Rigas Feraios or Velestinlis was born in 1757, in the village of Velestino (ancient Feres) of Thessaly, Greece, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Rigas was a major figure of the Greek Enlightenment, a polyglot and a prolific writer and translator who worked ardently towards the liberation of Greek and Balkan peoples from “Ottoman despotism”. A revolutionary and political publicist, Rigas was inspired by the French Revolution in his vision of the Greek Republic.
Inspiration for the New Political Constitution
In 1797, one year before his execution, Rigas Feraios published the New Political Constitution of the Inhabitants of Rumeli, Asia Minor, the Islands of the Aegean and the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. The book contained a sui generis translation of several articles of the 1793 and 1795 French Constitutions and of the Rights of Man. It also included his famous revolutionary song, Thourios.
Rigas’ inspiration for the New Political Constitution was the political and intellectual developments taking place in the West on the wake of the French Revolution. It has been suggested that Rigas went for the translation of the 1795 Constitution because the satellite republics set up by Napoleon in Europe had all constitutions that reproduced the constitution of 1795. Rigas was counting on Napoleon's support of his revolutionary project.
A Political Constitution for a Greek Republic
Rigas's intention was to revolutionize the Ottoman Empire, to stir "all those who groan under the most unbearable tyranny". This he intended to do through the wide distribution of revolutionary literature, such as the New Political Constitution. Rigas's new political order to rise from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire was set out in his Political Constitution as a multinational state, a "Greek Republic".
In this Greek Republic that included all the Balkans there would be equality for all, independent of race or religion. As Villalba comments, Rigas adapted the French Constitution which was intended for a homogenous state to his vision of a multinational state with different languages, religions and cultures. He believed that "the moral strength of democratic patriotism" and the "universal principles of the Enlightenment would reduce religious and national antagonisms".
Rigas's New Political Constitution stipulated Greek, the Balkans' lingua franca, as the language of the Greek Republic. The Republic was going to include all Turks, Greeks, Romanians, Albanians, Bosnians, Serbians and Montenegrans of the Balkans in an indivisible, multicultural state with a hierarchy of representative institutions and an independent judiciary.
Rigas and the End of the Greek Republic
Rigas was hoping that Napoleon Bonaparte, who had landed in Corfu, would set up a Greek Republic in the Ottoman-occupied lands. In 1797, Rigas arrived in Trieste where he had beforehand shipped several thousand copies of his subversive literature. There he was betrayed by a Greek merchant and was arrested by the Austrian authorities who were very alarmed by the insidious spread of French revolutionary ideas.
Rigas Feraios and seventeen of his associates (all Ottomans) were handed over to the Ottoman authorities in Belgrade in May 1798. They were all strangled and their bodies thrown into the Danube. With his death the vision, or the political utopia, of the Greek Republic came to an end. However, Rigas Feraios became a powerful symbol for future generations of Greeks and is considered as a forerunner of the Greek War of Independence.
Sources:
Richard Clogg, A Short History of Modern Greece, Cambridge University Press 1979.
Maria Lopez Villalba, "Balkanizing the French Revolution: Rhigas's New Political Constitution", in D. Tziovas, Greece and the Balkans: Identities, Perceptions and Cultural Encounters Since the Enlightenment, Ashgate 2003.
Wikipedia
 |
