The Greek Revolution and the Greek Diaspora in the United States 1032458356, 9781032458359

Citation preview

The Greek Revolution and the Greek Diaspora in the United States

This book examines the question of historical awareness within the Greek communities in the diaspora, adding a new perspective on the discussion about the Greek Revolution of 1821 by including the forgotten Greeks in the United States and Canada. The purpose of this volume is to discuss the impact of the Greek Revolution as manifested in various discourses. It is celebrated by the Greek communities, taught in Greek schools, and covered in the local newspapers. It is an inspiration for literary, artistic, and theatrical creations. The chapters reflect a broad range of disciplines (history, literature, art history, ethnology, and education), offering both historical and contemporary reflections. This volume produces new knowledge about the Greeks in the United States and Canada for the last 100 years. The Greek Revolution and the Greek Diaspora in the United States will attract scholars, students, and public readers of Modern Greek Studies and Greek American Studies, as well as those interested in comparative history, diaspora and ethnic studies, memory studies, and cultural studies. Maria Kaliambou is Senior Lector at the Hellenic Studies Program at Yale University. Her research focuses on the dialogue between folklore and book history, particularly in the diaspora. Her current research is on the book culture of Greek American communities.

Routledge Studies in Modern History

Antisemitism before the Holocaust Re-Evaluating Antisemitic Exceptionalism in Germany and the United States, 1880–1945 Richard E. Frankel Labour in the Suburbs Political Change in Croydon during the Twentieth Century Michael Tichelar Globalizing the Soybean Fat, Feed, and Sometimes Food, c. 1900–1950 Ines Prodöhl Italy and Libya From Colonialism to a Special Relationship (1911–2021) Edited by Luciano Monzali & Paolo Soave Subaltern Political Subjectivities and Practices in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Between Loyalty and Resistance Edited by Karen Lauwers, Sami Suodenjoki, and Marnix Beyen Interacting Francoism Entanglement, Comparison and Transfer between Dictatorships in the 20th Century Edited by José M. Faraldo & Gutmaro Gómez Bravo The Greek Revolution and the Greek Diaspora in the United States Edited by Maria Kaliambou For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Modern-History/book-series/MODHIST

The Greek Revolution and the Greek Diaspora in the United States

Edited by Maria Kaliambou

First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Maria Kaliambou; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Maria Kaliambou to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-032-45835-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-45836-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-37891-4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003378914 Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

Contents

List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction

vii ix xi 1

MARIA KALIAMBOU

1

A History of AHEPA’s Commemorations of 1821

8

ALEXANDER KITROEFF

2

“Hellenes of Toronto: Proud of Canadianism.” Commemorating the 1821 Revolution in Canada, 1920s-2021

20

SAKIS GEKAS

3

Architecture, Abolition, Revolution: Greek American Revival (1920s) of the American Greek Revival (1820s)

38

KOSTIS KOURELIS

4

Representations of the Greek Revolution in Greek American Publications

58

MARIA KALIAMBOU

5

Celebrating the 150 Years of the Greek Revolution in Greek Orthodox Schools in the United States

74

FEVRONIA SOUMAKIS

6

Recontextualizing the Bicentenary in Greek America and Beyond: Greek Civic Identities in the Diaspora

86

YIORGOS ANAGNOSTOU

Index

103

Figures

0.1 Lexington Theater, New York, Monthly Illustrated National Herald, April 1921, p. 7 2 2.1 March 1952. Toronto Telegram, “ASC08802,” York University Libraries | Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections online exhibits, accessed November 23, 2022, https://archives. library.yorku.ca/items/show/412427 2.2 Toronto Telegram, “ASC08803,” York University Libraries | Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections online exhibits, accessed November 23, 2022, https://archives.library.yorku.ca/ items/show/411428 2.3 March 1962. Toronto Telegram, “ASC08779,” York University Libraries | Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections online exhibits, https://digital.library.yorku.ca/yul-233879/ ethnic-groups-greeks29 2.4 March 1963. Toronto Telegram, “ASC08810,” York University Libraries | Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections online exhibits, https://digital.library.yorku.ca/yul-233898/ ethnic-groups-greeks30 3.1 Saint George Greek Orthodox Cathedral of Philadelphia, previously Saint Andrew’s Protestant Episcopal. Historic American Building Survey, Library of Congress, Washington, 42 D.C. Public Domain 3.2 Hiram Powers, The Greek Slave, model 1841–1843, carved 1846. Corcoran Collection, National Gallery of Art, 44 Washington, D.C. Public Domain 3.3 Chicago’s World’s Fair, looking west from peristyle, C. D. Arnold and H. D. Higinbotham, Official Views of the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago, IL: Chicago Photo-Gravure 47 Co., 1893), 17. Public Domain

viii Figures 3.4 Greek Brigand, Frederic Ward Putnam, Oriental and Occidental Northern and Southern Portrait Types of the Midway Plaisance (St. Louis: N. D. Thompson Publisher, 1894). Public Domain 3.5 Holy Cross Theological School Chapel, Brookline, Mass. Author’s photo, 2016 4.1 Actress Argyro Ralli, New Haven, Connecticut. Helias Janetis (or Tzanetis), Η Φιλική Εταιρία και το πατριωτικόν Δράμα Μάρτυρες και Εκδικηταί εις πράξεις 4 (έκδοσις δευτέρα) [The Society of Friends and the Patriotic Drama Martyrs and Avengers in Four Acts], second edition (New York: D.C. Divry, 1928), 259 4.2 Actor St. Euthymiou, Springfield, Massachusetts. Helias Janetis (or Tzanetis), Η Φιλική Εταιρία και το πατριωτικόν Δράμα Μάρτυρες και Εκδικηταί εις πράξεις 4 (έκδοσις δευτέρα) [The Society of Friends and the Patriotic Drama Martyrs and Avengers in Four Acts], second edition (New York: D.C. Divry, 1928), 231 4.3 The Greek Child. Venetia Vidali, Νέον Αλφαβητάριον διά τα Ελληνόπουλα «Εθνικού Κήρυκος». Επί τη βάσει των τελευταίων αρίστων παιδαγωγικών συστημάτων. Μέρος Α΄ [The New Alphabet Book for the Greek Children of National Herald. Based on the last best pedagogical systems. Part A] (New York: Ethnikos Kyrix, 1930), 8 4.4 Advertisements from the bookstore Atlas, 1938–1939. Γενικός τιμοκατάλογος του ελληνικού καταστήματος Atlas [General Price Catalogue of the Greek Bookstore Atlas] (New York: Atlas, 1938–1939).

50 52

62

62

65

66

Contributors

Yiorgos Anagnostou is the Miltiadis Marinakis Professor of Modern Greek Language and Culture at The Ohio State University. His research interests include diaspora and American ethnic studies, with a focus on Greek America. He is the author of Contours of White Ethnicity: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America (Ohio University Press, 2009; in Greek by Nisos, 2021) and numerous articles. He is a coeditor of the volume Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation (Fordham University Press, 2022) and an editor of the online journal Ergon: Greek/American & Diaspora Arts and Letters (http://ergon. scienzine.com/). Sakis Gekas is Associate Professor and the Hellenic Heritage Foundation Chair in Modern Greek History at York University. He works on British colonialism and state formation in Greece, the history of the Greek Revolution of 1821, and the history of Greeks in Canada. His publications include Veterans: The Fighters of the 1821 Revolution during the Period of King Otto’s State (National Research Foundation 2022, in Greek) and Xenocracy: State, Class and Colonialism in the Ionian Islands, 1815–1864 (Berghahn 2017; in Greek by Hellenic Open University Press, 2021). Maria Kaliambou is Senior Lector at the Hellenic Studies Program at Yale University. Her research focuses on the dialogue between folklore and book history, particularly in the diaspora. Her current research is on the book culture of Greek American communities. Recent publications include “A Parade of Home. Representations of Home in Greek American Community Albums” and “The First Schoolbooks for Greek American Children.” She is also interested in foreign language pedagogy, especially the teaching of Modern Greek. Alexander Kitroeff is Professor Emeritus of History at Haverford College, and currently, he teaches at College Year in Athens. Kitroeff’s research focuses on the modern Greek diaspora. His most recent publications are Greek Orthodoxy in America: A Modern History (New York, 2020) and The History

x Contributors AHEPA 1922–2022 A Century of Service (Athens, 2022). Kitroeff’s current projects include a book on Greek-owned diners in America. Kostis Kourelis is Associate Professor of Art History at Franklin & Marshall College. He is an architectural historian who specializes in the archaeology of landscapes, labor, and migration in the Mediterranean. He leads archaeological surveys of deserted villages and refugee camps in Greece, as well as ethnic slums, temporary housing, and internment camps in the United States. Recent publications on Greek American history include “Three Elenis: Archaeologies of the Greek American Village” and “Style and Real Estate: Architecture of Faith among the Greek and Italian Immigrants, 1870–1925.” Fevronia K. Soumakis holds a PhD in History and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. She currently teaches in the Modern Greek Program at Queens College, The City University of New York. Her research interests include the history of education, immigration and ethnicity, and religion and education. She is a coeditor with Theodore G. Zervas of Educating Greek Americans: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Pathways (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Acknowledgments

The idea for this volume originated from the conference “The Greek Revolution and the Greek Diaspora in North America,” which took place on October 16, 2021, at Yale University. The conference was generously supported by The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University, and the Modern Greek Studies Association Innovative Initiative Fund. In Memoriam: Dan Georgakas (1938–2021) Dan Georgakas, the tireless scholar, activist, and mentor, departed from this life on November 23, 2021, soon after the conference was held at Yale University, where he gave his final talk on Harry Mark Petrakis’s two novels on the Greek Revolution: The Hour of the Bell and The Shepherds of Shadows. Dan provided his unwavering support for this book project from its inception. May he be remembered for his lifelong dedication to Greek American Studies.

Introduction Maria Kaliambou

The Greek Revolution and the Greek Diaspora in the United States On April 10, 1921, the Greek Americans in New York City celebrated the centennial of the Greek Revolution in the Lexington Theater. Two photographs printed in the April issue of the Monthly Illustrated National Herald capture the grand event. Well-dressed men accompanied by only a few women are seated on the packed parterre and the balconies of this enormous theater. According to the subtitle of the photograph, “more than 4,000 people from the city of New York and the vicinities overflowed this colossal theater” and attended the festivities for the centennial commemoration (Figure 0.1).1 The centennial was organized by the Venizelists in New York City, the supporters of Eleftherios Venizelos, Greece’s prime minister and head of government, and was attended also by the Bishop of Athens, Meletios, who participated in the ceremonies and delivered the celebratory speech.2 The anniversary ceremonies in Greece were postponed until 1930 due to the painful Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, which led to the Asia Minor catastrophe. Greeks in Greece were struggling with the disappointments and failures of the war, and thus, any celebration of the centennial seemed inappropriate.3 In contrast, Greeks in New York organized the above glamorous event at the Lexington Theater, demonstrating their commitment to celebrating the centennial notwithstanding the political climate in Greece itself. Besides New York, other cities in America also organized centennial commemorative festivities.4 How can we understand this discrepancy between the actions of the old and the new home? Why didn’t Greeks in America feel the same need to silence any celebrations, but rather preferred to demonstrate their pride and belonging to their ancestral community in a new place? The Greek Revolution of 1821 constitutes an indelible point of reference for every Greek person. Particularly for Greeks in the diaspora, the Revolution serves as the foundational event of their collective identity—so celebrating the Revolution is an integral part of their community life. Greek Americans

DOI: 10.4324/9781003378914-1

2  Maria Kaliambou

Figure 0.1 Lexington Theater, New York. Monthly Illustrated National Herald, April 1921, p. 7.

have celebrated the Revolution since they began to arrive in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. As early as April 6, 1893, the Greek society in New York, Brotherhood of Athena, organized and sponsored the first public parade for Greek Independence Day. Three hundred Greeks marched on Broadway, all the way through Chambers Street to City Hall where the Greek flag was raised. The president of the Brotherhood, Solon J. Vlasto—a prominent figure in the intellectual life of Greek Americans in New York who founded the newspaper and the publishing company Atlantis—requested observance of the day from the New York City Mayor at the time, Thomas Francis Gilroy.5 Since then, Greeks in America have celebrated the Greek Revolution with great enthusiasm. Similarly, Greeks in Canada started celebrating the Revolution during the first years of their settlement in new communities in Canada.6 The impact the Greek Revolution has on the Greeks in the United States is demonstrated by the various other ways in which they honor this seminal historical event. Besides parades on the streets and festivities in theaters, Greek American communities demonstrated their respect for the Revolution by naming their organizations after legendary heroes who fought in the war. As early as 1922, one society in a small community of 4,000 Greek immigrants in Milwaukee

Introduction  3 named itself after Papaflessas and another named itself after Athanasios Diakos, both heroes well known for their sacrifice and courage.7 The practice of honoring the heroes of the Revolution was imprinted in the minds of Greek American communities. Naming communities and associations after those heroes symbolizes the identification of the new generations with the struggles of their heroic ancestors. In addition to these naming practices, the Greek Revolution is being taught in every Greek school in North America; is performed by amateur theater groups; is a frequent subject in local Greek newspapers; inspires literary publications, architectural artwork, and visual artwork; and is celebrated in many other ways by local communities and associations. It shapes and strengthens the communal identity. Two hundred years after the Revolution, for the bicentenary in 2021, the Revolution inspired all Greeks around the globe to celebrate and embody their ethnic pride in being Greek. The Chapters This book is the beginning of a conversation about the internalization of historical moments by diasporic Greeks.8 The Greek Revolution of 1821, the fundamental milestone in modern Greek history,9 constitutes an integral part of the history awareness, ethnic identity, and cultural life of Greeks in the diaspora. It functions as the nexus of all Greek communities abroad. A variety of discourses and practices demonstrate the impact of the Revolution on the Greeks in the diaspora. This edited volume will tackle these practices and discourses, offering both historical and contemporary reflections. The chapters of the volume focus on the perception of the Greek Revolution by Greeks in the United States. Furthermore, two chapters expand the geographical boundaries beyond the United States and engage with other Greek diasporic communities, namely, Greek Canadians and Greek Australians. The chapters reflect theories and methodologies from several fields (history, literature, art history, cultural studies, and education studies). The authors enter into dialogue with each other to reach a better understanding of the past and current importance of the Greek Revolution—its evolution, accommodations, and adaptations—as these aspects come to bear on the identity of Greeks in the diaspora. The first chapter by Alexander Kitroeff, entitled “A History of AHEPA’s Commemorations of 1821”, traces the celebrations of the Revolution by the largest Greek American organization, American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (AHEPA), since its establishment in 1922. Kitroeff views the commemorations as a reflection of the evolving identity of Greek Americans and reflects on their instrumentalization by the association. In the interwar period, the focus of the association was on the Americanization and assimilation of Greeks in the United States, so the celebrations placed greater emphasis on the role of American Philhellenes in the Revolution. AHEPA’s commemorations developed

4  Maria Kaliambou a different character later in the Second World War and the Cold War period by reflecting the political issues of their time, namely, the struggles against fascism and communism. After the revival of the concept of ethnicity in the 1960s, AHEPA increased its support of Greece’s national claims on the political and geographical front, and it celebrated the bicentennial in Greece, demonstrating its tight connections with the homeland and its role in the transnational diaspora. The second chapter by Sakis Gekas, entitled “‘Hellenes of Toronto: Proud of Canadianism’. Commemorating the 1821 Revolution in Canada, 1920s-2021”, provides an overview of the commemorations in Greek communities in Canada, focusing on the city of Toronto. Basing his study on Canadian newspapers since the 1920s, Gekas illustrates the evolution of the celebrations from a theater event to a city parade and gala performance, a change which also reflects the change in the perception of Greeks by Canadians. He historicizes the depiction of Greek pride throughout the hundred years and contributes to a better understanding of the formation of Greek national identity in the diasporic Greeks in Canada. He concludes by referring to the bicentennial commemorations of the Revolution during the pandemic in which new digital media were implemented to satisfy a transnational audience. The third chapter by Kostis Kourelis, entitled “Architecture, Abolition, Revolution: Greek American Revival (1920s) of the American Greek Revival (1820s)”, demonstrates how the ideologies about the Revolution influenced the architectural heritage of Americans and Greek Americans. Kourelis argues that the Greek Revival movement in the United States, which was the first national style of American architecture from 1810 to 1840, was inspired by the Greek Revolution and promoted ideals of human rights, contributing to advocacy for the abolition of slavery. He notes further that in the 1920s, Greek American communities revived the Greek revival movement by appropriating older American buildings for their churches and abandoned it later in the 1960s for a neobyzantine style. The fourth chapter by Maria Kaliambou, entitled “Representations of the Greek Revolution in Greek American Publications”, focuses on three categories of books produced by Greeks in America during the first half of the twentieth century: poetry collections, scripts of theatrical productions, and schoolbooks for elementary schools. Kaliambou argues that the common motif in all the above-mentioned Greek American publications is that they include segmented moments of the Revolution, focus on heroic acts, emphasize self-sacrifice, and represent heroes as neo-martyrs with almost supernatural strength. Kaliambou emphasizes that these narratives oscillate between history and mythology and strengthen feelings of national pride among the community members. The fifth chapter by Fevronia Soumakis, entitled “Celebrating the 150 Years of the Greek Revolution in Greek Orthodox Schools in the United States”, offers a historical analysis of the ways in which Greek Orthodox schools under the purview of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America

Introduction  5 commemorated the 150-year anniversary of Greek independence, during the same period that Greece was ruled by a military dictatorship. Soumakis critiques the practices of the Archdiocese and the parish schools. She argues that the Archdiocese’s Department of Education continued using nationalistic statements and missed the opportunity to make authentic claims regarding freedom and democracy. The sixth and last chapter by Yiorgos Anagnostou, entitled “Recontextualizing the Bicentenary in Greek America and Beyond: Greek Civic Identities in the Diaspora”, moves beyond the geographical boundaries of the United States and emphasizes the need to compare Greek Americans with other diasporic communities such as Greek Australians. Anagnostou raises the ethical question of how Greeks should commemorate the Revolution in America or in Australia, when other people in the new land are victims of injustices and plight (such as the Indigenous and Black People in America and the First Nations in Australia). Anagnostou asks that we reframe the commemoration, shifting from a nation-centric celebration to reflect on “the Greek people’s ethical and political responsibilities associated with civic belonging in their new lands.” The 2021 bicentennial was an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of the Revolution. A considerable number of publications in many languages saw the light for the first time. The Greek Revolution and the Greek Diaspora in the United States fills the lacuna of the forgotten Greek diaspora in America. This book produces new knowledge about the Greeks in the United States and Canada and aspires to initiate further research on the topics that could not be covered in this volume. Notes 1 Monthly Illustrated National Herald, April 1921, 7. 2 Meletios’s speech is printed in the Monthly Illustrated National Herald, April 1921, 8–9. See also Kitroeff’s analysis on Meletios’s presence in America in 1921: Alexander Kitroeff, The Greek Orthodox Church in America: A Modern History (Ithaca, NY and London: Northern Illinois University Press, An Imprint of Cornell University Press, 2020), 34f. 3 In 1921, modest celebrations for the centennial of the Revolution were organized in the capital city Athens and in a few smaller cities. The big celebrations were postponed for 1930, a centennial from the foundation of the independent Greek state in 1830. See Gonda Van Steen, “Anniversaries”, in The Greek Revolution: A Critical Dictionary, eds. Paschalis M. Kitromilides and Constantinos Tsoukalas (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021), 698–701; and Christina Koulouri, “Centennials,” in Historical Memory in Greece, 1821–1930. Performing the Past in the Present (New York: Routledge, 2022), 335–371. See also Richard Clogg, “A Greek Odyssey: Two Hundred Years since Independence,” in A Concise History of Greece, 4th edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 275–290. 4 Another circulated photograph depicts local societies (from the island Syme) at Campbell, Ohio, celebrating the 100-year anniversary of the Revolution.

6  Maria Kaliambou



Bibliography Anagnostou, Yiorgos. Contours of White Ethnicity. Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America. Athens: Ohio State University Press, 2009. Beaton, Roderick. Greece. Biography of a Modern Nation. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2019. Beaton, Roderick. The Greek Revolution of 1821 and Its Global Significance. Athens: Aiora, 2021. Brewer, David. The Flame of Freedom. The Greek War of Independence, 1821–1833. London: John Murray, 2001. Canoutas, Seraphim G. United States and Canada Greek Business Directory 1921–1922. New York: Greek Commercial and Information Bureau Inc. Clogg, Richard. A Concise History of Greece, 4th edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Gallant, Thomas W. Modern Greece. From the War of Independence to the Present, 2nd edn. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Gillis, John R. Commemorations. The Politics of National Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Hatzidimitriou, Constantine G. “The Forgotten Centennial,” The GreekAmerican, March 20, 1993: 3 and 14. Kitroeff, Alexander. The Greek Orthodox Church in America: A Modern History. Ithaca, NY and London: Northern Illinois University Press, An Imprint of Cornell University Press, 2020. Kitromilides, Paschalis, ed. The Greek Revolution in the Age of Revolutions (1776–1848). Reappraisals and Comparisons. New York: Routledge, 2022. Kitromilides, Paschalis and Constantinos Tsoukalas, eds. The Greek Revolution. A Critical Dictionary. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021. Kostis, Kostas. History’s Spoiled Children: The Formation of the Modern Greek State. Translated by Jacob Moe. London: Hurst & Company, 2018.

Introduction  7 Koulouri, Christina. “Centennials.” In Historical Memory in Greece, 1821–1930. Performing the Past in the Present, 335–371. New York: Routledge, 2022. Laliotou, Ioanna. Transatlantic Subjects. Acts of Migration and Cultures of Transnationalism between Greece and America. Chicago, IL and New York: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. Mazower, Mark. The Greek Revolution. 1821 and the Making of Modern Greece. New York: Penguin Press, 2021. Monthly Illustrated National Herald, April 1921. Santelli, Maureen Connors. The Greek Fire: American Ottoman Relations and Democratic Fervor in the Age of Revolutions. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. Van Steen, Gonda. “Anniversaries.” In The Greek Revolution: A Critical Dictionary, edited by Paschalis M. Kitromilides and Constantinos Tsoukalas, 694–707. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021.

1

A History of AHEPA’s Commemorations of 1821 Alexander Kitroeff

Commemorating the Greek Revolution of 1821 has been an important annual activity for the Greeks in the United States and for the largest Greek American organization outside the Church, the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (AHEPA), founded in 1922. AHEPA’s celebrations are especially interesting in that they occurred even in the 1920s—when the organization prioritized the Americanization of Greek immigrants in the United States. After that formative period, AHEPA gradually shifted away from its exclusive focus on assimilation to American society and began acknowledging and celebrating Greek American ties with the homeland. Even so, these acknowledgments were always from the perspectives of the assimilated Greek Americans of the second, third, and fourth generations. AHEPA’s commemorations of 1821 reflected that shift, even though, unlike other such tributes by Greek American organizations, AHEPA dwelt primarily on the actions of the American Philhellenes. In this choice, it hoped to underscore the affinities between American and Greek values. And as AHEPA became more and more involved with Greece over the next decades, always from an American standpoint, the organization’s events linked to 1821 began to diversify. This chapter charts the trajectory of AHEPA’s relationship with 1821 over its 100-year history and uses it as a window through which we can understand the transformation of Greek American identity over the past century as it was expressed by AHEPA, the organization whose history embodies the steady assimilation of the Greeks into American society. Toward that end, this investigation is arranged chronologically, in periods that correspond to the major phases of AHEPA’s history from 1922 to the present.1 The standard account of the Greek Revolution of 1821—most prevalent in commemorations in Greece and its diaspora—focuses, not surprisingly, on the heroic deeds of the Greek rebels. Against all odds and with the help of the Great Powers, the rebels put an end to four centuries of rule by their Ottoman overlords. Another factor contributing to the Greek victory was the mobilization of philhellenes in Europe and America—who regarded the rebels as descendants of those Ancient Greeks who founded Western civilization. The American philhellenic movement was tripartite: a few members of Congress tried unsuccessfully DOI: 10.4324/9781003378914-2

A History of AHEPA’s Commemorations of 1821  9 to persuade President James Monroe to intervene directly on the side of the Greeks, some prominent Americans went to Greece to fight as volunteers, and others established “Greek Committees” that raised funds and humanitarian aid that was sent to Greece. Some of the volunteers, upon their return to America, brought back several small children: either orphans or children from destitute families, those who would most benefit from an education in America.2 Since AHEPA initially promoted the Americanization of Greek immigrants and then shifted to promoting closer ties between Americanized Greeks and their homeland, emphasizing the role of American philhellenes above all other elements of Greece’s 1821 was an obvious choice. This or any other aspect of AHEPA’s history forms part of the bigger picture of the history of immigration and ethnicity in the United States, and it is part of the experiences of diaspora communities and organizations in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Looking at AHEPA as an ethnic association that maintained ties to the homeland, notwithstanding its initial espousal of assimilation and its subsequent assertion of an American identity, two analytical frameworks apply. The first is an approach that regards Greek American identity, and by extension AHEPA’s identity, as a transplanted one: an identity that has survived being uprooted and finds ways to adapt and survive, albeit in an altered state, in its new American environment.3 The second framework is that of diaspora studies—specifically, recent theories that have been informed by the emergence of transnationalism as a lens through which to understand international relations and diaspora-homeland relations as well. Definitions of the term diaspora vary but choosing the right one when dealing with the Greeks in the United States is made easier by the explicit description of the so-called political diasporas as being modeled on the experiences of the Armenians, the Greeks, and the Jews. The resilient ties to the homeland that make these diasporas political—in the sense that they are invested in the political existence of their homelands—are based on their so-called ethnoreligious character. Indeed, in the case of the Armenians and the Jews, as well as the Greeks, their identity is both secular and religious, giving it a particular depth and sustainability.4 Operating as an ethnic group that maintains ties to the homeland requires integration into the home society, scholars suggest. Preserving a form of ethnic identity which the assimilated members of the group can accept also requires that identity to share American values. This is necessary in order to preserve their ethnic or religious identity even while the second and third generations assimilate.5 As we will see, AHEPA’s emphasis on its American character, its ties to the Greek homeland, and the way it commemorated the Greek Revolution by focusing on the role of the American philhellenes is a perfect example of the models of behavior of political diasporas that scholars have identified and prescribed. The dual framework this article adopts, namely considering Greek American identity as a transplanted one in the United States and also treating the Greek

10  Alexander Kitroeff American community as a diaspora with ties to its homeland despite its increasing assimilation, informs the chronological divisions that follow. The first is the interwar period, the 1920s and 1930s, an era in which AHEPA focused its efforts on persuading all Greek Americans to assimilate, to learn and speak English, to display loyalty to America, and to acquire United States citizenship. This did not mean forgetting the Greek roots of its members. On the contrary, AHEPA also promoted the idea that Americanism and Hellenism were similar, culturally and racially, and encouraged the cultivation of direct ties to the homeland through an annual excursion to Greece around the time of the Greek Orthodox Easter.6 The first excursion took place in 1928. The second period this article examines spans from the 1940s to the early 1960s, when xenophobia in America had abated and Greek Americans entered the mainstream of American society. This can be described as the period of upward social mobility and respectability. AHEPA’s connections with Greece multiplied, and it became part of the United States’ greater involvement in the affairs of Greece and Cyprus (the British colony with a Greek ethnic majority which gained independence in 1960). The third period covers the revival of ideas of ethnicity in the United States, from the mid-1960s through the 1980s, when, as a result of the legitimization of the idea of “returning to roots” generated by the civil rights movement, European ethnic groups such as Greek Americans began celebrating their ethnic identity. During this period, Greek American journalist Nicholas Gage wrote, it was “chic to be Greek.”7 The fourth and final period this article addresses focuses on AHEPA’s commemoration of the bicentennial of the Greek Revolution in 2021. In an era of globalization and transnationalism, many scholars have pointed out that diasporas gained a degree of autonomy and influence, enabling AHEPA to return to highlighting the role of the American philhellenes. The Interwar Period 1920s–1930s AHEPA’s campaign to achieve the Americanization of the Greeks, begun at its founding in 1922, was very successful. In 1923, 2,920 Greek immigrants acquired U.S. citizenship, and four years later, in 1927, those who gained citizenship increased to 9,518. And AHEPA itself was expanding. In 1928, it had 192 local chapters (organizations) throughout the United States and a total membership of 17,516. All this meant that the organization could turn its focus toward Greece, meeting the demands of many members. Thus, the 5th “Supreme Convention” of AHEPA held in Miami, Florida, in 1927 included among its decisions “to spend $1,000 for research work to compile all historical information relating to the aid given by American citizens to Greece in her 1821 struggle for independence.”8 And at the end of that year, in the December issue of the AHEPA Bulletin, there appeared a long and detailed article by Achilles Catsonis on this same subject. Catsonis, a lawyer, exemplified the educated, middle-class people

