Upset by the critical reaction to his Morea study, Fallmerayer resolved to travel abroad to collect material for the projected second volume.
In November 1833 Fallmerayer finally
set foot in the Morea, where the party remained for a month before travelling north to
Attica. There Fallmerayer was struck by the preponderance of
Arvanitika, an
Albanian dialect. The party arrived in Italy in February 1834, and returned to Munich in August of the same year. Upon his return Fallmerayer discovered that the Landshut Lyceum had in the meantime been moved to
Freising, and that his position had been eliminated. Behind this early "retirement" lay Fallmerayer's "known convictions, which, particularly in religious matters, are incompatible with the teaching profession."
[10] He was instead offered an
Ordinarius position as a member of the Bavarian Academy, where his first lecture concerned the "
Albanisation" of the population of Attica. His lecture was answered with an attack on his theories by
Friedrich Wilhelm Thiersch, and the two opposing lectures led to a controversy in Munich academic circles, as well as in the popular press.
The controversy had a pointedly political dimension, with Thiersch representing the "Idealpolitik" position, according to which Bavaria should support the Greek state, and Fallmerayer advocating a hands-off "Realpolitik." This political polemic was further provoked by the preface to the second volume of Fallmerayer's
Geschichte, published in 1836, in which he wrote that the Greek War of Independence was a "purely Shqiptarian
Albanian, not a Hellenic Revolution." He advocated furthermore the replacement of the German monarchy in Greece by a native regime.
