The growth of folklore studies and the interest in demotic cultural practices in Greece arose under the influence of larger European trends transmitted primarily by Greek intellectuals abroad.
Among the Enlightenment generation of Greek intellectuals (1770-1820), two opposing attitudes towards traditional culture emerged, one rationalistic, the other more idealistic. The former, prevalent in the Paris-based circle around Adamantios Koraīs, saw the common people as the vulgar societal stratum, tainted by ignorance and superstitions. Such scholars sought, therefore, to educate the masses by imparting to them the glorified achievements of classical Greece. The other attitude was developed by Bucharest-based Dīmītrios Katartzīs (1725–1807) and his followers: it valorized the language then spoken in Constantinople. Daniīl Filippidīs (1750/55–1832) and Grīgorios Kōnstantas (1753–1853), followers of Katartzīs, published Geographia neoterikī (“Modern geography”) in Vienna in 1791, one of the first studies of local folklore. It focused on the (mainly contemporary) culture of a specific place (the Pelion).
The studies of Katartzīs’s followers, with their focus on a specific locale, were less than favourably received. Given the new Greek state’s need to establish its national identity and consciousness, folk tradition was to be embraced as a collective, national whole (i.e. thematically), so as to demonstrate the uniformity of the customs and traditions of the Greek nation – both within the newly-founded Greek state and in the Greek-speaking areas as yet under alien rule. The construction of a national identity was based, at that particular time, upon the duality “us and the ancient Greeks”.
The continuity between ancient Greece and modern Greek life had been thematized since the mid-18th century by classical philologists and travellers who, driven by their admiration for the archetype of classical antiquity, sought out its descendants in modern Greece. In the early years of Greek independence, there was an imperative need to substantiate that continuity both in order to secure European support and to vindicate the state’s national (i.e. cultural, historically-based) individuality. In the second half of the century, the study of folklore became increasingly important both for developing national consciousness and for demonstrating the direct descent of modern Greeks from ancient Greeks. Not all demotic practices were calculated, however, to corroborate that ideal continuity, which was a demonstrandum both for Romantic idealists and for Enlightenment rationalists, and which had been exposed to serious questioning by European scholars such as Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer (1790–1861). In his historical monograph Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea während des Mittelalters (1830), Fallmerayer denied any ethnic continuity whatsoever and claimed that no Hellenic blood flowed in the veins of the Christian population of present-day Greece. This provoked a proliferation of folk studies and gave political importance to vernacular culture.
Folklore interest in Greece developed from the 1850s onwards; its objective was mainly one of national vindication. It was characterized by an antiquarian orientation: a search for survivals from antiquity and for “living monuments”. A case in point is Meletī epi tou viou tōn neoterōn Ellīnōn: Neoellīnikī mythologia (“Study on the life of modern Greeks: Modern Greek mythology”, 1871-74), by the founder of Greek folklore studies, Nikolaos Politīs. In 1890 Politīs (who had studied in Munich and was influenced by German philological historicism and by Edward Burnett Tylor’s cultural evolutionism) was made professor at Athens University; his chair carried the title of “Mythology and Greek Archeology”. In 1908, he set up the Hellenic Folklore Society, which from 1909 published the journal Laographia (“Folklore”), which, in its subsequent issues, printed articles on manners, customs, traditions, and genres of oral literature. In the initial issue, Politīs (the first scholar in Europe to do so) gave a definition of the academic scope and aims of folk studies, and an outline of the field’s various pertinent aspects.
Following the establishment of the Folklore Archive in 1918, aiming at the collection, preservation, and publication of the monuments of the Greek life and language, folklore became a more systematic and methodical discipline. The antiquarian orientation remained forceful on an academic level until the first decades of the 20th century and was also bolstered from outside Greece, e.g. by archeological theories such as John Cuthbert Lawson’s Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion: a study in survivals (1910).
