Fallmerayer and the Albanian past: Greek blood does not flow in Greece

From: Dorian Koçi

The historical theses of the Bavarian academic, Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, shook European historical thought in the second half of the 1857th century. For the first time, after the formation of the Greek national state, the Greek continuity in its historical territories was questioned and special importance was given to the influx of Slavic and Albanian peoples into the territories of what was known as ancient Greece. Fallmerayer, in his treatise "The Albanian element in Greece" which was published in three volumes of the Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences of Bavaria in the years 1860-XNUMX, at the same time dealt extensively with the origin of Albanians.

According to him, after the all-round revolutionary upheavals brought by the storms of the barbarian waves and the massive settlement of the Slavs in the Balkans, there was nothing left of the legacy of ancient Greece but the earth, the ruins, while in the veins of this people "no blood flowed anymore." Greek", and for this reason there could be no question of any kind of historical continuity, especially since in the 14th century a second massive influx, now Albanian, had also covered the deepest Greek villages up to the Peloponnese. He went on to say that now there lives a new tribe fraternized with the great tribe of Slavs. As the second element of the population there, the Albanians are to be included... The Scythian Slavs, the Illyrian Arnauts, the children of the northern countries of the same blood as the Serbs and Bulgarians, the Dalmatians and the Muscovites (Russians) are what we call Hellenes today.

It was natural that this finding and affirmation of this historical break of the Greek ethnos and the evidence of the ancient origin of the Albanians caused a reaction in the intellectual circles of Europe, in most cases 20 years after the triumph of the Greek Revolution and the construction of the national state Greek, had been strong advocates of the construction of the new Greece according to a model and ideal that would represent the Greek spirit of antiquity studied in the chairs of European universities.

European fascination, against the revival of Greece, had turned into a stream of European political and cultural thought of the beginning of the 1824th century, known as Philohellenism, whose exponents had been some of the most famous figures of European culture, such as Lord Byron, Chateaubriand, Goethe, Manzini, etc. In the publication of "Popular Songs of Modern Greece" in Paris in XNUMX, by Claude Fauriel, two years after the massacre of Chios and the brutal suppression of the first Greek uprising, the author insistently asserts that the Greek nation sufficiently possesses all that has been retained as an inheritance. indispensable to a nation worthy of this name, a language and a culture that ensures continuity with great posterity, a living popular literature, rooted in the land and soul of the nation.

This statement and other publications in the European press of the time narrate how deeply the process of uniformizing different cultural, linguistic and geographical identities was extended in European thought when the realities on the ground were different from what was claimed. This is evident from the perception of men of letters who lived in Greece, including the German historian Fallmerayer. In a letter dated February 11, 1834, he says that the whole of Attica is populated by Albanian speakers and in the capital we find people who only know Greek if they need it. In Boeotia, with the exception of three localities, the same situation is observed.

Of course, this definition expressed a well-known reality of the time, but over time it changed to the detriment of the Arvanite population. The Arvanite population, present since the 13th century in Greece, went through various processes of assimilation at the time of the formation of the Greek national state. These assimilation processes were based on those characteristics that had helped to establish the Greek nation as a religious identity - the immediate urbanization where the new Greek kingdom entered and especially the region of Attica where this population was more concentrated.

As Orthodox Christians that they were, and since Orthodoxy was at the core of the emerging modern Hellenic identity, many of them had participated in the liberation struggle, some of them even becoming its leaders. As in previous centuries, Hellenism was aided by the mixing and compactness of some populations, as well as the process of urbanization. The lack of a literary tradition also acted in this regard. The network of Greek education that was developing was, together with the Church, a powerful engine of Hellenization, especially when efforts to educate girls were also increased. But what helped to erase the Albanian language was its social devaluation, at least in the public space: speaking Albanian meant belonging to the lowest stratum of neo-Hellenic society, that is, being a peasant or a sailor. while speaking Greek meant being a "true Hellene".

