Extract from The Cyprus Conflict - national identity and statehood by Zenon Stavrinides l. The Growth of the Greek Nation-State and the Great Idea In 1453 the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, and by 1460 the whole of the Greek mainland had been brought under Ottoman rule. Once the Greek Orthodox Christians had submitted to the Turkish Sultan and agreed to pay tribute, they were recognized, in accordance with Islamic tradition, as a millet or nation. This meant that they were allowed the freedom to retain their ethnic, cultural and religious identity in its manifold manifestations, under the administration of the Greek Orthodox Church. Within the old Byzantine Empire the Church had developed into an official institution of the State; and now, within the Ottoman Empire, it remained the unified institutional structure of the Greek national community. The Oecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople was entrusted with the collection of taxes, and was given detailed jurisdiction, exercised locally through bishops and the lower clergy, over matters relating to marriage, divorce, dowry and inheritance - matters which affected most intimately the daily lives of ordinary people. Thus, the Greeks developed a conception of their own nationhood - in contrast to that of the Turkish soldiers, officials and settlers in their midst - in terms of their language, social institutions and values, customs and traditions, and their Orthodox Christian religion. When in 1571 the Turks conquered Cyprus from her Venetian rulers, they recognised the Archbishop of the Autocephalous Orthodox Church as the head of the Greek Cypriot millet. In 1821 the Greeks of the Peloponnese, Sterea Hellas and the Aegean Islands revolted against their Ottoman masters. After six years of fighting, and under the protection of Britain, France and Russia, an independent State of Greece was established. The `Greece' of 1827 was roughly half the size of the country we now know, and comprised 700,000 out of 3 million Greeks, the majority of which still living under Ottoman rule. As long as there were Greek lands under foreign domination the struggle of the nation was not over: all `unredeemed' Greeks must be liberated. So, Greeks organized more revolts against their Ottoman rulers, notably in 1880 and 1897. In the meanwhile, the urban-based Greek establishment developed a cultural orientation towards Greek antiquity. They thought of themselves as direct descendants of Plato, Sophocles, Pheidias, Pericles and Alexander the Great, and heirs to their splendid intellectual, artistic, political and military tradition. The cultivation of the `Hellenic values' - which meant in practice the study of the ancient Greek language and literature, and the history of the nation with a stress put on hero-worship - and the more recent Christian tradition of the Byzantines, formed the content of Greek education; and this, in turn, helped to create a more unified national consciousness. In 1864 Britain handed the Ionian Islands back to Greece, and in 1881 Thessaly and a part of Epirus were detached from the Ottoman Empire and united with the Greek State. Growing national pride and self-confidence took the form of `the Great Idea', i.e., a belief in the necessity of building up a Greater Greek State `of the two continents and the five seas', to cover all the Greek-speaking, Christian Orthodox part of the old Byzantine Empire, which was still under the domination of `the ancestral enemy', the Turks. Following the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, Greece won from the Ottoman Empire the rest of Epirus, Crete, most of Macedonia and all the Aegean Islands except Imbros and Tenedos which commanded access to the Dardanelles. In 1915 Britain promised Cyprus to Greece if the latter entered the Great War on the side of the Allies, but the pro-German King Constantine I refused, so the offer lapsed. In 1916 the King was forced to abdicate and Greece, under Premier Venizelos, joined the War. After the War and under the Treaty of Sevres (1920) Greece gained Western and Eastern Thrace, the strategic islands of Imbros and Tenedos, and was entrusted with the administration of Smyrna and a chunk of the Anatolian hinterland. The Turkish General Mustafa Kemal refused to recognize the Treaty and went on to organize an Army to fight the Greeks. In August 1922 the Greek Army was destroyed, and a new Treaty was signed in Lausanne in 1923. Under this Treaty Greece lost Eastern Thrace, Imbros, Tenedos and Anatolia. Further, 1.5 million Greeks living in Asia Minor were forced to leave their homes and go to live in the Greek mainland, whereas 1 million Turks inhabiting Greece were taken to Turkey. The Great Idea, which implied a national struggle against the Turkish oppressors, was crushed by the force of the Turkish national resistance. During the heyday of the Great Idea the Greeks developed a conception of their national identity which included the following features: (a) The Greek nation are a people who lived for millenia in their Mediterranean territory. Present-day Greeks are the descendants of the Hellenic heroes Plato, Sophocles, Alexander and the Greek-speaking Christians of Byzantium. They are to be identified not by reference to citizenship of the existing Greek state, but by reference to a distinguished civilisation and language to which they are all the rightful heirs. (b) The Greek nation is much larger than the modern Greek State. The latter is that part of the Hellenic and Christian Orthodox world which has been liberated from (mostly Ottoman) domination by the sacrifice and heroism of Greek people. (c) It is the patriotic duty of all `true' Greeks, to work for the liberation of all historically Greek lands, now inhabited by Greeks under foreign rule. And it is a `prescription of history' (a meaningless phrase which has enjoyed wide currency among history-conscious Greeks) that all foreign-dominated Greek territory will eventually become united with the free Greek State. Thus to be a `true' Greek, one would have to conceive of oneself as a member of a great nation only a part of which having, as yet, been redeemed and organized as a free national State; and further, to believe that this national state must grow steadily until it encompasses the whole of the ancient and Byzantian Hellenic world. Greek children at school were taught extensively their history (or an official version of it), ancient, medieval and modern; and modern history was taught as a record of the gradual fulfilment of national aspirations, mainly by fighting against Ottoman Turkish conquerors. So, by a combination of various historical factors, state-controlled education, propaganda and political demagogy, Greek nationalism and patriotism came to mean by the 1860s: pride in being a member of a Superior nation, belief in the necessity of extending the boundaries of the Greek State to include all historically Greek lands, and consequently the assertion of the duty to support a just struggle against the Turkish conquerors who have for long held by force sacred national territory.