Megali Idea - Greek Independence

Greek Independence

After the Greek War of Independence in 1821, a new Greek state was established, with belated assistance from the United Kingdom, France and Imperial Russia. However, the new Greek state under John Capodistria after the Greek War of Independence was, with Serbia, one of the only two countries of the era with ethnic population which was smaller than the population of those outside its borders; most of ethnic Greeks still resided within the borders of Ottoman Empire. This version of Greece was designed by the Great Powers, who had no desire to see a larger Greek state supplant the Ottoman Empire.

The Great Idea embodied a desire to bring all ethnic Greeks into the Greek state, and subsequently revive the Byzantine Empire; specifically those Greeks in Epirus, Thessaly, Macedonia, Thrace, the Aegean Islands, Crete, Cyprus, parts of Anatolia, and the city of Constantinople, which would replace Athens as capital.

When the young Danish prince Vilhelm Georg was elected king in 1863, the title offered to him by the Greek National Assembly was not "King of Greece", the title of his deposed predecessor, King Otto; but rather "King of the Hellenes". Implicit in the wording was that George I was to be king of all Greeks, regardless of whether they then lived within the borders of his new kingdom.