Soldiers celebrate the 200th anniversary of the 1821 Revolution (ANGELOS TZORTZINIS/AFP via Getty Images)

My ancestor Georgios Sisinis was a leading figure of the Greek Revolution and, by all accounts, a man of large appetites — for food, women, and violence. His bearded, heavy-lidded features hang in portrait in the Natural Historical Museum of Greece in Central Athens; a far less impressive reproduction adorns my living room wall. He fought in several battles during the War of Independence, provided a load of the troops for the war in the south, and afterwards, as Speaker of the revolutionary National Assembly, he invited Ioannis Kapodistrias to return to the country as the first head of state of independent Greece. He then became President of the Greek Senate, only to end up rowing furiously with Kapodistrias and resigning from frontline politics.
During this year’s 200th anniversary celebrations, I thought about my ancestor a lot, particularly when I read Mark Mazower’s sublime new book, The Greek Revolution. Mazower describes him as “one of the most powerful magnates in the west of the Peloponnese” — but he was also a complicated man. Probably brilliant, he was a patriot and integral to the war effort. But he was also, essentially, a warlord.
This matters. Mazower is at pains to underscore the relationship between myth and reality and the importance of the latter to Greece’s 1821 revolution from Ottoman rule. In particular, he understands that the “national-togetherness” (ethniki omopsychia) so important to the Greek national story was in many ways just that: a story. In fact, what existed were clusters of people like Sisinis and his followers: local clans and chieftains who often fought each other, occasionally allied with the Ottoman Empire, and frequently had entirely different visions of how to build a nation-state and what that state should in fact be.
Even the idea of the “Greeks” of an Ottoman province was wrong. “The peoples of the peninsula included not only Greeks but also Serbs and Albanians, Bosnians and Romanians, an assortment of Orthodox, Catholics, Muslims and Jews,” Mazower notes. How could this mob be turned toward a single national goal? Mazower’s answer is: imagination, or what we might call myth. The portrayal of chieftains like Sisinis as what Mazower calls “heroes” was and is vital because “heroes have their uses too and in the Greeks’ struggle with a far mightier foe, heroism had been at the heart of revolutionary thinking”.
The goal was simple: to homogenise a variegated population into a nation, which emphatically it was not. But it worked and “the fiction bolstered what otherwise seemed a hopeless cause”. It was genuinely a tremendous achievement for Greeks; and an important one for the West. Greece was the first country to break free of empire and become a nation state in the modern age. It began the age of modern nationalism that in turn created the Europe — and indeed the West – that we know today.
If Greeks began the first modern nationalist movement then, perhaps fittingly enough, Greece was also the first example of what the historian Benedict Anderson called an “imagined community”. For Anderson, all nations are “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”.
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