Greece in the second half of the nineteenth century

By the mid-nineteenth century, the days of romantic philhellenism were over and Greece had ceased to be a subject of particular concern to Western commentators. This was a far cry from the time when Byron and Chateaubriand had marvelled at the ruins of Hellas and the Western world had unanimously saluted the courage, bravery and heroism of the Greeks in their struggle against the Ottomans. If in 1822 Percy Shelley exclaimed ‘we are all Greeks’ and Benjamin Constant added three years later ‘the cause of the Greeks is ours’, further into the nineteenth century the enthusiasm created by the philhellenism of its first three decades, which had reached its peak in the times of the Greek Revolution of 1821, seemed to have diminished. The reasons were both ideological and political. For, as the romantic and neoclassical dreams cultivated by philhellenism and the desire for a return to antiquity weakened, simultaneously Greece no longer appeared in the eyes of European diplomacy as a necessary political and religious bulwark against the Muslim East.

However, if ‘true philhellenism, so to speak, historical philhellenism had lasted as long as the war of independence’, as Dimitrios Bikelas wrote, and had perished with the foundation of the independent Greek state in 1830, during the second half of the nineteenth century an interest in things Greek became gradually evident and certain philhellenic manifestations appeared. These were triggered by the military and political adventures and national claims of the small Greek state, and were further strengthened by events in Crete and later in Macedonia.

More specifically, the second half of the nineteenth century, marked by geopolitical tensions over control of the Eastern Mediterranean, was a period of profound political, economic and social change for Greece. Greek political life and, more generally, society, popular culture and the literary world were dominated by the ‘Great Idea’, a term first used in 1844 by Prime Minister Ioannis Kolettis to express the irredentist Greek ideal. While the small kingdom that had been born in the aftermath of the Greek War of Independence (1821–1829) remained under the control of the three allied powers (Great Britain, France and Russia), Greek aspirations for territorial enlargement and the desire to unite all Greeks in one state were powerful.