By Saimir Lolja
The seaport town of Navarino locates in south of Doric (Morea; today, Peloponnese) Peninsula. Its original name was Pyllas (Forest Place, Alb.), and today, it is called Pylos. On 20 October 1827, a naval battle took place in its harbor. The combined British, Russian and French fleets defeated the joint Egyptian and Ottoman fleets. Muslim Arvanites made up most of the Egyptian fleet under Mehmet Ali’s son, Ibrahim Pasha.
August 1828, the French Army landed south of Doric Peninsula and commenced fighting against Ibrahim Pasha’s forces. The period of April 1828 – September 1829 had the Russo-Turkish War, which concluded with heavy losses for the Ottoman Empire. For instance, the latter permitted the autonomy of the religious principality named “Servia’.
Those three military events forced the Ottoman Empire to endorse the London Protocol of 22 March 1828. The latter was what Britain, Russia, and France had decided to form an ecclesiastical principality named “Greece” autonomous to Ottoman Empire. The name “Greece” derived from Shqip (Albanian), and the just-signed quasi-state area was 1/6 of today Greece. It was the first time in history that a state entity received the name “Greece”. Sponsored by Britain, Russia, and France, a Third National Assembly in Troizen, east of Morea, on 4 May 1827 had decided that the town of Nafplion, south of Morea, would be the future governmental site.
After Arabs and Ottomans captured Constantinople in 1453, the Patriarchate became the Central Committee of Christian Orthodox commissars in service to the Ottoman Sultan. Together with Imam commissars, they served the Asiatic empire to advance towards the West and ruin Europe. In century XVIII, the Eastern Christian commissars slid in the channel of the Christian Russian Empire. Arbëresh populations south of the Illyric Peninsula and their priests, which did not accept the new conditions and could not hold against Asiatic Arabic Mongol Ottoman waves, relocated to Sicily and southern Italy. They are distinctly still there after 500 years as uninterrupted live evidence with their Albanian inheritance, culture, dressing, arts, and speech. Their priests continue to do religious services in the Albanian tongue (Shqip) and preserve it.
Promoted by Britain, Russia, and France, a Fourth National Assembly took place in Argos near Nafplion on 11 July – 6 August 1829. The question of what to select as the official language for the state of Greece appeared. The choice was between the Albanian tongue (Shqip) of Arvanites-Arbanites and Katharevousa, the church’s language supported by the Russian-made clandestine organization Filiki Eteria (Society of Friends). The Eastern Church, and the organization Filiki Eteria after the year of 1814, had worked that the hatred against Muslims to shudder the national Arbëresh consciousness of Christian Arvanites. They were only illiterate fighters who had orthodox Christian priests as their commissars. At that time, the written Albanian tongue was not in circulation in Europe.
Apart from the church, Russia, Britain, and France’s agents shaped the internal and external politics of “Greece” is cooked. Even in those national assemblies, the political factions had the tags of Russian, French, and British Parties. Therefore, though Christian Arvanite representatives who openly spoke Albanian (Shqip) and constituted above 80% of the Fourth National Assembly, they were not the Assembly’s playwriters. Consequently, the deceived Christian Arvanites, without understanding what the written script, applauded the show put on that stage.
The Fourth National Assembly decided that the official language in the new state named “Greece” would be the Katharevousa language of the eastern church. It had to be adjusted for the public and therefore got the name Dhimotiki (Demotic). Today, it is the official language in Greece. The Eastern Christian commissars and imperial agents, especially Russia, such as Arvanite Gjon Gjika (Ioannis Kapodistrias), needed that decision. Because it completed the concoction of “Greek national” consciousness for which it was enough to be Eastern Christian in name, to learn the “Greek” Dhimotiki and hate Muslims, Ottomans, Turks, and Muslim Arvanites.
Britain, Russia, and France signed the next London Protocol on 3 February 1830, which authorized Greece as an independent country and defined it as a monarchy with the London Conference in May 1832. The 17-year Bavarian Prince Otto Friedrich Ludwig got nominated for being the King of Greece. Britain and Rothschild Bank made money and lent it to the new state of “Greece”.
Arvanites continued to speak and used Albanian tongue (Shqip) like they had done for 2000 years under Roman Latin and Eastern empires. As citizens, they had been called Romans, Romaioi, or Romioi. The decision of the Assembly in 1829 opened the gates of a propaganda sap that had begun to accumulate since midcentury XVIII in central and western Europe. Much fluid had started to gather by German historian of art and archeology Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768). He put the name “Hellenism” to the color of sap, lacking the understanding that the word “Elina-s” was Albanian in origin. He missed the link that it was the famous antiquity art collector Cardinal Alessandro Albani (1692 – 1779) who kindly advised him that word. He bypassed the nation’s path that cannot have a silhouette in the darkness of 3000 years ago by using a woman’s name in a Homeric fairytale; even the latter is antique.
