Greek Irredentism in Asia Minor and Cyprus

The concept of national identity and its transmogrification into the historical phenomenon of nationalism have been one of the problematic areas of social theory. Although some of the great thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries paid attention to these issues, generally speaking, the idea of the nation has remained in the margins of social theory.[footnote 1] Furthermore its twentieth century association with fascism has done little to enhance its attractiveness as an object of research.[2] Consequently thinking about the idea of the nation and nationalism is plagued by stereotypes, unsubstantiated assumptions and a variety of mythologies. One such mythology, central to all nationalist ideologies, posits the diachronic permanence of national characteristics as the necessary foundation of national identity. Failing to perceive that this static conception is not only unhistorical but also contingent upon an assumption of the stagnation of an ethnic community, this view has considered nations as unchanging entities which have remained the same throughout all the stages of their historical existence.[3] With the idea of dynamic change exiled by definition from enquiries about the nation, it is not surprising that social theory felt so little captivated by the subject. '

Recent research has been more sensitive to the conceptual problems deriving from the traditional understanding of nationalism and has attempted consequently to connect the phenomenon with broad and epoch-making mutations in the collective destiny of sections of humanity and the political choices contingent upon them. [4] The reorientation towards this more dynamic perspective however has not responded to the more concrete problems as to how the collective sense of identity of an ethnic group comes to be forged. It has been increasingly realized that this eminently political problem can be treated adequately only in terms of historical studies that trace the gradual evolution of communities over time. This approach makes possible the reconstruction of processes of cultural and social change that lead to the emergence of self-conscious and articulate national communities and it has, for instance, been fruitfully applied to the study of East European history. [5] For convenience one might label this method historical ethnography to distinguish it from the ahistorical and largely folkloristic understanding of the nation as an almost transcendental and unchanging entity.

In this essay I would like to suggest that this approach might be profitably applied to the phenomenon of the propagation of Greek nationalism in the Eastern Mediterranean in the course of the nineteenth century. My objective is to develop the methodological framework for such a study of Greek nationalism by focusing on three cases of the Eastern periphery of the Ottoman Empire: Cyprus, Cappadocia and Pontos.

The emergence and growth of Greek nationalism in Cyprus was the outcome of the interplay of two factors. One was the Hellenic ethnological character of Cypriot society, as reflected in its language, traditions and archaic culture. This provided the demographic and cultural substratum for the implantation and growth of a nationalist movement. [6] The second factor was the nineteenth-century process of Greek intellectual expansion emanating from the Hellenic kingdom to the Eastern periphery of Hellenism - - a policy aimed at the ideological preparation of the application of the political programme of the Great Idea. [7] It was this ideological process that politicized the local ethnological traditions and turned them into dynamic elements of political change in distant and isolated regions without any direct or organic ties with the independent Greek state. A consideration of the Cypriot experience in these terms will reveal precisely the dynamic process of the formation of national identity. To appraise the nature of this process and its historical significance, events in Cyprus must be examined comparatively in connection with similar processes that unfolded on a much larger scale in Asia Minor. A consideration of the process in Asia Minor therefore will set the context for the balanced historical understanding of the growth of Hellenic national consciousness in Cyprus.

The cultivation of Greek national feeling in Asia Minor was a complex process whose character was determined by the historical demography and the geographical dimension of the Greek presence in the peninsula. The pattern of Greek settlement in Asia Minor was the decisive factor in the differentiation of the social significance of the local manifestations of Greek nationalism. Asia Minor Hellenism in the nineteenth century was composed of three main geographically based demographic subgroups.[8] In the Western coastal regions and their natural extensions into the riverine valleys that penetrated inland, were concentrated the compact settlements of Greek-speaking populations mostly based in the towns but also spreading into villages in the countryside. Most of this population was the product of immigration from the Aegean islands and continental Greece, [9] it spoke the common Modern Greek tongue and shared in the common Modern Greek culture. All these factors and the geographical proximity to the Greek kingdom turned these areas and their leading urban centres like Smyrna and Kydonies (Ayvalik) into home bases of Greek nationalism. It was from here as well as from Athens that Greek nationalism was exported to the Eastern periphery, including Cyprus.

