Byzantine Culture

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The Megali Idea

For a century Greek policy aimed at recovering Constantinople and the Greek lands of Asia Minor. The Great Idea, its Byzantine justification, and the catastrophe that ended it in 1922.

In January 1844, in a debate in the Greek national assembly about whether Greeks born outside the small new kingdom should hold office, the prime minister Ioannis Kolettis used a phrase that defined the next eighty years of Greek politics:

The Kingdom of Greece is not Greece. It is only a part, the smallest and poorest part, of Greece. The Greek is not only he who inhabits the Kingdom, but also he who lives in Ioannina, in Thessaly, in Serres, in Adrianople, in Constantinople, in Trebizond, in Crete, in Samos, and in any land associated with Greek history or the Greek race.

The Megali Idea, the Great Idea, was the programme that followed: to bring all these lands and populations into a single Greek state with its capital, eventually, at Constantinople.

The Byzantine Justification

The independent Greek state established in 1830 was small, poor, and covered a fraction of the Greek-speaking world. More than half the Greeks of the Ottoman Empire lived outside it.

The Great Idea needed a historical basis for the claim, and it found one by annexing the Byzantine past. This required a substantial reworking of Greek self-understanding, because the western philhellenes who had supported the revolution had done so in the name of classical Athens, and regarded Byzantium — following Gibbon, as Byzantine studies describes — as a thousand years of theocratic decline.

The reworking was accomplished principally by the historian Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, whose five-volume History of the Greek Nation (1860–1874) argued for an unbroken Greek national continuity from antiquity through Byzantium to the present. Byzantium, in this scheme, was not an oriental interruption but the medieval Greek nation, and the Greek claim to Constantinople was a claim to recover what had been taken in 1453.

The scheme has been criticised as a nationalist construction, and it is one. It also corrected a genuine distortion: the western habit of treating a thousand years of Greek-speaking history as an embarrassment.

Underneath the historiography lay folk tradition, and it was older and stronger.

The legend of the marble emperor — that Constantine XI was turned to stone by an angel at the fall of the city and lies in a cave near the Golden Gate, from which he will emerge to retake it — was current by the sixteenth century and elaborated in song. So was the story of the priest at the altar of Hagia Sophia who walked into the wall mid-liturgy and will come back to finish the service when the church is Christian again.

These are the emotional content of the Great Idea, and they explain why an abstract territorial programme could mobilise people who had never seen a history book.

The Political Programme

For eighty years the Great Idea shaped Greek foreign policy, and it delivered:

TerritoryAcquired
Ionian Islands1864 (ceded by Britain)
Thessaly1881
Macedonia, Epirus, Crete, Aegean islands1912–1913 (Balkan Wars)
Western Thrace1920

The state roughly doubled in area and population between 1912 and 1920. The strategy also produced a disastrous war with the Ottomans in 1897 and a constitutional crisis during the First World War, when the prime minister Venizelos and King Constantine I divided the country over whether to enter on the Entente side.

Asia Minor

The climax came after the First World War. With the Ottoman Empire defeated and being partitioned, Venizelos obtained Allied authorisation to land Greek troops at Smyrna in May 1919, ostensibly to protect the Christian population of a city with a Greek majority.

The occupation expanded into a full campaign into the Anatolian interior against the Turkish nationalist forces under Mustafa Kemal. The Greek army advanced to within about eighty kilometres of Ankara, overextended, and was halted at the Sakarya river in 1921.

The Turkish counter-offensive of August 1922 broke the Greek front. The army retreated to the coast; Smyrna fell on 9 September and burned, with very large numbers of Greek and Armenian dead and hundreds of thousands of refugees taken off by ship.

The Catastrophe

The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 ended the war and imposed a compulsory population exchange on religious lines. Around 1.2 million Orthodox Christians were moved from Anatolia, Pontus and eastern Thrace to Greece, and around 400,000 Muslims from Greece to Turkey.

The Greeks of Istanbul and of two Aegean islands were exempted, as were the Muslims of western Thrace.

In Greek this is I Mikrasiatiki Katastrofi, the Asia Minor Catastrophe. It ended a Greek presence in Anatolia going back three thousand years, added refugees equal to a quarter of the kingdom’s existing population, destabilised Greek politics for a generation, and killed the Great Idea as a policy.

Afterwards

The Great Idea has not been a serious programme of any Greek government since 1922, and Greek–Turkish relations, while difficult, have not turned on irredentist claims to Anatolia.

