| Summary/Abstract |
The civil war in Mount Lebanon and the massacres of Christians in Damascus and other cities in 1860 ushered in a new era to the Levant region, leading to the establishment of the Mount Lebanon Mutassarifate and strengthening the move towards confessionalism in public life. This paper, based on unpublished documents from the Archives of the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as articles in the Greek press and literary reviews, aims to explore the image of the various ethnic, linguistic and religious groups of Syria in the Kingdom of Greece during the 1840s–1860s. The presence of Greek merchants in the region and above all the strong ecclesiastical ties of the local Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch with the Constantinople Patriarchate add broader perspectives to the Greek ‘discovery’ of Syria. The character and ‘mission’ of the Greek Orthodox Church in the region was analysed by the Greek consuls in Beirut, who also formulated or advanced blueprints for the aims of Greek ‘cultural diplomacy’ in Syria. The different shades of opinion were highlighted during the first Greek ‘humanitarian intervention’, in the summer and autumn of 1860, when Greek war vessels sailed to Beirut to assist the needy and transport some local Christian refugees to Greece. For the government in Athens, this mission was a question of prestige. For Greek journalists and writers, it had much broader implications since it reinforced a feeling of cultural affinity between Greeks of the nation-state and the Christians of Syria.
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