Dimitris Krallis examines the historical role of the state and state institutions in the lives of the people of Lesvos.

There are a number of historical continuities that mark the geography of the northern Aegean and especially Lesvos that are more or less obvious. Linguistically, Greek had and still has a dominant presence, now in its third millennium on the island. Even in place names, we easily detect the linguistic imprint of the ancient language on the island’s topography. This is evident in examples from the analysis of D. Matzouranis:

Three kilometers south of the ancient Pyrra there are the rural sites of Lefkada, Temenos, Temenitis (hill) and then Tyda, occupying a total of roughly 2500 stremata. There is no doubt as to the correspondence of these sites to the place names ‘Tydai’, ‘Lefki Akti’ and ‘Temenos’ in the land register. ^[1]

Politically, culturally, and economically, the island’s peculiar relationship with the opposite coast, both the Troad and the so-called Mytilenean peraia, was not disturbed until the early twentieth century; the recent dramatic rise of tourism from Turkey reminding us of these ancient geographical realities.

Some other historical continuities are, however, less obvious. Here, I would like to talk about a less discussed continuity, that in the field of administration. Lesvos and its cities were integrated into the Roman world relatively early on. In the first century BCE, as the island fell under Roman rule, its city-states submitted to Rome, while retaining their internal independence and self-government. As elsewhere in the Roman Empire, the process of romanization took years to turn the local Greeks into Romans. The first inroads took place in the area of Roman law, which influenced more and more the life of the population. In the third century the granting of Roman citizenship to every free inhabitant of the empire created Romans out of all free inhabitants of Lesvos. Then, in late antiquity, from the fourth to the sixth century, the streamlining of taxation, the more effective registration of all lands, and the consolidation of an intrusive Roman bureaucracy, which interfered more intensely in city affairs, brought New Rome (Constantinople) directly into the affairs of the locals.

You may ask: why should we care about land registration and taxation? So let us look at this issue. In modern Greece, every time something happens that is beyond our powers, a disaster or a major let down, we wonder aloud: “but where is the state?!” (που είναι το κράτος;) Well, in Lesvos the state, the centrally directed state based in Rome or in New Rome, that is, Constantinople, and later Ottoman Kostantiniya, this very state has been continuously present from the first census, the one that led the family of Jesus from Nazareth to Bethlehem, until today. So, starting from the Roman censuses, continuing in late antiquity to a period in which the need for stable fiscal planning led to tax reform and stricter registration of both persons and assets, we enter a period in which the inhabitants of Lesvos get to know their place both in the village or town and in the state cadasters. This reality intensified during the Middle Ages during the so-called Byzantine period and continued during the years of the Ottomans whose bureaucratic bent left us rich records of detailed information about the island’s population.

All this to explain how, despite its position on the borders of the national state in modern times or its peripheral character during the Roman or Ottoman periods, Lesvos was for over 1500 years a meticulously recorded quantity in the administrative records of its rulers. As for its population, given their continuous interplay with the state authority in question for more than a millennium, they retained a unique experience of conciliation and dialogue with these same authorities. In this, of course, Lesvos is not unique. Like the lands of Greece and Anatolia, it has lived as part of bureaucratically complex and developed states for many more years than most of Western European provinces, regions, or states. In other words, for centuries Lesvos was able to answer the question “where is the state?” with relative clarity: because it had simply always lived in close rapport with it.

The reader will again ask, why should I care about that? How does this relationship between the state and the islander of the northern Aegean acquire a certain historical significance? The answer can be summarized as follows: in their daily life, the Lesbian citizens or subjects of the Roman polity, the Ottoman Empire and the modern Greek state interact primarily with members of their close family and friends circle, their neighbours, farmers, shopkeepers and other private business owners. These social, economic and everyday contacts, unfolding in a more or less local context, play a central role in the formation of their identity as, for example, a Moliviatis, a farmer, a student, an athlete, a father, etc. Compared to these myriad interactions and contacts, the relationship with the state may appear rather marginal. And yet, each of these personas an islander inhabited at any given time, these qualities constituting an individual’s identity at the local level, is more or less anchored in conventions and regulations issued occasionally by the state entity in question to delimit daily life within supra-local frameworks. Thus, the Roman state of late antiquity and the Middle Ages or the Ottomans and later on the so-called Athenian state (το κράτος των Αθηνών), were all to play, through the process of registration described above, a central role in the constitution of local subjectivities, which were continuously in dialogue with myriad other local identities within the state in question. In short, the census with the attendant registration of people and assets, but also the official recording of assets within specific geographical realities, this outwardly induced placement of each individual in his local geography and in the cadasters of an imperial or national centre, influenced the life of the people of Lesvos throughout the centuries.

Both during Roman times, from the first century BCE to 1461 CE and during the period of Ottoman rule over Lesvos, the state of Rome, New Rome and the Sublime Porte in Constantinople were in dialogue with local communities which they approached by treating their inhabitants first as members of local tax groups with collective obligations to the state treasury and only secondly as individuals with distinct economic and social interests. Perhaps because both Rome and the Ottomans, from the 14^th century onwards, conquered territories city by city and community by community, the structuring of their relations with their subjects was based on identities that were locally collective rather than on aggregations of individualized citizens. Simply put, Roman and Ottoman conquest and domination were based on city contracts with Rome and the Sublime Porte, not on some generalized kneeling of conquered Greeks and Romans before the conqueror. I focus quite a bit on this reality because this particular administrative relationship between the local community and the state for centuries shaped the political and social conscience of those populations at the local level. The state may have been far away, but its institutions approached towns and villages in a way that fashioned strong local identities. In short, communitarianism and localism were not only the outgrowth of local dynamics. They were also the result of trans-local initiatives and forces.

