The foreign origins of the Great Idea
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The foreign origins of the Great Idea
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18 March 2021
Abstract
A common place of our historiography for the Great Idea is, since the time of Paparrigopoulos, that the paternity of the term belongs to Ioannis Kolettis, during his speech at the National Assembly, on 14 January 1844, regarding the third article of the constitution that defined the features of the Greek citizen. The ambiguity of the expression used by Kolettis and the paths of the Great Idea until 1922 gave rise to various interpretations (irredentism, enlightenment of the East, national unity), typologies and periodisations.
The lecture refers to the early presence of the Great Idea, even to the most extreme version that of the recovery of the Byzantine throne and the creation of the Greek Empire, in publications and letters of Greek and Bavarian scholars and politicians, several years before its official articulation. In particular, evidence of the so-called “eternal dream of our total national restoration” is pointed out, as early as 1821, in writings of Ludwig I of Bavaria and the philhellene Friedrich Thiersch, who had mediated for the election of Otto to the Greek throne; the member of the regency Georg Ludwig von Maurer and the first rector of the Ottonian University Konstantinos Schinas; in the correspondence of Kolettis with Thiersch and others.
The discussion of realistic and extreme forms of the Great Idea, before it acquires its historical name, outside and far from Greece, in the context of European policy-making in the southeastern Mediterranean, reveals that a narrative that we consider completely national, such as the Great Idea, could have been a result of foreign origins, as a cultural “loan”, that was formed in other contexts and for different reasons.
(Edited and translated description from organiser’s website)
The lecture refers to the early presence of the Great Idea, even to the most extreme version that of the recovery of the Byzantine throne and the creation of the Greek Empire, in publications and letters of Greek and Bavarian scholars and politicians, several years before its official articulation. In particular, evidence of the so-called “eternal dream of our total national restoration” is pointed out, as early as 1821, in writings of Ludwig I of Bavaria and the philhellene Friedrich Thiersch, who had mediated for the election of Otto to the Greek throne; the member of the regency Georg Ludwig von Maurer and the first rector of the Ottonian University Konstantinos Schinas; in the correspondence of Kolettis with Thiersch and others.
The discussion of realistic and extreme forms of the Great Idea, before it acquires its historical name, outside and far from Greece, in the context of European policy-making in the southeastern Mediterranean, reveals that a narrative that we consider completely national, such as the Great Idea, could have been a result of foreign origins, as a cultural “loan”, that was formed in other contexts and for different reasons.
(Edited and translated description from organiser’s website)
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00:29:08
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