They were a kind, hospitable people; prisoners of war were very rarely ill-treated at their hands. But they were by no means prone to live along Graeco- Roman lines. As a matter of fact, they preferred to live as much by hunting, as by fishing and agriculture.
They were tall, fair - haired and hardy; but they had little military skill. They fought without fortifications (something that happened to be fatal to them); and, when endangered, they retreated into the great forests which they held in affection. In brief, their primitive groups were rural communities united by common descent; and they used to possess fields and woodlands in common. They lived in log cabins, disposed in lines along either side of the way, or grouped around a central space; and they practised a simple, often semi-nomadic agriculture and cattle raising. Civilization (whatever it means) came to them late…
This is the Slavic image, from the sixth to the eighth century, painted by Byzantine chroniclers and modern historians[1]. Nonetheless the former could hardly believe the turmoil in which Greek intellectual life was found to be during the nineteenth and the twenty centuries, due to this Arcadian people; and as far as modern historians are concerned, very few among them discussed this unbelievable state of affairs.

I

The end of the Greek Revolution in late 1829 marked the beginning of another conflict, this time an ideological one. In fact, the fight of the Southern Balkans’ Christian insurgents against the troops of the Sublime Porte had begun as early as 1821; nonetheless it had a successful conclusion, given that a kingdom was founded on the “classical soil” of Greece. It was the first independent non–Moslem State there after Constantinople had been captured by the Ottomans in 1453.
However, the freshly liberated country desperately needed not only a King but an official ideology, too. Both were essential to her national coherence; and both proved difficult to find. An unescapable truth is that after the tragic death, in 1831, of count John Capo d’Istria[2], the Czar’s joint Secretaty of State (1816-1822)[3] and, afterwards, the President of Greece[4], everybody within Europe’s Royal Houses was loath to accept the Greek crown[5]. Finally a candidate for the new throne was found; he was Otho, the second son of Louis I, King of Bavaria[6], who was eventually declared King of Greece in 1833. But he had not yet come of age; and until he did so, the country was run by a Council of Regency. This hybrid situation remained in being up to 1835. It was only then that Greece had at last a King and, thus, she was entitled to proclaim her legacy urbi (namely Athens) et orbi. But in the year after that, something critical took place: there was published in Germany the second volume of Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer’s monumental book Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea[7]. As a result a clamour was raised among the scholars of Central and Eastern Europe; and up today none has been able to put an end to the strife.

II

The achievement of Fallmerayer was Herculean; but he was ill prepared to confront the impact of his conclusions. For in the prologue of the second part of his work, he made an assertion that had repercussions not merely in Greece, but in the whole of Europe and even in the Near East: “The glow surrounding the Periclean age as well as the times of Praxiteles and Plato; the very halo that the the quixotic friends of the natives of both the Morea and the Rumelia had cherished is now being destroyed before our very eyes. Therefore, the inner divide of the [Greek] people, both its major divisions, i.e. the Slav and the Albanian one, as well as the death of the Ancient Greeks’ national character is every day more clearly brought out” [8].
In brief, Fallmerayer was trying to explain by means of Mediaeval History the internal disorders in nineteenth century Greece. Nevertheless, the corollary of his thesis was that the Modern Greeks had little (if any…) relationship with the Hellenes of classical times; and as could be foreseen, his concepts were regarded as sapping away at the very ideology on which Modern Greece was based.
That the Greeks who fought the 1821 Revolution thought of themselves as Hellenes needs no argument: that is why the State which was formed as a result of their struggle was given the name Hellas. Nonetheless, the Byzantines did not call themselves Hellenes; and although from the seventh century on practically all of them spoke Greek, they were considered as being merely the subjects of the Roman Empire in that Christian, progressively Eastern form conferred on it by Constantine the Great[9]. Moreover, it is a fact that the leaders either of the Greek struggle against the Ottomans or of the regenerated Hellas’ politics were mainly non–Greek. Some of them were descended from the Albanian invaders of Greece in the late Middle Ages; and they spoke Greek only with difficulty; a lot of them were Vlakhs[10], i.e. Walachians… and so on. In other words, there was abundant, palpable evidence of the veracity of Fallmerayer’s thesis; but, strangely enough, during the nineteenth century, neither public opinion nor academics in Greece showed any reaction towards the German scholar’s doctrines as far as the Albanians were concerned[11]. In fact, the main problem was the Slavs; and, of course, its nucleus was the Morea, in other words the ancient Peloponnese.