Fallmerayer's work was not unknown to the Albanian renaissance thought. Since it was considered the first more or less extensive detailed history of Albanians, it was part of the corpus of works of Albanian studies, which were the result of the European intellectual cosmopolitanism of the middle of the 19th century. As Anne-Maria Therese rightly underlines in her work "The Creation of National Identities: Europe of the 18th-19th Centuries", one of the consequences of intellectual cosmopolitanism is the assistance to the nations in the East, whose intellectual environments are not yet so developed. equipped to undertake, without support, the construction of their antiquity and their language. In the Albanian reality of national awakening, his work was classified in support of the Pelasgian thesis, through the revocation of the ancient past, equivalent to that of the Greeks and Latins.

The national poet Naim Frashëri, in the preface to the translation of the first song of Homer's "Iliad" in 1896, mentions Fallmerayer and other foreign scholars who have contributed to the study of Albanian culture and language. The Pelasgian thesis in the mid-nineteenth century actually represented a double concern. It reflected a geostrategic concern towards Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism fighting for territories in the Balkans. The middle of the 26th century and the beginning of the 1699th century are the years of nationalism in the Balkans, but also of the geostrategic and political interests of the Great Powers, which try to create client states in the territories of the Ottoman Empire that are liberated one by one under the fire of successive uprisings. . First Greece, which gains independence but aligns itself under the Bavarian cultural tutelage and later the geostrategic interests of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – the empire of coexistence of many peoples that soon finds itself under the fire of nationalisms arising among its many populations but also under the imperialist desire to expand further south – form what is called the cultural Germanic front in Eastern Europe. In its contacts with the populations of the Balkans, starting after the Peace of Karlovac on January XNUMX, XNUMX, the Holy Austrian Empire would watch their cultural development with great interest.

Against Pan-Germanism in the Balkans, Pan-Slavism was aligned with its unifying ideology of the Slavic peoples. Secondly, it was a scientific concern since, as Dora D'Istria rightly observed, it was considered a science that had just been born in our day and, like all other sciences, had very sound foundations in comparative philology and mythology, in the examination of moral and physical characters, in primitive archeology, in national traditions, etc.

So, as seen in the middle of the 19th century, the Pelasgian origin was an almost tangible scientific reality to which important representatives of the Albanian elite could not be indifferent, but the mixing with it and his name was exaggerated. His work was admirable and remains admirable even today according to Franc Babinger, the well-known albanologist who calls it the force of interpretation and says about the language used that the beauty of his language is mind-blowing.

However, despite the various mentions or citations of Fallmerayer's work, by various exponents of Albanian culture, we find a complete academic portrait of the Albanian world in the 1980s of the last century, in the lecture of Professor Aleks Buda , "JP Fallmerayer and the history of the medieval Albanians" held at the Academy of Sciences of Bavaria in 1981 and published in Historical Writings 3, p. 164-184. According to Buda, despite the objections and accusations addressed to him by the Greek public opinion, Fallmerayer and his thesis never had the intention of a moral devaluation and a subversion of the autochthonous national element. Professor Buda, after noting Fallmerayer's enlightened and republican education as a participant in the 1848-1849 revolution, and therefore also a supporter of the freedom of the new nations that were being born, underlines the fact that his academic attitudes should be sought first in an epistemological plan. Precisely in this plan, Buddha understands and rightly supports the methodical questions posed by Fallmerayeri how historiography could claim, after all these upheavals that, between a Pericles and a Kolokotron in Greece, between Ghent and Teuta and Skanderbeg in Albania, there could be an unbroken direct ethnic continuity?

However, despite the fact of addressing these questions methodically, Buda underlines the other authoritative fact based on new historical findings and research, that the thesis of the absolute lack of ethno-cultural continuity that applied to Greece, as well as to other populations autochthonous Daco-Romanians, Albanians cannot be maintained. When it comes to the Albanians, he bases his argument of Illyrian-Arberian continuity on the discovery of Koman culture, which he considers as an eloquent link of continuity between the ancient inhabitants and Arberian successors; a culture with a time span from the 7th century to the 9th century and with a fairly wide territorial extension from the Albanian Alps to the southern shores of the Adriatic Sea and the Vjosa valley.

