Georgios Gennadius, Teacher

 

 

Georgios Gennadius                                 ΓΕΩΡΓΙΟΣ ΓΕΝΝΑΔΙΟΣ 

Born 1784                                                   Died 1854

                                            Section Four, Number 584A

The name Gennadius is familiar to most Athenians today because of the imposing Gennadius Library, a part of the American School of Classical Studies in downtown Athens. If you have never visited the Gennadius, you should. It is a treasure house of early books on Greece and the repository of the papers of many distinguished people including archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann and poet George Seferis.  What you may not know is that when it was founded by collector John Gennadius in 1926, he named it in honour of his father whose grave is tucked away in Section Four inside the original entrance to the First Cemetery.  Georgios Gennadius: teacher, member of the Filiki Etairia, and fighter during the Greek war of Independence was instrumental in founding many of the first educational institutions of modern Greece. His story brings together many familiar strands of Greece’s modern history: the influence of the Enlightenment, the importance of family connections in almost every individual endeavour, and the contribution of Greek merchant families who financed Greek schools in the Ottoman sphere and then, when freedom came, arrived in Greece to build not just the capital city but  the educational system which would be instrumental in forming the national identity of  the citizens in the fledgling state.

 

His portrait in the National Gallery of Greece.  (19^th century portraits never seem to capture the dynamism or life force of their subjects.)

 

His Life

Georgios Gennadius was born in 1784 in Selymbria, a town 67 kms west of Constantinople on the Sea of Marmara. His father was a priest and, when he died three years later, George’s mother returned with her son to Doliana and the embrace of relatives who could help. In the village of Doliana, he first attended school.

 

 

A small village today but many villages in Epirus were well off during the Ottoman period because they owned pack animals (camels, mules and donkeys) and controlled the area’s trade routes running east towards Constantinople and west to Italy.

 

His family then sent him to study in Ioannina 40 kilometres to the south. This was during the period that Ioannina was under the control of the notorious Ali Pasha. Ali had a complicated relationship with the ethnic Greeks in Epirus but tolerated Greek schools in the city (1). Georgios went on to study in Bucharest in today’s Romania; it was then the Ottoman Principality of Wallachia. There he studied at the Princely Academy, an institution that had been founded in 1679 and in which lessons were taught to the entire Orthodox community in the Greek language.

In 1804 he went on to university in Leipzig in Germany to study philology. In 1814, at the age of 30, he returned to Bucharest.

 

Dress for Greek merchants in Leipzig as depicted in this drawing in 1800. This was not quite what I expected. Suits became the norm much later.

  

 

The opportunity for Greeks to study at such institutions of learning while still under the Ottoman thumb requires a small aside.

The Millet System

The Ottomans had initiated the millet system as a means of controlling and ruling  their religious minorities.

 

In the case of the Orthodox community, the Orthodox Church under the Patriarch in Constantinople was put in charge of the “Rum” (Roman) millet: collecting taxes, controlling his own people, and offering whatever educational opportunities a subject people were able to put in place. In early days schooling, especially in what would eventually become Greece in 1830, was a rudimentary affair usually entailing a village priest holding classes for children aged 6 to 9 and teaching the rudiments of writing, arithmetic and religion. There was no money for separate school buildings, so these lessons, if held at all, took place in the church itself.  But, in the late 1600s, when Greeks began to take over larger parts of both the Ottoman government machine as well as their trade, a wealthy Greek merchant class emerged in the large commercial centres of the empire. In the Ottoman provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia, ethnic Greeks were often chosen as governors or ‘Princes’, -  still subject to the Porte in Constantinople but well placed to help their own communities if they managed to avoid incurring the wrath of the Sultan.

