Summary

The heroes glorified in Greek schoolbooks — Botsaris, Bouboulina, Miaoulis, Tzavellas, Kanaris — were predominantly Albanian-speaking. They swore, sang, commanded ships, and dictated dictionaries in Albanian, while the Souliots fought under Albanian codes of besa and often felt greater kinship with Albanian Muslims than with Greeks. “Greekness” was largely a foreign-imposed label: a commercial-religious category rebooted by European philhellenes and Parisian intellectuals. The new state received a Bavarian king, borders drawn in London, a purified artificial language, and renamed places to erase Albanian, Slavic, and Turkish layers. Modern Greece was not an ancient rebirth but Europe’s prototype of a manufactured nation forged from a multi-ethnic patchwork.

Open any Greek schoolbook and you’ll meet the heroes of 1821: Botsaris, Tzavellas, Androutsos, Karaiskakis, Miaoulis, Kanaris, Bouboulina. What the schoolbooks leave out is that they spoke Greek in business but swore, sang and dreamed in Albanian. The pantheon of “Greek” liberators was, in everyday life, an Albanian-speaking warrior class — and they made no secret of it.

Laskarina Bouboulina, the legendary woman admiral of the “Greek” Revolution, was the Albanian-speaking widow of a merchant from Spetses — and she was no exception. Most of the celebrated sea captains of Hydra, Spetses and Psara, the islands that built the rebel fleet, used Albanian as readily as Greek. The navy that defeated the Ottoman fleet was, on its own decks, an Albanian-speaking force flying a flag that did not yet exist.

The Souliots, those mountain warriors immortalized as the soul of Greek resistance, were Christian Albanian clans — Tzavellas (Xhavella), Botsaris (Boçari) — who fought first for Venice, then France, Russia, Britain and even Ali Pasha before they ever fought for “Greece.” When Russia recruited them, the imperial authorities printed a military manual in their honor that named their “national hero” not Leonidas but Skanderbeg, the Albanian.

Whole regions of the Morea — the supposed cradle of Hellenism — were Albanian-speaking deep into the 19th century, with villages and neighborhoods still Albanian into the 20th. Markos Botsaris, hailed as a “Greek Garibaldi” and turned into porcelain figurines across Europe after his death in battle, sat down with the French diplomat Pouqueville and dictated an Albanian–Greek wordbook to his nephew. The hero died in his Albanian-style kilt.

In imperial Russia, the Orthodox merchant-warriors who fought the Ottomans were officially the “Albanian Force” (Arnautskoe voisko) — they spoke Albanian, called themselves Arnauts, and were paid as Albanians. A generation later, with no change in personnel, the same regiment was renamed the “Greek Infantry Division.” The men did not become Greek; the paperwork did. Greekness here was a bureaucratic act, performed on Albanian bodies.

Kotsonis is blunt: “Like many nations, the idea of a coherent Greek people began as a foreign import.” European travelers, classicists and spies arrived in the Ottoman Balkans clutching maps with ancient names, looking for Spartans and Thebans. They couldn’t find them — so they relabeled the Orthodox Christians they met as “Greeks.” The Greek nation was first imagined in Paris, London and St. Petersburg, then exported to the Aegean.

Before 1821, “Greek” was not blood — it was a job. From Cairo to the Danube, “Romios,” “Rum,” even “Görög” in Hungarian, all meant essentially “merchant.” Vlachs, Albanians, Slavs, even Roma who spoke Greek for trade were registered as Greeks; Albanian-speaking islanders, Tatar-speaking Christians of Mariupol, all became Greek by occupation and confession. Greekness was a category of commerce long before it was a nation.

Modern Greece was not won — it was decreed. At conferences in London and St. Petersburg the Greeks were not invited to, the Great Powers drew the borders, signed the protocols, sent fleets to Navarino, then handed the new state an absolute monarch chosen in a Bavarian salon: Otto of Wittelsbach, a Catholic teenager who arrived speaking no Greek. The country was a European product, delivered to its inhabitants pre-assembled.

The first governor of independent Greece, Ioannis Kapodistrias, spoke Italian as his native tongue and his Greek was halting. The most influential revolutionary ideologue, Rigas Velestinlis, was a Vlach. Souliot commanders dictated dictionaries in Albanian. As Kotsonis puts it, somehow this “Tower of Babel” — Italians, Vlachs, Albanians, Slavs, Romaic-speakers — was forged into a single Hellenic nation. “Greekness” was never one thing; it was made one.

