Greeks should re-examine their history books

On the 25th of March, Greeks celebrate the launching of their War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire. It is the day when Greek schoolchildren are told by their teachers how lucky they are to be Greeks and how the Turks kept the Greek nation enslaved for 400 years.

The pattern has not changed much over time although there are today more historians and educators pointing out that the Greek war of liberation was often a messy affair. Thus, for instance, in its interesting series about Great Greeks the Sky TV Network dealt on March 16 with the feat of the most prominent Greek revolutionary leader Theodoros Kolokotronis to liberate the Peloponnesian city of Tripolis. The presenter did mention that this was "one of the fiercest battles of the revolution" and added the following comment: "Elegant formulas like 'collateral damage' did not exist at the time. The Greek armed band (askeri in Greek) went on for days killing men, women and children."

It is good that truth (usually ignored in the official history books) was revealed for once. However, the tongue-in-cheek subsequent comment by the presenter that this kind of 'collateral damage' was to be expected in those days is used to explain Greek, but never Ottoman (mis)behaviour. The Turkish massacres in Hios and elsewhere are always presented as diachronic abominations perpetrated by Muslim savages. This distorted view does not stop with the War of Independence of 1821-27.

When the Greek army landed at Smyrna on 2 May 1919, fighting broke out with the local Turks and some ugly scenes did follow. As Efthymios Tsiliopoulos says in his Athens News column of 2 May 2008, "since the Greek element far outnumbered the Turks, there were quite a few instances of disgruntled Greeks seeking to vent their frustrations or simply taking advantage of an opportunity to loot the property of their erstwhile overlords." Such stories are rarely, if ever, told in this part of the Aegean. In today's Greece, there is mention only of the savage Turkish retaliation by Kemal, who ousted more than a million Greeks from Asia Minor.

What this type of 'national education' (ethniki agogi) has led to is that many Greeks today have difficulty in applying the concepts of human rights to the ethnic minorities living in Greece. Thus, as Brady Kiesling notes in his Athens News' article Borrowing Nations of 2 May 2008, "in March, the European Court of Human Rights shut down the Greek state's two-decade crusade to ban the Turkish Association of Xanthi."

Greece invokes the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923 that mentions only "religious minorities" in the two countries, Greece and Turkey, which signed it. Greece believes that this treaty gives her the right to refuse any Greek citizens who are Muslims living in western Thrace to call themselves Turks. However, Lausanne has never stopped Greece to refer to the ethnic Greeks living in Turkey as homogeneis (of the same stock).

So is there something that can be done? Of course there is. Modern Greeks should be proud of those ancestors of theirs who rebelled against the sultan in the name of the Enlightenment values and the Rights of Man. The archbishop of the Greek-Americans was 100 percent right in telling President Obama during his annual visit to the White House on March 25 that the politicians and intellectuals who prepared the Greek Revolution of 1821 were inspired by the founding fathers of America. One would hope that this message is popularised in Greece and that one day it will take pride of place in the school curriculum.

The 25th of March was fixed (somewhat arbitrarily as is now known) as the day when the Greeks started their rebellion for another reason as well. According to the Christian belief system, this is the day of the Annunciation when Archangel Gabriel visited a young Jewish woman named Mary bearing a lily for her to smell and thus become pregnant with the Son of God. Exactly nine months later, on December 25, the Incarnation took place and Jesus was born.

This columnist remembers asking his teacher at school why Mary had to be a virgin even though she had been married for some time to Joseph. He was not given an answer coherent enough for him to remember. Well, Richard Dawkins in his The Selfish Gene book, page 279, does give an explanation. The Hebrew word used by Isaiah who had prophesied the coming of the Messiah for the woman that would give him birth "was alurah, which undisputedly means 'young woman', with no implication of virginity.

If "virgin" had been intended, bethulah could have been used. The "mutation" occurred when the pre-Christian Greek translation known as the Septuagint, rendered alurah into parthenos in Greek, which does indeed mean virgin. It is widely accepted among Christian scholars, notes Richard Dawkins, "that the story of the virgin birth of Jesus was a later interpolation put in presumably by Greek-speaking disciples in order that the (mistranslated) prophesy should be seen to be fulfilled".

What one can say for sure is that on the 25th of March Greeks should indulge less in ancestor-worship and insist more on the need for mistakes to be avoided in the use of their rich language, as these may give rise to serious problems.

Mark Dragoumis writes for Athens News from which this article was adapted.