This article investigates the ideological instrumentalisation of astronomy within twentieth-century Greece, centring on the work of Dimitrios Kotsakis (1909-1986) and, secondarily, Stavros Plakidis (1893-1991). The study demonstrates how Greek astronomers functioned as active agents, reframing scientific practice to serve specific apologetic and political agendas. By recontextualising pre-existing antimaterialist discourses, these figures perpetuated an ideological struggle against materialism and socialism that long predated the geopolitical Cold War, but which contributed to it. Ultimately, the article argues that Kotsakis and his milieu successfully synthesised disparate intellectual fields - scientific, religious and political-to wage what was essentially a Cold War anticommunist crusade, yet one deeply rooted in a distinctively Greek context.
The interweaving of anticommunist/totalitarian patterns of thought in Greece with those formulated in other Western countries invites a crossnational pursuit without a comparative evaluation. Anticommunism was linked to nationalism during the Greek Civil War, while antitotalitarianism created an ethical and political space for those opposed to totalitarianism and the communist regimes. It also formulated a semasiological field around notions such as freedom of speech, the captive mind, intellectual enslavement, anticommunist martyrs and the antithesis between truth and ideology/fanaticism.
This article reviews the perception of atheism by Orthodox Christian circles in Greece from the early 1930s to 1974, as reflected mainly in texts published in various Orthodox periodicals. It focuses on their conceptualisation of "atheism" and how it was influenced by factors such as Christian education and apologetics, political motives, ethics and cultural beliefs. It shows that their perspective on atheism, which focused primarily on it as materialism and its facets, moved beyond its theological interpretation as a form of "apostasy" from God, shaping the portrayal of the relationship between science and religion within the Greek context.
This article investigates the fiscal mechanisms of the Greek state during the Greek Revolution, with a particular focus on taxation and the institutional formation of the public finances between 1822 and 1829. Drawing on underexplored fiscal documents - such as tax registers and auction records - it examines how the Provisional Administration sought to establish a centralised revenue system through the abolition of Ottoman personal taxes, the introduction of tithe-based taxation and the leasing of public revenues. The analysis highlights both continuities with Ottoman fiscal practices and significant innovations aimed at legitimising and consolidating state authority under revolutionary conditions.
This article explores the intersection of science, atheism and gender in Greek history from the interwar period to the period of the METanoXiTEuar), or democratic transition (1936-1974). Engaging with science studies, gender studies and masculinity studies, it addresses the methodological and historiographical challenges of analysing gender in the absence of women from primary historical archives. By developing an interdisciplinary epistemological framework, the article explores how masculinity and gender power relations shaped and were shaped by the interactions between science, atheism and Orthodox Christianity. The study is divided into two sections: the first outlines the theoretical and methodological foundations, while the second applies this framework to the Greek journal Hpwronpo iota (1930-1931), offering new insights into the gendered dimensions of scientific and religious discourses. This analysis contributes to a deeper understanding of the sociopolitical and epistemological structures that influenced the development of science in modern Greece.
This Special Section, based on the workshop "Communism, Anticommunism and the Sciences in Greece" (2023), examines the intellectual history of communism and anticommunism in twentieth-century Greece through the lenses of the natural sciences and history. During the Cold War, the natural sciences acquired not only military and industrial significance but also cultural prestige, functioning as markers of moral and political superiority in the global confrontation between liberal democracy and communism. Yet the ways in which Greek communist and anticommunist discourses appropriated science have remained largely understudied. History, by contrast, became a discipline of central national importance and a key site of ideological struggle. From the 1920s onward, Marxist historiography challenged dominant national narratives, but after the Civil War it was excluded from state institutions, while recent history was mobilised for anticommunist purposes. The contributions gathered here analyse how science and history operated as crucial arenas of ideological contestation, cultural mobilisation and the articulation of both national and global Cold War frameworks.
This article challenges the dominant perception of the 2015 refugee crisis in Greece as an unprecedented event by contextualising it within the country's broader history of migration. Through a comparative analysis of two key episodes, the mass arrival of Albanian migrants in the 1990s and the post-2015 refugee presence, it demonstrates the continuities in state responses, public discourse and integration policies. Drawing on legal, historical and sociopolitical perspectives, the study reveals how narratives of temporariness and "nonintegrability" have been consistently applied to newcomers, regardless of their background. While Albanian migrants were once vilified and later viewed as "successfully integrated", today's refugees are framed as transient and incompatible. The article critiques the failure of both national and EU policies to develop sustainable integration strategies, highlighting instead a shift towards exclusion and containment. It argues for the need to historicise mobility to understand contemporary migration beyond emergency framings.