Why so? Because nobody could have misgivings about Rumelia, i.e. the Mainland Greece[12]. This toponym’s etymon is Turkish. In fact the term Rumeli, meaning the “land of the Rumi”[13], is found as early as the fourteenth century as a term indicating the European possessions of the Ottoman Sultan[14]; but in Modern Times, and in particular shortly before the Greek Revolution, it was just the name of the regions stretching as far as Epirus and Thessaly in the North and the Gulfs of Patras and Corinth in the South. The battles fought there, after the outbreak of the 1821 uprising[15], consecrated the toponym and integrated it in the vocabulary of the Modern Greek. In short, no problems were foreseen as far as Rumelia was concerned. But what about the Morea’s etymon? To tell the truth, the question was all the more crucial since this region was regarded as the very melting pot of the Greek nation (as it was, indeed).
However, Fallmerayer’s position on this issue was clear cut: the toponym Morea was derived from the Slavic word more, that means “sea”[16]. The evidence of that could be furnished by the German name of Pomerania, Pommern, the etymon of which is the Slavonic expression po – moran, i.e. “on the sea”[17]; and as a case in point, the Polish name of that region is Pomorze[18], expressing the very idea that Fallmerayer was the first to point out.
Thus the German scholar ‘cracked’ the enigma of a lot of the Morea’s toponyms. In other words, he explained that the name (N)ezeros derived from the slavonic ezero/ozero/jezero meaning “marsh” or “swamp”[19]; that the name Goritza>Koritza>Koritsa, widespread not merely in the Morea but throughout the Southern Balkans[20], was just a ‘diminutive’, meaning a mountain village or town and deriving from the root gora (=mountain)[21]; that the toponym Divri, the name of a provincial capital in the Northern Peloponnese, was a Serbo–Bulgarian word meaning “good, beautiful”[22]; and that the etymon of Mistras, the famous Mediaeval despots’ capital, was a slavonic toponym [23]. And last but not least, he managed to give a satisfactory explanation of the toponym Bardounia, a complex of villages north of the Mani, where, until the outbreak of the 1821 struggle, Albanian–speaking Moslems were settled. In fact, Fallmerayer brilliantly explained that the etymon of this toponym was bardo, a term in Illyrian slavonic meaning “mountain”[24].
Fallmerayer was right; and the correctness of his assertions is proved not only by the etymology of Pomerania but by the very name the Sublime Porte had given the Morea: djezire, which means “the isle” but also the “peninsula”, the “littoral”, and generally speaking the “land by the sea” or even “by the water”[25]. In other words, the Ottomans invaders had roughly the same conception of the Peloponnese as their Slavic ‘forerunners’ did[26]. And now the main problem is to know the path the German scholar followed in order to arrive to these conclusions.

III

During the sixth and the seventh centuries of the Christian era, a massive Slav influx poured into Greece[27]; moreover, in 747, the Peloponnese was a plague-ridden region[28]. As a result, Slavs submerged it[29]; thus merely a few nuclei of autochthonous populations remained here and there; and at least the western part of the peninsula remained a “slavic country” for over two hundred years[30]. Moreover, the restricted Greek groups on the eastern littoral were, during that same period, obviously in territories inhabited by Slavs[31]. Under these circumstances, the physical description of Nicetas, father-in-law of Christopher, a son of the emperor Romanus I Lecapenus (920-944), is quite understandable: Nicetas was from the Morea and his physiognomy was described as truly slavic[32].
