slowly and particularly in the late eighteenth century Before that, there were plenty of other Orthodox churches. There was Jerusalem, there was Aleppo, there was Achrid, there was Petch, there was all kinds of things. and they were independent, you know, archbishops or whatever, you know, rank they had They individually got the authorizations that you mentioned earlier, right It was very ad hog or ad hominem, right? Okay, the Sultan will say, I will appoint you to run the church of Jerusalem And here are your rights and your your jurisdiction, right U If you look at these documents from like sixteenth century the patriarch of Constantinople is in charge of the Greek churches that are like In trace. Um, notot all of Macedonia U most of Greece you know, a little bit of Asia minor Yeah, okay, no, that's not a Malette. That's just that's just a bishop who has some suffragants in right Um Moreover We now know Um that the that the bubble theory is false and that Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire were fully integrated into this society, dealt withom like Muslim institutions all the time, including the courts that their leadership that represented them in these cases was not all ecclesiastical, in fact, in many places and perod not primarily ecclesiastical They had their own secular local, you know bigig wigs and whatever They went to Muslim courts. they knew exactly what was like they're very integrated. Um there's, you know, some of them convert to Islam. There's or they have family members who have, and they're very close with them. Sometimes their families would hedge their bets. They'd have someone who converts and like doesn't eat pork at the family meals, but is there You know, access point to various Muslim institutions, okay? So U The millette doesn't exist as a system as an institutional system. It doesn't exist as like social and legal practice. It just generally doesn't exist U Something like it emerges like around eighteen hundred So for various reasons, the patriarch of Constantinople does gradually swallow up many of most of the other Orthodox churches so by the late eighteenth century, this is happening. And you know, this is for a lot of reasons And the relations in wars with the Russians had a big part to play in this, especially when Um Oh we know, like why would Um non ethnic Roman Orthodox people in the Ottoman Empire want to be associated with That's a room church. Um, well, because this now gives you a ck of a lot of benefits, especially protection by the Russians. Um, and so because they're like the The champions of the Well, this is the Orthodox Church or the Orthox Church of Constantinople or whatever Um But it creates incentives for you know Bulgarian, Wallachian, Serbian whatever, Albanian to present themselves as room whenever they're in a sort of potentially international situation. And that includes trade But since trade byy that point was much more difficult for actual foreigners to break into the Ottoman trading system. and a lot of it was in the hands of Greeks Um but whether Um whether Western Greeks from Italy or wherever, who could liaise in Greek with the Romans of the Ottoman Empire There was a kind of incentive for everybody to especially merchants to pass as Greek They learned Greek and when you're dealing with Russians or French or whatever. Okay So I mean, these are the complexities of Ottoman society. And you know, if you start looking for complexity in Ottoman society we could spend hours and hours and hours talking about it U But it's not until the nineteenth century that something like a Mleette system. emerges. In other words, where it becomes a kind of policy by the Sultans to recognize chief religious leaders for this and that group and the Iish Armenian side and then the Jewish, but But over the nineteenth century, like all of these groups started lobbying for Maleette status and recognition. ofen backing of foreign powers, mean England, France, you know, whatever Because once you're like, oh recognized as a sort of religious malleed in the Ottoman Empire, you can now Um, you know, lobby institutionally with foreign backers to get this right or that right or whatever or, you know, some promises of protection rightight U I think the British Empire was sort of active on behalf of like protecting Jews and you know, this kind of thing So there was a kind of incentive to organize and consolidate yourself as a Moleette. In the later nineteenth century, the so called Syrians are beginning to like, wait a minute, why are we grouped under the Armenians? We should have our own thing, right U And so leaders of the Syrian community are 'm not only to pressuring to create a Syrian Mleet putting a lot of pressure on their own people who found it convenient to, let's say, caucus with the Armenian Malette It's like,'re not Armenians, you should be with us. And so there's a lot of internal fighting and things like this. So that's in the Mette system. as it emerged and evolved Basically in the nineteenth century and it does mean that there was a time when All Orthodox people were grouped under the room. searched and formed a Rom Malette and in that context do actually have a kind of like room Orthodox ideology and identity emerged likeike it does. For a lot of reasons I mention only a few of them here, but the patriarchs certainly projected that kind of identity because they wanted this kind of all encompassing U Orthodox identity, right? Because it allows them a sort of maximalist projection of power and authority Um, and they also kept saying Oh, this is this transcends ethnicity. Right? Like some of us are room that is in the ethnic sense or by language, rooms or whatever And some are Bulgarians and Serbs, whatever. but no, no, no, we're We're just panorthodox. And you actually do see people in not just in these central institutions, but You know, elsewhere in the Balkans, they do kind of espouse this. like, you know They will say, well, in this village, there were so many Romans and so many Armenians and so. And in those cases, the Romans are not just ethnic Romans. It probably just means Orthodox generally U But I still don't think it was the dominant sense. I mean, for the most part, like in like on the ground in social life you could tell it you Distinctions between like Rom and Bulgarians are made all the time, and that does not make sense if Rom means orrthodox And there's another problem, which is that the Rom church was named that becausecause the dominant element were Romans. Greek speaking, orthax Romans. And for all that they wanted to say, oh, yeah, we're like a panorrthodox. We don't see ethnicity. In fact, all of the top positions were held byree native Greek speakers. And everybody else could see that Neg is you can't hide that, right? And so You could you had one of two choices. You could either like learn Greek, you could go Greek in order to get ahead in these institutions, which many did Or You could say, no, actually, you know, the hell with that, we want to form our own separate bulgarian church which happens eventually, in the nineteenth century,? It's called the XR kit at first, anyway. And that trend actually prevails in the end So that the panorthodox utopia It doesn't last very long Um And it's also complicated by another factor, which is that in the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire it goes through this periodbe about a generation or more where it tries to like modernize and modernize not just in terms of railways and guns, but Um but to create a kind of more unified Um, citizen culture R whereere all of its subjects regardless of their ethnicity or religion, your religion even and that was a hard one to give up are kind of Ottoman citizens and have the same kinds of rights. And that if you think about it, that doesn't work very well with the Moleette system, where you have rights based on what church you belong to. And those two things were kind of sideways to each other and created tensions. And ultimately, things got dark pretty quickly at the end of the nineteenth century U Anyway That's getting us to nineteen hundred and you know Um My focus would be on the period from fourteen fifty three to around eighteen hundred or you know, the seventeen eighties where D during that period it' When you see room that In a Christian context, that means ethnic Roman and is often put in lists with other groups like Bulgarian and Serbian Christian Albanian and Well Acean and so forth. So it indicates a Greek speaking you know, Orthodox subject of