Кај си бе чоли, те нема нешто на котле. Фала за коментарот.Стилот и содржината на текстот од линкот е навистина многу добар, опериран од типична балканска митоманија. Всушност, гледаме денес сличен процес (1-2 века подоцна) во Македонија ( а и во некоји други нови ex-YU држави) каде идентитетот и континуитетот се редефинира односно продлабочува во ова или она насока, во зависност на политичките прилики. Во другите држави создадени во регионот и време слично како и Грција, како Бугарија, Србија, Романија има исто паралели.
Би навел уште некои работи кои ми изгледаат интересни а при тоа малку спомнати на други места. Ова се однесува во многу поскоро време, погледнете колку "варварски" села имало пар години пред Блаканските војни, значи пред анексијата на Е. Македонија.
III. The Hellenization of space
1. Name changing and nation building
When arriving by airplane at Athens, one lands at the new airport at Spata. Spata is town situated in the Messogia region that bears an Arvanitename that means “axe” or “sword”. The term Arvanite is the medieval equivalent of “Albanian”. It is retained today for the descendants of the Albanian tribes that migrated to the Greek lands during a period covering two centuries, from 13nth to 15nth. The area round the airport, like the rest of Attica, was riddled with Arvanite toponyms of which only very few survive today: Liopesi was changed to Paiania, Harvati was changed to Pallini, Koropi was changed to Kekropia, Liosia was changed to Ilion, Menidi to Acharnai. These changes of the names of the toponyms from the Arvanite to the (classical) Greek are a puzzle for scholars who must examine, in each case, the relation between the toponyms they encounter in older sources and those in use today, and must have recourse to ancient maps and dictionaries. But when were the names of the cities, villages, mountains and rivers of Greece changed?
The tourist who travels today in Greece recognizes in the regions he visits the names of places he has encountered in ancient Greek literature, mythology, and history. But he does not know that this map of ancient Greece has been constantly redesigned over the last 170 years, that is, since the beginning of the Greek state. The creation of the new state, as we know, does not only mean the reorganization of the map or of collective memory, according to the scheme on which the state founded its ideology. It also means the creation of a historical consciousness out of living memories or forgotten histories and the allocation of their marks to space. One way to achieve this reorganization of the historical consciousness is to attribute new names to common places, or to nationalize space. In Modern Greece, the privileged field of memory was that of classical antiquity. Even if this period did not correspond to the memory of the inhabitants of each place, it was a question of the “discovery”, or invention, of a “ chronotope” (literally space-time)]. In this way, the conferring of a place-name involved a reference to a whole chapter of Greek history.
2. Dark periods – Banned names
The modification of place-names began just after the constitution of the Greek state in theearly 1830s, and went hand-in-hand with the reorganization of the administration of the country and its division into prefectures, municipalities and parishes. The people attempting this renaming of space were conscious of the ideological importance of this action. In the language of the time it was deemed no less than the continuation of the Greek revolution which re-constituted the Greek nation. The renaming of space was not achieved in a single attempt but was a long process that went on for decades. It took place each time a new region was integrated into the Greek State. This was the case with the integration of Thessaly (1881), of Macedonia (1913) and of Thrace (1920). Every time they carried out a reform of the local administration – until as recently as 1998, when many municipalities and communities were reunited with the so-called Kapodistrias plan – ‘new’ Greek classical names, previously unknown to the local inhabitants, made their appearance.
Which were the toponyms that had to disappear? According to the Greek authorities, they were those toponyms that were “foreign or that did not sound good”, in other words, those that were in “bad Greek”. What did the first category consist of? The answer is those that recalled the Turkish past and the other “dark periods” in the history of the nation. The historical consciousness should conform to the national narrative, according to which the history of the nation was constituted by glorious and dark periods. To the first belonged Classical Greece, Hellenistic times and the Byzantine era. To the second belonged the centuries of Roman domination until the foundation of Constantinople, and the periods of Latin, Venetian and, above all, Turkish domination.
Despite the weight of official ideology, there was no unanimity among the leading intellectuals as to what exactly to do with the names. Living in a century of historicism and of the cult of tracing the past, they hesitated to erase them all. Some toponyms, according to Nikolaos Politis, the “father of Greek folklore studies”, could be eliminated without scruple. Scruples weighed on the conscience of historians in cases where the toponyms were thought to represent historical testimonials of displaced populations. On the other hand, the art of constructing a national historical consciousness was developed not only by remembering but also by forgetting. The middle of the 19th century was the stage of a conflict between the Greek intelligentsia and Fallmerayer who maintained that in the Middle Ages, Greece was inhabited by Slavs and Albanian peoples. As a consequence, Greek intellectuals were prompt to erase all the Slavic and Albanian names which could support the rival arguments. In 1909, the government-appointed commission on toponyms reported that one village in three in Greece (that is, 30% of the total) should have its name changed (of the 5,069 Greek villages, 1,500 were considered as “speaking a barbaric language”). This expression is characteristic: the names that ought to be changed were qualified as “barbaric”, but what is equally important is that these very same villages were called “villages of barbaric language”. They thus reintroduced the Classical distinction between Greek and Barbarian, and, because place-names were based on that distinction, their modification amounted to a sort of Hellenization of the country and assumed a civilizing function. Hellenizing the minorities meant subjecting them to a civilizing process. After the Balkan wars (1912/13), new reasons were added to the previous ones: names ought to be changed so as not to “give rise to damaging ethnological implications for the Greek nation, of a sort which could be used against us by our enemies”. The new enemy was the revisionism of the northern borders acquired after the Balkan wars, through the use of minority issues. As a consequence, the renaming of space was given a new dimension and a new importance, which was related not only to the internal procedures of building the nation but to threats to this process from external sources. Those who did not conform to the change of toponyms were liable to a fine or even imprisonment as traitors to the Nation.
But how were the names changed? One method was the direct replacement of the existing names by their ancient predecessors. The usual source was Pausanias’ Description of Greece, written in the 2nd Century A.D. When the names stemmed from (Ancient) Greek toponyms but had been adapted to the local dialect (i.e. they had been “altered”), they should be reformed in accordance with the phonetic and morphologic forms of katharevousa (Marousi, derived from the Ancient Amarynthos, became Amarousion). Sometimes, toponyms were replaced by names that really existed, other times they were changed randomly and hastily. When non-Greek toponyms were adapted, this was done in a totally arbitrary manner, sometimes on the basis of misunderstood morphology (a wooded village might be called “tree-less; in other cases the result was the unsuccessful translation of the non-Greek name. Names that had acquired a commemorative value, particularly since the Revolution of 1821, were often replaced by obscure, antiquated denominations (Tripoli in place of Tropolitza). Even national heroes had to change names. For example, Rigas Velestinlis had to change to Rigas Phereos, because his village of Velestino was near the site of the ancient town of Pherai. Still, despite apparent chaos, frequently comic results, and general incoherence, the process followed an internal logic: the creation of a Hellenized toponymic environment.
Бензинoт e ваш, a идејите наши.
О. Б.
(This post was last modified: 15-08-2011, 08:08 PM by Zoograf.)
|