Selective Memory and the Legacy of Archaeological Figures in Contemporary Athens: The Case of Heinrich Schliemann and Panagiotis Stamatakis

The aim of this paper is to present the influence the Greek Orthodox Church has on matters of Education Policy in the Modern Greek state, especially on Science Education. Historically, since its foundation, the Greek state is closely linked to the Orthodox Church, which is the institution of orthodox Christianity, the official religious dogma of the Greek state as it is explicitly mentioned in the Greek Constitution. Since the foundation of the Modern Greek state, nearly two centuries ago, the Orthodox Church plays a key role in every aspect of general policy, and especially in educational policy. It is characteristic that religious affairs and education are governed by the same ministry, the Ministry of Education, Research and Religions, and orthodox priests are public employees enjoying the status of civil servants. Historically, this interlink of the Church with the State can be easily explained by the privileged relation the patriarch had with the sultan in the Ottoman empire, a status that continued to exist in a different form in the epoch of the Modern Greek state. Due to its privileged position in the state apparatus, the Orthodox Church and its multitude of official and unofficial organizations could control the educational policy and especially the national curriculum. This control is more obvious in science education. The aim of this paper is to present the influence the Greek Orthodox Church has on matters of secular education policy in the Modern Greek state, especially on the curriculum of natural sciences. Here, we don’t refer to the parallel secondary education system organized by the Church, which is another point of confrontation between the Greek Orthodox Church and the Greek state in several occasions.

This article explores how nostalgia may represent a culturally creative force in contemporary cities by examining the case of Athens. Since the beginning of the economic crisis of the 2010s, Greece has witnessed a nostalgic wave looking back to the late 20th century. A prominent expression of this nostalgia was the creation of nostalgic groups on Facebook that expressed yearning for a better and bygone past. Simultaneously, nostalgic locations flourished in the Greek capital. The article examines nostalgic initiatives that attracted significant media attention (three museums, one shop, one café-bar and one exhibition on the mass culture of the 1980s) and discusses how they have contributed to cultural life. Drawing on personal observation, invisible observation of social media, semi-structured interviews and an analysis of articles in the press, the article argues that nostalgia expressed through these initiatives differs from nostalgia on social media. These nostalgic initiatives do not promote yearning-driven nostalgia. They invigorate a form of creative cultural connectivity not particularly aligned with the market and tech-focused post-1990s discourses on creativity, profit from the solidarity that marked the crisis, and strengthen communication among generations through interest in contemporary history.

The present article addresses the question of secularism in Greece. It discusses the prevalent modernist and civilisationist explanations of the recent crisis in state-church relations in Greece. Based on the idea that there is neither a single route to, nor a single pattern of, modernity and secularism, the article argues that the entanglement between state and church in modern Greece does not necessarily indicate either incomplete modernity or incomplete secularism. The paper emphasises both the structural weakness of the Orthodox Church in the modern Greek state and the secularisation of the church's ideology as core dimensions of the particular pattern of secularism in this country. The recent crisis is interpreted as a result of the twofold challenge of democratisation and globalisation that this historically grown pattern of secularism is facing over the last decades. Further, the article seeks to demonstrate that the nationalist stance of the Church of Greece should not be seen as persistent blind traditionalism and anti-modernism.

This chapter explores the progressive development of market mechanisms in Greece in the nineteenth century. It also makes reference to the emergence of Greek capitalism in the eighteenth century (i.e., during the period prior to the Greek War of Independence, 1821–1832); it focuses then on the paths to the Greek diaspora’s entrepreneurship. The intermediary role of Greek merchants and entrepreneurs influenced the national economic structure after the foundation of the modern Greek state and defined in a way capitalism’s implementation in the country. It discusses how investment on the part of the Greek diaspora and efforts to integrate the agricultural sector played an important part in these processes. The chapter also examines the consequences of two centuries of booms and bankruptcies in modern Greece. In this regard, it examines the economic effects of Greek participation in the world wars and the impact of the Great Depression on the national economy. Economic developments and monetary shocks in the economic history of Greece are examined in association with global integration or desegregation processes. The chapter’s purpose is to further incorporate the Greek paradigm into international economic literature and global studies, eliminating by the aforementioned methodology a top to bottom dichotomy between economic modernization and traditional economic mentalities.