The demographic and cultural pattern was quite different further inland. To the East of the riverine valleys of Western Asia Minor in the ancient Roman provinces of Phrygia, Galatia, Pissidia, Pamphylia, Lucia, Lycaonia and Cappadocia the Greek presence was much less compact and the Greek language had been replaced by Turkish as the daily tongue of the Orthodox Christians. [10] Even in the case of immigrants moving inland from the West or from Cyprus to the port cities of Southern Asia Minor like Attaleia (Antalya), Greek tended to disappear as a main language and to be replaced by Turkish. Except for the coastal communities of Makri and Livisi in Lycia, [11] only in a few isolated communities in the interior of Cappadocia a form of idiomatic Medieval Greek had survived but it was in the process of disappearance under the pressures of socio-economic change in the early twentieth century. [12] This network of highly traditional and backward, mostly Turkish-speaking communities in Cappadocia constituted the most important of the fragments of Greek Orthodox society in the interior of Asia Minor. [13]

The third region of Greek presence in Asia Minor was that of the Pontos in the Northern section of the peninsula, along the Black Sea coast. Here too the pattern of Greek settlement had its peculiarities. Pontos was the single region of Asia Minor where a compact Greek society had survived from Hellenistic and Byzantine times because of the late conquest of the area by the Turks in 1461 and the consequent absence of the social dislocation that was suffered by other areas during the four centuries of Byzantine-Turkish confrontation (11th - 15th centuries). [14] Isolated in the Pontic mountains and protected by the Empire of Trebizond from the nomadic raids that dislocated Greek society in the rest of Asia Minor in the centuries of conquest, Pontic Hellenism preserved its social cohesion, ethnic traditions and its peculiar language and culture. In the centuries of Ottoman rule the Greek presence in the Pontos constituted the single most important segment of native Hellenism that had survived from the Middle Ages. [15] In the nineteenth century favourable economic circumstances reinforced local Greek society and fostered its extraordinary cultural and political development. [16]

It was these populations of the distant interior of Asia Minor that nineteenth century Greek irredentist nationalism aspired to integrate into its system of values. This was an epic process whose broad outlines are roughly known but which, with the exception of a remarkable literature about the Pontos, still awaits systematic research. These details are beyond the scope of this essay. But in order to have a comparative standard for the appraisal of the growth of nationalism in Cyprus two general statements about the historical significance of the expansion of Greek nationalism in Asia Minor are in order.

First, concerning the impact of this dynamic factor of cultural and political change in the closed and backward Greek Orthodox communities of Cappadocia, it has to be noted that it reversed a process of social integration that was well-advanced at the time of its emergence. In Cappadocia the Greek Orthodox communities were well-advanced on the way to being fully integrated into the dominant Turkish society. Not only had the language ceased to be a barrier, but also popular religion with its traditional syncretism provided an element of psychological integration at the basis of Christian and Muslim communal life---an element that bridged instead of reinforcing ethnic separateness. [17] The introduction of Greek nationalism in the Orthodox communities of Cappadocia, through the creation of a network of Greek schools, staffed by teachers who had been socialized in Greek nationalist values, had over a period of half a century from the 1870s through the early 1920s, the effect of reversing the process of integration and cultivating a sense of Greek national identity among the younger generations of this isolated and distant community. [18] These younger generations tended gradually, as a result of their education, to shed their ties of traditional loyalties which focused exclusively on the Orthodox Church and to identify politically with Greece---a country they had never seen and of which they had a very vague, if idealized conception. [19] The process was initiated under the aegis of the Greek Orthodox Church, whose original motives however were not nationalist but were dictated by a pastoral strategy aiming at eradicating the elements of religious syncretism at the grassroots.