the Ottoman Empire. The thing is, however That is an incredibly clunky phrase to use, and I've been using it a lot for the purposes of clarity But it makes no sense to be saying, o, in this village you have so many Bulgarians and so many Greek speaking, Orthodox, Like that doesn't make when the source says Rom or romse It just doesn't make any sense, but I have colleagues who do that They just straight up do that or they will just use Greek. U, but this really distorts the identity. and I think it gets us to the next topic that L what you wanted to talk. So where do like modern Greeks come from Absolutely. I mean So as as a Non scholar I'm now assuming that the American and French revolutions and the ideas around them are spreading A because we're now into the seventeen hundreds and now into the early eighteen hundreds What influence do they have on what happens next in within the Ottom world Well a great deal of influence for priding even them. The reforms I mentioned, the Tanzimat reforms, they come out of Ottoman bureaucrats and scholars were actually quite aware of what was going. in the West, they these were not isolated, you know people. they We even have s on the French Revolution that Ottomans are sending home about like trying to explain what's going on and they're very fascinating. I mean You know, Americans are fascinated by like the Americans who were in Paris and writing reports on, you know, the French Revolution. what did Jefferson say D and Franklin some of these people, but there' also some otuments and they're trying to explain what's going on All right. Come So the Ottoman authorities are being influenced by Western ideas at this point, yes, and also buying guns and trains But so are the intelligensia among the Christian subject groups and primarily the Greek speaking ones. So the Greek speaking ones are Compared to other Orthodox groups. produce byy far the most literature or writing or texts or whatever U and an argument can be made that Greek was the learned language of the Ottoman Balkans In fact, even for many like Muslims too, but certainly for the Orthodox group So once again, Greek becomes a kind of lingua frranca for All Christian society in the Balkans reggardless of ethnicity in some ways, now Not entirely. so And this is a bit of a problem with like essentialism, especially in national essentialism Right. So this is when we attribute an identity to a person or a group diachronically that is throughout time and assume that essence remains unchanged, even if the the way it appears looks different. It's basically like an Aristotelian metaphysics, right? where which is the basis also for the transubstantiation theory in the churches, right? The essence of the thing is the flesh and the blood of Christ, even though it looks like It's accidental properties. are the it looks like bread and wine Right? It's like that this microphone is white, but that's not its essence. It could be blue or black. It would still be a microphone. Its essence is the microphoneness of it And so When scholars will say something like, well, this Bulgarian person or his family, they learned Greek and they moved in Greek social circles and they wrote in Greek and whatever And like They walked and talked and spoke whatever in Greek, but they were really Bulgarians at heart. That's just essentialism U Allright At some point you have to treat these people as kind of assimilated cultural Greeks and from the second generation on That's just what they are in their words, they would be wrongous. That's just what you become. And this is how groups and individuals move in and out of identities, right? They just change their right. And to any individual among us, that might sound unthinkable. Like someone in the audience might wonder, well,, okay, How could I become, you know, Cck Like, that's just impossible Like well If you move to the Czech Republic and you send your kids to a school there and they learn that language and maybe they're Greek or whatever your native language is is kind of weak from whatever you teach at home And then they grow up and they get a successful job and you know they're Czech citizen. and okay, for all intents and purposes they're kind of like an ethnic Czech with maybe a kind of, you know, this happens in the U.S all the time. you know is why we have Greek Americans and Italian Americans and whatever. And at some point they just cease being Greek Americans. They become Jennifer Aniston or Like they might say, oh, yeah, yeah, I had a grandfather who whatever, you know. Um But it just doesn't matter anymore. And this happens in the Balkans too Uh people you know, over the course of two or three generations, people can shift and yet it's very important in national historiographies to preserve the integrity of like, oh no, he was one of ours. And you know, he was just doing that Greek thing to get ahead because of the whole, you know, business interests and all of that. But it's like, o yeah, okay, for some people that's true. For others, it probably went a bit further Anyway U So the learned culture of the Christian Balkans certainly in theh later in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is Greek based. manyany of the prominent scholars who did not like have Greek names and they write in Greek. and you can easily treat them as figures in like Greek language and eectorual history. They do have like other ethnic origins if you search for them, and maybe they didn't talk about them, maybe they didn't care about them. Maybe they're just not reflected in their works U And so, you know, it is a kind of artificial question for many of them to decide, is are they this or are they that? Whatever they are, they're participating in this Um, comm intellectual culture that takes place in Greek And Western ideas do enter that in a pretty big way. I mean, even in the Revolution, you will find read the outbreak of the Revolution and they're drafting these constitutions for the state Greece that they envisage U they're very, very influenced by the American and the French. developments and ideas. And they want like a democracy and they don't they don't get one, but, you know U They're thinking along these very, very progressive lines for that time, revolutionary progressive lines are very kind of mostly French influenced Anyway, so yes, these ideas are definitely spreading. and along with those ideas comes a valorization of the ancient Greek. becausecause this is something that's really picking up. in Western Europe. um that The ancient Greeks are like the source for all goodness, beauty, rel you know democracy, philosophy, you know, all of this U At the expense of Rome, in fact So like the eighteenth century is not really great for imperial Rome in Western thinking. There are times when it's perceived as you know, a model of greatness. There are times when it's perceived as It's largely a model for decline and fall But there are also times when it's perceived as despotic imperialist, you know, because it was Um And and the Greeks are highlight it instead because they're like free city states they're just trying to stay free and they fight off the Persians and produce philosophy and whatever And so at exactly this time, Europe is going through one of its most intense uh, you know Heleno Philic. stages And this is also picked up. by Western influenence theorists in the let's say, Ottoman enlightenment context. And so Many of them A connection to the ancient Greeks is now actually a strong point It's it's something that can give them recognition and prestige and legitimacy in the eyes of the Westerners whom they not only want to impress, of course These are their former teachers. Many of these people have gone to Paris and wherever to study, right Um But secure help Um, So if you're talking mostly too like Russians and Iperial Russia and looking for help, you're going to stress your orthodoxy But if you're talking to the Western powers, which are most of them You're going to stress your connection to Greek antiquity. This is my language, this is the land I live in. Th were my ancestors. So kind of picking up and supercharging The kinds of things that Lani cs And those sort of late Byzantine thinkers were writing that had no appeal really in their time, but now suddenly these are like existentially important And so you begin to get, yes Sorry. But just to be clear well, just to be precise. so there hasn't been any kind of political Revolutionary movement. amongst Roman people living in the Ottoman world till this time that we