From Exclusion to Inclusion: The Religious «Other» in Greece of the 1820s and 1830s

Resumen

As with other nineteenth‐century successor states in the Balkans, from its inception Greek polity was grounded on the principle of nation‐building and the homogenisation of the realm. In a generic sense, homogenisation comprised a series of interconnected processes aiming at reconfiguring political and civil authority along national lines in the name of the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ and the genos. Unsurprisingly, in the early days of the 1820s War of Independence, the exclusion of the religious «other» from the polity and society that the warring factions of the rebels envisaged went handin‐hand with the victimisation and discrimination of the indigenous Muslim and Jewish element and an innate suspicion and mistrust of the adherents of the Western Church.