Historian Mark Mazower, from his earliest work in the 1990s on Greek history, has been devoted to firmly placing Greek history in the greater context of the history of Europe, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Friday.
Mitsotakis delivered a videotaped address for the presentation of the Greek edition of “The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe” which Mazower was expected to attend at the War Museum in Athens.
Mentioning that the historian became an honorary citizen of Greece, the premier said that Mazower’s recent book is “another sample of his scientific zeal and genuine love of his second country,” will contribute to Greek historiography and will prove a landmark in the Greek people’s diligent search for national self-awareness.
The book leaves no space for comforting stereotypes or myths, and looks at the role of foreign powers in Greece as well as their contributions to the building of the modern state, the premier noted.
“[While the fighters of the Greek Revolution of 1821 came from different backgrounds], all of them shared the belief that the newborn nation-state must be viable, and for this to happen it had to be modern, just, and productive: in other words, a Greece with a rigorous society and with economic and geopolitical power, exactly the path the country wants to follow today, two eons later,” Mitsotakis said.
Mazower, he stressed, has refused to give in to a politically motivated point of view, and “while his books may be political, they are not politically affiliated.”
The book’s Greek translation is by Kostas Kouremenos and published by Alexandria publications.
With The Greek Revolution, Columbia University history professor Mark Mazower gives a thoroughly engaging and thought-provoking account of the revolt that began in 1821—not in Greece but hundreds of miles north in Ottoman-ruled Moldavia.
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