Banditry constituted a complex phenomenon of nineteenth-century Greek society, as it occupied a space between illegality and social acceptance, acquiring particular significance in the public sphere of the newly established Greek state. Bandits did not function solely as criminal subjects but also as symbolic figures, around whom a variety of discourses were articulated by the press, literature and the official state apparatus. Perceptions of banditry reveal the tensions inherent in a state striving to define the boundaries of legality and to consolidate its authority by replacing informal regional networks of power with centralized institutional mechanisms.  The present study examines perceptions of banditry in the mid-nineteenth-century public   sphere   through   Pavlos Kalligas’s  novel Thanos Vlekas (1855), one of the earliest realist works of modern Greek prose. The aim of the study is to highlight the way in which Kalligas’s literary discourse reflects, interprets and comments on the historical and social conditions of the period, linking banditry to broader structural problems including the agrarian question, rural poverty, institutional dysfunction, clientelistic   political   practices and the arbitrariness of state power. The methodology adopted is based on the analytical and interpretive study of the novel as a literary document that engages in dialogue with historical reality. At the same time, state texts, journalistic sources and relevant secondary literature are employed in order to correlate literary discourse with the dominant public discourse of the period. The study is structured into three chapters: the first examines the life and activity of Pavlos Kalligas, the second addresses the phenomenon of banditry in the nineteenth century and the third provides an in depth analysis of banditry in Thanos Vlekas. Through this approach banditry is examined as a social phenomenon inextricably linked to the formation of the modern Greek state.