Athens, Constantinople and the victory of nationalism

One of the things that struck me when I first visited Athens in 1975 was its sheer newness. Unlike many European cities, which are centuries old and have substantial sections dating back to their earliest days, Athens has the feel of a modern industrial city. This surprised me. After all, Athens was supposed to be an ancient city, whose heritage included Solon, Pericles, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. It was known to be the birthplace of democracy and the centre of the classical Greek world.

To be sure, all of these elements were there, and Athenians are justifiably proud of the vestiges of this earlier history.  However, the city itself could not boast a continuous existence as an urban metropolis.  Indeed for long centuries, extending well into the 19th, Athens was a sleepy Turkish village consisting only of the neighbourhood known as the Plaka, nestled at the base of the Acropolis, and the various ancient ruins scattered around the vicinity.  The modern Greek capital was "invented" in 1834, the very year Toronto was incorporated as a city and the year after Chicago was started.


Gauntlet

Athens

The Greek revolt against the Ottoman Turks broke out in 1821 and continued throughout the following decade.  Nearly ten years later the Greeks had won the support of the European powers, but not for all of their aspirations.  The Ottoman Empire would not be supplanted by a revived Byzantine Empire centred in "The City," i.e., Constantinople. Rather a small Kingdom of Greece was created at the very foot of the Balkan Peninsula -- much smaller than today's Greek Republic.  The majority of ethnic Greeks remained within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire, while a minority were left to create a Greek state in land that was largely a rural backwater.  The major centres of Greek culture at the time -- Thessaloniki, Constantinople, Smyrna and Alexandria -- remained on the outside. The seaside town of Navplion was chosen as the first capital and a junior member of the Bavarian Wittelsbach dynasty became its first king.

The small territory of this new Greek kingdom just happened to include Athens, an unimposing village long since lapsed into obscurity, but with a luminous history in the distant past.  In 1834 the government of the kingdom decided to move the capital from Navplion to this unpromising location in deference to its classical heritage.

Yet well into the 20th century, Constantinople remained The City, the real urban centre of Greek civilization.  To be sure, many Greek Orthodox Christians moved to the new Greek kingdom to be free of Turkish rule.  But just as often, if not more so, Greeks moved in the other direction: to the more prosperous urban centres within the Ottoman Empire, where they were more likely to be able to make a comfortable living.  These cities were Turkish, but not in an ethnic sense.  They were in fact polyglot and had been for many centuries.  In Constantinople itself one was likely to hear many languages spoken in the street, Greek being especially prominent.  Constantinopolitan Greeks saw Athens as an upstart, unlikely to take the place of this ancient second capital of imperial Rome.


Texas Tech University

Constantinople

However, the 20th century saw the beginning of the end for these polyglot cities.  The Treaty of Lausanne fixed the boundary between Greece and Turkey.  Those on the wrong side of this arbitrary border were sent packing.  After Naser had come to power in Egypt in 1952, Greeks were no longer welcome in Alexandria and began to leave.  After Turkish authorities stood by and did nothing to stop an anti-Greek pogrom in Istanbul in September 1955, Greeks started to leave The City, moving to Greece or North America or Australia.  Istanbul became ethnically Turkish.  Thessaloniki had become wholly Greek, although it had boasted a large Jewish population prior to the Second World War.  Smyrna was destroyed in 1922, its polyglot character eliminated during the massacre in September of that year.

The old empires are gone.  Artificially contrived nation-states have taken their place.  Millions of refugees were created in the process. Citizenship has come to be tied to ethnicity and not to territory of birth. Is this progress? Nationalists would say yes. Greater homogeneity has been effected, but at great human cost. My own relatives have been victims. Small wonder then that, while I am able to see the positive contributions of virtually all the ideologies, I have a blind spot where nationalism is concerned. Nationalism may create solidarity serviceable to the creation and maintenance of political community, but it has done so at the expense of legitimate human diversity. The primary casualty has been justice itself.