Visitors to the Cycladic island of Syros today encounter a striking juxtaposition: the two churches on the hills – one Catholic and one Orthodox – overlooking the port symbolize centuries of coexistence, while the bustling waterfront below attests to the island’s modern vitality. For many, these churches narrate a story of syncretism and shared struggles against Ottoman rule. Dimitris Kousouris’s The Island of the Pope challenges this comforting narrative. His study shows how the Catholic community of Syros – once the overwhelming majority – was forced to relinquish its Latin identity and reconstitute itself as “Greeks of the Western Church” during the turbulent decades surrounding the Greek Revolution.
The book is structured in two parts. The first offers a long-term perspective on Syros’s place within successive imperial orders, tracing the Latin community from the Crusades through Venetian, Ottoman, and French entanglements. The “island of the Pope” was a unique case in the Aegean: an Ottoman territory where the Catholics (“Latins,” or “Franks” for their Orthodox neighbors and Ottoman officials) constituted more than 90 percent of the island’s population, while enjoying French protection and direct links to Rome in ecclesiastical matters.
The second part turns to the years 1821–1830, when war, migration, and state formation transformed the Aegean. Kousouris reconstructs the encounter between the Catholic community and waves of Orthodox refugees from Chios, Psara, Crete, Ayvalık, and beyond. Initially declaring neutrality, the Catholics were soon drawn into negotiations with the Greek provisional government. Violence, land encroachments, piracy, and disrupted trade eroded the community’s cohesion, while French protection weakened and revolutionary authorities pressed inconsistent claims: some treated Syros as conquered, others as tributary or under shared sovereignty. By the end of the decade, the Latins were citizens of the new state, designated as “Greeks of the Western Church.”
In telling this story from the perspective of the Latins, Kousouris draws on a wide range of sources from Greek, French, Italian, and Vatican archives (in particular the Propaganda Fide): petitions from local priests, reports by French consuls, and the correspondence of Catholic hierarchs illuminate how the community sought to navigate an unstable geopolitical landscape. His analysis of language is particularly strong: contemporaries referred to the islanders variously as “Latins,” “Franks,” “Greco-Latins,” “Romans,” or “Greeks,” and these shifting appellations reveal the contested nature of words, concepts and identifications in this liminal imperial space.
The book makes several contributions. First, it places Syros – a “small” place par excellence - at the center of the Age of Revolutions, complicating familiar narratives of Greek independence. Unlike many islands, Syros was not swept into revolt from within but confronted it as a Catholic-majority community tied to Rome and protected by France. Second, the book shows how the revolutionary decade brought not only the expulsion of Muslims from parts of the Aegean but also the redefinition of Catholic communities – in this case from imperial subjects to national citizens. Third, it offers a fine-grained case study of how sovereignty and jurisdiction operated in a zone where imperial authority was fragmented and layered.
Most importantly, the book foregrounds the politics of jurisdiction. In dialogue with recent literature on the international order in imperial and semi-imperial settings, Kousouris shows that in spaces of layered sovereignties, disputes over identity and belonging often crystallized in questions of jurisdiction: for example, who could levy taxes, demand exemptions, conscript soldiers, or guarantee protection. For Syriot Catholics, caught between Ottoman and French empires, Rome, and the Greek rebels, these were existential matters. The answers shifted with every military reversal or diplomatic intervention, and the community sought to exploit ambiguities, petitioning Rome, Paris, or local vice-consuls as circumstances required. The book shows well how events pushed the limits of these legal fictions and gave new resonance to old terms. As French protection weakened and Greek authorities advanced, words such as patria or privilege acquired novel meanings. Petitions invoking “Sira nostra patria” encapsulated a pre-national conception of fatherland, soon overtaken by the national idiom.
At the same time, there are some points that merit discussion. Kousouris is careful when analyzing identity within the Aegean but less so when referring to actors beyond it. Categories such as “Westerners” or “Europeans” are used with less nuance, obscuring divergent agendas among French, Italian, or Maltese Catholics. Causality also remains underdeveloped. While the book describes how property disputes, peasant unrest, and ecclesiastical conflicts coincided with political tensions, the connections are suggestive rather than clearly articulated.
A further question arises from the book’s treatment of the Catholic community’s projects during the revolutionary decade. Kousouris portrays their proposals – a free port, autonomy under papal protection, neutral status and so on – as projections of an imperial past that was doomed to fail. Yet they might also be seen as adaptive attempts to graft older frameworks of privilege and protection onto a new order. Even the 1830 London Protocol, which guaranteed Catholic rights within the Greek kingdom, employed a hybrid language that included references to both privileges and rights. The more general point here is that contemporaries – not just the Catholics – were not aware of what the making of a nation-state involved. Nationalism was a force of course, but there was no manual of how to make a national state. The semantic and political fields were open for negotiation and the Catholics did exactly that. In that sense, 1830 was more of a beginning, rather than an end.
Finally, while the book explores the case of Syros as unusually contingent, many imperial peripheries exhibited similar patterns of non-linear accommodation within empires and then within nation-states. Perhaps, a wider comparative frame might have contextualized Syros less as a singular exception than as a particularly illuminating example of a broader imperial dynamic.
These critical points do not detract from the book’s significance. Rather, they underscore the richness of the material and the debates it invites. By bringing Catholic Syros into focus, Kousouris compels historians of the Age of Revolutions and the Mediterranean to reckon with overlooked “small” places whose experiences complicate nationalist teleologies. The book intervenes in discussions of sovereignty and identity, showing how this small place at the heart of the Aegean navigated the collapse of empire and the birth of a nation-state.
