[Footnote 1: There is still practically no literature printed in the Albanian language.]
The Greek troops arrived only just in time, for the ‘Hellenism’ of the Epirots had been terribly proved by murderous attacks from their Moslem neighbours on the north. The latter speak a variety of the same Albanian tongue, but were differentiated by a creed which assimilated them to the ruling race. They had been superior to their Christian kinsmen by the weight of numbers and the possession of arms, which under the Ottoman régime were the monopoly of the Moslem. At last, however, the yoke of oppression was broken and the Greek occupation seemed a harbinger of security for the future. Unluckily, however, Epirus was of interest to others besides its own inhabitants. It occupies an important geographical position facing the extreme heel of Italy, just below the narrowest point in the neck of the Adriatic, and the Italian Government insisted that the country should be included in the newly erected principality of Albania, which the powers had reserved the right to delimit in concert by a provision in the Treaty of London.
Italy gave two reasons for her demand. First, she declared it incompatible with her own vital interests that both shores of the strait between Corfù and the mainland should pass into the hands of the same power, because the combination of both coasts and the channel between them offered a site for a naval base that might dominate the mouth of the Adriatic. Secondly, she maintained that the native Albanian speech of the Epirots proved their Albanian nationality, and that it was unjust to the new Albanian state to exclude from it the most prosperous and civilized branch of the Albanian nation. Neither argument is cogent.
The first argument could easily be met by the neutralization of the Corfù straits,[1] and it is also considerably weakened by the fact that the position which really commands the mouth of the Adriatic from the eastern side is not the Corfù channel beyond it but the magnificent bay of Avlona just within its narrowest section, and this is a Moslem district to which the Epirots have never laid claim, and which would therefore in any case fall within the Albanian frontier. The second argument is almost ludicrous. The destiny of Epirus is not primarily the concern of the other Albanians, of for that matter of the Greeks, but of the Epirots themselves, and it is hard to see how their nationality can be defined except in terms of their own conscious and expressed desire; for a nation is simply a group of men inspired by a common will to co-operate for certain purposes, and cannot be brought into existence by the external manipulation of any specific objective factors, but solely by the inward subjective impulse of its constituents. It was a travesty of justice to put the Orthodox Epirots at the mercy of a Moslem majority (which had been massacring them the year before) on the ground that they happened to speak the same language. The hardship was aggravated by the fact that all the routes connecting Epirus with the outer world run through Yannina and Salonika, from which the new frontier sundered her; while great natural barriers separate her from Avlona and Durazzo, with which the same frontier so ironically signalled her union.
[Footnote 1: Corfù itself is neutralized already by the agreement under which Great Britain transferred the Ionian Islands to Greece in 1863.]
The award of the powers roused great indignation in Greece, but Venezelos was strong enough to secure that it should scrupulously be respected; and the ‘correct attitude’ which he inflexibly maintained has finally won its reward. As soon as the decision of the powers was announced, the Epirots determined to help themselves. They raised a militia, and asserted their independence so successfully, that they compelled the Prince of Wied, the first (and perhaps the last) ruler of the new ‘Albania’, to give them home rule in matters of police and education, and to recognise Greek as the official language for their local administration. They ensured observance of this compact by the maintenance of their troops under arms. So matters continued, until a rebellion among his Moslem subjects and the outbreak of the European War in the summer of 1914 obliged the prince to depart, leaving Albania to its natural state of anarchy. The anarchy might have restored every canton and village to the old state of contented isolation, had it not been for the religious hatred between the Moslems and the Epirots, which, with the removal of all external control, began to vent itself in an aggressive assault of the former upon the latter, and entailed much needless misery in the autumn months.
The reoccupation of Epirus by Greek troops had now become a matter of life and death to its inhabitants, and in October 1914 Venezelos took the inevitable step, after serving due notice upon all the signatories to the Treaty of London. Thanks in part to the absorption of the powers in more momentous business, but perhaps even in a greater degree to the confidence which the Greek premier had justly won by his previous handling of the question, this action was accomplished without protest or opposition. Since then Epirus has remained sheltered from the vicissitudes of civil war within and punitive expeditions from without, to which the unhappy remnant of Albania has been incessantly exposed; and we may prophesy that the Epiroi, unlike their repudiated brethren of Moslem or Catholic faith, have really seen the last of their troubles. Even Italy, from whom they had most to fear, has obtained such a satisfactory material guarantee by the occupation on her own part of Avlona, that she is as unlikely to demand the evacuation of Epirus by Greece as she is to withdraw her own force from her long coveted strategical base on the eastern shore of the Adriatic. In Avlona and Epirus the former rivals are settling down to a neighbourly contact, and there is no reason to doubt that the de facto line of demarcation between them will develop into a permanent and officially recognized frontier. The problem of Epirus, though not, unfortunately, that of Albania, may be regarded as definitely closed.
The reclamation of Epirus is perhaps the most honourable achievement of the Greek national revival, but it is by no means an isolated phenomenon. Western Europe is apt to depreciate modern ‘Hellenism’, chiefly because its ambitious denomination rather ludicrously challenges comparison with a vanished glory, while any one who has studied its rise must perceive that it has little more claim than western Europe itself to be the peculiar heir of ancient Greek culture. And yet this Hellenism of recent growth has a genuine vitality of its own. It displays a remarkable power of assimilating alien elements and inspiring them to an active pursuit of its ideals, and its allegiance supplants all others in the hearts of those exposed to its charm. The Epirots are not the only Albanians who have been Hellenized. In the heart of central Greece and Peloponnesus, on the plain of Argos, and in the suburbs of Athens, there are still Albanian enclaves, derived from those successive migrations between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries; but they have so entirely forgotten their origin that the villagers, when questioned, can only repeat: ‘We can’t say why we happen to speak “Arvanitikà”, but we are Greeks like everybody else.’ The Vlachs again, a Romance-speaking tribe of nomadic shepherds who have wandered as far south as Akarnania and the shores of the Korinthian Gulf, are settling down there to the agricultural life of the Greek village, so that Hellenism stands to them for the transition to a higher social phase. Their still migratory brethren in the northern ranges of Pindus are already ‘Hellenes’ in political sympathy,[1] and are moving under Greek influence towards the same social evolution. In distant Cappadocia, at the root of the Anatolian peninsula, the Orthodox Greek population, submerged beneath the Turkish flood more than eight centuries ago, has retained little individuality except in its religion, and nothing of its native speech but a garbled vocabulary embedded in a Turkified syntax. Yet even this dwindling rear-guard has been overtaken just in time by the returning current of national life, bringing with it the Greek school, and with the school a community of outlook with Hellenism the world over. Whatever the fate of eastern Anatolia may be, the Greek element is now assured a prominent part in its future.
[Footnote 1: Greece owed her naval supremacy in 1912-13 to the new cruiser Georgios Averof, named after a Vlach millionaire who made his fortune in the Greek colony at Alexandria and left a legacy for the ship’s construction at his death.]
These, moreover, are the peripheries of the Greek world; and at its centre the impulse towards union in the national state readies a passionate intensity. ‘Aren’t you better off as you are?’ travellers used to ask in Krete during the era of autonomy. ‘If you get your “Union”, you will have to do two years’ military service instead of one year’s training in the militia, and will be taxed up to half as much again.’ ‘We have thought of that,’ the Kretans would reply, ‘but what does it matter, if we are united with Greece?’