Forefathers of our Greek Independence

[Prokomenos]

Forefathers of Greek Independence

Two individuals who are referred to most often with the first stirrings of the Greek ideas of independence, are Adhamantios Korais and Rigas Phereos. Rigas was born in 1757 in the Thessalian village of Velstino. After an impressive scholastic career Rigas went at the age of 23 to Wallachian in today's Romania, where he became secretary first to the principality's governor and then to an Austrian baron who brought him to Vienna for the first time in 1790. In Vienna where Rigas spent much of his years, provided both the stimulus and the opportunity for the expression of his revolutionary ideas. There was a large Greek community in Vienna, mainly merchants and students of science, who would meet at the city's Taverna ton Ellinon. Rigas had his revolutionary ideas printed in a Greek newspaper known as Ephimeris , and his revolutionary writings had to be printed secretly at night. He is known for two of his works dating from 1797, first a revolutionary hymn including an oath against tyranny which was used as hymn, and in a more philosophical a statement of the rights of man, combined with a proposed constitution for a new Greek republic.

The value of Riga's contribution to the Greek cause was that he took the principles underlying the American and French revolutionary declarations and adapted them for Greece. With the help of his compatriots in Vienna, he was able to print and distribute his calls for revolt. Three thousand copies of the revolutionary declaration, constitution and hymn were produced in October 1797, and the hymn was sung over the next two decades throughout the Greek Orthodox world, even it was said in the Turkish capital. While Rigas remained in Vienna had be able to escape the attention of the autocratic and anti revolutionary Austrian authorities. That he eventually fell into their hands was a matter of mischance and betrayal. In December 1797 Rigas with his faithful companion and biographer Perrevos set out for Trieste, sending ahead a friend a letter and boxes containing copies of all his writings, the subversive ones at the bottom. The friend was away, but his business partner opened the letter and boxes and handed them over to the Austrian authorities. When Rigas arrived at Trieste he was arrested. Seventeen others were arrested with Rigas as members of a conspiratorial brotherhood and sent to Vienna for interrogation. Those with Austrian and Russian nationality were expelled from Austria. Rigas was handed over to the Turkish authorities at Belgrade, where on the night of June 24 1798 all were murdered on orders from Constantinople and their bodies into the river Sava, drowned while trying to escape, his captors said that a story from their executioners, Rigas cried out " This is how brave men die. I have sown, the time will come when my country will gather the harvest". In the next Rigas was appropriated by the evil filthy Communist groups resistance to German wartime occupation, and his name was used by the secret society of students opposed to Greece's military dictatorship of 1967-1974.

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Adhamantios Korais was born in Smyrna, modern Izmir, in 1748. His youth tells us in his autobiography, was spent in efforts to get an education in a city where at the time it was almost impossible. The Greek school in Smyrna, only recently established, had a single teacher who provided very poor teaching, accompanied by frequent beating. Languages were Korais passion. He found himself teachers of Italian and French, but they differed from his Greek teacher, he says, only in that they taught him without beatings. Latin could not be learned because the only teachers were the Jesuits, hated for their proselytising. Learning Arabic would mean a Turkish teacher, a prospect which he could not stomach. When Korais family silk business sent him to Amsterdam for six years in his twenties he continued his education there. After an unhappy return to Smyrna, devastated not long before by an earthquake and fire in which the family house was destroyed, he went in 1782 to Montpellier in southern France for six years the study of medicine, and reached Paris in 1788 at the age of 40, his period of self education at last completed.

Besides his passion for learning, two other factors dominated Korais's youth, ill health and hatred for Turks. Of his health he says " After my thirteenth year I began to spit blood, and I spat it incessantly until my twentieth year. From that time I did not cease spitting blood, but at long intervals, however, until my sixtieth year. For all this neither my unhealthy condition, nor the fear of worsening it, stood in the way of my thirst of knowledge. " Of his hatred of the Turks he says that it had been nourished in his soul since birth and that the devastation of Smyrna " transformed my abhorrence of living together with Turks into such a melancholy that I was in danger of falling into genuine madness. For Rigas some Turks were potential allies, for Korais all Turks were obviously and with good reason loathed.

To earn a living like Rigas Korais he worked as a translator, mainly from the ancient or the later Hellenistic Greek into French. He was also keen to alert the French to the situation in Greece, as he did in his Memoire sur l'etat actuel de la civilisation en Grece, delivered to an attentive human rights society in 1803. His main effort was the production of his Greek Library, translations of ancient Greek authors into a form of modern Greek, which eventually reached some thirty volumes, each preceded by an introduction. These introductions, which he called Impromptu Thoughts, were not simply scholarly essays , but were used by Korais to make rousing personal appeals to fellow countrymen. Such statements was intended of course, for a far wider audience that the learned, and here Korais fell into a difficult moment, he did not know in which form language to write. The written and spoken language had begun to diverge from around 300 B.C. The archaic written form, the only one considered suitable for serious works, had remained very close to its ancient classical ancestor, while the demotic spoken form had developed along paths of its own, generally simplifying grammar and syntax and incorporating foreign word. The spoken form was understood by all , and the written only by the educated. Korais was not a innovator but was certainly a trail blazer in the development of a new, more accesible Greek. which is called katharevousa or purged. It was largely based on the structure of the spoken variety, but retained many ancient features and rejected foreign importations.

Korais main preoccupation was with education. It had been the basis of the French Revolution, he believed. He also attributed military success to education, the amazing French victories were the result of learning, he quoted. He encouraged rich Greeks to multiply throughout Greece schools and libraries, at common expense send promising youths to Europe, that they may bring her benefits back to you; and entrust to them the education of our people. When in 1802 the people of Souli in north west Greece were in the last stages of their resistance to the attacks of Ali Pasha, he advised them, as Albanian speakers: "When you have a little peace, bring to your country a teacher to instruct your dear children in the Greek tongue. When the warriors of Souli learn from what ancestors they have sprung, nobody will be able to defeat them, either by guile or by force." Education would ensure not only the achievement of independence but also the establishment of a proper constitution for a new state. But if education was essential to the success of a revolution, and the process of reviving and reinvigorating Greek education was only beginning in the first years of the nineteenth century, it followed for Korais that revolution must wait, in his view till 1850 or later. He held his position firm, expressing it well before the revolution.

Korais despised many foreign countries with good reason. First on list of antithapies were , of course, the Turks, "that race of sodomites". The other European powers, always excepting France, fared little better. He suspected Russia of "pushing us forward to tame the wild beast so that they can then strike the final blow", leading to a Greece occupied by Cossacks. The English " uncircumcised Turks" were to be distrusted because they too were simply pursuing their own interests. Special ire was reserved for the church even though Korais was devout.

Korais wanted liberation to come much later. But each was a force for change by disseminating Enlightenment ideas, by articulating a commitment to a regenerated nation, and by the passionate rhetoric each used to advocate it. It is that commitment which is symbolized by their supportive hands ready to raise to her feet the suffering maiden Greece.