know of Oh no, there had always been U, you know, they're difficult to classify. I mean, you called it revolutionary. I'm not sure exactly Yeah. That's wrong word. yeah A political rebellion No, it could be the right word in certain context. I mean, so there were some rebellions in the Mi that were sort very revolutionary in a certain sense. In so far as we can access what they were thinking, it's possible that some of them were thinking in pretty know far reaching ways but You know, that can cover everything from a you bandit u bandit resistance in the hills, which, you know, The Greek Revolution in eighteen twenty one had a lot of that Perhaps if you have enough bandits in the hills, it counts as a revolution. I don't know. if it's just two or three guys, right whatever. But if it's forty or fifty, it's starting to look like like a real proto state So yeah, no, there were those things. there were always Um Western, sometimes Venetian Um, sometimes Russian You're treating Russian as a kind of Christian empire, so Western, yes attempts to intertervene u or rather interfere and stir up rebellions. So the Russians had a sequence of plans in which they were like Catherine the Great She had what's called quote the Greek project, which was that so we're going to just stir up the Greeks in the Ottoman Empire and get them to rebel and we're going to overthrow whatever. And we'll take over Constantinople and we'll put Catherine's son Dply name Constantine on the throne or do whatever Um So Yeah, yeah, these kinds of plants. Um had been hatched before the Greek Revolution, which was Um, yeah Um Not the one that some of them were hoping for, but that's the one that they got But But there was no kind of native let's Let's hail our own emperor in fifteen ninety in the Peloponnese and we have any hope that that will not just get crushed by the nearest Ottoman garrison kind of thing M boy No. I don't I'm not familiar with anything like that No A I mean, it's outoman history. I mean, who knows what you know little things are hiding in the in the corners, but Um no, not not anything that would enter the history books as kind of like a proto revolution on you And certainly none of them, I mean, not even the Greek Revolution Well, by the time that came along, it was so eneshed in Republican ideals that they were not going to say, and our next king will be, you know they were they were looking for a sort more parliamentary system. So yeah Um, Yeah. so the Hellenic didentity and link to antiquity This was its moment. And it was reinforced by a lot of enlightenment thinking, a lot of schooling that went on. Now, the thing is that these ideas were largely confined to learned people scholars or revolutionary leaders who you know, hypothetically, one of them might have been illiterate, but they got the gist of what, you know, was being said just from the sort of ambient discussion bulk of the population whether involved in the revolution or not, hadn't gotten the memo U And so there's this broad period of transition in The state of Greece between a kind of romaic Orthodox model and a sort of Hellenic more a revolutionary one. and I've been gathering moments of tension on that And it's something that again, for obvious reasons, you can imagine that you know modern Greek historians will not want to look at that. where modern Greek identity is presented as something very revolutionary and unwanted by the very people to whom it was being applied. And It's like, no, what Hellans what? No We have a perfectly good name. We are Romans and we call our language Romaic and what is all of this Hellenic stuff? And I have even found sources which will say all this Hellenic stuff is a Jewish conspiracy. It's a Jewish conspiracy to, you know, undermine our faith and our traditions And to use Hellenism as a kind of Trojan horse right to You know harm the Christian world in a way that will favor, I don't know. Jews are you know, yeah, it's kind of thinking, you know, once you start you know, following it, you know It goes off a cliff, but they do say things like this And it's like, your name is Mikalis. Why are you calling yourself The myistically Right You were baptized And you're a Roman. So they say things like this to each other. And as you can imagine, this is difficult. This would be difficult for modern Greek scholars to handle assuming they did, which they don't Um Anyway, because it kind of disrupts the narrative of identity continuity, certainly. And for a long time, this continued, but The Greek state, once it was formed, and once it started to form laws about who counts as a Greek citizen and who not Uh again, you know social reality kind of falls into place because Everybody will want to and within the territory of the state will want to be a Greek citizen, alen in Greek, right And then ye, you keep that. you keep saying that, but that's just something that you say in private life. It's not part of your, you, political and legal identity anymore. It's part of your cultural identity and it remains so well into the twentieth century. Okay. That's another topic Now what happens in the Ottoman Empire is that you have lots of these Greek speaking Um ome or room, right? And they now have to decide Are they going to ideologically align themselves with the New Greek state Which has advantages for them but also disadvantages in their ottoman context because they can be seen as a kind of fifth column or possible traiters or whatever Most of them stick with their room identity, and so in Once that happens There's a distinction now between Rum, which is like a Greek speaking Orthodox subject of the Ottoman Empire, who wants to be seen by the Ottoman authorities as a lawyer or at least not a troublemaker and a Greek sort of Hellenic person who is kind of aligned with the more revolutionary claims that are being made about like liberating the Greeks, you know, all theree even the ones who are not currently right in the Greek state potentially, you know, not necessarily Yes Could you Just give the listeners who don't know a very brief description of what happens politically with the Greek Revolution and how it succeeds I mean this going be very, very basic J remind There was a massacre and then there was another massacre. and it was followed by several more massacres, and then they massacred each other some more And then the Turks brought in an army to massacre more people U Braking pusha until finally everybody got very sick and tired of this. Okay U no. So The social origins of the Greek Revolution are highly contested. likeike who exactly are these people? and why are they doing this There is immense scholarship on this and I'm not I'm not going to touch that. That's like a third rail. Okay U, because You can imagine the kinds of implications and consequences for this, but long story short, in eighteen twenty one, a group of potential revolutionaries kind of like declares as it were independence And starts massacring. and they' like driving out Ottoman garrisons and taking over cities and then the Ottoman armies respond And the whole thing just gets it's incredibly chaotic And where are we specifically geographically? We are mostly in the Peloponnese and southern mainland Greece and some islands So this is the heartland of the Revolutions of Pelbones what we call a stadad Lather, which is like rumorly or so like from Athens over to Messolongi in over the mainland and some islands like Ivra near there, but also in some other places like well anyway, that's a sad story But yeah, some islanders get involved too It doesn't spread really to like the other Asian Asia minor provinces of the Ottoman Empire. they are obviously sympathizers and, you know, whatever There are also some movements coming from the North, like from Russia Um, and the Danubian regions There was an army that was actually formed there marches south, them doesn't go anywhere So that's not like the center stage All of this is happening there and eighteen twenty one and it lasts until the late eighteen twenties when at some point basically I mean, the main intervention was by Russia who in various ways put pressure on the Ottoman Empire to like, no, you know, we're going to recognize this state There's also a big naval battle at Navarino W the Western allies and Russia defeated an Ottoman fleet creating a kind of military situation where The the, you know Constantinople had to basically concede and allow the existence of a modern Greek state. which the Allies insisted had to be a monarchy, not a democracy because'm