Lord Byron’s Last Journey

The uprising against the Ottoman Empire and the birth of the Greek nation – told as a tragicomedy.

The Greek War of Independence (1821-29): a rebellion in which nothing was the way it appeared to be. It drew in thousands of Philhellenes from all corners of Europe: visionaries, fools, impostors, crooks, idealists – among them the poet Lord Byron. Once there, their illusions were shattered by the situation on-site: the »struggle for freedom« was led by gangs of bandits, warlords and owners of large etstate; the Muslim and Jewish populations were murdered or expelled in the first months of the war, while the Ottomans did nothing but administer their eroding empire and the British creditors acted as self-serving speculators.
Richard Schuberth tells the story of the war in sharp contrast to national constructions – as an epic tragicomedy, which above all caused unimaginable suffering for the general public. His study shows the various facets of this war and its protagonists, construeing this conflict as the »umbilical hernia of modernity«, during which many of the topoi and ideologies of our time made an appearance: media propaganda, orientalism or nationalism.