Page 248 - Beholding Liberty!

Ioannis Kossos (1822-1873) Bust of Ioannis
Kapodistrias, 1866
marble, height 58 cm
Hellenic Parliament Art Collection
16. Spyridon Trikoupis, History of the Greek Revolution, vol. 4, Taylor
& Francis, London 21862,
pp. 231-242; Alexandros
I. Despotopoulos, Governor Ioannis Kapodistrias and the liberation
of Greece, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens 1954, pp. 54-64; Daphnis, Ioannis A. Kapodistrias,
pp. 543-554.
17. Tryfon E. Evangelidis, History
of Ioannis Kapodistrias, Governor of Greece, 1828-1831, Zanoulakis, Athens 1894, p. 121.
diplomatic and economic support of the Powers. When in January of 1828 he landed in Nafplion, his welcome by the Greek people who had placed all their hopes on his person, was triumphant.16 The arrival at the port of Nafplion of the ship that was carrying Capodistrias had an additional symbolic connotation: the warships of Great Britain, France and Russia that were docked there greeted the Greek flag with canon fire, thus for the first time conveying official honors to the head of the Greek state.17
The jubilant atmosphere that accompanied Kapodistrias’ arrival in Nafplion was not enough to negate the extremely unfavourable conditions under which he had to work. After the civil conflicts and Turco-Egyptian counterattack, most of the areas that had been the strongholds of the Revo- lution – and which would consequently be about form the Greek state – were almost completely destroyed, and their inhabitants were in every respect destitute. The economic distress, the absence of even rudimentary state institutions, the inefficient administration and the absence of an organised army were only the most prominent symptoms of the crisis. The picture of disin- tegration was completed by the stubborn refusal of many local actors to accept the removal of their pre-revolutionary privileges in favour of the central power.
At the level of foreign policy, Kapodistrias sought to achieve two objectives: on the one hand, to ensure independence and, on the other, to extend the boundaries of Greek territory as much as possible. The task was extremely challenging. In mathematical terms, the sums involved were inversely proportional. In other words, the achievement of independence would in all probability require a retreat on the question of the boundaries of the Greek state. On the other hand, the
248 BEHOLDING LIBERTY!