By Todd Smith
Modern Greece is often described as ancient reborn. In truth, it was something far more radical. It was an Albanian led state that later learned to speak in classical Greek.
This is not polemic. It is history, once stripped of ceremony.
As The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe demonstrates, the Greek Revolution was not driven by philologists, poets, or an awakened national consciousness. It was driven by those who already exercised power when the Ottoman order began to collapse. In southern Greece, those people were Albanian speaking Orthodox Christians.
They dominated the land, the fighting, and the leadership.
Long before 1821, much of what would become Greece functioned in practice as an Albanian world. The Arvanites controlled the countryside of Attica, Boeotia, the Peloponnese, and large parts of central Greece. Their language was Albanian. Their faith was Orthodox. Their political culture was Balkan and militarized. They served the Ottomans as armatoloi when it suited them, defied them as klephts when it did not, and accumulated authority that no imperial decree could easily remove.
When revolution came, it came through these structures.
The most feared and effective fighters were Albanian. The Suliots, perhaps the clearest example, were not marginal mountain tribes but a disciplined Albanian speaking military society that resisted Ottoman rule for decades before 1821. Their code of honor, their warfare, and their leadership became a model for revolutionary resistance. They did not join the Greek cause. They shaped it.
Mazower makes clear that the revolution succeeded where armed power already existed. The uprising did not produce commanders. It revealed them. And those commanders spoke Albanian among themselves. Orders were given in it. Songs were sung in it. Family life continued in it, even as proclamations were issued in Greek.
Athens itself tells the story plainly. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was not the symbolic capital it would later become but a small town whose Orthodox population was largely Albanian speaking. Albanian dominated daily life, local authority, and communal networks. Greek was the language of the Church and administration. Albanian was the language of home, street, and solidarity.
The same pattern extended upward into the new state. The early leadership of independent Greece emerged almost entirely from Albanian speaking families. Generals, ministers, and heads of government often spoke Albanian at home and Greek in public. The language of governance was learned. The language of power was inherited.
Greekness, in other words, was constructed after victory, not before it.
Mazower emphasizes how late national identity solidified. During the war, allegiance mattered more than ethnicity. Orthodoxy mattered more than language. Command mattered more than ideology. What eventually became the Greek nation was assembled out of Albanian military dominance, Balkan political habits, and Ottoman administrative inheritance, then rebranded for European consumption.
That rebranding was swift and ruthless. Once independence was secured and foreign recognition achieved, the Albanian foundations of the state became inconvenient. Europe wanted heirs of Pericles, not Balkan warlords. The new kingdom obliged. Albanian speech retreated from public life. Arvanite identity was absorbed, softened, and eventually denied.
The result was a remarkable act of historical erasure. The people who had done the most to create Greece became Greeks by definition, their Albanian past transformed into a harmless curiosity or denied altogether. Participation was replaced by purity. Power was replaced by myth.
Yet the evidence remains stubborn. Without Albanian control of land, there was no revolution on the ground. Without Albanian military culture, there was no sustained resistance. Without Albanian leadership, there was no state capable of being recognized by Europe.
Modern Greece did not emerge despite Albanians. It emerged through them.
This does not weaken Greece’s claim to modernity. It explains it. Greece was not the resurrection of an ancient nation but one of the first post Ottoman states to invent itself successfully. It did so by converting Albanian Balkan power into a European national form.
History becomes clearer when stripped of romance. Greece was built not from marble alone but from Albanian villages, Albanian fighters, Albanian families, and Albanian speech. The silence that followed was political, not accidental.
The real question is not whether Albanians played a decisive role. They did. The question is why a state so confidently modern still hesitates to admit the truth of its own creation.
