This pioneering book reveals how nationalism in Ninteenth-century Greece helped women to develop an alternative vision of female politics, history, and citizenship. Shedding new light on women's ideas and beliefs the author brings to life the story of the ideas that formed our societies and individual identities.

DIVAn ethnographic study that shows how similar national and cultural beliefs about gender, sexuality, and Greekness are the basis of both the public condemnation of abortion and its prevalence in Greece./div

The image of a woman bearing arms is a potent symbol of modern Greece's nation-building conflicts. Margaret Poulos traces the influence of this image on Greek feminist discourse from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1970s and 1980s. The study begins with the heroines of the 1821 Revolution and the extent to which Greek protofeminism capitalized on this legacy. Poulos then explores the role of partisan women in the communist-led resistance movement during World War II and Greece's subsequent collapse into Civil War, which saw a striking and controversial increase in the number of women fighting in the ranks of the partisan army. In conclusion, Poulos examines the way in which postwar feminism engaged, ignored, or reconciled this fraught history. Poulos's unique focus coherently connects a series of historical events otherwise separated by a hundred and fifty years at both extremes. The image of a woman-in-arms has long been a source of fascination for its embodiment of an inherent contradiction--the fragility and passivity of the feminine and the menace and violence of the gun. Poulos probes both the myth and reality of these representations within the context of Greek history, and the specific ways in which their symbolic power has been utilized by feminists, nationalists, and others to advance at times diametrically opposed political agendas. Therefore, while demystifying highly celebrated images, she also illuminates the contributions and experiences of the marginalized, shedding important light on the historical significance of women's agency.

In 1821, when the banner of revolution was raised against the empire of the Ottoman Turks, the story of 'Modern Greece' is usually said to begin. Less well known is the international recognition given to Greece as an independent state with full sovereign rights, as early as 1830, placing Greece in the vanguard among the new nation-states of Europe. This book brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines to explore the contribution of characteristically 19th-century European modes of thought to the 'making' of Greece as a modern nation. It focuses on the themes of nationalism, romanticism and the uses of the Classical and Byzantine past in the construction of a durable national identity at once 'Greek' and 'modern'.

Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize • One of The Economist's top history books of the year From one of our leading historians, an important new history of the Greek War of Independence—the ultimate worldwide liberal cause célèbre of the age of Byron, Europe’s first nationalist uprising, and the beginning of the downward spiral of the Ottoman Empire—published two hundred years after its outbreak As Mark Mazower shows us in his enthralling and definitive new account, myths about the Greek War of Independence outpaced the facts from the very beginning, and for good reason. This was an unlikely cause, against long odds, a disorganized collection of Greek patriots up against what was still one of the most storied empires in the world, the Ottomans. The revolutionaries needed all the help they could get. And they got it as Europeans and Americans embraced the idea that the heirs to ancient Greece, the wellspring of Western civilization, were fighting for their freedom against the proverbial Eastern despot, the Turkish sultan. This was Christianity versus Islam, now given urgency by new ideas about the nation-state and democracy that were shaking up the old order. Lord Byron is only the most famous of the combatants who went to Greece to fight and die—along with many more who followed events passionately and supported the cause through art, music, and humanitarian aid. To many who did go, it was a rude awakening to find that the Greeks were a far cry from their illustrious forebears, and were often hard to tell apart from the Ottomans. Mazower does full justice to the realities on the ground as a revolutionary conspiracy triggered outright rebellion, and a fraying and distracted Ottoman leadership first missed the plot and then overreacted disastrously. He shows how and why ethnic cleansing commenced almost immediately on both sides. By the time the dust settled, Greece was free, and Europe was changed forever. It was a victory for a completely new kind of politics—international in its range and affiliations, popular in its origins, romantic in sentiment, and radical in its goals. It was here on the very edge of Europe that the first successful revolution took place in which a people claimed liberty for themselves and overthrew an entire empire to attain it, transforming diplomatic norms and the direction of European politics forever, and inaugurating a new world of nation-states, the world in which we still live.