‘Sacralising the past: cults of archaeology in modern Greece’ appears within the framework of recent discussions on archaeology and nationalism and attempts to produce a reflexive and sophisticated analysis of the construction of nationalist discourses, both at the level of state and on an individual basis. Along these lines, Hamilakis and Yalouri argue that attitudes toward classical antiquity in modern Greece constitute what they term a form of ‘secular religion’ which presents distinct affinities with Orthodoxy. In constructing their argument the authors combine a number of analytical domains and touch upon a multitude of issues, all of which merit extensive discussion. However, the main point of their thesis concerns the relationship between the classical past and Greek Orthodox religion, a link forged during the creation of the modern Greek state. According to the authors, apart from being at the roots of nationalist state discourse, this link has also been a persistent, even dominant, feature in the popular perception of classical heritage.

Performing in ancient Greek theaters in modern Greece is an activity which often finds itself embroiled in the cultural politics surrounding a classical heritage which is conceptualized as venerable, unbroken, and exclusive. The first ever instance of a non-Greek production of a Greek play at the ancient theater of Epidaurus was the British Royal National Theatre's Oresteia directed by Peter Hall in 1982. (1) Despite Hall's adherence to key conventions of classical theater, such as an all-male cast and the use of masks, the admission of a non-Greek group to the theater of Epidaurus did not go uncontested. Yannis Varveris, a well-known critic, maintained: I do not think that this generosity is to our own cultural benefit, especially when it comes to Epidaurus. We are--as Rondiris has at least proved--capable of articulating our heritage better than anyone. A place of such sanctification like this koilon [the spectators' area in ancient amphitheaters] could be reserved for the whatsoever most legitimate interpretation of ancient drama and not yielded as an arena for international theater acrobatics, especially if the genre itself is not amenable to them. It is a matter of category. The tragic word is not just one page in theater repertory. It is morally and aesthetically adamant, most of all because it is ontological. Epidaurus is its natural manger. On the contrary, the foreign director, having not the affinity of language and the umbilical cord--of both language and place--with the source deigns well-intentioned experimentations which are perhaps irreverent. (2) This passage encapsulates the most cherished Greek views about ancient drama: uniqueness, legitimate interpretations, and the authenticity of a highly acclaimed tradition established by past Greek directors (Dimitris Rondiris, 1899-1981). It is telling that the theatrical space is discussed in a language pregnant with religious allusions (sanctification, manger) which, in turn, generates the view of a sacredly ontological text. Most notably, performing in Epidaurus, in the critic's view, presupposes a biological relationship with the place and the language (umbilical cord, source) which naturalizes the idea of Greek continuity from antiquity down to the present day. The view of the theater of Epidaurus as a sacred place continues to come up in disputes over stagings of Greek drama by, most characteristically, non-Greek directors. In the 2009 production of Dimiter Gotscheff's Persians, for example, the audience was exasperated every time the actors set foot on the ancient thymele, the altar of the god Dionysus, which is not meant to be stepped over according to a well-established Greek theater custom. (3) The spectators responded in indignation against the supposed act of desecration with hisses, loud jeers, and massive walk-outs which nearly interrupted the performance. The sacralization of the ancient theater of Epidaurus within modern Greek culture requires serious scrutiny in relation to the Greek claim of an exclusive authority over classical antiquity and the sense of cultural preeminence. However, the idea of sacred ancient ruins was not unknown to the nineteenth-century European imagination. The foundation of Greek state itself in the mid-nineteenth century triggered the Romantic Hellenism of European travelers, by providing the actual place where they could connect to the classical past through the ruins of antiquity. (4) In this spirit, leading theater figures of that time sought the very origin of the theatrical art in the ancient theater of Dionysus on the slopes of the Acropolis. When great Italian tragic actresses toured to Athens, their visits to the ancient monuments was filled with a sense of worship. Adelaide Ristori marveled at the theater of Dionysus in 1865, (5) while it is submitted that Eleonora Duse went on a pilgrimage there on the evening before her Athenian performance in 1899. …