A History of AHEPA’s Commemorations of 1821  11 who led AHEPA in the 1920s. He was born in Greece, on the island of Lemnos, and arrived in the United States with his parents when he was 11 years old. He subsequently earned both a law degree and a doctorate in political science. He served as Supreme Secretary of AHEPA from 1927 to 1934 and as Supreme President of the organization from 1934 to 1935. He was also Editor-in-Chief of AHEPA Magazine.9 Significantly, in his article Catsonis linked the commemoration of Greek independence to the role America and American philhellenes played in supporting the Greeks from 1821 onwards.10 His move was not surprising—this first organized, widespread commemoration came at a time when AHEPA was still invested in Americanization. Thus, linking America and Greece while referring to 1821 was a perfect and obvious choice. And in doing so, Catsonis set the tone for future commemorations of 1821 in the 1920s and the 1930s. The following year, 1928, the March expanded edition of the AHEPA Bulletin was dedicated to commemorating 1821 and again stressed the role of the American philhellenes featured on its cover. Later that year, as part of its 6th Supreme Convention held in Detroit, Michigan, AHEPA presented the town of Ypsilanti, Michigan, with a bust of Dimitrios Ypsilanti, a hero of the Greek Revolution of 1821 after whom local philhellenes had named that town in Michigan. It was a way for AHEPA to express its gratitude to the spirit of all American philhellenes.11 The AHEPA excursion to Greece in 1930 coincided with the celebrations of Greek Independence in Greece. Because of the ongoing Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, the centenary of the 1821 uprising had not yet been celebrated officially in Greece. Instead, centenary celebrations were held in 1930, which marked 100 years since 1830s official recognition of Greece as an independent state. The role of American philhellenes was mentioned throughout the visit and was an almost permanent feature in the discussion of the AHEPA Bulletin of that year. Maude Howe Elliott, daughter of Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the best known of the American philhellene volunteers to Greece in the 1820s, was honored by AHEPA. Howe was a Bostonian physician who had been educated at Harvard, went to Greece during the uprising, and became surgeon general of the Greek forces. He made a brief trip back to the United States to raise money for the rebels. That same year, AHEPA laid a wreath in Montpellier, Vermont, at the grave of Jonathan Peckham Miller, who had fought with the Greek revolutionaries, and also honored Daniel Webster, the congressman who had championed Greece in Washington during Congress’ debates on Greece in 1823 and 1824. Finally, in 1935, AHEPA donated a memorial honoring Samuel Gridley Howe to his alma mater, Brown University, and in 1939, AHEPA’s junior organization, The Sons of Pericles, donated a monument in memory of the American philhellenes to the town of Messolonghi in Greece where some of the Americans had fought. By that time, others within the Greek American community were also referring to the American connection to 1821, broadening the standard narrative of

12  Alexander Kitroeff Greek heroism. The heroic motif had been the focus of other Greek American organizations, such as the Greek American Progressive Association (GAPA), which unlike AHEPA prioritized Greekness over Americanization as well as the “Topika Somateia”—the associations formed by Greeks who originated from the same region, island or village—and the Greek language press. The first real acknowledgment of the role of the American philhellenes appeared in the New York Greek language daily Ethnikos Kyrix in January 1930, and after that, similar articles began appearing more frequently.12 The 1940s and 1950s Greece’s involvement in World War II (WWII) followed by the outbreak of civil war in Greece between 1946 and 1949 and the beginning of the Cold War meant that commemorations of 1821 were less historically oriented and more explicitly used to draw parallels with the fighting spirit of the Greeks. Nonetheless, in 1940, AHEPA used the term “philhellene” to describe Americans who recognized the significance of the Greek Revolution of 1821. In 1941, the AHEPA Magazine published a speech in the House of Representatives by the Democratic Congressman from Pennsylvania, Herman P. Eberharter, on the importance of the anniversary of the Revolution, describing him as a philhellene.13 In the same issue, there also appeared an article on the role of American philhellenes in 1821 itself.14 What also happened in those decades was that AHEPA participated with a float (άρμα) in the annual Greek Independence Day parade in New York City, an event that began in 1938. The parade stressed the heroism of the Greeks above all other aspects of the events of the 1820s. But that theme was accompanied steadily by a growing emphasis on current affairs, such as the fighting spirit of the Greeks in the 1940s and then issues related to the Cold War. For example, the 1951 parade had a threefold focus: an expression of gratitude to the people of the United States for the aid offered in the 1940s, a protest against the removal of children from Greece by the communist forces that fled across the Greek borders at the conclusion of the Greek civil war, and a demonstration of support toward the Greeks of Cyprus, then a British colony, who demanded union with Greece.15 Also in 1951, the AHEPA Magazine’s articles about 1821 wrote the heroism of the Greeks and the universal values of their uprising, linking them to the struggle of the world’s democracies during WWII.16 Thus, because of the prevailing patriotic climate in this period, there were fewer opportunities to recall the deeds of American philhellenes. But locally, AHEPA organizations held events to commemorate the Greek Revolution and the role of philhellenes. And when excursions to Greece resumed in the 1950s, AHEPA members laid a wreath each year at the monument to American philhellenes that had been erected in Athens.

A History of AHEPA’s Commemorations of 1821  13 The Revival of Ethnicity 1960s–1980s A short notice in the March 1962 issue of the AHEPA Magazine argued that the organization had been too apathetic in its celebrations of Greek Independence Day, and it was time it resumed expressing its pride for “our national origin as exemplified by our wholehearted participation in observing this day.”17 Exactly a year later, the magazine’s cover featured a painting depicting the first act of the 1821 uprising with Greek Orthodox Bishop Paleon Patron Germanos blessing the rebels and the revolutionary flag. The article on 1821 in the magazine focused on the American philhellenes, whilst elsewhere a notice announced that AHEPA would play an important role in the Greek Independence Day parade in New York.18 And from the mid-1960s onward, AHEPA Magazine’s March issue regularly published one or two articles about 1821, most commonly focused on the American philhellenes but also on other aspects of the Revolution. In this era of publicly acknowledging the ethnicity of European immigrants, AHEPA was clearly able to engage in the commemoration of 1821 by maintaining its previous focus on American philhellenes and participating more broadly in the other commemorative events. Interestingly enough, even though AHEPA was sympathetic to the colonels’ regime that established a dictatorship in Greece between 1967 and 1974, it did not look to the Greek government for any guidance on the commemoration of 1821. This was because the regime appeared satisfied with receiving support from major diaspora organizations in the United States such as AHEPA and the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America but did not have a prescribed overarching narrative about Greece and its history.19 The dual approach of combining references to American philhellenism along with accounts of either Greek heroism or the principles 1821 represented was made explicit on two important occasions: the 150th anniversary of the uprising in 1971, and the 50th anniversary of AHEPA in 1972. In order to commemorate the 150th anniversary of 1821, AHEPA produced a 51-page booklet, entitled “The 1821 Greek War of Independence and America’s Contribution to the Greek Cause,” written by its Executive Secretary George Leber. One-third of it was devoted to a summary of the events in the 1820s, while the other two-thirds were devoted to America’s contributions. These were covered extensively from the American politicians supporting Greece to the volunteers and the young children they brought back with them. The booklet included quotations from the Americans’ speeches and correspondence and short biographical notes describing their actions in the 1820s. There was also a short section on the revolution itself.20 Leber was also the author of the history AHEPA produced in 1972 to mark its 50th anniversary. Leber included a preface to AHEPA’s history which included the history of Greece and Greek immigration to the United States and in that he included references to the 1821 Revolution, the role of the American philhellenes, and the Greek children who were either orphans or from destitute families

14  Alexander Kitroeff whom the philhellenes brought with them upon their return to America to be educated. The decision to include this segment in AHEPA’s official history of its first 50 years was emblematic of the ways the organization had embraced and promoted America’s role during the Greek Revolution. The segment underlined AHEPA’s focus on the American philhellenes, a focus that no other Greek American organization has ever matched. After those two important turning points, the 150th anniversary of the Greek Revolution and AHEPA’s 50th anniversary, AHEPA’s and, more generally, Greek America’s commemorations of the Greek Revolution remained more narrowly focused on the parades in New York City and, with a smaller turnout, in other cities with a significant Greek American population. As had become common in the post-WWII era, current events and Greece’s tensions with Turkey were the themes of those parades. In particular, the 1980s witnessed two moments of heightened tension between Greece and Turkey: around Cyprus in 1983 and sovereignty over the Aegean Sea in 1987, and also the presidential campaign of Greek American Michael Dukakis.21 These parades reflected the ongoing interest of the Greek American community in these issues.22 The Bicentennial of the Greek Revolution AHEPA, as we have seen, moved from its early focus on the role of the American philhellenes in the 1920s and the 1930s to a thematically broader commemoration of the Greek Revolution after WWII. This broadening truly began in the1950s when the organization participated in parades in New York and elsewhere. The years starting in the 1990s onward brought an increased importance to the role of diaspora communities thanks to globalization and an expanded transnational network. Even so, it remained events in the homeland that shaped Greek American relations with Greece.23 In the 1990s and 2000s, the commemorations of 1821 did not differ from those of previous decades in that they were focused primarily around the parades and publicized Greek national claims, such as the dispute over the naming of Macedonia with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in the early 1990s or the Athens Olympic Games of 2004. But when the 200th anniversary of the Revolution came around, all this changed and AHEPA pursued two major strategies. The first was to honor the American philhellenes, while the second was to hold its 99th Supreme Convention in Athens in honor of the bicentennial despite the huge obstacles created by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It was only the fourth time that AHEPA held its Supreme Convention, an annual event, in Greece. The project of honoring the American philhellenes who had helped Greece in the 1820s was also circumscribed by the pandemic, and instead of any large gatherings, the then-Supreme President George Horiates led small delegations to the gravesites or memorials of those Americans and laid wreaths in brief but dignified ceremonies. Appropriately, the first American philhellene to be so honored was Samuel Gridley Howe. Supreme President Horiates placed a wreath at

A History of AHEPA’s Commemorations of 1821  15 the monument AHEPA had created in 1935 at Brown University, followed by another memorialization ceremony at Howe’s graveside in Boston.24 Another philhellene honored was John M. Allen, at a ceremony held in Annapolis, Maryland. Allen, a midshipman of the United States Navy, had served on Greek ships that blocked the port of Souda, Crete, during the Revolution and was wounded in 1825 during the siege of Messolonghi.25 In a third such event, AHEPA paid tribute to the U.S. Marines stationed at Fort Mifflin near Philadelphia who had raised funds to support the Greek Revolution. In 1827, Commander Samuel Miller and his troops had donated money toward the Greek cause. Commander Miller had specified that the donation was: for the unparalleled distresses of the brave Greeks…I cannot permit the opportunity to pass, without contributing in conjunction with the officers and men attached to my command…to alleviate the sufferings of the oppressed inhabitants of the land of Themistocles and Leonidas.26 AHEPA’s decision to honor the 200th anniversary of the Greek Revolution by holding its Supreme Convention in Athens was bold and difficult to execute. AHEPA went through with it despite all the obstacles posed by COVID-19, a bold decision worthy of its commitment to honor both Greece and the 1821 Revolution. The welcome AHEPA received from officials in Greece was nothing less than impressive. It included a reception hosted by the President of the Hellenic Republic, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, a banquet complete with an address by the Prime Minister of Greece, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, and the President of Cyprus, Nicos Anastasiades, and several other events attended by Greek government ministers and the mayor of Athens.27 The convention itself and the receptions that featured Greek government officials were not explicitly tied to 1821, but there were references to the bicentennial throughout the proceedings. And AHEPA’s “Hellenic Cultural Commission” participated in a poignant pilgrimage trip to the town of Argos in the Peloponnesus region to honor the American philhellenes George Jarvis and James Williams, who are buried there. George Jarvis was the first American to join Greece’s fight for freedom. Wearing the traditional foustanella dress of the rebels and known as “Captain Zervas/Zervos,” he reached the rank of Lt. General in the war. James Williams was an African American slave from Baltimore who fought in the Barbary Wars as a U.S. Navy Marine and later under Lord Cochran’s Hellenic Navy fleet, fighting at Nafpaktos and elsewhere.28 Conclusion There are no big surprises hidden in this examination of the historical trajectory of AHEPA’s commemorations of the Greek Revolution of 1821. Yet, the trajectory itself speaks volumes in confirming that AHEPA’s relationship with this anniversary correlates with the evolution of Greek American identity. The interwar

16  Alexander Kitroeff period of assimilation into American society brought an emphasis on honoring the American philhellenes. In the wartime and Cold War decades that followed, the commemoration reflected the urgent need of associating the legacy of 1821 with the political concerns of the present, namely, the struggle of democracy against fascism and then the struggle of western democracies against the threat posed by communism. The following era that witnessed the revival and legitimation of ethnicity brought a different contemporary tone to the commemorations that of associating them with Greece’s national claims and supporting it in its confrontations with its geographical neighbors. At every period, therefore, the celebration was instrumentalized—designed to underline AHEPA’s continuing effort to position itself as an American organization that fostered a close relationship with its homeland. Finally, AHEPA’s dual commemoration of the bicentennial, by honoring the American philhellenes and also by taking its convention to Athens, and earning an extraordinary welcome, confirmed the suggestions that in the context of globalization and expanded transnational networks, diasporas and diaspora organizations such as AHEPA can play a crucial role in defining the character of homeland–diaspora relations, in this case Greece’s relations with its diaspora. Notes







A History of AHEPA’s Commemorations of 1821  17

18  Alexander Kitroeff Bibliography “AHEPA Pays Homage to Philhellene Dr. S. G. Howe.” National Herald, March 20–26, 2021. AHEPA E-News 15, no. 15, April 14, 2021. AHEPA Press Release, March 8, 2021. “AHEPA to Play Major Role in 1964 Greek Independence Parade.” Ahepan XXVIII, no. 2, March–April 1964. Anagnostou, Yiorgos. “Forget the Past, Remember the Ancestors! Modernity, ‘Whiteness,’ American Hellenism, and the Politics of Memory in Early Greek America.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 22, no. 1 (2004): 25–71. Ανακοίνωση της Ομοσπονδίας για την Φετινή Παρέλαση της 25ης Μαρτίου στη Ν.Υ. [Announcement of the Federation About This Year’s Parade of the 25th of March in New York City]. Ethnikos Kyrix, March 1, 1984. Bayor, Ronal. Race and Ethnicity in America: A Concise History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Bodnar, John. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Catsonis, Achilles. “America’s Service toward Greek Independence.” The Ahepa Bulletin 1, no. 2 (December 1927): 2–5. Dufoix, Stéphane. Diasporas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Eberharter, Herman P. “Anniversary of Greek Independence.” The Ahepan, March–April 1941: 12. “Fifth Ave. Parade Hails Free Greece.” New York Times, April 9, 1951. Gage, Nicholas. “America Discovers that Greek Is Beautiful.” New York Times, December 26, 1975. Hatzidimitriou, Constantine G. (ed). “Founded on Freedom & Virtue”: Documents Illustrating the Impact in the United States of the Greek War of Independence, 1821–1829. New York and Athens: Aristide D. Caratzas, 2002. Hatzidimitriou, Constantine G. “Revisiting the Documentation for American Philanthropic Contributions to Greece’s War of Liberation of 1821.” Journal of Modern Hellenism 31, (2015): i–xxxx. https://embca.com/event/pilgrimage-to-philhellenic-revolution-of-1821-holy-burialground-in-argos-greece/?event_date=2021-07-27. Ioannides, Chris P. “Greek Americans and the Cyprus Issue: 1980–1992.” In Greeks in English Speaking Countries, 239–254. Melbourne: Hellenic Studies Forum, 1993. Kitroeff, Alexander. “Archbishop Iakovos & the Greek Colonels’ Dictatorship 1967– 1974.” In The Greek Military Dictatorship: Revisiting a Troubled Past 1967–1974, edited by Othon Anastasakis and Katerina Lagos, 312–347. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2020. Kitroeff, Alexander. “Greek American Identity in the 1980s.” In Arméniens et Grecs en Diaspora: approches comparatives Athens, edited by Eric Bruneau, Ioannis Hassiotis, Martine Hovanessian and Claire Mouradian, 299–306. Athens: L’École Francaise d’ Athènes, 2007. Kitroeff, Alexander. The History. AHEPA 1922–2022 A Century of Service. Athens: AHEPA & Hellenic American Union, 2022.

A History of AHEPA’s Commemorations of 1821  19 Kitroeff, Alexander. “The Limits of Political Transnationalism: The Greek-American Lobby 1970s-1990s.” In Greek Diaspora and Migration since 1700 Society Politics & Culture, edited by Dimitris Tziovas, 141–153. Burlington: Ashgate, 2009. Kitroeff, Alexander and Stephanos Constantinides. “The Greek-Americans and U.S. Foreign Policy since 1950.” Etudes Helléniques-Hellenic Studies 6, no. 1 (1998): 5–24. Kourides, Peter T. “America’s Aid to Hellenic Independence.” The Ahepan, March–April 1941: 12. Kyrou, Alexis. “A Date, a Symbol. The Aided U.S.” The Ahepan, January–February– March 1951. “Lawyer, 79, Greek Ties.” The Washington Post, January 8, 1978. Leber, George J. The History of the Order of AHEPA 1922–1972. Washington, DC: AHEPA, 1972. Loumos, Nicholas A. “Greek Independence Day.” The Ahepan XXXVI, March 1962. Mihalakis, Giannis. “Μαζική η Παρέλαση Παρά την Κακοκαιρία” [A Well-Attended Parade Despite the Bad Weather]. Ethnikos Kyrix, March 26, 1984. “Ο Μιχάλης Δουκάκης στην Εθνική μας Παρέλαση” [Michael Dukakis at Our National Parade] Ethnikos Kyrix, March 18, 1984. “Οι Αμερικανοί Φιλέλληνες Κατά την Ελληνικήν Επανάστασιν” [The American Philhellenes during the Greek Revolution]. Ethnikos Kyrix, January 19 & 26, 1930. Pournara, Margarita, “Συγκίνηση και Εθνική Υπερηφάνεια στις Παρελάσεις των Ομογενών σε Αμερική και Καναδά” [Emotion and National Pride at the Parades of Diaspora Greeks in America and Canada], Kathimerini, March 28, 2017. Repousis, Angelo. “The Cause of the Greeks. Philadelphia and the Greek War of Independence, 1821–1828.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 123, no. 4 (1999): 333–363. Safran, William. “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return.” Diaspora 1, no. 1 (1991): 83–99. Santelli, Maureen Connors. The Greek Fire: American Ottoman Relations and Democratic Fervor in the Age of Revolutions. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. Shain, Yossi. “The Role of Diasporas in Conflict Perpetuation Or Resolution.” SAIS Review 22, no. 2 (2002): 115–144. Shain, Yossi and Ahron Barth. “Diasporas and International Relations Theory.” International Organization 57, (2003): 449–479. Sheffer, Gabriel. “Transnationalism and Ethnonational Diasporism.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 15, no. 1 (2006): 121–145. Sirigos, Constantine S. “AHEPA Convention in Athens a Celebration of Hellenism and Unity.” National Herald, 31 July–6 August, 2021. St. Clair, William. That Greece Might Still Be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence. Cambridge: Open Book, 2008. “Struggle for Independence”, and “Ahepa to Play Major Role in 1964 Greek Independence Parade”, The Ahepan XXVIII, (March–April 1964): 9–10, 14. Tsakonas, Panayiotis J. “The Hellenic Diaspora and the Macedonian Issue.” Journal of Modern Hellenism 14, (1997): 139–158. Vlavianos, Basil J. “I Ikosti Pempti Martiou. [March 25th].” The Ahepan, January– February 1951.

2

“Hellenes of Toronto Proud of

Canadianism.”

Commemorating the 1821 Revolution in Canada, 1920s–2021 Sakis Gekas Introduction This chapter provides a chronological narrative of the Greek Revolution commemoration events as reported in Canadian newspapers—primarily in Toronto— since the 1920s. As perceptions of Greeks and Greece changed in Canada, so did Greek representations of commemoration events such as the parade. Although commemorations began as folkloric representations of Greece, they became another version of “Canadianism”, a phrase used by reporters in the 1930s. This chapter looks mainly at commemoration events in Toronto and Montreal. Montreal was the first centre of economic and cultural activity in Canada until the 1970s and the centre of the Greek population until World War II. Since the 1980s, Toronto has surged forward to become the economic and cultural capital of Canada.1 This chapter focuses on Toronto because of the anti-Greek riots in 1918—a turning point in the history of the Greek presence in the city—and the conflict over the “Macedonian issue.” In the early 1990s, conflict over the Canadian state’s recognition of then called FYROM (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia)—now Republic of North Macedonia—overshadowed the commemoration of Independence Day. This chapter draws on secondary literature about commemoration, parades, and representations of ethnic pride in the press to historicize the depictions of Greek communal pride in Canadian newspapers. One national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, and one local newspaper, the Toronto Star, kept a nearly yearly record of the commemoration events. Photographs of the commemorations in the Toronto Telegram and the Greek Canadian Archives at York University are evidence of the under-appreciated historical material that awaits historians of Greek Canadian History. This chapter argues that in the 1920s and 1930s, the press viewed Greeks and their commemoration events as a curiosity, an almost exotic addition to the city’s fabric of diversity. During the occupation of Greece by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Bulgaria (1941–1944), the plight of Greek people attracted the sympathy and support of Canadian society—exemplified by the Canada Greek War DOI: 10.4324/9781003378914-3

“Hellenes of Toronto: Proud of Canadianism.”  21 Relief Fund.2 During the Greek Civil War years (1946–1949), Greek government representatives’ statements at the commemoration events were in tune with the Cold War spirit that was emerging. During the dictatorship period (1967–1974), Independence Day became a contested terrain, since anti-dictatorship groups claimed a continuity between 1821 and the struggle against the dictatorship in their own time. In the 1980s, the Turkish occupation of Cyprus reunited Greek communities in solidarity, and most Greek Canadians expressed their support for the end to the occupation during the yearly March 25 commemoration event. In the last couple of decades, the event has been less about promoting any “national issues” and more an occasion to celebrate immigrant stories of achievement and assimilation into Canadian society. The study of ethnic commemoration can also contribute to a better understanding of how transnational Greek identities were formed in North America.3 Recent research on public rituals and national holidays has stressed the extent to which rituals are central to the formation of national identities in diaspora.4 Studies on public events and ethnic identities in Toronto reveal prevailing notions about immigrants and their practices of citizenship. The Toronto Canadian Hispanic Day Parade—a multicultural event that aims at celebrating ethnic diversity and that occurs in a marginalized suburban neighbourhood5—represents the struggle of Latin American immigrants to gain a foothold. Debate on the politics of commemoration in diaspora is often confined by national context and lacks historical perspective. Parades are an intrinsic characteristic of the migrants’ city, and communities hold their signature parade on special occasions in their nation’s history. Celebratory accounts of the cultural landscape in Canada can obscure the fact that while the post-war state has been very good at promoting cultural diversity, it has also excelled at appropriating it. For Italian Canadians, it has been the Easter parade in Toronto’s Little Italy, while for Greek Canadians, it is the 1821 anniversary parade on the last Sunday of March. Greek institutions and their representatives, such as the institution of the Greek Community, the Greek Orthodox ecclesiastical authority, ethnoregional associations, Greek Canadian and Canadian politicians and individuals all participate regularly in parades and other commemoration events. For Greek Canadians, one author has argued, “parades, festivals, commemorative celebrations and other performances infused with political messages and meanings are non-conventional forms of (migrant) politics.”6 I argue the opposite that parades are indeed conventional—in fact mainstream—and quite common in the construction of transnational and immigrant identities among many immigrant groups, including Greeks. Public display and manifestation of Greekness took the form of a parade that is ongoing, albeit with decreasing participation compared to the 1980s and 1990s. Since the 1920s, Greek participation in parades and other commemoration events focused on the representation of a modern, “Romaic” national identity, with folk costumes from the era after

22  Sakis Gekas Greek independence. The parade combines at the same time a demonstration of pride that is distinctively Greek and symbolizes the integration of Greekness to the Canadian urban culture that includes parades and similar commemorations.7 Over time, the parade became an opportunity to celebrate Greek Canadian identity and assimilation. Mainstream newspapers reported the commemoration events, and since the 1970s, television and then videos on the internet have focused on plays, crowds, and parades. Newspaper articles served as entry points to an unfamiliar culture and aimed to satisfy the public’s curiosity, especially in a rapidly changing social milieu such as the one in Toronto. Commemoration events were marked by Greek and international political events that reverberated in both the Greek Canadian and the larger Canadian world. The 1821 commemoration events are high visibility for Greek communities around the world—so they are well photographed and documented. Greek immigrants established a community in Montreal in 1906 and completed the first Greek Orthodox Church, Evangelismos, in 1910. In 1912, Greek residents of Montreal celebrated Independence Day, probably for the first time ever in Canada, and were captured in a photograph outside Platon School at 733–735 Clark Street.8 At the beginning, these were small, community-focused indoor events with little impact on the broader city community. Greeks can also be seen commemorating the event in Montreal in 1928 with Greek and city dignitaries outside the Holy Trinity Church.9 In Toronto, the history of commemoration is similarly entangled with the history of the Greek community in the city. Greeks lived and worked in the city centre, where commemoration events took place until the 1970s. In 1978, the parade on Greek Independence Day and the one for the October 28th commemoration moved to the Danforth/Greektown area of Toronto, at a time when the press popularized a mainly positive take on the Greekness of the area. Newspaper reports demonstrate that those participating in commemoration events mobilized around and promoted Greek nationalist politics. The remainder of this chapter will trace the commemoration of Greek Independence Day in a chronology that reveals the changing conditions and perception of Greeks in Canada, starting with the interwar period in the aftermath of the 1918 anti-Greek riots in Toronto. Commemorating the 1821 Revolution in the Interwar Period The first events commemorating the Revolution of 1821 were held in Toronto, probably in the 1910s, at 170 Jarvis Street, which also served as the church, school, and community meeting place. Until the 1920s, the few newspaper articles that mentioned or focused on Greeks tended to lump them together with other Balkan immigrants in considering them as second class and less visible than, for example, Italians or Chinese. Greek and international politics and World War I substantially shifted Canadian views on Greeks. The neutral status of Greece in the war until 1917 and the perception of Greeks as “slackers” who

