Showing papers in "Journal of Modern Greek Studies in 2002"

An "Ancient" Landscape: European Ideals, Archaeology, and Nation Building in Early Modern Greece

Abstract: The role of archaeology in the creation of modern Greek national identity is a question that has drawn increasing attention in recent years. The most powerful national symbol may well be the Acropolis, an archaeological topos that was "constructed" in the course of the nineteenth century. This paper explores the early phase of the Acropolis purification program in the first decades of the nineteenth century. European approaches to classical antiquities were very influential during this formative stage. Of particular interest here is the interaction between foreign visitors and Athenian notables, especially the debates and discussions that accompanied the creation of the modern version of the archaeological landscape of the Acropolis. Accounts of Western travelers along with documents concerning the activities of the Greek-based Philomousos society offer a glimpse into the events and key players who set the process in motion. Recent archaeological discussions of landscape and site development in general provide the theoretical framework for this discussion.

The Other "Parthenon": Antiquity and National Memory at Makronisos

Abstract: Makronisos, the small, uninhabited island off the Attica coast, was the location of the most notorious concentration camp set up by the Greek government during the Civil War (1946-1949). It was a place of brutality, torture, and death, but its distinctive feature was its role as an indoctrination center for many thousands of political dissidents (mostly left-wing soldiers and citizens, but also ethnic and religious minorities) who, after they were "re-educated" in the national dogmas, were sent to fight against their ex-comrades. Classical antiquity was one of the main ideological foundations of this "experiment," the audience for which was the whole of Greece and the international community. In the island, still known as "The New Parthenon," the "redeemed" inmates were encouraged to build replicas of classical monuments, and the regime's discourse emphasized the perceived incompatibility of the inmates' "destiny" (as descendants of ancient Greeks) with left-wing ideologies. Paradoxically, many of the counter-discourses of the Makronisos inmates and their supporters also subscribed to the essentialist discourse of continuity and ancestral glory. This paper situates this phenomenon within the broader context of the role of antiquity in modern Greek society; it also examines the topological construction of Makronisos as a heterotopia where the panopticism of classical antiquity (the watchful eye of History and Destiny) merged surveillance with spectacle.

Haunted by the "Enemy" Within: Brigandage, Vlachian/Albanian Greekness, Turkish "Contamination," and Narratives of Greek Nationhood in the Dilessi/Marathon Affair (1870)

Abstract: This essay explores Greek and British observations on the phenomenon of brigandage in Greece following a major Anglo-Greek diplomatic episode known as “The Dilessi/Marathon Murders” (1870). Brigandage in Greece was extensively discussed abroad after the foundation of the Greek state in the 1830s. The Dilessi Murders, however, triggered a debate in Britain on Greece’s inability to become a fully modernized state. Other European voices, sympathetic or not, also joined this debate. The unhappy coincidence of this “trial” with the creation of the Neohellenic imagined community produced an internal (Greek) debate that was nicely reflected in the rhetoric of Greek journalism and administration. In this debate brigandage was represented as an “epidemic” phenomenon communicated to Greece from Turkey. The Turks had managed to contaminate the “nation” with the help of the Vlachs and the Albanians who lived within the Greek Kingdom. These populations were subsequently expelled from the “nation” through a series of symbolic actions. This discourse, which was crystallized after the Dilessi Affair, assumed a double function in the Greek imaginary: as a response to British and indeed European accusations of Greek backwardness, and as an expression of the Vlachian/Albanian contribution to the process of Neohellenic self-recognition.

Landscape, Memories, and Medicine: Traditional Healing in Amari, Crete

Abstract: Cretan folk medicine has a long, yet obscure history. Popular medical handbooks from the Byzantine era forward incorporated material rooted in ancient medicine and routinely claimed Hippocrates and Galen (among others) as sources. Exhibiting numerous similarities in both content and style to these earlier handbooks, the notebook of early twentieth century Cretan village healer, Nikolaos Theodorakis, records a broad spectrum of cures. An examination of both the botanical materia medica Theodorakis used and the manner in which he employed his skills demonstrates underlying continuities in the healing tradition and, equally, its capacity to evolve: mutating, adapting, accreting over time. Even today in Crete traditional therapeutic plant use competes—and sometimes even co-exists—with modern medicine. Three characteristics of Cretan traditional medicine are the key to its resilience: a respect for the authority of tradition, an ability to experiment and innovate, and an intimate knowledge of the resources of the local landscape.