What was the perception of Greece in Europe during the later nineteenth century, when the attraction of romantic philhellenism had waned? This volume focuses on the reception of medieval and modern Greece in the European press, rigorously analysing journals and newspapers published in England, France, Germany, Italy, and The Netherlands. The essays here suggest that reactions to the Greek state's progress and irredentist desires were followed among the European intelligentsia. Concurrently, new scholarship on the historical development of the Greek language and vernacular literature enhanced the image of medieval and modern Greece. This volume's contributors consider the press's role in this Europewide exchange of ideas, explore the links between romantic and late philhellenism and underscore the scholarly nature of the latter. Moreover, they highlight the human aspects of cultural transfers by focusing on networks of mediators, publishers and scholarly collaborators. This context enhances our understanding of both the creation of Hellenic studies and the complex formation of the modern Greek identity.

What was the perception of Greece in Europe during the later nineteenth century, when the attraction of romantic philhellenism had waned? This volume focuses on the reception of medieval and modern Greece in the European press, rigorously analysing journals and newspapers published in England, France, Germany, Italy, and The Netherlands. The essays here suggest that reactions to the Greek state's progress and irredentist desires were followed among the European intelligentsia. Concurrently, new scholarship on the historical development of the Greek language and vernacular literature enhanced the image of medieval and modern Greece. This volume's contributors consider the press's role in this Europewide exchange of ideas, explore the links between romantic and late philhellenism and underscore the scholarly nature of the latter. Moreover, they highlight the human aspects of cultural transfers by focusing on networks of mediators, publishers and scholarly collaborators. This context enhances our understanding of both the creation of Hellenic studies and the complex formation of the modern Greek identity.

What was the perception of Greece in Europe during the later nineteenth century, when the attraction of romantic philhellenism had waned? This volume focuses on the reception of medieval and modern Greece in the European press, rigorously analysing journals and newspapers published in England, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. The essays here suggest that reactions to the Greek state's progress and irredentist desires were followed among the European intelligentsia. Concurrently, new scholarship on the historical development of the Greek language and vernacular literature enhanced the image of medieval and modern Greece. This volume's contributors consider the press's role in this Europe-wide exchange of ideas, explore the links between romantic and late philhellenism and highlight the scholarly nature of the latter. Moreover, they highlight the human aspects of cultural transfers by focusing on networks of mediators, publishers and scholarly collaborators. This context enhances our understanding of both the creation of Hellenic studies and the complex formation of the modern Greek identity.