“Hellenes of Toronto Proud of Canadianism”  23 escaped active duty (they were not obliged to do so as Greek citizens), combined with the perception of Greeks from Asia Minor as “suspect aliens”, created an explosive mix that triggered the riots.10 Greeks in Toronto and Montreal following the riots responded by writing to newspapers to demonstrate their pro-Allied stance in the war and to re-establish their credentials as law-abiding Canadian citizens. Yet, the press did not record a commemoration event until 1925; it was performed in a theatre and therefore outside of the Greek community and church building.11 The Greek Ladies’ Philoptohos Society was also founded in 1925 under the auspices of the Greek Community and Church organization.12 Those early anniversary celebrations aimed to bring together the three most important institutions of the community: the church, the school, and the voluntary association that was linked to the church and operating under the auspices of the Greek Community. The Ladies’ Benevolent Association was particularly active in the parade, according to women’s place in family and society at the time, especially working-class women.13 The commemoration of 1821 was presented to the Canadian public as an event with Greek music and dance that introduced Greek culture and had the capacity to enchant. In April 1925, a journalist from The Globe attended the Greek Easter Festival and wrote a celebratory piece, one of the earliest examples to introduce to the non-Greek public elements of Greek culture that are now identified as “typically” Greek. Dance and music did not require Greek language skills and could “fascinate” and “charm” as they were full of “grace”, to use the reporter’s words: Greek flags, together with the Union Jack, decorated the hall, the dancers wearing roses or carnations and a knot of blue ribbon – the patriotic color of Greece. W.E. Miller, Greek Consul for Ontario, present as a guest, gave a brief speech.14 The folklorization of Greekness in Toronto had only just begun. The blue-ribbon knot resembles the blue and white flowers, representative of the Greek section of the 4th of July parade in 1918 in Washington offered to President Wilson and the First Lady. The participation of Greeks in US Independence Day with their own national symbols signified the “social agency on the part of migrants in the process of cultural and social engineering of migrant subjectivity.”15 The presence of the Greek Consul signified that a Greek state-appointed Canadian representative endorsed the event.16 References to the Greeks in other cities in Ontario demonstrate the appeal of the event to Greeks outside Toronto and the existence of a Greek network in this part of Canada. The Toronto public was becoming more aware of the still small Greek population and its cultural characteristics. In April 1930, the Toronto Daily Star published a long article on how the Greek community of the city commemorated the “100th anniversary of liberation”, also in a closed space, a theatre. That year, the Greeks of Toronto celebrated

24  Sakis Gekas 1830 and not 1821, since the centennial of the 1821 anniversary coincided with the Greco-Turkish War in Asia Minor (1919–1922) and was sidelined by the war effort. The commemoration reports of the 1821 Revolution underscored how proud Greeks were of their Canadian identity, with an emphasis on the word “Canadianism.” The Toronto Daily Star published a photograph accompanying the article titled “Hellenes of Toronto Proud of Canadianism”; Greeks “emphasized culture”, meaning their own culture, and were noted because “in addition to public schools, children attend[ed] classes in Orthodox Church.” The description in the legend reads: “City has some 1,200 Greek citizens – Menfolk talented, women pretty – Greek boy born in Canada can speak both English and Greek fluently.”17 The collage of photographs of members of the commemoration is unique in the history of representations of the Greek presence in the city. The bilingual boy was George Letros, aged 7, a member of the Letros family of four brothers, who were among the founders of the Greek community and owned various restaurants and entertainment venues in Toronto from the 1900s to the 1950s. This was one of the first times the Greek struggle for national independence, and their connection to Ancient Greek “civilization”, was linked to the struggle of Greeks in Canada to achieve respectability. The 1932 commemoration event was also performed in a closed space, in one of the city’s theatres, and the programme included the usual recitations, speeches, patriotic songs, and a “playlet” in Greek.18 This was also the first year a report included extracts from the Toronto vice-consul N.L. Martin’s speech. Martin was an honorary consul, not a Greek state official, since Greek diplomatic service in North America was present only in the United States. Even so, the presence of an honorary consul reflects an upgrading of the Toronto community in the eyes of the Greek Foreign Service. This shift was primarily related to the BulgarianMacedonian nationalist activity and propaganda in Toronto, as well as in Florina and Kastoria in Greece, the origin point for several thousand Greek migrants heading to North America. Consul Martin stressed apparent similarities between the 1821 Revolution and that of 1932. Less than ten years after the Asia Minor national catastrophe and at the cusp of the period of economic and political crisis in Greece, officials were overly enthusiastic. They made grandiose claims that building “a new Greek nation on the ruins and devastation wrought by the Turk had been, he declared, the wonder of the past century. Now the country was the greatest of the Balkan States.”19 The American Hellenic Educational and Progressive Association (AHEPA) is recorded as participating in commemoration events for the first time in 1932.20 The association spread quickly in Canada, “transmitted” by Greeks who crossed from the United States to Canada in the 1920s and 1930s, in Toronto and in smaller cities, too, such as Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Vancouver in British Columbia. The AHEPA president projected the Association’s main message and “traced the history of Greek contribution to civilization in ancient and modern times.”21 The newspaper’s colourful description shows that the event included

“Hellenes of Toronto Proud of Canadianism”  25 Greek and “Canadian” dances, waltzes, and fox-trots. The same event sustained a fundraising campaign that the church and the school promoted, part of a tradition of Greek cultural philanthropy that continues to the present day. In 1938, the Greek community in Toronto entered a new chapter when they bought and converted a synagogue at 180 Bond Street into the St George Greek Orthodox Church. The community moved from a building that from the outside did not manifest any religious purpose to a building that was visibly a religious space. In 1939, the Toronto Daily Star printed news about the Greek and the Macedonian communities in the same page, following the period of contested Macedonian identities in the 1920s and early 1930s and the founding of the “Ion Dragoumis” Association in the city and elsewhere in the Greek diaspora.22 The commemoration event of 1938 was still held indoors, this time at the Madison theatre, with 700 people attending and a customary play performed in Greek: “We are glad to live under the flag of Lord Byron, who contributed so much to Greek independence”,23 declared Prof. George Vlassis, chairman. Frederick M. Moffat, Greek vice-consul, said he was impressed particularly by the way in which the children sang the Canadian national anthem. Father Nicholas Salamis of the Greek Orthodox Church also spoke. In the 1930s, Toronto was still the “Belfast of Canada”,24 a place where Irish communities were still numerically significant and the centre of Irish population in Canada. The Protestant Orange Order parades and Catholic religious processions formed some of the major public events, while new ethnic immigrant nationalisms, Hungarian, Italian, and— still in their early stages—Greek and Bulgarian-Macedonian nationalisms were slowly emerging. Strong Irish religious and ethnic nationalism probably left little space for these “new” nationalisms to venture into the sphere of the general public. Commemorating the 1821 Revolution since the 1940s While in the 1920s and 1930s, the Canadian gaze was curious, infused with exoticism and depictions of folklore, in the early 1940s, Greeks were seen with sympathy and even admiration—thanks to their participation and sacrifice in World War II. Official diplomatic relations between Greece and Canada started in 1942 and it was during the war that the image of Greeks in Canada changed significantly. On November 24, 1940, members of Toronto’s Greek community proudly flew the Greek flag at the Cenotaph in front of Old City Hall and laid a wreath as a tribute to the Greek victory in Albania and the entry of the Greek army into the city of Koritsa (Korçë). This was a rare manifestation of solidarity and a shared celebration of victory, since at the time Greece was the only ally of Great Britain (and therefore Canada) still fighting the Axis of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. In March 1941, just before the Greek army collapsed under the force of the German war machine, Greeks in Toronto celebrated the 120-year anniversary of

26  Sakis Gekas Independence. The community hailed the “homeland’s hard-won liberty with a scintillating pageant of costume and color”25 at the Century Theatre on Danforth Avenue, several years before the Danforth area became known as Greektown, writes the Toronto Daily Star. Moffat, the consul for Greece, referred to the ongoing war and congratulated the Greek people for their contribution to the war effort against the Italian forces, stating that: Greece has had its baptism of fire but today she is just as determined to remain free as were those noble ancestors who won the independence we celebrate. And if Germany persists, it will be only a matter of a few days until Greece has another powerful ally in Yugoslavia.26 Peter Palmer, the president of the Greek community, connected the ongoing war with the struggle for liberty, calling March 25 of that year “an epoch-making date in one of the world’s greatest battles for liberty.”27 But the main feature of the programme was a version of “The Dance of Zaloungo [sic]”28: “And today”, said Miss Helen Kleon, who acted as interpreter for the press, “in that same district of Epirus, according to American newspapers, the women of Greece have carried food, clothing, and other supplies up the little-known paths to the top of the cliffs for their men, who were trapping the Italians.”29 It is quite rare that the celebrated “women of Pindos” were acknowledged already at the time of the event in November 1940 so far away from the battlefield in the mountains of Albania. During the Greek Civil War (1946–1949), anti-communist rhetoric shaped newspaper reports. Dr. D. L. Floras, Greece’s Consul General in Toronto, told a Greek Independence Day rally at Massey Hall: “Our country is firmly resolved not to give way to communism. But on the other hand, we have seen many nations succumb to communism without the slightest resistance, and this is occurring continuously.”30 Although it is unclear as to which “nations” the Greek official had in mind, there is a sense of urgency in the phrase “another glorious page”,31 obviously connecting the Revolution of 1821 with the fight of the national army and the government against the guerrilla forces of the Democratic Army. The presence in the parade of ethnoregional associations accompanied by folk costumes continues to be one of the most characteristic expressions of ethnic pride. In Figure 2.1, Greek Canadian women dressed in traditional Greek costume are seen marching west on Queen Street at the anniversary parade, as it was called at the time. The women’s ribbons reveal that they represented the Association of Antartiko (Zhelovo) and Florina. Antartiko and Trigono (Ostima) Florinas were two villages that hundreds of immigrants left behind for Toronto. Immigrants from Zhelovo, which was renamed Antartiko in the 1920s, formed one of the first ethnoregional associations in Toronto. The young women can be seen carrying the Union Jack Canadian flag (this was before

“Hellenes of Toronto Proud of Canadianism”  27

Figure 2.1 March 1952. Toronto Telegram, “ASC08802”, York University Libraries | Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections online exhibits, accessed November 23, 2022, https://archives.library.yorku.ca/items/show/4124.

the maple leaf flag was adopted in 1965), which signifies respect for the host society. These photographs are similar to the representations of American national pride in photographs of Greek immigrants in the United States, which “simultaneously communicate cultural affinity with and political loyalty to the host nation.”32 Figure 2.2 shows the culmination of the 1952 commemoration event as dignitaries present memorial wreaths at the Cenotaph. The commemoration event at the City Hall Cenotaph was an opportunity for many regional associations to be seen, following the parade that ended in the cenotaph.33 The legacy continues to this day, with the raising of the Greek flag in the Ontario Parliament at Queens Park, similar to the raising of many other countries’ flags on their national day. The photographer’s clear instructions on how to stage the event for the newspaper’s audience reflect the care with which these events were planned. It also reveals the mediated process through which images and other representations of Greek communities were displayed in the press and projected to the public. Above all, it clarifies the parameters of the new era in Greek–Canadian relations,

28  Sakis Gekas

Figure 2.2 Toronto Telegram, “ASC08803”, York University Libraries | Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections online exhibits, accessed November 23, 2022, https://archives.library.yorku.ca/items/show/4114.

the context in which thousands of immigrants from Greece would arrive in the next two decades until the number of Greek immigrants to Canada peaked in 1969. In 1958, the celebration included the parade to the City Hall as well as a ceremony at the Odeon Carlton theatre, a central venue in the city where “more than 1,500 persons of Greek extraction” attended along with “Marcos Economides, the Greek consul, as the main speaker.”34 A few years later, in 1962, the younger generation was once again front stage. Figure 2.3 shows the photograph of a young girl dressed in the national folklore costume and the caption reads: “looking up at patriotic poster featuring a symbolic figure of Greece with a sword, Greek Orthodox priest and an evzones soldier holding a flag with a dark cross on a light background.” Verso reads: Four-year-old Joanne Tzoitis, in Greek national costume, learns from a mural of Greece’s struggle for independence. Joanne and 2,000 members of Toronto’s Greek community were at Massey Hall yesterday to celebrate the 141st anniversary of independence. Mayor Nathan Phillips spoke.35

“Hellenes of Toronto Proud of Canadianism”  29

Figure 2.3 March 1962. Toronto Telegram, “ASC08779”, York University Libraries | Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections online exhibits, https://digital. library.yorku.ca/yul-233879/ethnic-groups-greeks.

The presence of Toronto Mayor Nathan Phillips signifies a major increase in the importance of the event as Toronto moved into its multicultural phase. This transition included and probably necessitated the recognition of the several cultural groups present in the city. Greeks were one of the groups with the most dynamic increase in population in the 1960s and 1970s, with the most visibility in the Danforth area (“Greektown”). The following year’s report in the Toronto press included a photograph (Figure 2.4) that reminds of the prominent role and place of local–regional associations, in this case the association of Kastoria. The 1960s was a decade when most of the associations that connected new immigrants with their local—even to the level of village—and regional place of origin were founded. During the Greek dictatorship (1967–1974), the few but vocal anti-dictatorship activists, protesters against the junta regime, organized disrupting events during

30  Sakis Gekas

Figure 2.4 March 1963. Toronto Telegram, “ASC08810”, York University Libraries | Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections online exhibits, https://digital. library.yorku.ca/yul-233898/ethnic-groups-greeks.

the commemoration in Toronto and Montreal. On March 24, 1969, a striking photograph was published on the front page of the Globe and Mail that showed a police intervention the previous day breaking up a fight between participants in the 148th anniversary commemoration of Greek Independence and called those who participated “demonstrators against the Greek Government.” The report noted that one policeman was injured and eleven people were questioned after the brawl in Montreal’s Dominion Square, which involved more than 150 people.36 The conservative newspaper Ελεύθερος Τύπος (Free Press) condemned the protest and expressed frustration about whether Greeks would be able to celebrate their independence undisturbed, reporting on clashes in both Toronto and Montreal, with the emphatic titles “Trampoukismoi” (Thuggery).37 The antijunta movement had associated their activism with the 1821 struggle since the first months of the dictatorship,38 and this association would be repeated several

“Hellenes of Toronto Proud of Canadianism”  31 times, especially during the commemoration event every March. The connection with the 1821 Revolution and the references to the emblematic figures, the “heroes” of the Revolution, are evident in the fact that the main anti-dictatorship organizations of Greeks in Canada were Rigas Feraios in Toronto and Makriyannis in Montreal.39 In the 1980s, the second generation of Greeks in Toronto participated in the parade as teenagers and young adults, while the first generation continued to be present in large numbers. The comments of Greek participants and spectators reveal a shift towards a unified representation of the community; the parade was becoming more about the participants, the spectators, and their histories as immigrants and second-generation Greek Canadians, and less about the event that was being commemorated. The 1983 visit of Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou caused enthusiasm that overshadowed the events of the commemoration of that year. Joe Serge’s report for the Toronto Star was more about A. Papandreou and his time in Toronto, where he taught at York University between 1969 and 1974 and led the anti-dictatorship movement, than about the parade that year. The article reminded readers that Papandreou had addressed Greeks at a mass rally at Varsity Arena; he had been there in 1968 “to give a powerful attack against the dictatorship to an estimated 10,000 people.”40 Papandreou was honoured at a dinner for about 1,000 people with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.41 In 1984, one newspaper article mentioned that 50,000 Greek Canadians attended as spectators of the parade.42 Although this number is probably exaggerated, it certainly surpasses anything reported before. The presence of Archbishop Iakovos of the Greek Orthodox Church of North and South America reflects the significance the archbishop attributed to the diocese of the Greek Orthodox Church in Canada. In 1987, one article mentioned an even greater number: 60,000 spectators and 5,000 marchers.43 That year the commemoration was linked to the Athens bid for the Olympic games of 1996, especially since the mayor of Toronto supported his own city’s bid to host the games. The next point in Peter Edwards’ article stresses the need to organize the parade on behalf of the 80,000-member Greek community of Toronto by hiring a professional to organize the parade, which was pulled together mainly by volunteers from more than 100 community groups. In 1988, there were still large numbers of about 40,000– 50,000 people attending the parade, according to police estimates. Among them were Greek veterans, student groups, Scouts, Cubs, Girl Guides, and members of a bowling league. One of the scores of veterans on parade was Peter Stanois, secretary of the Greek Veterans Royal Canadian Legion Branch 626. Stanois fought against and helped to turn back the invading Italian army in 1940. When Adolf Hitler ordered German troops to save Mussolini’s forces, Stanois joined the Greek resistance fighters. The independence parade “is something we feel very good about”, he said.44 In 1990, lower numbers were reported: “30,000 Greeks turned out along the Danforth, to stroll in the sunshine, feast on souvlaki from outdoor barbecues and

32  Sakis Gekas watch the parade that marked the 1821.”45 The parade was becoming a street party, something that would grow a few years later into a proper street party called “Taste of the Danforth”, which takes place every August. In the early 1990s, however, the issue that dominated Greek politics and preoccupied many Greeks in Canada began to make itself clear. In a piece entitled “Protesting Macedonians demand recognition”, Tracey Tyler of the Toronto Star reported on the confrontation, writing that “angry Macedonian-Canadians beating drums and shouting nationalist slogans clashed yesterday with Metro Greeks celebrating Independence Day at City Hall.”46 The police intervened to keep the two sides apart and no one was injured or arrested. When Greek Canadians arrived at the City Hall, “about 200 flag-waiving people of Macedonian descent” started shouting “Long live Macedonia! Free our people” and booed the raising of the Greek flag over Nathan Philips Square. Four years later, in 1994, the Toronto Star reported again on protests against the Greek government’s blockade of what was then the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The article stressed the polarization between Greece and FYROM that reached its peak in the early 1990s. The Toronto Star reporter interviewed one woman who was protesting the blockade of FYROM by the Greek government and said that she remembered her mother being slapped by a Greek police officer for speaking Macedonian. She added that “Macedonians have nothing to celebrate amid Greek Independence Day festivities.”47 The same page also included a note on the Greek protest outside the Toronto Star offices about the newspaper’s editorial policy on the “issue of Macedonian independence.” The protesters tore up and burned copies of the article, understandably upsetting Star journalists—but the article did also mention that other Greeks condemned the act. The celebration of the 2001 Revolution anniversary in Montreal raised aspects of Greek identity as expressed in the participation of the parade. The article on Greek residents of Montreal stressed how those who participated in the parade celebrated not the heroes of 1821 and an independent Greece, but rather their parents’ accomplishments, who immigrated to Canada in the 1960s and worked incredibly hard.48 The Montreal parade is best known now for the attendance of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, since he is elected from Papineau, Montreal, a long-standing centre of the Greek population in the city. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stated in a 2014 message on Greek Independence that “throughout our history, Greek-Canadians have contributed to the shaping of a strong, diverse, and prosperous Canada.”49 In 2003, an article appeared titled “Danforth Ave. awash in music and costumes as thousands mark end of Ottoman rule in 1821”, which accompanied a photograph of a young couple carrying a wreath and a smaller photograph of a teenager who “wolfs down souvlaki.” This was the image of a younger generation of Greek Canadians, not women in black scarves on the side of the road. One woman enthusiastic about the parade commented on another war, the war

“Hellenes of Toronto Proud of Canadianism”  33 in Iraq; she said that millions of people hope for the freedom she had in Canada and that she hoped that the war would end quickly.50 The parade has continued to be a space for politicians to participate in the commemoration, especially during election years. At the 2003 event, Deputy Prime Minister John Manly was present, as were the Toronto deputy mayor and mayoral candidates, while in almost every parade and event of the last several years, politicians from Greece represented their parties and the Greek Parliament. As John Barber noted wryly, everyone loves a parade—especially politicians.51 The same could be said about the commemoration of the revolution by a new generation of Greek Canadian politicians. In 2019, the Ontario Parliament passed the Hellenic Heritage Month Act proclaiming March as the month to celebrate Hellenic heritage in Ontario. These proclamations are the result of political lobbying, but they are also testament to a commemoration ritual that started as an extension of Greek tradition and has now become part of the Greek diaspora politics. Greek Independence Day has traditionally been an opportunity for Greeks in Canada to proclaim their national pride and to reaffirm their loyalty to Canada as their adopted country and their engagement with Canadian politics and society. The transfer of the parade to the Greektown of Toronto from the city centre meant that the parade became marginalized while simultaneously becoming centralized in the space identified with the Greek population. At the same time, newspaper reports and images of commemoration events show that in the last few decades, Greek Independence Day has been more about celebrating the achievements of the first generation of post-war immigrants, and their hard work and integration in mainstream Canadian society. In 2021, on the bicentennial anniversary, pandemic conditions forced—and the digital world encouraged—commemoration events to move online, reflecting a more nuanced approach to the memory of the great event. One such example was the Toronto-based Hellenic Heritage Foundation initiative that together with York University faculty and graduate students produced “The Idea of Greece”, a seven-episode podcast on the history of the Greek Revolution of 1821.52 There is little doubt that once health conditions allow, parades will return to the streets of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, and the next generations of Greek Canadians will infuse the 1821 Revolution commemoration events with their own subjectivity. Notes 1 Αllan Levine, Toronto: Biography of a City (Madeira Park, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 2014). 2 Florence MacDonald, For Greece a Tear; the Story of the Greek War Relief Fund of Canada (Fredericton: Brunswich Press, 1954). 3 Ιoanna Laliotou, Transatlantic Subjects. Acts of Migration and Cultures of Transnationalism between Greece and America (Chicago, IL and New York: The University of Chicago Press, 2004).

34  Sakis Gekas

“Hellenes of Toronto Proud of Canadianism”  35

36  Sakis Gekas

­

“Hellenes of Toronto Proud of Canadianism”  37 Laliotou, Ioanna. Transatlantic Subjects. Acts of Migration and Cultures of Transnationalism Between Greece and America. Chicago, IL and New York: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. Levine, Allan. Toronto: Biography of a City. Madeira Park, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 2014. Lorinc, John et al. The Ward: the Life and Loss of Toronto’s First Immigrant Neighbourhood. First Edition. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2016. MacDonald, Florence. For Greece a Tear: The Story of the Greek War Relief Fund of Canada. Fredericton: Brunswick Press, 1954. McCrone, David and Gayle McPherson. National Days: Constructing and Mobilising National Identity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. McNenty, Pat. Toronto Star, March 28, 1988. Nelles, H. V. The Art of Nation-Building: Pageantry and Spectacle at Quebec’s Tercentenary. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Noula, Mina. Homeland Activism, Public Performance, and the Construction of Identity: An Examination of Greek Canadian Transnationalism, 1900s-1990s. PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2015. Polyzoi, Eleoussa. ‘Greek Immigrant Women from Asia Minor in Prewar Toronto: The Formative Years’. In Looking into My Sister’s Eyes, edited by Jean R. Burnet, 107–124. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1986. Royson, James. Toronto Star, March 28, 1994. Semenak, S. Greeks to Celebrate Their Heritage: 30,000 Expected to Attend Independence Day Parade. Final Edition. Montreal, 2001. Smyth, William J. Toronto, the Belfast of Canada: The Orange Order and the Shaping of Municipal Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Tamis, A. and E. Gavaki. From Migrants to Citizens. Greek Migration in Australia and Canada. Melbourne: La Trobe University, National Centre for Hellenic Studies and Research, 2002. Veronis, Luisa. “The Canadian Hispanic Day Parade, Or How Latin American Immigrants Practise (Sub)Urban Citizenship in Toronto.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 38, no. 9 (September 2006): 1653–1671. doi: 10.1068/a37413. Wilkes, Jim. Toronto Star, April 24, 2003. Newspapers Sunday Star The Globe Toronto Star

3

Architecture, Abolition, Revolution Greek American Revival (1920s) of the American Greek Revival (1820s) Kostis Kourelis

During the first wave of mass migration to the United States from 1890 to 1924, Greek immigrants developed unique architectural expressions for religious worship in their new multiethnic environment. Greek Orthodox churches of this period demonstrate how immigrants exercised creative agency in shaping their communities. They did not labor passively in the American city that received them, but they actively transformed its spaces. The visual, historical, and ideological semantics of churches illustrate a double intellectual engagement with Greek and American architectural heritages and their points of intersection. A study of Greek American churches reveals the cultural capital of immigrants in the making of global modernity. This chapter examines how the Greek Revival style of architecture prevailed in the first decades of immigration, contrasting with the Neo-Byzantine style institutionalized in the second half of the twentieth century. Greek immigrants of the 1920s revived a canonically American style of the 1820s. This sophisticated appropriation of the American past explicitly celebrated the Greek Revolution and, more specifically, the artistic imprint that the Revolution left on American artistic production from 1820 to 1840. Back in Greece, it would have been unthinkable to design Orthodox churches in the form of Ancient Greek temples. Classical architecture was Christianized by the humanism of the Italian Renaissance before it spread to northern Europe. Under Ottoman control from 1453 to 1821, Greece missed out in Europe’s four-century-long project of humanism and the Enlightenment. Greek intellectuals contributed to the inception of the project (cf. the maniera greca style in Italy), but they did so from a position of exile. During the colonial period, America received classical ecclesiastical forms via its English colonists educated in Renaissance and Baroque fashions. After its revolutionary war of 1776, the American republic did not reject its Renaissance heritage but inflected it toward Greece (representative of liberty and democracy) and away from Rome (representative of imperial exploitation and monarchy). The American fervor over the Greek Revolution consolidated the Greek Revival as the first national

DOI: 10.4324/9781003378914-4

Architecture, Abolition, Revolution  39 American architectural style that declared independence from England, while also exporting liberational struggle back to Old Europe. The Greek Revival went out of style after 1850, when romantic historicism offered a richer set of historical options. Gothic, Romanesque, Byzantine, Italianate, Egyptian, Moorish, and other styles were deployed to trigger emotional associations through either pure or hybrid designs. Coinciding with the Industrial Revolution (and the permanent discoloration effected by its coal-fired furnaces), the pure white architecture of the Greek Revival was replaced by an admixture of colors that Lewis Mumford called “the brown decades” of American architecture.1 When Greek immigrants arrived in the United States in the 1890s, they encountered an extravagant brown potpourri of styles. The Greek Revival buildings of the Early Republic were old and antiquated, but they bespoke a patriotic heritage. Pluralism The American city of the 1890s was a marketplace of theatrical urbanism, where secular and religious institutions adorned the commercial streets with hypervisual facades. In the new world, immigrants encountered a radical eclecticism much different from the familiar monocultural coherence that the Greek nationstate imposed over its conflicting past. Europe’s modern nation-states were defined by ethnic purity and self-determination. In contrast, the Greek American adaptation of the Greek Revival style and its implicit rejection of Byzantium negotiates a competitive cultural environment and an interesting divergence from the church architecture of Constantinople (reflecting the Patriarchy) and the church architecture of Athens (reflecting the autocephalous Church of Greece). How did Greek immigrants participate in the stylistic pluralism of the American city? How did they respond to the dominant norms of the host country and the choices made by other foreign groups around them? Each immigrant group fabricated a sense of identity through the single most expensive real estate investment—its ethnic church or synagogue—that served a social and communal function as much as a religious one. National identity did not always match religious identity. Sephardic Jews from the Ottoman Empire had more in common with Greeks and Armenians than they did with the more numerous Ashkenazi Jews from Central Europe. The Catholic Church developed differentiated ethnic parishes for the German, Irish, Polish, and Italians who immigrated at different periods, spoke different languages, and claimed different architectural traditions.2 Conversely, some Orthodox churches ministered to Russian, Greek, and Slavic parishioners in one space; kept multilingual administrative records; and acted as multinational organizations in the spirit of the medieval Byzantine commonwealth. None of these multinational congregations lasted, since each ethnicity eventually gathered enough numbers to separate along ethnic lines.