Nonetheless, the Morean Slavs were, at the beginning of the ninth century, strong enough as to attack Patras, one of the last Greek strongholds in the peninsula. The city was besieged in the year 805[33]; but the aggressors were eventually defeated[34] - thanks, according to the tradition, to a miraculous intervention by Saint Andrew, the patron saint of Patras[35]. Their defeat was a turning point in the Mediaeval History of Greece; for the imperial authority embarked after that on a large-scale campaign in order to graecize the “barbarous” Morea. The hellenization meant in practice christianization; and at the beginning of the tenth century there were no more pagans (even autochthonous ones) in the Morea[36]. The fidelis in Christo deo basileus et imperator Romaeorum, in Constantinople[37], had henceforth the Morean Slavs as loyal subjects; and it was in that way that these Slavic populations became an integral part of Greek nationhood.
In other words, Fallmerayer was right; for his own subject was race, i.e. the stock, the blood, and in no case the nation. In fact, practically throughout Europe, nationhood is a concept quite different from that of common ancestry; and it was thanks mainly to the bitter, the cruel experience of the 1789-1792 years that the French people emerged as the primordial pattern of nationhood in today’s Western World. And to the crucial question “What is a Nation?” there were the French to provide the classical answer: “A group of human beings who have achieved success and victories in the past and who wish to do alike in the future”[38].
This very principle was fully adopted by Modern Greeks; and it is undoubtedly noteworthy that John Capo d’Istria was the first to define their nationhood. In fact, he had made, even before the end of the 1821 Revolution, the following statement: “The Greek Nation is composed of people who, after the capture of Constantinople [in 1453], did not abandon either the [Greek] Orthodox faith or the tongue of their fathers; and thus remained within the spiritual jurisdiction of their Church regardless of the region where they live in Turkey”[39].
Almost three decades later, this essential principle was brilliantly epitomized by Constantine Paparrhigopoulos, an intellectual who went on to write the historiographic gospel of Modern Greece. “Everyone who speaks Greek is Greek”, Paparrhigopoulos declared in 1853[40]; and he deduced the inescapable corollary: “everyone who will speak Greek is going to be Greek”[41]. Notwithstanding, by means of the above statements and declarations no solution is given to the essential problem, i.e. the reaction to Fallmerayer’s thesis, as far as the Slavic migration into Mainland Greece and the Morea is concerned. As explained, the German scholar’s theme was not the nation but the ancestry; and thus his theory was not at all in contradiction to the maxims of John Capo d’Istria and C. Paparrhigopoulos. In other words, the clamour raised after the publication of Fallmerayer’s theses is a real problem; and the key to the mystery is the political climate in the Balkans throughout the nineteenth century.
It was only a year after Paparrhigopoulos had epitomized Capo d’Istria’s maxim that a diplomat accredited to the royal court of Greece tried to bring the debate to an end with the following laconic statement: “A really independent Greece is an absurdity. Greece is either Russian or English; and since it may not be Russian it must be English”[42]. The obviously undiplomatic character of this ‘explanation’ should be regarded as being no more than a ‘reflection’ of belligerency: the Crimean War had already begun.
King Otho and his Queen Consort, Amelia, were then ardently in favour of the Russians. Otho used continuously to bring up that he was the only Christian monarch in the Near East; accordingly he regarded Athens as being merely a provisional capital of the regenerated Hellas. The Ottomans should be driven out of Constantinople; and Russia’s war against the Sublime Porte and her allies appeared to be a unique occasion for such an impressive achievement. The very antinomy between the ancient Hellas, based -allegedly- on blood relationship but chiefly on paganism, and the graecized Eastern Roman Empire of the Middle Ages, based entirely on the Christian faith, had, in those days, slipped everybody’s mind; though that contradiction was pointed out actually by both, Fallmerayer and Paparrhigopoulos. As a result, Greek volunteers fought in Sebastopol against the French, the British, and the Turks; and at the same time officers of the Greek army stirred up a general insurrection of the Christian populations in Epirus and Thessaly - regions, at that time, of the Ottoman empire bordering on Greece. The consequence was unescapable: in May 1854 French forces occupied Piraeus, the port of Athens. They were joined a little later by British troops and a policy partial to the interests of the two Western Powers was imposed on Greece. Thus the Crimean War turned into a traumatic experience for the Greek people: a general upheaval along the lines supposed to be the most appropriate for the regeneration of Byzantium resulted in the defeat of Russia and the occupation of Piraeus by Turkey’s allies. This revealed, among other things, the need for far-reaching changes in both the domestic structures and the international position of the country[43].