What remains is cultural. Byzantium is thoroughly integrated into Greek national identity: the three-part scheme of ancient, Byzantine and modern Greece is the structure of the school curriculum; 29 May is marked; the double-headed eagle is the emblem of the Church of Greece; and the Byzantine chant, the rite and the monuments are national heritage. The wider inheritance is described in the Byzantine legacy in Greece.

The refugee communities also transformed Greece. The music of rebetiko, a substantial part of modern Greek cuisine, and the urban character of Athens and Thessalonica all owe a great deal to the people who arrived in 1922 and 1923 from cities their families had lived in since before Rome.

The Historian’s Note

The Megali Idea is a case study in what happens when a historical claim becomes a strategic plan. The scholarship that established Greek continuity with Byzantium was defensible and corrected a real western prejudice. The policy built on it — that a state of five million should conquer and hold Anatolia against a Turkish national movement — was not, and its failure was foreseeable and foreseen by some at the time.

The Marble Emperor, in the Songs

The folk material behind the political programme deserves quoting, because it is the emotional engine of the whole thing.

The best-known lament, recorded in several versions across the Greek world, ends with a voice from heaven telling the Virgin not to weep, because in time — “with the years, with the seasons” — the City will be hers again.

The legend of the emperor: that an angel seized Constantine XI at the moment the walls were breached, turned him to marble, and hid him in a cave beneath the Golden Gate. He waits there. At the appointed time the angel will return the sword, he will wake, and he will drive the Turks out — the Greek tradition says as far as the Red Apple Tree, a place whose location has never been agreed.

The legend of the priest: that when the Ottomans broke into Hagia Sophia, the liturgy was in progress, and the celebrant took the chalice and walked into the south wall of the sanctuary, which opened and closed behind him. He will come out and complete the interrupted service when the church is Christian again.

These are recorded from the sixteenth century onward and were current in Greek villages well into the twentieth. They are not political programmes; they are consolations. What the nineteenth century did was convert them into a foreign policy.

The Asia Minor Catastrophe in Human Terms

The numbers give the shape of 1922–1923 and not much else, so it is worth being specific about what the population exchange meant.

Around 1.2 million Orthodox Christians were moved to Greece; around 400,000 Muslims to Turkey. The criterion was religion, not language: Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians from Cappadocia — the Karamanlides, who wrote Turkish in Greek characters — went to Greece, where they spoke no Greek. Greek-speaking Muslims from Crete went to Turkey, where they spoke no Turkish.

Greece’s population increased by roughly a quarter in two years. The refugees arrived destitute, in a country that had just lost a war and had no capacity to house them. Shanty settlements grew around Athens and Thessalonica; the names of the districts still record the places they came from — Nea Smyrni, Nea Ionia, Nea Philadelphia.

The cultural consequences were large and not only tragic. Rebetiko, the urban music of the refugee quarters, came out of this population and became the most distinctive Greek music of the twentieth century. A substantial part of what is now regarded as Greek cuisine is Anatolian. Greek literature of the following decades — Venezis, Myrivilis, Doukas, and later Politis’s At Hatzifrangou — is substantially refugee literature.

Turkey’s own losses in the exchange are less discussed in western accounts and were real: the departure of the Greek commercial and artisan population of the Aegean coast left a gap that took decades to fill.

The Idea’s End, and What Replaced It

The Megali Idea did not fade; it was killed on a specific date, and what followed is worth stating.

The Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923 fixed the borders that remain, ended Greek claims in Anatolia and eastern Thrace, and legitimised the exchange. Greek foreign policy since has not pursued irredentist claims on Turkish territory.

What replaced the Great Idea as a national project was internal: absorbing the refugees, land reform, industrialisation, and — through the long instability of the 1930s, the occupation, the civil war and the dictatorship — the construction of a modern state.

The Byzantine inheritance remained, detached from the territorial programme. It is in the school curriculum’s three-part scheme of ancient, Byzantine and modern Greece; in the church calendar; in the double-headed eagle of the Church of Greece; in the chant; and in the annual commemoration of 29 May.

Cyprus is the one place where something resembling the older ambition persisted, in the form of enosis, union with Greece, and the consequences there in 1974 were severe. Elsewhere the idea survives as history rather than as policy — which, given how it ended the last time, is generally regarded in Greece as a settled question.

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