Here, then, we observe a series of unintended consequences. Already in the so-called Byzantine years and specifically in the tenth century, we see that this communal organisation, which the central administration itself had tailored to its own needs, began to produce socio-economic realities that were not to the imperial court’s liking. A society coherently structured at the local level, through a series of centrally directed state policies, created local interdependencies and relationships that turned the general population into clients and dependents of local elites who, in turn, increasingly competed with the state and its embodiment, the emperor. As the ‘powers that be’ imposed their will on local communities, the relationship between the citizens and the guarantor of legitimacy and protector of the state, the emperor, was broken, creating a political climate that was dangerous for the central authority, which was to face a series of revolts by the provincial aristocracy during this period. In an attempt to balance the situation, the emperors of the time legislated and through a series of provisions sought to limit the power of the ‘powerful’ (the so-called dynatoi), emphasising the paternalistic nature of a central authority focused on protecting the many from their local oppressors. Somewhat paradoxically, then, the same central authority that imposed the grouping of citizens for tax purposes had to reinvent the individual in order to build a direct personal relationship between the emperor and the citizen, a relationship that would bypass communal relations of solidarity and dependence.

Here, then, we find another continuity with the Ottoman period. In his account of his youth, during the years of the so-called Tanzimat, that period from the mid to late 19^th century in which Greek communities in the empire flourished significantly, Stratis Kalligeris, registered in the Ottoman registers of Sykamnia in North Lesvos, vividly describes the time of the olive harvest, the liomazoma. Born into a wealthy family with influence in the area, young Stratis, whose diary records his life up to the age of 22, when he settled in Alexandria, Egypt, tells us the following:

All the locals around the month of October come to the gathering of the olives. It was at that time, when the locals, once they woke up were led to the olive groves. It was at that time that our yards were full of women and men who were waiting to depart together. But, before their departure, while it was still dark, we prepared a meal, rogos, made with flour, water, onions and oil, or other things, all for the dependents (δούλοι) whose leader was then Michael Vontakis, who had served about 10 years in our house. Many times they also rose in the middle of the night to knead, so that the bread be ready around the morning. As for us [the children] we did not cease to rise very early in the morning to see the groups of people leaving for the olive groves. The oil harvest continues from the end of September to the end of December or even February. When everyone has finished with the olives, there is a great feast. The men and women (those who were present at the end of the olive harvest) go up to the village in the middle of the day, tie on long rods still called golas, and from time to time, shooting, singing and laughing, still arriving at the master’s house, they drink raki and the like until they are drunk.^[2]

How does the above text relate to the discussion of the social, economic, and political organization of Lesvos’ communities in the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires? Ignoring for a moment Stratis’ atrocious spelling in the original Greek, let us focus for a moment on the vignette he offers his reader. We have here a description of perhaps the most important annual activity of the olive-growing regions. As the young Stratis explains, the olive harvest unfolds from autumn to early winter and mobilizes the village community. In these few lines of his diary, the local social stratification, the distinction between “powerful” (of Byzantine law) and “local”, “slaves” (the term deployed by Stratis, δούλος, has an ambiguous meaning akin to “dependent”), is clearly visible. Our modern reflexes stumble over the image that emerges from this text. Instead of social classes clearly lined up against each other, here we see an organically interconnected society where the “domestic” working class come to the “master’s” home in order to be offered the “rogos” for breakfast before heading to the estates. At the end of the harvest there is a big feast where those who worked on the olives drink and get drunk at the master’s house.

Relationships of hierarchy, economic exploitation and dependence are here articulated within the framework of a local paternalism that would have been familiar to the Byzantine legislator. The interesting thing, of course, was that the reaction of the Ottoman administration was not very different from that  of the Byzantine authorities that preceded it. Writing a report to the authorities in Constantinople regarding Ioannis Kralis, an village elder from Molyvos and a family friend of Konstantinos, father of Stratis, Namik Kemal, the governor (Mutasarrif) of Lesvos and prominent figure of the late Ottoman period, described Ioannis in the following words: “so far, he has not rendered any good service and I have never seen a particularly benevolent behaviour. As soon as he is given the opportunity he seeks to secure his personal interests by terrorizing the locals.”^[3] Ioannis did not differ much socially from the “gentleman” of Sykamnia, who opened his house to the “native” cultivators, offering breakfast as well as opportunities for feasting and revelry. The juxtaposition of local with state paternalism, the difference between the imperial idea of an individualised approach to justice and the local reality of social relations characterised by a web of dependencies between unequal but organically bound citizens, refers to Byzantium and reminds us that despite the constant presence of state power in the provinces and especially in Lesvos, from antiquity to the 20th century, local rites and traditions have never ceased to be in dialogue with supra-local forces and diktats.