Modern "greeks" pre-1821 did not think Byzantine Empire was 'greek'

[TrueMacedonian]

[TrueMacedonian]

The myths just seem to unravel themselves after a while. Modern "greeks" this is becoming effortless. You might as well use Risto Stefovs name "ArvanoVlachia" as your nations name.

[Pelister]

This is why some writers refer to it as "the Macedonian Christian Empire" because the language of Christianity in Ottoman Europe was for the most part in Macedonian, not Greek.

It kinda makes sense.

[TrueMacedonian]

I just like how Terra returns to this forum after a 2 day goodbye and has pretty much avoided everything on this section of the forum. The truth ultimately does hurt I guess.

[osiris]

tm sorry batska i must protest i was using arvanovlachia quite a few years ago. but thats not enough these days, wannabbees is a better ethnic description.

[Daskalot]

TM, TerraNova is an ultra apologist.....

[TrueMacedonian]

tm sorry batska i must protest i was using arvanovlachia quite a few years ago. but thats not enough these days, wannabbees is a better ethnic description.

That's true you were using it for a while. I remember the anger that alot of the pseudo "greeks" would spew at you when you referred to them as either Neo-Hellenes or ArvanitoVlachs And they said you had no basis for such names,,,yet here we are reading about their Albanian, Vlach, and Slav heros in their war for independence

[TrueMacedonian]

TM, TerraNova is an ultra apologist.....

Terrable Nova fears the Truth!

[TrueMacedonian]

It appears that Paparrigopolous didn't think the 'Byzantine Empire' was a very Hellene empire either.

[indigen]

On topic and very revealing on how "Byzantines" (up to 1821) perceived themselves is the following:


CYRIL MANGO

BYZANTIUM: THE EMPIRE OF NEW ROME

PULISHEED BY WEIDENFELD AND NICOLSON
ISBN 0-297-793779-9
Copyright Cyril Mango 1980.

CHAPTER 10

THE PAST OF MANKIND

[...]

The interest of the annus mundi for our purpose is that it reflected the entire conception of the human past that was held by Christians in the Late Antique and Byzantine periods, a conception that was both 'historical' and symbolic and also had to take account of certain astronomical factors. This system was enshrined in a type of book known as the `universal chronicle' or, as the Byzantines usually called it, the `chronicle from Adam'. When the average Byzantine wished to inform himself on the course of past history, it was to this type of book that he turned. As a result, the universal chronicle enjoyed a wide circulation, and since it was meant for the ordinary reader, it was couched in simple language. As time went on, chronicles were supplemented with an account of recent events. They were treated, in fact, not as literary works, but as handbooks or almanacs that called for periodic revision. This circumstance has caused much difficulty to scholars desirous of identifying the successive layers of such compilations. Here, however, we are concerned not with particular problems of attribution, but with the genre as a whole and the ideas it contains.

The first impression that Byzantine chronicles produce on the reader is one of naïveté, but the triviality of much of their content should not blind us to the extreme complexity of their conceptual framework. They are, in fact, the product of along evolution and of much scholarly endeavour, and we must pause briefly to examine their ancestry. The story they tell is not that of one nation, but of the whole world as it was then known. The principal strand of that story is provided by the Bible, but several other threads -Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman have been intertwined with it. The synchronization of these separate histories required an overall chronological framework. More importantly, the chronicles set out to explain the working of divine Providence and, since God acts in an orderly fashion, history, too, must express not only His moral purpose, but also the symmetry of His design. By what process, then, was this vast panorama built up?

[.....]

The foregoing, somewhat arid, discussion was necessary to explain the chronological skeleton of the Byzantine view of history. The main structure of the universal chronicle was erected in the third century, perfected by Eusebius at the beginning of the fourth and further systematized ,in the fifth by the Alexandrians Panodorus and Annianus. The work of these pioneers has come down to us only in fragments. The earliest preserved Byzantine chronicle, that by the Antiochene John Malalas, dates from the sixth century, and is followed by the Paschal Chronicle in the seventh, George Syncellus and Theophanes at the beginning of the ninth, George the Monk towards the middle of the ninth, the several versions of Symeon Logothete in the tenth and so forth. The tradition of the universal chronicle was continued even after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks and supplied the historical reading matter of the Greek people until the revolution of 1821.

[...]

[indigen]

On topic and very revealing on how "Byzantines" (up to 1821) perceived themselves is the following:


CYRIL MANGO

BYZANTIUM: THE EMPIRE OF NEW ROME

PULISHEED BY WEIDENFELD AND NICOLSON
ISBN 0-297-793779-9
Copyright Cyril Mango 1980.

CHAPTER 10

THE PAST OF MANKIND

In broad outline the content of the world chronicle was the following. The account of the antediluvian age raised no particular difficulties since it was based on the Bible and Old Testament apocrypha. We may note, however, that this long period (2,362 years according to some reckonings) was marked by a process of nomenclature and practical invention, even if much of this knowledge was later lost as a result of the Flood. Adam gave names to all the animals; Cain invented the measurements of the earth, while Lamech’s three sons discovered, respectively, cattle-breeding, musical instruments and the forging of brass and iron. The greatest sage of that remote period was, however, Seth, who devised the Hebrew alphabet, discovered the succession of years, months and weeks, and gave names to the stars and to the five planets. The names he bestowed on the planets (the sun and the moon having already received theirs from God) were, curiously enough, Kronos, Zeus, Ares, Aphrodite and Hermes, so it was not the planets that were named after the pagan gods, but the gods (who were really men) that were named, much later, after the planets.