Secondly, the special circumstances of Pontos fostered the growth of a powerful local movement of Greek nationalism in that outlying region. If in Cappadocia we can talk of a process of radical ethnic differentiation, in Pontos the conditions and scale of cohesive ethnic Greek settlement could and did sustain the growth of a movement of national consciousness-raising and national assertion that culminated in a political vision of national emancipation through union with Greece. [20]

My argument about placing the study of Greek nationalism in Cyprus in its relevant historical context suggests that the case of Cyprus can be considered as a third example of this phenomenon of political socialization. The insular society of the Eastern Mediterranean constituted another instance of an ethnically Greek community which preserved its traditions and ancient memories but had remained isolated politically and culturally from the new Greek state, locked in its backwardness and tempestuous destiny. Yet the ethnic cohesion and archaic culture of Cypriot Hellenism provided a most fertile ground for the implantation of Greek nationalism. The historical record suggests that this environment was gradually penetrated by Greek nationalism in a process parallel to the one that politicized Pontic Greek culture. The two cases are highly similar: distant, archaic but cohesive Greek-speaking communities which managed to resist the pressures of ethnic assimilation in Ottoman society on account of their geographical isolation, they discovered in Greek nationalism a relevant cultural system that meditated the articulation of their self-conception and the conscious visualization of their collective destiny. [21]

During the last half-century of Ottoman rule the penetration of Greek nationalism into Cyprus represented a parallel reenactment of the process of the politicization of Pontic Hellenism. The compactness and cohesion of the two communities in their isolated geographical regions set the preconditions for the impressive effectiveness of the process. This was their critical difference from Cappadocia where the interpenetration with Turkish society and the fragility of Greek presence despite the genuineness of the archaic tradition of the area, could never provide the basis for a full-blown nationalist movement. Cyprus and Pontos on the contrary present a remarkable similarity with only two critical differences: first there was a difference in timing dictated by the remarkable economic development in Pontos in the early nineteenth century which fostered the cultural and political awakening at an earlier date. Cyprus did not catch up until after the 1850s, always lagging behind however as a more parochial and backward society. The second critical difference naturally was the British occupation of Cyprus in 1878 which created an entirely new basis for the growth of nationalism.

Between the Crimean War and the British occupation of Cyprus however the phenomena of national >awakening= in Pontos and Cyprus present remarkable parallelisms in the set of mechanisms and forces that drew these two distant outspots of Hellenic culture into the larger community of the Greek nation by infusing them with a sense of collective identity that broke their traditional isolation and insularity and cultivated their consciousness of partaking in the wider collective destiny of that distant and vaguely known nation. [22]

III

On the substantive historical basis that has been outlined above a model of the penetration and development of Greek nationalism in Asia Mi- nor and Cyprus, could be formulated. The comparative approach to the growth of nationalism in the three regions of the Greek East suggests that the process might be understood in terms of the following dimensions:

(a) The construction of a Greek educational network represented a process of political socialization involving a radical break with past attitudes and values. In this perspective the expansion of the system of Greek schools in the East constitutes the foremost indicator of the penetration of Greek national ideas into distant and inaccessible regions with no direct ties with the Greek state. [23]

The most important effect of the expansion of Greek education into the interior of Asia Minor was the spread of the Greek language among younger generations. Thus from the 1860s onward the major thrust of the educational effort was aimed at the substitution of Greek for Turkish as the language of the members of the Orthodox communities in the Turcophone regions of Asia Minor. The same objective applied to the Greek-speaking parts of the Greek East, like Pontos, Cyprus and the Greek-speaking communities of Cappadocia, with their highly idiomatic archaic and Byzantine idioms, which however were incomprehensible to speakers of the common Modern Greek tongue. These sharp linguistic peculiarities, which were looked upon as symptoms of cultural and ethnic degeneration, were as much a target of the linguistic rehellenization of the East as the Turkish speech of other Orthodox communities. Thus the educational effort of the nineteenth century promoted the linguistic homogenization of the Christian Orthodox populations of the East, as the basis of their incorporation into the broader community of the Greek nation. It is significant that language was replacing religion as the major unifying bond of nationality under the new conditions. In ideological terms this represented a transition from the older community of the Orthodox millet in whose context linguistic differences were immaterial, to the new community of the Greek nation, which, following modern nationalist doctrine, used language as its foremost hallmark.

(b) The development and content of intellectual life and the emergence of local intellectual elites usually grouped together in voluntary associations, was the leading element of ideological change in the process of national definition. [24]  Of particular importance in this connection was the formation of an extensive network of local social clubs and cultural associations aiming at the cultivation of the newly discovered national identity.

