Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (40 page)

Two other Greek educators of the period held views markedly different from those of Voúlgaris: his contemporary Iósipos Misiódhax
(c.1730–1800) and the younger man Athanásios Psalídhas (1767–1829). Misiódhax was born in Wallachia in today’s Romania, a Vlach by birth and originally a Vlach speaker. His name is derived from the old Roman province of Moesia, which stretched along the banks of the Danube as far as the Black Sea. However, Misiódhax became completely Hellenised in language and outlook: he referred to Greeks as his kith and kin (
omoyenís
) and to Greek schools as ‘our schools’. He was educated in Thessalonika, Smyrna and at the Mt Athos academy under Voúlgaris, whose curriculum he thought was far too ambitious. He learned his physics and mathematics at the University of Padua, and from 1765 to 1777 taught these subjects as head of the academy of Iasi in north-east Romania, a return to his roots. But like Voúlgaris he fell foul of conservative opposition and gave up teaching to travel to Budapest, Vienna and Venice and to write. His writings, all published in Vienna, show the range of his interests: a treatise on the education of children, mainly derived straight from Locke, a
Theory of Geography
, and a more general
Apologia
. He died in Bucharest in 1800.

Misiódhax differed from Voúlgaris in a number of ways. Despite his earlier praise of Voúlgaris as a man of the first distinction as both writer and teacher, he later condemned Voúlgaris’ mathematics as a total muddle. Misiódhax was also far more critical than Voúlgaris of religion and particularly of religious observances: the pious offerings of ten or twenty people, he said, would be enough to set up a decent academy. Whereas Voúlgaris wrote in Ancient Greek, Misiódhax used and advocated everyday common language. He wrote that the use of the ancient language in teaching pupils produced ‘fearsome constructions in which their fathers conceal themselves in deep thickets’, and that ‘this culpable prejudice in favour of antiquity is the cause of our meagre and indeed our bad knowledge.’
⁶
Misiódhax was firmly on the side of the practical. Logic and metaphysics he regarded as of little use or even interest, and mathematics and all the branches of science as much more important. The purpose of education, he believed, should be personal and social betterment, and the true philosophy was ‘a unitary theory which investigates the nature of things with the constant end of providing for and establishing the true happiness which man,
qua
man, can enjoy on this earth’.
⁷

The last of this trio of educators was Athanásios Psalídhas. He was born in Iánnina in 1767 and was educated there until the age of eighteen. Then after two years in Russia he went to Vienna, where he studied medicine, philosophy and science. It was here between 1791 and 1795 that he published his main surviving writings, including
Alithís Evdhemonía
(True Happiness) and
Kalokinímata
(Moves Towards Progress). In 1795 he returned to Iánnina as a teacher and became head of the progressive school where Voúlgaris had taught. Here Psalídhas’ classes included philosophy, history, geography, mathematics and the rarity of experimental science, for which he brought the equipment from Vienna. Psalídhas came under attack from the head of the conservative school in Iánnina as Voúlgaris had done, and Psalídhas was accused of atheism, Voltairism and other heresies. As well as teaching, Psalídhas became an adviser to Ali Pasha, the semi-independent ruler of Iánnina and of large tracts of northern Greece. In 1822, the year of Ali Pasha’s downfall and death, Psalídhas left for Corfu, where he became an honorary doctor of the Ionian Academy, involving himself in the affairs of the war of independence and corresponding with its leaders. He died in Corfu in 1829.