not gonna do that And so they had to accept a king from Bavaria, which was considered neutral enough, kind of small and powerless enough to, you know, not not step on any of the toes of the great powers. And so the Greek state was established then And just again, as for a non academic, the Western The Western interest in this is partly because the idea that people should be able to seelf determine and have their own rulers is popular because Greek is now a huge part of elite education in the West The Ottomans being weakened is advantageous to everyone in the Mediterranean Interesting, you should say that. So no, there's no idea of national self determination at this time. That would be a century later like with Wilson and even then with limits. No, in fact, exactly the opposite. At this time, Europe is a Oh has reached a kind of well, and this is where these terms come from, balance of power Among these major empires are states, England, France, Austria, Hungary, Russia And they had basically agreed after Napoleon that they would just kind of keep the status quo and that no revolutions or rebellions from anyone would be tolerated or allowed. They would all help each other suppress these things in order to keep the peace And then the Greek revolution happens And this is a problem And it was among the leadership, very unpopular because it causes kind of disruption No U The Ottoman Empire, which, you know, is famously being called a It's a sick man of Europe an empire that was believed to be on the verge of collapsing at any moment, though it outlived little bit the other ones. Austria, Hungary and the Russian Um Uh ye, so the Christian powers I had always wanted to kind of dismember it. They were always apprehensive that one of the other powers would get an advantage. And so they had all kind of agreed to kind of not sort of leave it alone or prop it up. You might think of it as being propped up from all sides simultaneously, so it wouldn't lean in any one particular direction. The Greek Revolution was a problem for a number of reasons. First of all, because it violated the kind of new revolutionary movements principle And for another is that Um The There was suddenly this upswell of support for the Greeks among the Western societies, which we call Phil Hellenism And this happened only because the revolution was very successfully perceived and this was a major propaganda or advertising coup branding as The Greeks are now rising up finally against their oppressive Muslim Turks, you know, overlords and And we should all rush to help them Because these are the Greeks after all. like look at our museums and look at our textbooks and our history and it's just full of stuff from Greece and like how can we abandon them to their cruel fate This is not an argument that would have ever worked for like Serbs and Bulgarians. When they tried it, like they who who again Right? And again, you see how the narrative requires a Hellenic label It would not work for a Rom Roman label at all. Like what are you talking about Romans? what Um so Um There's suddenly all this support, money keeps coming in and volunteers are coming in and the press is just running articles about helping the Greeks and Byron. famously, goes to Greece and joins the fight and he dies and You know, he wrote letters and these sort of inspired people. Now a lot of those people who went to fight in Greece, this was an event kind of like the Spanish Civil War was a century later where all of these people will go to join a noble fight. They go to Greece and they realize this is just one massacre after another and that neither side isic behaving particularly virtuously here and some of them get really disillused with all of But not the people who weren't there. They just keep sending money and supplies and pressuring their governments Eventually their government's like okay, you know, whatever And they all agree, okay, we can have a small small Greek state and we have to put it under a king so that they don't get any ideas. becausecause we don't want there to be some sort of source of contamination spreading democracy in Europe. That would be abhorrent, right Um, Remember, by the way, your audience should know that there is no pro democracy philosophy or anything going on in Europe at this time. you know Well of course, now that you've engaged my brain, I'm like, of course they weren't encouraging national self determination, having just put Napoleon down Yeahes, they' not interested in that at all. What am I thinkin No No, no, no, no And it also poses another problem because Like, for example, Britain has you know, India. And not just India, but other places and you actually have discontent there because what they're seeing in like, you know, what became Pakistan or Afghanist? They're saying wait a minute You're allowing the Christian subjects of a Muslim empire to gain independence, but you're not allowing the Muslim subjects of a Christian empire to gain independence. Why? That's a double standard And this sort of fed in ultimately to even pushes for like Indian independence and things like that. The Greek Revolution has repercussions like around the world You kind of indicated you didn't want to get into the the labyrinth of scholarship on the Greek the origins of the Greek Revolution, but just in a very broad sense because I'm anticipating listener questions. W the sense be that Ottoman rule in Southern Greece wasn't particularly onerous or violently resented in the centuries before that, it presented certainly But this was more about circumstances like Ottoman weakening, And then leaders gaining these new ideas about how to Runner revolution this coalesces into that. It wasn't We don't know of particular build upp of resentment from changes in Ottoman policy that led to this revolution Yeah So it is difficult to measure the degree, let's say of oppression, exploitation or of perceived oppression and exploitation and a part of the subjects of the empire at any time or to compare them across periods I while not being an expert on like social realities on the ground in this village and that town and whatever do get the sense that U The Ottomate administration, such as it was in the early nineteenth century in Greece was particularly dysfunctional and exploitative compared to previous centuries. The Ottoman Empire You know, we don't say that it was in decline for no reason It had kind of lost control over a number of its regional officials. Parts of it were becoming sort of quasi independent They were all these basically regional warlords that we're paying lip service to the port. This is the Ottoman court Um but in fact, kind of running the show with their penchmen Um, Ottoman officials definitely you know, behaving imperiously and sort of fleecing the there all kinds of taxes and injustices and things like that Now this is of course, you know I mean we know about all of this even before the Revolution, during the Revolution, of course, they complain about it. A lot more And Certainly, these kinds of, you know developments were more advanced if you compared like to the sixteenth century. U At the same time, you do have the infiltration of foreign ideas, especially the examples of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, which were different kinds of revolutions, if you think about it obviously, but You know, they they can kind of merge together into the idea of throwing off a hated and distant overlord that's just charging taxes all the time with a model of, you know, having your own state U that is sort of more egalitarian. especially at a time when It's becoming increasingly difficult to justify Um, kind of like, an overtly discriminatory policy toward your subjects on the grounds of you know, religion, let's say or U or ethnicity, like even in like Britain in the nineteenth century, it' It's like becoming increasingly difficult to justify the kinds of penalties that Catholics were subject to Um which, you know, two centuries earlier was like obvious. And not two centuries, a century earlier was like, no, obviously we have to keep the papists down, right or Jews for that matter. like just, you know Um And and many of these societies are facing pressures of this kind. So was the Ottoman Empire, as I mentioned, Just a couple decades later, there no, not a decade later, in the thirties, they'd start initiating this process of kind of like equalization and creating a more , you know, unified law of citizenship, let's say Um, So these ideas are You know, by the time a