English economist, Nassau William Senior travelled to Greece between 1857 and 1858 and recorded his impressions of the country and its people.Travellers’ accounts such as Senior’s are useful for researchers looking into Greek royalty and Greek 19th-century society and politics as well as they are indicative of colonialist writings of the time.
King Otto’s Reign
Greece was proclaimed a monarchical and independent state in 1832 and the hereditary sovereignty was offered to Otto, the 17-year-old son of King Ludwig I of Bavaria. He ruled amidst mounting criticism and discontent and was forced to grant a constitution after the so-called 3 September 1843 revolution. However, he and his wife Queen Amalia continued to be unpopular and had to leave Greece in 1862 never to return.
Otto of Greece in Senior’s Journal
During his sojourn in Athens between November 1857 and January 1858, Nassau Senior met with a number of public figures whose names he does not reveal and whose opinions on the Greek royals he reinstates in his travel journal. Senior also had a brief conversation with King Otto himself during a royal ball at the Palace – “a frightful factory-looking building... its construction perpetrated by a Bavarian architect”.
Senior deplores the fact that a boy of seventeen was selected by the protecting Powers to reign over the Greek people and to assume such absolute power “until its exercise had degraded the people and corrupted the monarch”. King Otto and Queen Amalia did not reportedly enjoy the respect and affection of their subjects as they had no tastes in common. In fact, it was claimed that the Greek royals despised the Greeks and used them as a means of getting money, a palace and a garden.
Other interlocutors speak of King Otto’s intellectual and moral defects accusing him of having narrow views, slowness of apprehension and poverty of invention, of being jealous, vain, indecisive, inconsequent, strong-willed and adverse to any criticism. Otto is accused of appearing calm, never angry, while in reality “he never forgets and never forgives”.
Senior believes Otto to be inexperienced and gullible and paints a picture of him quite opposite to the one Fredrika Bremer presents in her travel journal written around the same time.
Otto is described by some as hard-working and doing the best he can in a country “unfit for constitutional monarchy” but is accused by most of manipulating the constitution to his own ends. Fond to present himself as a constitutional king since the 3 September 1843 revolution – “I am mere decoration of the stage, a mere phantom" – Otto governs as he always did.
A Conversation with King Otto
Senior’s first impression of King Otto at the palace ball on November 1857 was of a “gentlemanlike man with quiet, easy manners". Otto wore the Albanian dress while Queen Amalia sported an enormous crinoline. The ball was a dull affair.However, on his second visit at the Palace in January 1858, on the occasion of yet another ball, Senior had the chance to have a conversation with the King.
Otto expressed his delight to reign over a country with such a passé and such an avenir, declared the Greek people the most docile in the Continent, eager to detect and seize offenders in their midst, intelligent and never embarrassed in high society. Otto purported that art comes naturally to the Greeks pointing at the rich and delicate embroidery of his Albanian jacket made by country women.
Nassau William Senior concludes sarcastically that King Otto’s observations were true. There is no doubt, he remarks, that every Greek looks down on his Bavarian king and his Oldenburg queen: a Greek "feels at ease and unembarrassed in their society, for the same reasons which make an English sailor at ease in the court of a South Sea island chief”.
Sources:
Nassau William Senior, A Journal Kept in Turkey and Greece, in the Autumn of 1857 and the Beginning of 1858, (Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts) London 1859