The movement of local cultural associations went through its most energetic phase around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when in one Greek village after another throughout Asia Minor, Thrace and elsewhere in the Ottoman empire active young teachers were taking the initiative for the creation of such clubs. [25]  Voluntary associations with similar cultural objectives were founded in Cyprus as well in the same period, under conditions of greatest freedom because of the British occupation of 1878. The movement retained its momentum in Cyprus in the interwar period and it did recur in the period after the Second World War as part of the intellectual preparation of the revolt against British rule in the 1950s.

(c) Local factors, traditions and initiatives were rarely autonomous. They were set in motion through their interplay with external influences, emanating especially from the great centres of the Greek diaspora in the Eastern Mediterranean, which besides commercial commodities exported cultural commodities as well, thus reinforcing the dialectic of nationalism. Athens, the capital of the independent Greek state, was by no means the only one or the most important centre of emission of cultural influences to the East. Other major focal points of Greek urban culture in the Eastern Mediterranean, which played a major role in the propagation of Greek nationalism included Constantinople, Smyrna, Alexandria and Trieste. Books, newspapers, teachers and ideas poured out of these cities---at times on a larger scale by comparison with Athens---and found their recipients among the Orthodox populations of the East. As a matter of fact in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period in which Greek claims in Macedonia were intensified, a division of labour is observable between Athens and Constantinople in the promotion of Greek culture in the Ottoman empire. Whereas the Athens based >Association for the Propagation of Greek Letters= directed the main bulk of its effort toward Macedonia, the famous >Greek Literary Association of Constantinople= carried the major burden of the cultural revival of the Greek communities in Asia Minor, including Cyprus. It was not until the last decade of the nineteenth century (1891) that an association of Asia Minor Greeks, mostly university professors, intellectuals and clergymen was established in Athens under the name >Anatolia= with the express purpose to aid the intellectual, moral and national regeneration of their compatriots in Asia Minor. [26] >Anatolia= operated through scholarships to students from Asia Minor, support of local schools, active encouragement of local initiatives to form new cultural associations and the establishment of a seminary on the island of Patmos in 1901 to train teachers for Asia Minor Greek schools. The seminary was transferred to the autonomous principality of Samos in 1906, where it operated until 1913, when Samos was united with Greece. In 1909 the Association founded a school for the training of nursery teachers at Zindjideré, near Kayseri, the ancient Caesarea, in Cappadocia, in order to promote the teaching of Greek to the Turcophone population of the interior of Asia Minor. From 1896 to 1910 the Association published the journal Xenophanes, which is a mine of information on the mechanisms and content of the whole process of the propagation of Greek nationalism in Asia Minor.

(d) The Greek state fostered programmatically the process by means of the expansion of the consular system from the 1840s onward with the opening of Greek consulates in the major geographical points of Greek settlement in the Ottoman Empire. The pertinent law of 12 July 1851 is a significant document of this enhanced state-action in the promotion of nationalism in the East. The role of the state as the producer of the nation, recognized long ago by Rudolph Rocker, is made graphically clear by the mission ascribed to Greek consulates in the Ottoman Empire. [27] This mission is outlined quite openly by the Greek Consul General in Smyrna in the first decade of the twentieth century. [28] The relevant consular reports constitute a most important source for the study of the phenomenon. [29]

(e) The attitude of the Ottoman state to intellectual movements and cultural initiatives among the subject non-Muslim communities, constitutes a critical parameter of the whole process of the implantation of nationalism. This attitude was shaped by the traditional policy of toleration toward the >religions of the Book= (Judaism and Christianity), reinforced by the new climate of reform of the Tanzimat era. Especially after the Crimean War official toleration and non-interference in the educational and cultural life of the subject nationalities allowed space for the initiatives which led to nationalist ferment among Greeks and Slavs in the Balkans and among Greeks and Armenians in Asia Minor during the second half of the nineteenth century. The ideology of >Ottomanism= with its vision of a common Ottoman identity based on the equality of all ethnic groups in the Empire, turned out to be a precondition of the growth of nationalism among the Christian subjects of the Sublime Porte.[30]  The historical irony of this situation is obvious: the attempt to save the empire by elaborating an ideology of mutual toleration of its component ethnic groups (Ottomanism), only facilitated the more effective growth of nationalism which eventually destroyed both the empire and the subject nationalities in Asia Minor. A comparison of the attitude of the Ottoman supranational Empire with that of the Balkan states toward nationalism is instructive: the neutrality of the empire toward nationalism in this period made room for the promotion of aspirations of the new nation-states which coveted its territories in order to achieve their own national integration. In either of its aspects, the role of the state in the promotion of nationalism, appears to have been the most critical factor. Nationalism was thus effectively overtaking the state as the Janus of modern politics.

