By: Dorian Koçi. Translation Petrit Latifi
The historical theses of the Bavarian academic, Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, shook European historical thought in the second half of the 19th century. For the first time, after the formation of the Greek national state, Greek continuity in its historical territories was questioned and special importance was given to the invasions of Slavic and Albanian peoples into the territories of what was known as ancient Greece.
Fallmerayer, in his treatise “The Albanian Element in Greece” which was published in three volumes of the Proceedings of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in the years 1857-1860, at the same time dealt extensively with the origin of the Albanians.
According to him, after the comprehensive revolutionary upheavals brought by the storms of barbarian invasions and the massive settlement of Slavs in the Balkans, nothing remained of the heritage of ancient Greece except land and ruins, while in the folds of this people “not a single drop of Greek blood flowed”, and for this reason there could be no question of any kind of historical continuity, especially since in the 14th century a second massive invasion, now Albanian, had covered the deepest Greek regions up to the Peloponnese.
He continued that now a new tribe lives there, fraternized with the great tribe of Slavs. As a second element of the population there, the Albanians are to be considered… The Scythian Slavs, the Illyrian Arnauts, the children of the northern countries of the same blood with the Serbs and Bulgarians, the Dalmatians and Muscovites (Russians) are those we call Hellenes today.
It was natural that this observation and affirmation of this historical interruption of the Greek ethnos and the evidence of the ancient origin of the Albanians caused a reaction in the intellectual circles of Europe, which in most cases 20 years after the triumph of the Greek Revolution and the construction of the Greek national state, had been strong advocates of the construction of a new Greece according to a model and ideal that would represent the Greek spirit of antiquity studied in the departments of European universities.
The European fascination, towards the revival of Greece, had turned into a current of European political and cultural thought of the beginning of the 19th century, known as Philohellenism, whose exponents had been some of the most famous figures of European culture, such as Lord Byron, Chateaubriand, Goethe, Manzini, etc.
In the publication of “Folk Songs of Modern Greece” in Paris in 1824, by Claude Fauriel, two years after the massacre of Chios and the brutal suppression of the first Greek uprising, the author insists that the Greek nation possesses sufficiently everything that has been held as the indispensable heritage of a nation worthy of the name, a language and a culture that ensures continuity with great descendants, a living folk literature, rooted in the soil and spirit of the nation.
This statement and other publications in the European press of the time testify to how deep the process of standardization of different cultural, linguistic and geographical identities had extended in European thought when the realities on the ground were different from what was claimed. This is evident from the perception held by men of letters who had lived in Greece, including the German historian Fallmerayer.
In a letter of February 11, 1834, he says that the whole of Attica is populated by Albanian speakers and in the capital we find people who know Greek only because they need it. In Boeotia, with the exception of three localities, the same situation is observed.
Of course, this definition expressed a known reality of the time, but that over time changed to the detriment of the Arvanite population. The Arvanite population, present since the 13th century in Greece, went through various processes of assimilation at the time of the formation of the Greek national state.
These assimilation processes were based on those characteristics that had helped to establish the Greek nation as a religious identity – the immediate urbanization that the new Greek kingdom entered and especially the region of Attica where this population was more concentrated.
As Orthodox Christians that they were, and since Orthodoxy was at the foundation of the emerging modern Hellenic identity, many of them had participated in the liberation struggle, some of them even becoming its leaders. As in previous centuries, Hellenism was aided by the mixing and non-compactness of some populations, as well as the process of urbanization.
The lack of a literary tradition also acted in this direction. The network of Greek education that was developing was, together with the Church, a powerful engine of Hellenization, especially when efforts were increased to educate girls. But what also helped to erase the Albanian language was its social devaluation, at least in the public sphere: speaking Albanian meant belonging to the lowest stratum of neo-Hellenic society, that is, to be a peasant or a sailor, while speaking Greek meant being a “true Hellene”.
