Tanja Zimmermann, University of Konstanz
Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer: From Philhellenism to Balkanism
Around 1830, after the boom of philhellenic enthusiasm for Greece in the 1820s and its liberation in 1829, Europe had been seized by a wave of scepticism and disappointment. Philhellenes in Eastern and Western Europe realised that mythical heroes from Homer’s Illias and Odysee or Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s noble savages where not reborn in the modern Greece. Also their art, following the rules of orthodox iconography, did not correspond to “the noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” of classic sculpture, or to the archaic heroism of Phidias’ Elgin Marbles, praised by Canova and by Quatremère de Quincy. Historian Jakob Pilipp Fallmerayer (1790-1861), member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Arts, came to believe that it was not the Ottoman conquerors who were to blame for the decline of classic Greek antiquity, but Slavic tribes migrating southwards whose blood had been infiltrated into the Hellenic race. The paper analyzes the displacement of orientalist discourses from Philhellenism to Balkanism, and thereby explores some origins of Balkan imagology.