40  Kostis Kourelis The Orthodox Church of Greece, with its metropolis in Athens, singlehandedly controlled the design, financing, and construction of its churches. Hence, the Greek laity of the homeland had no say in the architectural style of churches. In contrast, Greek immigrants in America had complete control of acquiring property, constructing or renovating buildings, paying the clergy, burial expenses, maintenance, and administration. These choices were made at the local level by each congregation that financed each project entirely from the collections of its stewards. Each congregation was chartered as a unique legal institution under state law. The separation of church and state in the American Constitution assured a firewall between religious foundations and governmental authorities. At the same time, the United States was vigilant about foreign nations leveraging influence through the religious satellites of their emigrants. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, a centralized clerical authority that formed in 1921, did not succeed in uniting the fractured Greek communities until 1931.3 Fragmentation also describes the architectural choices of other Eastern Orthodox churches (Serbian, Carpatho-Russian, Ukrainian, Albanian) whose national dioceses formed later. Between the stylistic pluralism of the American city and the operational freedom granted by the absence of a national church, Greek immigrants engaged creatively with architecture in ways that have not received adequate scholarly attention.4 The assumption that the first wave of Greek immigrants was comprised of uneducated peasant folk who were passively bound to rigid customs and beliefs needs reconsideration. The architecture of the first Greek churches in America does not blindly imitate the village churches of the homeland but displays an acquired understanding of the visual semiotics of the capitalist American city. Even the most remote rural Greek peasants had gone through national state education made compulsory in 1911. Greek Americans, in fact, financed the construction of schoolhouses back in their villages through remittances. Some immigrants to the United States had already become cosmopolitan through previous journeys to Egypt. The ruins of past civilizations scattered in the countryside provided Greeks with an experience of cultural difference expressed through the diversity of peoples who invaded or migrated to its lands over two millennia. No need to go to Rome, since the Romans brought their temples and aqueducts; no need to go to Paris, since the Crusaders brought their Gothic Cathedrals; no need to go to Istanbul, since the Ottomans brought their finest mosques. Since the world had already passed through Greece, a global education could be had without foreign travel. Those monuments in the fields of the Greek peasants were, moreover, attracting tourists armed with their Baedekers and transported by the same ships that brought Greeks to America. This archeologically layered rural environment would have prepared Greek immigrants for the commercial American city, whose eclecticism recycled precisely such monuments. Cheap print media—directed to both tourist and native—saturated the country with photographs of Hagia Sophia, the Acropolis.

Architecture, Abolition, Revolution  41 Greek immigrants brought their vernacular understanding of architecture to the United States and played with it in their religious expression. As small business owners, many of the Greek confectioners, florists, and restaurateurs fashioned shop windows and store interiors with the romantic imaginaire of foreign periods and places. The stylistic freedom in Greek American architecture between 1860 and 1960 is obscured by the singularity of a Neo-Byzantine style that the Greek Orthodox Church of America promoted after 1958, which was modeled on Middle Byzantine monuments from the twelfth century. Supplementing this shift, Byzantine style painting became the standard for church decoration after World War II, when the rediscovery of Byzantium by Photis Kontoglou crossed the Atlantic. Religious images adorning all Greek Orthodox churches in the United States before ca. 1948 were executed in a Renaissance and Neoclassical style, which also adorned churches built between 1830 and 1930 in Greece. Kontoglou and the intellectuals associated with the Generation of the Thirties sought to purge western influences from Greek art by rejecting the Neoclassicism imposed by the Bavarian kings of Greece after Independence. The Generation of the Thirties, thus, purged the neoclassical language that had once tied Greece to a young United States (through its Greek Revival style). Paradoxically, Byzantine art and architecture had already been embraced as a model in Europe and the United States in the 1870s, half a century before they were acceptable by Greek intellectuals. Byzantine mosaics could be found in Protestant churches, Jewish synagogues, and Masonic lodges. In this American context, however, Byzantium was tied to a more generalized Orient, to pre-Catholic Christianity, to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, and not exclusively to the Greek nation-state. The first Greek American churches to use a Greek Revival style included Holy Trinity in New Orleans (1866), Holy Trinity in Salt Lake City (1905), Holy Trinity in San Francisco (1910), and the Assumption in Oakland (1921). Others featured a rehabilitation of Greek Revival buildings, such as Saint George Cathedral in Philadelphia (1921, converted Saint Andrew Episcopal Church of 1822) and Saint Basil in Chicago (1927, converted Ashe Shalom Synagogue of 1911) (Figure 3.1). Saint George Cathedral is especially important as an early 1822 Greek Revival building where the Episcopal church spearheaded its support of the Greek Revolution. When buying this property in 1921 and converting it into an Orthodox Church, the Greeks of Philadelphia were fully aware of the centrality of Saint Andrew as the birthplace of America’s support to Greek Independence only five blocks from the Liberty Bell that signaled America’s own revolution. In 1827, the rector of Saint Andrew delivered a sermon called “The Cause of the Greeks” that galvanized the Committee for the Relief of the Greeks.5 Saint George, the new tenants of Saint Andrew, were also aware that John Haviland, their building’s architect, was not only a member of the original congregation but also buried in the crypt. His portrait that hangs in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York shows a young Haviland

42  Kostis Kourelis

Figure 3.1 Saint George Greek Orthodox Cathedral of Philadelphia, previously Saint Andrew’s Protestant Episcopal. Historic American Building Survey, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Public Domain.

clutching his copy of Antiquities of Athens, the first architectural publication of Greek temples and the blueprint for an American style. The bond between Greeks and Episcopalians remained strong in the 1920s, with the Episcopal Church being the only Protestant denomination to treat Greek immigrants with respect. The patriarch of Constantinople underscored this friendship by allowing Greek immigrants to attend Episcopal services and receive communion by Episcopal priests when an Orthodox church was not available. By purchasing elite historical buildings from the most prestigious Protestant denomination, the Greek immigrants affirmed a multitemporal bond between America’s and Greece’s births as modern nations.6 By appropriating the Greek Revival style in their churches, Greek Americans distanced themselves from the authority of the Orthodox Church for the sake of reviving the philhellenic sentiments that architects of the 1820s had monumentalized. Benjamin Latrobe (U.S. Capitol), William Strickland (Second Bank of the United States), Robert Mills (Washington Monument), Thomas U. Walter (Girard College), and John Haviland (Saint Andrew Episcopal Church) provided an all-American heritage that could be liberally reassembled by a community of newcomers.

Architecture, Abolition, Revolution  43 Revolution and Abolition In the eighteenth century, archeology started as a new academic discipline to give scientific testimony to classical culture so that its principles could be revived in the Enlightenment aspirations of reason, science, and the rights of the individual. James Stuart and Nicholas Revett traveled to Athens to extend archeology’s reach centered in Italy to the unexplored territories of Greece. Controlled by a perceived illiberal Islamic state, Greece was too dangerous to be included in the Grand Tour. Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens (1762–1816)—held by John Haviland in his portrait—carried a national fervor. Thomas Jefferson owned a copy (which he gave to his carpenter at Monticello). After Independence, the Greek temple became ubiquitously American in houses, taverns, churches, banks, and civic buildings. The eruption of the Greek Revolution 45 years after the American Revolution endowed the Greek Revival a more acute political valence: the extension of Enlightenment freedoms abroad (Modern Greece) and the extension of universal rights domestically to the enslaved peoples of the United States.7 Classical forms did not always signal abolition. Thomas Jefferson (who favored Roman over Greek models) saw no contradiction between ancient architecture and slavery. Many of the beautiful Greek Revival houses in the southern colonies were, in fact, slave plantations. Construed as an explicit call to liberate enslaved Christians, American support for the Greek Revolution was also addressed to the liberation of African Americans. The white body of a nude Greek girl was the most efficacious proxy for the black bodies that could not be yet represented. The Greek Revolution was an opportunity to extend the national success of 1776 into a global experiment of democratic values. The stylistic features of the Greek Revival promoted a global idealism for human rights, national selfdetermination, and the eradication of slavery.8 The Greek Revival style embodied a triple agenda: the celebration of democratic origins, the liberation of enslaved Christians in the Ottoman Empire, and the abolition of slavery in the American South. The sculptor Hiram Powers accomplishes this triple message in The Greek Slave (1843), the first American sculpture to receive international recognition (representing America in both the 1851 and 1854 World’s Fairs in London and Paris, respectively) (Figure 3.2). Shocking for its nudity, the Greek Slave forced a collision between antiquity and modernity. Disguised under a pure and autonomous aesthetic experience afforded by the classical ideal, the Greek Slave called for a moral to action. The sculpture had a powerful afterlife, continuing to inspire activism through the Civil War. Greece was outside the geographic limits of the European Grand Tour (that started in London and ended in Sicily). The first American intellectuals to visit Greece were connected to Philadelphia and its progressive abolitionism. Joseph Allan Smith was the first American to visit. He made sure that plaster copies of classical statues were shipped to Philadelphia in order to form the collections of

44  Kostis Kourelis

Figure 3.2 Hiram Powers, The Greek Slave, model 1841–1843, carved 1846. Corcoran Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Public Domain.

the United States’ first art school, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.9 He was followed in 1805 by Nicholas Biddle, whose letters from Greece are the first personal accounts of cultural interaction between the two countries.10 Upon his return to the United States, Biddle commissioned Benjamin Latrobe to design his house modeled after a Greek temple. As director of the Second Bank of the United States, Biddle had the new building modeled on the Parthenon and constructed during the Greek Revolution by William Strickland. The craze for Greece can be seen in American portraiture (where many subjects don Byronic Greek costumes) and in the popularity of Greek furniture, such as the popular klismos chairs and Grecian couches.11 The 1829 presidential election of Andrew Jackson precipitated a shift to deliberately oust the Greek Revival as the national style. Jackson’s agenda ran against the intellectuals who had supported the Greek Revival in Philadelphia. His populist rhetoric sought to

Architecture, Abolition, Revolution  45 eradicate the elitism associated with the educated philhellenes of eastern cities in favor of the entrepreneurs and industrialists involved in the western expansion and the American common man.12 The Greek Revival slowly lost its distinction as the official national style in the second half of the nineteenth century. The high aesthetics of a Venus (in the Greek Slave) or a Temple of Athena (in the Second Bank of the United States) led to moral action: Christian philhellenes invested in the cultural enlightenment of the newly liberated Greece. In 1829, the Episcopal Church of the United States realized that it had fallen behind in the zeal of the Great Awakening and concurred that Greece would be its first focus of global missionary engagement. John and Frances Hill established the Hill School in Athens in the ruins of the Roman Agora in 1831; it was the first educational establishment in Greece to admit women. With the support of Greece’s first prime minister Ioannis Kapodistrias, the American Samuel Gridley Howe built a refugee colony near Ancient Corinth and helped organize an orphanage in Aegina and a farm school in Ancient Tiryns. Howe gave his refugee town the name of Washingtonia to bind the American and Greek nations to a shared humanitarian principle. Howe’s wife, Julia Ward Howe (who wrote “the Battle Hymn of the Republic”), was also an abolitionist and a pioneer in the suffrage movement. The Howes’ activism continued in both Greece and the United States with their simultaneous support of the Cretan Revolution and the Union cause. It is clear that the Greek immigrants of the twentieth century saw Greek Revival architecture through the lens of their own liberation, with Americans playing a supportive role. It is less clear whether Greek immigrants understood how Greek Revival aesthetics inspired a conversation about American slavery and the racial injustice inflicted upon all peoples. Did the adoption of the Greek Revival continue to spread its original message of universal values, or did it imbue Greek Americans with a sense of racial and ethnic superiority? Yiorgos Anagnostou has convincingly argued that Greek immigrants deployed their ancient past to escalate their climb up the racial ladder in the racist hierarchy of the United States.13 Confronted with the racial ranking of American society, Greeks and other southern European immigrants were categorized as non-white or Asiatic. The rituals of their worship were used as proof of their primitivism and racial inferiority. The Greek Revival style helped Greek Americans become white, in the same way that the Irish had to become white before them.14 As one of the earliest causes taken up by Americans, the Greek Revolution provided the seeds to cultivate a notion of a Greek American model minority whose race was demonstrated by the white walls of the Greek Revival. At the same time, there is evidence that Greeks were involved in racial justice early on. The Greek community of Philadelphia, for instance, embraced an African American priest and assisted in his ordination in 1907 (previously a deacon in the Episcopal church).15 The story of Philadelphia’s Father Raphael Morgan provides a point of reference to the most celebrated gesture of solidarity during the Civil Rights Movement, when Archbishop Iakovos marched with the Reverend Martin Luther King in Selma.

46  Kostis Kourelis The 1821 Revolutionary War bound Greeks and Americans into a moral narrative. Like the abolition of slavery, Greek independence was an incomplete project: replayed in the Cretan Revolt, the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, two Balkan Wars, World War I, the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, and the 1923 Asia Minor refugee crisis. Greek temples, therefore, retained their liberational, iconic, and polemical value long after the Greek Revolution. The outbreak of World War II was the endgame for the acceptance of Greek immigrants as assimilated Americans (in the same way that the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor transformed the status of Chinese immigrants). Greece’s heroic resistance to Mussolini’s invasion on October 28, 1940, made Greeks into heroes and turned Greek Americans from despised foreigners into model citizens. Like Hiram Powers’ Greek slave had done a century earlier, the cover of Life magazine conflated ancient and modern on December 16, 1940. A modern soldier dressed in the pleated skirts of 1821 blows a bugle with the Temple of Olympian Zeus in the background.16 To an American viewer, this image underscored the moral engagement of the people and the architecture of a Greek diaspora of 327,000 people. The White City Greek immigrants arrived in large numbers to the United States between 1890 and 1924, two generations after the Greek Revolution. These Greeks had grown up in a nation that aggressively embraced neoclassicism in all major national buildings: the Royal Palace (1843), the University (1841), the Academy (1856), the Archeological Museum (1866), and the National Library (1888). This Athenian style trickled down to the rural provinces in town halls, schools, and private houses.17 Upon their arrival to the United States, Greeks encountered the aging specimen of a Greek Revival architecture that had gone out of style half a century ago. It had been replaced by an array of styles more appropriate to a heavily industrialized economy that favored the energetic forms of the medieval past. In the United States, Greek immigrants would have seen the muscular masonry of the Richardsonian Romanesque, which incorporated Byzantine elements. They would have been surprised by the number of fashionable churches and synagogues with large arches, domes, mosaic decoration, polychromous masonry, and the general feel of the medieval Mediterranean transplanted across the Atlantic. By the 1870s, a hybrid Byzantine–Romanesque–Gothic style had displaced the Greek Revival. Greek immigrants to Chicago would have witnessed the massive masonry of the Marshall Field department store by H. H. Richardson and the Auditorium Building by Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, completed in 1887 and 1889, respectively. The young architect Frank Lloyd Wright worked on the interior designs of the Auditorium Building and gave free lectures to Greek immigrants at Hull House. This muscular, ornate, Byzantinizing topography of the industrial American city provided the architectural framework for the

Architecture, Abolition, Revolution  47

Figure 3.3 Chicago’s World’s Fair, looking west from peristyle, C. D. Arnold and H. D. Higinbotham, Official Views of the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago, IL: Chicago Photo-Gravure Co., 1893), 17. Public Domain.

confectionary and florist shops that Greeks increasingly dominated. Although still in the context of the “brown decades” of industrial America, Greek immigrants arrived in the United States at a critical moment of aesthetic reconfiguration, when American architecture changed colors from brown back to white in the critical year of 1893. The Colombian Exposition of Chicago rejected the medievalizing hybrids of American architecture and rediscovered Greece and Rome (Figure 3.3). Known popularly as “the White City,” the Chicago World’s Fair triggered an American artistic renaissance through the language of classical revivalism.18 The Chicago World’s Fair celebrated the 400th Anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ 1492 arrival in America. It included 200 newly designed buildings that recreated the mirage of an ancient city. Although the buildings were temporary, they successfully promoted the Beaux Arts style as an appropriate model to revive America’s prominence in the global sphere. The model was successful enough to inspire the 1902 master plan for Washington, D.C., which monumentalized the White City in the National Mall. Chicago’s White City precipitated what contemporaries called an American Renaissance. Translated into the City Beautiful Movement, the classicism of the Chicago World’s Fair had the moralistic ambition that beautiful design would promote moral and civic order, which

48  Kostis Kourelis would in turn resolve America’s urban conflicts. Like the Greek Revival movement of the 1820s, the City Beautiful Movement of the 1900s was grounded in the ideology of social reform. Its white architecture was not simply a celebration of the western tradition, which in some form or another has always been the foundation of western architectural styles. More crucially, it replicated the monuments of Athens (and mostly Rome, in the City Beautiful Movement) to facilitate progressive political action. The Greek Revival had helped galvanize support for the abolition of slavery in the United States and the liberation of Greeks from Ottoman oppression. In turn, the City Beautiful Movement hoped to eradicate the social ills of overcrowding, crime, corruption, exploitation, and inhumane housing conditions among the new immigrants and working poor in the booming but unjust industrial cities that attracted masses of laborers from Eastern and Southern Europe and the Great Migration of African Americans from the South after the Civil War. Greek immigrants to Chicago witnessed both the economic oppression of the urban slums and progress toward liberation through progressive reform. Rising out of the traumas of the Civil War with a renewed industrial vigor, America had become an economic (although not quite yet a military) superpower, centered around coal, steel, cheap immigrant labor, western expansion, and a theory of manifest destiny with Chicago as a midway point between San Francisco and New York. The Fair’s cultural significance lies in the boldness of its aesthetics, in its ideological stance toward history, and in its applicability as a national style replicable across every corner of the nation. The structures of the Chicago World’s Fair were also masterpieces of engineering, built with a steel frame system invented by William Le Baron Jenney at the Home Insurance Building of Chicago in 1885. The innovative engineering, however, was covered by a skin of white plaster ornament derived from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, whose pedagogical model was adopted by America’s first architectural schools founded immediately after the Fair (at the University of Pennsylvania, at MIT, and at Columbia). The uniform whiteness of the fake facades gave the Fair the name The White City. Although it lasted only six months, the fair was seen by 1.2 million visitors and its designers were hired by the municipal government of Washington, D.C., to design the new capitol. The fake and impermanent white city, therefore, put its permanent imprint on national ideology through the white buildings of the National Mall. The Greek Revival churches of the Greeks could claim a diachronic entanglement in the host nation’s history. Brigand Pageantry and World Religions The centrality of 1893 Chicago in the rhetoric of American immigrants requires a look beyond the stylistic façade of the Fair. The reason why Chicago was selected for the site of the World Exposition was the city’s recent genesis as a modern industrial capital (in contrast to the older centers of Philadelphia, Boston, or

Architecture, Abolition, Revolution  49 New York), fueled by a migrant labor class from Europe. In the 1890s, half of Chicago’s population was foreign born, and migrants comprised almost 80% of the city, if one adds the Chicago-born children of those immigrants.19 Chicago became home of the largest Greek population outside of Greece—even though those Greeks made up a miniscule proportion of Chicago’s foreign population. In 1893, Hull House and the University of Chicago initiated the first sociological studies of Greek immigration, producing the earliest empirical data on the living conditions of Greeks in America.20 This early sociological lens provided information on criminality, sexual abuse, and debt bondage within the community that proved necessary to rectify the public opinion of Greek Americans.21 Images of the 1821 Revolution were transmitted in a more populist medium at the Chicago World’s Fair. Running perpendicular to the more serious grounds of the White City, the Midway Plaisance was an amusement park with spectacles, balloon rides, the first Ferris wheel, and ethnographic attractions. The Midway included imported ethnic characters from across the world, some staged in an architectural configuration of native villages. The project was supervised by the Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology and had a pseudo-scientific attraction for its viewers. The eastern Mediterranean components of this global carnival were curated by the Greek entrepreneur George Pangalo, a native of Smyrna, who was educated in Constantinople at Roberts College and active as a banker in Cairo.22 Pangalo orchestrated the performance of the Greek Revolution of 1821 through the character of a Greek brigand on stage at the Turkish Theater. The brigand was played by Hadji Abeet, a Syrian actor and dancer who frequently performed in Athens (Figure 3.4).23 Thus, the high-culture reenactment of classical antiquity as the main style of the Fair’s formal grounds was coupled with a lower culture performance of Greece’s revolution against Turkish despotism. Finally, the Chicago World’s Fair contained a third manifestation of revolutionary rhetoric, this time emanating from a religious conversation. The Parliament of the World’s Religions was scheduled to take place at the Chicago World’s Fair as the first global interfaith conference. It met for two weeks at the Fair’s Auxiliary Building (today the Art Institute of Chicago).24 The Church of Greece was represented by its Archbishop Dionysius Latas, the first Church official to visit the United States. Panagiotis Phiambolis, the priest of the Greek American community of Chicago, was also present. The priest’s speech defied the conciliatory spirit of the Congress by attacking Islam and rekindling the antiTurkish rhetoric of the Greek Revolution: “The people of the orient suffered, and still suffer; the Christian virgins are dishonored by the followers of the moral prophet, and the life of a Christian is not considered as precious as that of a dog.”25 Four year later, Phiambolis made sure that the Greeks of Chicago signed an oath of allegiance to the King of Greece during the 1897 Greco-Turkish War, which influenced many Chicagoan Greeks to return to Greece to fight. In Phiambolis’ mind, the liberation of Greece had not been completed. During his 1893

50  Kostis Kourelis

Figure 3.4 Greek Brigand, Frederic Ward Putnam, Oriental and Occidental Northern and Southern Portrait Types of the Midway Plaisance (St. Louis: N. D. Thompson Publisher, 1894). Public Domain.

visit to the Parliament of the World’s Religions, Archbishop of Greece Latas presided over the services of the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church. The congregation’s orientation toward Greece can be seen in the architecture of its first structure. Built in 1910, the Annunciation (which served as Chicago’s metropolis church after 1942) was modeled on the Metropolis of Athens. This inspiration reflects the ideological choices of 1842, since Bavarian King Otto I of Greece had then assured that his national church was autonomous (autocephalous) from the Patriarchy of Constantinople.26 It was designed in the pan-European Rundbogenstil, a style of assertive hybridity that engaged with Europe’s multinational heritage. Neither purely Greek nor Byzantine, neither purely Renaissance nor Romanesque, the Athens Metropolis became, idiosyncratically, model for the ecclesiastical style of Modern Greece. The double towers flanking the façade became the telltale sign of a new national style, since neither Classical temples nor Byzantine churches had towers. Like the Holy Trinity Church at Lowell (1906),

Architecture, Abolition, Revolution  51 the Annunciation Church in Chicago (1910) rejected the American Greek Revival for the sake of the neologism of Greece’s national church and its Athenian metropolis. Against the Greek Revival During the late twentieth century, the Greek Orthodox Church of America rejected the pluralism of styles that had characterized the first wave of immigrant architecture. It adopted an official Neo-Byzantine style to add a needed sense of coherence to the diversity of architectural practices up to that point. The NeoByzantine style also corresponds to the Greek community’s white flight from the ethnic inner city to the suburbs. A hard-earned economic prosperity was boosted by other national mechanisms like the G. I. Bill, the Federal Housing Administration, and the Housing Act of 1949. The unrest of the Civil Rights movement in old Greek towns from 1963 to 1969 further encouraged Greeks to abandon their churches (occasionally selling them to African American congregations) and move to the suburbs, where they found the financial means to build anew and meet the demographic boom presented by the second wave of immigration following the Greek Civil War. The shift from city to suburb, from struggle to prosperity, and from variety to singularity in style is represented by the church of St. Nicholas in Lower Manhattan. The church, a sumptuous Neo-Byzantine building, was designed by Santiago Calatrava in 2012 to replace the original St. Nicholas destroyed in the collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Whereas the new design was inspired by the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, the original immigrant church had been a house from 1823 that was converted into a church in 1923. Its replacement by an iconic Neo-Byzantine building testifies to Greek America’s progressive erasure of its earliest architectural identity in place of a more recent iconic coherence. The adoption of a Neo-Byzantine architectural identity dates to the 1960s, and specifically to Archbishop Iakovos’ choice of W. Stuart Thompson as the architect of the Holy Cross Seminary chapel in Brookline, Mass (next to which Iakovos was buried in 2005). Thompson’s relationship with Greece began in 1912, when he was an architecture fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. He became the School’s chief architect for its major building projects of the 1920s, including Loring Hall, the Gennadius Library, and the Corinth Museum. Thompson studied Byzantine architecture while assisting in the restoration of the Holy Apostles in the Athenian Agora, dedicated in 1956. As the only other building next to the Stoa of Attalos, the Holy Apostles became an iconic symbol of the American cultural presence in postwar Greece. Thompson’s scholarship is evident in his design of the Greek Orthodox Church of the Archangels in Stamford, Connecticut, dedicated in 1958. Archbishop Iakovos was so impressed by this project that he enlisted Thompson to design the chapel of the Holy Cross Seminary in Brookline dedicated in 1962 (Figure 3.5).

52  Kostis Kourelis

Figure 3.5 Holy Cross Theological School Chapel, Brookline, Mass. Author’s photo, 2016.

The election of Iakovos as Archbishop of North and South America in 1959 marked the transformation of the Greek Orthodox Church from an immigrant church to a mainstream American institution.27 The model of the sixth-century Hagia Sophia exerted its influence on the assimilated modernist designs of the Ascension in Oakland (1960), Frank Lloyd Wright’s Annunciation in Milwaukee (1961), and the Annunciation in Atlanta (1967).28 The “tyranny of Hagia Sophia” in the late twentieth century has eclipsed the history of Greek American church architecture before the suburban 1960s, whose designs were resolutely “unByzantine.”29 The architectural agency of early Greek America is obscured not only by the prominence of the later Neo-Byzantine style but also by the demolition of earlier monuments and their replacement with newer ones. Out of the 40 Greek Orthodox churches established by the year 1912, only five of the

Architecture, Abolition, Revolution  53 original buildings survive today.30 The geographic breadth of the Greek American experience, moreover, requires an archeological approach that looks beyond the traditional centers of Chicago and New York and incorporates all of the 167 Greek American communities established by the 1910s (half of which had a population of less than 200).31 During the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, immigrants from Central and Southern Europe transformed American society and changed the physical fabric of its cities. In a study of America’s immigrant architectural roots, it was considered that Greeks along with other urban groups like Jews and Italians “built little that was distinctive but instead expressed their ethnicity through language, food customs, religion and social organization.”32 This notion reflects the disappearance of the early churches, the lack of archeological scholarship, and the ease with which the postwar Byzantine style sought to simplify a complicated past. In the 1920s, Greek immigrants chose to move beyond the canonical architecture of medieval Byzantine Orthodoxy and the Athenian style of modern basilicas. They recognized the cultural capital afforded to them by recycling an American style of a century ago that asserted their claims to both American and Greek revolutionary origins. Notes

54  Kostis Kourelis

7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21

22 23 24

(2008): 28–36, special issue on The Archaeology of Xenitia: Greek Immigration and Material Culture. David P. Handlin, American Architecture, second edition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 62. Talbot Hamlin, Greek Revival Architecture in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), Maureen Connors Santelli, The Greek Fire: American-Ottoman Relations and Democratic Fervor in the Age of Revolutions (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021). Richard A. McNeal, “Joseph Allen Smith, American Grand Tourist,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 4, no. 1 (1997): 64–91. Richard A. McNeal, Nicholas Biddle in Greece: The Journals and Letters of 1806 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993). Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley, Peggy A. Olley and Jeffrey A. Cohen, Classical Splendor: Painted Furniture for a Grand Philadelphia House (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2016). Michael J. Lewis, American Art and Architecture (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2006), 87. Yiorgos Anagnostou, “Forget the Past, Remember the Ancestors! Modernity, ‘Whiteness,’ American Hellenism, and the Politics of Memory in Early Greek America,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 22, (2004): 25–71. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995). Paul Manolis, “Raphael (Robert) Morgan: The First Black Orthodox Priest in America,” Θεολογία [Theology] 52, no. 1 (1981): 464–480. Life, “Greek Soldier,” Life 9, no. 25 (December 16, 1940): cover. Manos Biris and Maro Kardamitsi-Adami, Νεοκλασσική αρχιτεκτονική στην Ελλάδα [Neoclassical Architecture in Greece] (Athens: Melissa Publishers, 2001). There are many studies of the architectural legacy of the Chicago World’s Fair, but Erik Larson’s bestseller is the best overview, Devil in the White City (New York: Crown 2003). Caroline Golab, “The Immigrant and the City: Poles, Italians, and Jews in Philadelphia, 1870–1920,” in The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-Class Life, 1790–1940, eds. Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973), 203–230. Grace Abbott, “A Study of Greeks in Chicago,” American Journal of Sociology 15, no. 3 (1909), 379–393; Natalie Walker, “Chicago Housing Conditions. X. Greeks and Italians in the Neighborhood of Hull House,” American Journal of Sociology 21, no. 3 (1915): 285–316. The Dillingham Commission focused on the Greek padrone system of forced labor, A. A. Seraphic, “The Greek Padrone System,” in Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. 2, ed. William P. Dillingham (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911), 391–408; Paul G. Cressey mapped the role of Greeks in Chicago’s dance hall business, The Taxi-Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercialized Recreation and City Life (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1932); Grace Abbott studied the high crime rates among Greeks and identified cases of sexual abuse among businessmen towards their female staff, The Immigrant and the Community (New York: The Century, 1917). He settled in Cairo as a banker, where he conceived of the Cairo Street. Frederic Ward Putnam, Oriental and Occidental Northern and Southern Portrait Types of the Midway Plaisance (St. Louis: N. D. Thompson Publisher, 1894). Matthew Namee, “The World’s Parliament of Religions, 1893,” Orthodox History, May 11, 2010.