 Higher Education and Family Ties

As the wealth of this merchant elite increased, so did educational opportunities. They wanted the best for their children and were prepared to pay for it by funding school buildings, high schools, and the procurement teachers. The earliest of these merchant families were Phanariots from the Phanar district of Constantinople; later, many were Epirots who had first thrived at home under the Ottoman rule in their own area and then in Ottoman controlled Egypt.  Even later they would be joined by sea faring families from the Aegean islands. In an era of large families, networks of family run businesses were soon spreading their commercial reach well beyond the Ottoman sphere into Russia, and places like Livorno, London and Vienna which was to become a centre for the publication of books and articles in the Greek language.(2)

The importance of family ties to the advancement of promising young men during the Ottoman era cannot be overstated.  Not only was his family instrumental in funding his education, but, in George’s case, Bucharest itself  was likely chosen because his uncle was the abbot of a monastery there.

As the scions of merchant families went beyond the secondary studies, they went to European universities where they were exposed to events in Europe and ideas embodied in the Enlightenment, ideas which also included revolutionary ideas of national statehood.

Greek merchant families went from strength to strength. In the years preceding 1821, the Sultan had found it increasingly important to treat with European powers. The usefulness of this educated and Europeanized class of Greeks, so many of whom resided within his Empire but who had family members living in Europe, became vital because they proved to be better intermediaries with European leaders than their Ottoman overlords.

A graph showing the downward descent of the Ottoman Empire could easily be set against one showing a corresponding ascent of members of the educated Greek merchant community.

Of course, the raison d’etre of Greek schools in Ottoman territory and elsewhere was not revolution, but their existence and the world that they opened up for their students was one of the key factors in the process that would lead to the Greek War of Independence.

Our Teacher Becomes a Revolutionary

1815 saw Georgios as an assistant to famous educator Neophytos Doukas (3), at the Princely Academy of Bucharest. Then, in 1817 the Greek community of Russian Odessa invited him to help in the founding of a Greek School of Commerce in the thriving city.

 

By 1814, schools teaching in the Greek language had become large and very imposing

The invitation had come personally from Greek Corfiote Ioannis Capodistrias who was at the time foreign minister to the Russian Tsar Alexander 1.  Ethnic Greeks had become welcome settlers in Russian territory and this school soon became one of the best in the city. While in Odessa, Georgios came into close contact with Capodistrias who would become the first governor of the modern Greek state. This connection would determine much of his future career although he may not have realized it at the time.

 

In an era before steam and railways, it is amazing how well travelled men of Gennadius’ class were. Getting from Ioannina to Bucharest would have been an adventure all by itself, not to mention getting to Leipzig or Odessa.

 

 

To what extent Georgios became involved with The Filiki Etairia (4) in that city of increasingly revolutionary ferment is not clear but he certainly would have been aware of the winds of change. In 1819, at the invitation of Greek Prince Alexandros Soutsos who was then the designated Prince of Wallachia, he returned to Bucharest to teach at the Academy.

While in Bucharest he did become a member of the Filiki Etairia - just in time for the disastrous defeat of the Greeks’ first incursion into Ottoman territory in 1821. He was forced to flee and ended up in Dresden where he began to study yet another discipline, - theology, a study he believed would help prepare him for his future role as an educator in a free Greece. Theology might seem like a strange discipline to our modern concept of education, but this was an age of faith and The Orthodox church had, in any case, been intimately involved in the education Georgios had received in Doliana, Ioannina, and Bucharest.  He had come to believe that introducing a strong moral element to education would be as vital as reading, writing, and arithmetic in moulding Greek citizens out of the unpromising clay created by 400 years of neglect and servitude under the Ottomans, the Franks before them, and even under the Byzantine government before that.  

1n 1826 he returned to Nauplio to take part in the last 4 years of the struggle for Greek independence. His role was less as a fighter, although he did see action, but more as a mediator and unifier among the many factions in Nauplio which had emerged and whose squabbling was so debilitating to the struggle. During that period, his speeches to various disgruntled factions smoothed many a ruffled feather.