The pivotal place of the Church in the life of the Orthodox communities in the Ottoman empire, allowed it to exercise the paramount influence in the formation of collective attitudes and values. The interplay between religion and nationalism has been a critical factor in the creation of these attitudes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and therefore requires a more detailed examination. In elucidating this issue it should be pointed out that the identification of the Church with nationalism in the early twentieth century fostered the misconception that Orthodoxy had always spearheaded national movements among the Christian subjects of the Sultan. This view is in fact an ideological stereotype which projects in to the interpretation of the past latter-day political positions. It is true that the Orthodox Church has been the only permanent institution in the life of the Orthodox peoples of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Medieval empires declined and collapsed, modern national states have been very recent, rather unstable and completely circumstantial creatures of power politics, modes of economic organization have been changing over the centuries, but the Church with her medieval monastic institutions and her ancient focal role in communal life, has always remained there. By virtue of its permanence and continuity, the Church preserved and transmitted the foremost elements of cultural life, language, script and learning and an ancient memory as the depository of a sense of history. It was precisely these elements that nationalism inherited or usurped and used them for its own purposes, which were quite different from those of the Orthodox Church. The fact however that this cultural inheritance was identified with and owed its preservation to the Church led to the mistaken assumption that the Church had also been the depository of nationalist values.

The ecclesiastical history of the Orthodox East in the age of nationalism, since the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century, points to the contrary conclusion. The official attitude of the Orthodox Church as represented by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, was from the outset inimical and often actively hostile to the secular values and aspirations propagated by nationalism. This explains the confrontation between the Church and the Enlightenment in the period from the 1790s to the 1820s. The leadership of the Orthodox Church repeatedly and unequivocally made clear its opposition to the secular aspirations of freedom and national independence advocated by the Enlightenment and it issued condemnations of major initiatives of national liberation like those of Rhigas Velestinlis in 1798 or of the Greek Revolution in 1821. Ironically it was Patriarch Gregory V who issued the pertinent pronouncements on both of these occasions to the great embarrassment of latter-day supporters of the nationalist role of the Church. They however find their consolation in the fact that the Sublime Porte, in order to revenge the revolt in 1821, hanged the Patriarch, whom it held responsible for the disobedience of his flock. [31]

Although the regional Orthodox Churches that emerged in the new national states of the Balkans, being state institutions became inevitably identified with nationalism, the Patriarchate of Constantinople remained actively opposed to nationalism.[32]  The Church knew that its own survival was tied up to the survival of a supra-national empire, which recognized its traditional privileges. The scepticism of the Church toward nationalism became even more pronounced as the nineteenth century brought more challenges from within the body of Orthodoxy. These took the form of unilateral and therefore uncanonical proclamations of ecclesiastical independence by regional churches, beginning with Greece in 1833, Romania in 1866 and Bulgaria in 1870, the latter culminating in the religious schism that accompanied the violent conflict in Macedonia. However the most alarming consequence of the growth of nationalism among the Christian Orthodox peoples of the Balkans from the point of view of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, was the fact that nationalism among the former subjects acted as a catalyst for the emergence of nationalism among the ruling Turks as well. This essentially meant that once nationalism had developed among the Turks, the supra-national empire would come to an end and nationalist exclusivism would replace the former imperial toleration that had made possible the survival of the Church in the Ottoman Empire. This was precisely the diagnosis of the great Patriarch Joachim III, who a century after Gregory V, opposed equally the pressures of Greek nationalism and the rise of Young Turk nationalism in the Ottoman empire. Joachim died significantly in November 1912 just after the outbreak of the Balkan wars. What he feared eventually did come to pass: the conflict of rival nationalisms brought the end of the empire and by 1922 had also obliterated the Orthodox Church in what had become the modern Turkish national state.