Architecture, Abolition, Revolution  55

56  Kostis Kourelis Lower-Class Life, 1790–1940, edited by Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller, 203–230. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973. Hamlin, Talbot. Greek Revival Architecture in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1944. Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995. Kirtley-Alevizatos, Alexandra, Peggy A. Olley and Jeffrey A. Cohen. Classical Splendor: Painted Furniture for a Grand Philadelphia House. Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2016. Kitroeff, Alexander. The Greek Orthodox Church in America: A Modern History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. Kourelis, Kostis. “From Greek Revival to Greek America: Archaeology and Transformation in Saint George Orthodox Cathedral of Philadelphia.” New Griffon 10, (2008): 28–36, special issue, The Archaeology of Xenitia: Greek Immigration and Material Culture. Kourelis, Kostis. “Style and Real Estate: Architecture of Faith among the Greek and Italian Immigrants, 1870–1925.” In Transcultural Encounters, Comparative Inquiries: Italian Americans and Greek Americans, edited by Theodora Patrona, Yiorgos Anagnostou and Yiorgos Kalogeras, 105–140. New York: Fordham University Press, 2022. Kourelis, Kostis and Vasileios Marinis. “The Immigrant Liturgy: Greek Orthodox Worship and Architecture in America.” In Liturgy in Migration: Cultural Contexts from the Upper Room to Cyberspace, edited by Teresa Berger, 155–175. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2012. Kourelis, Kostis and David Pettegrew. “The Greek Community of Harrisburg and Lancaster: A Study of Immigration, Residence, and Mobility in the City Beautiful Era.” Pennsylvania History 87, (2021): 66–91. Larson, Erik. Devil in the White City. New York: Crown, 2003. Lewis, Michael J. American Art and Architecture. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2006. Life. “Greek Soldier,” Life 9, no. 25 (December 16, 1940): cover. Manolis, Paul. “Raphael (Robert) Morgan: The First Black Orthodox Priest in America.” Θεολογία [Theology] 52, no. 1 (1981): 464–480. McNeal, Richard A. “Joseph Allen Smith, American Grand Tourist.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 4, no. 1 (1997): 64–91. McNeal, Richard A. Nicholas Biddle in Greece: The Journals and Letters of 1806. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. Mumford, Lewis. The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America 1865–1895. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931. Namee, Matthew. “The World’s Parliament of Religions, 1893.” Orthodox History, May 11, 2010. Nelson, Robert. Hagia Sophia, 1850–1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Putnam, Frederic Ward. Oriental and Occidental Northern and Southern Portrait Types of the Midway Plaisance. St. Louis: N. D. Thompson Publisher, 1894. Santelli, Maureen Connors. The Greek Fire: American-Ottoman Relations and Democratic Fervor in the Age of Revolutions. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021. Seraphic, A. A. “The Greek Padrone System.” In Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. 2, edited by William P. Dillingham, 391–408. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911.

Architecture, Abolition, Revolution  57 Thompson, Ariadne. The Octagonal Heart. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1956. Upton, Dell. America’s Architectural Roots: Ethnic Groups that Built America. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1986. Walker, Natalie. “Chicago Housing Conditions. X. Greeks and Italians in the Neighborhood of Hull House.” American Journal of Sociology 21, no. 3 (1915): 285–316.

4

Representations of the Greek Revolution in Greek American Publications Maria Kaliambou

The Greek Revolution in Greek American Book Culture Since the last decade of the nineteenth century, a variety of books and publications about the Greek Revolution of 1821 have circulated among Greek immigrants in America. The first Greek American publishing company in New York, Atlantis, imported many books of Greek history and literature including texts on the Greek Revolution. The company established a newspaper by the same name of Atlantis in 1894 where it advertised the imported books. In an 1896 advertisement, the newspaper includes five publications related to the Greek Revolution: a history of the Revolution, three novels, and a poetry collection by Lord Byron.1 Greek American newspapers published commemorative articles about the Revolution from their very first issues. On March 25, 1903, a celebratory edition of the newspaper Thermopylai included an essay by Neoklis Kazazis, Rector of the University of Athens, titled “America and the Greek Revolution.” The author, in heavy Katharevousa (a language form that combines ancient and modern Greek), comments approvingly on American philhellenism and advises Greek immigrants “to love [the Americans], imitate and learn, being thankful to them because their fathers contributed to the resurrection of Greece.”2 For the centennial anniversary of the Greek Revolution, the Greek American journal the Monthly Illustrated National Herald, published in April 1921 in New York, dedicates its first seven pages to the 100-year anniversary of this milestone in Greek history. The opening three-page article by Antonios G. Darlakos speaks about the resurrection of the nation and expresses the hope that Greece will be able to free the rest of its people who were still under the Ottoman rule.3 The text is followed by two photographs depicting a glamorous, majestic event in Lexington Theater in New York, where more than 4,000 Greeks gathered to celebrate the centennial of the Revolution. The visuals are followed by a transcription of the anniversary speech—delivered by Metropolitan Meletios from Athens who attended the event.4 Greek Americans used many other genres alongside newspapers and journals to express themselves and recount their history as they began to settle into their DOI: 10.4324/9781003378914-5

Representations of the Greek Revolution in Publications  59 new home. A variety of literary and educational materials written and published by Greek immigrants focused on the Greek Revolution. This chapter analyzes the multifaceted representations of the Greek Revolution transmitted by poetry collections, anthologies of plays, and schoolbooks. Greek American publishers started producing poetry collections in the 1910s, followed in the late 1920s and 1930s by anthologies of plays and schoolbooks for the Greek American schools. All these publications on the Revolution played an important role in augmenting the historical awareness of Greek Americans. What type of narrative do these texts contain? I argue that the main narrative in these early-twentieth century representations of the Revolution oscillates between history and mythology and contributes to the national pride necessary for the coherence of Greek American immigrant communities. Poetic Verses on Greece’s Resurrection The first known poetry collection published by a Greek American publishing house is by Demetrius Valakos and was published in 1912 in New York under the title “Songs of the Foreign Lands.”5 The collection includes poems about life in foreign lands (“xenitiá”), family, community, love, and nature. Valakos is also interested in Greek history—he dedicates several poems to seminal moments in Greek history, such as the conquest of Constantinople6 and the Greek Revolution. The poem “March 25”, written in the style of Greek folk songs, is a hymn to the Revolution, and its title refers to the Revolution’s start date. Although there is a “longstanding debate over the beginning of the Revolution”, March 25th has been celebrated as a national holiday ever since 1838, when the first king of Greece, Othon, officially announced the day as the anniversary of the Revolution.7 The poem starts with an idyllic description of nature in bloom and moves to a frightening scene where the hidden voice of the last Byzantine Emperor Constantine Palaiologos “scatters horror.” In the poet’s interpretation, Constantine has not died but is only turned to stone, waiting for Greece’s resurrection:8 Dressed in gold, beautiful, kind, and brave, Death could never take him. He was turned to stone in his City [Polis] and he is waiting— Let the sword shine again, the rifle gleam.9 For the poet, the starting date of the Revolution symbolizes the beginning of a new era in Greek history: it marks the resurrection of the country. The Revolution even evokes the Resurrection of Christ himself: Such a glorious Resurrection the world has never seen: a second one, after that first great [Resurrection] of our Christ.10

60  Maria Kaliambou As the poem continues, Valakos honors another emblematic figure of the Greek Revolution—the Philhellene par excellence Lord Byron, who wanted Messolonghi to be his “eternal home.”11 The poet also muses on the enslaved Greeks who “dreamed of the erased glamour”, referring to the Byzantine Empire. But he does not forget to praise the ancient glory of Greece, either. Valakos combines the ancient and the Byzantine glory with the modern struggle within his text: Hellas! Resurrect once more, resurrect the ancient, Your first glory again and all the best Ideals, once more the earth should be scared, In the Polis, the crossed eagle should fly again.12 All the poetic images above—the “Emperor turned to stone” who longs to see his land resurrected, the Greek slave who dreams of long-lost freedom, and of course the nostalgia for ancient glory—culminate in the last line of the poem, where the poet implies that the City [Polis], Constantinople, will become Greek again. The poem, written and published in 1912, reflects the dominant political discourse in Greece at the time—the irredentist concept of “the Great Idea.” The position advocated for Greece’s territorial expansion to include the Greek populations under Ottoman rule, an idea that led to the national catastrophe in Asia Minor in 1922.13 The same patriotic, nationalistic feelings are central to the poem “National dreams. Lost words” by the poet Chr. Marinos from Conneaut, Ohio. The poem starts explicitly with the well-known irredentist line “Once again after many years, they will become our own again.” The poet talks about the loss of the Byzantine Empire and the Greek hope for the resurrection of the City of Constantinople [Poli].14 This patriotic poem is included in a collection of “religious, patriotic, militant, heroic, love poems” by Greek male immigrants. The collection, titled “Hellenic Muses”, was edited by Vasileios Zoustes and published in New York in 1917. Zoustes notes in his preface not only that Greek immigrants are successful in their professions (merchants, industry labor, etc.) but also that “they serve the muses, the letters, the arts, and the sciences, taking into advantage all the comforts that prosperous America offers them”15. The poems in the collection describe the challenges of living in a foreign land, muse on the pain caused by lost love, and praise the Greek flag16 and the “foustanela”17 (the traditional soldier’s costume). Several poems in Zoustes’s collection make reference to the heroic battles and wars of the Greek Revolution. To take one example, “The marching song of Souliotes” by N. K. Liaskas vividly describes the Souliotes’ heroism—indelible in the mind of every Greek. The proud immigrant poet sings of the selflessness and self-sacrifice of the people in Souli who marched forward “for our homeland, for freedom.” The poet praises the unwavering unity they maintained

Representations of the Greek Revolution in Publications  61 until their last moments. Men, women, and children resisted the Turks together with whatever means was left to them and were eventually reduced to throwing stones before they died.18 Anthologies of Plays: The Performance of Heroism Reenacting the Revolution through theater performance was customary among Greek Americans, for both adults and children. Helen Papanikolas, narrating her personal experiences of the ceremonies for the celebration of the Revolution, explains that: [in 1920s and ’30s] plays were produced on the theme of the Greek Turkish war and given on March 25, the anniversary of the revolt. In Carbon County [Utah] the girl students of the Greek schools took all parts. In Salt Lake City, the adults were the actors.19 Plays were also performed in school festivals and ceremonies for religious and national holidays. Their dramatic, expressive character, particularly important for childhood education, intensified the memory of the Revolution in Greek American communities and carried it on from generation to generation. In Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1918, the playwright Helias Janetis published in Greek a play for adults titled “Martyrs and Avengers. A Patriotic Drama in Four Acts.” Ten years later, in 1928, he reissued it alongside a historical study about the secret society “The Society of Friends.” Janetis writes in the preface of the second edition that the play was put on “very successfully by amateur theater groups and by school students and was performed in several Greek diasporic communities in America and in Greece, Smyrna, Rumania, Cyprus and elsewhere.”20 Several images are printed throughout the book depicting actors from various productions of the play. Argyro Ralli plays Ourania, the girl abducted by Turks who was sold in Constantinople but finally saved by her fiancé, a member of the secret Society of Friends. Ralli belonged to a local amateur group in New Haven, Connecticut (Figure 4.1).21 In another production, Actor St. Euthymiou, a member of the amateur group Apollo in Springfield Massachusetts, plays the elderly priest Agapios, saved from decapitation by Turks at the very last moment by a young member of the Society of Friends (Figure 4.2).22 The story of the play consists of a series of patriotic deeds by the members of the Society of Friends, violent scenes with girls being kidnapped by the Turks, protests again the Turks, and a final family reunion.23 The main scenes of the play constitute an homage to martyrdom: the abduction of young boys and girls,24 threatened brutal deaths, suffering parents who lost their children, affirmations of strong faith in the church and Greece, and, of course, the self-sacrifice of the members of the Society of Friends. The play presents its heroes as neo-martyrs,

Figure 4.1 Actress Argyro Ralli, New Haven, Connecticut. Helias Janetis (or Tzanetis), Η Φιλική Εταιρία και το πατριωτικόν Δράμα Μάρτυρες και Εκδικηταί εις πράξεις 4 (έκδοσις δευτέρα) [The Society of Friends and the Patriotic Drama Martyrs and Avengers in Four Acts], second edition (New York: D.C. Divry, 1928), 259.

Figure 4.2 Actor St. Euthymiou, Springfield, Massachusetts. Helias Janetis (or Tzanetis), Η Φιλική Εταιρία και το πατριωτικόν Δράμα Μάρτυρες και Εκδικηταί εις πράξεις 4 (έκδοσις δευτέρα) [The Society of Friends and the Patriotic Drama Martyrs and Avengers in Four Acts], second edition (New York: D.C. Divry, 1928), 231.

Representations of the Greek Revolution in Publications  63 as the saints who suffered excruciatingly and died brutally thus became martyrs of Christ. Similarly, the young men of the Society of Friends demonstrate passion, dedication, and fearlessness. They are martyrs for our time, whose noble deaths made possible the freedom of Greece. In a similar vein, Nikolaos Vavoudis, a children’s books author, wrote a play in 1937 called “The Hero of Alamana”,25 commemorating one of the most prominent fighters of the Revolution Athanasios Diakos, who remains in collective memory because of his horrific death by impalement.26 In the first act, we follow the transformation of the priest Diakos into a dedicated fighter. He teaches his students and his fellow countrymen to revolt against the Turks and choose death over slavery. The protagonist and his students sing the famous battle hymn “Thourios”, written by Rigas Feraios: “It is better to live one hour in freedom than forty years in slavery and prison”, goes the song. Two pages with the musical scores of Rigas’s patriotic poems are printed at the end of the first act. The second act narrates the remarkable resistance of the hero even at the moment of death. Diakos, truly deserving of the label of martyr, experienced his death with extraordinary courage and self-sacrifice: He died a hero, as heroic in death. The Turks impaled him and grilled him over the fire. And he, in his martyrdom, still sang sweetly: Look what time Death [Charon] chose to take me Now that the branches are blossoming, and the earth is growing grass.27 The third and final act of the play shifts to contemporary times, when Greeks honor this hero of the Revolution by laying wreaths at his statue. Children in traditional costumes and a girl dressed in ancient garments symbolizing Hellas offer their tributes to Diakos. Among them is a Greek American, “an original idea of the author in order to give an American touch to the patriotism and to give dramatic interest to the statue.”28 The whole play is full of well-known symbols and slogans (the above-mentioned songs that are cultural heritage to every Greek child, the dressing of the children either in traditional or ancient garments, the sacrifice and mythical heroic act of the hero) that all contribute to affixing the hero’s acts in the collective consciousness. As Mark Mazower notes “heroism had been the heart of revolutionary thinking”29—we remember the Revolution’s heroes and their heroic acts. National Images in Schoolbooks What historical accounts of the Revolution are available to Greek American children? What stories are included in their schoolbooks? In the emblematically titled schoolbook “The Palaces of My Fatherland” by Plato Papazoglou, published in 1934 in New York, the last 14-page chapter is dedicated to “The

64  Maria Kaliambou Epos of the War of 1821” and is titled “The Continuation of the Glory. A Patriotic Reading.”30 The schoolbook, intended for fourth and fifth grade, was approved by the High Council for Greek Education of the Archdiocese in New York. It includes lessons on religion, history, grammar, general knowledge, songs, and poems. The text was reapproved by the High Council in the following years, so it saw four editions between 1934 and 1944. The revised, more elaborate fourth edition of 1944, edited this time by Nikolaos Vavoudis, includes one new chapter about Rigas Feraios, “the cantor of Greece’s resurrection.”31 The chapter “Patriotic Reading” contains a few basic themes,32 which constitute the main circulated narratives about the Revolution taught in Greek American schools. Greek American children learn about the national religious holiday of Annunciation (Evangelism) which coincides with the starting date of the Revolution; they hear about “the secret school”; and they are taught about the violent abduction of children by the Turks, massacres of Greeks, heroic battles, and great heroes and their sacrifices. The chapter also includes several wellknown folk songs. Fevronia Soumakis mentions that in the Greek school system in America, “the slavery narrative was impressed upon students at an early age”, and “Greek revolutionary heroes, among other items, adorned classrooms, bulletin boards and hallways.”33 Soumakis argues further that the Greek education system emphasized the importance of clergymen to the success of the Revolution and the pivotal role of the church in the secret continuation of Greek education.34 The Archdiocese’s influence encouraged schools to propagate these narratives through schoolbooks. The “secret school” myth, namely, the narrative about the priests teaching Greek language and culture in secret spaces of the churches throughout the Ottoman period, prevalent till today even though recent scholarship has proven it to be false,35 could not be missing from books approved by the Archdiocese. Another recurring national image in the schoolbooks is the young boy dressed as evzonaki in fustanella (as a soldier in the traditional costume with a pleated skirt). As Helen Papanikolas narrates, in Greek America “it was rare for a son of Greek immigrant parents to get through childhood without having his picture taken in the fustanella.”36 This image cannot be absent from schoolbooks. In the first Greek American learn-to-read book, written by Venetia Vidali and published in 1935 by National Herald in New York, the author illustrates the letter E with a Greek child dressed in fustanella. The subtitle reads “The Greek child is full of bravery”,37 which adds a triumphant tone to the image of being Greek (Figure 4.3). The image of the little Greek soldier was also sold as a gift in bookstores in New York. Atlas Bookstore’s price catalog from 1938 to 1939 advertises little Greek soldiers as “the best memory of home” and sells the toys for $2.50 (see Figure 4.4). The bookstore also sells figures of girls in traditional costumes “as the most beautiful gift”, and “tsarouchakia” for little kids from two to 15 years

Representations of the Greek Revolution in Publications  65

Figure 4.3 The Greek Child. Venetia Vidali, Νέον Αλφαβητάριον διά τα Ελληνόπουλα «Εθνικού Κήρυκος». Επί τη βάσει των τελευταίων αρίστων παιδαγωγικών συστημάτων. Μέρος Α΄ [The New Alphabet Book for the Greek Children of National Herald. Based on the last best pedagogical systems. Part A] (New York: Ethnikos Kyrix, 1930), 8.

old (a traditional shoe with an upturned toe and a pompon).38 Christina Koulouri poignantly comments that the fustanella: has an exciting history: from an everyday item of clothing worn by many fighters in the 1821 Revolution and rural residents of the Greek state throughout the 19th century, it subsequently became a national costume worn by the king, the uniform of the regular Greek army, a primary exhibit at World’s Fairs and national museums, a carnival costume and, ultimately, a child’s toy and touristic souvenir. … The fustanella thus became a metonymy for the Revolution, symbolizing bravery and martial virtue.39 Indeed, this national image of the soldier in the skirt is prevalent in Greek America in many facets of everyday life (school ceremonies, theater performances, souvenirs, gift ideas, etc.). Besides heroes and soldiers in traditional costumes, another revered personality is the revolutionary thinker Rigas Feraios (1757–1798) whose writings inspired the enslaved Greeks to revolt and to liberate Greece. The scholar, writer,

66  Maria Kaliambou

Figure 4.4 Advertisements from the bookstore Atlas, 1938–1939. Γενικός τιμοκατάλογος του ελληνικού καταστήματος Atlas [General Price Catalogue of the Greek Bookstore Atlas] (New York: Atlas, 1938–1939).

and important figure of the Greek Enlightenment also inspired Greek Americans, particularly those engaged with some type of scholarly activity such as education or publishing. Rigas functioned as a role model for those Greek Americans who wanted to play a leading role in immigrant communities. He was the leading educational inspiration for the teacher Dimitris Dimitriou, who in 1935 published the first children’s anthology in Greek America with poems and skits for school ceremonies.40 Rigas wanted to enlighten the broad rural population through his engaging texts, free them from superstitions by offering scientific reasoning, and lead them to actively participate in the freedom of Greece.41 In a

Representations of the Greek Revolution in Publications  67 similar way, Dimitriou wanted to inspire the Greek American youth to learn all things Greek and be active members of the community. He writes in his preface: “Let’s not forget that Rigas Feraios enlivened the sentiment of the enslaved [Greeks] by the style of his several patriotic works.”42 Just as Rigas Feraios transmitted the ideas of Enlightenment, inspired patriotic fervor, and mobilized the population toward freedom through his writing, Dimitriou wants to ignite the fire of Hellenism in the hearts of Greek American children. It is imperative that his goal be achieved—Greek children must continue the traditions of the first generations and keep the culture and language alive. Conclusion The Greek Revolution has an important role in the lives and historical awareness of Greek Americans. The investigation of several literary genres from the first half of the twentieth century written by Greek Americans (poetry collections, anthologies with plays, and schoolbooks) shows the prevalence of some recurring themes and leitmotifs regarding the perception of the Revolution. First, the narratives focus on the prerevolutionary time, which is surrounded by an aura of excitement and inspiration leading to the “resurrection” of the enslaved nation. Important personalities of that preparatory era are memorably featured: Rigas Feraios, “the father of the Revolution”,43 who ignites the passion to live in a free country; the Society of Friends, which takes the lead to engage their compatriots; and Bishop Palaion Patron Germanos, who by raising the flag at the Agia Lavra Monastery officially started the Revolution. The “secret school” is an important recurring narrative that underlines the role of the Church and the clergy in the continuation of the Greek language and Greek traditions during the Ottoman occupation. Second, the actual history of the Revolution is fragmented into stories about heroes and their heroic deeds. The self-sacrifice of the Souliotisses and the inhabitants of Messolonghi, the brutal deaths of Athanasios Diakos and Patriarch Grigorios, and the death of Lord Byron are some of the most frequently recurring representations of these archetypal heroes.44 They function as neo-martyrs who intellectually inspire, emotionally move, and spark patriotic pride. All of the above narratives about the Revolution blend reality and fantasy. They oscillate between history and mythology. In fact, these historical narratives “function as modern myths.”45 Societies need selective glorious myths to feel proud of their ancestors. Heroes and heroic actions by eponymous or anonymous people of the Revolution create a continuously charged genealogy of impressive and fascinating ancestors. These narratives strengthen feelings of pride and belonging in the Greek American community. Moreover, for Greeks in the diaspora, these myths carry one more additional quality: that of connecting with their beloved but irrecoverable home. They can replace the severed umbilical

68  Maria Kaliambou cord. Thus, these stories lend an existential weight to the historical awareness of Greeks in the diaspora and play an important role in preserving the diasporic Greek Nation. Notes 1 These are a translation of the “History of the Greek Revolution”, a historical account of the war by the German historian Karl Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, three well-known novels (“The heroin of the Greek Revolution” by Stefanos Xenos, “The last days of Ali Pasha”, and “Katsantonis” by K. Ramfos) and the whole poetic oeuvre by Lord Byron in three volumes (“Book Department of Atlantis,” Atlantis (New York), February 29, 1896: 4). 2 Neoklis Kazazis, “Η Ελληνική Επανάστασις εν Αμερική” [The Greek Revolution in America], in Ημερολόγιον «Θερμοπυλών» 1904 και Ελληνικός Οδηγός της Αμερικής [1904 Almanac of ‘Thermopyles’ and Greek Guide of America], ed. John Booras (New York: Thermopylae, 1904), 28–34. 3 Antonios G. Darlakos, “1821 – ΚΕ Μαρτίου 1921. Η Επέτειος της Εκατονταετηρίδος της ελληνικής Ανεξαρτησίας” [1821 – 25 March 1921. The Centennial Anniversary of the Greek Independence], Μηνιαίος Εικονογραφημένος Εθνικός Κήρυξ [Monthly Illustrated National Herald], New York, April 1921: 3–5. 4 Let’s not forget—the year of the Revolution’s centennial, Greece was entangled in the irredentist war in Asia Minor, which prevented any celebrations in Greece itself. However, Greek Americans celebrated in New York. 5 Dimitrios E. Valakos, Τραγούδια της Ξενητειάς [Songs of the Foreign Lands]. New York: D.C. Divry, 1912. The poet dedicates the collection to his mother. 6 The poem “Gioul Mosque” refers to the loss of Constantinople and the transformation of the churches into mosques (Valakos, Τραγούδια της Ξενητειάς, 53–55). 7 Paschalis Kitromilides, “Introduction,” in The Greek Revolution. A Critical Dictionary, eds. Paschalis Kitromilides and Constantinos Tsoukalas (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021), 8–9. 8 The death of Konstantine Palaiologos achieved legendary dimensions in people’s minds and is widely present in folk traditions. Konstantine, the paradigmatic hero, functions as the guiding spirit in the new revolution for the freedom of enslaved Greece. 9 Valakos, Τραγούδια της Ξενητειάς, 35. 10 Valakos, Τραγούδια της Ξενητειάς, 35. 11 Valakos, Τραγούδια της Ξενητειάς, 35–36. Indeed, Lord Byron, the English romantic poet who supported the Greek Revolution, died while in Greece in 1824. 12 Valakos, Τραγούδια της Ξενητειάς, 36. 13 Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece, fourth edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 46–97. 14 Vasileios Zoustis (ed.), Ελληνικαί Μούσαι. Πρωτότυπος συλλογή ποιημάτων των Ελλήνων της Αμερικής. Θρησκευτικά, πατριωτικά, πολεμικά, ηρωικά, ερωτικά. Τόμος Α΄ [Hellenic Muses. Original collection of poems by Greek Americans. Religious, patriotic, militant, heroic, love poems. Band A], (New York: “The Moussai” Publishing Company, 1917), 122–124. 15 Zoustis (ed.), Ελληνικαί Μούσαι, 4. 16 Zoustis (ed.), Ελληνικαί Μούσαι, 56. 17 Zoustis (ed.), Ελληνικαί Μούσαι, 59. 18 Zoustis (ed.), Ελληνικαί Μούσαι, 47. The poet comes from Ioannina, a town close to the legendary village Souli, which explains the poet’s choice of this battle.