Once more, Paparrhigopoulos was among the first to herald the coming of the new era. It was in 1860, i.e. only four years after the end of the Crimean War, that he published the first volume of his masterly work “A History of the Greek Nation”[44]: the last tome happened to appear as late as 1874[45]. In the meantime, Otho and Amelia were overthrown[46], a new King, George I, was proclaimed in Greece[47] and the country had definitely entered the sphere of influence of the Western Powers. Paparrhigopoulos’ writings seemed to be prophetic: it was already in 1853 that he had plainly specified Macedonia as being the natural area for Greek expansion[48]; nonetheless Macedonia, in those days a part of the Ottoman Empire, was inhabited by compact Slavic populations; thus the Mediaeval precedent of the Morea, i.e. the Slavs’ hellenization, would be repeated in nineteenth century Macedonia. In short, he prescribed, in a few words, a foreign policy for Greece (regardless of the political party in power): no more dreams of Constantinople being christianized again. Macedonia was henceforth considered to be Greek living-space. It was of no matter that it was the very cradle of Slavic Christianity in the Balkan mountains[49]; and so Macedonia became an Apple of Discord between the Greeks and the Slavic nations of the Balkan Peninsula up to our time.



Constantine Paparrhigopoulos was an exceptional man. He was born in Constantinople in 1815; nonetheless his father was from Arcadia, i.e. the very heart of the Peloponnese. Because of the 1821 turmoil, little Constantine with his mother and brothers settled in Odessa; and, after Greek independence had been achieved, in Nauplia, then capital of Greece. Initially he joined the civil service; but after the 1843 military coup, that made the granting of a constitution and subsequently the establishing of a dictatorial régime by King Otho faits accomplis, he took up the teaching of History. Firstly he taught in an Athens gymnasium; and from 1851 on in the university of Athens; and thus he managed to become the most influential historian in nineteenth century Greece.
Paparrhigopoulos was virtually a self-taught man[50]; he had acquired, in Odessa, a good primary education as well as the basics of a secondary one; but he never went on to higher studies. Nevertheless he read a lot; and he kept reading and doing research during the whole of his life. He had a brilliant talent d’amateur, as efficient as Heinrich Schliemann’s[51]; he might be compared even to Anton van Leeuwenhoek[52]. In any case, he was the one to emphasize the importance of traditional oral sources as a factor linking Ancient with Modern Greece[53].
The most astonishing fact, however, is the equivalence between Paparrhigopoulos’ and Fallmerayer’s cases. Their work is complementary to each other. The latter had challenged the claim by Greeks (and by Philhellenists[54] on their behalf) to linear descent from the ancient Hellenes[55]; the former had produced evidence of the unbroken continuity of Greek History. The latter’s subject was race, whereas the former’s was the nation, i.e.something quite different[56]. The theses of both are objectively irrefutable[57]; and only their theses’ interpretation made them seem antithetical. In short, the key to the mystery is to be found, once more, in the political coincidence.
Fallmerayer was born in 1790, in Tyrol[58]. His family was a poor one; nevertheless he managed to study, at the university of Salzburg, Theology, Oriental Languages, and History. Already in 1835, he was a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, at Munich; and in 1848 he was appointed professor of History in the university of the Bavarian capital. Nonetheless, during the revolutionary agitation of that année folle, he adopted a marked republican attitude; and as a result he lost his university chair. From that time on and until his death, in 1861, he excelled as a member of the Academy, as a historian - and as a columnist.
