Greek Identity Essay

In 1832, Greece became an independent kingdom under the protection of the Great Powers after decades of fighting for emancipation from Ottoman rule (Kokkinidou and Nikolaidou 2004:156–157). Greece was in a unique position to receive support from Britain, France, and Russia due to their past as a great civilization in Classical times. In fact, the Great Powers saw Greece’s fight against the Ottomans as a war between civilization and barbarism. Some even went so far as to view it as a continuation of the Persian Wars during the Classical Period (Hamilakis 2007:78). Although Classical Greece was a part of modern Greece’s identity, Europeans also thought of classical antiquity as part of Europe’s identity and felt that they owed Greece an intellectual …show more content…
This was so much so the case that often Greek archaeologists would not research anything but Classical Greece. This focus also helped to create a purely Greek national identity rather than one based off of the many cultures that had occupied the land in recent history. Regrettably, this led to the destruction of the archaeological record of more recent cultures to give a more sanitized and idealized view of the past (Hamilakis 2007:96–97). A more famous example of this is the removal of Islamic and Byzantine monuments from the Acropolis in order to feature the architecture from the Classical period more prominently (Kokkinidou and Nikolaidou 2004:160). Clearly, the construction of their national identity was affecting how archaeologists viewed and prioritized the …show more content…
After World War I, the Ottoman Empire began to rapidly disintegrate and although Mehmed VI still retained his title of Sultan, the Allied powers wielded most of the power. Indeed all the signs suggest that the Ottoman Empire would be colonized by Western Europe. Turkey evaded this fate due to the actions of the nationalist movement, headed by Mustafa Kemal. After driving out Greek and Allied forces, Kemal (also called Atatürk) founded the Republic of Turkey and moved the capital to Ankara in 1923 (Goode 2007:19). Of course, Kemal was now tasked with the job of creating a Turkish national identity that would separate Turkey from its Ottoman past and give the new nation-state a heritage that could compete with those of the European world (Shaw 2007:169). Getting the world and Turkish citizens to take pride in being a Turk would require what some may call a radical change in opinion. In truth, the word “Turk” had come to be associated with barbarism and rudeness by foreigners and Ottomans alike (Goode 2007:21). Atatürk tried and succeeded in reversing this image through the use of the culture-historical