Psalídhas made clear his reliance on Enlightenment thinkers – Locke, Leibniz, Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant among others. He told Greeks living abroad to ‘imitate the Europeans, the civilised and enlightened nations in which you are living’.
⁸
Nevertheless his philosophy was far from rigorous. He criticised Voúlgaris’ three sources of ideas – revelation, reflection and sensation. Revelation, Psalídhas declared, cannot be a source of ideas since it is outside the realm of reason. Reflection, which Psalídhas equated with the activity of ‘the soul itself’, was dismissed because the soul cannot produce any idea just by itself. There remains only sensation, and in ‘True Happiness’ Psalídhas wrote: ‘All the ideas we possess we must acquire through the senses.’
⁹

So far so coherent. But in ‘Moves Towards Progress’ he maintains that there are four truths essential to the good life, the first of which is that God exists. God is infinite, and ‘The mind can neither acquire nor represent to itself the idea of an infinite being.’
¹⁰
Yet the mind does have such an idea, and must do so to live aright. So the idea of God must come through revelation, and revelation was supposed not to be a source of ideas. Psalídhas had failed in his attempts to ride two horses at once, and his proposals for reconciling revelation and reason were no more successful than those of Voúlgaris.

Psalídhas attacked both Voúlgaris’ thinking and Voúlgaris the man. He criticised, with some justice, Voúlgaris’ use of Ancient Greek. He pounced on mistakes by Voúlgaris, who had written that the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle was equal to the sum of the other two sides, not their squares. He maintained, again with some justice, that Voúlgaris’
Logic
is badly disorganised. But Psalídhas attacked Voúlgaris personally as well as professionally. The whole output of Voúlgaris, he wrote, displays ‘his vanity, his egotism, his pride and arrogance, and in
consequence the emptiness of his reputation’, and in a final outburst: ‘Despising his country and all his own race, he has taken himself off on the slightest of excuses to barbarous foreign lands, letting patriotism come second to pleasure and greed, and without putting either his life or his substance at risk for the sake of his people.’
¹¹
The progressive Greek followers of the Enlightenment had more than enough difficulty with conservative traditionalists. Their efforts to improve Greek education might have made more progress if there had at least been solidarity among them.

The second group of Greeks influenced by the Enlightenment were primarily revolutionaries rather than educators, and they looked to the overthrow of Turkish rule and the establishment of a free and independent Greece. Two names are prominent: Rígas Pheréos, also called Velestinlís (1757–98), and Adhamántios Kora
ḯ
s (1748–1833). Both also looked to education, in one form or another, as a prelude to Greece’s regeneration.

Rígas was born in the Thessalian town of Velestíno, ancient Phére, hence his two toponyms. His father was wealthy, and Rígas was well educated, first by a village priest at home and later at local schools. After a few years as a schoolmaster in Thessaly he left for Constantinople some time between 1777 and 1780 when he was in his early twenties. There he continued his studies, learning French, Italian and German. He also became friendly with the families of the phanariots, the Greeks who filled higher posts in the Ottoman bureaucracy and also served as governors of the semi-independent principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia in today’s Romania. In 1785 Rígas became private secretary to the phanariot Alexander Ipsilántis, who two years later was appointed governor of Moldavia, and was the grandfather of the Ipsilántis brothers who played important roles in the war of independence. For the rest of his professional career Rígas served as secretary to a succession of senior officials, mainly in Bucharest or in the Austrian capital Vienna. In Bucharest Rígas became friendly with Misiódhax, and shared with him a commitment to communicate in the language of the people, not in Ancient Greek.

Rígas’ companion and biographer Christóphoros Perrevós described Rígas’ appearance and character when he was in his thirties: ‘He was of average height, with a thick neck, a round red-and-white face, fair moustache, rather broad nose, wide forehead, bulky temples, large ears and a decidedly large round, powerful head. His merits were charm and intelligence, a lively nature, articulate, industrious, of simple habits, sympathetic; the persuasiveness on his lips attracted everyone to his advice.’
¹²

