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Local Brothers, National Enemies: Representations of Religious Otherness in Post-Ottoman Epirus (Greece)
Abstract
The paper presents a general overview of an ongoing research on representations of multi-religious Epirote society in local textual narratives. Aim of the paper is to explore the interplay between the Greek nationalistic script of anti-Muslim discourses and the local narratives of the Ottoman past. The focus is on the objectification of local memories in textual narratives and how this process has been affected by the diglossic relationships between oral and written Greek, which favoured a textual re-elaboration of local memories through the lens of dominant national narratives.
It is argued that the analysis of ‘marginal texts’ in ‘marginal contexts’ can provide a useful ground to reflect on the complexities implied in the reshaping of the Ottoman past and the multi-religious character of Ottoman Balkan society, caught in between the imperatives of national narratives and the selective processes of local memories.
... While the town's troubled history is significant for modern Greek nationalist historiography that celebrates the victory of the state over the "communist conspirators" during the Civil War, Konitsa is marginal in terms of the resources invested in its development and regeneration (Pusceddu 2012). Positioned in the liminal region of the Greek-Albanian border and between memory and forgetting, Konitsa seems to embody both monumentality and ruination. ...
... After the exchange, the Fethiye Cami shared the fate of many Muslim religious sites, which lost their original religious function and emblematic character (Kolovos 2015, 250). The associated türbe structures of Kato Konitsa were handed over to newcomers from Cappadocia as shelters and remain their families' private property to this day, serving as barns (Pusceddu 2013). The forced displacement of populations was thus the factor that drastically changed attitudes toward this local heritage. ...
... Tourkokratia): in a concise survey of written novels and articles in periodicals, Antonio Maria Pusceddu (2013) showed how Konitsa's regional literature celebrated the virtue of religious coexistence during the Ottoman era. Only after the establishment of the Greek and Albanian border did "local brothers" gradually become "national enemies" (Pusceddu 2013, quoting from the title). The same attitude was evident throughout the present research, mostly in encounters with elderly interlocutors: when asked to identify heritage sites in Konitsa, they all included the mosque, although it typically appeared near the ends of their lists. ...
The key point of this paper is the process of State building in Greece during the XXth Century. This is approached by focusing on the interplay between the State and denominational communities, from 1913 to 1939. Located on the borders of Greece and Albania, Epirus constitutes, from that standpoint, a relevant case study. During the interwar period, this poor and mostly mountainous area is characterized by the coexistence of several denominational communities and the porosity of political borders. In this context, religious factors got intertwined with major sociopolitical issues such as the settlement of a great number of refugees ; state building on new territories ; land property ; education and national integration ; public order and defence. The intricacies of this situation contributed to keep the higher clergy within the political field. The case of the Orthodox bishopric of Ioannina, in the Greek part of Epirus, clearly illustrates this tendancy. Although the close connections between the Orthodox Church and nationalism made easier the social control of local population, the bishops, however - who held not only religious but also political power in the preexisting Ottoman system - kept ambiguous and sometimes strained relationships with State authority and its representatives.
This book provides a history of the great language controversy that has occupied and impassioned Greeks - sometimes with fatal results - for over two hundred years. It begins in the late 18th century when a group of Greek intellectuals sought to develop a new, Hellenic, national identity alongside the traditional identity supplied by Orthodox Christianity. The ensuing controversy focused on the language, fuelled by a desire to develop a form of Greek that expressed the Greeks' relationship to the ancients, and by the different groups'contrasting notions of what the national image so embodied should be. The purists wanted a written language close to the ancient. The vernacularists - later known as demoticists - sought to match written language to spoken, claiming the latter to be the product of the unbroken development of Greek since the time of Homer. The book explores the political, social, and linguistic causes and effects of the controversy in its many manifestations. Drawing on a wide range of evidence from literature, language, history, and anthropology, it traces its effects on spoken and written varieties of Greek and shows its impact on those in use today. The book describes the efforts of linguistic elites and the state to achieve language standardization and independence from languages such as Turkish, Albanian, Vlach, and Slavonic. The sense of national and linguistic identity that has been inculcated into generations of Greeks since the start of the War of Independence in 1821 has, in the last twenty-five years, received blows from which it may not recover. Immigration from Eastern Europe and elsewhere has introduced new populations whose religions, languages, and cultures are transforming Greece into a country quite different from what it has been and from what it once aspired to be.
The collapse of the Communist regime in Albania after 1990 led to overt tensions between Greece and Albania as a result, on the one hand, of massive illegal Albanian immigration to Greece and, on the other, new questions concerning the status and security of the Greek minority in southern Albania. During the 20th century, nation-construction across the Greek-Albanian border involved the reciprocal differentiation of heterogeneous populations into bipolar Greek and Albanian nationalities. In this article, I consider the public rhetoric and diplomatic processes involved in distinguishing Greek and Albanian populations. I suggest that through attention to border history, segmentary models of cultural identity can be usefully married to the theory of nationalism at the scale of the state. The Greek-Albanian case demonstrates both the centra lily of the border to the legitimation of the state and the marginality of actual border populations who persistently generate conditions of social heterogeneity. [Greece, Albania, nationalism, ethnicity, border, stereotype]
The origins of a Balkan Orthodox merchant class or classes may be traced back to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Not until the eighteenth century, however, did it become sufficiently strong in wealth and number to capture the trade of Hungary, South Russia, and the eastern Mediterranean. The eighteenth century was a time of expansion of French, German, English, and Russian trade in the Balkans. It was also a time of growth of the trade of Moslem Albanian and Bosnian merchants. But, in terms of its significance to the cultural, political, and general historical evolution of the Balkan peoples, most important of all was the expansion of the Balkan Orthodox merchant: the Greek trader of Constantinople, Salonika, and Smyrna, the Greek and Orthodox Albanian merchant, sailor, and shipper of the smaller Aegean islands, the Greek, Vlach, and Macedo-Slav muleteer and forwarding agent of Epirus, Thessaly, and Macedonia, the Serbian pig-merchant of Šumadija, the “Illyrian” muleteer and forwarding agent of Herzegovina and Dalmatia, who set up business in Ragusa (Dubrovnik) or Trieste, the “Rascian” of Pannonia, and the Greek or Bulgarian of the eastern Rhodope. The Balkan Orthodox merchants were Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian subjects, but their principal business was to bring goods into or out of the Ottoman Empire. The area of their primary business concentration stretched north and west of the political limits of the Ottoman Empire to Nezhin in South Russia, Leipzig in Germany, Vienna in Austria, and Livorno and Naples in Italy. In western Europe, they succeeded in creating an area of secondary commercial penetration.