Greece is part of Western civilization, for the very simple reason that over the last two hundred years Greeks have determined that it should be.

Samuel Huntington, in his influential book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, published in 1996, noted the paradox: ‘Greece is not part of Western civilization, but it was the home of Classical civilization which was an important source of Western civilization.’ In fact, Greece is part of Western civilization, for the very simple reason that over the last two hundred years Greeks have determined that it should be. 

R. Beaton, Greece (2019), 11

Their chief achievement was to leave them, as they found them, unmistakably Greek

The Venetians left the Ionians peacefully if in obloquy, pushed out by Napoleon, and their place was presently taken by the British, whose manners were not dissimilar and whose intentions towards the islands were much the same. When, in their turn, the British voluntarily left in 1864, the islands became the most cultivated and progressive parts of the new Greece, and for this the Venetians could properly claim credit. They had ruled the Ionians for four centuries, and their chief achievement was to leave them, as they found them, unmistakably Greek.

J. Morris, The Venetian Empire (1980), 152

A tumultuous line of princelings governed the Venetian Aegean under the watchful, often baffled and sometimes infuriated eye of the Serenissima

Certainly the arrogance of the Venetians has never been forgotten by the Greeks – who, established here in Homeric times long before Venice existed, have out-stayed all successive rulers to remain as Greek as ever. Until the land reforms in Greece after World War II the Catholic descendants of the Venetians, with their Latinized local associates, remained overwhelmingly the landlords of Naxos. Embittered locals used to say that the war had not been won at all until the Catholics of the Kastro had been dispossessed. Seven and a half centuries after the arrival of Sanudo and his young men, the lifestyles of the island remained recognizably those of conquerors and conquered: even in the 1950s, there used to be at least one family of the Kastro which, loading its necessary comforts upon strings of mules, set out each spring beneath parasols, attended by servants and household pets, seigneurially through the dusty suburbs for the annual migration to its summer estates in the interior of the island, held by right of conquest since the beaching of Marco’s galleys.

A tumultuous line of princelings governed the Venetian Aegean under the watchful, often baffled and sometimes infuriated eye of the Serenissima. The chronicles of the Archipelago are confused and very bloody, and the only constant thread linking the feuds and the dynasties is the shadowy presence of Venice in the background, the knowledge of her war-galleys over the horizon and the stern if not invariably effective supervision of Doge and Grand Council far away.


J. Morris, The Venetian Empire (1980), 49

A town which does not yet have a road, but where they started building a palace

The city had been ravaged by the war and struck one visitor as a 'disgusting and filthy place'. Two years after Otto's palace had started, a French reporter scoffed: '[New Athens] is a town which does not yet have a road, but where they started building a palace - a sufficiently correct image of a country where they first made a king before they were assured that there was a nation.'

M. Mazower, The Greek Revolution (2021), 443

The Sultan could count on bringing much larger and better-armed forces into the field

The Greeks were a minority of the population of the Ottoman Empire, comprising perhaps 3 million out of its 23 or 24 million people; only in a few areas - the Morea, the islands of the Aegean and some places north of the Gulf of Corinth - did they predominate. Yet even these figures ail to give a full sense of the imbalance, for whereas the Greeks had no cavalry and found it hard to raise and arm even 15,000-20,000 fighters, the Sultan could count on bringing much larger and better-armed forces into the field.

M. Mazower, The Greek Revolution (2021), 182

Persian apples were peaches

A word of warning: in Greek the word ‘melon’ is always taken to mean apples, but ‘melon’ covers a number of other fruits including pomegranates: ‘Armenian apples’ were apricots, still grown on the northern side of Mount Ararat. ‘Cydonian apples’ were quinces. Cydonia was an ancient city state near Chania in Crete. Persian apples were peaches.

J. Crowden, Cider country (2021), 36

Sadness is soaked into the fibre of every Greek song that isn’t trying to sound like an American or British song

Sadness is soaked into the fibre of every Greek song that isn’t trying to sound like an American or British song. Four centuries of Ottoman rule prior to the twentieth century would be enough to see to that, although we Greeks hardly needed any encouragement. Even at the peak of Greek civilisation 2,500 years ago, when things were going pretty well for us, we still made time to invent Greek tragedy.

P. Paphides, Broken Greek (2020), kindle loc. 889