When people of later generations speak of the Balkans, they will think of the endless ethnic contradictions and conflicts that arise there. Guo Kang also once felt that he needed to seriously consider the special issues here.

However, the more Greeks he came into contact with, he wondered how the originator of Balkan nationalism defined such a thing. Are they really that good at boasting?

The Greeks today are a mess of sand. And a few hundred years later, I'm afraid it will also be a plate of scattered sand. In his world, Greek nationalists have long been unclear even about "who the Greeks are".

According to Paparigopoulos's theory, the foundation of the continuous history of Greece is the continuous development of the Greek language. Therefore, the Greeks should be distinguished by the Greek language.

But, on the other hand, religion is just as important. The first idea of the Greeks when they were restored was to create a state similar to that of the Orthodox Church. So, religion also seems to be an element of distinction.

The combination of these two factors gives rise to a number of permutations: Greek-speaking Celestials and Turkic-speaking Orthodox; There are tribes that use the Greek alphabet but speak Turkic, and there are tribes that use the Turkic alphabet but speak Greek......

In Crete and Asia Minor, this promiscuity was common, and it was not clear whether they were Hellenistic Turkic or Turkic Greeks. From the perspective of later generations, these two kinds of people were the same thing in blood, and the Greeks at that time could not verify what they were.

This complication finally succeeded in making the Greeks stupid.

In 1844, the Greeks, who had succeeded in independence, finally began to write a constitution – this time not to cheat money, but to have the need for it in the new nation. It was also at this time that the Greeks came up with what was known as the "Great Ideal", which was roughly to create a state that would include all Greeks.

In fact, this is a skinned Eastern Rome, probably not daring to call it Rome directly, so it uses this nationalist narrative technique to propagandize.

However, the most important thing for Rome is the skin of the universal empire. Without skin, no matter how much you imitate it, you can't achieve it. Sure enough, the Greeks soon ran into the question: should they give citizenship to those "permutations" of Greeks whose identities were unclear?

In Roman times, this was not a problem. But for Greece, it is a very troublesome issue related to the nature of the state. In the end, the Constituent Assembly refused to grant them full political powers. Before the "Great Ideal" had even begun, people were being expelled......

The religious aspect is just as bad. In accordance with the demands of national independence, the Greeks built their own Greek Church. But what you do, others do. The Bulgarians soon learned from it, and also formed an independent diocese of Bulgaria, and even forced the Ottoman-controlled Ecumenical Patriarch to approve it. Then they moved on to the traditional arts: who were the Greeks and who were the Bulgarians?

At the junction of two regions, there is no clear boundary between these two groups of people. If you want to make a distinction, you have to look at the details of the ceremony. Both sides reacted quickly, and many armed men arrived to force the locals to adopt their own side of the ritual, believing that this would be an increase in their sphere of influence.

Under the persecution of the mob on both sides, the local priests and residents became religious experts: when the Greek mob arrived, they performed rituals in Greek liturgy and performed them for them. When the Greeks were gone and the Bulgarian mob returned, they quickly changed to Bulgarian rituals. In the end, I don't know how this thing is divided, so I can only use violent means to meet each other directly.

Therefore, the Greeks wanted to make their nationalism both language and religion, but in terms of language and religion, they did not have much influence on the outside world, and fell into an embarrassing situation.

So, is this theory valid internally?

Of course, it's even more useless.

The infighting of the Greeks never stopped, and it didn't even affect even their own people. At the outbreak of the War of Independence, there were enough European volunteers to organize a single unit, but they were quickly exhausted: in the first head-to-head battle with the Ottomans, European volunteers lined up in line according to the military rules of the time. However, as soon as the battle began, the Greek soldiers in charge of the flanks fired two shots and all fled. The Greek nobles who commanded the entire army did not give any orders and disappeared.

The European volunteers who were left in place were too regular, and before receiving orders from their commanders, they insisted on firing at each other, even after being hit, so that it was too late to react. In the end, he failed to retreat in time and was almost completely annihilated by the Ottoman army. After that, the European "Jingxi" did not dare to come. In the end, the great powers stopped acting and went straight to the end. It took Russia to enter the Balkans and France to land in the Peloponnese to force the Ottomans to submit.

The old aristocracy could not be relied on, foreign volunteers were scared away, and the Greeks' own army could only rely on bandits. However, these people are just as brutal to outsiders as they are to themselves, and even after the founding of the country, they have been disobedient for many years. By 1870, bandits were just a few miles outside of Athens, looting a tour group of British nobles, killing several nobles and causing serious diplomatic problems.

But the bandits did play an important role in the founding of Greece and belonged to the "national heroes", and it was too late to sing praises, and there was no way to care. This banditry also spread among the Greek army for a long time, resulting in their performance being similar to that of the always brutal Ottomans.

There are those in both domestic and foreign countries who question this ethos, arguing that tying Greek nationalism to brutality is clearly harmful and will only undermine the realization of the "Great Ideal." Unfortunately, this kind of problem has accumulated too much.

As a result, the Greeks did not end up building the ideal mono-nation state, the Turkic exiles from the Balkans by the Ottomans, who had a blood feud with the Ottoman regime. They fought the Ottoman army and were stronger than the Greeks, so the Greeks had to accept them as well.

It stands to reason that there is more than one such person. The Turkic and Armenian tribes in Asia Minor, who had also suffered centuries of massacre and persecution by the Ottoman regime, were the brothers and sisters of the Greeks. Many were happy to resist the Ottomans and were also on the sidelines for a Greek counteroffensive.

However, the Greek army played on the tradition of revenge and did not distinguish between them, regardless of the position of these "outsiders", and treated them with indiscriminate violence and killing. As a result, his own power continued to weaken, but he pushed the locals to the opposite side.

In the end, as soon as the support of the great powers was cut off, the Greek army, which lacked foundations, had no room for error. On the contrary, the new Turkish state was firmly established under the command of Kemal and was also supported by the Soviet Union. The Greek army soon collapsed.

Therefore, Guo Kang feels that there is really nothing worth advocating in the Balkans. Their nationalist theories are somewhat more advanced than the previous slogans, but in the final analysis, they have not reached the level of qualitative change that people expect.

This situation of constant division and vendetta against each other is not so much the power of the new theory as the fact that a group of people are not killing each other. But as long as there is a little bit of a person, it will not be like this.

And the Greeks made trouble for two hundred years, and in the end they still had to sneak "back to Rome". They accepted the Turks in their country, accepted the vernacular Greek, and began to fly the Eastern Roman flag everywhere. This is also where Guo Kang's confidence in making a judgment lies - the Greeks really can't toss anything.

(End of chapter)