Even modern Greek itself is artificial. After independence, Adamantios Korais and the new state engineered a “purified” language — katharevousa — to weld speakers of Albanian, Vlach, Slavic, Italian and Turkish into one imagined people. Place names were rewritten to erase Albanian, Slavic and Turkish heritage; Tripolitsa became Tripoli, Anapli became Nafplio. Greekness wasn’t inherited — it was legislated, standardized and taught in classrooms.

The “fustanella” kilt today sold in Athens souvenir shops as the timeless costume of the Hellene was, in 1821, simply Albanian-style military dress. When Lord Byron wanted to look the part of a Greek warrior, his tailors stitched him an Albanian kilt and vest. Even the Roumeliot mercenaries who descended on Nafplio in 1824 flooded the town with “ornamented weapons, gold-braided vests, and Albanian-style kilts.” The national costume of Greece is Albanian.

Markos Botsaris, the Souliot warlord turned “Greek martyr,” was offered a colonel’s commission by the Greek government in 1822. He refused — and tore the document up while swearing in Albanian, the only language that could carry his contempt. The man whose face was painted on European porcelain plates as the soul of revived Hellas didn’t even cuss in Greek.

The code by which Souliot fighters lived and died was not Greek at all. They called it, in Albanian, besa pre besa — word for word, oath for oath. Loyalty, vengeance and honor among these “Greek” heroes were governed by an Albanian moral vocabulary that had no equivalent in Romaic Greek. Their mythology was Albanian; only the labels were translated.

Even Mehmed Ali, founder of modern Egypt and the man who very nearly crushed the Greek Revolution, was probably an Albanian from Kavala. The army that brought him to power was Albanian. So was the army that defeated the Greeks at Missolonghi. The 1820s were not a Greek-vs-Turk war — they were, in large measure, Albanians fighting Albanians, with both sides claiming a different empire’s flag.

Ioannis Kolettis, who would become Greece’s first elected prime minister and father of the irredentist “Megali Idea,” learned his politics not in Athens but in the court of the Albanian Ali Pasha of Yanena. So did Androutsos. So did Karaiskakis. So did virtually every Souliot clan. The architects of the Greek state were apprentices of an Albanian warlord.

Look at the names on the map of “ancient” Greece. Tripoli was Tripolitsa, before that the Slavic Drobolicha. Nafplio was Anapli, Mora Yenişehir, Napoli di Romagna. Piraeus was Porto Leone and Aslan Liman. After 1830, the new Greek state systematically renamed places to “remove a Turkish, Albanian, or Slavic heritage” and reclaim a Classical past. The map of Greece is a forgery on top of a palimpsest.

Even the word “Hellene” — the name modern Greeks proudly call themselves — had been dead for centuries. In 1821 it was dusted off by “a handful of Peloponnesian men” (in the words of one revolutionary notable) and applied to the rebelling Christians. Before then, people called themselves Romioi, Rum, Graiki, Arvanites, Vlachs, Maniots — anything but Hellenes. The continuity is rhetorical; the rupture is real.

The Greeks of Mariupol, brought to Russia in 1779 as the model “Orthodox Greek” community, dressed like Tatars, spoke Tatar at home, and wrote their liturgy in Tatar using Greek letters. The Russian Empire stamped them “Greek” anyway. Greekness, again and again in this book, is shown as an administrative category that absorbs whoever is needed — Tatar speakers, Albanian speakers, Vlach speakers — under one label.

The “Greek” cause was sold to Europe through porcelain. French, Belgian and German factories mass-produced figurines of Botsaris and Bouboulina, dinner plates with battle scenes, salt-and-pepper shakers in the shape of Greek heroes. A Bavarian housewife who had never met a Greek could season her food with Miaoulis. Hellenism — the dream that brought the volunteers, the loans, the fleets, the king — was a European retail product before it was a nation.

Kotsonis’s verdict, after 393 pages and ten years of archives in Paris, London, Geneva, Athens, Corfu and Odessa, is unsparing: “Greece, it turned out, was the rule.” A patchwork of Albanians, Vlachs, Slavs, Italians, Tatars and Romaic-speaking Christians was simplified, by foreign decrees and domestic violence, into one Greek nation — and that template was then exported across the Balkans. Modern Greece is not the survival of an ancient people. It is the prototype of the modern nation-state.

Reference

Yanni Kotsonis (New York University), ‘The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism’ (Princeton, 2025)