Representations of the Greek Revolution in Publications  69

70  Maria Kaliambou

32

33

34 35 36 37

38 39 40

41

42

υποδείξεις του Α.Ε.Σ. και των διδασκάλων των Ηνωμένων Πολιτειών. (Δυνάμενον να χρησιμοποιηθή και διά την Ε΄ τάξιν του δημοτικού. Εν συνδιδασκαλία με την Δ΄ τάξιν [The Palaces of My Fatherland. Reader for the fourth grade of elementary school. Approved after competition of the High Board of Education of the Archdiocese in America. Fourth Edition. Developed after the suggestions of the High Board of Education and the teachers of the United States. Possible to be used to the fifth grade in schools in co-teaching with the fourth grade] (New York: D.C. Divry, 1944), 114. The chapter about the Greek Revolution is divided into ten small subsections: (1) The national holiday; (2) The Greek’s neck does not accept any yoke; (3) Benefits; (4) Armatoloi and Klephts; (5) The Secret School; (6) The heroism of Souliotes; (7) The Society of Friends; (8) The Patriarch’s hanging; (9) The massacres of the Christians; (10) The foreign [people] supporting Greece. Fevronia Soumakis, “Greek Orthodox Education: Challenges and Adaptations in New York City Schools,” in Educating Greek Americans. Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Pathways, eds. Fevronia K. Soumakis and Theodore G. Zervas (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 2020), 29 and 30. Soumakis, “Greek Orthodox Education,” 30. John Koliopoulos and Thanos Veremis, Greece. The Modern Sequel. From 1821 to the Present, second impression, corrected (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 157. Helen Papanikolas, “Toil and Rage in a New Land. The Greek Immigrants in Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 38, no. 2 (1970): 187. Venetia Vidali, Νέον Αλφαβητάριον διά τα Ελληνόπουλα «Εθνικού Κήρυκος». Επί τη βάσει των τελευταίων αρίστων παιδαγωγικών συστημάτων. Μέρος Α΄ [The New Alphabet Book for the Greek Children of National Herald. Based on the last best pedagogical systems. Part A] (New York: Ethnikos Kyrix, 1930), 8. Γενικός τιμοκατάλογος του ελληνικού καταστήματος Atlas [General Price Catalogue of the Greek Bookstore Atlas] (New York: Atlas, 1938–1939). Christina Koulouri, Historical Memory in Greece, 1821–1930. Performing the Past in the Present, (New York: Routledge, 2022), 279. Maria Kaliambou, “The First Schoolbooks for Greek American Children,” in Educating Greek Americans. Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Pathways, eds. F. Soumakis and Th. Zervas (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 41–70, and Maria Kaliambou, “Transmitting Heritage through Children Books. The First Greek American Children’s Anthology,” Journal of Modern Hellenism 35 (2023: 110–128). Τhe first Greek American children’s anthology which contains theater skits and dramas is particularly geared toward school ceremonies. Rigas tried to appeal to the wider audiences by publishing a popular broadside with Alexander the Great, which “combined Rigas’s Greek patriotic message with the legendary traditions which cultivated people’s fantasies for centuries” (Paschalis Kitromilides, Ρήγας Βελεστινλής. Θεωρία και Πράξη [Regas Velestinlis. Theory and Action] (Athens: Vouli ton Ellinon, 1998), 53). Mimes Demetriou, Πρώτη Ελληνο-Αμερικανική Παιδική Ανθολογία δια τα Ελληνόπουλα της Αμερικής. Πρωτότυπα έργα με πνεύμα Ελληνο-Αμερικανικόν. Ήτοι: ποιήματα, μονόλογοι, διάλογοι, κωμωδίαι, δραμάτια, ταμπλώ, επιστολαί, άσματα. Διά τας διαφόρους τελετάς των ελληνικών σχολείων της Αμερικής. [The First Greek American Children’s Anthology for Greek Children in America. Original pieces in the Greek American spirit. Namely: poems, monologues, dialogues, comedies, dramas, skits, letters, and songs. For various ceremonies in Greek American schools.] (New York: D. C. Divry, 1935), 6.

Representations of the Greek Revolution in Publications  71

72  Maria Kaliambou Kazazis, Neoklis. “Η Ελληνική Επανάστασις εν Αμερική” [The Greek Revolution in America]. In Ημερολόγιον «Θερμοπυλών» 1904 και Ελληνικός Οδηγός της Αμερικής [1904 Almanac of ‘Thermopyles’ and Greek Guide of America], edited by John Booras, 28–34. Thermopylae: New York, 1904. Kitromilides, Paschalis. Ρήγας Βελεστινλής. Θεωρία και Πράξη [Regas Velestinlis. Theory and Action]. Athens: Vouli ton Ellinon, 1998. Kitromilides, Paschalis. “Introduction.” In The Greek Revolution. A Critical Dictionary, edited by Paschalis Kitromilides and Constantinos Tsoukalas, 1–15. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021. Kitromilides, Paschalis and Constantinos Tsoukalas. The Greek Revolution. A Critical Dictionary. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021. Koliopoulos, S. John and Thanos M. Veremis. Greece. The Modern Sequel. From 1821 to the Present. Second Impression, Corrected. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Koulouri, Christina. Historical Memory in Greece, 1821–1930. Performing the Past in the Present. New York: Routledge, 2022. Laliotou, Ioanna. Transatlantic Subjects. Acts of Migration and Cultures of Transnationalism between Greece and America. Chicago, IL and New York: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. Liakos, Antonis. Πώς το παρελθόν γίνεται ιστορία [How Past Becomes History?]. Athens: Polis, 2007. Mazower, Mark. The Greek Revolution. 1821 and the Making of Modern Greece. New York: Penguin Press, 2021. Papanikolas, Helen. “Toil and Rage in a New Land. The Greek Immigrants in Utah.” Utah Historical Quarterly 38, no. 2 (1970): 100–203. Papastamatiou, Dimitrios. “Military Leaders.” In The Greek Revolution. A Critical Dictionary, edited by Paschalis Kitromilides and Constantinos Tsoukalas, 399–419. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021. Papazoglou, Platon S. Τα πατρικά μου παλάτια. Αναγνωστικόν διά την Δ΄ τάξιν του δημοτικού. Δυνάμενον να χρησιμοποιηθή και διά την Ε΄ εις σχολεία συνδιδασκαλίας ή εις τάξεις μη συμπληρωσάσας τον κύκλον των διαγεγραμμένων μαθημάτων. Εγκριθέν κατόπιν διαγωνισμού του ανωτάτου εκπαιδευτικού συμβουλίου της αρχιεπισκοπής βορείου και νοτίου Αμερικής [The Palaces of My Fatherland. Reader for the fourth grade of the elementary school. Possible to be used to the fifth grade, in schools with co-teaching or in classes who didn’t fulfill the prescribed lesson’ cycle. Approved after competition of the High Board of Education of the Archdiocese of North and South America]. New York: Ethnikos Kyrix, 1934. Santelli, Maureen Connors. The Greek Fire: American Ottoman Relations and Democratic Fervor in the Age of Revolutions. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. Soumakis, Fevronia K. “Greek Orthodox Education: Challenges and Adaptations in New York City Schools.” In Educating Greek Americans. Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Pathways, edited by Fevronia Soumakis and Theodore Zervas, 9–40. Cham: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2020. Valakos, Dimitrios Euaggelou. Τραγούδια της Ξενητειάς [Songs of the Foreign Lands]. New York: D.C. Divry, 1912. Vavoudis, Nikolaos I., Σύντομα δράματα (μετά μουσικής). Σειρά δευτέρα [Short Dramas, with Music. Second Series]. New York: Ethnikos Kyrix, 1937.

Representations of the Greek Revolution in Publications  73 Vavoudis, Nikolaos I. Τα πατρικά μου παλάτια. Αναγνωστικόν διά την Δ’ τάξιν του δημοτικού. Εγκριθέν αρχικώς κατόπιν διαγωνισμού του ανωτάτου εκπαιδευτικού συμβουλίου της αρχιεπισκοπής Αμερικής. Έκδοσις τετάρτη. Βελτιωμένη κατά τας υποδείξεις του Α.Ε.Σ. και των διδασκάλων των Ηνωμένων Πολιτειών. (Δυνάμενον να χρησιμοποιηθή και διά την Ε΄ τάξιν του δημοτικού. Εν συνδιδασκαλία με την Δ΄ τάξιν [The Palaces of My Fatherland. Reader for the fourth grade of elementary school. Approved after competition of the High Board of Education of the Archdiocese in America. Fourth Edition. Developed after the suggestions of the High Board of Education and the teachers of the United States. Possible to be used to the fifth grade in schools in co-teaching with the fourth grade]. New York: D.C. Divry, 1944. Vidali, Venetia. Νέον Αλφαβητάριον διά τα Ελληνόπουλα «Εθνικού Κήρυκος». Επί τη βάσει των τελευταίων αρίστων παιδαγωγικών συστημάτων. Μέρος Α΄ [The New Alphabet Book for the Greek Children of National Herald. Based on the last best pedagogical systems. Part A]. New York: Ethnikos Kyrix, 1930. Zoustis, Vasileios (ed.). Ελληνικαί Μούσαι. Πρωτότυπος συλλογή ποιημάτων των Ελλήνων της Αμερικής. Θρησκευτικά, πατριωτικά, πολεμικά, ηρωικά, ερωτικά. Τόμος Α΄ [Hellenic Muses. Original collection of poems by Greek Americans. Religious, patriotic, militant, heroic, love poems. Band A]. New York: “The Moussai” Publishing Company, 1917.

5

Celebrating the 150 Years of the Greek Revolution in Greek Orthodox Schools in the United States Fevronia Soumakis

Introduction On Sunday, March 28, 1971, Ekaterini Apostolou Michopoulou, a fourth-grade Greek American student of the Greek Orthodox Church of the Holy Trinity Greek School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, delivered a speech she wrote in Greek in celebration of Greek Independence Day. The title of her speech was “The Revolution­1821–1971.” Ekaterini begins by describing the onset of the Revolution, when Bishop Germanos III of Patras raised the flag of independence in the Monastery of Agia Lavra and galvanized Greeks everywhere to fight for their freedom. The last portion of her speech reads as follows: Greece let the world know that the Greek man does not live enslaved, but free. He taught them that Greece was and is the Mother of freedom and Democracy. He taught them that he knows how to die for Faith and Homeland, for glory and honor, for language and Religion. Today we must all offer praise to God because thanks to the spilled blood of our ancestors and with God’s strength, we live as free people and not as slaves. Let us pray for those great men who perished, so that we may live a joyous life. Little Greece fought many great [enemies] until a few years ago, and taught the world that Greece, despite her small stature, desires freedom. She fought Communism, Atheism. All these things make us proud children of our Two Mothers, America and Greece. Let us all come together and proclaim: LONG LIVE AMERICA LONG LIVE GREECE.1 “Commemorative activity,” according to John R. Gillis, “is by definition social and political, for it involves the coordination of individual and group memories, whose results may appear consensual when they are in fact the product of processes of intense contest, struggle, and, in some instances, annihilation.”2 The 50th, 100th, and 150th anniversary celebrations of the Greek Revolution in Greece were “social and political” commemorative events, which amplified nationalism, religiosity, and the notion of uninterrupted historical continuity as DOI: 10.4324/9781003378914-6

Celebrating the 150 Years of the Greek Revolution  75 Gonda Van Steen shows.3 The content of Ekaterini’s speech reflects the convergence of historical narratives and ideologies that the Church and Greek American educators promoted in Greek Orthodox schools in the United States during the 150-year anniversary of Greek independence.4 My analysis draws from archival sources that include school materials produced by the Archdiocese’s Department of Education, school programs and curricula, teachers’ and clerical correspondence, press releases, and newspaper articles. I argue that the Church, while espousing a rhetoric of liberty, freedom, and social justice during the 150th celebration in 1971, was wholly disconnected from those values in its practice. Rather, the Church instrumentalized Greek schools through their 1971 pageants to showcase the influence the Church and clergy had on the 1821 Revolution, to stage a (re)production of a nationalist narrative of Greek history, and to underscore the role of Philhellenes who supported the Greek struggle. In so doing, Greek schools affirmed a Church that was pushing for visibility in the American mainstream at the height of the civil rights movement and during the era of military dictatorship in Greece from 1967 to 1974. Celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Greek Revolution in Greek Orthodox schools in 1971 was a “social and political event”; it was a conservative exercise in nationalistic sentiment aimed at the shaping of Greek American identity. Greek and Greek American educators were part of a fluid network of community representatives that circulated primarily, although not exclusively, through the Greek Orthodox Church in America. In December 1970, Emmanuel Hatziemmanuel, the director of the Department of Education at the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America in New York,5 received a three-page letter from Nikitas Sioris, the Greek Minister of National Education and Religious Affairs under the military dictatorship, requesting that Greek schools collect their Greek Revolution celebration material and photographs and send them to the Greek Ministry. Those materials would be compiled into an album with the title “The Contribution of the Greek Children Living Abroad to the 150 Year Anniversary of the Revolution of 1821.” According to the Greek Minister’s request, the year 1971 was designated as the year to celebrate “Greek Rebirth,” a slogan adopted by the military regime.6 The pastor of Holy Trinity, the Very Reverend George Thomas sent his parish’s material to Hatziemmanuel to be included in this “special Anniversary album.”7 Many educators and clergy, such as the Reverend Thomas, complied with the seemingly benign request originating from the dictatorship’s Ministry of Education. Ekaterini’s speech, the production and compilation of materials at the local parish level, the coordination of the broader school programs under the Archdiocese’s Department of Education, and the interest of the Greek Ministry of Education during this time reflect what was seen as the paramount significance of celebrating the Greek Revolution in Greek Orthodox schools. Alexander Kitroeff argues that “the Greek Orthodox Church in America has shaped Greek American identity by adapting to the steady Americanization of the Greek

76  Fevronia Soumakis Americans.”8 Greek Orthodox schools, as one part of the diverse functions of church communities, served as spaces for shaping Greek American identity in schoolchildren. Their purpose was to instill knowledge of the Greek language, culture, religion, and Greek history, and, in doing so, to reinforce the significance of the church in everyday life. Thus, each year, March 25th was a day devoted to celebrating both the Greek Revolution and the feast of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, as was done in Greece, but this time in the United States, celebrated in a church and school. This yearly reenactment of nationalism and history in Greek school communities, which would have looked similar in years prior and even years after, encountered a set of social and political dynamics in place in 1971 that unmasked its deeply entrenched ideology. The 150th Anniversary Celebration and the Archdiocese In anticipation of the 150-year celebration, Archbishop Iakovos, the leader of the Greek Orthodox Church in the western hemisphere, sent formal announcements to all the Greek Orthodox communities.9 In his announcement of February 20, 1971, he draws attention to the “underlying forces which contributed to the successful outcome of a gallant struggle.” These forces included, first and foremost: “The Contribution of the Church” which “nourished the enslaved Nation with heroic visions—now in the Narthex of the Church; then in school rooms provided by the wealthy…” The other “forces” included “The Conscious of the Nation,” “The Bravery of the People,” and “The Altruism of the Philhellenes.” He raises the notion of “slavery” at least 5 times.10 The Archbishop elaborates upon these ideals in his encyclical from March 25, 1971, the anniversary of the Greek Revolution, in which he focuses on the “dignity of man,” which he said could not be sustained in an era of “Exploitation, discrimination, [and] social injustice.” While the Archbishop clearly places the church at the center, he also incorporates language characteristic of the civil rights movement—the ideals of freedom, self-respect, and equality.11 In fact, it was only six years earlier that the Archbishop had revealed his stance toward the civil rights movement in a most dramatic and public way. He was captured on March 26, 1965, on the cover of LIFE Magazine, as he stood next to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma, Alabama, during a memorial service for the Reverend James Reeb, who was attacked and killed by white segregationists. By accepting King’s invitation to participate in the civil rights march in Selma, Iakovos felt compelled to put into practice his deeply held belief in the “ancient Orthodox teachings on poverty, the person, and the responsibility of the Christian community for social justice.”12 In the statement he delivered during Reeb’s memorial service, Iakovos echoed an earlier Church pronouncement opposing racial inequality and expressing the certainty that the Orthodox faithful were sympathetic with Blacks’ struggles for freedom and justice.13 It has been well documented, however, that the Archbishop did not have the full support of his flock.14

Celebrating the 150 Years of the Greek Revolution  77 The ideals expressed in Iakovos’ communications to the Greek Orthodox faithful could not be reconciled with the use of a slogan and image that gestured to the military dictatorship that governed Greece at the time. The Archdiocese’s Department of Education produced an educational toolkit, which will be discussed in greater detail below, that was sent to all parishes and Greek schools to aid them in their preparations.15 Situated in the upper left-hand corner of the front cover is an image of a bird with extended wings, whose head, slightly tilted upward, faces to its right. Beneath the winged bird is written “150th Anniversary 1821–1971.”16 The same image is featured on the cover of an invitation to the Archdiocese’s public celebration, held at Fordham University Auditorium at Lincoln Center. The subtitle is “150 YEARS OF FREEDOM.”17 The program for the event uses the English “150 YEARS OF FREEDOM,” but is rendered in Greek as “150 YEARS OF REBIRTH.”18 The image of the winged bird closely resembles the mythical phoenix, whose history dates to ancient times and has been co-opted by various groups and institutions to represent their ideologies. The phoenix is a symbol of rebirth and renewal, often depicted emerging from its ashes; in Christianity, the phoenix represents the resurrection of Christ.19 During the Greek revolutionary period, the phoenix was used by various Greek masonic lodges, and in 1828, Ioannis Kapodistrias, the Governor of Greece, minted the first national currency: the phoenix.20 The more infamous use of the phoenix, however, was associated with the colonels’ regime in 1967. Their adoption of the image of a phoenix rising from the ashes foregrounded by a black silhouette of an armed soldier captures the tenuous ideology and nefarious propaganda promulgated by the junta, an ideology which, according to Katerina Lagos, was “vague and undefined.”21 The objectives of their self-styled “revolutionary” coup of April 21, 1967, were to protect the nation from communism and to effect a “National Regeneration,” crystallized in their slogan “Greece of the Christian Greeks.”22 The notion of rebirth served as the crux for the dictators’ ideology and was widespread in their propaganda and self-justification for seizing power in 1967. The theme of liberty, which was closely associated with 1821 and with the call to arms for Greeks (“Liberty or Death”) would not have served the dictators well: their regime was too oppressive. There was neither innovation nor clarity in their rhetoric, but rather a repackaging of “nineteenth-century nationalist ideology… that was based on the linear progress of the Greeks and their role in Western civilization.”23 While the motivation behind the phoenix and slogan on the 1971 Lincoln Center anniversary invitation and program is not entirely evident from the archival records, it appears that Greek language education was instrumentalized to appease Greek-born immigrants and the military regime. The organization of materials and broader planning for the Archdiocese’s celebration was conducted by Hatziemmanuel himself. The individuals who assisted in coordinating the Lincoln Center event consisted of clergy, principals from New York City

78  Fevronia Soumakis parochial schools, and other local community members.24 One year prior at the 1970 Clergy-Laity Congress held in New York City, Iakovos supported the use of English in Sunday sermons at the discretion of the parish priest, no doubt in response to the everyday experience of many Greek Orthodox churches which had a largely American-born and limited Greek language-speaking flock. Despite the realities the church hierarchy acknowledged in other parts of the United States, the vote to use English initiated a series of protests by the local Greek press and Greek-born immigrants; the military regime, too, questioned Iakovos’ commitment to the Greek language.25 Thus, the Archdiocese used the grand setting of Lincoln Center and the 150th celebration to showcase its power, authority, and commitment to Greek language education. Nonetheless, appeasement in this manner implied an endorsement of the Greek regime. It was customary to invite Greek government representatives to participate in events sponsored by the Archdiocese or the broader Greek community. At the Lincoln Center commemoration, Hatziemmanuel introduced the Ambassador of Greece, Basil Vitsaxis, who delivered one of the keynote speeches. Emanuel Kalpadakis, first secretary to the Greek Embassy in Washington, D.C., is captured in a photograph with the Governor of Maryland (the Governor had presented a proclamation to the clergy and parish of the Greek Orthodox Church of Saints Constantine and Helen of Annapolis).26 Universities also welcomed high-ranking officials of the regime. Education Minister Nikitas Sioris, who was hosted by the U.S. State Department, visited Harvard University in late February 1971 as part of his three-week tour of the United States to learn more about the American education system.27 Students and faculty protested Sioris’ visit, which a reporter in The Harvard Crimson characterized as “a gross outrage to the thousands of Greek people who have fought and died for their freedom from the right-wing tyranny.”28 Sioris was criticized for his alleged interest in education when the military regime he served under had overturned democratic education reforms enacted in 1964.29 Anti-junta protests were not widespread, however, and Greek American activists such as Dan Georgakas were taken aback by the lack of mobilization on the part of Greek Americans and Greek American institutions, especially the Archdiocese.30 The fact that the Archdiocese held the 1968 Clergy-Laity Congress in Athens appeared to reinforce what many considered to be the Church’s pro-dictatorship stance. Iakovos did not publicly criticize the military dictatorship, preferring instead “to use his good offices to persuade the Colonels to restore democracy in Greece.”31 He hoped to leverage his political astuteness to effect change behind the scenes. The 150th Anniversary Celebration in Greek Orthodox Schools The Church’s role in promoting freedom and defying the Ottomans was a central theme of the educational toolkit produced by the Department of Education. Titled “150 Years of Freedom 1821–1971,” it was sent to all the Greek Church

Celebrating the 150 Years of the Greek Revolution  79 communities and schools to aid them in their community-wide preparations.32 The toolkit mirrored in its materials the ideas referenced in the Archbishop’s encyclicals. These materials included the Archbishop’s encyclical of February 20, 1971, articles on the Church and the revolution, reflections on the national poets Dionysios Solomos and Andreas Kalvos, and other history essays, poems, skits, and articles. Clergy were encouraged to approach local and state politicians to issue an official proclamation declaring March 25, 1971, a day to celebrate Greek Independence. A draft text for this purpose was included in the toolkit. The church takes center stage as a guardian of Greek learning in a complementary packet of education materials.33 The front cover of this packet features an image titled “The Secret School” in which a group of children directed by an elderly bearded priest are gathered around a candle with an open book. The pages that follow consist of an elaborate skit that brings to life the heroic efforts of the clergy and the impact of the secret schools; the clandestine spaces popularized in national memory where the church allegedly kept Greek language and learning alive throughout the Ottoman period. To drive this point home, children would have recited the following: What does the Church and the Homeland not owe to the secret school’s teacher, the one with the honored robe? Under the light of the candle of some secluded monastery, he was preparing the uprising, the Great Twenty-One. From there emerged the Karaiskakides, the Kolokotronaioi, the Tzavelaioi, the Botsaraioi, the Kanarides, the Miaoulides, and all the best that the Nation could show.34 The theme of a romanticized American past wedded to an equally romanticized revolutionary Greece dominated educational materials produced by the Department of Education, an acknowledgment of the growing Americanization of Greek Americans. English materials focused especially on American support for the Greek Revolution of 1821. In fact, Hatziemmanuel himself compiled excerpts of writings and speeches from prominent Americans such as James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Daniel Webster, each evincing his support for the “struggling Greeks” and their “heroic cause.”35 In his introduction to these excerpts, Hatziemmanuel characterized the relationship between the Americans and Greeks as one of “natural allies.” The Americans themselves had experienced the “ordeal of liberty” to realize “the destiny of which had already ordained it to guide the peoples of the earth in the manner in which the Greeks had done two thousand years before.”36 The idealized thematic emphases in the toolkit—the church and clergy, Greek history, and philhellenism—amplified Greek Americans’ special place in the American imagination. Their economic status placed them firmly within the upper echelons of American society. After all, it was the 150-year anniversary of the Greek Revolution and therefore the time to showcase the best and brightest

80  Fevronia Soumakis contours of Greek history to the United States and to the world. From the public performances of school programs to the public proclamations of Greek Independence Day on city and state levels, a heroic version of Greek history and Orthodoxy prevailed that was disengaged from contemporary issues both in Greece and in the United States, especially regarding those of freedom and social justice. How did the Archbishop’s framework for understanding and celebrating the Greek Revolution and the Department of Education’s toolkit play out in the Greek schools? Dozens of teachers and clergy members from communities throughout the United States, Canada, and Latin America sent enthusiastic letters, well-organized school programs, patriotic essays, and photographs to the Department of Education in response. The same amplification of nationalism, religiosity, and historical continuity dominated this correspondence and the school celebrations. The Reverend Father Vasilios Kapsalis of St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church in Fall River, Massachusetts, sent a letter describing his school’s celebration: students performed patriotic poems, songs, and three skits, including “The Secret School” skit outlined by the Department of Education. Eleni Balli, a teacher at the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Charlotte, North Carolina, wrote that nearly five hundred parents and community members attended their national celebration, which commenced with a parade of the afternoon school students dressed in traditional costumes, holding Greek and American flags, and singing the military marching song “Black is the Night in the Mountains,” in Greek. The Haverhill, Massachusetts school program lists, in Greek, the titles of traditional poems and the name of each student who recited them. The program of Transfiguration of Christ Church in Charlottesville, Virginia, entitled “150 Years of Freedom 1821–1971” was written, by contrast, nearly entirely in English. Other parishes went even further. The Reverend Antonios Moshonas (Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Sioux City, Iowa) submitted several articles published in The Sioux City Journal to the Department of Education. These included a history of their Greek school, an article on the role of their church as an educational and cultural center, and one on their celebration of the Greek Revolution. As part of his correspondence with the Archdiocese, the Reverend added a text from a television program broadcast on a local TV channel in addition to a copy of a proclamation issued by the Sioux City mayor in honor of March 25th. This particular church community leveraged the media—radio, TV, and press—to effectively convey the significance of the 150-year anniversary.37 All in all, school and community-wide celebrations mirrored the messaging and practices of the Archdiocese and the Department of Education. Absent from the 1971 school celebrations were connections to the civil rights movement and social justice in the United States or opposition to the repressive military regime in power in Greece.

