Moments and expressions of the European Philhellenism: the “Cretan Question” in Messina (1866-1889)

Being excluded from the borders of the Independent Kingdom of Greece, the island of Crete, with its troubled and unstable matters, represented during the 19th century until 1913, the date on which it was reunited with its motherland, a nerve centre of the “Eastern Question,” which was an intricate tangle of issues concerning the geopolitical order of the Balkan–Danubian area under the sovereignty of the sultan. Those issues were becoming more and more serious because of the progressive and irreversible decline of the Ottoman Empire. In the course of a strong debate among the international public opinion and in accordance with the philhellenic sentiment growing stronger among vast parts of the western society from the second half of the 18th century and with positive results for the Greek emancipation, the Cretan independence aspirations were supported –both materially and culturally– by the city of Messina, point of conjunction between the two shores of the Mediterranean and the centre of a large and active Greek community in modern and contemporary age. Therefore, the present essay aims at analyzing how the “Cretan Question” was perceived in the Sicilian city of the Strait through the study of the local press and political journalism from 1866 to 1889