Reviewed by: Το πρόσφατο μέλλον: Η κλασική αρχαιότητα ως βιοπολιτικό εργαλείο (Δημήτρης Πλάντζος) [Recent futures: Classical antiquity as biopolitical tool] by Dimitris Plantzos Despina Lalaki (bio) Dimitris Plantzos (Δημήτρης Πλάντζος), Το πρόσφατο μέλλον: Η κλασική αρχαιότητα ως βιοπολιτικό εργαλείο [Recent futures: Classical antiquity as biopolitical tool]. Athens: Nefeli. 2016. Pp. 272. 40 illustrations. Paper €17.90. In 2008, when the economic crisis broke out in Greece as a result of the wider economic and fiscal crisis in the United States and the greater part of Europe, a fierce debate over who was to blame erupted within the Greek public sphere and the international media. Did the fault lie with the economic and political elites of the country, who over the decades failed to reform the economy while also engaging in rampant corruption? Was it the ancien system of clientelism that bound the government and the people into a relationship of increasing codependence and led to the creation of a hydrocephalus, dysfunctional state? Or did responsibility lie with the leadership of the European Union, with international financial organizations, such as the IMF and the World Bank, and with the world’s investment banking system? After the lengthy discussions and biting debates, and once the dust kicked up by thousands of protesters and the [End Page 416] smoke and teargas in the streets of Athens settled, the question “why Greece?” may still haunt our imagination for some time to come. Το πρόσφατο μέλλον: Η κλασική αρχαιότητα ως βιοπολιτικό εργαλείο (Recent futures: Classical antiquity as biopolitical tool) is certainly not a book about the economic crisis, yet it attempts to delineate the crisis’s cultural history, as Dimitris Plantzos suggests in his introduction (15). The book outlines narratives about violence, civil society, the right to Europe, and the ways these intersect with understandings of the past as both a mechanism to control the present and a disciplining apparatus to regulate public sentiment. Western modernity’s political and cultural imaginary is inextricably tied to ancient Greek civilization, while Modern Greece owes its existence precisely to this dialectic between the West’s imaginary and Greek classical heritage. Before it was even politically constituted as a nation-state, Modern Greece had been grounded on a series of imaginary significations directly tied to antiquity. The literature on the subject is quite rich. Rarer are the studies that bring questions of Hellenism into the present in order to explore its effects and the ways it informs our aesthetic, moral, political, and social life today. Hellenism in this sense has a dialectic relationship between Western and Greek modernity and the classical past. Plantzos’s book is a very welcome contribution, especially as it addresses a wider readership beyond academia. Το πρόσφατο μέλλον is largely based on some of the author’s most thought-provoking articles and studies available until now only in English. Following a roughly chronological order, the book covers the decade between 2004 and 2014. It starts with the opening ceremony of the Olympics in 2004 and interprets the event as both a coming-of-age ritual for the Modern Greek state and as a farewell to the traumatic twentieth century. It ends with the events surrounding the rediscovery of the monumental Amphipolis Tomb. The book moves gradually from a discussion of biopolitics to an analysis of thanatopolitics—by now the central agenda of the West, according to Giorgio Agamben (1998)—and an analysis of the European politics of the crisis. All four chapters critically approach rituals and public performances of local, national, or international appeal that have been orchestrated either by the Greek state itself or by the general public. Habituated to archaeolatry and the worship of ancestors (προγονολατρία), these rituals reproduce familiar narratives about the nation, patriarchy, heterosexuality, and racial purity while often changing and recolonizing them in the process. The first chapter analyzes in depth a series of heterotopian technologies—the Olympics opening ceremony, campaigns by the Greek National Tourism Organization (Εθνικός Οργανισμός Τουρισμού, EOT), Greek filmography, vernacular architecture—and offers a [End Page 417] genealogy of the scientific, literary, and artistic grounding of Hellenism. Historians, folklorists, archaeologists, poets, and artists at large took it upon themselves to Hellenize Greek history or recover the singular essence of Hellenic art. The internalization of the relationship with ancient Greece would be central in this process of the constitution of the national subject and archaeology, to which Plantzos, a classical archaeologist himself, pays particular attention...

The presence of religion in Greek history was determined by both the ancient Greek political thought, and the modern policy options for the creation of the modern Greek state. The "polytheism" of the ancient Greeks and the religious freedom wasn't only a personal choice, but it involved into a political commitment in established ceremonies for the cult of the city. On the other hand in modern Greece, the presence of the Christian "monotheism" strengthened its functional structures of the newly established Greek State in the name of an official "monotheistic" religion. This does not prevent the modern Greeks following this religion with the criterion of its adaptation to their specific impulses and needs. At the same time, they continued to see through this religion their politic and national identity, even its ancient Greek version.

