The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, C. 500 to 1050: The Early Middle Ages [Hardcover]

My first observation goes to Pr. Curta remark that "through the Civil War, the Slav Macedonians of northern Greece made an important contribution to the Communist cause" (page 3). The major goal of the Slav Macedonians during the civil war was the occupation of the Macedonian areas from the Greek territorial state. Moreover, in the case of the Greek Communist Party, the defection of significant numbers of "Aegean Macedonians"( a extreme nationalist term) from the ranks of the Greek Democratic Army to Tito's Yugoslav Macedonia was a painful stab in the back. Theirs Bulgarian sentiments, as also and the collaboration of significant numbers of these people with the Bulgarian, Italian and German occupation forces during World War II, doesn't make them "Sudeten's". The Communist cause was the establishment of a totalitarian regime in Greece and the segregation of Macedonia soil from Greece according the Commintern directions.

My second observation goes to the claim that the place name "Gavrolimni is a compound Greek and Slavic word"(page 285). This is a huge mistake, because both words are Greeks. Gavros is a Greek word and not a Slavic. Is the "European anchovy" (Engraulis encrasicolus) is a forage fish somewhat related to the herring. According Babiniotis Lexicon, Gavros came from the ancinet Greek word "gravlos".

My third observation focus in the last part of the book (pages 294-295), that is obvious Pr. Curta ,is not clear, if there were Greeks or a Greek ethnic group (ethnie) during the early middle ages. Is obvious that he used the word "nation" with the influence of the constructivist theory of Benedict Anderson. This approach failed to distinguish three imported relationships regarding the existence or not of the Greeks: cultural continuity, recurrence and reinterpretation. Nations, ethnic groups and theirs connections of the past to the present or to the future, constitute several ways of causal relationships, there different ways of links, depending on external circumstances and the resources of the nation or the ethnic group.

The book seems to fail to show the history of the Greeks over the "long duree", as the Edinburgh series want to show (Series Editor's preface). The fail is because he doesn't show the ways (cultural continuity, recurrence and reinterpretation) in which the past is related to the present(early middle ages), and it may be an ancient and half-remembered past that must be recovered and authenticated. We can only begin to grasp the power exerted by such pasts if we extend the analysis of nations and ethnic groups(ethnies) well before the onset of modernity, to the collective cultural identities and communities of premodern epochs. It is indeed difficult, in practice, to draw a clear distinction in certain cases between ethnic groups(ethnies) and nations. As I remark, Pr. Curta seems to use modernist views in order to exam the Greek "long duree". And he failed.