Why Greece has a complicated relationship with Russia
From its creation, the Greek state was torn between a Russian East that wanted to revive the Byzantine Empire and a Philhellene West that wanted to revive ancient Greece.
It’s 1831, and Greece is having an identity crisis. After a brutal ten-year revolt against the Ottoman Empire, the Greeks have just won independence and Greece has just been created as a country. But, as often happens after successful revolutions, the fighting has moved to internal disagreements about what kind of country Greece is going to be. The vitriol builds to a crisis, and the country’s first leader Ioannis Kapodistrias is assassinated. The disagreement revolves around one central question, and it is one in which the European powers have taken keen and competing interests: What is Greece? Is it the successor of the Byzantine Empire which the Ottomans had conquered and took over 400 years earlier? Or is it the successor of the ancient Greek city states which had thrived 2000 years earlier?
In 1923, this century-old question was definitely settled toward the latter, with Greece’s acceptance (at the Western powers’ urging) of the expulsion of 1.2 million Greeks from Turkey. Or was it? While it might seem that Greece accepted the Western conception of it as a successor of ancient Greece only, the reality is that this East/West dichotomy still looms large over the country and its relations with the wider world. Most people in Western Europe and the Americas aren’t aware of this dual identity, because their side won in determining what Greece would be. For most of these Western tourists, it’s taken for granted that Greece is the continuation of ancient Greek city states, which is why we always here the anachronistic platitudes about the country of Greece “inventing Democracy”. But the history of Greece, and what the Greek state really is, is much more complex than Western tourists tend to think.
I’ve spent the past month travelling through the country, from Thessaloniki in the North (formerly the second-biggest city of the Byzantine Empire) to Aegean islands in the South (formerly ruled by the Venetians) to Mystras in the West (last holdout of the Byzantines) to Athens in the center (formerly a near-abandoned village at the time Greece was created). During these travels I’ve been visiting historical sites, particularly Byzantine ruins and museums at which I’ve found myself as the only visitor. I’ve walked around the empty Byzantine Museum in Athens, which didn’t even have a working toilet when I visited, and jostled with the thousands of tourists at the Acropolis, Olympia and Delphi. I’ve also talked to people about Greek identity – both what they feel themselves and what the outside world feels about them. And, delicately, I’ve been asking people their opinion about the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Greece and Cyprus were the two EU member states who were the hardest to convince for policies against Russia. Following Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, I heard much grumbling from EU diplomats (particularly those from former Soviet and Eastern Bloc member states) that Greece and Cyprus were standing in the way of sanctions. But there was also an understanding that this was for historical, cultural and economic reasons. There are only four EU member states which are also of the Eastern Orthodox religion like Russia: Bulgaria, Romania, Greece and Cyprus. The first two have less-than-fond memories of their time under Russian domination during the Communist years, but the latter two never fell under the Russian Communist yolk. Their long political separation from Russia during the five decades of the Cold War counterintuitively has translated into warmer feelings toward Moscow than other countries in Europe’s East have. But this is only part of the story. What so many Western Europeans fail to understand is that their understanding of what Greece is, ‘the cradle of Western democracy’, completely ignores the parts of Greek identity which are fundamentally Eastern in nature.