Brothers in Fustanella: Minority Integration and National Identity in the 4th Evzone Regiment, 1868–1949

This study investigates the paradox of ethnic diversity within one of modern Greece’s most iconic military institutions: the 4th Evzone Regiment. From its foundation in 1868 through its disbandment in the aftermath of the Civil War in 1949, the regiment operated as both a battlefield force and a symbolic arm of the Greek nation-state. While the Evzones are popularly remembered as uniform, Orthodox, and ethnically Greek, this manuscript reveals the extent to which Arvanite, Vlach, Asia Minor Greek, and other minority soldiers shaped the regiment’s operational reality and symbolic power. Through an interdisciplinary lens combining archival research, oral history, military sociology, and theories of nationalism, the study uncovers the mechanisms of “integration without recognition” - a model in which minority soldiers were physically included but culturally erased. The Evzone uniform functioned not just as military attire but as a symbolic mask, absorbing difference into national sameness. Meanwhile, state propaganda, postwar archival silences, and ceremonial imagery contributed to the construction of the Evzone as a mythic Greek soldier-citizen, divorced from the plural histories that made him. This work challenges traditional models of military homogenization and contributes to broader theories of performative nationalism, memory politics, and state formation in post-imperial societies. It repositions the Evzones not as timeless symbols of Hellenism, but as products of modern, contingent processes of ethnic negotiation, cultural suppression, and symbolic production. By reconstructing the buried diversity of the 4th Regiment, this manuscript reveals how modern states choreograph national unity through the selective memory of their soldiers.