Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (41 page)

After the rights of man comes Rígas’ constitution for the new state, again closely modelled on the revolutionary French constitutions. All citizens of this state, of whatever religion or race, are equal, and citizenship
is very widely granted: to any foreigner who has lived in the state for a year and is working, or who has married a Greek woman or adopted a Greek child, and to anyone who speaks Greek and helps Greece, even if he lives in the Antipodes. Education is again stressed: foreigners who bring their skills or wisdom to Greece, and Greeks who go abroad to acquire them, are to be honoured. A scheme of government is outlined, very like the system that emerged in the war of independence, with local assemblies and a national government consisting of a legislature and an executive. This national government is to control the army, and army officers are to hold their ranks only in time of war, after which ‘all are equal and brothers.’
¹⁸
How were the citizens to know their rights and obligations? Rígas’ solution, for a land without printing presses, was for the rights of man and the constitution to be engraved on copper tablets that should be set up in every town and village ‘where each hour each citizen may see in what consists the priceless treasure of his beloved freedom’.
¹⁹

The final part of Rígas’
New Political Order
is his
thoúrios
or battle song, still popular in Greece. It is in the galloping metre of a traditional Greek brigand ballad, as reproduced in this translation, and opens with the lines:

Similarly, the oath against tyranny begins:

And concludes:

But even in the full flow of revolutionary fervour Rígas maintains his ecumenical vision. The revolution is to be not against the Turks as such but against tyranny. Thus Turks are summoned to join in the coming struggle and not only the Turks; in the course of some twenty lines Rígas calls for support from Bulgarians, Albanians, Armenians and Arabs, and from the people of Malta, Egypt and Aleppo, and says to them:

Rígas’ revolutionary enthusiasm and writings ultimately brought his undoing. At the end of 1797 he was in Vienna intending, as he told friends, to travel with companions first to Trieste, also in Austrian territory, and then to stir up revolt in the Peloponnese and in northern Greece and Albania. He had been informed that the Greeks were ‘roaring like lions’.
²²
He sent ahead to a friend in Trieste boxes containing many copies of his writings, clearly intended for distribution in Greece, with an accompanying letter to his friend. This friend was away, and his business partner opened the letter. The letter has not survived, but the business partner was alarmed by its contents and handed it to the Austrian authorities. After Rígas had reached Trieste there was a knock on his hotel bedroom door in the middle of a December night; Rígas was arrested and his boxes seized.

By the end of February fourteen suspects, including Rígas, were under arrest. Six were Austrian subjects and sent into internal exile in Leipzig, from where they all later returned. The other eight, including Rígas, were Ottoman subjects and handed over to the Ottoman authorities. The Austrians were very willing to cooperate with the Ottomans as for some years both had been facing local unrest. Pasvanoglu Osman, nominally a Turkish pasha, had been trying since 1792 to carve out for himself, at the expense of both Austria and Turkey, an independent fiefdom based on the Danube town of Vidin. The Austrians feared that their subjects too might be stirred to revolt by a rising in Greece, and within a few weeks of Rígas’ arrest the Greek newspaper
Ephimerís
was closed. The Turkish ambassador to Vienna wrote to the Austrian police chief: ‘Now more than ever great monarchs must support each other in order to oppose effectively this general political disorder.’
²³
This cooperation precluded any trial in court, which none of the suspects ever faced.

At the end of April 1798 Rígas and his seven companions were sent to Belgrade, chained in pairs, and imprisoned in a grim medieval tower overlooking the Danube. There at the end of June, after six months’ incarceration, they all died, according to different accounts either strangled or shot or drowned. None of the bodies was ever found. It is reported that just before he died Rígas said: ‘This is how brave men die. I have sown; the time will soon come when my country will gather the harvest.’
²⁴

Rígas quickly became revered. When in 1809 Byron met the young Andhréas Lóndos, later a revolutionary leader, the poet mentioned Rígas’ name, at which Lóndos immediately jumped up and ‘clasping
his hands repeated the name of the patriot with a thousand passionate exclamations, the tears streaming down his cheeks’.
²⁵
In the next century Rígas’ portrait was appropriated by the Communist resistance to German wartime occupation, and his name was used by the secret society of students opposed to Greece’s military dictatorship of 1967–74. Rígas’ dying words may well have been apocryphal, but his name is still alive today as both prophet and proto-martyr of the Greek revolution.

The last Greek figure to be considered in the context of the Enlightenment is Adhamántios Kora
ḯ
s, who was both educator and revolutionary. His prolific writings were designed to educate the Greeks, specifically along the lines that he favoured. This education would prepare the Greeks for revolution and independence, events to which Kora
ḯ
s constantly looked forward though he was a severe and sometimes bitter critic of the revolution that actually happened.

