Hellenism and Christianity: Petros Vrailas-Armenis on the Constituents of Modern Greek Identity (original) (raw)
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The Quest for Hellenism: Religion, Nationalism and Collective Identities in Greece, 1453-1913
The main aim of this essay is to offer a critical survey of the development of Greek collective identities, between 1453 and 1913. That period witnessed dramatic transformations, and the arrival of a modernising and Westernising wave, which crashed onto the Greek shores in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The ensuing clash between Western and modern ideas of nationalism on the one hand, and timehonoured local mentalities nurtured by Orthodoxy and the Ottoman millet system, on the other, was intense. This paper attempts to chart some salient aspects of that struggle, to discuss the evolution of concepts and words, such as "Hellene" [OEÏÏËÓ·˜], "Hellenism" [∂ÏÏËÓÈÛÌfi˜], "Roman" [ƒˆÌÈfi˜] and "Romiosyne" [ƒˆÌÈÔÛ ‡ÓË], and to place them within their changing historical context.
History and Religion as Sources of Hellenic Identity in Late Byzantium and the Post-Byzantine Era
Genealogy, 2020
Recently, seminal publications highlighted the Romanitas of the Byzantines. However, it is not without importance that from the 12th century onwards the ethnonym Hellene (Ἓλλην) became progressively more popular. A number of influential intellectuals and political actors preferred the term Hellene to identify themselves, instead of the formal Roman (Ρωμαῖος) and the common Greek (Γραικός). While I do not intend to challenge the prevalence of the Romanitas during the long Byzantine era, I suggest that we should reevaluate the emerging importance of Hellenitas in the shaping of collective and individual identities after the 12th century. From the 13th to the 16th century, Byzantine scholars attempted to recreate a collective identity based on cultural and historical continuity and otherness. In this paper, I will seek to explore the ways Byzantine scholars of the Late Byzantine and Post Byzantine era, who lived in the territories of the Byzantine Empire and/or in Italy, perceived national identity, and to show that the shift towards Hellenitas started in the Greek-speaking East.
in: Chrubasik, Boris and Daniel King (eds.), Hellenism and the Local Communities of the Eastern Mediterranean, 400 BCE–250 CE, Oxford: OUP (2017), 1–11., 2017
This chapter introduces the themes of the volume and the individual contributions. It argues that the cultural history of the Hellenistic East transcends the political time frame often associated with the period in Anglophone publications. Therefore, the framework of this study is extended to include the fourth century BCE as well as the first three centuries CE in order to closely investigate the processes of cultural interaction often associated with the term Hellenism. It offers examples of the presence of adapted Greek cultural and political elements in the communities of the Eastern Mediterranean, it raises the question of cross-cultural exchange and its impact on Greekness itself, and it opens the debate on whether terms such as Hellenism, Hellenistic, and Hellenization are still useful to describe the cultural processes in the period under investigation.