 

Nauplio in 1825 – a far cry from Leipzig, Bucharest, or Odessa

 

 The New State and Early Education within its Boundaries

Below the line drawn by the European powers between Volos to the Gulf of Preveza, education had not progressed as it had in the large Greek speaking mercantile centres of the Ottoman Empire. It is an irony of the revolution that not one of the Greek schools that had contributed so much to the desire for a Greek state was within its new borders. In fact, most people who identified as Greeks did not live within the borders of the new country at all.  In 1830 Greece had a population of one point eight million, 98 percent of whom lived in the countryside. If questioned about their loyalties most might have cited family, their own local community, and Orthodoxy. The majority had yet to see themselves as part of the broader Greek nation. This imprinting of a national identity was vital to the survival of the country as a unified entity. Kapodistria  and his appointed educators were faced with something of a tabula rasa (at least from their point of view; many locals resented this assessment) on which to work and none were in doubt as to the importance of education in accomplishing their goals.

As early as 1822, the First Greek National Assembly had advocated free elementary education for all citizens, girls as well as boys, and the establishment of middle and high schools in all parts of the country. This was very modern thinking for the times. And, unlike the situation under the Ottomans where the Church had been in charge of education, the new system was to be created and monitored by a government ministry. The Church was not ignored, of course, but incorporated into a centrally controlled educational system which would design text books and curricula to meet the needs of the nation.

In 1828 Kapodistria arrived in Aigina, Greece’s first functioning capital. He immediately appointed Georgios Gennadius together with Georgios Konstantas and Ioannis Benthylos to compile an official grammar of the Greek language. The Greek language itself was a thorny issue, one that needed ironing out.  Katharevousa, the ‘pure’ version of Greek, won out over both the everyday spoken language (demotic) and ancient Greek which had also been favoured by many.

In Aigina, Georgios aided in the founding of an orphanage to accommodate the children whose families had died in the struggle and, in 1829, he became the principal of the Central School of Aegina (Κεντρική Σχολή της Αίγινα).  His stated goal was to create the new generation of free Hellenic citizens. (Να πλάσωμεν άλλην γενεάν ελεθερων Ελλήνων Πολιτών). The Central school (also called the Eynard after the Swiss banker and Philhellene who financed it) was designed by architects Stamatis Kleanthis and Eduard Schaubert and was the first neoclassical building ever to be built in the modern state.

 

The Central or Eynard School

The Central School was transferred to the new capital Athens in 1834 and is still going strong today. (5)  Georgios remained its principal until his death.  In 1832, he was also appointed first director of the National Library of Greece.  The founding of a National Library was an important step. Its stated aim, along with housing all manner of intellectual production, was to locate, collect, organize, describe and preserve the perpetual evidence of Greek culture and its uptake over time.  He also founded the Society of the Friends of Education (Φιλεκπαιδευτική Εταιρεία, ") and  taught at  Athens’ Arsakeion School and at the University of Athens. 

Among his students was Constantinos Paparrigopoulos (6) the man whose histories would set forth the concept of a continuous and uninterrupted history of the Greek nation from ancient to Byzantine, and on to contemporary times. His history was taught in Greek schools as early as the 1850s and did much to create a unifying context for Greek identity separate from the broad definition of Orthodoxy under the Ottomans (while still encompassing it) but one separate from other national entities that were emerging in the Balkan states at the same time.  (7)

Georgios was one of the founders of the Archaeological Society of Athens in 1837. Uncovering ancient Greece was of tantamount importance to the uncovering the nation’s past. A numismatic collection which is now housed in the mansion of archaeologist Heinrich Schleimann in central Athens was also his initiative and he had a hand in the founding of the Rizarios School in the capital.

Gennadius took part in the initiation of so many institutions of learning in the 1830s and 40s that he is widely perceived as the teacher of an entire generation. Fully involved until the end, he was the leader of the movement to free Epirus from Ottoman control when he died of cholera in 1854.

His Character and Personal Life

Georgios Gennadius was a unifier at a time when such men were sorely needed. As principal of the Central School (then called the Royal School in honour of the king) he received Theodoros Kolokotronis, the great hero of the revolution and a man deeply distrusted by the government at the time. He addressed the entire high school on the fabled Hill of the Pnyx on Oct 8, 1838 and  stressed  the historical continuity of the Greek nation and the importance of an education, - both ideas dear to Gennadius’ heart. 

