Page 71 - Beholding Liberty!

The vision of freedom
Paschalis Kitromilides
Academy member, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Political Sciences and Public Administration, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
The declaration of the Greek Revolution during the winter and spring months of 1821, the liberation of Greek lands during the months that followed and the ten-year liberation strug- gle with its various ups and downs, internal and international, were neither sudden events nor occasional explosions of the resentment and sense of injustice felt by a subjugated nation. On the contrary, these were the outcome and the revenge in practice of liberation after a long period of ideological preparation, discussion and the internalization of the modern concepts of freedom and human rights, as these values had been cultivated and diffused around the Western world by the Enlightenment. The processing of these ideas by Greek education and Greece’s political aims during the period before 1821 will be discussed in the following pages, in order to follow the emergence of the new Hellenism from the foundation of the subjugated religious community to the declaration of its existence as a free nation.
This was obviously a process of multiform and complex transformation, which is moreover visible in the sources regarding its social content; it appears however with much greater clarity on the level of the written testimonies regarding its intellectual expression and ideological formulation. The transformation process could be dated to the fifty years between 1770 and 1821, the ear- liest of which was the uprising of 1770, the so-called Orlophika; the last was the outbreak of the revolution in 1821. During this period one could realistically identify the processing of the vision of freedom as a political demand, a demand for political independence and probably a self-existent national existence, rather than as a primitive passion for liberation from the foreign other religion, a weight that never ceased to exist in the souls of the enslaved people and was expressed in various ways, mainly however through the oracular tradition.
Here, our concern will be the gradual appearance, with repeated attempts one could say, and the expression of the demand for political liberation on contemporary terms, in the language of recent political theory. Perhaps the earliest manifestations of such ideas, could be traced in the simmering hopes of the uprising, which was provoked by Russian intervention in the Eastern Mediterranean during the first Russian-Turkish war, under the reign of Katerina II in 1768-1774, the so-called Orlov revolt. During the uprising, in order to attract the participation of the Greeks, the Russians allowed a promise to circulate that the successful outcome of the operation would be dealt with by the creation, for the first time after many centuries, of an independent Greek po- litical entity under their protection. The temporary liberation and self-government of the Aegean islands after the great victory of the Russian fleet against the Ottomans in the maritime region of Tsesme on the Asia Minor peninsula of Erythraia in June of 1770, were unknown political expe- riences that cultivated hopes for the creation of Greek leadership in the archipelago.1
The same hopes were also expressed in the Greek political thought of the era, particularly in a series of texts by the top expresser of the Neohellenic Enlightenment, Eugenios Voulgaris, who
Greece enslaved stares
her historical past
illustration in the title page
of the work by count Choiseul-Gouffier, Voyage pittoresque de la Grece,
Paris 1782, vol. 1
Library of the Hellenic Parliament [cat. no Ι.1.2]
1. Pantelis Kontogiannis, Οι Έλληνες κατά τον πρώτον επί Αικατερίνης Β’ ρωσσοτουρκικόν πόλεμον (1768-1774), Αthens 1903 (reprint N. Karavia 1989),
pp. 219-264 offers the most realistic assessment of the situation.
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