This intellectual ferment was the most striking change of all.  Since the sack of Constantinople in 1204, Greek culture had retired into the monasteries—­inaccessible fastnesses where the monks lived much the same life as the clansmen of Suli or Agrapha.  Megaspelaion, the great cave quarried in the wall of a precipitous Peloponnesian ravine; Meteora, suspended on half a dozen isolated pinnacles of rock in Thessaly, where the only access was by pulley or rope-ladder; ‘Ayon Oros’, the confederation of monasteries great and small upon the mountain-promontory of Athos—­these succeeded in preserving a shadow of the old tradition, at the cost of isolation from all humane influences that might have kept their spiritual inheritance alive.  Their spirit was mediaeval, ecclesiastical, and as barren as their sheltering rocks; and the new intellectual disciples of Europe turned to the monasteries in vain.  The biggest ruin on Athos is a boys’ school planned in the eighteenth century to meet the educational needs of all the Orthodox in the Ottoman Empire, and wrecked on the reefs of monastic obscurantism.  But its founder, the Corfiot scholar Evyenios Voulgaris, did not hesitate to break with the past.  He put his own educational ideas into practice at Yannina and Constantinople, and contributed to the great achievement of his contemporary, the Khiot Adhamandios Korais, who settled in Paris and there evolved a literary adaptation of the Romaic patois to supersede the lifeless travesty of Attic style traditionally affected by ecclesiastical penmen.  But the renaissance was not confined to Greeks abroad.  The school on Athos failed, but others established themselves before the close of the eighteenth century in the people’s midst, even in the smaller towns and the remoter villages.  The still flourishing secondary school of Dhimitzana, in the heart of Peloponnesos, began its existence in this period, and the national revival found expression in a new name.  Its prophets repudiated the ‘Romaic’ name, with its associations of ignorance and oppression, and taught their pupils to think of themselves as ‘Hellenes’ and to claim in their own right the intellectual and political liberty of the Ancient Greeks.

This spiritual ‘Hellenism’, however, was only one manifestation of returning vitality, and was ultimately due to the concrete economic development with which it went hand in hand.  The Greeks, who had found culture in western Europe, had come there for trade, and their commercial no less than their intellectual activity reacted in a penetrating way upon their countrymen at home.  A mountain village like Ambelakia in Thessaly found a regular market for its dyed goods in Germany, and the commercial treaty of 1783 between Turkey and Russia encouraged communities which could make nothing of the land to turn their attention to the sea.  Galaxhidi, a village on the northern shore of the Korinthian Gulf, whose only asset was its natural harbour, and Hydhra,