state reacts to these things, you have to imagine that the discussion on the ground has been going on for some time and is rather heated because states don't give up per and privileges, you know, just like on principle you know, they rarely, they do sometimes but it's rare and So those ideas are also u filtering. and you have an intellectual class now that's sort of Western Western educated of, you know, stirring people up. They're forming secret societies. They're doing all of this kind of nineteenth century stuff with like high ideals and secret handshakes So Yeah, I think it's a combination of all of these classes of factors, plus classes in Gree that where let's look, at the same time, there's no like loyalty really to the Ottoman Empire. I mean, what is there exactly to be loyal to You have a different religion, different language, different ethnicity. you're clearly a subject population, right? This is utterly unlike Romania in the Middle Ages, different relationship between provincial populations in the center This is a center that's just very, very difficult to deal with and remote and you deal with it normally through some you know, arrogant exploitative intermediary. and yeah, I mean, this is a completely different situation So these things come together and there are classes in Greece that think You know I can probably get a better deal uh from a kind of small state that's possibly weak but close at home than from this distant overlord who doesn't pay me when They contract me for some operation or another and treat me as a bandit the other times So in a sense, the to announce a Greek revolution to a Western audience doesn't require any rebranding at all because that's what So that doesn't That doesn't require any effort And as you say, there's then an internal discussion where presumably the leaders are saying We can talk about that, but don't used The Western is by talking about whether you're really Romans or not because the branding exercises what's getting their support. There's no advantage to haaving that debate in in those circles Yeah, I'm not aware of any attempt to kind of Um Jos. people who might be inclined to talk about Romanness, because those kinds of people are normally like and not engaging with like Western interlocutors really at all, or are sort deep in the church Um It's I mean, obviously the church Uh react pretty negatively to this development because Hellenism is, as I mentioned, kind of tied to paganism. It still is in the eyes of many churchmen Um It indicates disloyalty to the Ottoman authorities, which the church had accepted and had worked with for some time. in fact Remember, this comes right at the moment when The Orthodox Church, like the pedriarch of Constantinople has a sort of maximum amount of power within the overall church than ever before. And so they're very aligned with the Sultans who have made all of this possible through imperial orders And so they're they They're like, no, you should have stop this. This nationalism is a sin basically. know Christians are not, you're not supposed to be doing any of this. You get in line and pay your taxes and you know, Pray to God that the Sultan provides a just and peaceful life for you Yeah, even though he's not a Christian, but they'd gotten used to that part So this state gets created and a king is imposed or Cho yen. imposed Both imposed and chosen by the Western powers. And this is Otto, a son of the King of Bavaria and would people Would his people have called him VilFs or would Okay. Um And so This is where I leave it to you to take the story forward in terms of How does that How do people process this development in terms of Roman versus Greek identity 'use presumably no one's saying he's Constantine XleI and now Otto. like U I I don't know of any specific Cases of that happening, but I wouldn't be entirely surprised if some turn up and again Your audience should know, I'm not As a historian, I'm not someone who like has spent most of my career looking into the documents of this here And the later we go the more we're we'rere we're going into areas where I haveve done a lot of general reading, but primary sourcesh Soort of oddly this, these discussions kind of hook up with a little bit with just my experience of growing up in Greece and the kind of general knowledge that you have and reading, which I have done, you know, quite a bit. Um, but Th those are just like my general interests. So U I mean, Otto was a king for thirty some years and He was replaced, he was deposed and replaced And it brought in a sub brranch of the Danish royal family that stayed in until the seventies when they were constitutionally removed' one of the most corrupt and unpopular royal families in Europe and that's saying something because, you know, Think of the competition U So U Some of the members of the Danish branch when they were in Greece were hailed as like Constantine XI as it were I mean, the numbering system sometimes vary depending on whatever, but U yeah, so King Constantine in the early twentieth century, especially when he was active up in Thsoniki and Macedonia during before the First World War He was hailed as a kind of descendant of or not successor of Bosil II and you know, these kinds of things. So yeah, no those comparisons were made.'m not I don't think they were made with Atto Even during the Revolution Um So in the eighteen twenties before Otto is, you know, even on the horizon Some of the revolutionaries who assemble in various places, the Peloponnes, usually in Epidorus or, you know, somewhere And they're drawing up draft constitutions and talking about you know the kind of state that they want. In one of these documents, they say, well Until further notice, the laws of our state will be those of our Christian emperors I would say mean Roman law, like just innianic law But they call them our Christian emperors, that's the anyway So So some people are clearly thinking in terms of some continuity. from The Basilieton Roman Um, Yeah U Now I would recommend Michael Hurzfeld wrote a book called Os Once More and it's about the creation of folklore as a discipline in modern Greece. And he has some chapters where he talks about Um, this kind of coe existence of Hellenic and Romaic For some time in Greece during the nineteenth century and they're just They're concurrent Sultaneous identities. That refer to different parts of life and existence. in an interesting kind of curious way. So I mentioned earlier that For some time, like from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, you have a kind of clash between them with people saying what are you talking about this Hellenic business? that's like insane, or from churchmen, that's blasphemous or you know, or this is a Jewish plot or you know we have a name for ourselves. Why do we have to change it? you know, this kind of thing Once the Greek state is established and there's a body of law that's talking about Greek citizenship and all of that, I think those kinds of like clashes kind of die down By the way, it takes a while for the Greek state to decide who by whatiter criteria someone is a Greek U Like in the time of the revolution, it could be just very straightforwardly like after you're a Christian orr if you're pressed, you're say, well, if you know, if you're orrthodox Christian, but well maybe we'll, you know, because' all these Philhllions running around. I mean Byron wasn't Orthodox Christian, you know So U If you're a Christian and you're with us, they're good enough we'll treat you as a Greek Later on it becomes more narrowed down and eventually becomes a kind of self perpetuating institution with a much more specific kind of ethnic right aspect to it. U or later national U, but At that point, The Romaic and the Hellenic kind of coexist in modern Greek consciousness and social life And both Hertzfeld and also Patrick Lee Fermmer, who the famous travel writer in the twentieth century, who wrote two books of his I think walks through maybe more, but at there two there's rumorly and there's a money Um and I think in the Rumly book, he has some pages where he also is talking about like, And this is in like the fifties, sixties, whatever. He's still finding people who think in these kind of bifurcated way between Hellenic and Romaic I think it's pretty much dead now. If you referred to itom when I was growing up, it wasn't. You could still you say Romi and they know who, you know, you mean Greeks basically by that point But if you were to use it today, I think you would be regarded