According to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s translation of the declaration, based upon Alexandros Mavrocordatos’s rendition of it in French and published in London’s Morning Chronicle the following month, Ypsilantis stressed the connection between the ancient Greek ‘ancestors’ and their modern ‘descendants’ living in ‘European Turkey’, as an inspiration for rebellion: Two centuries ago, on 7th March 1821, Prince Alexandros Ypsilantis, a major-general in the Russian army and leader of the secret diasporic Friendly Society centred in Odessa, issued a declaration calling for a ‘simultaneous insurrection throughout Greece’ (Robinson 1980: 53–4) and the liberation of his fellow Greeks. This year marks the 200th anniversary of the start of the Greek Revolution, known by non-Greeks as its ‘War of Independence’. Reviewing the scholarship on both Western and Greek Hellenism over the past four decades, our article considers the relationship between classical reception, revolution and the act of commemoration and reveals the hybridity of Hellas in 18. The bicentenary celebrations of 2021 have highlighted the complex, competing claims for the authority to give the dominant account of the founding of modern Greece. How the revolution and post-revolutionary Greece have been interpreted has shifted over the past 40 years, reflecting changes in both critical theory and also in the geopolitical circumstances in the Eastern Mediterranean and globally. These complicated ideas influenced the ways both Greeks and non-Greeks thought about the nation, its political character, language, literature, history, culture and landscape. The Greek Revolution of 1821–1829 mobilized the ideas of classical reception and Philhellenism developed over the previous century to appeal for international support for the war.
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