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Modern Greek Ethno-Religious Nationalism: An Ideological and Spatio-Temporal Relocation of Selfhood

Issue: Vol 20 No. 1 (2017) Special Issue: Theorizing Religion and Nationalism

Abstract:

Since Greece’s independence in 1829, modern Greek identity has been perceived in both scholarly and popular accounts as the ideological interrelationship of Hellenic nationhood and Greek Orthodoxy. Through state-funded representations, this interrelationship has produced the ethno- religious identity of Ελληνοχριστιανισμός (“Helleno-Christianism”) shaping conceptions of the “Self” and the “Other” in terms of emic claims to a “lived” historical memory of topographical boundaries, cultural uniqueness, and national heritage. Rather than speak of Greek nationhood as an “imagined community” of the modernist constructions of the nation-state, in this study I argue that Greek nationhood is the product of a pre-modern process of geographical and ideological relocation of ethno-religious self-perception in response to the Sack of Constantinople by the Latin Crusaders in 1204, which reduced the Byzantine Empire to its “Hellenic” geographical space making it a Greek state of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic homogeneity. The theoretical contribution of this study is to examine how the nationalistic enterprise of modern Greek ethno-religious identity formation constitutes synchronic relations and diachronic extensions that involve the strategic sacralization of geographic space as a pragmatic expression of pre-modern nationalistic discourse promoting a notion of the “Self” as a resistance to the “Other.”

Author: Damon Zacharias Lycourinos

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