as sort of hopelessly Um not just antiquarian, but it's a kind of fantasy world are you living in? and maybe you're some sort of conservative fascist type or something like this U Okay For a long time, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these were U like complementary aspects of Greek identity where the Hellenic referred to Your national identity That is the history of your nation. It's standing in the world how you interact with foreign people which we do a lot because we have a lot of tourists in Greece. This is This is a frequent occurrence Um a sense of pride in the classical tradition, in fact, the monuments, like the whole classical side of things, also democracy, philosophy, science, like things that Greeks you pride themselves a lot on And so the Hellenic was like those kinds of things. It was a little bit the official building, by which I don't mean to say that it's not real or heartfelt or anything, because Classical right Greek culture is if you try to picture it, you start picturing columns and statues and things like that, which might to some people seem rather You know, maybe some bureaucracy somewhere put up a statue or a you know, kind of classical facade on a building, but in Greece these actually do speak to an identity and that so that on the one hand, right? Classical Greek and all that, the Romanic was much more the side of your life that the foreign tourists weren't interested in Right? The foods that you eat at home, the church, the Orthodoxy, your the icons of your saints that you have I have a bunch of them over there Um But you know, they're completely separate from my profession as a classicist. It has nothing to do with each other, right Or yeah, so church like the festivals, the dances All of the stuff that a Greek would point to and say, yeah, that's totally Greek that a a tourist would not ever have seen before in their life That's the romic stuff. So the more folkloric kind of part of life, the stuff that you do at home the more colorful demonic idioms that you use, right? Yeah, all of that. So It was kind of complimentary for a long time U As I said, I think during the twentieth century that kind of faded out and the Romaic became like almost too folkloristic. like it itself became a whole kind of outdated category And so the Hellenic kind of this absorbed All of it And what you find instead I think that the kind of bifurcation that picks up in the later twentieth century and specifically with the entry of Greece into the European community But also, you know, NATO and other, you know international institutions is a kind of split between U, like a desire to modernize Um and to be a respected Um, you know, up to date kind of country Um, even if that means sacrificing some of your more colorful local practices Um for a kind of bureaucratic standardization. that would make for a more efficient administration and more respect in the eyes of the world Um, versus And here's where you get a split U the more colorful practices that some regard as sort of constitutive of a distinctive national identity because if we go all in on the stuff I just mentioned, how do we differ from like you know Belgium or Canada or whatever. Now it turns out that Belgium and Canada are not exactly Um um, you know, paragans of of that either Um and that they have their own kind of nativist, let's say aspects that that that But whatever, people in those countries know what I'm talking about And so there are in Greees. So some people will say, no, we don't want to give up who we are in order to be an efficient bureaucracy U And there are others who say yes, we absolutely should because those things are either embarrassing superstitions from the Middle Ages or what they would call leftover Ottoman practices such as like back backroom dealing corruption, bribes, you know, nepotism, networks of insiders and like all of that stuff. And, you know, we don't want we don't want that anymore U And, you know, the dances and the icons and the food are just like, well, I mean, nobody's against those things and we'll just have those things And so I think that the whole Romic Hellenic has been reconfigured in asymmetrically into a kind of tension between Um Do we want to you know, get with the program of Western modernization or modern Westernization or Is there value in keeping some sort of distinctive, whatever. But I mean Turkey went through the whole this's the same thing, right? And this is very much a part of Turkish politics. where for a long time it was like aspirational to join the European Union and that this would, you know help in mitigating some of the tremendous abuses and injustices of Turkish society and You know, the events of the twenty first century have led many Turks to like not that they don't reform those abuses, but it's like, hm Maybe The Western European model is not exactly ideal as it was once sold to us and especially, you know, after the crisis and all everything, you know that's been happening, the European Union has been shown to be, you know, not quite a as effective or inspiring an institution for dealing with crises I mean, again, that's debatable. I'm not asserting that as a fact. I'm saying that it can be seen as sort of not effective on its own terms Whereas You know, others would insist more on a local Turkish identity that revolves around a kind of, you know, kind of Islam, not not hardcore Islam, Anyway I think that's the trajectory of the Greek debate on this question. And the Romic side has just kind of fallen out of history in that part of the world H I I suppose When you create a new state with a new political system And it has a brand and a name then the children who then grow up in that state will have much less of a connection to the old state, which is now centuries gone But so focusing on you when you were ing up At what point did that history become something you were aware of Well, I was aware of it at all times Um Oh wait, which history? Well so Uh yeah So I have no contested identity to worry about as a seven year old. If someone says, we're English. That person's French, that makes sense to me presumably you were told at some point you're Greek or not you're Roman. how does that interact for you as a young person No, at no time in my life was I told I was Roman. That just wasn't a thing. And I might not be the right person to talk to about this because I had a contested identity in a very different way, which is that I was both American and Greek. Not Greek American. I did not grow up in I'm not saying that there's nothing wrong with being Greek American. I'm just not one of that group because I didn't grow up in the US. nor am I a fully Greek immigrant from Greece to the U.S I grew up at all times being ose, but like along parallel tracks I' speent a year in Greece this summer in the U.S. My family was split fifty fifty.uage I'm bilingual, right? I had always there was this and there was that and they're different. And I was always kind of curious as to where they kind of intersect and where they really, really differ bothoth as identities and as just experiencing the world in like, you know, Athens on the one hand or Philadelphia on the other the later my university career Um, but they were never in any particular conflict Um And it gave me a certain perspective from which to see I see both of them through the lens of the other. And so that's just an interesting little unique thing to myself interest other people Um But the romaic stuff is it just came up in the footnotes of of reading or just in conversation, you pick it up But it's never anything that was presented to me as a choice that that was remotely viable to make or as a set of commitments or nothing like that my grandmother, my great grandmother was intensely pious and then very much a Marxist, which is very orthodox and very Marxist But I never heard her talking about anything like that. even though posossibly she was born. a room subject of the Ottoman Empire And she was yes. ye, she was born before the Liberation of Lzvos in nineteen thirteen So she, you know My grandmother was a room of the Ottoman Empire, but it's just not something that, you know, she spent her whole life Well, of course, trying to raise children through all those wars and, you know, Nazi occupations and whatever But also in Greek politics, which were a kind of left right thing and this just takes us very far from the Hellenic Romic. So these are different kinds of sources of tension that distracted Greeks away from that whole question You