The term "Romaiko symbolism" was coined by the controversial language reformer Yiannis Psycharis at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, in order to name the vigorous current of the time for the intersection of domestic folk traditional elements and European avant-garde quests during the formation of the national identity of the Modern Greeks.

This study attempts to trace the development of this very trend, as it persistently manifests within the revealing mirror of the theater, from the time of the first awakening of the related concerns, during the Enlightenment years, to the post-war and post-civil war period of the official integration of the country into the institutions of a cautiously unified Europe.

The developments during this entire period are overwhelming, as local consciousness struggles to reconcile a series of mutually negating concepts: its pre-Enlightenment tradition with urban modernization, romanticism with classicism, nationalism with cosmopolitanism; as it tries to connect the popular "kleptic" song with modern literature of robbing novels.

The conflicts and related deadlocks may be better perceived in the case of Karagiozis, which, from a traditional theater of popular oral improvisation, ended up as an industrial production of standardized pamphlets, printed entertainment readings for the semi-literate petty bourgeois masses.