Borderland: Europe’s Eastern faultline
THE OLD MAN LOOKS PAST MY SHOULDER and off into the distance. His face is smooth, the nose is beakishly angular and classically Greek. The eyes, which are almost expressionless, transmit an imperturbable patrician confidence, and they are shaded in darkness and heavy-lidded — just like mine.
The old man is my ancestor Georgios Sisinis, and I am in the National Historical Museum of Greece in Athens staring at his portrait. Sisinis was a leader in the 1821 Greek War of Independence. After proclaiming freedom for the region of Elis in the Peloponnese, he fought at the battles of Patras and Chlemoutsi, and ended up as Speaker of the revolutionary National Assembly, inviting the diplomat Ioannis Kapodistrias to return home to become the first Governor of an independent Greece.
Almost exactly 200 years ago, my ancestor made a decision: to help tear Greece from Ottoman rule and plant it firmly in Europe. En masse, Greeks rebelled from a decaying empire in the East to rediscover a civilisation they had helped build in the West. Lord Byron would die for Greece at Missolonghi. And the British and French navies, along with Russia, would strike the final blow for Greece at Navarino.
Now Greece once more feels a threat from the East. Once more, it looks to its European allies. Greece is a country of frontiers and borders: between Europe and the Middle East; the EU and Turkey; Christianity and Islam. It is an ancient civilisation contained within a new state; a country that reveres both its pagan forefathers and the Orthodox church; and it is sundered between a Balkan, inward-looking, mountainous north that ends only in Moscow, and a Mediterranean, sun-kissed south that gazes out onto the world.
Is this a country on the very western border of the East or is it on the very eastern frontier of the West? Once more Greeks are being tested. Can they again count on Europe, and the wider West — or will they now be forced to go it alone?
David Patrikarakos is the author of War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century (Basic Books). His book Nuclear Iran has just been reissued by I.B. Tauris
is ringed by a line
