Customer Reviews

Modern Greece: A Short History

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an extremely fine history of Greece up to about 1990. The word MODERN appears in the title even though it starts with Constantine, but this only enriches the total work. Its main virtue is that it weaves the cultural and intellectual life of Greece into the story of national development in the post-Turkish period. Especially good is the way it details 18th and 19th century attempts to develop a national Greek consciousness. It also offers fascinating details on the intellecual currents that led to the armed insurrection against the Ottoman government.

Probably deserves more than five stars.

If you need a book on the history of Greece from 4th to 20th century, this is it. The author shows a very good knowledge of Greek history and shares his analysis of the events. At it's price, this is the best book on modern Greek history you can get.

Woodhouse's "Modern Greece: A Short History," has saved me from some unnecessary disappointments during my first visit to Greece this fall. I will be touring Greek cities and cruising the Aegean, so I read Woodhouse's book for prepatory background information. He described the disillusionment of the 19th Century European "panhellenes" (lovers of things Greek) who flooded into Greece to help fight the 1820-1827 wars of Greek liberation. These panhellenes saw themselves as defending the lineal descendants of the heros of Thermopylae and Marathon, but they quickly discovered modern Greeks exhibit no organic connection with the world of the ancient Greek city states. At least they have no more connection than contemporary Egyptians do the builders of the pyramids. Since I have been educated in the classics of Hellenic Greece, I too had been looking forward to experiencing the world which produced Pericles and Socrates. Woodhouse showed this to be nothing but a silly romantic projection on my part.

Greeks do think and act in the light of their long cultural tradition. But the tradition which informs them does not go back to the Hellenism of the 5th Century B.C.E. It goes back instead to the foundations of the Byzantine Empire at Constantinople in the 4th Century C.E. By the 7th Century this eastern branch of the Roman Empire was all that remained of classical civilization. It was defined by its distinct language (Greek) and by its distinct version of Christianity (Greek Orthodoxy).

Woodhouse explains that these social and religious features of the Byzantine Empire were not erased when the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453. The Turks incorporated many of the forms of Byzantine rule into their own empire, and left the Orthodox Church and the Greek Language largely untouched among their conquered Greek subjects. (Woodhouse claims this Islamic attitude of toleration toward conquered "people of the book" was one reason for the rapid Muslim advance. Muslim rulers were frequently experienced as being less oppressive than their Christian predecessors.)

Like the Jews before them, the Greek people's common religion and language provided an enduring basis for their national identity. This became increasingly evident as the Ottoman Turks began to lose their grip on power late in the 18th and early 19th Centuries. But the Byzantine traditions of Greeks living under Turkish rule did not provide these Greeks with much purchase on democratic ideas or practices. The Byzantine Empire had often been severely totalitarian. Greek Orthodox Christianity demanded "orthodoxy" (right inner belief) as well as "orthopraxy" (right external behavior). Consensus about orthodoxy was difficult to sustain because of the complications surrounding the Doctrine of the Trinity. Christian Byzantium was riven with heresies, all having to do with plausible, but mutually contradictory, interpretations of that doctrine. Since each "heretical" faction had a belief community to back them up, these conflicts became political as well as theological. For example, the so-called "Nika" riots which occurred during Justinian's reign nearly destroyed his government. The rioters were members of opposing "Blue" and "Green" parties, and each party was defined by differing views of the "nature" of Christ. That was the sort of problem which led Byzantine rulers to insist on detailed conformity of beliefs. But this requirement made their rule oppressively totalitarian, especially when compared to the simpler theology and orthopraxy characteristic of Islam.

Woodhouse explains how this Byzantine tradition of doctrinaire factionalism informs Greek politics to this day. The Greek electorate acquiesced in the military dictatorship of 1967-1974, but then five years later it elected the party of the doctrinaire socialist Andreas Papandreou and sustained it in power for nearly eight years. The Greek electorate today appears to have repudiated both military dictatorship and militant socialism. But the polarities of totalitarianism and anarchism still exercise a strong influence on Greek political consciousness. According to Woodhouse, this tendency toward extremism in politics can be traced to the Greek experience of eleven centuries of Byzantine Empire and four centuries of Muslim occupation and rule.

I feel I have a far better appreciation of the cultural realities I will be encountering in Greece this fall, as a result of having read Woodhouse. For that I am grateful.

Fred Hallberg

I'm afraid that there are serious pitfalls in this book. Mr. Woodhouse has insufficient knowledge about the history of Greece.
The obvious traps in his book is about the Greek tribe Arvanites which are referred in his book as Albanians.
One must bear in mind that the greek populations were extended further than today's Greek borders.
Arvanites who came from the today's south Albania were not Albanians as is not the Greek minority that inhabits today the region of Nothern Epirus/South Albania.
Those kinds of falsifications usually appears in political texts, when Albania and Romania wanted to present an Albanian (Arvanites) respectively Romanian minority in Greece (Vlachs).

There are plenty of written sources about Maurokordatos and Markos Botsaris. It is well known that they were Greek Arvanites; however they were speaking a dialect which can be considered as Ancient Albanian. There are no serious researches about the Arvanitika language. In this dialect can be traced elements from the times of Homer.
One must also bear in mind that under the Ottoman occupation of Greece, the Greek language was prohibited, and the population were under extinction. Kosmas Aitolos (Cosmas of Aetolia ) a Greek monk tortured to death exactly because he was arguing people to speak the Greek language (and raising their Greek consciousness) and not any other dialect.

Statements like "Koundouriotis was descended from the Albanian invaders of Greece in the 14th century" are completely inaccurate as the Arvanites came to inhabit large isolated areas after the instruction of the Byzantine emperor Manouil Kantakouzinos (13th century AD).

This book must be seriously revised.

This history book did a fairly good job explaining the greek history. However, it only has 4 very poor maps in a 350+ page HISTORY text. In the text there were many references to cities, regions and countries related to significant events, but those places were not shown on any of the maps. I consider this a major flaw. Buy a different book unless you eastern Meditrainian geography very well.

This is THE BOOK for anyone wanting a very readable resource for research in modern Greek history. I used it extensively while writing my latest spy thriller, THE WINDS OF OCTOBER (2009). But be warned, it's written in British English, so you may find some of the spelling somewhat different from what Americans are used to.
James R. "Jim" Stephens
Also author of CAMERA SOLDIERS: The Philippine Odyssey (2007)