Kora
ḯ
s was born in Smyrna in 1748, son of a wealthy merchant. His education was partly at the hands of incompetent schoolmasters, partly from tutors whom he sought out himself, and partly from the library inherited from his maternal grandfather. At the age of 23 he was sent to Amsterdam as representative of his father’s business, and remained there for seven not very successful years. ‘He was no businessman,’ wrote a colleague, ‘and it was a good thing that his father sent him off to study medicine.’
²⁶
After four years back in Smyrna these studies took him to Montpellier in southern France and lasted another six years. At the age of 40, his education at last completed, he went to Paris in 1788, a year before the start of the French Revolution. He remained in Paris for the rest of his long life, in the course of which he never set foot on Greek soil.

Kora
ḯ
s witnessed at first hand the unfolding of the French Revolution, and this experience shaped all his future thinking about how Greece should be regenerated. At first the French Revolution seemed to be a model for Greece. The French had overthrown their oppressive rulers, the King and his nobility, and the Greeks would overthrow the Turks. The French had abolished the privileges of the clergy and brought the wealth of the Church into common ownership, and so would the Greeks. Kora
ḯ
s would not favour going as far as the French and imposing, as Robespierre did, a republican religion. Kora
ḯ
s himself was devout and it was not the Church itself but the corruption of the Church, especially the monasteries, which he condemned. The monks, he wrote, were even worse oppressors than the external ones, the Turks, and were concerned only with the rapacious preservation of their own power. The monasteries were dens of sloth, superstition and corruption. The Church needed
to be saved from itself and return to the simplicity and humility of the early Church.
²⁷

Kora
ḯ
s’ early optimism soon faded. He was present at the storming of the Tuileries by a mob in June 1792, and heard Condorcet’s vain attempt to restrain the attackers by appealing to reason and humanity. In January 1793 he witnessed the guillotining of Louis XVI in the Place de la Révolution, now somewhat ironically the Place de la Concorde. Kora
ḯ
s was in Paris during the Reign of Terror instituted by Robespierre in 1793, the factional struggles that followed, and the ending of the revolutionary period by Napoleon’s coup d’état in November 1799. Kora
ḯ
s made his reaction clear: ‘The age of Enlightenment has been destroyed by the impact of criminality and of ignorance posing as opposition to religion, while thinkers and artists have been condemned to inaction by the vandalism. Virtue and talent have fallen prey to the sword of the murderers.’ And Kora
ḯ
s concluded: ‘Freedom without justice is simply criminal.’
²⁸

How then might the Greeks achieve freedom while maintaining justice? Kora
ḯ
s’ answer was education. Near the end of his life Kora
ḯ
s wrote that ‘the increase and spread of education in the French nation gave birth to the love of liberty,’
²⁹
though, as Kora
ḯ
s had seen, the French Revolution had not produced liberty with justice. French education was the fruit of the Enlightenment, and Kora
ḯ
s maintained that Greek education should be aligned with that of the enlightened nations of Europe by a process of what he called the pouring (
metakínosis
) of one into the other.

But Kora
ḯ
s was also committed to a parallel form of education: a return to the writings of ancient Greece. This would not only revive the wisdom of their ancestors in the minds of contemporary Greeks but would give them military prowess as well. His example was the Greek success against the Persians in the fifth century
BC
, at a time when the Greeks ‘had not been deprived of their virtues’.
³⁰
It was the successive occupiers from the Romans onwards who had deprived the Greeks of these virtues, which could be restored by a return to the learning of ancient Greece.

Kora
ḯ
s put this idea into practice by publishing editions of the ancient Greek writers. These formed his Hellenic library, which ran to seventeen volumes with nine companion volumes, and would have been even more comprehensive if the Greek Zosimádhes brothers had not stopped their initial subsidy. All the volumes were prefaced by long introductions, headed ‘Impromptu Thoughts’, in what Kora
ḯ
s called the common language. Particularly passionate was his introduction, written in September 1821, to Aristotle’s
Politics
: ‘I can write
no more, beloved fatherland, prevented as I am by the turmoil in my heart, which paralyses my hand and darkens my eyes with tears. I was a willing exile from your bosom, unable to bear the sight of your daily torments from the lawless acts of the barbarians. I have learned, beyond all my hopes, that your liberty, which had withered under the tyrants, has blossomed again. I shall not see or learn of its fruits, but I pray that they may be abundant and beautiful for all your children, my own brothers.’
³¹

The common language for Kora
ḯ
s was not the demotic speech of the people but a compromise between demotic and more ancient forms of Greek. This was known as
katharévousa
or purged since it rejected foreign importations, especially Turkish or Italian. Kora
ḯ
s did not invent
katharévousa
; it already existed in a haphazard form, but Kora
ḯ
s and others systematised it.
Katharévousa
had a turbulent later history. In the 1830s in the newly independent Greek state
katharévousa
became the official language of government, the press and education. In the course of the nineteenth century creative writers increasingly adopted demotic rather than
katharévousa
. In 1913 the first textbooks in demotic were introduced in Greek primary schools, though secondary schools and higher education continued with
katharévousa
. From then on the language to be used in education became a highly contentious political issue, with left-wing governments increasing the use of demotic and their right-wing successors reversing the process. Only in the 1980s was a standard modern Greek, essentially demotic, used throughout the education system.