A Concise History of Greece

"Yes, and even a bit before. Clogg is a British intellectual and a very good historian. He’s considered the ‘professor father’ of historians of Greece, in Britain and even abroad, including in Greece itself. He’s very well respected and probably deserves even more respect than he gets, particularly in Greece. Clogg has a good feel for Greece without the temples. He writes about daily life and the laboring poor alongside the great historical events. It’s a straightforward, unadorned narration of modern Greek history, with all the major events stopping along the way to consider what it was like to live at that time, depending on what class or region you came from. He has a very good eye for that, and it’s a very enjoyable read. This one I would take to the beach, definitely. It’s very short. This is his concise history. He’s written other histories, but this is the short one. He’s a good historian and it’s a good read. He’s also a very nice man, which sometimes happens. So if you’re in Greece, for the first, second, third time, and you want a general sense of where you are in this place, this book would be the one to read. The basic geopolitical outline is that Greece begins as a little speck which includes what is today the Peloponnese, the area north of it up to around Athens, and then some of the islands. The Ionian islands are British. The rest is Ottoman Empire. That Greece was formed in that spot was an accident. Nobody knew where Greece was supposed to be because the Greeks were everywhere. The Greek Revolution actually began in what is today Romania and failed. It took hold, though, in the south. So most story of what happened to Greece after that, over the next 90 years, would be how it took on its present form as a sort of irredentism. There were diplomatic arrangements that gave them part of central Greece, Thessaly. There was a new king in the 1860s. The British gifted him the Ionian islands, including Corfu, and that became part of Greece as well. Then there were a series of wars. They failed in the 1890s but were successful in 1912-1913 when Greece conquered the territory that it has today, with some minor exceptions that were added later. The other Balkan states also took on their present form, ending up with the big ones like Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria, etc. There were some squabbles over Thrace. This was when the Ottomans were finally expelled from Europe, except for the sliver of land in Thrace near Istanbul. The next big event was the belief among a lot of Greeks and Greek politicians that it shouldn’t stop there and that Hellenism, going back to ancient times, went as far as the Black Sea and all the way towards the Caucasus, including what is today Georgia. After the Ottomans were defeated in World War I, there were a series of diplomatic manoeuvres whereby the British and the French countenanced a Greek presence in what would become Turkey. They marched all the way to Ankara to take over this territory and annex it to Greece. It’s at this point that Mustafa Kemal found a way to mobilize the population into a Turkish nation, expelled the Greeks, and the new borders were then established. That’s called the ‘Great Catastrophe’ here in Greece. Then there was the arrival of the refugees. If you go to any Greek city, you’ll see neighbourhoods called new this and new that—new Smyrna, new Ionia, new Philadelphia. These were all refugee neighborhoods. So the neighborhood surrounding the center of Athens was all refugees. Whenever you see a football team founded around the same period, and they have the two-headed eagle as their emblem, again it’s refugees. Some of them still call themselves the Athletic Union of Constantinople. Nearly every family in Greece has some refugee background. So that was the next wave, assimilating this population as Greeks, and the end of the idea of a greater Greece. The next events were fascism, the Great Depression, and then World War Two, the invasion and occupation of Greece by Germany. After the Greeks defeated Italy, the Germans then came down and occupied the country, which was a time of famine followed by a civil war. There was a continuum of violence from around 1940 until 1949, when the nationalist Greek government defeated the communists and the left, and Greece became capitalist, authoritarian and joined NATO. There was a great burst of economic development that lasted all the way to the 1970s, when Greece went into a slump the way that most of the world did. Greece deindustrializes and becomes this country of tourism, of agriculture and agricultural exports. It joins the EU, and there is massive development. The next big moment, I would say, was the economic crisis of 2015 in particular, which impoverished the country, stripping away about 25% of GDP, and casting 25% of the population into unemployment in the name of…we still don’t know what. We still don’t know why. It was a punishment, but there was no material gain for anybody. The country is still suffering today. We like to come to Greece. We go to the taverns, but take a look at the waiter who’s running around frantically to keep his job serving customers, getting paid a wage that would not be acceptable in Britain. We’re still in that moment now."