gott to remember from the late nineteenth century When they started to fight the wars in the Balkans straight through to the end of the Civil War In nineteen forty, whatever, eight Let's say Greece was Almost at all times either at war or militarized and preparing for war And there were all of these generations that just Lather They spent so much time in the armed forces or fighting this or that or under occupation or whatever that the main you know, sort of structural tensions in their lives shifted to those very present concerns and away from the more It antiquated those concerns in the nineteenth century A story I took from your book So in that episode, like the fourteenth episode I did was Peter Tiranas's story about being on Lemnos as a young boy, and Helen is arriving, Greek soldiers arriving and him and his friends saying We're here to see what a hell nos looks like and the soldier' saying Well, aren't you Helliness and him saying, no, we're Romans Yes. and I mean Well I was going to say is that reflective of the idea that those outside of the Greek state may still have seen themselves as room, you know for much longer and only as they joined the state again to embrace Greek identity Absolutely This is early twentieth century. His name in Greek is Cardanes Um And I have since found several other similar stories from the early twentieth century O're very, very late nineteenth, but There's a story that Carl Krumbachher U sort of one of the founders of the study of Byzantine literature. and he told a story um, where he was at notot far from Adine in the coast of Asia Minor, and he said, so this is in nineteen oh five And he's talking to someone and he says, U So I mean, how many Greeks are you here and how many Turks And his local contact who as a native Greek speaker, will say, well, Greeks Uh, I mean, I think he says something like forty, he says And Kumba has looked around and said forty. this place looks like it's like full of Greeks. And it's o, oh. Yeah, no, Greeks they're about forty. Romans they're like countless. like I don't know how many Romee literally says Rome in a Sapoli. Edines Monoseranda U, so Yeah, there are lots of those stories. But like as I said, The Greek speaking Orthodox in the Ottom Empire. Romans some of them, you know, I mean, they had a choice to make in that context. Do they do they go Greek and embrace that identity, affiliate with the Greek state or Or do they stay Roman and Um Most of them stayed Roman and so Romee until the twentieth century when the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist, and then Then they were just kind of forced to Grease In the population exchange in nineteen twenty three And then yeah, they I mean, they very quickly had to become U Greeks In the same way that Greeks who hadated Romans who had emigrated to Italy in like the fifteenth century had to become Greeks, so too with the Romans who emigrated to Greece in the twentieth century and The exchange exempted The Rom of Constantinople So the The Greek speaking, Orthodox room of Constantinople, they stayed there, but Yeah. Let's just say Things got pretty dicey for during the course of the twentieth centur Um And many of them left and emigrated to Greece. So this is like in the fifties and even later in the sixties. I mean in fifty five there's a huge poram against them and they've been of even left then, okay, and Rionis has written a book on that. U So I've read like anthropological studies This basically based on interviews of the room in Greece So once they've emigrated there, right? And s one there's a Turkish anthropologist who wrote a study of this. I mean in Turkish, but it was translated into Greek, thankfully, and her name is Turker Um, and U And there were some fascinating sort of insights into what happens when when you have to move like that U for example, in while they were living in Istanbul They' inside language was of course, Greek And I mean, Turkish was a language of general society. They're all Turkish speakers, obviously Um, but when they wanted to like my daughter and I, when we don't . Our private language is Greek and no one in the US really will understand it, right? Or I was just now in Japan, and we would just speak Greek and it was perfectly fine And of course when we go to Greece It cannot be our secret language. And so these room in Athens fine In order to maintain a kind of group insiderness, They switched to Turkish Right? Um which is this like for some of them, this was like mind blowing that they would now associate speaking Turkish with their former room identity, that they wanted to keep, you know, social ties and networks alive. And how do you do that and keep out all the, you know, Um And the same with religion when they were lived in Istanbul, that going to church every week was a strong affirmation of their group rightite identity and forming ties and all of that. And they go to Athens where it's just part of the background, It's just background noise and going to church like For many of them, they would say, no, it' lost its value for me. L I I don't go because it's all like everybody. like it just't it's not special I have found those this fascinating to observe That's really interesting Well, so my final question on this whole discussion would be let's say things had played out differently in the nineteen twenties war between Greece and Turkey, and the border had fallen between Europe and Asia So The Greek state had taken Constantinople. and Turkey said fine, we'll be an anchoror and would the two sides separate What do you think would have happened to Greek identity with Constantinople back within the state would been pushes for the capital to move there and What does absorbing the old homeland of the Roman Empire do to the sense of Greek identity Dangers in question Now it actually proposes it requires two hypotheticals, not just one. not just that the Greeks Let's say win the war in Asia mininor. They didn't necessarily need win they needed only to not lose Let's suppose that they kept whatever that kind of Basically the Let's say the lands of the Empire of Niceaa in the thirteenth century, right That doesn't mean they get Constantinople. The Allies were emphatic that the Greeks do not get Constantinople Istanbul, it's still called Constantinople officially at the time, was under like British, French, etcetera, occupation. And they were absolutely clear that the Greeks don't get that U for a number of reasons, but you know, they first of all, they weren't going to surrender it to anybody because of its control of the straits The Russians have a tremendous incentive to Right, Make sure that Im Anyway So it would require Constantinople would require a much bigger change in imperial policy in, you know nineteen eighteen Um than just the Greeks, you know, clinging on an Asia minor. But you know, even supposing that happens So you're asking the question because you're probably aware that even during the nineteenth century, there were Greeks like in Athens who would say things like, well, Aence is great, but it's only a temporary capital because our real capital is Constantinople. like they would say this. and So they're Harking back right to medieval Vasileron Roman, the Empire of the Romans and And this is part of the Lingering aspiration to reconstitute that in modern form, but with like a more overtly Greek Now dominant class So it's not u compleomtely outside the pale of national Greek thinking to retake Constantinople in a way But even if the Allies had said, okay, you can have Constantinople, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have allowed them to relocate the government there U Okay, assuming they even did that, right? Uh You know, that would by then require massive population transfers because it was a predominantly Muslim very, very large Roman presence there. U But I mean, now it's like you know, a couple thousand or something. backack then it' was huge. I don't know the numbers, but it was a significant part of the population, but not a majority. You would have had to what do you do now with all of these Muslims? I mean, okay,es send them well, where? Be If we're talking about a situation where the Turkish state isn't kind of constituted in the way that it is today. if Kamal had not been successful in the way that your hypothetical suggests There's no reason to think that the Turkish state would be what it turned out to be He might have faced challengers for having failed U the French or you know, whatever, Armenians want revenge for the