Being a narcist, homoerotic, and pedophile, Johann Joachim Winckelmann created with his dreams, which he published, an ancient “Greece” with nice, tall, blond-hair, blue-eyed, wised people who represented perfection. His publications influenced a lot the creative European minds in century XVIII and beyond, such as G. E. Lessing, J. W. von Goethe, F. V. E. Delacroix, V. M. Hugo, F. W. Nietzsche, etc. Consequently, the creativity about history in sincere dreams flew like oil on pictures and stuck as books’ discoveries. It is true that the few books about the distant past got written and rewritten in harmony with the new music. It was so the dream of a Persian in century V BCE, who got assigned to be a “Greek” after 1000 and 2000 years and named Herodot-us in Latin idiom and Herodot-os in Eastern Katharevousa expression. Furthermore, the nickname “father of history” was allotted for him; for laughing, not a joke.
All travelers and imperial officers moving around in “Greece” in those centuries wrote on their letters only for the Albanian-Arvanite population. When the assigned King for Greece, Otto Friedrich Ludwig, landed for the first time in Nafplion on 30 January 1833, he tried to return to his “Hellenic” dreams because there were around him only Albanian-Arvanites who spoke only Albanian (Shqip). Therefore, leading politicians of the British, Russian, and French empires hurried to use European painters and writers for pouring the river of propaganda inside and outside “Greece”. The Mythology (Science of Fairytale), which got initially composed in century V, was put on full gears. Anyway, a “Greek” citizen cannot simultaneously be a Christian Orthodox and connected with Arbëresh antiquity of Athens, other cities, Aegean, and Mediterranean Seas. The reason is that the Arbëresh antiquity and Orthodox Christianity are detached at least 1500 years in time and are two opposite civilizations and philosophies that exclude each other. There were no” Greeks” before the year 1830.
The formation of a state named “Greece” had an incentive to remake the Eastern Christian (Byzantine) Empire. Therefore the adjusted Katharevousa (Demotic) was chosen as the official language. Obviously, “Greece” would be an extension of the Christian Orthodox Great Russia and would attempt to absorb lands with the Christian Orthodox population as much as it could. Russia’s agents realized to position the Greek Army on the Russian Army’s side against the British, French, and Ottoman Armies during the Crimean War in 1853-1856. Christian Orthodox Greeks equalize themselves with Slavic Orthodox Russians and dream the future together with them.
The Eastern Christian Orthodox and Ottoman empires counted their populations in “Greece” in a religious way. “Greek” was everyone who bore the Christian Orthodox belief and such a name understood Demotic language and hated Turks, Muslims, including Muslim Arvanites. The names of people and places lengthened with suffixes -OS or -IS. In that kind of soil, the implanted seed sprouted leaves in 1844 when the prime-minister Ioannis Kolettis put forth the Great Idea (Megali Idea, Dem.). Since then, the “Greek” state aimed at absorbing through or without war populations that 1001 years before had been in the earrings of ecclesiastical commissars of the Byzantine Empire. For 100 years, the Great Idea watered from Britain, Russia, and France increased Greece six times to Great Greece, like it is today.
The British and French empires betrayed Europe and the West when in century XIX allied with Slavic Russia and created an image of an Eastern Christian empire named “Greece”. Their sin expanded in century XX when the Entente League of Britain, Russia, and France formed three times in the middle of Europe a Slavic Byzantine image named “Yugoslavia”, that is, Greater Serbia. Likewise, the latter’s idea entitled the Sequence of Actions (Naçertanije, Serb.) appeared precisely in 1844. Its first author was Ilia Garashanin, and his son Milutin Garashanin supplemented it in 1886. For 150 years, the Sequence of Actions watered from Britain, Russia, and France increased Serbia (Servia) up to six times, until it began to crumble in the late twentieth century.
Imagine, how would be, even these days, written about the antiquity if the Fourth National assembly in 1829 would have decided the Albanian tongue (Shqip) of Christian Orthodox Arvanites as the official idiom of “Greece”? Would then departments in western universities that “discover ancient Greece” exist? Would Ph.D. degrees renown in Greek Mythologae (the Science of Untruth) then exist?
Arbanites-Arvanites make the majority in Greece. They are in cities and in at least 900 villages spread across Greece where they speak openly Albanian. They are the state-forming, state-founding, and state-leading population, which means that the Albanian tongue (Shqip) is still missing to be the official idiom in Greece.