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Post by Teuta1975 on Feb 24, 2008 22:34:02 GMT -5
The continuing of this article...sorry...posted it twice, but leaving this one as it has the bibliography included.
Major Leake's theories quickly took hold. The clergyman Henry Holland, who published his travels the year after Leake's work, wrote of 'the discovery' of the Illyrians and endorsed without reservation Leake's argument that the Albanians had descended from the Illyrians: 'I should be disposed, then, to consider this historical point of the origin of the Albanians as nearly settled, as to give additional interest to the examination of a people who have descended from distant times, with fewer changes perhaps in their situation and habits of life than almost any other community in Europe.'22 But John Cam Hobhouse, the companion of Byron's travels, was sceptical. He dismissed Leake's theories and argued that the Illyrian region had always been populated by a miscellany of barbarian tribes, an 'almost uninterupted sucession of barbarians', for which a pure continuous line of descent was impossible. He confessed an admiration for the Albanian people, who were 'exceedingly decent in their outward manners and behaviour', but this was rather as a result of the enjoyment of otherness than a consequence of re-claiming the Illyrians as Greek.23 It is significant that Hobhouse's map does not designate the region as Illyria but as Albania, while Leake's map clearly terms the area which lies west of Macedonia Ill~ria.'T~h e terms used by these cartographers were clearly more influenced by their particular theories of ethnic and historical identity than by any objective geographical or common usage on the ground. Byron's Mapping Byron's description of Illyria in Childe Harold was published just a few years before Hobhouse's and Leake's maps, which owe much to his discovery. The sense of the obscurity and attractive difference of the Albanians/Illyrians which Leake reveals is inspired by Byron's portrayal. But Byron's Illyria is far more complicated than that of Leake, with his narrower ethnic concerns. Byron's Illyria is characterized by a great 222 A (H1)STORY O F ILLYRIA range of its associations, the changing significance of Illyria described so far. It draws upon the political Illyria, the literary, the mythical, and so uses one reading to impinge upon another. One normally associates Byron's Childe Harold I1 with the philhellenic movement and certainly the poem is primarily concerned with creating a vision of classical Greece, a 'sad relic of departed worth'. The melancholy of the narrator of Childe Harold influences the particular vision of classical Greece with its ruined columns, weed-strewn villages, and ancient battlefields and urges swift action from the British readers, who are created as the obvious sympathizers and inheritors of the situation, to remedy the situation. But besides the clearly philhellenizing rhetoric of the poem, Byron also explores other myths about Greece and other ways of understanding the country. This counter-rhetoric reaches a climax in a particular stanza: From the dark barriers of that rugged clime Ev'n to the centre of Illyria's vales, Childe Harold pass'd o'er many a mountain sublime, Through lands scarce noticed in historic tales; Yet in famed Attica such lovely dales Are rarely seen; nor can fair Tempe boast A charm they know not; loved Parnassus fails, Though classic ground and consecrated most, To match some spots that lurk within this lowering The contrast between 'Illyria's vales' and 'famed Attica' could hardly be made more telling. One is obscure but 'sublime', the other 'classic', 'consecrated most', familiar. But what did Byron mean by Illyria? The first answer must be that he was thinlung of the historical or political significance of Illyria. When Childe Harold was published, Napoleon had enjoyed control over the region for two years, and had re-introduced the ancient name, the Illyrian Provinces. It is widely recognized that Childe Harold is a topical, political poem. Byron's landscape in the poem, for example, has been called 'a palimpsest of political maps'.26 As Byron's protagonist, Harold, travels from Portugal, Spain, Malta, Greece, and Illyria, he is effectively touring the areas most contested by the British and the French during the Napoleonic War. The little-known Illyrian Provinces were part of the new empire, just as the 'sad relic' of Greece was part of the old ancient empire, now departed. Byron's poem marks the re-inscribing of the historical Illyria in the public consciousness. But at the same time, Byron is keen to keep Illyria private, to retain its A (H1)STORY OF ILLYRIA 223 imaginary or literary qualities. While Childe Harold maps Napoleonic Europe, it is also concerned to subordinate 'public sentiment to individual feeling'.27 Harold invokes the topical, martial quality of his travels only to reject that association: Oft did he mark the scenes of vanished war, Actium, Lepanto, fatal Trafalgar: Mark them unmoved, for he would not delight (Born beneath some remote inglorious star) In themes of bloody fray, or gallant fight, But loathed the bravo's trade, and laughed at martial wight.28 Trafalgar, scene of the recent victory of the British over the French, is rejected