The Golden Century

The eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth were the high point of Chian civilisation, and they are worth describing in some detail, because the more one knows about what existed on the island in 1820, the more one understands what was destroyed in 1822.

The wealth came first. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Chian merchant houses were operating in Constantinople, Smyrna, Alexandria, Livorno, Genoa, Venice, Trieste, Marseille, Amsterdam, and Vienna, and after Russia annexed the northern Black Sea coast and founded Odessa in 1794, they moved into the new Russian grain ports within a decade. Chian shipowners built and operated a merchant fleet. Chian bankers financed other people's trade. Every contemporary observer who mentions the subject describes Chios as the richest island in the Aegean and among the richest districts of the Ottoman Empire, and the consular reports of the period bear it out.

But the thing that really distinguished Chios was the school.

The Great School of Chios — the Scholi tis Chiou — developed over the eighteenth century into one of the finest educational institutions in the entire Greek-speaking world. It was funded by the island's merchants and, crucially, by the diaspora: men who had made money in Odessa or Livorno and sent a share of it home to pay for teachers, books, and buildings. It taught ancient and modern Greek, literature, rhetoric, mathematics, natural philosophy, and foreign languages. By the early nineteenth century it had an enrolment in the hundreds, drawn from across the Greek world and from the Balkans, a printing press, a collection of scientific instruments, and a library running into the tens of thousands of volumes — one of the great libraries of the Ottoman Empire, in an era when a Greek town of any size counted itself fortunate to have a few hundred books.

The School mattered because of what it was part of. The eighteenth century saw the emergence of what is called the Greek Enlightenment — a movement, carried largely by merchants and by scholars in the diaspora, which set out to reconnect the Greeks of the Ottoman Empire with the intellectual life of Western Europe: to translate, to publish, to found schools, to introduce modern science and modern philosophy, and to argue that a people who had produced Aristotle should not be content with what the empire currently permitted them. It was, in the beginning, an educational programme rather than a political one. It became a political one, and the transition is the intellectual prehistory of the Greek Revolution.

Chios was one of its principal engines. And the movement had its internal quarrels, which the island also hosted: Athanasios Parios, a leading figure of the Kollyvades — the conservative Orthodox revival that regarded the whole westernising project with deep suspicion — served as director of the Great School, and represented the counter-current with considerable force. The argument between the two tendencies, between Enlightenment and tradition, was conducted on Chios as everywhere else in the Greek world, and it has never entirely ended.

The island produced scholars of the first rank. Neophytos Vamvas (1770–1855), born on Chios, taught at the Great School, and went on to become a professor at the new University of Athens and to produce the first modern Greek translation of the Bible made from the original languages — a project of enormous cultural consequence and, as such projects always are, of considerable ecclesiastical controversy. Earlier, the island had given the West Leo Allatius (Leone Allacci, c. 1586–1669), born on Chios and taken to Italy as a boy, who converted to Catholicism, became one of the great polymath scholars of his century, and served as Custodian of the Vatican Library, in which capacity he personally supervised the transport of the Palatine Library from Heidelberg to Rome — one of the largest movements of books in European history.

And it produced the man who did more than anyone else to invent modern Greece.