Greece and the Philhellenes

Abstract

Greece came under the domination of the Turkish Ottoman Empire by degrees in the fifteenth century. After a long period of acquiescence, during which the country was often a theatre of war between the Turks and the Venetians, the Greeks began gradually to rediscover a distinctive culture and identity. This process accelerated in the eighteenth century, with the founding of new schools and academies, and was given significant impetus by a regular flow of sympathetic travellers from abroad — men such as the politician and educationalist Frederick North, future Earl of Guilford — who, through their books and diaries, encouraged across Europe a belief in the possible regeneration of the modern Greeks as true descendants of the ancient Greeks, heirs to the spirit and virtues of a lost civilisation. The importance of Lord Byron in furthering this upsurge of ‘love for Greece’, the phenomenon known as philhellenism, cannot be too heavily stressed. His visit to Greece with J. C. Hobhouse in 1809 and 1810 produced the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (published in 1812), and subsequently the series of Grecian-Turkish tales The Giaour (1813), The Bride of Abydos (1813) and The Siege of Corinth (1816).