Seth, who had been divinely forewarned of the Flood, was thoughtful enough to write down the names of the stars on a stone slab which survived the catastrophe and enabled Canaan to compile an astronomy.

It also seems that certain Chaldaean letters were contrived before the Flood by the so-called Wakeful Ones, the same as the mysterious sons of God who married the daughters of men in Genesis 6. 2, and that these letters were used to express some magical lore. They were later discovered by Salah who became versed in this dangerous knowledge and passed it on to others.

The Flood, which destroyed all humanity except for Noah and his family, played an important part in establishing a relative chronology of Jewish and gentile history. Among the various national traditions current in Late Antiquity, only the Assyrian (or so it was thought) mentioned a universal deluge. The Flood of Deucalion of Greek mythology was considered to have been local rather than universal; as for the Egyptians, they had never heard of a flood at all. It followed from this that only the Assyrians or Chaldaeans had a history stretching further back than the Flood. According to their records there had been ten antediluvian kings, the last of them, Xisuthrus, being saved from the Flood. It followed that Xisuthrus was the same as Noah and that Chaldaean and Jewish histories were one. As for the Egyptians, who had no recollection of a flood, yet claimed a history stretching back nearly thirty thousand years, one could only conclude that they did not know how to count. Evidently, Egyptian history began after the Flood, and their first ruler was Mizraim, Noah’s grandson.

The division of the earth among Noah’s sons (of which we have already spoken) and the subsequent multiplication of the tongues provided the natural starting points for the history of various gentile peoples.

Now one of Ham’s descendants was Nimrod, the mighty hunter, who ruled something called the land of Shinar (Genesis 10. 10), evidently in Assyria or Persia, even though that part of the world appears to have been assigned to Shem. The Bible neglects to say that Nimrod also invented magic and astrology which he taught to the Persians, and that when he died he was deified and became a star in the sky, the same as Orion. Nimrod, therefore, was some sort of a giant, and it was not unnatural that he should have been succeeded by another giant named Kronos, the son of a certain Ouranos and Aphrodite.

This Kronos subdued all of Syria and Persia and became the first ruler of men. He married Semiramis (whom the Assyrians called Rhea) and had two sons, Ninos and Zeus (also called Picos) and one daughter, Hera, whom Zeus married. To make matters worse, when Kronos died, he was succeeded by Ninos who married his own mother Semiramis, and so this foul custom of incest became implanted among the Persians. In spite of their sins, the progeny of Kronos were now launched on their historic course. Ninos, appropriately enough, built Nineveh. After him reigned a certain Thouras who was renamed Ares and was worshipped by the Assyrians under the Persian [sic] name of Baal. As for Picos Zeus, he somehow became King of Italy, a part of the world that had at that time neither cities nor government, being simply inhabited by the tribe of Japheth. This Zeus was an amorous fellow and begat a numerous progeny by his concubines. His successor, Faunus (renamed Hermes), had to contend with the plots of his seventy-odd half-brothers and, at length, fled to Egypt where he was received with great honour because he had brought with him a large quantity of gold and was also able to foretell the future. Eventually, Hermes became King of Egypt. He was succeeded by the lame Hephaistos who came to be remembered for two achievements: first, he introduced a law requiring the women of Egypt to practise monogamy and, second, he received, thanks to a mystical prayer, a pair of tongs from heaven and this enabled him to forge weapons of iron: for previously men had fought with clubs and stones.

We may note in passing that while certain characteristics of the Olympian gods are still dimly discernible in this farrago of nonsense, their Greek origin has been forgotten. The progeny of Kronos is represented as either Assyrian or Persian; Zeus ruled in Italy, while Hermes and Hephaistos are associated with Egypt.

The pagan gods and their descendants were thus inserted into the period of some five centuries that stretched from the construction of the Tower of Babel to Abraham, a period concerning which the Bible has nearly nothing to say save for a bare genealogy (Genesis I I).

This was the time of the `old idolatry’, invented by one Seruch of the tribe of Japheth, and it lasted down to Terah, Abraham’s father, who was a sculptor. Idolatry (hellênismos) derived from the custom of setting up statues of prominent men, became popular in Egypt, Babylonia and Phrygia and then spread to Greece, where it received its name after one Hellen, a son of Picos Zeus.

[...]

[Bill77]

“Science Monthly” - edited by J. McKeen Cattell,
Published in 1915

Pages 41 and 42

“Most of the old Greek race has been swept away, and the country is now inhabited by persons of Slavonic descent. Indeed there is a strong ground for the statement that there was more of the heroic blood of Hellas in the Turkish army of Edhem Pasha than in the soldiers of King George.”

Page 42

“The Modern Greek has been called a ‘Byzantine Slav.’ King George himself and Constantine his son are only aliens placed on the Grecian throne to suit the convenience of outer powers, being in fact descendants of tribes which to the ancient Greeks were merely Barbarians.”