Fallmerayer nourished republican sentiments even before the année folle[59], given that, in the crucial 1848 year, he was elected a member of the German National Assembly[60]. The latter sat, from May 1848 to June 1849, in Frankfurt on the Main, and advocated the union of all Germans, along liberal lines, in a national state. In other words, the bitterness of Fallmerayer’s assertions[61] was nothing more than a disguised attack against the Wittelsbach Royal House, most probably because he regarded them as being an obstacle to German unity.
In brief, Louis I was the King of Bavaria; and his son, Otho, the Sovereign of Greece. Louis ascended the throne in 1825, but he abdicated after the 1848 uprising. Nevertheless and as far as culture is concerned, he achieved spectacular success. He regarded his capital as being a “New Athens”; and in fact he was able to give Munich a beautiful, typically neoclassical appearance. His peculiar ‘classicalist romanticism’ was one of the main reasons for acquiescing in the Greek crown be given to his son; and Otho made the classical revival a constituent element of his monarchy’s ideological basis. This is why almost every aspect of Greek intellectual life was ab initio oriented towards the classical past[62] and, moreover, why Fallmerayer’s book on the Morea was considered to be “anti-Greek”[63]; although it should never be emphasized enough by historians that the very lines on which ancient Hellenes conceived the world were a fundamental contradiction to the way of thinking and living of the Mediaeval and Modern Greeks.
At any rate, Paparrhigopoulos was a protégé in all but name of the Wittelsbach Royal House both in Athens and Munich. His ascendancy began in 1844, i.e. when King Otho established in Greece a royal dictatorship; and it was John Kolettis[64], a politician favoured by the Sovereign and prime minister from 1844 to 1847, who drove him to abandon a career in civil service and opt for a teaching post, albeit he had no doctor’s degree. Then there appeared a deus ex machina. After Louis I had abdicated, Maximilian II, i.e. Otho’s elder brother, succeeded him as King of Bavaria; and though liberal he pursued, as far as the liberal Pan-Germanism was concerned, the same policies as his father. This attitude proved to be fortunate for Paparrhigopoulos: in 1850, he was proclaimed, by the university of Munich, doctor in absentia. Thus a year later he was able to occupy the chair of History at the university of Athens. He kept teaching, and writing, and playing a leading role in the national life of the Greeks almost till his death in 1891.
Unfortunately for Fallmerayer, he died already in 1861, i.e. before Germany was unified (by means of blood and iron and by no means along liberal lines) by Otto von Bismarck[65]. Paparrhigopoulos remained unique in the arena of Greek historiography. Public opinion adulated him; and scholars throughout Europe held him in high esteem. Beyond the Greek border he was regarded very highly, for he was the first to give satisfactory evidence of Greek civilization extending, from Antiquity to our time, a connected whole; and domestically he was deemed worthy of the highest honours, because he managed to deal a severe blow to the Slavs, who “continuously threatened the Greeks”. Nonetheless, he was not entirely out of reach of potential attacks; and in February 1876 he was the victim of a public outcry. The reason? He was accused of being a … Pan-Slavic agent!



In January 1876, Paparrhigopoulos published in the first issue of Hestia, an influential scholarly review of Athens, an article on George Castriota (in Turkish being Scanderbeg), i.e. the Albanian leader who, after the fall of Constantinople, brought about the expulsion of the Ottoman troops from Albania[66].
George Castriota, born most probably in 1403, was a son of the lord of Croya[67], a fortified city in upper middle Albania. Sent as a hostage to the court of the Ottoman Sultan Murat II, he became a Moslem and he was named Iskender bey or Scanderbeg[68]. Subsequently he fought in the battle of Niš, in Serbia, on November 3, 1443, on the side of the Ottomans. Nonetheless, the latter were crushed there by the governor of Transylvania, John Hunyadi[69]; and that battle had grave consequences for the Balkans. First of all, Serbian independence, abolished after the 1389 Kosovo battle, was now restored; but far more important was the beginning of the Albanian uprising led by Scanderbeg[70]. In point of fact, the young Castriota rushed to Albania, reconverted to Christianity, took again his baptismal name, George, and afterwards raised the banner of the revolt in the very centre of his father’s fiefdom[71].
