Free Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence by David Brewer

families. The garrison’s main task was to raise the alarm when sea raiders approached. Athens, wrote Wheler, ‘hath no Walls to defend it self, in so much that they have been frequently surpriz’d by the Pirates from Sea, and sustained great Losses from them: until some Years since, they secured all the Avenues into the Town by Gates, which they built anew, and made the outmost Houses, lying close together, to serve instead of Walls. These they shut up every night: and are by them reasonably well secured from these Corsairs.’ 10 The garrison soldiers were referred to as janissaries, but according to de la Guilletière they were in fact the dregs of the Turkish militia, with small local businesses that they operated when off duty.
    The visitors’ impressions of the Athenians were widely variable. De la Guilletière, dismissive as usual, remarked on ‘the dullness and muddiness of the Genius of the Modern Greeks’, and the Marquis de Nointel scorned them as ‘surrounded in ruins and ignorance’. But a more usual view, as expressed by George Wheler, was that ‘their bad Fortune hath not been able to take from them what they have by Nature; that is, much Subtlety, or Wit.’ 11 Athens had one of only three public schools – as opposed to church seminaries – in the Ottoman domains, the other two being at Sinop on the Black Sea and at Constantinople. The Athenians had a representative committee of eight, like those in Thessalonika and elsewhere, and the committee successfully pursued Greek grievances at Constantinople.
    Athenian subtlety and wit could become ridiculous, according to de la Guilletière. He claimed to have listened to a long harangue by an educated monk declaring that all the world’s achievements were in fact Greek. According to this monk Turkish successes were due to the Greeks because the janissaries recruited through the devshirme were Greek (well, some of them). Even the Sultans were Greeks because the father of Osman, the first of the line, was a Byzantine prince. Somewhat paradoxically, the monk also blamed western Europe for not uniting to defeat those same Greek-descended Turks.
    The visitors discovered a sharp intellect in the Athenians partly because that was what they expected to find. St Paul had said that the Athenians ‘spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing’, and surely, the visitors thought, the descendantsof Plato and Aristotle must be clever. But it was the monuments and remains of antiquity that dominated the travellers’ perceptions, above all the Akropolis, which to this day remains both an architectural wonder and a powerful icon. When in 1834 Athens became the capital of independent Greece the Akropolis became the symbol both of the city and of the new state, a role for which it was uniquely appropriate. It was a Greek building as opposed to the Italian architecture of the previous capital, Navplion. It was visible for miles around. Most importantly, it was a summary in stone of Greek history, built by the genius of ancient Greece, converted from a pagan temple to an Orthodox church by the Byzantines, to a Catholic cathedral by the Franks and to a mosque by the Turks. It had been wrecked in 1687 by a Venetian cannon shot, and later despoiled by Elgin and others. In short, the Parthenon was a continuing memorial to both the achievements and the vicissitudes of Greece throughout the centuries.

 
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    The Greek Church
     
    F or anyone brought up in the Anglican tradition of the Church of England, the Greek Orthodox Church is at first sight quite familiar. There is a similar hierarchy of archbishops, bishops, senior clergy and parish priests. As in England, great churches are found in Greek towns, and village churches dot the Greek countryside, though the architecture and decorations of the churches of the two faiths are interestingly different. Both Anglicans and Orthodox attach great importance to their services for baptism,