Gennadius’ wife was Artemida, a member of the well known Benizelos family of Athens which, during the Ottoman period, had produced leaders appointed to deal with their overlords on behalf of the Greek population of the city.  By Athenian standards, they were wealthy. The Benizelos home on Adrianou Street in the Plaka, the only example of a Greek home built during the Ottoman period, has been renovated recently and is now open to the public.

 

The Benizelos house today

Artemida and Georgios had eight children, four boys and four girls and they were very well educated indeed.  One daughter, Kleoniki, would become a sculptress of note.

 

 

Kleoniki in a very modern looking portrait by Ludwig Thiersh

 Another sister was also an artist.  Their son Panayiotis studied in America becoming an agriculturist and teacher, another, Anastasios, became a teacher at the university and editor of the Newspaper Athena. And then, there was Ioannis, who has become the best known Gennadius of all.

 

John Gennadius (1844-1932)

Ioannis was born in 1844 in Athens and became a diplomat, man of letters, and bibliophile. He spent a great deal of his life in England, married an English woman, and is buried there. Over his lifetime, he accumulated a library of over 26,000  books.

 

Ioannis at home

After searching for a worthy recipient for his collection and one able to finance a building to hold it, he settled on the American School of Classical Studies in Athens in 1922.

 

The Gennadius

The Gennadius Library, dedicated to his father, was inaugurated in 1926 and was the last public neoclassical building to be built in Athens. Compare it to this:

 

The Eynard, 1830

It is strikingly similar to his father’s school on Aigina, something which seems to me to be very fitting. The father taught in the first neoclassical building to be built in Greece and his son’s library is housed in the last, each building a lasting  monument to their storied lives.

Although Ioannis is buried in England, the bottom tier of his grave marker reads: Son of Georgios Gennadius, the Greek Patriot.

 Family...

 

 

Ioannis’ grave in England

The Grave

 

 Section Four, Number 584A

The cemetery lists him as buried here. The more prominent names on the stele belong to his son. Since he died in an epidemic, his bones may have been brought here at a later date. A small mystery!

The Map

 

Footnotes:

(1)    In 1648 the School of Epiphanios Igoumenos was founded in Ioannina. It was followed by the Gionma School (1672 - 1800), the Maroutsi School (1742 - 1749) and the Kaplaneios School (1805 - 1820). In fact Ioannina became the centre for the ten schools that were founded in Epirus during the Ottoman period. These schools were supported by emigrants from Ioannina and Epirus who had settled mainly in Venice. Ali Pasha was cruel and mercurial but many Greeks prospered under his strange rule.

 

(2)   The editor of Hermes o Logios  was the  Greek cleric and intellectual                  Anthimos Gazis and its purpose was to promote a national awakening among Greeks in the Ottoman sphere and the diaspora. It was supported by the Bucharest Philological society during the period that Gennadius taught there. When the revolution did occur in 1821, the Austrian authorities  closed it down. 

(3)Neophytos Doukas was a priest and scholar, one of the many clerics who contributed to Greek letters before the revolution. His star was eclipsed for a time after 1830 because he was an advocate for ancient Greek becoming the official language of the Greek state rather than Katharevousa.At the request of Capodistria, he became the administrator of the Orphanage in Aigina.

(4)  The Filiki Etairia was started by three Greeks in Odessa expressly with revolution in mind. For more see: https://athensfirstcemeteryinenglish.blogspot.com/2021/01/emmanuel-xanthos-and-filiki-etaireia.html

(5)  It is now called the 1^st Experimental High School of Athens.

(6)   Paparrigopoulos’ theory of Greek history can be seen in more detail in http://athensfirstcemeteryinenglish.blogspot.com/2018/02/constantinos-paparrigopoulos.html

 (7)   The article: https://www.espaciotiempoyeducacion.com/ojs/index.php/ete/article/view/137/104 by Theodore G Zervas is a good source for more on Greek education at that time.

Sources

 

https://etetradio.wordpress.com/2020/09/26/1838-10-08_kolokotronis-logos-pnyka_en/  Theodore’s Kolokotroni speech at Pnyka, Acropolis, 8 Oct. 1838