Meanwhile, however, and despite the opposition of an older generation of prelates the church had been eventually converted to nationalism. This was partly the result of the rise of a new generation of prelates who came to identify closely with the interests and aspirations of the Greek nation-state and were quite prepared to subordinate the interests of the church to those of the nation---something that Gregory V or Joachim III for instance would not do. But the new bishops had lived through the vehemence of nationalist rivalries in the Balkans and many of them like Chrysostom of Drama and then of Smyrna or Germanos of Kastoria and then of Amasya transferred their nationalist commitments to their Asia Minor sees. Their eventual ascendancy was not won without a struggle which was waged---especially in the case of Chrysostom---mostly against Patriarch Joachim. [33] Thus the Orthodox Church, just on the eve of its fall along with the Ottoman Empire, was eventually converted to nationalism, after painful conflicts in the ranks of the hierarchy. So the Orthodox communities in the Eastern periphery of Asia Minor, such as Pontos and Cappadocia, found themselves led by nationalist bishops who had hoped, along with the nationalist teachers, that redemption could come through nationalist claims and struggles. [34]   This of course involved the collision of Greek national hopes with Turkish nationalism and the eventual defeat and expulsion of the Greeks, since all forms of traditional accommodation had been abandonned by both sides.

The Church of Cyprus, under British rule since 1878, went through its own crisis of >nationalization= in the period of the so called >archiepiscopal question=(1900-1910). [35]   The conflict between two candidates, both by the name of Cyril, to the throne, involved essentially a conflict between different attitudes toward nationalism. The more forceful nationalists eventually won and from then on the Church of Cyprus assumed the uncontested leadership of the nationalist movement in the island, that aspired to union with Greece. With the accession of Cyril II the older tradition of accommodation with the ruling power as long as matters of faith remained intact, which had been followed by the Church of Cyprus since the Ottoman conquest in 1571, was abandoned. Cyril's predecessor, Archbishop Sophronios, during whose archepiscopate Cyprus passed from Ottoman to British hands in 1878, had carried on this policy, true to the ethnarchic tradition of the Church. Sophronios maintained good relations with the new British masters of his island and was greatly honoured during a visit to Britain in 1889. [36] Cyril II abandoned this policy and pushed forcefully for union with Greece. For the rest of the twentieth century the Church of Cyprus has been closely identified with Greek nationalism in the island. A close reading of the historical record however leaves no doubt that this identification is a twentieth century development.

V

The enlistment of the Church under the banner of nationalism brought the process full circle. Her conversion removed the final institutional and ideological impediments to the assertion of Greek nationalism as the dominant political force in the life of the distant, isolated and insular communities of the Orthodox East. It was this achievement of the first two decades of the twentieth century that sealed the eventual destiny of these communities. The ideological content of the movement, the nature of the political and social ideas and values transmitted to the Orthodox Christian communities of the East by Greek nationalism, have never formed the object of serious research. On a certain level it represented a phenomenon of belated >Enlightenment=, in the sense that it replaced a traditional cultural system shaped by the values of Orthodoxy with secular ideas and the political values of the modern state. Yet the content of this belated Enlightenment was radically different from the humanism and cosmopolitanism of the period prior to the French Revolution and the national revolutions of the Balkan peoples. Those older systems of values had by the early twentieth century subsided before the inexorable logic of confrontation and violence immanent in nationalism, which was scarcely concerned with the needs and rights of the individual. Especially in connection with Cyprus where this ideology survived, was reinforced by reactions to British colonial policy and had a determining impact on twentieth century politics, the understanding of its inner structure and implications is an essential precondition of any appraisal of contemporary politics as well.

This final component of the blueprint for the comparative study of Greek nationalism in Asia Minor and Cyprus brings us to the specifities of the Cyprus experience, geographical, demographic and political. First, Cyprus offered a more fertile field for the growth of Greek nationalism than any other place in the Greek East because of its geographic insularity that made it a self-enclosed community and had assured its predominantly Hellenic ethnic character. Thus Cyprus presented the specificity of the only territory of the Greek East with an ethnic Hellenic and Greek speaking majority in its population in which Greek nationalism was received and developed free from the hostile pressure of an alien majority in the society. The second specificity was political and was the result of an event of decisive importance in the history of Cyprus: the British occupation of 1878. This event created an entirely different environment for the further development of Greek nationalism in the island and in the longer run assured its survival after the extinction of Greek communities in Asia Minor in 1922-24.