During the interwar period, public intellectuals and politicians engaged in debates within the public sphere, attempting to define and address the urgent issues of their time. The writings of Nikos Karvounis offer a particularly telling case study of the Greek interwar context, one that is deeply intertwined with the events that transformed Greek society. His confrontation with Fotos Politis in the columns of the Pi rho omega iota alpha newspaper reflected the concerns of the intellectual world regarding the rise of fascism and the impending war. Their exchanges also revealed the ideological origins and the evolution of the thought of both figures, making a significant contribution to the intellectual dialogue of the time. An analysis of the writings of both Karvounis and Politis reveals the contours of these debates, particularly Karvounis' ideological shift from conservative idealism to dialectical materialism.
This article argues that the distinction, which is today intuitive, between ancient Greeks and modern Greeks has its origin in western medieval polemics that sought to establish the hegemony of the Catholic Church over its Orthodox counterpart. Since the Renaissance, the "ancient" Greeks in this polar distinction were those of classical antiquity, who are usually valourised in western perceptions, but before that, in the original medieval form of the distinction, the ancient Greeks were the Greek fathers of the church who, western polemicists needed to argue, sided with Catholic thought rather than with contemporary Orthodox thinking. Thus, in order to appropriate the Greek fathers for the Catholic side in theological debates, western writers distinguished them - as the original "ancient Greeks" - from the "modern" (that is, contemporary) Greeks who had allegedly deviated from the Catholic faith. The article thereby offers the first historical genealogy of this now familiar distinction.
Various concepts, such as acculturation, osmosis, syncretism, hybridization and cultural transfer, can be used to describe the cultural interactions between the Catholic and Orthodox communities of the Cyclades, Chios, Smyrna and Constantinople. Books in Frangochiotika can be seen as a hybrid product of cultural transfer and mediation, as a large proportion of them are translations of Italian, Spanish or French religious books made by Jesuits or Greek Uniates at the time of the Counter-Reformation. Their main aim was to reinforce Catholic doctrine and form confessional communities in the 17th and 18th centuries, but also to convert the Orthodox, which led to the closure of the communities; a closure that was not always hermetic, however. The fact that these works were written in a simple language (romaiika) can also be seen as a cultural transfer, as the Catholic Church adopted the use of the vernacular in the religious texts introduced by the Reformation. In the 19th century, as the emergence of national identities made hybridization increasingly difficult to tolerate, numerous books in Frangochiotika were published to reinforce the doctrine in Catholic communities facing ethnic integration dilemmas. The study attempts to shed light on how, over the centuries, cultural interactions between East and West have evolved, influencing publishing, translation and educational practices, and profoundly shaping religious and cultural identities in a region characterized by confessional and ethnic diversity until the period of nationalization.
Our knowledge of the Jesuits' activity in present-day mainland Greece in the 17th century is extremely limited. For example, we do not know what instruments they had at their disposal for catechizing and instructing. However, the catalogue of books that these missionaries possessed in Athens and Chalcis is preserved in the archives of the College of Saint Benedict in Constantinople. The interest of this unexpected find is even greater if we take into account the fact that there were very few indigenous Catholics in these two cities, and that the Catholic editions published at the time in Greek or Frangochiotika were not numerous. This study presents and comments on this document, while posing some of the questions raised by its study.
Sexual violence during the Greek wars of the twentieth century has been an unevenly studied topic. While the rape of Greek women by enemy soldiers or irregulars has been occasionally referred to in mainstream war accounts in a rather abstract way, the corresponding record of the Greek Army is usually bypassed. Based on archival sources and extensive use of memorial literature, especially war diaries and memoirs of former soldiers (among them the private diary of a rapist soldier, who recorded in detail no less than four gang rapes perpetrated by him and his comrades during the Second Balkan War), this article examines what we actual know about the occurrence, the frequency, the aims and specific patterns of sexual violence perpetrated by Greek soldiers or suffered by Greek civilians during successive military conflicts.
