Greece
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Greece’
John Kapodistrias had an instinct for how a long-oppressed people might think.
In 1821, the people of Greece rose up against the Ottoman Empire that had conquered the ailing Roman Empire and its dependent territories in 1453. Life under the Turkish yoke had been hard, and John Kapodistrias, the man chosen by the Greeks in 1827 to lead their newly liberated nation, faced daunting problems of industry and education, but on his first arrival he had a more pressing issue: food.
The Persian King felt that a lord of his majesty should not have to take any nonsense from an overgrown river.
In 483 BC, Xerxes I (r. 486-465 BC) rallied all Persia for a second attempted conquest of Greece, after the failure of Darius I at Marathon seven years earlier. He planned his route meticulously, throwing two bridges across the Hellespont, the narrow stretch of water between the mainland of Asia Minor and the Gallipoli peninsula in what is now Turkey, but it was not a straightforward business.
Hospitality and sympathy, but no help - the Byzantine Emperor learns a bitter lesson about western diplomacy.
Byzantium became the capital of the Roman Empire in 330, and was renamed Constantinople after the Emperor, Constantine. Its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 was one of the great catastrophes of civilisation, yet England and the other powers of Europe stood and watched.
The mayor and bishop of Zakynthos went to extraordinary lengths to protect the most vulnerable people of their island.
In February 1943, the Italians, who had captured the Greek island of Zakynthos two years earlier, threw the island’s bishop, Chrysostom, in an Athens jail. Ten months later he returned home to find the island now in the hands of the Nazis.
Alexander the Great dropped a hint to his sycophantic entourage.
In 336 BC, the young Alexander, son of Philip II of Macedon, was just beginning his astonishing rise to be King of all Greece and Asia. Like all great men, he was surrounded by tittering hangers-on; one wonders if they quite got the hint he gave them here.
Both Rudyard Kipling and the Royal Navy saw Greek sovereignty as a universal symbol of freedom.
In 1821, the Greeks declared independence from the Ottoman Empire, setting off a bloody revolution that ended in victory for the Greeks. A century later, as the Ottoman Turks shared defeat with Germany in the Great War, Kipling and the Royal Navy rubbed a little salt in wounds old and new.