in favour of Harold's private feelings and personal reflections. So, too, with Illyria. First in his notes to the poem, Byron wrests Illyria back from the French by noting the similarity between the Albanians, 'part of Illyria', and the Scots: 'The Arnaouts, or Albanese, struck me forcibly by their resemblance to the Highlanders of Scotland, in dress, figure and manner of language.'29 The Illyrians are now British again, although as Highlanders they are still excitingly marginal. Second, Byron invokes the literary significance of Illyria, the Shakespearean Elysium. Illyria becomes the land of fiction, the 'lands scarce noticed in historic tales', its sublimity an indication of its mystery. And by contrasting it with the 'classic ground' of Attica, Byron alludes to the long-running literary conflict between the French neoclassicism and the wildness of Shakespeare which broke all conventional rules. The Illyria of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night allows the individual imagination to overshadow the public, historical might of Napoleon. But Shakespeare's Illyria was not only useful in countering Napoleon. Byron, in this stanza, was deliberately contrasting it with classical Greece. The Illyria of Twelfth Night was recognizably fictional, a magical conjuring trick by the dramatist. So by contrasting the Shakespearean Greece and the philhellenic classical one, Byron was able to question the historical validity of either image. The contingency of the two concepts of Greece become evident when juxtaposed. The idealizing and gloomy picture of Marathon, Thermopylae or Athens is exposed as another stereotype, a Western vision or imagining, rather than an objective, documentary description. Thus Byron's appropriation of Shakespeare's Illyria makes uncertain the assumed essential and uninterrupted link between the ancient Greek past and the contemporary Greek present upon which philhellenism and Greek nationalism depend.30 A (H1)STORY OF ILLYRIA Transformations Byron's portrayal of Illyria is salutary. Much of the history of Illyria seems ostensibly to be the history of nationalism. Recalling standard accounts of the rise of nationalism, Illyria has been the place where fiction and fact meet, where myths become appropriated as history and used to forge a nation's physical geographical e~istenceT.~o~da y, when we have experienced the use of mythical or literary versions of identity to justify violent wars of nationalism, the difficulty of distinguishing between a fictional and a factual place called Illyria might seem disturbing. But Byron's poem, which combines the Illyria of war and of literature, deliberately allowing the two associations to clash and resonate uncomfortably together, highlights the particular, different qualities of the place. Rather than any fervently believed but misplaced notions of an essential Illyria, the (hi)story of the place reveals a tradition of liminality, of contingency, of reversal, where fixed identities and expectations are tested and overturned. That elusive (or elysian) capacity of Illyria to challenge fixed ideas offers the possibility of a different model of national identity and other ways of imagining a place.32
NOTES *This article was prompted by a question following a paper I gave at the Cambridge University 'Greek Worlds' seminar. I am grateful to the seminar organizers, Pat Easterling and Shannan Peckham, for their suggestions at the time, and to Brendan Simms for later conversations. 1. The Illyrians (Oxford, 1993), 4. 2. 'Twelfth Night at Oxford', First Colbcted Edition of the Works of Oscar Wilde, 1908-1922, ed. by R. Ross, 15 vols. (London, 1969), Vol. 13, 46. 3. 1. 196. 4. 1. 56-8. 5. 7.7.1. See also E. Hall, Inventing the Barbat-ian: Greek Self-Definition Through Tragedy (Oxford, 1989), 170 6. 1. 24. 1-2. 7. 1. 24. 5-6. 8. 4. 126. 9. See J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik (edd.), Twelfth Night (Arden edition, London, 1975), xxxv-xli. 10. The XVBookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entytubd Metamorphosis, translated out of Latin into English meeter, by Arthur Golding Gentleman, A worke very pleasaunt and debctabb (London, 1567), 52. Shakespeare would have read Ovid in Golding's translation. 11. The XV Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, 52. 12. See J. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford, 1993), 144-51, for a dark reading of Illyria and the Metamorphoses in Twelfth Night. 13. Empedocbs on Etna I.ii.452-60. 14. See, for example, Geographi Graeci Minores, ed. by C. Miiller (Paris, 1855-61), i. 15-96: A (H1)STORY OF ILLYRIA 225 'After the L ~ ~ NthNere come the Illyrian people. The Illyrii dwell by the sea as far as Chaonia, which lies opposite Corcyra, the island of Alcinous. There is situated the Greek city called Heraclea, with a harbour. There dwell the Lotus-eaters, barbarian peoples with the names Hierastamnae, Bulini, and Hylli who are neighbours of the Bulini.' 15. For more on Arnold's vision of Greece and Illyria, see my 'Translation in Arnold's Empedocles', Essays in Criticism 45, 4 (October, 1995), 301-23. 16. For more on the Napoleonic rhetoric of 'liberation', see S. Woolf, Napoleon's Integration of Europe (London, 1991), 14-17. 