Egypt's Forgotten Communists: The Postwar Greek Left

Abstract: In the decade and a half after the Second World War, Egyptian Greeks were active in two communist organizations in Egypt: the wholly Greek Anti- fasistikAE Prvtopora (Antifascist Vanguard), and the Greek section of the Egyptian movement. Each pursued its own program of political priorities and enjoyed a different relationship with the Egyptian communist movement. While their activities were heavily circumscribed by the practical difficulties and ideological contradictions arising from the position of Greeks as a relatively privileged cultural minority, they both represent important expres- sions of an oppositional discourse within the complex dynamics of the Greek presence in Egypt. Though ultimately failing in the face of rising Egyptian and Arab nationalism and the decline of the Greek community in the late 1950s, the record of the Greek Left testifies to the attempts and accompanying difficulties of political engagement with the wider Egyptian community. The emergence of the Greek presence in modern Egypt originates from the active immigration policy pursued by the ruler of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, in the first half of the nineteenth century. Over the course of the next century the Greek population grew to more than a hundred thousand and came to occupy a prominent position in many aspects of economic, cultural, and professional life. Generally maintaining a distinct cultural-religious identity, Greeks nevertheless represented con- siderable diversity in social class, economic status, and geographical distribution and became a familiar element of Egyptian society. Despite this, under the impact of the decolonization process and the rise of a muscular Arab nationalism, the community came under considerable pressure in the postwar period and by the early 1960s was in steep decline. Scholarship on the Egyptian Greek presence might be placed in three broad categories. 1 The first has catalogued, in celebratory and often nostalgic tone, the economic achievements of its wealthy upper class, personified in such figures as Mihail Tositsas, Emmanuel Benahis,

Perceptions of the Parthenon in Modern Greek Poetry

Abstract: The Parthenon is not a popular source of inspiration for modern Greek poets. Only a few poems are devoted to it, expressing either the poet's grief for bygone ages of glory or his praise of the immortal Greek spirit. Against this background, three poets can be distinguished for being different and original. For Palamas, who fights for the cause of Demoticism, the attitudes of his contemporaries towards the Parthenon encapsulate what he takes to be a sterile veneration of the ancestors. He thus opposes the idea of the restoration of the Parthenon, promoting the Modern Greek language instead. For Sikelianos, the Parthenon is only one monument among many. This weighty symbol of ancient Greek tradition is not a source of awe or embarrassment, but the yardstick that indicates the importance of the modern poet's achievement. For Calas, finally, the Parthenon is associated with the declining values of a doomed bourgeoisie and should therefore be blown up and replaced by new standards in life and art.

Misunderstood and Forgotten: The Greek Naval Mutiny of April 1944

Abstract: After being driven from Greece by the German military in 1941, the Royal Hellenic Navy (RHN) operated alongside Britain's Royal Navy (RN) from bases in Egypt, Lebanon, and Malta. In April 1944 the RHN experienced a widespread mutiny, which began in Alexandria, Egypt, over the political composition of the Greek government. This essay explores the importance of the Alexandria mutiny to the RHN. It investigates the role of the navy in the royalist/republican rivalry of the 1920s-1930s, the wartime return to service of republican officers, the RHN's operations under British direction in the eastern Mediterranean, the political orientation of the government-in-exile, disturbances in the RHN prior to the mutiny, the events of the mutiny itself, the aftermath of the mutiny, how the mutiny affected the RN-RHN relationship, and the significance of the mutiny within the context of naval history in general. Wartime RN records held at the Public Record Office outside London, United States Navy intelligence reports held at the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland, as well as unpublished and published secondary sources, provide the basis of this investigation.

