History as
we know it, as we learn it is -may I say- half the truth. The text below proves
it. An amazing text - interview which with in a few lines gives a new dimension
to the Greek and world history and overturns historical views being itself fuel
for thinking. Another translation exclusively for the readers of GREECE AND
WORLD.
interview of George Karampelias to
"Antifonitis" magazine -
This study of yours, as you mention in the
preface, helped you to view and modify several times some negative opinions,
about Byzantium. This means a profoundly ideological change of your visual
approach to several issues of your past books?
It is a
characteristic of this time, that the characteristics of modern Hellenism are
formed in a final way, the ethos of resistance - according to Nikos Svoronos
the main element - and the political texture of its identity. In this respect
it is interesting that Digenis Akritas, written in the twelfth century, is
"the national epic of modern Hellenism", according to Nicholas
Politis, has as its central hero of a ... "Digenis" (of two descents)
with an Arab Christian father and Greek mother. His identity is cultural and
spiritual and not racial, showing in a way that, the famous phrase of Isocrates
about the ancient Greeks (Hellenes) " Greeks (Hellenes) are the ones who
posses Greek paedia - education", applied in a greater degree for modern
Hellenism. Yet this very developed culture lacked the aggressive reflexes of
colonial West, which began its course to conquer the world and of the Turkish -
Mongol tribes, which at the same time spread with lightning speed from Delhi to
Kiev. It succumbed after an unequal struggle that lasted four centuries
starting from 1071 AD when the Seljuks at Manzikert defeated the Byzantine army
and the Normans conquered Bari. In 1453 Mehmet the Conqueror simply knocked out
a breathless Byzantium. As for the bronze statues of the hippodrome, carried by
the Venetians in the Piazza of San Marco (Saint Mark), so the wealth, culture,
the Byzantine manuscripts will be transferred to the West and will form the
basis to trigger the western Renaissance, while the Greek people will sink for
a few centuries in the dark. The crucial moment was 1204 AD, when
Constantinople was at least 500000 population and was the "queen of
cities" and certainly not 1453 AD when approximately 50000 people lived in
the glorious ruins. So our rebirth will be "suspended" for 500 years
at least and when in 1700 we catch again the thread, we have already lost five
centuries. So we thought that we had no other choice but to import everything
from Hesperia.
-The first conquest of Constantinople was a
critical event, the importance of such -as you note- was ignored. What are the
immediate consequences of this?
Hiding the
importance of the first and decisive Fall of Constantinople obscures the actual
building process of modern Hellenism and its continuity with the Byzantine, as
well, in fact G. Karabelias -1204 AD and the formation of modern Hellenism
GREECEANDWORLD.BLOGSPOT.COM the first "nation-state"-or Modern Greek
states formed during the so-called "Late Byzantine time. " At the
same time, and in that regard, this silencing involves hiding the colonialstyle
relationship established since then among Westerners conquerors and Greeks of
late Byzantium, falsifying, moreover, global history itself, especially in the
crucial chapter on the colonial establishment of the West, which is not
launched with Columbus but with the Crusades - and essentially, the
dismemberment of Byzantium. furthermore is the ultimate humiliation for the
colonized to ignore or hide the texture of relations of subordination agreed
with the dominants, because they (the colonized) will continue forever to be
disoriented without being able to establish an autonomous culture.
-Apart from any internal, Greek, reading of the
book, which has much to offer as to clear up some things, what do you think
could be offered in the wider European family?
Today the
dominance of the West is closing in planetary field, with the emergence of new
centers of power - China, India, Islam, Latin America, etc. - and we' re headed
for a fundamental multipolar world. Europe is sinking more and more into a deep
and widespread crisis and to reconstruct itself as a center of culture and
power, the balance between the West and the East in our continent should be
reconstituted as well. A geopolitical balance, with the accession of Russia,
and certainly not the non European Turkey, in a future united Europe, but also
spiritual. The fact that the pope apologized in 2001, from the Greeks for
1204AD in Athens, is a step in the right direction. Because as shown by Europe
after the war, only the recognition of the crimes of Hitler's Germany against
the Jews and other European nations allowed to establish a united Western
Europe and certainly not oblivion. Thus the study of the rupture brought by
1204 in an old European tradition, is still up to the minute. At such a time, the
recognition of the contribution of the Greek (Hellenic) and the Orthodox
component configuration, finally, of a Europe that will not be limited to the
most-helpless now-western version, is a must. The "Greek way" the
balance between spirit and matter, man and nature, man and machine that would
probably give a different kind of Renaissance if Byzantium had survived. Maybe
it can be activated again today, because the Western power-centric model has
exhausted to an ecological and anthropological impasse.
-We can say that the message of the book, can
help to boost our confidence to go further, which in recent years only our
athletes offer us?
Certainly,
it emphasizes that History never ends. 1204 marks the change in the correlation
of forces between the Latin and Greek tradition, between Western and Eastern
Europe, in favor of the former. So I think as the cornerstone of the Modern
Greek hallmark as national resistance identity. Τhe development of the nations is, above all,
the rupture with the nearest "other" and the gradual diversification
away from him. And if this process of rupture accelerates from 11th century
until at least the 18th century, then, the two worlds will begin to close to
each other again, but now with almost absolute terms of inequity. The West is
the world's center, while the Greek (Hellenic) and "Oriental" world,
the heart of European culture once had changed to semi-periphery and
"parasitic outgrowth" of the western paradigm. Today - the West gets
in crisis - it is possible, if the thread went back to where we had left it,
finally overcoming the division between "tradition" that looks
backwards and "modernization" constantly looking outwards, with a
radical new proposal that might finally remove the "sorrow of Greekness",
of which Moskof talked about, a third proposal is to modernize our tradition.
and follow up where we left off when we suffered an unprecedented amputation is
the only option we have. Or completion of our face to the new conditions, or
permanent loss of any face.
"..the most important contrast of Greek
(Hellenic) society today is not the traditional clash between Left - Right, but
the contrast between Greek people and a -forced established occupying
elite."
source: the
biweekly newspaper of Komotini Antifonitis (issue 240), 2/20/2008 translated by
Pyrros
GREECEANDWORLD.BLOGSPOT.COM
1204: The first conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders. Perhaps the
biggest looting of city in world's history. Since then, Constantinople will not
recover and until the conquest by the Turks would remain a ghost of its old
self.