This study integrates the dominant archaeological discourse concerning use of the Classical past in defining national identity in Greece with a strand of ethnographic research on Greece’s officially unacknowledged minorities that has not found its way into the archaeological literature on Greece. The first part discusses how the Greek state has tried to deny the existence of ethnic alterities within its boundaries, often punishing those who insist on advertising their non-Greek origins. One of the ways in which Hellenisation has been forced on these groups is via an insistence that ‘true’ Greeks’ origins lie in a Classical past. Those whose origins lie elsewhere have been effectively marginalised. The second part of the study focuses on the Greek-Albanian (Arvanitis) minority. As a case study, two Arvanitic groups are compared, one Peloponnesian and one Boeotian. Boeotian Arvanites have no monumental symbolic capital as a usable past employable within the wider national(istic) discourse. In contrast, the Peloponnesian group has a monument linking them to an alternative (non- Classical) past which they use to advertise their right to be considered ‘proper’ Greek citizens.

<p>Haris Exertzoglou, Political rituals in Modem Greece: the reburial ofPatriarch Gregory V and the 50th anniversary of the Greek Revolution</p><p>This paper explores political rituals in Modern Greece by focusing onthe 50th anniversary of the start of Greek War of Independence andthe particular place of a reburial procession in the celebrations. In 1871 the Greek state decided to proceed with the rehurial of Patriarch GregoryV, whose body, allegedly found a few days after his execution bythe Ottomans in 1821, was buried in Odessa. The decision was not simplya gesture of respect; it was meant to support the 50th anniversary ofthe Greek Revolution, and the reburial procession was planned as themain event of the celebration. As such, the reburial of Gregory V wasused as a means of making the heroic meaning of the Revolution visible,to attract mass attention and mobilize the participation of thepublic. Admittedly, the anniversary proved a major success. However,the reburial procession, the key event of the celebration, exposed atension in the celebration: not only the mourning dimension of theprocession was not compatible with the gay aspects of the nationalfeast, it also generated varied meanings, some of them directly opposingthe heroic memory of the Revolution and the irredentist prospects ofthe Greek state. This aspect suggests that, however successful, politicalrituals are inherently contradictory events always susceptible to various,even contingent, uses.</p>

Citizenship is a concept that is strongly connected to the idea of the nation-state. During the twentieth century, most nation-states used education as one means to homogenize their citizenry and impose linguistic uniformity. Such is the case with Greece where there has also been a critical relationship between citizenship, ethnicity, and education. In recent years, Greece has experienced a large influx of immigrants for whom Greek ethnicity is not always a given. Schools have become one of the areas where attempts have been made to integrate these immigrants into the Greek state. For the most part, these attempts have not been very successful.

Aim of this study is to provide an analysis of immigration into Greece, underlying the main issues that are to be tackled by the Greek state with a view to drawing up an urgently needed comprehensive and efficient immigration framework. The first section presents the development of alien immigration in modern Greece and the main socio-economic features of the country’s u-turn from the period of sending to the one of receiving economic migrants. In the second section there are analyzed the three major phases of Greek immigration policy and law from 1991-2002: Greece in 1991, by its first draconian Immigration Law number 1975, showed the first signs of awakening from a long state of hibernation. The failure though of this first effort of controlling, in effect preventing, alien immigration led to the second phase of 1998-2001 when the first, also largely unsuccessful, programme of regularization of irregular immigrants was launched. The third major phase of Greek immigration policy started upon the entry into force of the new Immigration Law 2910/2001 which has been a delayed and elliptic attempt to move towards a modern immigration policy framework, introducing at the same time a second programme of irregular immigrants’ regularization. The second section of the study is complemented by an overview of the Greek attempts to control irregular immigration which has been one of the main preoccupations of Greek authorities and has topped their agendas with EU and Balkan states alike. The main tools against irregular immigration used by Greece so far have been regional inter-state agreements, an idea that has not produced the results wished for, since it has not been coupled by the necessary inter-state co-operation on substantive issues pertaining to the root causes of migration. Finally the third section focuses on some major issues regarding the peripheral, marginalized socio-political position of alien immigrant population and its prospects in modern Greek society. These are serious problems requiring the urgent action both of the state and the civil society. The study concludes by pinpointing the basic crucial themes on which a new comprehensive Greek immigration policy should be based, breaking the constraints of the archaic logic of immigration control that has so far led to a complete dead end, concurrently adopting a holistic thesis of action both regionally and on the European level.