ATHENS – Historian Mark Mazower was granted honorary Greek citizenship on January 28, in a special ceremony at the Ministry of the Interior, in the presence of Minister of the Interior Makis Voridis.

The British historian and the Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University was granted honorary citizenship by a decision of the Ministry.

In his books, Mazower delves into modern Greek history, the history of the Balkans, 20th century Europe, and international history. He has a BA and doctorate in Classics and Philosophy from the University of Oxford, as well as an MA in International Affairs from Johns Hopkins University. He lives in New York City and contributes regularly for the Financial Times and other newspapers and journals. He is the founding director of the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative.

It should be noted that a special event was also hosted on January 28 at the Athens War Museum amphitheater for the presentation of Mazower’s latest book, entitled The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe. As Mazower notes in the book, the Greek cause revealed “for the first time in modern history the transformative international power of public opinion expressed in print and fueled through associational life.”

Achieving independence was “the greatest miracle of all” for the Greeks, Mazower noted. It was the first successful revolution in which a people claimed liberty for themselves and overthrew an entire empire to attain it, transforming diplomatic norms and the direction of European politics forever, and inaugurating a new world of nation-states, which continues to the present day.

PM Mitsotakis addresses presentation of Mark Mazower’s book on the Greek Revolution in Athens

Historian Mark Mazower, from his earliest work in the 1990s on Greek history, has been devoted to firmly placing Greek history in the greater context of the history of Europe, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Friday.

Mitsotakis delivered a videotaped address for the presentation of the Greek edition of “The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe” which Mazower was expected to attend at the War Museum in Athens.

Mentioning that the historian became an honorary citizen of Greece, the premier said that Mazower’s recent book is “another sample of his scientific zeal and genuine love of his second country,” will contribute to Greek historiography and will prove a landmark in the Greek people’s diligent search for national self-awareness.

The book leaves no space for comforting stereotypes or myths, and looks at the role of foreign powers in Greece as well as their contributions to the building of the modern state, the premier noted. While the fighters of the Greek Revolution of 1821 came from different backgrounds, “all of them shared the belief that the newborn nation-state must be viable, and for this to happen it had to be modern, just, and productive: in other words, a Greece with a rigorous society and with economic and geopolitical power, exactly the path the country wants to follow today, two eons later,” Mitsotakis said. Mazower, he stressed, has refused to give in to a politically motivated point of view, and “while his books may be political, they are not politically affiliated.”

The book’s Greek translation is by Kostas Kouremenos and published by Alexandria publications.