King of the Greeks or King of the Hellenes?

Abstract

In 1830, the long struggle against the Turks ended favourably with the creation of an independent Greek state, but with the exclusion of Thessaly, Epirus, Crete, Macedonia, the Ionian Islands and parts of Asia Minor from the newly established state’s borders, and the elimination from the new state of such a large proportion of Greeks. Less than a third of the Greek population of the Ottoman Empire was contained in the borders of the Greek kingdom, thus creating tensions that would plague Greece throughout the nineteenth century.¹ Those factors for those Greeks who found themselves enclosed in the borders of this kingdom and who remained faithful to the Orthodox Church, simply meant that the state did not include the entire Hellenic nation. The nation was all the Hellenes (Hellenic men) and Hellenides (Hellenic women) living in the kingdom of Greece and those living in the Ottoman Empire.² The Megale Idea, the liberation and unification of the Hellenic genos and the establishment of a great Greek state in the lands that had once formed part of the Byzantine Empire with Constantinople as its capital, was the mission, according to contemporary intellectuals, that both Hellenes and Hellenides had in the name of history and God to accomplish. The kingdom’s mission, then, was to bring about the enlightenment, through Greek language and literature, of the East, a mission whereby intellectuals hoped to maintain the homogeneous culture and thus prepare the ground for what they assumed was a mere question of time: the political unification of the entire Hellenic genos.