ABSTRACT
The notion of a newly born nation is a convenient starting point to the question of the identity of the 1821 insurgents. The major themes in this respect are terms such as ethnos (nation) and genos (people), as well as the idea of the necessary space for the new nation state referred to as epikrateia (domain). The meaning of the term ethnos in revolutionary Greece is elusive and, more often than not, misleading: it was frequently used in the sense of the Orthodox Christians, irrespective of their mother tongue, or in the sense of the term genos, as well as in the sense of nation state.! Religion and residence, as well as language and 'descent', were used in various combinations to define the identity of the members of the insurgent nation.
