Page 74 - Beholding Liberty!

5. Rigas Velestinlis, Άπαντα τα σωζόμενα, [All that has been saved] vol. V, ed. Paschalis M. Kitromilides, Athens: Hellenic Parliament,
2000, p. 34.
6. Ibid, p. 44.
7. Paschalis M. Kitromilides, Νεοελληνικός Διαφωτισμός, [Modern Greek Enlightenment], pp. 338-360 and by the same author: Η Γαλλική Επανάσταση και η Νοτιοανατολική Ευρώπη [The French Revolution
and Southeastern Europe] Athens 2000, pp. 133-173.
of the inhabitants of Roumeli, Asia Minor, the Mediterranean Islands and Blachomoldavia (1797) constituted essentially the end and culmination of the ideological issues and works that had been tried during the previous 300 years, but at the same time was also the starting point of the revolutionary tradition in the Hellenic world that would end in 1821.
In his brochure, Rigas included the appeal to throw off the yoke, to announce the rights in thir- ty-five articles and the plan for the constitution of the Hellenic Democracy in 124 articles. In an appendix, he described the flag of the Hellenic Democracy in three colors, according to the mod- el of the tricolor flag of the French Republic. The brochure ended with the “vehement national anthem” of the battle hymn. With the texts gathered by Rigas in his revolutionary brochure, the vision of freedom established a specific political and cultural claim. The spirit of political demand is expressed characteristically in the following excerpt from the declaration of independence:5
This nation, unhappy until now, seeing that all its sadness, pains, and daily tears, its dis- appearance, are derived from the bad and villainous administration, from which good laws are absent, having decided once to gaze at the heavens, to raise bravely his exhausted throat and, armed in a manly way with the arms of revenge and despair, to help the entire world, with loud cries, to gain their holy and blameless rights which came from God who gave them joy by living quietly on this earth.
The vision of freedom for the Greeks as described by Rigas consisted of deliverance from the tribulations of arbitrary despotism, as well as in the maturity and determination to demand the “sacred and immaculate rights” that come “from God” for every nation and every person. This was precisely the spirit of the great age of revolutions. Whatever concerned a revolutionary demand, that the vision of freedom is essentially a revolution to be carried out, Rigas knew very well, knowing what had happened in the Europe of his time. He informed the Greeks and their fellow Balkan nations, whom he called to support the revolutionary demand for freedom and that facing them was an invitation to a revolutionary overthrow.6
“When the government is in a hurry, it violates, ignores the rights of the people and does not listen to their complaints, what the people will do then, or every part of the people, is revolution, to take up arms and punish their tyrants, it is the most sacred of all their rights and the most essential of all their duties”.
This invitation by Rigas functioned as the starting point of the appearance, in words and in po- litical action, of the tradition of Balkan radicalism. In the footsteps of Rigas and as the epitaph of his sacrifice, the Anonymous Greek, the author of Hellenic Nomarchia (1806), adds strong social content to the vision of freedom. First, he warns that liberation would come only from the struggle and determination of the Greeks themselves, who are called upon to rid themselves of the false sense of anticipating assistance from foreign powers. Indeed, it highlights the example of the Serbs who, at that precise moment, had begun their own revolution against the Ottoman yoke. Second, Anonymous proceeds to an overall and harsh charge against those he called “col- laborators of tyranny” and calls upon Greek patriots to turn against them as well as against the tyrants, in their revolutionary struggle. That is, Anonymous calls upon the Hellenic Nomarchia for a radical social reformation, a cleansing of Greek society from the extreme inequities that fed despotism, giving privileges to its servants among the subjugated. The charge of inequality, as a consequence of despotism, remains the common denominator of the expressions of radicalism among the ranks of Greek and Balkan society more generally.7
74 BEHOLDING LIBERTY!