The Greeks and their Past

Abstract

There is, I am sure, no need to remind an audience of historians of central and south-eastern Europe attending a conference held in honour of one of our foremost students of nationalism of the extent to which a sense of the past, an awareness of past glories, real or imagined, is, with language, the fundamental element in the national consciousness of all the peoples of south-eastern Europe. In all these countries the historical past is not, as has been remarked, ‘a subject for harmless small talk’.¹ Rather its reconstruction and projection is vital to the establishment of title to territories presently occupied and perhaps covetously eyed by neighbours or to justify claims to territories occupied by neighbours. In all the countries of the Balkans the remembrance of past wrongs, real or imagined, at the hands of alien overlords casts a heavy shadow over the present — as do the old grievances, which again may or may not correspond to reality, against the machinations of foreign powers. In few areas of the world is the burden of the past so intensely felt or the collective historical consciousness of such acute contemporary political significance. And in no country in the Balkans does the incubus of the past weigh so heavily as in Greece.

History is not only a science. It is at once the Gospel of the present and the future of the Motherland

(Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos)

This paper has also been published in M. Hurst (ed.), States, Countries, Provinces (Bourne End, Bucks., 1986) pp. 35–51.