The specificities of the Cyprus case had two important consequences for the subsequent history of nationalism in the island. First the ethnic predominance of the Greek element in Cyprus and the consequent facility of the expansion of Greek nationalism resulted in an oversight, even oblivion of the existence of a Muslim community in the island and a concommitant loss of the sense of importance of neighbouring TurkeyCwhich remained the sovereign power over Cyprus until 1914Cin Greek Cypriot political culture. Secondly the freedom of political expression under the British regime encouraged the growth of nationalism in ways that were unthinkable under Ottoman rule and therefore infused Greek Cypriot national claims with a rigidity quite uncharacteristic of the traditional politics of minority behaviour for survival in the Ottoman state. Furthermore, the character of British colonial policy contributed to the preservation and politicization of traditional corporate structures and cultures and thus laid the infrastructure of future ethnic confrontation and conflict. [37] The distant legacy of the British handling of the political problems of colonial Cyprus has been the ideological atavism of Cypriot political culture, which fostered both the antinomies of the Cypriot liberation struggle in the 1950s and the contradictory attitudes and half-hearted loyalties of the Cypriots toward their independent republic after 1960.

In conclusion, a few methodological and substantive remarks are in order. The comparative approach with its focus on historical change makes possible an analytical understanding of nationalism, as a product of the circumstances and contingencies of modern politics. The generally circumstantial character of the growth of nationalism belies the basic illusion entertained by nationalists as to the immanence of its values in particular cultures. The historical record instead seems to suggest that there is nothing foreordained about the emergence of nationalist movements and the conversion of particular ethnic and cultural groups to a particular set of national values. The adoption of a particular sense of ethnic identity and national loyalty are the outcomes of processes of historical change that transform certain ethnological contexts by politicizing them according to the policies of modern national states.

The politicization of the traditional ethnography of particular regions which fall within the aspirations of modern states going through their own process of national consolidation and integration, forestalls a range of alternative paths of political development that might be conceivable for the regions in question. In the particular case studies considered in this essay the export of irredentist nationalism from the independent Greek kingdom to the >Greek East= can be interpreted to have had precisely such effects upon the collective destiny of the Orthodox Christian populations which were converted to it. In Cappadocia it reversed the process of social integration of the Turkish-speaking Orthodox in Turkish society and it thus sealed their eventual expulsion to Greece. In Pontos it encouraged such an uncompromising identification with the Greek state that it precluded the serious consideration of any alternative political options when international circumstances seemed for a fleeting moment to favour the creation of an independent republic in which Greeks, Turks and Armenians might coexist at the end of the First World War. Finally in Cyprus, Greek nationalism excluded as heresy and treason the visualization of any other form of collective existence short of union with Greece, thus undermining the independent; republic that was created in 1960.

These are the substantive >lessons=, which unveil a deeper historical antinomy: the growth and total success of nationalism in converting the populations of the three historic regions of the Greek East eventually brought about the obliteration of the traditional Hellenic ethnography on which it had originally based its claims: the Byzantine heritage of Cappadocia of which a lingering presence had survived into the twentieth century in the local Orthodox communities and the dense and cohesive society of Pontic Hellenism came to an abrupt end as a consequence of the growth of Greek nationalism, whereas the Hellenic society of Cyprus which had been miraculously saved by British rule from the conflicts in Asia Minor, across the channel of the Cilician sea, and was delivered to independent statehood, suffered violent destruction in the Northern part of the island in 1974 as a consequence of nationalist folly that provoked Turkish military action and occupation. To the observer who looks at the politics of nationalism in the Greek East from this angle, it appears that as a drama of self-destructive passion this story is indeed worthy of a Thucydides in the fullness of his grimness. '

From Paschalis M. Kitromilides, Enlightenment, Nationalism, Orthodoxy (Varorium, 1994).

Notes