Chaos during a Greek celebration in Chicago when a 14 year old university student (she already has a bachelor) took the podium in order to talk about Greece (video, text). Her speech was two fold. One described the ancient Greece and the other one explained its demise.
In the first part, she described how Greece’s mountains was the… first to rise on Earth, how the first humans were… Greek, how Greece’s civilization was the best of all others in the classic world, how the Greek language is the most “perfect than all others”, and how the Greek alphabet was not a copy/paste from the Phoenician one.
In the second part she referred to Byzantium as never being Greek-centric, to Christianity meaning the violent death of the ancient Greek world and the Orthodox Church not wanting Greeks freed from the Ottoman Turks.
Now, any logical person who has finished any high school would be thinking that the first part (as opposed to the second one) is completely laughable. The claims about Greeks being heroes and sons of Gods and such, are of course completely unsubstantiated. And yet, the Greeks who angrily tried to remove the girl from the podium were NOT against the first part, but against the SECOND.
You see, the part that the 40+ year old boring Greeks in the audience disagreed with, is actually TRUE. By 1700 AD, the Greeks were still calling themselves “Romans” (they saw themselves as a remnant of the Roman Empire rather than Greeks). Only when the ‘Greeks’ who left for Europe and studied the Classic history sent books back to the occupied Greece and *recreated* the Greek ethnicity within 100 years from scratch — as a pretty clever way to get everyone under the same roof and fight the Turks.
So basically, you have a young girl who has her facts wrong regarding the ancient Greece but no one bothers her with that (because they were all positive points for Greece) and when she actually speaks the truth, the audience doesn’t want to hear it (because the Greek school history books do not speak that truth so they are unfamiliar with it — the Church pretty much rewrote history after the Ottoman wars, to suit their interests).
I guess it was all one big joke that day. I only hope that the girl will get her facts straight, cut a bit of “her love” for the ancient Greece and become more neutral when she investigates. Only then the world will benefit from the genius she is.
I must say one thing though. Judging from the girl’s name (Promethea Pythia), my guess is that her influence on what she spoke about was not from real history books she has read, but from her parents. Her given names are NOT typical modern Greek names. They are ancient Greek names and they are very rarely used today (if not at all). If that’s the case, I can only imagine all the disinformation her “ancient Greece loving” parents have fed the poor girl to the point that she had to spout that crap about the first mountains in the planet being Greek! You would think that a Bachelor degree genius would be able to see the truth for herself, but it would seem that parents have a big influence to her life.
Again, I can only hope that Promethea Pythia will find the truth by studying real history books rather than “pyramids were built by aliens”-type of books or her parents.
