Politics and popular music in modern Greece

Journal of Political and Military Sociology, Winter 2002 by Holst-Warhaft, Gail

In the context of the struggle for independence from Turkish rule and the establishment of a modern Greek state, it is not surprising that many Greeks should have distanced themselves from whatever seemed "oriental" in their culture. European Philhellenes encouraged Greeks to see themselves as the heirs of a great secular tradition, and the reality of both their Ottoman and Byzantine past became little more than an unfortunate episode in their history. Greeks were happy to claim their classical patrimony on grounds of language and geography, but reluctant to abandon their loyalty to a faith that had sustained them during years of Muslim domination. Moreover, as subjects of the Ottoman Empire, Greeks had not been an unfortunate minority but members of a multiethnic society in which European influences were strong. The late Ottoman Empire was a melting pot where, in cities like Istanbul and Smyrna, Greeks, Jews, and Armenians played a prominent role in the arts, commerce, and diplomacy.

The struggle for modern Greece's national independence took place in a context of 19th century European idealization of ancient Greece and its achievements. "The Classics" became the cornerstone of British, German, and French education, with the Greek language at its heart. In 1807, the Parthenon Marbles, brought to England by Lord Elgin, were exhibited to an awed public. Greece became an essential part of the "Grand Tour" undertaken by aristocrats of sufficient means who wanted to see the monuments of great civilizations with their own eyes. The most famous of these aristocratic tourists, Lord Byron, visited Greece in 1809 and 1810, and published his stirring "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" on his return. Byron's call to the Greeks and those who loved "Hellas" to overthrow their Turkish overlords was heeded by thousands of foreign Philhellenes who joined the Greeks in their struggle not because they knew anything about the contemporary inhabitants of a small province of the Ottoman Empire, but because of an ideal of what Greece or rather Hellas stood for (Herzfeld, 1986:3-8; St Clair, 1972; Holst-Warhaft, 1997:273-280).

The gap between the idealistic expectations of the western Europeans who encouraged and actually fought for Greece's liberation, and the cultural and social realities of the nascent Greek state was enormous, and attempts to bridge it were a major concern of Greek intellectuals and leaders from 1821 on. Most of the inhabitants of the new state were impoverished peasants whose customs and religion marked them as "oriental" rather than western and who spoke a language that, although obviously descended from ancient Greek, was significantly different from that of Plato and Aristotle. How were intellectuals, determined to establish Greece's special place in European thought, to overcome the dichotomy between an illustrious past and an apparently undistinguished present? Folklore provided an answer. From its earliest stages, the study of modern Greek folklore (and in practice this meant principally a study of Greek folksong) was a political project. As Michael Herzfeld has noted: