Despite deep historical, cultural, and genetic parallels between Greece and Italy, the two nations are perceived very differently by their neighbours and the wider world. For Greeks, this difference is not abstract; it is personal, and often painful. Their national identity is cross-examined far more frequently, their history debated or appropriated, and their cultural continuity challenged in ways Italians simply do not experience.
Both nations are heirs to some of the most influential civilisations in human history. Both have maintained a continuous presence in the Mediterranean for millennia. Both have experienced invasion, migration, empire, and social transformation. Yet modern Italians are rarely asked to justify their connection to ancient Rome, while modern Greeks often find themselves confronted with questions about their relationship to the Greeks of antiquity.
For centuries, Greeks have maintained substantial linguistic, cultural and historical continuity, yet racially charged theories from the 19th and early 20th centuries continue to echo in modern discourse. One of the most damaging came from Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, a German historian who claimed that “not a trace of ancient Greek blood” survived in the modern population. His theory, long disproven by modern science, nevertheless seeded a persistent myth that Greeks were somehow entirely “Slavicised” or “Albanianised.”
In the digital age, this questioning has been significantly amplified. Numerous online forums and social media platforms, often influenced by nationalistic perspectives rather than academic scholarship, routinely recycle politically motivated narratives. Greeks watch as their heritage is either disputed, treated as a prize to be claimed or their cultural legacy reframed or appropriated by outsiders. It is the frustrating feeling of being told that your own story does not belong to you.
The Geopolitical Dimension
Why are Greeks so often subjected to this scrutiny while Italians-who share similar ancient roots and shared Mediterranean culture, are left in peace?
The answer lies not in culture or history, but in geopolitics.
Italy was never conquered by the Ottoman Empire; Greece was. Italy’s borders have been stable and internationally recognised since the mid-20th century, and its neighbours are all long-stable Western democracies. Greece, by contrast, sits at a historic civilizational crossroads where identity, territory, and history have been violently contested well into modern times.
While Italy is buffered by the European core, Greece sits at the intersection of Europe, the Balkans, and the Near East. This dual position- Hellenic Mediterranean in origin and culture, and Balkan in geography, places Greece in a volatile neighbourhood. It is surrounded by states and narratives where history is frequently weaponized for political utility.
Regional Tensions and Historical Friction
Turkiye’s ongoing disputes with Greece over sovereignty, airspace, and maritime boundaries in the Aegean, are routine and are frequently accompanied by nationalist rhetoric, inflaming historical sensitivities, on both sides, which add further layers to an already complex historical relationship. In the digital sphere, some commentators, motivated by political agendas, territorial sensitivities, or ideological convictions, insist that modern Greeks bear little or no connection to the ancient people whose achievements they themselves admire.
Such assertions ignore the historical reality and conclusions of many historians, linguists, and genetic researchers that point to the Greeks of antiquity, the Greeks of Byzantium, and the Greeks of today as a continuous people. Yet acknowledging this continuity would mean acknowledging that large parts of Asia Minor and Anatolia were deeply Greek, shaped by Hellenic and Greco–Roman civilisation for millennia.
For example: Archaeologists in Turkiye as well as Turkish museums and publications often label Greek-Byzantine artefacts as “Roman,” (Rum). The term Rum is a legacy of the Eastern Roman Empire, whose population was predominantly Greek–speaking and culturally Greek. The terminology is historically valid, but its selective use can reflect a reluctance to recognise the Hellenic imprint on the region. It is easier to speak of “Romans” than to acknowledge that the land was once Greek before being conquered by the Ottomans.
North Macedonia provides another glaring example. For decades, successive governments in North Macedonia promoted aspects of ancient Macedonian symbolism as part of a broader nation-building project, a practice that Greeks viewed as historical appropriation.
