So far has Athens left the rest of mankind behind in thought and expression that her pupils have become the teachers of the world, and she has made the name of Hellas distinctive no longer of race but of intellect, and the title of Hellene a badge of education rather than of common descent.
There have been only two great peoples: the Greeks and the Jews. Perhaps the Greeks were even greater than the Jews, but now I can see no sign of that old greatness in the modern Greeks. Maybe, when the present process is finished we too will degenerate, but I see no sign of degeneration at present.
Historical justice obliges me to state that of the enemies who took up positions against us, the Greek soldier particularly fought with the highest courage. He capitulated only when further resistance had become impossible and useless.
I thank Your Majesty for your friendly message which comes at a time when all free peoples are deeply impressed by the courage and steadfastness of the Greek nation.
There, however, the medieval or early modern state assimilated most of them, although a significant number of distinctive ancient cultures persisted through such processes of integration — Irish, Catalan. Norwegian and others (in Eastern Europe, the Greeks perhaps form an analogy).
Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Persians, Chinese and Japanese could be cited as examples of ethnic continuity, since, despite massive cultural changes over the centuries, certain key identifying components—name, language, customs, religious community and territorial association—were broadly maintained and reproduced for millennia.
As Elie Kedourie has remarked “Greek [nationalism] may be considered the first to appear outside Western Christendom, among a community ruled by non-Christians and itself hitherto violently hostile to all Western nations.”
Some economically brilliant groups of this kind have behind them a long tradition of dispersal, urbanization and minority status: this is clearly the case of the Jews, Greeks Armenians or Parsees.
The Hellenes initially thought not so much in terms of secession from the Ottoman Empire, as of inverting the hierarchy within it and taking it over, thereby reviving Byzantium. The first Greek rising took place not in Greece, but in what is now Romania, where the Greeks were a minority and moreover one doing rather well out of the Ottoman system. The use of what is now southern Greece as a territorial basis only came later.
Greek and Armenian nationalism arose among populations which were generally more prosperous and better able to understand the wealth- generating economies of modern Europe than their Ottoman Muslim overlords.
A strong sense of a common ethnic identity emerged among Greek speakers of the independent city-states of the Aegean area in the Bronze Age and characterized the city-states of the classical period and their colonies in the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions. It endured over two millennia as these lands were ruled by the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Frankish, Venetian, and Ottoman empires, and as the area became ethnically heterogeneous.
Parents also stress the value of education,..Higher education is strongly valued…In the 1990s, 140,000 students annually vied for 20,000 university seats and 20,000 technical college seats. Many ultimately seek an education abroad.