Word: greeke
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...GREEK ADVENTURE...
Other European volunteers in the Greek war of independence knew the splendor of their own certitudes, but they did not know how or why war was fought in this often grubby and backward land that they honored as the cradle of Western civilization. And, of course, they did not know how to speak modern Greek. But they went anyway, intending to help the gallant Hellenes free themselves from the corrupt and perfumed tyranny (actually a rather benign rule) of the Turkish Sultan...
...remaining volunteers were "philhellenes," or friends of Greece, most of them luckless university students from Germany, Poland, Switzerland or England who had taken the idealism of their Greek literature professors too much to heart. When they began to reach Greece by the dozens and then by the hundreds, they learned that no one knew they were coming, and no one wanted them. Devout Orthodox villagers, furthermore, did not share their reverence for the philosophers of the Golden Age, whom Eastern Christians abhorred as pagans. There was nothing for the philhellenes to do except flounder about and die. Enough...
...Greeks who lived in Western Europe had conceived the notion of throwing off the Turkish yoke and unifying, their country as a sovereign nation. However fashionable in Paris and London, this was an alien idea in Greece, incomprehensible to the wild tribesmen who actually lived there. When unorganized slaughter of Turkish citizens began in 1821, partly as the result of agitation by the expatriates, Greek fighting forces consisted mostly of mutually hostile guerrilla bands. Their chiefs fought, looted, connived, ran away or made peace separately, as they had always done, without regard to Western ideas of patriotism or military strategy...
...philhellenes-as Howarth puts it, a "shrivelled, dyspeptic, doom-ridden little man" of 36, forlornly in love with his page. He had no military experience, but he had equipped himself with gold, scarlet and green uniforms and at least ten swords. He was courted ardently by all of the Greek factions, not because he was a great poet or an English lord, Howarth writes, and certainly not because he seemed to have some notion of leading the Greeks in battle, but because he had brought with him ?9,000 in cash. It appears to have been the only ready money...