The Balkans: A History of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—TurkeyHogarth, D. G. (David George)
History
The Balkans: A History of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey
Hogarth, D. G. (David George)
Balkan Peninsula -- History; Eastern question (Balkan)
The country lapsed into utter anarchy. Peloponnesians and Armatoli,
Kolokotronists and Kolettists, alternately appointed and deposed
subservient national assemblies and governing commissions by naked
violence, which culminated in a gratuitous and disastrous attack upon
the French troops stationed in Peloponnesos for their common
protection. The three powers realized that it was idle to liberate
Greece from Ottoman government unless they found her another in its
place. They decided on monarchy, and offered the crown, in February
1832, to Prince Otto, a younger son of the King of Bavaria. The
negotiations dragged on many months longer than Greece could afford to
wait. But in July 1832 the sultan recognized the sovereign independence
of the kingdom of Hellas in consideration of a cash indemnity; and in
February 1833, just a year after the first overtures had been made, the
appointed king arrived at Nauplia with a decorative Bavarian staff and
a substantial loan from the allies.
3
_The Consolidation of the State_
Half the story of Greece is told. We have watched the nation awake and
put forth its newly-found strength in a great war of independence, and
we have followed the course of the struggle to its result—the
foundation of the kingdom of Hellas.
It is impossible to close this chapter of Greek history without a sense
of disappointment. The spirit of Greece had travailed, and only a
principality was born, which gathered within its frontiers scarcely
one-third of the race, and turned for its government to a foreign
administration which had no bond of tradition or affinity with the
population it was to rule. And yet something had been achieved. An
oasis had been wrested from the Turkish wilderness, in which Hellenism
could henceforth work out its own salvation untrammelled, and extend
its borders little by little, until it brought within them at last the
whole of its destined heritage. The fleeting glamour of dawn had
passed, but it had brought the steady light of day, in which the work
begun could be carried out soberly and indefatigably to its conclusion.
The new kingdom, in fact, if it fulfilled its mission, might become the
political nucleus and the spiritual ensample of a permanently awakened
nation—an ‘education of Hellas’ such as Pericles hoped to see Athens
become in the greatest days of Ancient Greece.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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