The aim of this study is to explore the ways in which the "West" is perceived in the spaces of the "East" in the context of the 19th century, which was influenced by factors such as the rise of nationalism and the creation of nation-states, the Ottoman reform process, and the economic and political power of the major European powers.
The study argues that the reception and acceptance of the "West" in the "East" was an active process that cannot be understood in terms of opposition. By presenting itself as a model, the "West" exerted a systematic influence on the societies of the "East," including directly affecting the way in which different ethno-religious communities perceived themselves and the "others." However, the simultaneous influence of nationalism negated the conditions of "imitation" of the "West," highlighting all those elements that were considered inherent to Western modernity and, by extension, a threat to national identity.
The distances from the "West" did not equate to a rejection of modernizing or "civilizing" programs, which, in the case of the Greek Orthodox leadership groups in the Ottoman Empire, were associated with programs of linguistic Hellenization and, in practice, led to the nationalization of the cultural process in both the Balkans and the Anatolian territories. Greek national discourse presented the Greeks as holders of a significant advantage over other emerging nationalisms, as well as Muslim society. This advantage was an idealized Greek antiquity, which had been placed at the origin of European civilization by the dominant Eurocentric narrative in Western Europe. The appropriation of this narrative in the "East" by Greek intellectuals shaped the conditions that elevated the Greeks to exclusive representatives of culture in the East, disregarding any other cultural tradition.