Rígas was still in his twenties when his first works were published in Vienna, and these show that he was already well aware of Enlightenment thinking. One was his
Anthology of Physics
published in 1790 in 24 chapters that covered, as well as physics as understood today, the subjects of minerals, plants and animals, including man. The most important source was the French
Encyclopédie
. At the same time Rígas was translating Montesquieu’s
Esprit des Lois
, though this translation was never published. A curious work by Rígas, also published in 1790, was the
School of Delicate Lovers
, a Greek translation of 6 of the 261 stories, many salacious if not pornographic, by the French writer Retif de la Bretonne. It has often been asked why Rígas spent time on such frivolity, but Rígas’ choice of these six stories points to the answer. Each deals with love between young people of very different class: in two the humble lad loves his employer’s daughter, and in the other four a rich aristocrat loves a poor girl. The message was clearly that equality overrides all social divisions. The stories were also moral lessons, advocating hard work, no sex before marriage and not even forwardness on the part of girls. Rígas himself wrote that the book aimed to provide ‘both amusement and a kind of moral improvement’.
¹³

Rígas’ works of the following years had a more pointed revolutionary message and can be divided into two groups. In the first group the message was only implicit. It included an engraving of the head of Alexander the Great, with a lengthy inscription in both Greek and French, clearly intended to remind both Greeks and foreigners of Greece’s glorious past. There was also a series of detailed maps, covering twelve sheets, entitled
Map of Greece Including its Islands and Part of its Many Outposts
(apikíes)
in Europe and Asia Minor
, and including commentaries on historic sites and battles. Greece was shown as including Albania, Serbia, Bulgaria and parts of Turkey, and again the implicit message was clear: a greater Greece would supplant the Ottoman Empire in Europe and even beyond. Finally there was a Greek translation from French of parts of the
Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis
by Jean Jacques Barthélemy, the story of a Scythian prince of the fourth century
BC
who goes to classical Greece to be civilised. Greece, it was to be understood, had laid the foundations of European civilisation and deserved to be restored to her ancient pre-eminence.

The second group of Rígas’ works were two more openly propagandist books, both published in 1797. One was the
Military Manual
, based on a book by an Austrian field-marshal, and including two military songs that begin ‘All of the nations go to war’ and ‘Why thus endure, O friends and brothers all?’ The other, Rígas’ most significant work, was the
New
Political Order
in four parts: a revolutionary proclamation, a statement of the rights of man, a proposed constitution of the Hellenic Republic, and finally a
thoúrios
or battle song.

The revolutionary proclamation is addressed to all who suffer under Turkish tyranny, Greeks and Turks alike, ‘without any distinction of religion since all are the creatures of God and children of the first man’. The Sultan is denounced as being ‘wholly given over to his filthy woman-obsessed appetites’, and accused of reducing Greece to a state of abominable anarchy where no one ‘is assured either of his life, his honour, or his property’. Therefore the oppressed people have already, in Rígas’ view, resolved to ‘raise up manfully its overburdened neck’, to ‘equip its arms with the weapons of vengeance and despair’ and to proclaim ‘the holy and blameless rights which are God given’.
¹⁴
The proclamation did not quite call for armed rebellion. This came in the next part, where Rígas set out these rights of man. This section is largely based on the versions of the declaration of the rights of man that prefixed the successive French Constitutions between 1789 and 1795, but with additions by Rígas. There are four natural rights, Rígas wrote: to be equal, to be free, and that the law should protect both our lives and our property. To defend these rights is the most important right of all. ‘When the government breaches the rights of the people, then for the people to make a revolution, take up arms and punish the tyrants is the most sacred of all rights and the most compelling of all obligations.’
¹⁵

The law, which is the safeguard of these rights, springs from something like Rousseau’s general will: ‘The law is that free decision which has come about with the consent of all people.’ Rígas goes into some detail about how the law should operate: only the law can restrict a man’s freedom, not the whim of a judge; law is for the fault, so punishment is the same for all, and must fit the fault; legislation cannot be retrospective; a man is innocent until proved guilty.

One article of the rights of man concerns education. Schools for both boys and girls must be established in all the villages, since ‘from education is generated progress, with which free nations shine.’
¹⁶
And one of the last articles again emphasises Rígas’ ecumenical vision of a new state or empire containing all the oppressed ethnic groups: ‘When a single inhabitant of this empire is wronged, the entire empire is wronged. The Bulgar must be moved when the Greek suffers, and vice versa, and both for the Albanian and the Wallachian.’
¹⁷