How did a small province of the Ottoman Empire become a modern European state?
A concise, sober and clear account of the formation of the modern Greek state from its beginnings to the present day.

The main focus of this book is the transformation of a small province of the Ottoman Empire into a modern European state. In some respects, the problems that arose during the formation of the modern Greek state could be compared to the problems that the efforts of the Western world currently face in imposing its own political and cultural model on foreign, if not hostile, societies. The fact that the Greeks of the 19th and 20th centuries are Christians, while the societies that are currently the subject of Western experimentation are Muslim, is of little importance, to the extent that both have been or are being treated, explicitly or not, as fields of civilization and in no way as equal partners in the political endeavor to which the term modernization is attributed, rather uncritically. Furthermore, the Christianity of the Greeks has never ceased to represent the Schism, that is, a peculiarity compared to Western European perceptions, not always sympathetic, and even less understandable.

However, in this comparison there is a difference that cannot be ignored. The subject of the book is Greece and the Greeks, and this -now national in character- category, by definition, refers associatively to what Western Europeans consider the foundations of their civilization. From this perspective, the particular treatment that the West reserved for populations that did not simply rise up against the Ottoman Empire in the name of Christianity, but invoked, through their name, a connection to a past in which Europe sees the roots of its own identity, can easily be interpreted. This is a perception that is often invoked by all those who want to support or fight against the often desperate choices of the Greeks, to whom Europeans in the 19th century will attribute the characterization of the "spoiled children of History".