The New Byzantines: An exploration of Greece's Middle East ties, which are resurfacing in a turbulent world

At one level, The New Byzantines is a quest for identity by a fourth-generation Greek-American, a rummage through the multiple layers that the Greek soul has developed in the long journey from ancient Greece, through western and eastern Roman empires and some four centuries of Ottoman rule to the modern state.

Byzantines, Hellenes, Romioi, Rum/Romaios/Romeiko, Mathews explores all of these with affection, as he does other inhabitants of northern Greece, such as the Pomaks and "Turkish" Muslims.

He has an excellent eye, and a vivid turn of phrase - from describing Athens as "lathered in concrete" to "the staggering amount of glassware" represented by Istanbul’s teacups, and the enticing, decomposing charm of Cairo.

Mathews’s book is a tremendous read, with a fresh outlook on the outposts he visits.

Epirus to the Turkish border - that long corridor from Ioannina to the east is almost twice as far as the distance from Ioannina to Athens.

Entering it brings one face to face with the peoples and history whose complexities made the Balkans the tinder box of Europe.

It is not for the faint-hearted, and, in our times, with notable exceptions such as Heinz A Richter and Mark Mazower, has been much neglected.

Mathews delves deep and proves a far more informative and durable guide than the travellers of the past.

His section on the Greeks of Israel is an important addition to understanding that rancorous land.

The Greek Orthodox Church, we learn, is the second largest landowner in the country and landlord of the Knesset – and scandalous in its financial dealings.

The Greek community there has sunk from 8,000-20,000 to its present thousand or so, but those also visited by Mathews in Cairo and Istanbul have sunk just as dramatically.

They are today shadowy communities, holding their head above water, but only just.

Particularly poignant is the state of the Greek Orthodox of Istanbul. These are down to 2,000, surviving but laden with an intolerable diplomatic baggage as they seek to continue a community dating back some 2,700 years.

Here, his reporting and analytical skills and sense of history are on full display. 

All this only made me want all the more to learn his take on the poet Constantine Cavafy’s Alexandria, once a thriving world of financiers, traders and merchants, and ancestral home of many of the friends I made in Greece.

He tellingly cites the under-read Drifting Cities trilogy, by the Cairo-born Alexandrian Stratis Tsirkas, which I would rate more highly than some of the philhellenes he quotes elsewhere.

Many of these remained outsiders to the Greece that I knew. My only encounter with Patrick Leigh Fermor, the British travel writer, was when I vainly tried to persuade him to declare against the Colonels-the right-wing military dictatorship that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974. 

Within the US orbit

Cyprus, Smyrna/Izmir, Beirut and Damascus, all of these, of course, had Greek communities, but to have included these would have been to dilute the thrust of Mathews’s main themes.

These are the economic revival of Greece and its strategic partnership with Israel. Shared concern for the growing weight of Turkey has driven the two countries together.

They cooperate in defence, energy and intelligence, and Israelis flood the flat market in Athens.

The Greek opposition attacks the ruling centre right government, New Democracy’s, "shameful exception" of resisting trade or sanctions measures on Israel over its genocide in Gaza. But Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has not budged.

Nor has his government wavered in its support for the US.

In the post-Colonels 1970s, socialist Prime Minister, Andreas Papandreou, campaigned on "out with the bases of death," a rallying cry against the US's network of military bases that dot Greece's Eastern Mediterranean coast. 

As prime minister, he did nothing. In 1990, Konstantinos Mitsotakis, upgraded the status of Souda Bay naval base on the island of Crete.

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And in 2019 and 2021, his son gave over four sites on the mainland, and turned Alexandroupolis into a major logistics node for US troops, which they have used to supply Ukraine amid its war with Russia. 

In describing all this, he lifts a veil that many of us did not know existed.

Mathews is imbued with respect for the country which received his great-grandfathers, Mihailis and Panayotis, and enabled his family to flourish.

"American dollars done wonders for Greece. Uncle Sam saved the country," Panayotis said, referring to the American Marshall Plan aid to post-war Greece.

For that generation, the civil war of the 1940s was a Manichean struggle. In today’s Greece, that societal rift has been largely healed, a consequence of the unity created by opposition to the Colonels that must have been particularly galling for them.

One symbol of the rift was the struggle by the youth movement named after Grigoris Lambrakis, whose assassination in May 1963 inspired Costa-Gavras’s film Z and whose assassins were active in the team carrying out the 1967 coup.

The memorial to Lambrakis on a street corner in Thessaloniki, Greece's second largest city, marks the spot where he was murdered.

For many people, it is a shrine. To some, he and those defeated in the civil war come from the tradition of klephts, rebels to Ottoman authority, far older than the socialists and communists, but, I would suggest, also part of what makes Greece the vibrant world which Mathews portrays so well.

The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East by Sean Mathews is published by Hurst and is released on 11 December.