Meanings
- historicaluncountableThe theft and banditry characteristic of the anti-Ottoman insurgency when Greece was a part of the Ottoman Empire.
In the following section I explore how the history of klephtism was related to Scottish and Irish myths of social protest, producing a bloodless picture of nationalist outlawry and associating it with particular forms of masculinity.
2008, R. Tzanelli, Nation-Building and Identity in Europe: The Dialogics of Reciprocity2 more examples
Through the traditions and the manners of the inhabitants, who are pre-eminently addicted to piracy and klephtism — through the natural disposition of the terrain, which is filled with narrow valleys and defiles, forming a multitude of natural fortresses — the factious movements and attacks of the insurrectionaries have ever found full scope in the plains of Epirus and Thessaly.
1854, The New Monthly Magazine, volume 102, page 238Patriotic commentators emphasized that this sort of contemporary banditry had nothing to do with historic klephtism, and emphatically nothing to do with the essence of the Greek character—if not actually committed by foreign nationals (Albanians, Vlachs), it was at most the sad legacy of four hundred years of Ottoman misrule.
2003, Norman M. Naimark, Holly Case, editors, Yugoslavia and Its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s
Origin
Cite this entry
klephtism. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/klephtism
“klephtism.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/klephtism. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “klephtism,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/klephtism.
Source: klephtism on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.