Since the Accounting: A Chronicle of the Roman Khanate

Chapter 312 Just because you are too good

When people of later generations talk about the Balkans, they will think of endless ethnic conflicts and conflicts one after another.Guo Kang also once felt that it was necessary to seriously consider the special issues here.

However, as he came into contact with more Greeks, he began to wonder how the originator of Balkan nationalism defined this kind of thing.Are they really as powerful as they brag?

The current Greeks are a mess.And hundreds of years later, I'm afraid it will be a mess.In his world, Greek nationalists have long struggled to figure out who the Greeks are.

According to Paparigopoulos, the continuous history of Greece is based on the continuous development of the Greek language.So, the Greeks should make the distinction in terms of Greek.

But, on the other hand, religion is just as important.The earliest idea of ​​the Greeks when they restored their country was actually to establish a country similar to the Orthodox Federation.Religion, therefore, seems to be an element of distinction as well.

The combination of the two factors has produced many permutations and combinations: there are Greek-speaking Christians, and there are Turkic-speaking Orthodox Christians; tribes that use Greek letters but speak Turkic, and tribes that use Turkic letters but speak Greek...

In Crete and Asia Minor, such admixtures were common, and it was not at all clear whether they were Hellenized Turks or Turkified Greeks.From the perspective of later generations, these two kinds of people are the same in blood, and the Greeks at that time were even more unable to verify clearly what they were.

This complicated situation finally succeeded in fooling the Greeks.

In 1844, the independent and successful Greeks finally began to formulate a constitution-this time it was not a scam, but the new country really needed it.At this time, the Greeks put forward a strategic goal known as the "Great Ideal", which is roughly to establish a country that includes all Greeks.

In fact, this is an Eastern Rome with a different skin. Maybe it is afraid to call it Rome directly, so it uses this kind of nationalist narrative method to promote it.

However, the most important thing about Rome is the skin of the universal empire.Without the skin, no matter how imitated it is, it cannot be realized.Sure enough, the Greeks quickly encountered a problem: Should we give citizenship to those "arranged and combined" Greeks whose identities are not clear?

In Roman times, this was not a problem.But for Greece, it is a very troublesome issue related to the nature of the country.In the end, the Constituent Assembly refused to grant them full political power. "Great ideal" hasn't started yet, and people are being fired...

Religion is just as bad.In accordance with the requirements of national independence, the Greeks built their own Greek church.But if you do it, so can others.The Bulgarians quickly learned and established an independent diocese in Bulgaria, and even forced the Universal Patriarch controlled by Ottoman to approve it.Then, they started the traditional performance: who is the Greek and who is the Bulgarian?

At the junction of the two regions, there is no clear boundary between the two groups.If you want to make a distinction, you have to look at the details of the ceremony.Both sides quickly realized that many armed personnel rushed here and forced the locals to adopt their own rituals, thinking that this would expand their sphere of influence.

Under the persecution of the thugs on both sides, the local priests and residents have become experts in the law: when the Greek thugs came, they performed the ceremony with Greek etiquette and showed them.When the Greeks are gone and the Bulgarian thugs come again, quickly switch to the Bulgarian ceremony.In the end, I don't know how to divide this stuff, so I can only resort to violent means and directly fight each other.

Therefore, the Greeks wanted their nationalism to take into account both language and religion, but in terms of language and religion, they did not have much influence on the outside world, and fell into an embarrassing situation.

So, is this theory valid internally?

Of course it's even more useless.

The internal strife among the Greeks has never stopped at all, and it doesn't even affect their own people.At the outbreak of the War of Independence, there were enough European volunteers to form a separate army, but they were quickly exhausted: in the first direct confrontation with the Ottomans, the European volunteers lined up in line according to the military rules of the time. Formation array.However, as soon as the fighting started, the Greek soldiers in charge of the two wings fired two shots and all ran away.The Greek nobles who commanded the entire army disappeared without giving any orders.

The European volunteers who were left in place were too formal. Even if they were hit, they continued to shoot at each other before they received the order from the commander. As a result, it was too late to react.In the end, they failed to retreat in time and were almost wiped out by the Ottoman army.After that, the European "Jingxi" didn't dare to come.In the end, the big powers stopped acting and ended up directly.Russia sent troops into the Balkans, and France sent troops to the Peloponnese to force Ottomans to submit.

The old nobles were unreliable, and the foreign volunteers were scared away, leaving the Greeks to rely on bandits for their own army.However, these people are as cruel to outsiders as to their own people, and even after the founding of the country, they have not obeyed control all year round.By 1870, bandits had robbed a traveling party of British aristocrats just a few miles outside Athens, killing several of them and causing serious diplomatic problems.

But the bandits did play an important role in the process of the founding of Greece. They belonged to "national heroes", and it was too late to sing them, and there was no way to manage them.This kind of banditry has also spread in the Greek army for a long time, causing their performance to be quite different from the always brutal Osman.

No matter in this country or abroad, there are people who question this trend, thinking that it is obviously harmful to bind Greek nationalism with cruelty to others, and it will only undermine the realization of "great ideals".Unfortunately, this kind of problem has been accumulated for a long time.

Judging from the results, the Greeks ultimately failed to build an ideal single-nation state-the Turks who were exiled to the Balkans by the Ottomans had a blood feud with the Ottoman regime.They fought the Ottoman army more vigorously than the Greeks, so the Greeks had to accept them.

It stands to reason that there is more than one such person.The Turkic and Armenian tribes in Asia Minor have also suffered hundreds of years of massacre and persecution by the Ottoman regime, and they are the suffering brothers of the Greeks.Many people are willing to resist Ottoman, but also take a wait-and-see attitude towards Greece's counteroffensive.

However, the Greek army played on the tradition of not finding the right person for revenge, and did not make any distinctions at all. Regardless of the standpoint of these "outsiders", they all treated them with indiscriminate violence and killing.As a result, his own strength continued to weaken, but he pushed the locals to the opposite side.

In the end, once the support of the great powers was cut off, the Greek army, which lacked a foundation, had no fault tolerance rate at all.Instead, the new Turkish state took hold under the command of Kemal and supported by the Soviet Union.The Greek army quickly collapsed.

Therefore, Guo Kang feels that there is really nothing worth advocating in the Balkans.Their nationalist theory is somewhat more advanced than the previous slogans, but in the final analysis, it is just that, and it has not achieved the level of qualitative change that people expected.

The local ethnic groups are constantly splitting up and killing each other. It is not so much the power of the new theory as it is a group of Jie and Zhou who do not kill each other.As long as there is a family that is a little bit more human, it will not be in such a mess.

The Greeks have been making trouble for 200 years, and finally they have to sneak "back to Rome".They accepted the Turkic people in the country, accepted the vernacular Greek, and began to fly the Eastern Roman flag everywhere.This is also where Guo Kang's confidence in making a judgment lies-the Greeks really can't make a fuss.

(End of this chapter)