Tourists visiting the country cannot fail to notice that the capital, Skopje, is dominated by grand Greek-inspired neoclassical monuments and architecture, including a towering statue of Alexander the Great. Critics argue that such projects represent a blatant attempt to appropriate elements of Greece’s historical heritage in order to legitimise their own modern national identity. Nevertheless, nationalist rhetoric continues to portray modern Greeks as impostors in their own history while presenting North Macedonians as the authentic heirs of Alexander’s legacy. These claims persist despite the spirit and provisions of the 2018 Prespa Agreement.
This has understandably angered Greeks. Such rhetoric chooses to ignore the historical evidence that ancient Macedon like Sparta, Athens, Thebes and other kingdoms and states of the ancient Greek world, was a Hellenic kingdom that was part of the wider Hellenic civilisation. It was from this foundation that ancient Macedon helped spread Hellenic culture, establishing Greek colonies and kingdoms extending into the Near East and as far as Central Asia. The later Ptolemaic dynasty, itself of Macedon, established a Greek ruling house on the pharaonic throne in Egypt.
Other regional neighbours such as Albania and Bulgaria, also due to geopolitical and medieval historical issues, maintain grievances, assertions and or minority claims that keep the past alive as an active political weapon.
The Trauma of Rupture and the Weight of Romanticism
Italy did not experience the seismic demographic ruptures that defined modern Greece. Greece lost millions of people and core ancestral lands during the conquest and subsequent collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The trauma continued with the 1922 Asia Minor Catastrophe in Smyrna and other coastal cities, the Pontic Genocide, the Constantinople pogroms of 1955, and of course much more recently the 1974 occupation and division of Cyprus now existing almost in a bipolar state. These are not ancient history; they are living memories that profoundly shape Greek psychology, national defence, and foreign policy.
Part of Greece’s unique vulnerability also stems from Western academic romanticism. From the Enlightenment of the late 17th-century through the Philhellenic movement of the 19th-century, Northern European intellectuals mythologised ancient Greece as the blueprint of Western civilization.
Because academia of the time, placed ancient Greece on an impossible, idealised high pedestal, modern Greeks were subsequently subjected to an unfair purity assessment. They were and continue to be expected by outsiders to look and act like living statues of Pericles rather than a modern, resilient Mediterranean people shaped by Roman, Greco Roman / Byzantine, and Ottoman centuries. When outsiders encounter a modern Greece that is dynamic, complex, and distinctively Balkan-Mediterranean, they misinterpret this evolution as a “loss” of authenticity.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Greece does not face these “identity” pressures because its culture is fragile or its history is fabricated. It faces them because of geography and history. Italy faces few comparable challenges and does not face identity erasure because its neighbourhood is relatively stable and its borders are uncontested.
Greece, on the other hand bears the psychological and geopolitical weight of living where empires collided and borders were shifted by global powers with vested political aspirations in the region. This experience is not entirely dissimilar to that of its neighbours, many of whom have also been shaped by centuries of occupation, war and cultural upheaval.
This also highlights a profound double standard in how Western discourse and regional geopolitics treat Greece compared to Italy, inflicting a very real psychological and cultural toll that modern Greeks must continually navigate. Greece’s unique vulnerabilities stem from geopolitics, neighbourhood instability, and historical trauma rather than any lack of historical or cultural continuity
Greece is a Mediterranean country located in the Balkans, and that intersection has long shaped how the world perceives it. Yet, the persistence of Greek identity, surviving centuries of foreign rule, demographic upheaval, and constant external revisionism, is a testament to a cultural continuity that no amount of geopolitical friction can erase.
The true strength of a nation and its people is reflected in its resilience and Greece’s history demonstrates a remarkable capacity for survival, adaptation and renewal. If that resilience has sustained Greek identity through centuries of upheaval, it can also help Greece build stronger regional relationships and remain a nation that others look to with admiration and respect. As it has done in the past, it can do so again.
*Steven Karabatsos is a Melbourne-based writer and commentator with interests in history, geopolitics, public policy, science, and human-interest stories.