This article unpacks the role of League of Nations official Thanassis Aghnides in facilitating economic assistance to Greece, from the Greco-Turkish population exchange (1923) until the so-called Geneva Protocol (1927), which constituted a second international loan. Taking as its vantage point Aghnides' unique role as a "man in the middle", between the league and Greek authorities, it narrates and contextualises the almost continuous strategic dialogue between him and the deputy governor (later director) of the National Bank of Greece Emmanouil Tsouderos. The article argues that Aghnides was an educator (even disciplinarian), a purveyor of rumours and plans, and a "translator", who continuously embedded concrete economic reforms in the larger mission for a stable, liberal world order, with a peaceful, prosperous, democratic and, notably, Venizelist Greece as a part of it. This perspective, the article concludes, complicates a strictly "imperial" reading of economic, technical and humanitarian assistance to Greece in the interwar period.
Ioannis P. Miliopoulos is an example of a prominent Ottoman Rum scholar who dedicated his life and work to both Ottoman and Byzantine studies. Born in Trebizond, he lived in Constantinople and in Athens, and witnessed the transformation of the Ottoman Empire from a multiethnic kingdom to a modern nation-state. This article pieces together aspects of his life in Ottoman Constantinople, as well as his work, which was initially characterised by an effort to help Ottoman Rums better integrate into the Ottoman Empire, but soon focused on the study of the Bithynian coast of Constantinople during Byzantine times.
This article examines the refugee resettlement policies of the Greek state in the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) through the career of Alexandros Pallis, a key strategist in managing the influx of over a million Christian refugees from the Ottoman Empire. By analysing five pivotal moments in Pallis' career, it uncovers his significant yet often overlooked contributions to the resettlement process and the implementation of the population exchange agreement. It also highlights how Pallis' expertise in public administration and his deep involvement in international diplomacy shaped Greece's approach to refugee integration, thereby influencing the socio-political landscape of the interwar period.
The article is based on the study of a series of bilingual (in Ottoman Turkish and Greek) documents from the Archive of the Monastery of Saint John Theologos on the island of Patmos. Supposedly translations from Ottoman Turkish into Greek made by the dragoman of the Imperial Fleet, these documents, in reality, were the result of a complicated process that involved a more creative procedure than rendering an order in another language. Moreover, the Ottoman script was used in these documents to identify and legitimise the imperial order in the eyes of their subjects; for "translating" the Ottoman imperial orders, however, the Greek language was used in order to convey the message to the local communities. This article argues that the study of these texts reflects a cultural dialogue and interaction between languages and scripts of the Ottoman elite and of their Greek subjects that has been forgotten since the advent of nationalism.
This article analyses the collective actions undertaken by some Barcelona women textile artisans in the seventeenth century in defence of their independent work. The article opens with a comparative overview of the mobilisations of European women artisans. After it received petitions from some Barcelona filempueres (female veil weavers) between 1633 and 1635 complaining about their goods being confiscated by the silk weavers' guild, in 1636 the Barcelona city government enacted a specific ordinance for women who produced small textile garments (Ordinacio en favor de les dones). This ordinance, and its expansion in 1663 and 1686, reinforced the right of women to work in the production of seven textile and clothing items. Despite this, the women artisans continued to be harassed, but they successfully defended their work collectively on a number of subsequent occasions.
This study focuses on Frangochiotika, highlighting the importance as well as the challenges of this little-studied corpus. The analysis is structured around three axes. First, the influence of Frangochiotika publications on eighteenth-century religiosity, by examining the links between Baroque Catholic piety and Orthodox theology, exemplified by figures such as Nicodemus the Hagiorite. Second, the publication of legal texts from Catholic communities, in particular the constitutions of nuns, which offer a valuable insight into their social and religious life. Third, the study of private hymnbooks, witnesses to religious practice and popular art, underlines their origin in secular confraternities. Finally, with the aim of enriching our understanding of the religious and folk traditions of Greek-speaking Catholic communities in the Ottoman archipelago, the author calls for a more systematic study of these materials.
This article discusses the Frangochiotic corpus of Tommaso Stanislao Velasti, a prolific Jesuit scholar and writer hailing from the island of Chios (1717-1773), within the broader context of his advocacy for the Greek language, both ancient/classical and vernacular. It examines the linguistic intricacies of his allography, with a focus on two key works: Anapavsis tis cardhias (Rome, 1746), a translated manual of spiritual theology, and Psichofelis loji (Messina, 1753), an original collection of meditative sermons. The study includes a comprehensive typological analysis of his allographic systems, exploring the correspondences between Latin and Greek scripts, and investigates how his allography reflects the contemporary dialect of Chios. The article posits that Frangochiotika not only mirrors Velasti's overarching aspiration to champion his native Chiot dialect but is also paradoxically incorporated into a pioneering proposal- modeled after Dante and Petrarch- for the standardisation of vernacular Greek.
