Greek Identity White Paper

Traditionally, Greek history begins with the Minoan civilization of Crete, which dates from about 3500 B.C.E. It also serves as the first starting point to discuss how difficult it is to decide who is “Greek.” The Minoans predate the arrival of proto-Greek speakers in the Southern Balkans by over a thousand years. Based on archeological evidence, their cultural practices were also significantly different from later inhabitants of Crete and the Greece peninsula, for example around gender. 

The Minoans also prove our first example of the ways in which Greek identity has been a fueled concept. Because, except for the Minoans (who have notably been identified as “Greek” only retrospectively), Greeks has firstly been primarily a matter of language, though other cultural practices such as religion, social norms, etc. have also played a role. The first speakers of Proto-Greek (an Indo-European language) arrived in the Southern Balkan peninsula (much of which is now the territory of the Hellenic Republic today) around 2200 B.C.E. These people were importantly united by a common language, but most likely divided into small tribal groups that were not necessarily homogeneous in other important ways and, the lack of written evidence, means we will never properly know how members of one tribal group viewed their relationship with members of other tribes.

These tribes eventually gave way to what is known as the Mycenean civilization, from which the first evidence of written Greek emerges. The memory of this civilization also served as the “mythic past” for Classical Greece. It is also within Mycenean civilization that the principal mythic and religious practices identified with ancient Greece arose.

Despite the significant contributions of the Myceneans to what has come to be seen as “Greek,” it is really in Classical Greece (a period that last from roughly between 600 B.C.E. and 400 B.C.E.) which has been most important in shaping the popular (and particularly non-Greek) imagination about what “Greekness” constitutes. Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Athenian democracy, and ancient tragedy are all products of Classical Greek culture. During the period, Greek-speakers remained divided across several city-states, and lived as linguistic/ethnic minorities in large multi-ethnic empires. While there was certainly a sense of a shared Greek identity during the period, one that is identifiable a variety of texts, this shared identity was not a matter of citizenship. Moreover, the idea emerged during this period, spurred on by the growing importance and prestige of Greek culture, that Greek identity was something that a person could aspire to and obtain through the adoption of Greek language and cultural practices and beliefs. This idea was largely unique in the ancient world (and one might say the modern one) where ethnicity was exclusively matters of ancestry, an immutable characteristic based on descent not personal belief or preference.

The idea that Greek identity (and perhaps Greek identity alone) was uniquely obtainable would persist and grow as the Greek city-states were incorporated into the Hellenistic empires and then into the Roman Empire. Thus, by the 1^st century C.E., it was possible for Paul of Tarsus to claim to be Greek, Roman, and Jewish. While he was Roman and Jewish as a matter of descent, his claim to Greekness was purely linguistic and cultural.

When the Roman Empire was divided between the Latin-speaking West and the Greek-speaking East during Late Antiquity, it is worth noting the Eastern half not only survived politically intact for several more centuries, it retained a Roman political identity. The Greek-speaking Christians of what would later be called the Byzantine Empire[1] called themselves “Romanoi”- Romans.

Greek identity once again began to take on a more traditionally ethnic tone only after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. With the collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire, most Greek-speaking Christians found themselves living under a Muslim Ottoman government that organized civic life around religious identity. These confessional communities were called  millets. Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians found themselves grouped together and defined not by language, but religion. Moreover, because of Ottoman law, it was possible for people to exit the Orthodox Christian millet via conversion to Islam, but not to enter it, because conversion to any non-Islamic religion was forbidden. Thus, it can be suggested that it is in the Ottoman period, with its stringent religious categorization, that modern Greek self-identity begins to take shape. Where once Greek identity had been accepted by nearly all as fluid and changeable based primarily upon language, in the Ottoman context, Greek-speakers came to see themselves as primarily united by their shared Orthodox Christian faith.

While most people remained in the Ottoman Empire, many prominent political and intellectual figures fled westward following the fall of Constantinople, primarily to Italy. They carried with them the Classical Greek literature and philosophy that had survived in the Eastern Empire but had been lost in the Western one. They also brought with them the knowledge of the Greek language, which had been largely unknown in the Western Middle Ages. This infusion of Classical Greek culture into Western Europe was one of the catalyzing events of the Renaissance and inspired the re-creation and re-imagining of ancient Greek culture by Western Europeans, who adopted ancient Greek culture as their own mythic past and sought to “establish continuity with a suitable historic past”[2] vis-a-vi Classical Greece.  In what Stathis Gourgouris has called histories first instance of the “colonization of the ideal,”[3] Western Europeans, beginning in the 15^th and 16^th centuries C.E., claimed the Classical Greek past as their own, setting around it parameters which excluded modern ethnic Greeks, whose contemporary identity was being simultaneously shaped by Ottoman rule.

To this day, the tension between the ethnic Greek experience defined by longing for the Byzantine past and the trauma of the Ottoman occupation and consequently rooted in an Orthodox Christian identity and the Western European idealization and adoption of the ancient Greek (pre-Christian) past remains at the heart of debates around Greek identity. This tension was not resolved, but further exacerbated by the creation of the modern Greek state. The Greek War of Independence, which began in 1821, freed large numbers (though not all) Greek Christians from the Ottoman Empire after four hundred years of Ottoman rule. It was an effort greatly aided by Western European and American Philhellenes inspired by the ancient past, but conflicts between the ethnic Greek fighters and the Philhellenes over issues such as where the capital city of the new country should be (Athens or Constantinople) and what time of government it should adopt (monarchy or a republic) highlight how differently each group understood what “Greekness” means.