Celebrating the 150 Years of the Greek Revolution  81 Conclusion On the 200-year anniversary of the Greek Revolution, it is important to tackle the difficult issues of this history and to challenge our understanding and teaching of national past(s). The collective effort of the Archdiocese and the parish communities to realize their 150-year anniversary programs appears to be a jubilant event, an opportune moment for an ethnoreligious community to represent and define itself in the public sphere. The Archdiocese’s Department of Education designed materials that aimed to shape the identity of Greek American children. The augmentation and elaboration of the content in 1971 were orchestrated with the express purpose of maintaining the status quo. Ekaterini’s essay reflects her Greek school education in the United States within the framework of her parish in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She learned to read and write Greek rather well; she adopted the language of historical continuity; she fused her hybrid identity of two homelands, America and Greece, the new and the old, both embodying the ideals of freedom and democracy. These were ideals, however, which were not fully realized by all citizens in both countries. By continuing to emphasize these themes, Greek schools accommodated only a narrow understanding of freedom. The Department of Education missed an opportunity to recognize the paradox of celebrating 150 years of freedom through education while Greece was ruled by a military dictatorship. The Archdiocese’s inaction instead reflected an accommodationist stance promulgated through their use of those symbols in their materials. This chapter, which looks at the Greek American diaspora through the lens of the Greek schools, draws attention to the persistence of an idealized Americanized Hellenic narrative that places Greek Americans in the upper socioeconomic strata of American society without questioning their ideology of nationalism and its consequences.38 It challenges educators to think more critically about the continued use of nationalistic narratives in Greek schools, to look to the past to inform their work, and to transform the shaping of Greek American identity for the future. Notes

82  Fevronia Soumakis

5

6

7 8 9 10

11 12 13

14

Americans: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Pathways (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). During the academic year 1970–1971, there were 409 Greek schools and 18 parochial schools with a combined enrollment of nearly 25,000 students and 550 teachers in the United States, Canada, and South America. See: 1971 Yearbook of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America, Box E53, Folder 1971, GOARCH. For an in-depth analysis of early twentieth century schoolbooks for Greek American students, see Maria Kaliambou, “The First Schoolbooks for Greek American Children,” in Soumakis and Zervas, Educating Greek Americans, 41–70. Hatziemmanuel was the Director of the Department of Education during the period 1968–1989. See Alexander Kitroeff, The Greek Orthodox Church in America: A Modern History (Ithaca, N and London: Northern Illinois University Press, an Imprint of Cornell University Press, 2020), 152. Nikitas Sioris to Greek Educators of Greek Schools Abroad, 28 December 1970, Box V46, Folder AA, GOARCH. The author wishes to thank Dr. Maria Athanasopoulou of Queens College, CUNY for her assistance in translating this letter. Nikitas Sioris served as the Greek Minister of National Education and Religious Affairs from July 1970 to August 1971. See Othon Anastasakis, “‘Patient in a Cast’: How the Greek Military Regime Traumatized Education,” in The Greek Military Dictatorship: Revisiting a Troubled Past, 1967–1974, eds. Othon Anastasakis and Katerina Lagos (New York: Berghan Books, 2021), 141. Emmanuel Hatziemmanuel to Clergy, Presidents of School Committees, and Educators of Archdiocesan Schools, 14 May 1971, Box V46, Folder AA, GOARCH. Kitroeff, The Greek Orthodox Church, 9. Iakovos served as Archbishop from 1959–1996. For an in-depth analysis, see Kitroeff, The Greek Orthodox Church. Archbishop Iakovos, “Protocol No. 27,” 20 February 1971, Box V46, Folder AA, GOARCH. The idea of “400 years of slavery” refers to the perceived slave-like status of Greek speaking people living under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. The slavery narrative was embedded in Greek school books and history lessons and revisited yearly during March 25th commemorations. Archbishop Iakovos, “Protocol No. 33,” 25 March 1971, Box V46, Folder AA, GOARCH. Albert J. Raboteau, “In the World, Not of the World, For the Sake of the World: Orthodoxy and America Culture,” Orthodoxy in America Lecture Series (Fordham University, New York, April 4, 2006), 5. “Statement by His Eminence Archbishop Iakovos, Primate of the Greek Orthodox Church of North and South America, on the Occasion of the Memorial Service for Reverend James Reed [sic] in Selma, Alabama on Monday, March 16, 1965 [sic],” in The Complete Works of His Eminence Archbishop Iakovos. The Torchbearer Part 1, Volume 2, ed. Demetrios J. Constantelos (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1999), 198–199; See also, Archbishop Iakovos, “Greek Orthodox Statement on Racial Equality,” Constantelos, The Complete Works, 246–247. Athanasios Grammenos offers a detailed account of Archbishop Iakovos’ influence on the civil rights movement and chronicles the events leading to Selma. Athanasios Grammenos, “The African American Civil Rights Movement and Archbishop Iakovos of North and South America,” Journal of Religion and Society, The Kripke Center, 18, (2016): 1–19. See also Kitroeff’s analysis of Iakovos’ rhetoric regarding the civil rights movement in his push for the Church tο “engage with the burning issues of the day in the United States.” Kitroeff, The Greek Orthodox Church, 124–127.

Celebrating the 150 Years of the Greek Revolution  83

84  Fevronia Soumakis

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38

militaristic school culture. See Anastasakis, “Patient in a Cast” and Theodore G. Zervas, “Greek School Textbooks at a Political Crossroads: (Re)Defining the Greek Citizen in the Greek School during the Reign of Colonels (1967–1974),” American Educational History Journal 43, no. 2 (2016): 117–127. Kitroeff, “Uneasy Alliances,” 224–225. Ibid., 229. “150 Years of Freedom 1821–1971,” Box V46, Folder AA, GOARCH. “Department of Education Celebration Materials for the School Program of the 25th of March,” Box V46, Folder AA, GOARCH. Ibid. Orthodox Observer, March 1971, No. 612, 10–13, Box V46, Folder AA, GOARCH. Ibid. See correspondence and school programs in Box V46, Folder AA, GOARCH. The Bishop of Chicago communicated his diocese’s planning directly to the Archbishop. He met with the Consul General of Greece, Athanasios Petropoulos, in addition to Chicago clergy and presidents of parish councils, members of the Episcopal Council and the governor of AHEPA (American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association). Anna Karpathakis and Victor Roudometof, “Changing Racial Conceptualizations: Greek Americans in New York City,” in Race and Ethnicity in New York City, Research in Urban Sociology, Volume 7, eds. Jerome Krase and Ray Hutchison (Amsterdam: Elsevier Press, 2004), 265–289.

Bibliography Archives of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America (GOARCH), New York, NY. Anastasakis, Othon. “‘Patient in a Cast’: How the Greek Military Regime Traumatized Education.” In The Greek Military Dictatorship: Revisiting a Troubled Past, 1967– 1974, edited by Othon Anastasakis and Katerina Lagos, 140–163. New York: Berghan Books, 2021. Bodnar, John. Remaking America Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Constantelos, Demetrios J. (ed.). The Complete Works of His Eminence Archbishop Iakovos: The Torchbearer Part 1, Volume 2. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1999. Gillis, John R. “Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship.” In Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, edited by John R. Gillis, 3–24. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Grammenos, Athanasios. “The African American Civil Rights Movement and Archbishop Iakovos of North and South America.” Journal of Religion and Society, The Kripke Center, 18, (2016): 1–19. Kaliambou, Maria. “The First Schoolbooks for Greek American Children.” In Educating Greek Americans: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Pathways, edited by Fevronia K. Soumakis and Theodore G. Zervas, 41–70. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Kaloudis, George. Modern Greece and the Diaspora Greeks in the United States. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018.

Celebrating the 150 Years of the Greek Revolution  85 Karpathakis, Anna and Victor Roudometof. “Changing Racial Conceptualizations: Greek Americans in New York City.” In Race and Ethnicity in New York City, Research in Urban Sociology, Volume 7, edited by Jerome Krase and Ray Hutchison, 265–289. Amsterdam: Elsevier Press, 2004. Kazhdan, Alexander P. “Phoenix.” In The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium Volume 3, edited by Alexander P. Kazhdan, 1665. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Kitroeff, Alexander. “Greek America’s Liturgical Language Crisis of 1970.” Ergon Greek/American Arts and Letters, 2019. https://ergon.scienzine.com/article/articles/ liturgical-language-crisis-of-1970. Kitroeff, Alexander. The Greek Orthodox Church in America: A Modern History. Ithaca, NY and London: Northern Illinois University Press, an Imprint of Cornell University Press, 2020. Kitroeff, Alexander. “Uneasy Alliances: Archbishop Iakovos and the Greek Colonels’ Dictatorship.” In The Greek Military Dictatorship: Revisiting a Troubled Past, 1967– 1974, edited by Othon Anastasakis and Katerina Lagos, 215–239. New York: Berghan Books, 2021. Kostis, Kostas. “The Economics of the Revolution.” In The Greek Revolution: A Critical Dictionary, edited by Paschalis M. Kitromilides and Constantinos Tsoukalas, 453–466, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021. Lagos, Katerina. “The Political and Ideological Origins of the Ethnosotirios Epanastasis.” In The Greek Military Dictatorship: Revisiting a Troubled Past, 1967–1974, edited by Othon Anastasakis and Katerina Lagos, 34–69. New York: Berghan Books, 2021. Landau, M. David. “Greek Minister to Visit Harvard Tomorrow.” Harvard Crimson, February 23, 1971. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1971/2/23/greek-minister-tovisit-harvard-tomorrow/. Raboteau, Albert J. “In the World, Not of the World, For the Sake of the World: Orthodoxy and America Culture.” Orthodoxy in America Lecture Series, Fordham University, New York, April 4, 2006. Ryan, Michael. “Freedom Sioris.” Harvard Crimson, February 27, 1971. https://www. thecrimson.com/article/1971/2/27/freedom-sioris-brbri-the-mountains-look/. Soumakis, Fevronia K. and Theodore G. Zervas (eds.). Educating Greek Americans: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Pathways. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Van Steen, Gonda. “Anniversaries.” In The Greek Revolution: A Critical Dictionary, edited by Paschalis M. Kitromilides and Constantinos Tsoukalas, 694–707. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021. Zervas, Theodore G. “Greek School Textbooks at a Political Crossroads: (Re)Defining the Greek Citizen in the Greek School during the Reign of Colonels (1967–1974).” American Educational History Journal 43, no. 2 (2016): 117–127.

6

Recontextualizing the Bicentenary in Greek America and Beyond Greek Civic Identities in the Diaspora Yiorgos Anagnostou

The nation is an institution that defines itself in relation to three dimensions of social time simultaneously. At any historical moment, it (a) orients itself toward the past––it remembers or debates the representation of historical events, figures, and values; (b) imagines itself in the future––it projects goals and visions for its (re)fashioning; and (c) enacts these processes in connection to those issues and questions that are deemed important in the present. Being an integral component of nation-making, national commemorations represent paradigmatic expressions of this temporal logic. They ritually mark a time for nations to grapple with and reflect on an honored past and posit possibilities for an immediate or distant future, all from the perspective of the present. When commemorative practices engage with that past––addressing the question of “who we were”–– they also raise the questions of “who we are now” and “who we want to be in the future.” Commemorations and anniversaries bring the past, the present, and the future into conversation—albeit an often contentious one.1 The bicentenary of the Greek Revolution against the Ottoman Empire is not an exception in the emphasis commemorations place in imagining a nation’s future. Its official narrative explicitly recognizes the commemoration as the occasion to reflect on the direction of the nation. In her inaugural speech, Gianna Angelopoulos, the President of the “Greece 2021” Committee, frames the bicentenary as a moment “to determine not just where we are, but also where we want to go.”2 It is this high-stakes issue of linking the bicentenary with the future direction of Greek identity that motivates this writing. I am thinking here broadly about the future of Greek civic identity in relation to vulnerable “non-Greek” people, both in Greece and the various Greek diasporas. Greece’s future unfolds in the context of a rapidly changing ethnic demographic environment where national belonging presents an urgent issue about the civic and cultural position of people such as immigrants and their children. The future of identity within the Greek diasporas is also of political importance and not just in relation to Greek cultural reproduction. As heterogeneous democracies are confronted with social DOI: 10.4324/9781003378914-7

Recontextualizing the Bicentenary in Greek America and Beyond  87 movements demanding equal inclusion or group-specific rights for historically disenfranchised groups, it is of interest to investigate the position of Greek diaspora institutions and people vis-à-vis these other non-Greek groups and their claims. Is there support, tensions, or conflict? What specific form does each relation take? This chapter explores how a corpus of bicentenary narratives––three in all–– engage with the issue of Greek civic identity in the context of two diasporas–– Greek America and Greek Australia. The scholars who independently produced this corpus share a common interest: they link the bicentenary of the Greek Revolution with the diaspora’s historical encounters with populations subjected to slavery and colonialism. Built on power relations of institutional racism and whiteness, these structures of oppression undergirded hierarchies of immigrant, ethnic, and racialized identities in the past that reverberate in the present. The authors I discuss show why populations such as Indigenous and Black people in the United States, or the First Nations of Australia, play a significant role in how scholars and communities narrate diaspora histories and imagine the future of Greek identities. Their investigation engages with the ethics and politics of civic belonging, and their writings share the view (and vision) of Greek diaspora civic identity as an agent for advocating nonhierarchical belonging in a polity. This advocacy is vital to the working of a rigorous democracy. As Will Kymlicka writes, “the health and stability of a modern democracy depends, not only on the justice of its basic institutions, but also in the quality and attitudes of its citizens; … their desire … to promote the public good.”3 Τhe civic importance of identity leads the authors linking the bicentenary of the revolution with civic diaspora identity to investigate interethnic encounters in the past and identify how this history inflects the making of identity in the present. If white supremacy sets various groups in opposition to and conflict with each other to safeguard its power, it is important to recollect the archive along interethnic lines to illuminate the mechanisms by which ethnic hierarchies are produced, and privileges are endowed to some groups at the expense of others, pitting groups against each other.4 The goal is to reframe past relations of antagonisms into relations of solidarity today, “a politics of identity, a politics of position,”5 which also centers the Greek bicentenary narratives I discuss here. My analysis probes the insights of these narratives, identifies their interconnections, and reflects on the questions they raise. The aim is to identify how this bicentenary discourse contributes to a genealogy of Greek civic identity in the context of multifaceted interethnic encounters, including those between U.S. political elites and Indigenous populations. The genealogical reading, following Michel Foucault,6 recognizes the ways in which these accounts render visible gaps and silences in diaspora historiography. It interrogates linear and essentialized assumptions in cultural narratives and helps us identify historical discontinuities and disjunctures. It names the political and cultural effects of power regimes––colonialism, racism, philhellenism––on differential national

88  Yiorgos Anagnostou belonging. The narratives I explore recontextualize diaspora as a history of encounters and relations with stigmatized others and via this lens initiate a civicminded historiography of Greek identity in the diaspora. The Bicentenary and Civic Identity in Greek America My first set of examples is two recent pieces of writing that connect the history of the Greek Revolution with histories of colonialism and institutional racism in the nineteenth-century United States. They are Artemis Leontis’s essay “Visiting the Statue of Ypsilanti in Michigan on Martin Luther King Jr. Day”7 and Thomas Gallant’s webinar “From Orphan to Abolitionist: Photius Fisk and the Making of Greek America.”8 The context for both is Greek American initiatives honoring the struggles of African Americans for racial justice. “Visiting the Statue of Ypsilanti” was part of a tribute to civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., and “From Orphan to Abolitionist” was an event in honor of Black History Month. Both scholars connect their subject matter, in varying degrees, to the Greek Revolution. Leontis centers her reflection on the history of Woodruff’s Grove, an American settlement in Michigan, which was renamed Ypsilanti in 1825 thanks to an initiative led by a local American philhellene. Demetrius Ypsilantis (1793–1832) was a prominent figure in the Greek Revolution, and today, his statue in the town serves as a gathering place for Greek Americans in their annual commemoration of Greece’s Independence. Leontis’s work brings the Indigenous Americans who originally inhabited the region into the conversation. She shows that a local philhellene was also an agent of regional colonialism who participated and capitalized on the dispossession of Indigenous people. This perspective recognizes that philhellenism in that region––but also nationally–– cannot be divorced from colonial land politics as well as ideologies and practices associated with ethnic and religious hierarchies. Some philhellenes then were investing resources in support of a Christian people’s claim to a territory in southeastern Europe while extracting land resources from other people in the United States, denying those peoples’ ancestral right to territory. The philhellenic advocacy for liberty requires further examination in the context of reigning cultural hierarchies at the time.9 It is instructive to consider this history in relation to the present: a site that stages the annual honoring of the Greek Revolution and the value of liberty by local Greek Americans is historically implicated with colonial settler capitalism and the oppression of Native peoples. This is to say that a place of celebratory ethnic commemoration for one people is also a site where historical injustices have been inflicted on others. What do Greek Americans celebrate, then, when they exalt philhellenism in their annual pilgrimage to Ypsilanti? The question is ethical and political. Should the celebrating ethnic group recognize and respect the Indigenous Americans’ plight––which led to a historical disenfranchisement in the colonial context outlined above, and which is still affecting these people

Recontextualizing the Bicentenary in Greek America and Beyond  89 today? If so, what form does this recognition ought to take? Who should decide? The bicentenary is thus recontextualized within a framework that renders reflection about civic responsibility as integral to the event. Leontis’s critical inquiry introduces an element that appears to be outside the scope of much of the bicentenary discourse. Her investigation provides the rationale for taking notice and turning an invisible element in the narrative––the Indigenous population––into a presence we need to reckon with so that we refrain from unreflective celebrations of philhellenism. The site honoring Yspilanti is connected with histories of material and ideological interests whose actual practice resulted in profound and uneven consequences for many populations––the Greek revolutionaries, the Indigenous Americans, and the philhellenes. When the essay invites us to record and analyze those aspects of this unexamined history, identify the contradictions of discourses such as philhellenism, and account for the social and political effects of the implicated power regimes, it animates a genealogical reading of U.S. Greek history and identity. My second U.S. example is a webinar by social historian Tom Gallant, who discusses the role of a prominent nineteenth-century Greek American public figure, Photius Fisk (circa 1806–1890), in the emergence of a nascent Greek American civic identity. Born Photius Kavasalis Fisk in the island of Hydra to a Greek Orthodox family, Fisk grew up in Smyrna (1808–1815) and resettled in Malta after both of his parents succumbed to the plague that devastated the region in 1814. Eventually, he was sponsored in 1822 by American missionaries, arrived on the east coast of the United States in 1823, and subsequently attended a series of academic institutions, including Amherst College (1825–1827) and the Auburn Theological Seminary (1831–1839). His sponsoring was part of a broader American Protestant project for which “the Greek Revolution opened up a historic opportunity for the American missionaries to recruit and educate religious followers” in a nominally Christian country whose religious practices the American missionaries disdained and desired to transform.10 Fisk is remembered in the United States for his legendary activism on behalf of the Abolitionist and Suffragist movements and his campaign to end flogging in the U.S. Navy––where he served as a Chaplain––and for his unwavering commitment to the struggle against poverty. The fact that his life became the subject of a biography, published in 1891, reflects his high standing in American culture and politics at the time.11 Fisk is featured as a major figure in the broader context of the bicentenary, specifically in the discourse linking U.S. philhellenism with the Greek Revolution. In Greek and Greek American popular narratives, Fisk is frequently classified within the ideological category “war orphans” who were sponsored during the Revolution by American philhellenes, including missionaries. They became U.S. citizens, and their American education enabled them to become such accomplished professionals as educators, lawyers, and politicians, many marrying the daughters of their sponsors.

90  Yiorgos Anagnostou Fisk’s dual Greek and American affiliations, coupled with his civic prominence, qualify him––along with other socially distinguished boy “war orphans”––as an early exemplar of a developing Greek American identity. In fact, he is celebrated as a foundational precursor of the civic and cultural ideals of the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (AHEPA), an organization founded in 1922 at the height of American nativism targeting immigrants from southeastern Europe.12 Although the Greek Revolution is not the focus of Gallant’s investigation into Fisk’s life, it inevitably enters the narrative. The historian locates the emergence of Greek America in the “intellectual cohort” of “assimilated” Greek “war orphans”––which included Fisk, John Zachos (educator), Christophorus Plato Castanis (academic and author), and Lucas Miltiadis Miller (lawyer, politician, Congressman) who all espoused American ideals of liberalism, democracy, and humanitarianism––values which American thought attributed to classical Greece. Gallant’s ongoing research––still at an early stage, as he notes––begins to chart the conditions leading to the emergence of a proto-Greek American identity, which represents just one version of multiple beginnings.13 These new processes of identity-making take place in the mid-nineteenth century, prior to the first wave of mass migration from Greece to the United States (circa 1880s–1924). Notably, the identity charted by Gallant was one which enjoyed legitimacy in the eyes of the dominant society. The prominence of these early Greeks authorized their classification as a “living link” connecting classical Greece, U.S. modern Greeks––Fisk was portrayed as “a worthy specimen of his race”––and American identity.14 My reading of Gallant’s “From Orphan to Abolitionist” identifies at least three insights into a genealogy of U.S. Greek civic activism in solidarity with disenfranchised people. First, his tracing of Fisk’s geographical, professional, intellectual, and political journeys disrupts those narratives that portray the cultural and religious identities of the war orphans as linear and constant.15 Instead, Gallant’s reading enhances our understanding of the Greek diaspora and transnational identity as a multifaceted process of cultural and civic becoming. In Gallant’s telling, Fisk represents a “transnational or cosmopolitan” Greek American subject who navigates between two worlds. He is enmeshed in U.S. progressive political activism and practices philanthropy both in the United States and Greece, from which, as Gallant stresses, he never severs his ties. His example underlines the power of social encounters with others, and their resulting negotiations, in the making of a civic subject in the diaspora amidst multiple commitments and shifting allegiances. Fisk, as Gallant sees him, directly counters the view of diaspora as an aggregate of static national and religious subjects. Indeed, Gallant’s historicization of Fisk identifies a series of dramatic selftransformations: from a Greek Orthodox to a Congregationalist, from a Reverend to a free thinker, and from a newcomer––often ridiculed and subjected to racist taunts––in New England to an ardent Abolitionist and Civil Rights

Recontextualizing the Bicentenary in Greek America and Beyond  91 advocate. Furthermore, Gallant’s historical inquiry includes a fact that is consistently absent from bicentenary narratives about Fisk. After being expelled from Amherst College, Fisk returned to Greece and joined the revolutionary Greek navy in 1827. But he quickly went AWOL and returned to the United States.16 It was during his return voyage, while stranded on the island of Martinique, that he first witnessed chattel plantation slavery, a formative experience that shaped his commitment to abolitionism. His political passion shifted from a commitment to the cause of Greek national liberation to advocacy for U.S. progressive civic ideals. His priorities, therefore, do not necessarily privilege the historical homeland, but selectively incorporate it—demonstrated by his continued philanthropy in Greece. Civic identity centers his Greek American life, making Fisk an important figure in a genealogy of Greek America’s identity in the context of interethnic encounters. My genealogical reading––and this is the second insight that I extract from Gallant’s talk––turns attention to an often neglected or even silenced element in Greek America’s political discourse. In each historical era, the making of a Greek civic identity takes place within an ideologically heterogenous and conflictual civic debate on the question of what counts as public good. To cite a historical example from the early twentieth century, segments of the Greek immigrant working class saw their participation in the labor movement as a practice promoting the promises of U.S. democracy. But their participation in this oft-demonized movement was seen by Greek immigrant business owners and the emerging elites as a threat to their socioeconomic aspiration for middle-class respectability. Civic positioning, then, is always advocacy for a particular public good—benefitting a particular group—within a contested political field. It inevitably generates allies as well as adversaries and thus always carries both risk and reward. The less powerful one’s allies, the greater one’s risks. A diaspora enters the ideological field of its new home with concerns about its self-protection, well-being, dignity, class-specific interests, agency for intervention, and often a desire for recognition and social distinction. A web of power relations mediates its agency and the civic positions that it advocates. It’s important to place this politics in the context of the formation of a nascent, nineteenth-century Greek American civic identity. This politics occurred within a terrain crisscrossed with (a) ethnic hierarchies in the context of whiteness; (b) ideological oppositions and struggles (abolitionism vs the institution of slavery and their respective ideological and material interests); (c) dominant religious discourses (the orientalism of missionary philhellenism; justification of slavery on the basis of Christian principles); (d) discourses assessing the cultural worth of the modern Greeks (the discourse of Greek continuity and philhellenism); and (e) capitalism, economic interests, and the institution of slavery. The making of U.S. Greek identities within this field obviously involved complex negotiations, contestations, and consent to certain ideologies along with opposition to others.

92  Yiorgos Anagnostou In my view, Fisk’s importance to a genealogy of Greek civic agency––but also his importance to the envisioning of a future Greek identity––lies precisely in illuminating the essential step of taking an explicit civic position and identifying the stakes in this positioning, including the personal and social risks involved. As a vocal abolitionist and advocate for outlawing flogging in the navy, Fisk faced animosity within his immediate professional and social environment, resulting in his experience of “not only social isolation but insults and abuse.”17 Radical transformation of his beliefs was familiar to Fisk. His frustration regarding southern American protestants citing the Bible to justify their support of slavery led him to a “monumental transition,” in the words of Gallant: his abolitionism led him to question his commitment to Christianity, alienating his social circles and suspending him from work as a Navy chaplain. Fisk’s legacy for the future of civic Greek America thus lies precisely as a paradigm for an unwavering commitment to an explicit civic ideology within a nexus of risks and rewards. This brings me to a related third insight regarding a genealogy of diaspora identity. Because genealogy recognizes the social effects of power relations on the making of identities at any historical moment, it counters linear views of history and identity. It will be erroneous therefore to trace––and celebrate––Greek American civic identity across an uninterrupted, gradual continuum, say from Fisk to early twentieth-century Greek immigrants extending support to Black Americans, to Archbishop Iakovos marching in support of Black civil rights, to Archbishop Elpidophoros marching in support of Black Lives Matter. Instead, the analytical task is to identify silences, ruptures, discontinuities, and contradictions by historicizing these interethnic relations as we chart their effects on identity today.18 The Civic Example of Greek Australia—Connections with Greek America Both Gallant and Leontis work toward re/collecting diaspora social memory–– life histories, the making of monuments, the history of places, the silences in the archive, the making of institutional and personal identity––in relation to political processes such as colonialism, the institution of slavery, U.S. philhellenism, as well as civic struggles for social justice. In doing so, they recontextualize the historiography of the diaspora beyond singular ethnicity and ethnonational attributes to an approach that engages with interethnic encounters, gaps in historical narratives, the making of identity as negotiation with regimes of power, and the civic responsibilities of the diaspora in relation to stigmatized others. This Greek American call for recontextualizing diaspora identity in the bicentenary also finds expression in Greek Australia in a position paper entitled “Bicentennial Celebration[s] of Nation[s], Revisited,” by historian Andonis Piperoglou.19 Its intervention situates the 2021 Greek Australian bicentenary in relation to two unrelated historical contexts: the successful Greek Revolution

Recontextualizing the Bicentenary in Greek America and Beyond  93 against an empire and the subjugation of Australian Aborigines by a colonial power. What the Greek people and the Indigenous Australians share in this context is the collective memory of being second-class imperial and colonial subjects, respectively. A difference between the two is that the latter continues to be subjected to the legacies of white settler colonialism. Piperoglou draws from the 1988 bicentennial of Australia to underline that the nation’s celebration displayed insensitivity for the plight of Indigenous people during British colonial rule. On that occasion, Indigenous activists protested not only the oppressive and dehumanizing exercise of colonial power upon Indigenous populations but also the disrespect of that plight by the bicentennial. A people’s celebration failed to account for another people’s mourning around the same event. In contrast, the Australian governing authorities respected the 2021 Greek bicentenary by celebrating the Greeks as a model white ethnic group in the country, and in doing so reproduced racial hierarchies, the author notes. The official narrative did not attend to how colonial histories benefited the European immigrants at the expense of Indigenous people. This differential treatment takes us to the heart of civic engagement: what is the ethical and political responsibility of a post-imperial, relatively privileged diaspora group toward fellow stigmatized citizens still caught within the hierarchies of settler colonialism? An answer is to recontextualize the bicentenary beyond the question of national remembering: [As] the founding of Modern Greece is celebrated in settler colonial Australia, it is important to consider how diasporic nationalism chooses to present the history of the homeland. It is equally important to ponder the potentiality of history-making when diaspora and boundary crossing are reassessed, and Indigenous sovereignties recognized.20 The Greek Australians’ historical remembering ought to consider, Piperoglou pleads, not only the Greek national past but also the history of Greek Australians in the context of colonialism. The bicentenary offers an opportunity to recognize and make sense of how the immigrants-cum-settlers benefitted by participating in the colonial dispossession of Native lands, and how this history enters contemporary contestations regarding Indigenous claims to sovereignty on lands where Greek communities, among others, are well established. This call is a component of Piperoglou’s scholarly work on the historical impact of white settler colonialism, the acquisition of property, and the racialization of Greek immigrants as “white” in contemporary Greek Australia.21 His work inquires how it is that people celebrating their autonomy in the past can simultaneously reflect on their relationship to people striving for equal recognition and sovereignty in the present. In this respect, the Greek Australian and Greek American bicentenary examples resonate around the question I identified earlier: how to commemorate