Some ten years later, Constantinople was captured by Mehmed II, the son of Murat II. The result? No more Christian basileis[72] in the Balkan mountains. George Castriota jumped at the opportunity and raised the flammulum, i.e. the red ensign bearing the two-headed eagle. This ensign used to be flown by the Byzantine armies, whenever the Emperor was leading them. The significance was clear: the basileus was dead; nonetheless someone else was the leader in his place[73]. From that moment on, George Castriota’s struggle against the Ottomans became a merciless one; and it lasted up to the death of the Albanian leader in 1468.
In other words, for almost twenty-four years Castriota led his countrymen in wars against the sultan Mehmet II the Conqueror. The latter, after he had conquered Constantinople, Athens, the Morea and Serbia, had real difficulty, in the West, only with Albania[74]. Castriota was particularly helped by Alphonse V, the King of Naples, who represented Western ambitions in the Balkan peninsula[75]. The King’s death in 1458 however left Castriota vulnerable; and in 1461 he accepted a truce with the Sultan; but Castriota managed to dupe him. In fact, in return for vague promises to refrain from further attacks on the Ottoman territory, he achieved once more the control of southern Albania and Epirus; and just a year later, in 1462, he resumed attacks on Ottoman garrisons. As a result Mehmet II invaded Albania again, but he achieved neither the seizure of Croya nor the subjugation of Castriota[76]; thus the Sultan pursued a conciliatory policy and signed a peace treaty with the Albanians. Now Castriota was assuredly the victor, a crusader on behalf of Christian Europe, a true “Champion of Christendom”, as the Roman Papacy called him after the Ottomans had taken Constantinople[77]. But January 1468 proved to be catastrophic: the Albanian leader went down with a bout of malignant fever and died within a few days[78]. This was the finis Albaniae. In fact, the Ottomans then began to extend their possessions in that country; and in 1478 Scutari, i.e. the last important city, fell[79]. A year later Albanian independence was over[80]; and the islamization of the Albanians was already under way.
Paparrhigopoulos, in his famous Hestia article, by no means minced his words: George Castriota was unique among the Balkan “crusaders” never to have been defeated by the Ottomans, given that the last basileus and autocrator[81], Constantine XI Palaeologus, was killed on the walls of his capital and John Hunyadi was eventually overcome, in 1448, in yet another Kosovo battle. Nevertheless the true misfortune of George Castriota was the fact that he did not have a historian worthy of him to set down his achievements[82]; and so this leader, “whose ancestry was Slavic”[83], has been overshadowed by his ‘fellow-heroes’, i.e. John Hunyadi and Constantine XI.
One could easily foresee that the revelation of Castriota’s
Slavic lineage would be a scandal in Greece, as it truly was. In 1876 the whole of Europe was preoccupied with the Eastern Question; and the Greeks were plainly divided. The élites were on the side of the Western Powers, whereas the populace supported the Russians and, generally speaking, the Slavs against the Sublime Porte. War was imminent[84]. As a result, Paparrhigopoulos’ declaration that the national hero of the Albanians[85], who had ascendancy over Mehmet II the Conqueror, was of Slavic stock brought the stormy political discussions of those days to a climax. During the four months after Paparrhigopoulos had published his findings on the subject of Castriota’s ancestry, he was in the eye of the tempest. Greek public opinion, which had acclaimed him, now was launching bitter attacks against his very person[86]. Practically speaking, he was in the same position as Fallmerayer had been in the 1850’s and the 1860’s. Nevertheless he did not give up; and in October 1876 he published in Hestia another article, in which Greeks and Slavs were painted as unique, outstanding peoples and, of course, as equals. But this time he was astute enough to couple his admiration for the Slavs with a trumpeting insistency on the unbroken continuity of Greek History[87]; and of course this (indisputable) continuity of Greek History was interpreted as a reassertion of Modern Greeks’ linear descent from the ancient Hellenes; and thus the whole affair fell into oblivion.




