[ALBSA-Info] The Independent

[Agron Alibali]

Independent on Sunday (London) 
May 13, 2001, Sunday 
FEATURES; Pg. 43 
BOOKS: BLACK FARCE AND HIGH TRAGEDY; 
 THE LATEST CHRONICLER OF THE GREEK STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM IS PRONE TO BOUTS OF DELUSIVE ROMANTICISM. BUT THEN, RECALLS MURROUGH O'BRIEN, SO ARE THE GREEKS THEMSELVES 

Murrough O'brien 




The Flame of Freedom: The Greek War of Independence 

1821-1833 

By David Brewer 

JOHN MURRAY pounds 25 

At the beginning of the world, the nations stepped forward to receive their gifts from God. God was sitting - why is he always sitting? - on his throne when the Greeks, late as ever, rushed in breathlessly and demanded the gift of power. No dice, it seemed. Power had been given to the Turks, Labour to the Bulgarians, Commerce to the Jews, cunning to the Armenians... there was, in fact, very little left. "By what intrigue," roared the dispossessed Greeks, "have we been robbed of our due?" "Very well," answered God, "since you yourselves have named it, I give you intrigue as your birthright." 

God is renowned for his saturnine sense of humour, but to the ordinary Greeks living during the Greek war of independence, this witticism must have left a taste of wormwood in their mouths. As David Brewer reveals in The Flame of Freedom, they could have done with less intriguing from their leaders and rather more altruism. None the less, the story of the six-year struggle against the Ottoman Empire is characterised by courage as well as cowardice, by selflessness as much as self -regard. 

In his acknowledgements, Brewer expresses gratitude to one Nikos Kokantzis for "pointing out ways in which I may have unwittingly offended Greek susceptibilities". This does not bode well. Happily, the author seems concerned with presenting the facts as he understands them, without regard for gaudy myth-making, in an elegant and sympathetic study of the period which, however, leaves many questions unanswered and some evidence unexamined. 

The Greek rebellion is defined by black farce and high tragedy. A group of mercantile misfits forms the Philiki Etairia, the friendly society, and propose to start a revolution in Greece from outside Greece, with no support from anyone of substance; brigands who served the Turks use their skills against the Turks, and turn and turn again; at a time when there is no nation to govern, a national government is formed, espousing the highest ideals of European liberalism, only to scatter like an ant colony menaced by boiling water at the approach of the enemy; bright-eyed young Europeans rush to the defence of Greek liberty, only to discover that the Greeks are, oddly, no longer a nation of high-minded philosophers in togas, but a demoralised and desperate people whose hearts are Byzantine and whose ethics are Ottoman. Freebooters, aristocrats, adventurers and ascetics all collaborate - just - in a venture which fulfills the old prophecy, first uttered at the time of the fall of Constantinople, that Turkish domination of Greece would last only 400 years. 

This book is rich in examples of humanity and humour: stories of besieged and besiegers meeting for a quiet smoke outside the walls of a city, of beleaguered Turks wishing the enemy captain long life at his wedding. Most moving of all, perhaps, is the tale of the old woman on her deathbed asking to be buried in the clothes which her family would find in a locked chest. They find, instead of finery, the rough men's clothing which she had worn when, after the most heroic defence and the loss of thousands of Turkish lives, the Greeks of Missolonghi finally forced their way out of the doomed town. 

Brewer is conscientious in covering as much as he can of the motives of the other participants in this struggle - the great powers of Europe, the Ottoman Empire and its vassals - but he fails to account for a number of the more bizarre episodes. Quite why the firebrand Ypsilantis thought that he could begin the struggle for Greek independence in the Danubian principalities, whose inhabitants had good reason to loathe the Greeks, remains obscure. Likewise, Brewer finds it odd that the Orthodox Patriarch Grigorios should have been hanged by the Sultan when he had apparently done his best to recall his countrymen to obedience. There is in fact a simple explanation for this: some days before his execution, Grigorios had convened a council of his fellow hierarchs which had found itself unable to condemn the Greek revolt. The Sultan's fury, though savagely expressed, was not altogether baseless. 

The word "talisman" occurs frequently, but Brewer does not use it to show the nature of the Greek mentality: Byron was a talisman, but his effect on the result of the war was negligible; Bishop Yermanos was a talisman, but he died unmourned. The Greeks to this day are more concerned with the shadows cast by their monuments than with the stones themselves, and the Western failure to understand this has led to much avoidable acrimony. But Brewer himself is prone to a similarly delusive romanticism. At the beginning of chapter 10, he asserts that the Greeks have always been sailors. Later he maintains that the Turks are almost genetically unsuited to the sea. Aside from the very suspect notion of immutable racial characteristics which underlies these two complementary opinions, they fly against the facts of history; had the medieval Greeks been more alert to the possibilities of maritime commerce, then they might not have have been so thoroughly mauled by the sailing nations of Italy; and had the Turks not established absolute control over the Mediterranean by virtue of their incomparable navy then they would never have conquered North Africa. 

Like the landscape of the Peloponnese itself, the Greek war of independence shows mighty hills rising above depressingly arid valleys. Perhaps the Greeks are right: perhaps the most telling figure of the war is indeed the enigmatic Kolokotronis, that brave, brutal, honest, disingenuous, proud, subtle warrior who, for all his magnificent victories, did so much to undermine Greek unity when it was most needed, but who said, as the story now runs in Greece, "If we only remain united, why then we will reach even the walls of Constantinople!" 

"Greece expiring on the ruins of Missolonghi" (1852) by Eugene; Delacroix Independent on Sunday (London) 



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