According to Buda, the Koman Culture was a culture of a civic and peasant population, coastal and mountainous, rooted in the ancient tradition and with innovations, with elements inherited from the Illyrian Halshatian iron culture and from the Roman and Paleo-Byzantine provincial culture, where the Slavic elements they appear only as isolated elements and not as a compact culture. This very important conclusion of Albanian historical and archaeological science is also illustrated by linguistic studies of toponymy, where Buda gives the example of the cities included in the Koman Culture, which as an Albanian appellation prove the ethnic character of their inhabitants. He gives the example of the name of the city of Kruja, a metastasis of the ancient Albanopolis, one of the centers of the arboreal culture documented since the 9th century.

Buda's merit is that, through scientific seriousness and multidisciplinary study, he gives us a complete portrait of the Bavarian academician and his work in Albanianology. In this prism, the ethnic toponymy of the Arber name, their first mention and their geographical distribution has been seen. Buda opposes Fallmerayer's opinion based on the theory of the ebb and flow of the Slavic floods and the concentration of their political powers and which implies that in the moments of weakening of this power, the unstoppable empowerment of the Albanians began by studying with academic scrupulousness in the historical annals historical facts and documents, as well as analyzing the urban structure of the arboreal society.

Precisely in this analysis of this urban structure, which we do not find in Fallmerayer's work, lies the merit of Professor Buda's historical thought, when he underlines the fact that Fallmeraher's thought is without sufficient basis, which falls prey to a template way of thinking that characterizes the Albanians as a people of shepherds, while the documents speak of a differentiated feudal society of Albanian origin, such as the archons of Arbër who hold the high titles of the Byzantine feudal hierarchy such as panhypersevas, those "nobli viri", counts, barons, prelates, burgesses, those peasant communities which the Byzantine, Angevin rulers, etc., describe as "Albanian noblemen" with their characteristic ethnic names.

At the same time, Buda recognizes the merits of the Bavarian academic regarding the expansion of the name Arbër and Arbëri, an opinion which he paraphrases by excluding the laws of a demographic violence and violent extension, but as an extension of relations, different forms in a territory with a unitary population that spoke the same language, had the same origin, customs and as a historically formed and consolidated community that found expression with the common name.

Fallmerayer encountered the Albanians with the name Arvan in the peninsula of More, about which he wrote a work entitled "History of the peninsula of More". The phenomenon of their migration from Albania to Morea, in the light of the conclusions reached by the Bavarian academic, Professor Buda analyzes on a comparative level between the development of feudalism in Arberia, Greece and Germany. He analyzes the causes and reasons why this Albanian demographic expansion could not be channeled in the service of the arboreal feudal class located in the new lands and the use of this situation by the Greek feudal class to channel it into the population of barren and abandoned lands. Professor Buda extends the migratory movement of Albanians towards Greece on a comparative level when he takes the example of the German population of peasant masses who, under this pressure of increasing feudal exploitation, migrated en masse towards the east to places where they could find free land and conditions easier social.

The historical thought of the Buddha for the German historian Fallmerayer is of the same wave with the later European historical thought in terms of his theory of historical continuity as two of his sympathetic biographers, the historian Ernst Molden writes that finally, as a result of all new research into the whole complexity of this matter to a high degree of certainty, the idea can be expressed that Fallmerayer's theory can claim to be accurate only to a very limited extent.

The detailed analysis of Fallmerayer's historical thought, compared with the latest sources in Albanology, makes it possible to portray and highlight his contribution to Albanology. "Habent sua fata libelli", Professor Buda writes in his lecture, which is actually not only functional for Fallmerayer's work, but also for the professor's own works in Albanianology. The biggest challenge of the Albanian historical thought is precisely reading and analyzing the structure of the historical thought of the luminaries of the writing of the national history through the improvement of the writing of this history according to the latest documentation. Aleks Buda's lecture on the contribution of the Bavarian academician Fallmerayer and the issues of the Albanian Middle Ages is a good model that has something to offer in this direction.