Quotes from Stathis Kalyvas

Greece was born in a state of economic default and international receivership.

In fact a full cadastral survey of Greece remains incomplete to this day.

By 1938, the Greek state had redistributed about 40 percent of all arable land in Greece, creating some 310,000 small family farms, a revolutionary achievement that took place without the kind of bloody agrarian conflict so common elsewhere.

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, many educated Europeans saw Greece not as the obscure, impoverished, and backward province of the Ottoman Empire it was, but as the birthplace of the most important ancient civilization, whose values shaped and defined modern Europe.

What would later become modern Greece was at the time a backward and isolated province of the Ottoman Empire with few towns, far removed from all this intellectual ferment.

The rebels were seen as the descendants of the civilization to which the West owed its values—and now they rose from the ashes!

By essentially placing religion in its service, the Greek state gained a powerful instrument in forging a national identity.

During the forty-year period between 1880 and 1920, 370,000 Greeks (almost one-seventh of the total population of the country) settled in the United States.

Grafting Western liberal and democratic institutions on an Ottoman agrarian society was bound to be challenging.

The contrast between the greatness of Greece's ambitions and the poverty of her resources put a special premium on outside support."2

The ability of Greece to generate foreign interventions in its favor separates the Greek experience from that of the other Balkan states.

How can a country stumble from disaster to disaster only to find itself propelled so high in the end?

In spite of shared cultural traits, ancient Greeks owed their fundamental political loyalty to their city-state, or polis, rather than to some unitary Greek state, while Byzantine emperors did not see themselves as the heirs to ancient Athens or Sparta.

In addition to the emotional cost, these interventions have bred a sense of moral hazard and recklessness, for if outsiders will step in to correct Greek mistakes, then it makes sense to take big risks and not to invest in sound institutions. In turn, this has likely reinforced the ambition of Greek elites and has fed these successive boom-bust-bailout cycles.

Seen from a contemporary vantage point, not only is modern Greece definitively unrelated to ancient Greece, it may well be its antithesis.5

Most likely, this perception is an artifact emerging from the contrast between an idealized ancient Greece and its real modern version.

The British writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, an astute observer of Greece who spent most of his life there, called it the "Helleno-Romaic" dilemma, pitting the archetypal categories of Hellenes and Romioi against each other.

The Greek state arose as a self-conscious outpost of European modernity in what may have been an illustrious place in the ancient world but was in the opening of the nineteenth century an obscure, economically backward corner of the Ottoman Empire.

As elsewhere, war forged Greeks out of peasants.