Nonetheless Paparrhigopoulos was right; for in the main written sources concerning Castriota’s life, his father’s name is given as Ivan[88]; and even today everyone is able to recognize the name Ivan as the Slavic word for “John”. Nevertheless, the key to the mystery of his abrupt admiration for George Castriota is to be found in the last words of his Hestia article: Scanderbeg, undoubtedly of Slavic stock and a Roman Catholic, was a Christian hero; and this is enough for History to record a good opinion of him. Politics is something different, in fact another realm[89]. In other words, Paparrhigopoulos now clearly separated the historian’s task from the politician’s one; and in doing so, he was begging Fallmerayer’s pardon posthumously.
Why? Because the latter was the first to underline both the Slavic origin of the Castriota family and his adhesion to the Roman Church; moreover he was the first in Modern Europe to stress the importance of Scanderbeg’s struggle. In fact, in his monograph on the “Albanian element in Greece”, published a mere year before his death[90], he clarified as follows:
a) The father of George Castriota was Ivan Castriota, that means he was a Slav; and he produced as evidence the very passage of the Byzantine source which Paparrhigopoulos put forward sixteen years later[91].
b) The origins of the Castriota family were either Kastorja[92] based or Kastrati based, i.e. a village in Albania[93]; in any case they were named after the place of their extraction.
c) Not only Scanderbeg’s father but even his mother was a Slav - from a place “between Macedonia and Bulgaria”. This is why George Castriota’s mother tongues were both Albanian and Slavic[94]. Furthermore, Scanderbeg’s sister, Mara, married Stephan Czernovitsch, the ruler of Montenegro; and so she gave birth to the well - known Czernojevitsch Montenegrin House[95].
d) The Slavs’ presence in Albania (and Epirus) is explained roughly by means of the same arguments as those used to explain the Slavic infiltration into the Morea/Peloponnese [96] .
e) George Castriota not only became a Roman Catholic but also became somehow the Commander-in-Chief of the Western Christians against the Turks[97]; as such his struggle was a life and death one[98].
As explained, Paparrhigopoulos summarized the above theses of Fallmerayer and brought out Castriota’s image as painted by the German scholar; and the very fact that he did not give up in spite of the attacks launched upon him by sections of the Athens press honours both the Greek historian as well as the memory of his former opponent. Nonetheless, the affair of G.Castriota’s origin seemed to have been sunk into oblivion until a tragic figure rescued it in the late 1950’s.





George Soulis was now the persona dramatis. He was born in Yanina, Epirus, in 1927. His father, Christos, was a gymnasiarch[99] and a well known scholar who had a great influence on him during his early years. Thus he received his first training at his father’s hands; and after the end of WW 2 he attended the Philosophical School of the university of Athens.
Soulis’ family was an old one in Epirus; and, so to speak, a typical one in that remote, mountainous region bordering on Albania. Since Antiquity Epirus has been regarded as the cradle of the Greek race[100]. But in the 1940’s everything there was in turmoil. Leftist guerrillas began fighting against government troops as early as 1945; and so G.Soulis’ decision to study in Athens was something of an escape. Nevertheless Athens’ intellectual climate in those days was not favourable to him; and he left for the United States. He studied at Columbia University, obtained his doctorate at Harvard and, from 1957 to 1961, he served as Librarian of Dumbarton Oaks, the famous Harvard byzantine outpost[101]. Since the years of his early education, he had developed a love for Mediaeval Greece and he proved to be able to combine this love with a real sympathy for the Slavic peoples[102]. Thanks to his initiative, Dumbarton Oaks acquired rare Russian publications[103]; and as a result, in 1965 he was offered, by the University of California, at Berkeley, a professorship in Byzantine and Mediaeval Slavic History. He accepted; and it was at Berkeley that he died of a heart attack the following year.
