Map mania: Nationalism and the politics of place in Greece, 1870-1922

Abstract

The rival claims over Macedonia by the Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, and Turks prompted the so-called 'map mania' in the 1870s as national antagonisms were played out in conflicting cartographic representations of the southern Balkans. With the establishment of Greece in the early 1830s the majority of the Greek population had been left in Ottoman lands beyond the sovereign state's frontiers. This gave rise to a militant irredentist ideology, known as the 'Great Idea', which pressed for the aggrandisement of the fledgling state to encompass all the Eastern lands inhabited by Greeks in a reconstituted Byzantine Empire. The present paper begins with a discussion of the meanings that accumulated around the concept of the 'frontier' in Greek nationalist thought and focuses on the debates in Greece about the imperative to redefine the Greek Kingdom's boundaries in the Balkans and Asia Minor. An analysis of these debates sheds light on a wider process: the naturalisation of boundaries in late 19th century Europe. In the course of the paper an examination is made of the ways in which geographical discourse served to legitimate claims to, and consolidate, territories. The emphasis on an imperialist geography co-existed with a celebration of local, regional geographies, and a key word of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Greek nationalist discourse was 'place' (topos). The argument is put that the particularities of 'place' were construed both as underpinning a territorial expansion and as a resistance to the homogenising drive of a state sponsored nationalism.