genocide. The French want to move up from Syria. Mbe maybe Turkey doesn't emerge in the way that we're familiar with So what do you do with all of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims of Istanbul you send them Um, and You know, they were even if the Greeks were like given the green light to relocate their capital to Casa, I was like, well, well, Is that what we want? like there would be a serious discussion about that and in that discussion The lines of identity might very well be clarified. It's like, no, why don't we just run that as a colony from Athens because that's just much more convenient And ultimately we deal with the Muslims of the city in the same way that we deal with the Muslims in Thrace that you know we have just kind of give them something to keep them quiet, but kind of let's just pretend they're not. There Um, But this is the early twentieth century, man. I mean, you can imagine much darker scenarios like Like, oh, these are all just Greeks who were forced to convert and learn Turkish and we now have to remind them that And we now know, you can't teach Turkish here and you have to learn Greek. Like who knows? this is a dark Dark part of history. So in a way Constantinople has changed toooo much for that even in a theoretical scenario or there to be a An issue for the rebranding of Greece and Athens as center of this new state. Yes, yes. not really much differently than it is today. I mean, if you go You know And anyone and I encourage everyone to go to Istanbul with you Yeah just get the tour But okay, so today it has I don't How many countless of millions? it's just like That would be just an impossible logistical task. like, okay, let's suppose that for some reason or another, Istanbul like, okay, nowreek it comes into the Greek state. like, okay, but there are more Muslims living there than in the whole than you have people in Greece. L what do you do I And I will remind the audience that There were many moments, especially in the later tenth and early eleventh century when Emperors of Constantinople definitely had the ability and the opportunity to make much more extensive conquests in Syria, even know, push into Mesopotamia absorb Muslim principalities in Transcaaucasia. like They had armies that could crush any opposition there. But they did not do that They imposed a tributary client state status on Aleppo And that's as far as they really went And I think it's because they did not want to absorb large Muslim populations, which neither there this is not the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire has a framework one way or another of having, you know, large religious minorities, which in some cases are not even minorities, they're majorities. But Romania was not that kind of state. It had a more or less unified law of persons that saw On Orthodox Christians It had real difficulty in processing other groups. It had to like pretend that they were something other than they were or just ignore or does not apply its laws And this was not it created a dissonance that was not easy to resolve I think a modern Greek state would have real difficulty in processing that. There would be people who are saying, hey, no, no, now we need to have a special legal you rights and categories for the Muslims in Constantinople Um, like for the proposals for a joint cyprus, you know, a joint Greco Turkish Cyprus. Well, Okay, how do you do that? If you have a Turkish Muslim minority, how do you ensure that they have political representation and rights without either a quota system, Yeah. a kind of like sort of individual by individual approach, which would basically exclude them from parliament in a way, right? Like Be they're never a majority. so how do they they can never elect you know These are very difficult problems and rather than face them, might you keep his stum Youre keep it. that's not it. I know you've got to go. Do you have time for one more Yes. I had a big question. So how bad an analogy is this If you are an English person living in America in the sixteen and seventeen hundreds. you've got on a boat, you grew up in England. You're an English person. but Y children will be Americans and within century, your sense of Englishness within that family will be completely gone. Is that similar to a Greek person in say nineteen hundred that They are obviously from Roman stock But that Romanness is now notot only a century removed from this new identity you know, politically centuries gone. so to say that's a Roman person, not a Greek person is a silly thing to say It's not a bad analogy Um, Um I mean, setting aside the issue of stock, which somewhere metaphysical I'm even in a English context.. Yes a lot of English people in any period are, you know, the descendants of immigrants and vice versa in fact It's not a bad analogy. especially if you ask, so in the end Let's if you situate yourself in like, I don't know eighteen hundred What is the difference between Romic and Hellenic in terms of your as an identity, right? And there are many, I'm not trying to waave them away Um But one of them, and I'll just mention this U to close, there can be many others, though is a s your sense of history In other words, if you think of like the Roman people U and you're talking about their history, which they did U that history is a very, very different looking narrative Th if you were to tell the history of the Greeks So look at what is conventionally called Byzantine historiography That is the sequence of the emperors and it goes back to the Republic in Rome and back to Aeneas and Troy Like if they go into preistory that part of history That's where they go They do not go to Athens and Sparta. So they never mention Athens and Sparta often or they just mention it as well, that's where Socrates happened to live and we know him through the works of Plato, which we read. I mean, that's it, that's it U Whereas, If you are doing a Greek history If you're Group narrative part of a Greek history It looks very different It goes back to ancient Greece and, you know, Athens and Sparta and And the Greeks at Troy, not the Trojans U So the same with your Englishman and your're American, right? Yeah, you speak the same language and let's suppose that you're descended from the same people and you read the same literature down to what no, you read the same literature at all times But if you were to say, okay, tell me the story of your Rom It's a very different looking story Um Right. So that's one. And here's another. like I get email by you know, people who take history very seriously and they'll say things like, well, why Why shouldn't we like restore Romanic identity Right? U After all, it does account for the majority of the history of Greek speakers that we know of Um So why not? And so I'll say, well, I mean it's not my job Right? I'm a historian. That's a decision about the future and about people's identities now. That's for them to make.m not I'm not making any Not my business However I said, consider that Romaic is by certainly by this point aligned with a monarchy and Orthodoxy R? Like those are its historic associations, right? Whereas Hellenic is aligned with Like ideologically, democracy and like philosophy, science and whatever Let's suppose that you're actually choosing between those things Which would you choose? And like, oh, oh, okay. had and thought of it like that But yeah, so these things, right matter And those identities are aligned differently on those things I'm not taking a side on them because I don't care. I'm a historian. These things are all in the past As far as I'm concerned, and Mary, I can leave your audience with this None of these things should be binding on the major decisions that we make as people today We should make those decisions based on the principles that we think are the best and react both the best principles and what we think will ensure the best outcome for everyone U And if that has to be done within a national framework fine, not all the decisions that we do that we make are in such a framework We should not feel the weight of the past on us so heavily R? that we are limited by its choices. They made their choices. We make our choices So this is all as far as I'm concerned, personally, this is all like historical antiquarianism. It's fascinating. I love to study it It helps me to understand the present But not to make any decisions based on it. I do not make decisions based on any of all. Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast and this discussion. you again.