The database Cretan Institutional Inscriptions was created as part of the PhD research project in Ancient Heritage Studies Kretikai Politeiai: Cretan Institutions from VII to I century BC, carried out at the University of Venice Ca' Foscari by Irene Vagionakis from 2016 to 2019, under the supervision of Claudia Antonetti and Gabriel Bodard. The research project aimed at collecting the epigraphic sources related to the institutional elements of the many political entities of Crete, with a view to highlighting the specificity of each context in the period between the rise of the poleis and the Roman conquest of the island. The main component of the database consists of the epigraphic collection of the 600 inscriptions constituting the core of the documentary base of the study, for each of which an XML edition compliant with the TEI EpiDoc international standard was created. Each EpiDoc edition includes a descriptive and a bibliographic lemma, the text of the inscription, a selective apparatus criticus and a commentary focused on the institutional data offered by the document. In addition to the epigraphic collection, the database includes a collection of the main related literary sources, a catalogue of the attested Cretan institutions (assemblies, boards, officials, associations, civic subdivisions, social statuses, age classes, months, festivities and other celebrations, institutional practices, institutional instruments, public spaces) and a catalogue of the political entities of Crete (poleis, koina, dependent communities, extra-urban sanctuaries, hegemonic alliances). Data and SW available at https://github.com/IreneVagionakis/CretanInscriptions
Δεν παρατίθεται περίληψη στα ελληνικά. ; Spyridon Ploumidis, The notion of 'death' in the Greek Revolution (1821-1832): Ideological perceptions and political practice The evolution of Greek nationalist ideas signified the passage from patria to the nation. The eruption of the revolution influenced the way the Greeks perceived the notion of 'death'. Since, the struggle for independence was massive, death also became collective. The Greek revolutionaries claimed that the Sultan was intent on slaughtering the entirety of the Greek nation. This was not true, yet the death toll of the Greek Revolution exceeded the traditional limits of earlier Christian rebellions, and the number of dead is estimated between 230,000 and 600,000. Massacres occurred beyond the limits of the Peloponnese (in Constantinople, Smyrna, Chios at el.), and every Greek-speaking Orthodox individual became a potential victim of the revengeful Ottomans. The Ottoman atrocities drew the imaginary geographical boundaries of the Greek 'national' space. Nevertheless, Greeks were not the only victims of the War of Independence. By 1833, around 63.000 Muslims ('Turks') were either killed or expelled from the territory of the Greek state. Vengeance and hatred against the 'Turks' was a tenet of the Greek revolutionary agenda. In addition to its new collective nature, the notion of 'death' acquired during the Greek Revolution a new, political meaning. Koraes and Rigas had already prepared the ground for the grounding of their fellow-Greeks in this new perception. 'Death' came to describe 'slavery', 'tyranny', 'oligarchy' and submission to the 'Turks'. Natural death came to be seen as preferable to a meaningless life without Koraes' 'natural rights' (equality, rule of law, etc.). To this end, the Third National Assembly of the Greeks pronounced in 1827 the notion of 'political death'. The term 'death' in the revolutionary motto 'Freedom or Death' (Ελευθερία ή Θάνατος), which drew on the French maxim La Liberté ou la Mort, had by and large this political significance. The determination of the Greek revolutionaries to achieve freedoms and rights at the cost of their life is found in several official declarations and statements. General Spyromilios clarified that (life or) 'death' was hence forward a matter of 'national existence' and not of 'personal existence', i.e. it was primarily a collective and political issue. This ideological development was an outcome of secularization. Secular freedom was deemed to be hierarchically a superior value to the religious tolerance, which the Orthodox enjoyed within the Ottoman millet system. For that matter, the attainment of independence in 1830 was hailed by the protagonists as the 'resurrection' of the Greek nation.
Δεν παρατίθεται περίληψη στα ελληνικά. ; Kostas Raptis, Merchants in Imperial Austria during the 'Long' Nineteenth Century This article, which draws mainly on the Archives of the Austrian Ministry of Commerce, as well as on contemporary works and modern li terature, focuses on the examination of the historical course of merchants (above all the whole sale traders and the well suited shopkeepers and retail merchants) in Old Austria as a distinctive group within the Central European bourgeoisie. The contribution of the merchantmagnates (Großhändler) to the industrialization of the Austrian Half of the Habsburg Empire and the formation of a powerful business class, the importance of the involvement of businessmen from abroad in Austrian wholesale and foreign trade, the grip of the state and imperial allegiance in the commercial sector, the social position and the political activity of merchants– primarily at local and regional levels –as well as the attitudes of the multiethnic merchant class towards all kinds of nationalist movements in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, are the central issues of this essay. Merchantmagnates, among whom many of foreign provenance or/ and not of Catholic faith (Protestants, Jews and Greekorthodox) established themselves as the most active entrepreneurial group within the Austrian bourgeoisie during most of the nineteenth century (at least until the 1870s), since they exploited promptly every new opportunity to accumulate and augment their capital and income: in industry, banking, insurance and other shareholding companies, transport, shipping and real estate. The bourgeois status of the Austrian merchants is confirmed for the same period by their participation in all sorts of (bourgeois) associations, their subscription to public benefit causes, their charitable and philanthropic activities. The imperial state's favorable disposition towards entrepreneurs in general and merchants in particular, its recognition and reward of their contribution to the Austrian economy and export trade, of their mercantile knowledge and professional experience, as well as of their charity and philanthropic work, are documented in the appointment of honorary consuls of Austria abroad or of consuls of foreign states in the capital and cities of the Monarchy, the conferring of the highest social distinctions on merchants by Emperor Franz Joseph through award of medals, honorary titles and titles of nobility or the merchants' collaboration with the Ministry of Commerce as elected members and officials of chambers of commerce, as experts, special advisers and commission agents. In addition to the merchants' indirect relations with politics there were direct ones too, in other words their active participation as elected representatives, primarily to municipal councils and secondarily to the local and imperial parliaments of Austria after the constitutional reforms of 18601861. During the socalled era of liberalism, from the 1860s up to the mid1880's, it was mainly germanspeaking merchants, who, together with industrialists and other middle class groups, dominated in most towns, whereas in the three decades which preceded the First World War –an era of increasing antisemitism and nationalism– they had to share power with new emerging petitbourgeois strata (among them many shopkeepers). The article concludes with a remark on the upheavals caused to the merchant world by the two World Wars and nationalsocialism, which destroyed the unified economic space of AustriaHungary, nationalized its cosmopolitan bourgeoisie and finally led to the expulsion, material depravation or/and extermination of such a dynamic and prominent group, like the Jewish merchants and entrepreneurs, followed by the abolition of the capitalist economy by the new socialist regimes in Central and EastCentral Europe after 1945.