Suchergebnisse

Abstract
The Greek War of Independence (1821–1829) is a fascinating mélange of the old and new of traditional identities and modern concepts. Perhaps nothing exemplifies this better than questions of identity, ethnicity, and nationality as they played out and developed over the nine years of the conflict. This article examines two trajectories on the question of identity and nationality that seamlessly coexisted not only during the Greek War of Independence but also for much of the early history of the Modern Greek State. The first looks at popular understandings of identity and the second the legal constructs that tried to define a national identity and nationality in terms of law that would be compatible with developments elsewhere in Europe. This article explores these questions on the ground but also in terms of legal constructs and their evolution from the period just before the eruption of the revolt to the establishment of the Greek state arguing that these efforts and apparent contradictions can be seen as taking part in a wider European debate on nationality and identity following the experience of the Napoleonic Wars and at the same time continuing long-held identities in the Ottoman state.

Greek historiography no longer ignores the massacres of non-Christians during the Greek War of Independence, but little thought is given to the fate of those Muslims and Jews that survived or how their presence, as non-Christians or as new converts, impacted the new state, its ideology, structures, policies or laws. This article begins to address this gap and attempts to highlight the seriousness with which Greek governments, both in the revolutionary and post-independence periods, confronted this issue. Using a variety of sources such as wills and dowry contracts, court cases, government records and revolutionary memoirs, the article attempts to show that modern historiography has underestimated the numbers and significance of converts and conversion, and that in this regard Greece and the Ottoman Empire share remarkable similarities in their treatment of conversion, the conflicts it generated, and the use of religion to shore up political weakness. As in the Ottoman Empire, conversion was a thorny issue for the early Greek governments that were trying to establish their legitimacy in the international arena. At the same time it provided opportunities for Greece to assert its influence far beyond its physical capacities, presenting itself as the defender of Orthodox Christians, a role previously monopolised by the Russian Empire.

This paper discusses the legal debates of nineteenth-century Greece and the attempts to produce a legal framework following the establishment of the modern Greek state. These debates had both a practical significance since such a framework was essential for the creation of a modern state, and an ideological one since the chosen framework would be a statement about how the new state perceived itself, its history, and its place in Europe. These questions were particularly relevant in the case of civil law as Greek legal scholars contemplated whether to accept the use of customary law, or to reject it, and if so what laws should replace it. In this paper, I examine this debate within the context of European legal developments and the process of codification undertaken throughout Europe from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, as well as the ideological and practical implications of the debate. I argue that, despite the belief that the efforts of Greek legal scholars led to the elimination of the use of customary law from the Greek judicial system, my research in the archival material of the Appeals Court of Athens indicates that customary law was still dominant a generation after the establishment of the modern Greek state. I conclude that a re-examination of the role and practices of the Greek courts in the nineteenth century is much needed as their flexibility thirty years after the creation of the Greek state is closer to the legal pluralism of the courts of the Ottoman period than to the model advocated by the contemporary legal scholars who demanded a 'modern' judicial system to assist the renaissance of the Greek nation.