Fallmerayer’s work was not unknown to Albanian Renaissance thought. Since it was Considered the first more or less extensive and elaborate history of the Albanians, it was part of the corpus of works of Albanological studies, which were the result of the European intellectual cosmopolitanism of the mid-19th century. As Anne-Maria Therese rightly underlines in her work “The Creation of National Identities: Europe of the 18th-19th Centuries”, one of the consequences of intellectual cosmopolitanism is the assistance to nations in the East, whose intellectual environments are not yet sufficiently equipped to undertake, without support, the construction of their antiquity and their language.
In the Albanian reality of national awakening, his work was classified in support of the Pelasgian thesis, through the revocation of the ancient past, equivalent to that of the Greeks and Latins.
The national poet Naim Frashëri, in the preface to the translation of the First Song of Homer’s “Iliad” in 1896, mentions Fallmerayer and other foreign scholars who have contributed to the study of Albanian culture and language. The Pelasgian thesis in the mid-19th century actually represented a double concern. It reflected a geostrategic concern towards Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism that were fighting for territories in the Balkans.
The mid-19th century and the beginning of the 20th century are the years of nationalism in the Balkans, but also of the geostrategic and political interests of the Great Powers, which are trying to create client states in the territories of the Ottoman Empire that are being liberated one by one under the fire of successive uprisings. First, Greece, which gained independence but was placed under Bavarian cultural tutelage, and later the geostrategic interests of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – the empire of coexistence of many peoples that quickly found itself under the flames of nationalisms arising among its numerous populations but also under the imperialist desire to expand further south – formed what is called the Germanic cultural front in Eastern Europe.
In its contacts with the populations of the Balkans, immediately after the Peace of Karlovci on January 26, 1699, the Holy Austrian Empire would watch with great interest their cultural development.
Against Pan-Germanism in the Balkans, Pan-Slavism was aligned with its unifying ideology of Slavic peoples. Secondly, it was a scientific concern since, as Dora D’Istria rightly observed, it was considered a science that has just been born in our days and like all other sciences it has very sound foundations in philology and comparative mythology, in the examination of moral and physical characters, in primitive archaeology, in national traditions, etc.
So, as seen in the middle of the 19th century, the Pelasgian origin was an almost tangible scientific reality to which important representatives of the Albanian elite could not be indifferent, but the mixing with it of his name was exaggerated. His work was admirable and remains admirable even today according to Franc Babinger, the well-known Albanologist who calls it the force of interpretation and expresses about the language used that the beauty of his language leaves one speechless.
However, despite the various mentions or citations of Fallmerayer’s work by various exponents of Albanian culture, we find a complete academic portrait of the Albanian world in the 1980s of the last century, in the lecture of Professor Aleks Buda, “J.P. Fallmerayer and the medieval history of the Albanians” held at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 1981 and published in Historical Writings 3, pp. 164-184.
According to Buda, despite the objections and accusations addressed to him by Greek public opinion, Fallmerayer and his thesis in no way aimed at a moral devaluation and a subversion of the autochthonous national element. Professor Buda, after pointing out Fallmerayer’s enlightenment and republican formation as a participant in the 1848-1849 revolution, and consequently also a supporter of the freedom of the new nations that were emerging, underlines the fact that his academic positions should be sought first and foremost in the epistemological plane.
It is in this plane that Buda understands and rightly supports the methodological questions that Fallmerayer posed: how could historiography claim, after all these upheavals, that between a Pericles and a Kolokotron in Greece, between Gent and Teuta and Skanderbeg in Albania, there could be a direct, uninterrupted ethnic continuity?
However, despite the fact of the correctness of the methodological approach to these questions, Buda underlines another authoritative fact based on new historical findings and research, that the thesis of the absolute lack of ethno-cultural continuity that applied to Greece, as well as to other autochthonous populations of the Daco-Romanians, cannot be maintained among the Albanians. When it comes to the Albanians, he bases his argument of Illyrian-Arbër continuity on the discovery of the Koman culture, which he considers as an eloquent link of the medieval continuity.
s ancient inhabitants and their Arbër successors; a culture with a temporal extension from the 7th to the 9th century and with a fairly wide territorial extension from the Albanian Alps to the southern shores of the Adriatic Sea and the Vjosa valley.
