Gerasimos Augustinos

The Greeks of Asia Minor : confession, community, and ethnicity in the nineteenth century

The story of 19th-century Asia Minor Greeks illustrates the interplay of European and non-Western cultures. Although grounded historically in the latter culture, Greeks in Asia Minor interacted economically and culturally with Europeans. They were an integral part of Ottoman society, yet considered an ethnoreligious minority. Gerasimos Augustinos, in his social and cultural survey, traces their progress during a critical era of modern history and discusses how their development affected ultimately the entire Hellenic world. Augustinos emphasizes the period from 1840 to 1880, a time of transition from traditional agrarian society and the primacy of religious identity in multinational authoritarian states in Eastern Europe to the dynamic and more complex era of industrialization, nationalist ideology, mass politics, and centralizing states. The role and structure of the Greek Orthodox church was challenged, commerce and education developed, and culture became politicized with the emergence of a Greek nation-state which transmitted its influence from Athens to Asia Minor. Within the Greek communal institutions the sense of ethnic self-identity was reshaped. These forces, however, did not result in an allegiance to one political path. Differences between the urban and provincial Greek communities developed, as did tensions between higher clergy and community leaders, the Patriarchate and the representatives of the Greek government, and Greeks native to Asia Minor and those from Greece. Augustinos addresses these problems of social accommodation among a communally organized people in a multinational state and further defines the interrelation of folk and formal culture and the dynamics of ethnicity and faith. Using unpublished materials from a number of important archival collections and contemporary publications, he draws on the work of Ottomanists as well as neo-Hellenists.

Reviews : Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997; ISBN 0-19-508750-X; xi + 257 pp.; £35 (hbk), £17.99 (pbk

For this journal to review this work is most appropriate. It deals, of course, with a region of Europe. But more important, it raises issues about what is Europe and European. Second, while Todorova is an interdisciplinary scholar and makes good use of theoretical constructs from a number of social science disciplines, her work is thoroughly grounded in history. How we name places reflects how we view ourselves. And history needs geography to concretize the narrative of human society. Todorova investigates the relationship between identity, culture and politics. She does so by examining the development of a referential concept she calls ’Balkanism’. This is not a mere intellectual exercise, or textual explication, but a work of commitment by a person who has lived in and studied the Balkans.