Ancient Αναμνησία, National Μνήμη in the Poetry of Giorgos Seferis

Abstract: The aim of this essay is to explore memory in Seferis's poetry as a manifestation of variant modes of historical consciousness and in relation to various schemata that exemplify both European modernity and nationalist ideology. Building upon recent approaches to social and collective memory, the following reading bases itself on how memory operates within the text as an agon: between ancient and modern modes of anamnesis and mneme, between private remembrance and public recollection, between elements of memory that stem from cognition and those that derive from experience, particularly from nationalist ideological premises. Distinguishing, even further, the difference among empirical elements that surface in Seferis's poetry as modes of "lived history," to use Agnes Heller's formulation, highlights the residual function of the literary text in simulating a dominant form of historical experiencing. As such, it illustrates how literature in the case of Greece remained a popular medium through which memory continued to be preserved.

Identity and Difference in the Iphigeneia of Petros Katsaitis

Abstract: Relatively unknown until recently, the work of the eighteenth-century Cephalonian dramatist Petros Katsaitis, particularly his tragedy Iphigeneia, represents a point of intersection for various influences, such as those of Cretan drama, Italian humanist tragedy, and improvisational theater, which then become assimilated, transformed, and re-directed. A study of Katsaitis's work with reference to the historical, cultural, educational, religious, and literary contexts of his period, as well as to specific theatrical models, reveals the originality of the dramatist, his strong regional identity, as well as his remarkable consciousness of a broader Greek identity. Katsaitis's handling of the mythological and historical material of his play is at the same time consistent with and divergent from contemporary trends in Western Europe, as well as suggestive of future approaches to myth in Modern Greek literature.

The Least Satisfying Form of Writing: Seferis on Translation

Abstract: This article considers Seferis as a theorizing translator and focuses on his views on interlingual translation. These views are examined in terms of contemporary thought in the field of translation studies and are shown to have influenced the standard English translations of his poetry through his collaboration with his own translators. It is argued that Seferis was less interested in the theoretical and practical problems of translation than in translation as a means of testing the capacities of the Greek language of his times.

Classics in performance

Abstract: This paper examines different ways in which ancient quotations are incorpo- rated in contemporary poetry, arguing that Greek writing has often freed itself from the interpretive demands of modernist classicism by adopting the position of a public, virtuosic performance. By cultivating the ethics of an agonistic relation with their ancient predecessors, poets today reinvent cultural literacy and fashion their unique place in literary and intellectual history. But, generally speaking, only through knowledge of the present can the passion for classical antiquity be acquired. Without this knowledge, where could the passion come from? (Nietzsche 1990:340) It has become commonplace today to worry about the decline of cultural literacy. We have all discussed documentations of the diminish- ing interest in our shared (Western or otherwise) intellectual, artistic, and scientific heritage. Educators, journalists, opinion makers, and politicians have diagnosed a gradually weakening transmission of hu- manistic culture to younger generations. That the public no longer has a well-rounded familiarity with literary masterpieces, artistic treasures, historical events, or civic achievements of the past puts at risk the liberal institutions of the public sphere. What binds us together in a common culture may too easily come undone. Here is an eloquent expression of this concern from the early 1960s: The continuity of the cultural tradition guarantees a certain community of general cultural horizons, if not of philosophy or attitudes toward life. It is proper to ask whether this common horizon has perhaps in the last half- century lost in significance and in relative cohesion and stability, and whether this loss has perhaps had a reciprocal effect on literary production and helped to shape its features. (Meyer 1968:20)

The Culmination of Aesthetic and Artistic Discourse in Nineteenth-century Greece: Periklis Yannopoulos and Nikolaos Gyzis

Abstract: The writings of Periklis Yannopoulos and the Symbolist-Jugendstil paintings of Nikolaos Gyzis, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, constitute two parallel cases in the culmination of Greek aesthetic and artistic discourse, as it had been conducted since the late eighteenth century. The two main strands of this discourse were the place of Byzantium—especially Byzantine art—in the wider (Neo)Hellenic narrative, and the concept of a new, "truly Greek" art, along with the related notion of "Greekness in art." Yannopoulos contributed, more than anyone before him, to the positive reappraisal of Byzantine artistic achievements, and he gave the most systematic and sophisticated exposition, up to then, of the notion of a perennial Greek aesthetic. His aesthetically-defined landscape found visual expression in Gyzis's late work, and both announced equivalent cultural debates and artistic expressions that were to occur in the twentieth century.