According to Buda, the Koman Culture was a culture of a city and village population, coastal and mountainous, rooted in ancient tradition and with innovations, with elements inherited from the Illyrian Halshatian culture of iron and from the provincial Roman and Paleo-Byzantine culture, where Slavic elements only appear as isolated elements and not as a compact culture.
This very important conclusion of Albanian historical and archaeological science is also illustrated by linguistic studies of toponymy, where Buda gives the example of the cities included in the Koman Culture which, as Albanian appellations, prove the ethnic character of their inhabitants. He brings the example of the name of the city of Kruja, a metastasis of the ancient Albanopolis, one of the centers of Arbër culture documented since the 9th century.
Buda’s merit is that through scientific seriousness and multidisciplinary study he gives us a complete portrait of the Bavarian academic and his work in Albanology. In this prism, the ethnic toponymy of the name Arbër is also seen, their first mention and their geographical distribution. Buda opposes Fallmerayer’s opinion based on the theory of the ebb and flow of Slavic floods and the concentration of their political powers and which implies that in moments of weakening of this power, the unstoppable strengthening of the Albanians began by scrutinizing with academic scrupulousness in historical annals the historical facts and documents, as well as by analyzing the urban structure of Arbër society.
It is precisely in this analysis of this urban structure, which we do not find in Fallmerayer’s work, that the merit of Professor Buda’s historical thought lies, when he underlines the fact that Fallmerayer’s thought is without sufficient basis, as it falls prey to a stereotyped way of thinking that characterizes Albanians as a people of shepherds, while the documents speak of a differentiated feudal society of Albanian origin, such as the arhonds of Arbër who hold the high titles of the Byzantine feudal hierarchy as panhypersevasts, those “nobli viri”, counts, barons, prelates, burgesses, those peasant communities that the Byzantine rulers, the Angevins, etc., describe as “Albanian noblemen” with their characteristic ethnic names.
At the same time, Buda recognizes the merits of the Bavarian academic regarding the expansion of the name Arbër and Arbëri, an opinion which he paraphrases by excluding the laws of demographic violence and violent expansion, but rather as an expansion of relationships, of different forms in a territory with a unitary population that spoke the same language, had the same origin, customs and as a historically formed and consolidated community that found expression with the common name.
Fallmerayer encountered Albanians with the name Arvanit on the Morea peninsula, about which he wrote a work entitled “History of the Morea peninsula”. The phenomenon of their migration from Albania to Morea, in the light of the conclusions reached by the Bavarian academic, Professor Buda analyzes on a comparative level between the development of feudalism in Arbër, Greece and Germany.
He analyzes the causes and reasons why this Albanian demographic expansion could not be channeled into the service of the Arbëro feudal class settled in the new lands and the exploitation of this situation by the Greek feudal class to channel it into the population of barren and abandoned lands. Professor Buda extends the migratory movement of Albanians towards Greece to a comparative level when he takes the example of the German population of the peasant masses who, under this pressure of increasing feudal exploitation, migrated en masse eastward to places where they could find free land and easier social conditions.
Buda’s historical thought for the German historian Fallmerayer is in line with later European historical thought regarding his theory of historical continuity, as even two of his sympathetic biographers, the historian Ernst Molden, write that finally, as a result of all the new research on the entire complexity of this issue to a high degree of certainty, the idea can be expressed that Fallmerayer’s theory can claim accuracy only to a very limited extent.
The detailed analysis of Fallmerayer’s historical thought, compared with the latest sources in Albanology, makes it possible to portray and highlight his contribution to Albanology. “Habent sua fata libelli”, writes Professor Buda in his lecture, which is actually not only functional for Fallmerayer’s work but also for the professor’s own works in Albanology.
The greatest challenge of Albanian historical thought is precisely the reading and analysis of the structure of thought historical of the luminaries of national history writing through improving the writing of this history according to the latest documentation. Aleks Buda’s lecture on the contribution of the Bavarian academic Fallmerayer and the issues of the Albanian Middle Ages is a good model that has something to offer in this regard.
Reference
Balkan Academia 