Replacing Greece's quasi-feudal system

Patronage in Post-Independence Greece

"By the middle of the nineteenth century Greece had the trappings of democracy (though women did not get the vote until the middle of the 1950s), but lacked the infrastructure to implement it. For centuries the Greeks had lived a quasi-feudal existence, in which peasants owed allegiance to wealthy landowners or merchants. The drafting of a more modern constitution by westernized Greek liberals did nothing to alter the hard fact that Greece continued to survive, as it always had, by means of a medieval system of patronage. It made a great deal of sense in Byzantine and Ottoman periods for a poor person to have a patron who could represent him to the powers that be in times of trouble. This system of patronage and nepotism persisted in the nineteenth century, with politicians as the patrons, demanding votes in return for favors and jobs.

One of the more alarming aspects of the vote-rigging system was the employment by politicians of klefts to intimidate rural peasants into voting the right way. Originally mountain-dwelling brigands preying on Ottoman tax collectors and everyone else, the klefts had played an important role in the War of Independence as irregular troops. After independence, they were unemployed: new political realities made it hard for them to return to their jobs as the private armies of local warlords, there was insufficient legal employment, and many of them reverted to banditry or turned to guerrilla warfare in the northern Greek territories still held by Turkey."

Page 317, from Athens: From Ancient Ideal to Modern City, by Robin Waterfield. Published by Basic Books, 2004.

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