Preservation of American Hellenic History
Preservation of American Hellenic History
by Jason C. Mavrovitis
Through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Greek-speaking people dominated the cities and coastline of the Black Sea from the Bosphorous north to Odessa. Those that lived in what is now Bulgaria referred to their region as Anatolian Roumelia (Anatoliki Rõmilia) or the Anatolian Rome.(39)
The Bulgars who had been people of the inland mountains and valleys started to migrate to the coastal regions. There they found Greek landowners, merchants, ship owners and fishing fleets, and Greek speaking Orthodox clergy. Antagonism grew nurtured by jealousy, and anger over petty slights. The Greeks were dismissive of the Bulgars calling them tsiri (dried mackerel). The groundwork for ethnic strife developed with each real or imagined affront.
In the early nineteenth century as more of the Bulgarian population became literate and educated they published books and journals in their own language. Bulgarian students studied in Western Europe and Russia on scholarships and with the support of prosperous Bulgarian merchants. There was a groundswell of nationalism and a vision of a resurrected, free Bulgarian state equal to that which had existed in medieval times. Pride of language and ethnicity sparked fervor to wrest control of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church from the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople. For the Bulgars there were memories of historic defeats at the hands of the Byzantine Emperors and of terrible punishments meted out to defeated Bulgarian armies.(40)
Fueling anti-Bulgarian sentiments on the part of Greeks was the memory of an early thirteenth century Bulgar, Tsar John, also called Johannitsa (little John) and Kaloian (handsome John), whose cognomen was "Slayer of Greeks."(41)
A combination of the slow dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, establishment of the Kingdom of Greece and the geopolitical aspirations of Russia emboldened the ethnic and nationalist aspirations of the people of Bulgaria, Macedonia and Thrace. Their dreams found both creative and destructive expression in the conflicts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These were the Crimean, Turko-Russian and Turko-Greek wars; guerrilla warfare over Macedonia;(42) the first and second Balkan Wars; the First World War; and finally, in 1922, defeat of a Greek Expeditionary force on the Ionian coast by the Turks, and the total destruction of Smyrna and its Greek community. This final catastrophe resulted from the collapse of the Great Idea (Megali Idhea), the vision of a recreated Empire, of a synthesis of Hellenism and Orthodoxy in the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. The vision became a nightmare and resulted in the expulsion of one million Pontic(43) and Ionian Greeks whose ancestors had been located on the southern shore of the Black Sea and the Ionian coast of Turkey for more than two and one half thousand years.(44)
The Balkan peoples have yet to resolve the ethnic and religious differences they have among themselves and with Turkey, and continue to suffer the ravages of war.
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