While still the librarian of Dumbarton Oaks, he undertook to continue Paparrhigopoulos’ work as far as George Castriota was concerned. His starting point was the very assertion of Paparrhigopoulos’ that the Albanian leader’s posthumous fame was not worthy of his true achievements; he laid stress on his father’s name, undoubtedly Ivan; and he closed once for all the debate about his origin: George Castriota was of Slavic extraction[104].
Unlike Paparrhigopoulos, Soulis had strong arguments in favour of Castriota’s slavic ancestry. Halil İnalcık, the well known Turkish historian, had discovered in the early 1950’s a register of the Christian lords in Albania[105]; and simultaneously a sixteenth century Greek chronicle, by an anonymous author, was published in Athens[106]. In both sources, George Castriota’s father was spelled Ivan.
The young scholar was quick to do further research into the Albanian hero and, quite possibly, would had written his biography, had he not already been at death’s door.




Once upon a time? Vaguely, imprecisely? Not at all. As happened with Xenophon’s famous description, we are now able to establish firmly the cause, the date, and the corollary of the event. Greece has passed through many vicissitudes since Roman domination was stamped on her. The “barbarian” invasions and the successive epidemic outbreaks of deadly diseases decimated the indigenous populations[108]. The story could be considered to be one of rapid decline[109]. Moreover, the Byzantine monarchy discouraged municipal development mainly from the seventh century on; and as a result the so-called burgher class[110] practically disappeared[111]. As a corollary, the towns dwindled gradually (but rapidly) either becoming villages or castra/castella, namely fortified sites. Roads, bridges, and aqueducts, typical features in a Roman landscape, were neglected and began falling into decay. Communications in the mountainous regions became difficult; simultaneously, numerous plots of land, in wide areas, lacked culture. The invaders who had early overrun the Eastern (or Byzantine) empire, themselves often numerically inconsiderable, were accompanied by Slavonic auxiliaries or dependents; thus many regions devastated by their passage were repeopled by the Slavs who followed them[112]. Nonetheless, let us not underestimate those Slavonic tribes’ ability to raid Greek lands without foreign leadership. As early as the sixth century, they were allegedly the first to infiltrate themselves in great numbers through the porous (though militarily watched over) limes into the Empire[113]; and around the mid- eighth century they spread rapidly over the Peloponnese, a disease- ridden peninsula, and as a result drastically reduced in number the population in that time[114]. They were impressed by the sea surrounding the beautiful peninsula, all the more so because the Slavs, as far as we are able to know, have a passion for the great tracts of water (the sea included); and they named the whole country after their own word for the sea. But this was an obviously symbolic act; for the Greeks, from time immemorial, have been inseparably linked to the sea; and the very cry The Sea has been nothing other than a password signifying admission to the Greek world. Thus began the Slavic invaders’ integration into the Greek nation.
There is…no doubt that … the Greek lands were occupied by people of whom the overwhelming majority, whatever their ethnic ancestry, spoke Greek, belonged to the Orthodox Church and called themselves Romioi[115], meaning Greeks. Nor is it possible to believe that not a single one of them had an ancestor living in on Greek soil two thousands years ago. This is the way a brilliant scholar who knew the Greeks and their fatherland as very few did, epitomized the essence of the remarkably long history of the Greeks[116].
He was absolutely right. And so the main question that emerges from the imbroglios of the History - Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern - is the following: given that both, Fallmerayer and Paparrhigopoulos, were right, why then did they vie so vehemently one against the other? And why are their respective theses, even today, regarded as at variance, when they simply complement one another? Because Paparrhigopoulos went even further than his German colleague; for he, as one can see in the Ivan Castriota affair, virtually recognized the truth of mass Slav Mediaeval settlements throughout almost the whole of Greece.
The answer is simple: Political coincidences. Nonetheless, as Paparrhigopoulos himself emphasized, the realms of History are different from political ones.