94  Yiorgos Anagnostou an event significant for a people in places associated with the continuing subjugation of another people? Civic Identities in Greek Diaspora Institutions In a programmatic 2019 statement about the scope of the upcoming bicentennial commemoration, the editor of the popular Greek American platform The Pappas Post envisioned events in the diaspora “that will go far beyond the kitsch and nationalistic and have far reaching impact not only on Greek schoolchildren in Astoria and Melbourne, but also non-Greek Americans, Canadians, Australians and others throughout the world.” In this case, popular media acknowledges the links between the making of identity in the bicentenary and the impact of this construction on international audiences.22 Decisively placing themselves at the antipodes of nationalism, the civic narratives by Leontis, Gallant, and Piperoglou indeed engage a multitude of “nonGreek,” English-speaking audiences globally. The positions of the first two are enunciated in events honoring Black Americans and circulate widely in a variety of open access journals and platforms such as YouTube. Notably, the civic identity narratives I discuss contribute to a broader, internationally minded initiative that links the “bicentennial of the Greek Revolution … with contemporary world revolts and renewed struggles against the colonial legacies of white supremacy, nationalisms and racial capitalism.”23 It aligns with the project of the “active reshaping of ‘Hellas’ through emergent, emancipatory and creative forms of belonging” in conversation with scholars, journalists, and activists across the world. Notably, their authors also situate their research, directly or indirectly, in connection with their respective “ethnic communities.” Leontis sees her writing as a means “to constructively contribute to [her] community’s efforts toward social justice,” placing herself as a Greek American, civic-minded scholar. Gallant participates in a conversation of major interest to sectors of secular and ethnoreligious Greek America, namely, the historical and contemporary relations between African Americans and Greek Americans.24 Last but not least, Piperoglou presented his ideas at the 39th Greek Festival in Australia, in the event “1821 and the Greek Diaspora in Australia,” in a panel where “young, professional Greek-Australians” discussed their ideas about the personal and collective significance of the Revolution and its bicentenary.25 The interest in the diaspora’s civic engagement is not confined to scholars. It circulates across community organizations that also position Greek identity in relation to “non-Greek” fellow citizens. In the United States, this concern is evident in both secular and religious institutions. In 2013 in Baltimore, Maryland, the Hellenic Student Association of John Hopkins University collaborated with the Black Student Union to bring Greek American and African American politicians and civic figure together for the purpose of affirming and formalizing a

Recontextualizing the Bicentenary in Greek America and Beyond  95 civic bond between the two peoples. And in 2017 in Brooklyn, New York, State Senator Andrew Gounardes’s calls for a new legacy of the Greek American community in the twenty-first century were premised on the community’s collective support of refugees. On the ethnoreligious front, in 2020 the U.S. Greek Orthodox Archdiocese officially endorsed the Black Lives Matter movement and advocated for a vision of racial equality in the country. In 2021, on the occasion of Juneteenth––the annual commemoration of the emancipation of African American slaves––Archbishop Elpidophoros underlined in a tweet the importance of remembering racial injustices in the nation and working toward “forging a new future.” In Greek Australia, Melbourne’s Greek Community acknowledges the historical connections between Greek settlers and the Aborigines, including intermarriage, while committing itself to Aboriginal rights. In the words of the community’s vice president, “the Greek Community of Melbourne [GCM] recognizes the Aborigines as the true custodians of Australia whose struggles against discrimination still have a long way to go.”26 In 2021, the community unanimously voted for the Aboriginal flag to fly alongside the Australian flag and the Greek flag at GCM’s center. These developments connect Greek identity to the histories of other people and the power relations that have been mediating interethnic encounters. The historiographical emphasis on interethnic encounters recognizes that the settlement of the Greek diasporas in new territories has not been the neutral outcome of migratory movements but has taken place within broader processes entailing the violent displacement and devaluation of others engendered by colonial and racist powers. Even so, European immigrant groups have benefitted from structural inequalities––wittingly or unwittingly––via complex re-racialization processes that now endow Greek Americans and Greek Australians the privileges of model ethnicities. The interests of this discourse posit this historical consciousness and awareness of present inequalities as a necessary feature for the future of Greek identities across continents. Conclusion The bicentenary narratives I have foregrounded in this work participate in a political phenomenon––the question of national belonging––which affects the lives of a vast number of people. They imaginatively and constructively challenge canonical and sometimes exhausted historical narratives to advocate inclusive and equitable modes of national belonging. In doing so, they reframe the scope of the commemoration from a singular nation-centric celebration to a deliberation about the Greek people’s ethical and political responsibilities associated with civic belonging in their new lands. An occasion to recontextualize the past, the bicentenary serves as a fertile ground for reflective historical consciousness that has its eyes on the future. The question of Greek identity is raised

96  Yiorgos Anagnostou in civic and ethical terms: who the Greeks are as a people is intimately interwoven with how they position themselves in relation to structures of inequality in their home countries. This narrative recognizes the role of power-laden processes in the production of racialized hierarchies of belonging and requests a consideration of these histories in the fashioning of Greek identity everywhere. Its attention to the material and ideological interests embedded in these processes moves the conversation beyond idealized ideologies of liberty and freedom, inviting analysis of the contradictions and ethnocentrism of discourses such as philhellenism. It raises, therefore, new questions regarding the scope and range of Greek America’s historiography and its role in envisioning the future of diaspora identity in official and unofficial narratives. Neither commemorations nor identities are neutral cultural fields. In selectively constructing the value of the past for the purposes of fashioning vested versions of identity in the future, they inevitably involve ideological struggles. Significantly, despite its importance for shaping multiethnic polities, the diaspora discourse on civic identity is sidelined within the discursive field of the bicentenary. As Lyn Spillman notes, anniversaries take place within discursive fields that “establish ‘limits of discussion’ and define ‘the range of problems which can be addressed.’ They delineate the meaningful and valuable from a large range of potential meanings and values available.”27 And because this field of meaning-making operates within relations of power, certain “meaningful and valuable” renderings will be privileged while others are marginalized or excluded. A genealogical mapping of the diaspora bicentenary discourse is necessary to identify the prevailing commemorative modes, the interests each serves, and the power relations that promote certain narratives while displacing others. More broadly for transnational modern Greek studies, the project of investigating Greek civic identity raises prospects for comparative projects and academic collaborations across national contexts and the diasporas. It invites scholarship that situates Greece and the diaspora in larger conversations with postcolonial, citizenship, and whiteness studies and the historiography of other peoples. Unfortunately, diaspora scholarship regarding questions of civic identity in these contexts is at an embryonic state. The challenges of this project for scholars are vast. One major task is to disentangle the various narratives within each diaspora’s civic terrain. Institutional expressions of solidarity or alliance of disenfranchised people do not constitute an ideologically uniform field.28 They are refracted through incompatible political projects such as liberalism, on the one hand, and radical economic and political restructuring, on the other hand.29 This is to say that there are different modes of civic identities. The genealogical question, therefore, is to investigate what modes of Greek civic identities are embraced, by whom, and the implications of their respective positioning at any one historical moment. This includes probing the question of intersections between Greek civic and cultural identities.30

Recontextualizing the Bicentenary in Greek America and Beyond  97 At the ethnographic level, it is not at all clear how various diaspora demographics understand civic identity and the question of racial justice. This applies to those who support, in principle, Indigenous Americans or Black Americans. What is the extent of their civic vision regarding the place of these populations in the polity and the question of redressing historical injustices? Or, put differently, how could “white ethnic” empathy for Indigenous people along with a firm commitment to national integration, on the one hand, be reconciled with demands by Indigenous peoples for cultural and territorial rights or even autonomy, on the other hand? This is a fertile terrain for diaspora ethnographies about the interrelationships among diasporas, multiethnicity, and political belonging. The challenge, therefore, is to concretely explore civic identity in relation to various ideologies of public good––including racial justice––and identify how major diaspora institutions engage with policies of civic responsibility.31 An additional labor, I believe, is finding a common language to facilitate communication across the academy, activists, and communities. The broad dissemination of ideas fashioning a Greek civic identity, which will hopefully empower the agency of Greek diasporas as well as Greek people in Greece toward inclusive civic belonging, could serve as the bicentenary’s legacy in shaping the meaning of Greek identity in the twenty-first century. Notes

98  Yiorgos Anagnostou

Recontextualizing the Bicentenary in Greek America and Beyond  99

100  Yiorgos Anagnostou Christopoulos, Dimitris. “Giannis Antetokounmpo and 200 Years of Greek Revolution.” OpenDemocracy, 8 March 2021. Accessed March 8, 2021. https://www. opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/giannis-antetokounmpo-and-200-yearsgreek-revolution/?utm_source=fb&fbclid=IwAR1ySq8UKo9Cu3ocAe5hmiUxVADR_ D-cjVETKD-mFq7EzIRiCE6lQ8TZaGE. Decolonize Hellas. “Our Thinking.” Accessed July 5, 2021. https://decolonizehellas.org/ en/out-thinking/. Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, translated by Donald F. Bouchard & Sherry Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Frangos, Steve. “Revisiting the Legend of the Forty Orphans of the Greek Revolution.” The National Herald 13, no. 633 (November 26, 2009): 8. Gallant, Thomas W. “From Orphan to Abolitionist: Photius Fisk and the Making of Greek America.” UCLA SNF Hellenic Center, Webinar, 20 July 2021. Accessed July 20, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEWxFwojPQM. “Gianna Angelopoulos Calls on the Diaspora to Join in Bicentenary Celebrations for Greece 2021.” Neos Kosmos, 8 November 2019. Accessed November 15, 2019. https://neoskosmos.com/en/150767/gianna-angels-calls-on-the-diaspora-to-join-inbicentenary-celebrations-for-greece-2021/. “Greek Australian and Aboriginal Ties Strengthen,” The Greek Observer, 13 November 2017. Accessed June 15, 2021. https://thegreekobserver.com/blog/2017/11/13/ greek-australian-aboriginal-ties-strengthen/. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, 222–237. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. Hodge, Lyman F. Photius Fisk: A Biography. Boston, MA, 1891. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. “Thinking about an Anti-confederate Whiteness in the 21st Century.” Erγon: Greek/American Arts and Letters, 31 October 2022. Accessed October 31, 2022. https://ergon.scienzine.com/article/essays/anti-confederate-whitenessin-the-21st-century. Jusdanis, Gregory. The Necessary Nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Kymlicka, Will. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Lalaki, Despina. “American Liberalism and Greek America in the Times of Black Lives Matter.” Erγon: Greek American and Diaspora Arts and Letters, 31 October 2022. Accessed October 31, 2022. https://ergon.scienzine.com/article/essays/ american-liberalism-and-greek-america. Leontis, Artemis. “Visiting the Statue of Ypsilanti in Michigan on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.” Erγon: Greek/American Arts and Letters, 18 January 2021. Accessed June 2, 2021. https://ergon.scienzine.com/article/essays/visiting-the-statue-of-ypsilanti-in-michigan. Mourtoupalas, Connie. “Greek Εvangelical Μissionary Τurns Αbolitionist.” ekathimerini.com, 5 May 2020. Accessed May 5, 2020. https://www.ekathimerini.com/society/ diaspora/252314/greek-evangelical-missionary-turns-abolitionist/. Pappas, Gregory. “The Diaspora Created 1821… The Diaspora Must Be Part of 2021.” The Pappas Post, 14 October 2019. Accessed October 28, 2019. https://pappaspost. com/greek-diaspora-bicentennial/.

Recontextualizing the Bicentenary in Greek America and Beyond  101 Photius Kavasalis Fisk. Ahepa History. Accessed January 5, 2021. https://ahepahistory. org/biographies/Photius-Kavasalis-Fisk-1807-1890.html#. Piperoglou, Andonis. “Bicentennial Celebration[s] of Nation[s], Revisited.” Decolonize Hellas, 31 March 2021. Accessed March 31, 2021. https://decolonizehellas.org/en/ bicentennial-celebrations-of-nations-revisited/. Piperoglou, Andonis. “Migrant-cum-Settler: Greek Settler Colonialism in Australia.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 38, no. 2 (October 2020): 447–471. Poulopoulos, Nikos. “Διατλαντικά Εμπορικά Δίκτυα και το Παλίμψηστο της Ελληνικής Μετανάστευσης στην Αμερική του 19ου Αιώνα”, Πολιτιστικός Σύλλογος Παλαίχθων Κορίνθου [Transatlantic Commercial Networks and the Palimpsest of Greek Migration in America during the 19th Century. Cultural Association Palaichthon of Corinth 16 May 2021]. Accessed June 5, 2021. https://ekorinthos.gr/palaichthon-korinthou-npoulopoulos-diatlantika-eborika-diktya-stin-ameriki-tou-19ou-aiona/. Prashad, Vijay. “Foreword: ‘Bandung Is Done’––Passages in AfroAsian Epistemology.” In AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics, edited by Heike RaphaelHernandez & Shannon Steen, xi–xxiii. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Spillman, Lyn. Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Turner, Charles. “Nation and Commemoration.” In The SAGE Handbook of Nations and Nationalism, edited by Gerard Delanty & Krishan Kumar, 205–213. London: SAGE Publications, 2006. Van Steen, Gonda. “The United States as a Haven for Greek Revolutionary War Orphans? Myth and Reality.” In New Perspectives on the Greek War of Independence 200 Years: Myths, Realities, Legacies and Reflections, edited by Yianni Cartledge & Andrekos Varnava, 155–179. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.

Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. abolition 43–46, 44; of slavery 46 Adams, John Quincy 79 Adler, Dankmar 46 African Americans: liberation of 43; for racial justice 88; relations between Greek Americans and 94; slaves 15, 95 AHEPA see American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (AHEPA) AHEPA Bulletin 10, 11 AHEPA Magazine 11–13 Ali Pasha 35n28 Allen, John M. 15 American architecture 47; Greek Revival movement 4; “the brown decades” of 39 American Constitution 40 American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (AHEPA) 8, 15–16, 24, 84n37, 90, 98n18; commemorations of 1821 8; connections with Greece 10; dual commemoration of the bicentennial 16; history of immigration and ethnicity 9; interwar period (1920s–1930s) 10–12; 1940s and 1950s 12; revival of ethnicity (1960s–1980s) 13–14 Americanism 10 Americanization 3, 11, 12, 79; of Greek immigrants 8–10 American philhellenes 8–16, 88, 89

American philhellenic movement 8–9 American philhellenism 13, 58 Anagnostou, Yiorgos 5, 45 Anastasiades, Nicos 15 Angelopoulos, Gianna 86 anti-dictatorship organizations 31 anti-Greek riots (1918) 20, 22 anti-junta movement 30, 78 Antiquities of Athens (Stuart and Revett) 42, 43 Archdiocese 76–78, 81 architecture: Greek Revival style of 38, 45, 46; see also American architecture; church architecture Atlantis 58 Barber, John 33 Bavarian King Otto I of Greece 50 bicentenary: in Greek America 88–92; of Greek Revolution 86 Biddle, Nicholas 44 Black Americans 92, 94, 97 Black Lives Matter movement 95 bookstores 64–66, 66 brigand pageantry 48–51, 50 Byron, Lord 25, 60, 67 Byzantine art and architecture 41 Byzantine–Romanesque–Gothic style 46 Byzantine style painting 41 Byzantium 39, 41 Calatrava, Santiago 51 Canada: cultural landscape in 21; economic and cultural capital of

104 Index 20; Greek immigrants to 28; Irish population in 25; newspapers 4, 20; perceptions of Greeks and Greece in 20 Canada Greek War Relief Fund 20–21 Canadianism 20, 24 “Captain Zervas/Zervos” 15 Catholic Church 39 Catsonis, Achilles 10–11 “The Cause of the Greeks” 41 Chicago World’s Fair 47, 47–49 Christianity 77, 92 church architecture, historical studies of 53n4 City Beautiful Movement 47–48 civic identities: in Greek America 88–92; in Greek diaspora institutions 94–95 civil rights movement 45, 51, 75, 76, 80, 82n14 civil war 48; in Greece 12 classical architecture 38 Cold War 12, 16, 21 Colombian Exposition of Chicago 47, 47 commemoration events 35n28; chronological narrative of Greek Revolution 20; at City Hall Cenotaph 27–28, 28; in interwar period 22–25; mainstream newspapers reported 22; since 1940s 25–33, 27–30 commemorative activity 74 Constantine Palaiologos 59, 68n8 Darlakos, Antonios G. 58 Diakos, Athanasios 3, 63, 67, 69n26 diaspora organizations, in United States 13 diasporas 9; Greek American community as 9–10; politics of commemoration in 21 dictatorship period (1967–1974) 21 Dillingham Commission 54n21 Dimitriou, Dimitris 66–67 Dukakis, Michael 14 Eberharter, Herman P. 12 “The 1821 Greek War of Independence and America’s Contribution to the Greek Cause” (Leber) 13 Ekaterini Apostolou Michopoulou 74, 75, 81

Elliott, Maude Howe 11 Elpidophoros (Archbishop) 92, 95 Enlightenment 38, 43, 67 ethnic commemoration, study of 21 ethnic groups 9, 10, 88, 93 ethnicity: of European immigrants 13; revival and legitimation of 16 Ethnikos Kyrix 8, 12, 17n, 18, 19, 65, 69n25, 70n37, 72, 73 European ethnic groups 10 European immigrants 93, 95; ethnicity of 13 Fisk, Photius 89–92, 98n18 Floras, D. L. 26 fragmentation 40 Frangos, Steve 98n15 “From Orphan to Abolitionist” (Gallant) 90 Gage, Nicholas 10 Gallant, Thomas 88–92, 98n15; “From Orphan to Abolitionist” 90 GAPA see Greek American Progressive Association (GAPA) Gekas, Sakis 4 genealogy, of Greek civic agency 87, 90–92 Georgakas, Dan 78 Germanos III of Patras (Bishop) 74 Gillis, John R. 74 Gilroy, Thomas Francis 2 “Gioul Mosque” poem 68n6 The Globe and Mail 20, 30 Gounardes, Andrew 95 Grammenos, Athanasios 82n14 “the Great Idea” concept 60 Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) 1, 11, 24, 46, 49 Greece: AHEPA excursion to 11; civil war in 12; demographic distribution of 55n31; folkloric representations of 20; Greek American relations with 14; heroic resistance to Mussolini’s invasion 46; involvement in World War II 12; resurrection, poetic verses on 59–61 Greek America/Greek Americans 1, 8, 10, 40, 87; bicentenary and civic identity in 88–92; churches 38, 41, 52; community 9–11, 53;

Index  105 emergence of 90; Greek Australia connections with 92–94; lives and historical awareness of 67; stylistic freedom in 41 Greek American Book Culture 58–59 Greek American identity 9, 90; evolution of 15; shaping of 75–76, 81; transformation of 8 Greek American Progressive Association (GAPA) 12 Greek Australia 87; civic example, connections with Greek America 92–94; Melbourne’s Greek Community 95 Greek Canadians 21 Greek civic identity 86, 87, 91, 96, 97 Greek Civil War (1946–1949) 21, 26 Greek Committees 9 Greek communal pride, depictions of 20 Greek community: and church building 23; commemoration events (1821) visibility for 22; of Philadelphia 45; in Toronto 25, 31 Greek diaspora institutions 87; civic identities in 94–95 Greek diasporas 25, 97; architecture of 46; future of identity within 86; settlement of 95; understanding of 90; in United States 1–3, 2 Greek dictatorship (1967–1974) 29–30 Greek Easter Festival 23 Greek immigrants 22, 38, 58, 59; Americanization of 8–10; to Canada 28; Protestant denomination to 42; of twentieth century 45; in United States 27, 39, 40, 46 Greek Independence Day 12, 13, 22, 32, 33, 74, 80 Greekness: folklorization of 23; integration to Canadian urban culture 22; public display and manifestation of 21 Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America 40 Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America 13 Greek Orthodox Church 38, 74–76, 78, 80, 81n4 Greek Orthodox Church of America 41, 51 Greek Orthodox Easter 10

Greek Orthodox Schools: Greek Revolution in 75; 150th Anniversary Celebration in 78–80; in United States 74 “Greek Rebirth” 75 Greek Revival 38–39, 43–45, 48; against of 51–53, 52; architecture 38, 45, 46; in churches 42; Greek American adaptation of 39 Greek Revolution 6n9, 46; and abolition 43–46, 44; bicentenary against Ottoman Empire 86; bicentennial of 10, 14–15; celebrations for centennial of 5n3; centennial anniversary of 58; commemoration events, chronological narrative of 20; in Greek American Book Culture 58–59; by Greeks in United States 2–3; in Lexington Theater 1, 2; standard account of 8; in United States 1–3, 2 I would add here the item “commemoration events” (see above) The Greek Slave (Powers) 43, 44, 46 Greek-Turkish war (1919–1922) 1 Greek War of Independence 15 Grigorios, Patriarch 67 Hadji Abeet 49 Hagia Sophia 40, 51, 52 Hatziemmanuel, Emmanuel 75, 77–79, 82n5, 82n7 Haviland, John 41, 42 “Hellenic Cultural Commission” 15 Hellenic Heritage Month Act 33 Hellenism 10 “The Hero of Alamana” (Vavoudis) 63 Hill, Frances 45 Hill, John 45 “History of the Greek Revolution” 68n1 Hitler, Adolf 31 Holy Cross Seminary, in Brookline 51–52, 52 Horiates, George 14–15 Howe, Samuel Gridley 11, 14, 15, 45 Iakovos (Archbishop) 45, 51, 52, 76–78, 82n9, 82n10, 82n14 “The Idea of Greece” 33 Indigenous Americans 88, 89, 97 Industrial Revolution 39

106 Index interwar period, commemorating 1821 Revolution in 22–25 “Ion Dragoumis” Association 25 Italian Renaissance, humanism of 38 Jackson, Andrew 44 Janetis, Helias 62; “Martyrs and Avengers. A Patriotic Drama in Four Acts” 61; “The Society of Friends” 61, 62, 63, 67, 69n23 Jarvis, George 15 Jefferson, Thomas 43 Jenney, William Le Baron 48 Kaliambou, Maria 4 Kalvos, Andreas 79 Kapodistrias, Ioannis 45, 77 Kapsalis, Vasilios 80 Kazazis, Neoklis 58 King, Martin Luther 45 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 76, 88 Kitroeff, Alexander 3–4, 75 Kleon, Helen 26 Kontoglou, Photis 41 Koulouri, Christina 65 Kourelis, Kostis 4, 55n31 Kymlicka, Will 87 Ladies’ Benevolent Association 23 Lagos, Katerina 77 Latas, Dionysius 49, 50 Latrobe, Benjamin 42, 44 Leber, George: “The 1821 Greek War of Independence and America’s Contribution to the Greek Cause” 13 Leontis, Artemis 88, 89, 92 Lexington Theater, Greek Revolution in 1, 2 Liakos, Antonis 71n45 Liaskas, N. K. 60–61 LIFE Magazine 76 Manly, John 33 “The marching song of Souliotes” 60–61 “March 25” poem 59 Martin, N.L. 24 “Martyrs and Avengers. A Patriotic Drama in Four Acts” (Janetis) 61 Mazower, Mark 63 Melbourne’s Greek Community 95 Meletios (Bishop of Athens) 1, 5n2

Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Karl 68n1 Mills, Robert 42 Mitsotakis, Kyriakos 15 Moffat, Frederick M. 25, 26 Monroe, James 9, 79 Monthly Illustrated National Herald 1, 2, 58 Montreal 20; Greek immigrants community in 22; Greeks in 23; 2001 Revolution anniversary in 32 Morgan, Raphael 45 Moshonas, Antonios 80 Mumford, Lewis 39 national identity 39; Greek 4; Romaic 21 national images in schoolbooks 63–67, 65, 66 “National Regeneration” 77 Neo-Byzantine architectural identity 51 Neo-Byzantine style 51, 52; singularity of 41 Neoclassicism 41 newspapers 58; Canada 4, 20; commemoration events 22 150th Anniversary Celebration: and Archdiocese 76–78; in Greek Orthodox Schools 78–80 Orthodox Church of Greece 40 Ottoman Empire 39, 43, 86 “The Palaces of My Fatherland” (Papazoglou) 63–64 Palaion Patron Germanos (Bishop) 13, 67 Palmer, Peter 26 Pangalo, George 49 Papandreou, Andreas 31 Papanikolas, Helen 61, 64 Papazoglou, Plato: “The Palaces of My Fatherland” 63–64 Parliament of the World’s Religions 49–50 Patriarchy of Constantinople 50 Pettegrew, David 55n31 Phiambolis, Panagiotis 49 Phillips, Nathan 29 Piperoglou, Andonis 92, 93 plays, anthologies of 61, 62, 63 pluralism 39–42, 42 political diasporas 9 Powers, Hiram: The Greek Slave 43, 44, 46

Index  107 Protestant Orange Order parades 25 proto-Greek American identity 90 Putnam, Frederic Ward 50 Ralli, Argyro 61, 62 Reeb, James 76 Revett, Nicholas: Antiquities of Athens 42, 43 Revolutionary War (1821) 46 Richardson, H. H. 46 Richardsonian Romanesque 46 Rigas Feraios 31, 63–67, 70n41 Saint George Greek Orthodox Cathedral of Philadelphia 41, 42 Sakellaropoulou, Katerina 15 Salamis, Nicholas 25 schoolbooks, national images in 63–67, 65, 66 “The Secret School” 79, 80 “secret school” myth 64, 67 Sephardic Jews 39 Serge, Joe 31 Sioris, Nikitas 75, 78, 82n6, 83n29 The Sioux City Journal 80 Smith, Joseph Allan 43 “The Society of Friends” (Janetis) 61, 62, 63, 67, 69n23 Solomos, Dionysios 79 “Songs of the Foreign Lands” 59 Soumakis, Fevronia 4–5, 64 Spillman, Lyn 96 Stanois, Peter 31 St. Euthymiou 61, 62 Strickland, William 42, 44 Stuart, James: Antiquities of Athens 42, 43 stylistic freedom, in Greek American 41 stylistic pluralism 39, 40 Sullivan, Louis 46 Supreme Convention in Athens 14, 15 “Taste of the Danforth” 31–32 Thermopylai 58 Thomas, George 75 Thompson, Ariadne 55n25 Thompson, W. Stuart 51 “Topika Somateia” 12 Toronto 20; anti-Greek riots (1918) in 20, 22; folklorization of Greekness in 23; Greek community in 25, 31;

history of commemoration 22; public events and ethnic identities in 21; second generation of Greeks in 31 Toronto-based Hellenic Heritage Foundation initiative 33 Toronto Canadian Hispanic Day Parade 21 Toronto Star 20, 23–26, 31, 32 Toronto Telegram 20 Trudeau, Justin 32 Trudeau, Pierre 31 Tyler, Tracey 32 Union Jack Canadian flag 26–27, 27 United States: Americanization of Greek immigrants in 8; diaspora organizations in 13; first wave of mass migration to 38; Greek immigrants in 27, 39, 40, 46; Greek Orthodox schools in 75; Greek Revolution and Greek Diaspora in 1–3, 2; history of Greece and Greek immigration to 13; history of immigration and ethnicity in 9 Valakos, Demetrius 59 Van Steen, Gonda 75 Vavoudis, Nikolaos 64; “The Hero of Alamana” 63 Vidali, Venetia 64, 65 Vitsaxis, Basil 78 Vlassis, George 25 Vlasto, Solon J. 2 Vrioni, Omer 69n26 Walter, Thomas U. 42 Webster, Daniel 79 the White City 46–48, 47 Williams, James 15 Wilson (President) 23 “women of Pindos” 26 world religions 48–51, 50 World War II (WWII) 12, 46; Greek population until 20; Greek Revolution after 14 Wright, Frank Lloyd 46, 52 Ypsilantis, Demetrius 88, 89 Zoustes, Vasileios 60