17. Danica 1 (12 December 1835), 288, quoted in E. M. Despalatovic, Ljudevit Gaj and the Illyrian Movement (New York and London, 1975), 89. 18. Researches in Greece (London, 18 14), i. 19. Researches, iii-iv. 20. Edward Daniel Clarke repeated the claim that the Albanians were more attractive and purer than the Greeks: 'The Greeks are, for the most part, indolent and profligate, vain, obsequious, poor and dirty. The Albanians are industrious, independent, honourable and hospitable. They are a hardier and healthier race', Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa, 6 vols. (1810- 23), Vol. 4, 321. For the attractive simplicity of the Albanians, see also R. Chandler, Travels in Greece or an Account of a Tour made at the Expense of the Society of Dilettanti (Oxford, 1776), 119. 2 1. Researches, 25 1. It is interesting to note that the Albanians, in their northern and mountainous terrain, are very close to the 'Aryan Model' of Greece which Martin Bernal argues was developed in the early nineteenth century: see Black Athena, 2 vols. (1987-1991), Vol. 1, 190-330. 22. Travels in the Ionian Isles, Albania, Thessaly, Macedonia etc During the Years 1812 and 1813 (London, 1815), 101. 23. Travels in Albania and Other Provinces of Turkey in 1809 and 1810, new edn., 2 vols. (London, 1855), Vol. 1, 137. 24. See Hobhouse's map in A Journey through Albania and Other Provinces of Turkey in Europe andAsia to Constantinople, during the years 1809-1810, 2 vols. (London: 1813), Vol. 1; see Leake's map in Travels in Northern Greece, 4 vols. (London, 1835), Vol. 1. 25. Childe Harold 11.406-14. 26. C. Woodring, Politics in English Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 156. 27. R. Cronin, 'Mapping Childe Harold I and II', Byron Journal 22 (1994), 27. 28. Childe Harold 11.355-60. 29. Byron's note to line 338, Childe Harold 11. 30. See my Shelley and Greece: Rethinking Romantic Hellenism (Basingstoke, 1997), chapter 6. 3 1. For the link between the imagination and nationalism, see, for example, E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (edd.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983) and B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983). 32. For one possibility of non-ethnic nationalism, see M. Tamer, 'Illyrianism and the Croatian Quest for Statehood', Daedahds (Summer 1997), 47-62.
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Post by Teuta1975 on Feb 25, 2008 0:32:19 GMT -5
Well, Basil, all Balkan is mixed up. Hellenic, Alb, Serbs, Bulgarians, Vlah etc...therefore I can't hate any of them. PS: tried hard to hate Greeks...I just can't...they are very similar to Albanians...simple people with good hearts
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Post by atlantis on Feb 26, 2008 11:20:05 GMT -5
I just came from library …………………….. And I really can accept that some Albanian are real “Creasy” …………………… They have to believe absolutely what geeks say ………….Lol Let me say why? Leonidhas Sabinis was a great sportiest, who gave a lot honor and name for the Greek in the sport field. He was a really good sportiest. Honestly, I’m little bit confused about my neighbor Luan Shabani and his family living for a long time right beside my house, so maybe I’ll not go to the library for a while…………….
Mehmet Ali Pasha of Egypt has a great museum …somewhere in the Greek territory .A Friend told me (Never was there) Greeks are saying and proving him as unbelievable Greek hero….In all the Franco- England history documentation the first presentation in every conversation he said was “I’m Albanian …………..”
I don’t know from were this Name appeared Georgeos Kastriotis…………….. I’m going to re watch my favorite movie “My big fat geek wedding “………..I remember a old greek leady saying “all the word is greek”……………… O I forgot to explain The Hellenism meaning …….no I’m not able to explain that…….LOL
I’m not going to the library for a while…………………LOL Don’t like the Albanians fantasy grubbing Greeeeek heroes and make them Albanian…..lol next time I tell you more .............How easy is to get albanian facts and to paint with a greek colore...................
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Post by atlantis on Feb 26, 2008 16:25:01 GMT -5
Hi Kanaris, Accept my greetings, as you know I’m new here …….is just a way that seems to be ….nothing more ……..or maybe I moved on too fast …nothing personal, accept my apologies too, for any confusion May I call you a friend?!
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Post by Kassandros on Feb 27, 2008 15:36:25 GMT -5
When we say Greeks today we mean 2 big Groups. Achaians in the south and Dorians in the north. That Dorians in the north..... is that makes most Balkanians of Hellenic stock.
Dorians were the Macedonians, the Epirots, the Thessalians, the Spartans and the eastern Cretans.
Really now.... I need some answers to my thoughts...
Slavs came in 6th century AD;
Can somebody tell me where is the characteristic Slavic face with the cheeks... in modern Yougoslavians?
Albanians look like Epirots who were Dorians. How that comes?
Italians.. although Latinos.. look also like Greeks.
Generally speaking.... how the hell different races after 15 centuries share so much common characteristics today.... and these charactreristics are the Greeks ones?
Eh Teuta?
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