The Enlightenment and the Orthodox World (review)

Abstract: founded were all spokes: the Orthodox church would be the hub” (221). The building of the church and the formation of the community become the central concerns of the characters, while historical events in the outside world become insignificant: “For the next few years, the major topic of conversation was not American politics, events in Europe, or the fortunes of the League of Nations, but the progress of the church-building” (240). Eventually what becomes of sole importance to the members of the community are the local politics of the church: clashes between various cliques vying for control of the council, arguments over the quality and performance of the newly hired priest, the founding of a Greek school in the basement of the church. Conceived of as the place in which the community is unified and where tradition and culture are to be preserved against the encroachment of the forces of assimilation, the church (unintentionally) provides the community with a site in which it can resume the petty and self-obsessed attitudes of village life where gossip and in-fighting seem to take precedence over larger issues. In book three (“Not That They Starve”) the ever-growing Straton family is mired in the Depression. Costas has lost the bakery and supports the family as best he can through day-work on WPA projects. He later returns to the steel mill when an opportunity arises. The bulk of the latter part of the novel describes the renewed attempts of the steel workers to organize, an initiative that precipitates the bloody and violent events of the “Little Steel” Strike. In The Open Hearth Doulis has attempted, as he claims in his notes at the end of the novel, to portray an historical period and the experiences of Greek immigrants as authentically as he can. His research into the processes of steel production, the development of labor unions and the history of the Asia Minor Catastrophe have provided him with ample background for the novel, and he is adept at integrating a keen sense of the effects of history on the lives of his characters with a vivid portrayal of the immigrant experience. Like Papanikolas and Petrakis, Doulis is ambitious in his choice of themes and in the layers of historical and cultural detail he includes. Ultimately he contributes another invaluable voice to Greek American literature, one that is sometimes harshly realistic and at others enchantingly poetic.

Necessary Fictions: National Identity and Postmodern Critique in Gouroyiannis's [To Asemochorto Anthizei]

Abstract: As an aesthetic movement, postmodernism is selectively adopted and adapted by writers outside the mainstream of the West. In the case of Greece, due to the prevalence of the nationalist Modernism of the Generation of the Thirties, postmodernists have maintained a fascination with the notion of national identity. These authors have used postmodernist techniques to reexamine the meaning of Greekness and to critique the modernist ideology of national identity while reflecting more general postmodernist aesthetic issues. Because of the persistence of national identity in these writings, postmodern texts in Greece can be seen as \"national allegories.\" This paper conducts a reading of Gouroyiannis's novel as a postmodernist attempt to reevaluate national identity as well as modernist poetics.

The Cue for Passion: Grief and Its Political Uses (review)

Abstract: and hard to fathom that more research must be done on the crisis of July-August 1974 utilizing the Ford Presidential Library records for August 1974 and a full set of Kissinger telephone conversations. In addition, Nixon’s policy towards Cyprus cannot be separated from the administration’s enthusiastic support for the Greek Junta, and this is the one area of U.S. policy Nicolet does not cover. At times Nicolet displays a weakness for the selective morality that plagues the Cyprus issue. Great powers deserve criticism when their actions violate basic legal or ethical standards, but the same yardstick has to be applied to smaller states. Nicolet tends to overlook or excuse the questionable actions of smaller powers. As Cypriot leader Glafkos Klerides has acknowledged, the all or nothing approach of Greek Cypriots repeatedly undercut the pursuit of their best interests. The other major element missing in Nicolet’s recounting is a sense of irony. For example, Nicolet repeatedly criticizes U.S. officials for backing enosis, while most criticism of the U.S. has rested on the notion that it opposed the desire of the Greek Cypriot majority as well as of their elected leaders for enosis in the 1950s and 1960s. More ironically, U.S. policy kept pace with changing views among the Greek Cypriot majority and embraced independence at the same time as Makarios concluded that it better served his interests and those of his community. Hopefully, this first rate and extremely important study will stimulate a long overdue assessment of a complex era by Greek, Turkish, Cypriot, and Greek American scholars, all of whom have largely remained prisoners of their cherished prejudices.