Greek War of Independence : Impact, Perceptions, and Transformation Within and Beyond the Empire

The Greek Revolution of 1821 was not merely a national uprising―it was a transnational event that reshaped the Eastern Mediterranean and reverberated across the globe. Moving beyond traditional nationalist historiography, this study draws on recent transnational and Ottoman-centered scholarship to examine how diaspora networks, European Philhellenes, and great power rivalries transformed a regional revolt into an international cause. The Ottoman context is treated not as a passive or declining backdrop, but as a dynamic, multiethnic polity grappling with reform, resistance, and the challenges of maintaining imperial cohesion. Drawing on multilingual and cross-regional sources, the contributors explore how the Revolution was perceived, contested, and reshaped across diverse cultural and political spaces, embedding 1821 within the broader currents of nineteenth-century revolution, diplomacy, and state formation.

Alexandros Lamprou holds a PhD in Turkish history from Leiden University and is currently a lecturer at the University of the Aegean in Greece. He has taught Turkish and Greek history at different universities in Greece, Turkey, and Germany. His research interests include state-society relations, anti-minority campaigns, and the historiography of the early republican period in Turkey. His current research project focuses on Greek refugees in the Middle East and Africa during World War II.

Nikos Christofis is Assistant Professor at the Department of Language and Intercultural Studies, at the University of Thessaly. He holds additional positions as an adjunct lecturer at the Hellenic Open University and an affiliate researcher at the Netherlands Institute at Athens (NIA). He has published extensively in Greek, English, Turkish, Chinese, and Spanish, including over seventy articles and book chapters, eleven edited books, and a monograph. He is the chief editor of the series Mediterranean Politics for Transnational Press and New Directions in Turkish Studies for Berghahn Books.

Leonidas Moiras received his PhD in modern Ottoman history from the Democritus University of Thrace. He has taught Ottoman History and Ottoman paleography at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He has participated in several research programs and he is the author and co-author of four books His research interests included Ottoman Political and Intellectual History, the Young Turk Revolution, Balkan Nationalisms, Ottoman Westernization, and the Greek Revolution of 1821.